Fifty million years ago, splash! and there goes the Yucatan and eventually the dinosaurs.

We know the universe takes meteor target practice on the earth along with every other celestial body. We know the effects are often quite destructive (bye-bye, brontosaurus). Some speculate that the side-effects may be quite constructive (hello, new spores and germs of future life-forms).

Whether as Einstein maintained God doesn’t roll dice is really a moot question, of little interest to the teeming hordes that fall victim to these enormous, recurring splashes. Including, of course, at some point possibly, well, us.

Work on that problem and what to do about it continues apace, which is all well and good and offers some hope for an extended human future.

But what if there are other "meteors" of a wholly different kind (so different that we with our vaunted sciences are not even aware of their existence) that come barreling along through vasty interstellar space, colliding now and then with whatever happens to lie in their unseen paths?

Indulge me for a wee thought experiment.

Life we now know. Sort of. We’ve gotten pretty good at studying living things. A few brave scientific searchers have gone so far as to speculate on—and search for—what for want of a better term they have called "life fields." Harold Saxton Burr at Yale in the 20th century spent a lot of time (and, some—many—would say wasted a perfectly good career) postulating and attempting to measure such alleged fields. More recently Rupert Sheldrake has been thriving in professional hot water by continuing and expanding such speculations.

Slowly, against all orthodoxy, evidence accumulates that something is going on here (and what it is, certainly ain’t exactly clear) well outside/beyond/beneath our so-far best perceptions of That Which Is. The thoroughly mapped electromagnetic spectrum, quantum fields, string theory—all those clevernesses may have brought us better iPods and faster computers but they seem sadly wanting in inching us up the old self-awareness ladder.

Cogito ergo sum? OK, but here we are, 400 years on and no closer than Descartes was to understanding who or what is doing the cogito-ing, never mind how.

Getting up that next rung may be a matter of reverse-engineering, that is, considering anew historical evidence that we’ve hitherto paid little scientific attention to simply because it seemed at worst the domain of philosophers and at best that of historians and sociologists. The rest is not silence but the endless chatter of late-night radio charlatans and mountebanks.

2.
On a day when the earth still has blue skies and mostly friendly oceans and mostly stable mountains and mostly constant maps, I’ve got one example, one suggestion to throw into thus blurred fray. It doesn’t explain much, but it hints at the possibility of a path of exploration.

The vague and outlandish and ridiculous hypothesis I’m going to suggest is that not only are there fields of life of which we know nothing but fields of consciousness as well. Unknown, yes. Unknowable? Maybe, maybe not. Whatever these fields of consciousness may be, they include us and our daily flutter of waking dreams.

Further, the hypothesis is that equally unknown "interferences" may occasionally come zooming into the local fields of consciousness like so many mental meteorites, with, yes, both destructive and constructive effects.

What’s the evidence?

It’s slender and, given the depth of our ignorance concerning both life and consciousness, almost unverifiable. But it is a little bit suggestive.

Consider history, or at least those parts of history when great change occurred.

Isn’t it odd that written language appeared more or less simultaneously all over Asia and North Africa?

And that, separated by thousands of untracked miles, Buddha, Lao-Tse, and the Greek philosophers appeared almost simultaneously?

And that, again separated by geographical and cultural barriers, Mohammed and Bodhidharma planted new and rich seeds at the same time?

Splash, splash, splash! Could it be? Could some large cosmic "fireball" wholly invisible to us could have plunked down (or through!) the earth wreaking either havoc or help?

Naturally, historians, sociologists, and philosophers have all manner of well-constructed arguments to "explain" such phenomena as the developments of language etc. And if you grant the validity of the unstated assumptions at the base of their work, their "explanations" are convincing and gratifying.

But if you examine those assumptions, it turns out their arguments are all—ALL—circular. A happened and was followed by B and if we define A the way I want to and B the way I want to, then it’s clear that A caused B. Et cetera.

It’s a posited reality which, alas, has little to do with the LIVED reality of, say, Buddha, or Lao-Tse.

Which leaves us free to continue with our thought experiment which, it turns out, is no more ridiculous than that of Gibbons or Toynbee, Aristotle or Newton.

Consider a more specific event closer to us in time: the 1960s. Which was actually not so much a decade as it was a few months within a decade.

Roughly speaking, in 1967-1968-1969 something happened. Of course, as Vonnegut spent his life reminding us, something always happens. In the 1960s, this something was unusual on several counts:

    1. For those affected, it was widespread and powerful. For those
        not affected it was trivial and superficial.
    2. For those affected, it was instantly and profoundly positive. For
        those not affected it was baffling and upsetting.
    3. For those affected, it was liberating. For those not affected it
        was frightening.

It came fast and it went fast. Like a rock (a meteor? a monolith?) thrown into a pond, the ripples spread and spread and spread before finally giving out.

Music (the Beatles etc.), literature (Slaughterhouse Five, Myra Breckingridge), movies (2001: A Space Odyssey), pacificism (toy stores actually stopped selling war toys for a while), art, sex (women, gays), space travel.

An extraordinary year and a half.

To mention cultural artifacts is to miss the point. They were effect, not (contrary to orthodox thinking) cause. Something happened and for those affected, for a time everything—EVERYTHING—FELT different.

What a primitive way to describe what happened. The very primitivity reveals our lack of understanding of such phenomena, which lose a lot—EVERYTHING—in the telling.

What did life in Europe feel like before 1789, and after. What did life in Europe feel like when Shakespeare and Caravaggio were alive and working at the same time? What did life in Athens feel like when Socrates watched the Parthenon being built? What did life in China feel like when Confucius and Lao-Tse were alive at the same time?

Splash, splash, splash!

Now, decades on after the 1960s, the ripples still spread, to the chagrin of many and to the hope of many others.

Imagine the damage the dinosaurs did in their death throes, their world irrevocably changed by forces beyond their weak and limited understanding. While at the same time a world equally beyond our understanding was created by the same forces, a world that would eventually give birth to us. Now, we have dying dinosaurs once again thrashing about, gasping for air in a world that can no longer support their massive, destructive inefficiencies and boorish, lumbering behavior.

It happens again and again. And again and again we grapple for explanations and settle cozily for the most convenient, reductive, and mechanistic way out.

The only thing we can be sure of is that, whatever the cause, the something that happens is on its way again, like it or not.