This Is The Story of Your Life
There was only the Absolute energy.
There was no space. You were at once here and there.
There was no time. You were was at once now and ever.
You were only a seed of virgin consciousness...
Then energy materialized, bubbling out from effervescent fields of forces. Frenetic motions, stunning velocities, prodigious collisions filled the void.
Particles surged and vanished. You gathered some o them into a proton. An electron joined you, and you took the helm of the young hydrogen atom. Many others surrounded it. Together you formed a swarming cloud.
Slowly, your cloud began to contract into a globular mass. After millions and millions of years, pressure grew to a critical point. Your star ignited. A fiery nuclear fire burned at its core.
You sojourned long in the heart of the furnace. Protons like you were fusing into helium. The midst of the star was turning ever more massive and dense. Your helium transmuted into carbon.
Your star had swollen into a reddish sphere when it collapsed. In its center, compression forces became overwhelming and the star exploded. The flash of this supernova was brighter than a million suns. Gigantic amounts of gas and dust were blown outward.
You were floating in space. Soon, four lonely atoms of hydrogen bonded with your carbon. Your methane molecule went whirling into the infinities of the Cosmos.
During eons, you witnessed from afar the birth of millions of stars and their gathering into a spiraling galaxy. Eventually, your own cloud of matter slowly condensed, and you beheld the emergence of a stellar system. First, the flaming up of a sun; then, the gradual accretion of particles into a carousel of planets, satellites, and asteroids.
All these celestial bodies were being bombarded by meteorites and brushed by comets, but they changed little. Except one.
It was initially cloaked in gray and shrouded by a dull, gaseous mantle. Over millions of years, it metamorphosed into a magnificent halo of deep blue and ocher, partly concealed by ever changing swirls of a pure white. You felt attracted toward this planet.
Entering in its upper atmosphere, you gathered oxygen atoms and molded a structure of carbon dioxide. Such atomic mutation was good. It prepared you for the great adventure of organic life.
You went through long periods of idleness, here within a rock, there deep in sediment. Yet, you progressed from structure to structure. You experienced life in mineral molecules. First within a crystal and much later within a coral.
Washed away from the reef, then tossed up into marshland, you assembled a long chain of cellulose in a giant tropical fern. As time went by, you migrated through many plants, assuming the leadership of ever more intricate parts.
A reptile fed on your plant and for the first time you experienced a large animal. When the beast died, you remained buried with it at the bottom of a muddy river. During the next several millions years, the riverbed slowly rose in a high mountain range.
Eventually, melting snow eroded your mineral prison. A bird ingested you, along with some herb. From then on, you visited a variety of other animal structures, each time learning to shepherd greater numbers of less experienced particles.
Your knowledge had started with the simplest atoms and molecules. With the construction of cells and whole organisms, it had expanded to an astounding amount of information.
Two million years ago, you entered the body of a simian-looking creature. The creature was less than five feet tall, walked upright, and had nimble fingers. Within this strange creature, you found surprisingly advanced companions. They taught you a great deal and everything accelerated.
You went through several of the strange creatures. You even participated in the evolution of the extraordinary tool that these creatures had inside their skull. Theses "brain" got progressively so refined that the creatures commenced to share parts of their makers' consciousness.
After billions of years of schooling within so many different structures, you became responsible for a reproductive cell of one of the sophisticated brainy creatures.
Your reproductive cell became fertilized. For the first time, you followed the entire construction of a new creature. You eventually experienced the full workings of its consciousness.
That was thirty thousand years ago. Ever since, You, Eternon, have been leading some of these intelligent creatures that one day chose to call themselves "humans."
