“It may be the fate of the universe to spend an eternity in darkness, save one brief flash of self-awareness in the middle of nowhere.”
Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 154
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Steve Stewart-Williams 63
1971Related quotes

Indian Spirituality and Life (1919)
Context: The fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and Self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme Absolute, originating and supporting all that is transient, a one Eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original and sempiternal Divinity or divine Essence, Consciousness, Force and Bliss is the fount and continent and inhabitant of things.
Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware Eternity and this conscious Eternal.
“Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.”
Source: The Cannibal Within
“In Self Awareness Universe the breakthrough is that consciousness is the ground of being.”
Interview at NewConnexion (September 2002).
Context: In Self Awareness Universe the breakthrough is that consciousness is the ground of being. We have to introduce consciousness into science, but to do this consciousness must have some structure to manifest itself. That structure requires mind, vital energies, supra-mentality, soul in other words. All of that was lacking in the "self aware universe model." If I had stayed with that model I would have felt as dissatisfied as I was before the "self aware universe model."

"The Pessimist," http://books.google.com/books?id=nfUaAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Nothing+to+breathe+but+air+Quick+as+a+flash%22+%22gone+Nowhere+to+fall+but+off+Nowhere+to+stand+but+on%22&pg=PA225#v=onepage first published as "The Sum of Life" in the Chicago Mail, c. January 1893 http://books.google.com/books?id=RCgTAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Nothing+to+breathe+but+air+Quick+as+a+flash+tis+gone+Nowhere+to+fall+but+off+Nowhere+to+stand+but+on%22&pg=PA48#v=onepage.

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone