The 9 Realities of Stardust: A Guide to Being Human in the Universe

By Bruce P. Grether

THE 9 REALITIES OF STARDUST is a radical presentation of a new “scientific animism,” yet its content may seem in many ways quite familiar as it stirs deep memories and associations within you, to remind you of the wonder, the awe, and the enthusiasm that lives at your core.
The author empowers you while reminding you of much you probably knew as a small child, and of many things your Ancestors understood directly from their connection with Nature and the world they lived in. In today’s world fraught with new forms of corporate media control, and also increasing opportunities to employ the “godlike” powers of cutting-edge technology, one crucial process is that we must “get back to the Garden.”
We cannot go backwards, but in order to save our species and our planet from unconscious threats, we need to explore anew the concepts of matter, energy, and spirit.
This begins as we grasp that indeed, “We are stardust.”

BRUCE P. GRETHER grew up in Thailand. This is his 9th published book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce P. Grether
• Release date: Dec 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370719006

Bruce P. Grether

BRUCE P. GRETHER lives in the Hill Country of Texas with his beloved partner. Bruce grew up in Southeast Asia as the son of Protestant missionaries. He lived in Berkeley, California off and on during the 1960s, and later spent twelve years living in Estes Park at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park in the high Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Later, Bruce completed his university studies at CSU in Fort Collins, and has continued to write ever since. Though the people and events portrayed in Thanks for Breakfast are fictional, many of the places actually exist.

Book preview

Introduction

Within yourself you have direct access to everything. The truth is incredibly simple: in spite of appearances, nothing is actually separate from anything else.

Though it may seem a bit of a stretch to the rational mind, this is true: All information in the Universe is immediately available to you when you listen deeply and with heightened awareness to the actual realities of the world you live in, which is the same as the world that lives inside of you.

Clarity and truth are revealed directly to you when you embrace one simple, essential fact: You are stardust.

The answers to all of your questions are found in the stardust realities of your embodied existence as a human being.

What we call the re-enchantment of the world is really the re-enchantment of ourselves. The world already is, always has been enchanted. We, however, sometimes forget this.

What is happening in the Universe? What is happening inside of you? Actually, these are not 2 different categories. Within you and without you are not really separate realms, though the belief that they are is common. That belief can cause suffering.

In truth, there is no solid, objective external reality that exists out there independent of your participation. You always are involved. At the same time, it is not quite accurate to say everything is illusion, or, nothing is real.

Your body, Nature, the Earth, the Moon, Sun, Stars, and the Universe really exist! Life is real. Love is real. Love is connection.

The fact that you are made of stardust connects you with everything in existence. In its deepest essence this stardust connection is Love.

Anything else you experience is a distortion of Love, just a false belief about what’s going on; Love is your natural state, your default.

Stardust is far more than a poetic-sounding word. What this book is about is the literal realities of the complex atoms forged in the hearts of ancient stars that exploded and died long ago to scatter their atomic matter through the star ways. And this book is about why these realities are crucial to how you are a human being in and of this Universe.

Nature itself is the realities of stardust in you and your context in the world. Though there is a lot of matter and energy in this Universe that is not composed of stardust, it is because you are mostly stardust that you are able to recognize this fact. This is also why you are human.

Stardust makes possible everything you are, and your consciousness itself depends upon the complex atoms of which your body is composed. This also makes it possible to recognize your connection with All Things, how intimately you are related with the Universe as a whole.

The 9 Realities described in the book emerged from the practice of sitting meditation, mindfulness, or contemplative breathing. There is no particular instruction in this kind of meditation except: If your mind wanders into mental description, story or narrative, return attention to your breath. This is not about avoidance of thinking, rather it is about paying full attention to the presence of the body. Your immediate surroundings may be listened to closely, though the eyes are usually closed. It’s about gently allowing the thought-processes to recede in importance through alertness.

The essential significance of these 9 clearly reflects the refrain of Joni Mitchell’s lovely song from 1969, Woodstock, which in poetic form, describes precisely the current place and situation of humanity in the Universe.

What is sometimes called the Clear Light is the remarkable clarity that comes from being truly present, without illusions of the past or the future to compromise the luminosity of conscious awareness, being fully in your body, here and now. To SEE this Clear Light you must trust the process of expanding awareness and allow your ego to die.

This is not death as you have imagined it, rather it is the beginning of a new journey to reclaim the truth of your essence.

