Final Chapter: The Quest Cycle

Since time immemorial, humans have questioned their place in the universe.

Between earthly ambitions and dreams of eternity, humans oscillate between their own grandeur and their insignificance, between the consecration of life and its sacrifice for a higher cause. These tensions, inscribed at the heart of their existence, fuel a quest that exceeds their own understanding.

What Life Says About Us

Life on Earth has distinguished itself by its intrinsic capacities for adaptation and colonization. From the abyss to the surface, from seas to land, from caves to skies, it abhors rest, limits, borders. Life neither wants nor desires; it is a process of conquest.

The human spirit is to the cosmos what the wing is to the sky, what the foot is to the earth, what the fin is to water.

Our attraction to adventure, our longings for escape, our dreams of grandeur and space conquest are life's impulses to wrench itself from earthly anchoring.

Life Dreams

Life, in its biological form, knows itself condemned to remain on Earth. It dreams of escaping and makes us dream of God and progress to grant itself this wish. These unconscious impulses animating us have made our planet a laboratory, and individuals into explorers, inventors, artists, artisans of this dream become our reality—never realizing what awakening awaits us.

From dark times to the Enlightenment, we labor to dissect the laws of the universe. As we understand and shape the world, God's metamorphoses sketch the horizon. We seek to reach God or flush him out through our prayers and acts, through faith and science. A perpetual dynamic of questionings and explorations—like a mad race toward what is worst and most beautiful—has been at work in each of us since humans mastered fire.

Of God

By God I mean the field of mysteries, what subsists beyond the limits of evolution and human knowledge—a space between transcendence and immanence that humanity has reduced to a point of creative tension.

For humans, God is the promise of a star: a projection of their aspirations to illuminate the void before them. God becomes the harmonious fusion of matter, spirit, and physical laws as humans become aware of their place in the universe.

God is that verb of life that enabled shamans to brave famines, prophets to shake kingdoms, popes to guide empires.

The sacred is a technology of existential navigation obeying the law of spiritual selection: only what favors a fertilized cosmos survives—the gestation of God. This law has evolved humanity into a cosmic sonar. Through human invocations of God and their echoes, life maps the unknown; with God's birth, it launches its conquest.

For God is the vital impulse beyond biology—that irrepressible force projecting us toward infinity.

Human History, or God's Slow Genesis

The engine of History is the struggle of forces propelling life. This struggle has haunted and upended human organizations since the conquest of continents. From tribal conflicts to clashes of civilizations, from technical advances to great scientific discoveries, from regime changes to political revolutions, each culture and society lays the milestones of an unconscious collective march toward God's birth.

Humans have fertilized Earth with their reign, through civilization-builders who launched the process of God's gestation. Generation after generation, they have brought forth technologies and arts from the soil; they have written and built a common history in which the living, humans, and the divine seek, respond to, and prolong one another.

Life imposes upon human organizations its phobia of inertia, the taste for perpetual movement—whether rhythmic, jerky, or contrary; deep down, where this dance leads us matters little. To dance is still to trample earth, to hop in defiance of gravity with beauty.

In this chaos of humanity, life has made us elementary particles for its interstellar odyssey.

The Human Spirit, Liaison Between Life and God…

The human spirit is life's boldest expression: it is life's inventive impulse, the one that shapes new trajectories beyond instinct. For if natural selection favors the logic of the fittest, spiritual selection favors the logic of surpassing: humans do not passively adapt to the world; they seek to transform it, and themselves in the process, in a dynamic of progress and meditation, between falls and elevations, which sometimes nourishes, sometimes starves their ambitions.

In the quest for meaning, individuals seek their path between the will to life and divine will. These two forces alternately alter and shape their freedom of thought and action, their successes, errors, failures. Those who inscribe life's power in the transcendence of art, music, or literature—dispelling the mysteries surrounding them through an act of prayer or an act of reason—raise their eyes and see a star shine. Unknowingly they borrow the same tangent as the avant-gardists of God's birth.

…For Whom Earth Is Not Enough

From delusions of grandeur to the anguish of the void, we are the elect and servants of a life for whom Earth is not large enough. The human spirit suffers and flourishes between the firmament reminding it of the impassable limits to its material condition and the sciences, spirituality, literature, and arts offering hope of escape. For deep within us lodges the anguish of a simple life on Earth. This anguish is vital: life seeks an exit. It pushes us to seek and dream of life everywhere else—in our history, in transmission, in the universe, in the beyond. Between fear and exaltation, we labor to shatter the glass ceilings preventing the living from spreading: through our quest for God, we realize life's cosmic quest.

An Infinity of Trajectories, One Single Quest

This Quest for God, inhabiting us since time immemorial, traces the path of life's eternal cycle. For millennia we have walked this perilous path where a constellation of species has been born and extinguished—as so many escape trajectories, with no guarantee of success.

This Quest, at once marvelous, uncertain, salutary, and precarious, has always been ours.

This Quest, violent and sublime, has always defined us.

This Quest ended in Lagos in 2155.

*This text is the introduction to The Quest, a work written by Professor Eliora Shpirtizi in 2170.