To get back to the Garden is now the prime directive for humanity, not to try to return to a mythic concept of Eden. What this actually means is to remember that our beloved Planet Earth has been the Paradise Garden of our birth all along.

In our minds—in the narratives we have come to believe—we may have exiled ourselves from this full awareness. However, to rediscover the realities of stardust known to our animistic ancestors not so long ago is to recognize our inherent nakedness before the power of Nature.

Thus we recover our original fearlessness, our original innocence as Children of the Forest Primeval. The Garden is Nature—our parent and origin.

Allow the stardust realities to speak directly to your human experience from within the cellular, molecular, and atomic realms of your body’s matter and energy.

This book suggests many ways to reclaim your original innocence:

Be an ecstatic.

Allow the full range of human experience to flow through you without hindrance

Release both attachment and aversion.

Hold on to the Clear Light.

Resist nothing.

Allow.

The 9 Realities of Stardust are:

I AM the Source

At Every Moment I Leap into the Abyss of the Unknown

All Worlds Are Equally Real and Equally Imaginary

I AM virtually Identical with Every Human Being

Everything Evolves

I have Lived Forever and I Remember my Life

The Earth IS My Immediate Family

The Center Is Everywhere

Everything Is Alive

PART I

Preliminary Musings

The intelligence is inherent in everything.

— Charles Eisenstein,

YouTube, June 2017,

Chapter One:

Nature and Narratives

Science is just one of many stories about what is happening in this Universe, and one version of how things came to be as they are. It is not the only valuable way of looking at these important matters, however science has broad global significance in today’s world because it is based upon reason, evidence, and the principle that it is always a work-in-progress. By its nature science is self-correcting.

When a better explanation or better evidence comes along, science is willing to change in line with those innovations.

One well-reasoned account from cosmology and physics tells about the origins of the Universe in a great expansion of unimaginably intense energy that changed in ways that now make sense to us based upon the evidence we observe in the cosmos.

For example, once that primordial intensity and heat began to cool and settle down enough for sub-atomic particles to form, the first atoms appeared, and the newborn Universe was composed of the simplest atoms: Hydrogen and Helium. Along with Deuterium and Lithium, these are the earliest and lightest elements.

In the first few minutes, it was mostly Hydrogen.

Eventually enough of those original gases formed so that the atoms began to attract one another, forming dense enough clumps to collapse in upon themselves, to ignite the first generations of stars. The original Hydrogen, now considered to be about 13.8 billions years old, remains essential to the existence of life, as it combines with Oxygen atoms to form water molecules, the H2O essential in the Earth’s biosphere.

The first stars that blazed into existence lived out their lives in various ways according to their sizes and temperatures. In all stars nuclear fusion converts Hydrogen into further Helium. Stars massive enough collapse in upon themselves as they die, forming huge amounts of complex atoms in their cores, which then explode as supernovas to scatter this stardust.

That substance is necessary to the existence of solid rocky planets such as Earth, which like your body is composed of about 90% stardust, according to mass.

At the same time, stardust is among the most rare substances in the Universe. It forms only about 0.01% of all known matter.

This is one sense in which the ancient philosophers and alchemists got it completely right—you are a microcosm of the macrocosm. That is, your body, in terms of substance, organization, and the natural laws that govern your existence relate you directly to the Universe as a whole. You are clearly a localized image, an individualized version of the inconceivably immense totality of Nature itself.

You are not only the ancestral heir and most recent descendant of the earliest life forms that appeared on the planet over 4 billion years in the past, but also of the matter, which is now estimated to have begun around 13.8 billion years in the past. The earliest generation of stars that appeared with the first ignitions of nuclear fusion in the forge of gravitation, were born around 400 million years following that emergence we also call the Big Bang.

Since then, numerous overlapping generations of a wide variety of stars have been born, matured, and died in various ways, according to their species defined by their mass, size and temperature and how these factors evolve during their lifetime. The most massive stars may live only a few million years, while the least massive might endure for trillions of years.

So what are we to do with awareness of our remarkable heritage?

Mythic Stories

A Zen story tells of a monk in the forest who meets a ferocious and hungry tiger, and the man survives the encounter in a most unexpected way: He fearlessly jumps up onto the startled creature’s back and climbs onto its powerful shoulders. There, the tiger cannot easily harm or dislodge him. An ingenious solution, it seems momentarily, until the monk recognizes his dilemma—he will have to ride the tiger indefinitely, or be eaten when he gets down from its back.

The solution to this dilemma comes from another old tradition, the Legend of the King of Serpents, the Cosmic Naga. This Great Serpent Lord lives in the deepest depths of a great river, where he guards his greatest treasure, wisdom itself, in the Palace of Wisdom. One day the gigantic Naga rises from the depths and appears to a young yogi who sits meditating on the riverbank.

Are you not afraid of me? the Naga demands, for the yogi regards him calmly.

Instead of responding with words, the young man stands up slowly, then crouches low and jumps fearlessly into the gaping jaws of the Naga. The Lord of Serpents swallows him whole, and immediately this human meal slides all the way through the serpentine body. Thus the canny young man enters Nirvana; instead of a prolonged struggle, he goes directly to the Source. He enters Oneness.

There is nothing suicidal about what the yogi does in the story. He simply drops all resistance, and takes the express lane to awakening!

Those archetypal encounters with great forces of Nature and the Universe—the monk, the tiger, the yogi, and the Naga—are also about human nature reconciled with Nature itself by the conscious and willing surrender to what IS. Another way of looking at what happens to the monk, is that he becomes One with the tiger, for in a sense the tiger is the tiger of the mind.

The spiritual challenge is not to tame or control your mind, which does not work anyway, rather it is to befriend your mind, make of it an ally instead of your master.

The powerful and important advice to resist nothing is easier to say than it is to do. At the same time, this is the most effective way to become fully present in your body. It is how you show up in your life.

It is how you can get out of your own way, when you realize that no one is in your way except you.

Admittedly, this is easier to say than to accomplish, yet it is not really complicated.

How to Deal with Today’s Challenges

In today’s fast-paced, high-tech world, 3 issues in particular challenge many of us:

Accelerating Change

Information Overload

Media Negativity

These are all valid, common concerns in the Global Village where we now live.

Something that can help you deal with these admittedly overwhelming concerns is to remind yourself that by your deepest, highest nature, you are fully equipped to deal with such challenges.

Rather than allow the accelerating rates of change to overwhelm you, consider your own remarkable qualities that equip you to handle such acceleration, to ride the waves of so-called future shock, and to happily thrive in the process. We humans are astonishingly adaptable; as we change our environment, we change ourselves, because we adapt.

We have become the gods of the ancient world, not yet literally omnipotent or immortal, but still with many of the powers ascribed to beings of various pantheons and families of gods in the past. Literally at your fingertips, you have access to virtually all information available on the planet.

However, there is also a lot of misinformation, toxic sensationalism, fear mongering, outright lies backed by twisted agendas. It’s crucial for your happiness, health, and sanity to deeply Question authority, and think for yourself.

Regularly disconnect from the overload of data available to you via technological channels, for a refreshment in biological realities.

An important corrective to some of the drawbacks of the Global Village, which truly does have many benefits and blessings to offer as well, is to consciously create contemplative space in order to practice true mindfulness. Disconnect from your tech; focus on your own body, your actual immediate environment; meditate, read printed books, make love, enjoy intelligent in-person conversations, prepare healthy meals, exercise, expose yourself directly to unspoiled natural environments.

Many changes are not to be feared, for they contain the seeds of unprecedented opportunities.

For example, you are a multi-trillion-celled creature designed and fabricated by DNA over billions of years, generated from the level of your chromosomes, which are ultra-coherent molecular libraries of possibilities composed of immense numbers of complex atoms.

If you had to truly comprehend all the details, you would be in serious trouble, only the good news is you don’t need to comprehend it, because you are already the embodiment of all of those possibilities.

Your human nature is actually the summation, the product, and the direct result of the qualities, structures, the capabilities of those complex atoms that compose you.

This is exactly why you have everything you need—because in your nature you are everything you need.

Why Stardust Really Matters

Regardless of what you may choose to believe about the survival of your soul after the death of your body, or reincarnation or the lack of it, or even if you choose to believe there is no soul, you are literally the result of an unbroken line of biological ancestors stretching back to the beginning of Life on Earth.

Further, as stardust is the DNA of DNA, you also inherit the legacy of billions more years of complex atoms created in the core of ancestral stars as they died and exploded.

You are literally related to the entire planetary Tree of Life, according to numberless degrees of separation, yet all connected, plus even more awesome and remarkable is your connection with the Universe itself, as a whole. You are not only born on the Earth, born of