The Cosmic Restlessness: From Primordial Life to Infinite Possibilities

October 11, 2026

If your sense of identity, self-worth, and 'being just you deem yourself to be' gets inflated too much, O thou human being, then take a pause and look back.

Look at a monkey, or go into a zoo and watch out for, if you can, some orangutan, ape, baboon, chimpanzee, and look closely, and you will find there is a bit of you in that ape.

It's a long evolutionary chain. But to acknowledge it, you have to be aware of it, accept it, that you are part of a flow that started with some small amoeba in the original sea on Earth. And then that particular trail branched off in your direction, and now it manifests in you.

Look closely at a monkey; you will find most of the raw elements of you in it. Just its mind is a bit less organised, but fundamentally the structure is the same.

It's like you have a fully mechanised motor car, well controlled with all gears, levers, switches, steering, brakes, accelerator available to you so that you can control it.

The same is the difference between a human being and a monkey. A monkey is simply a rudimentary, unmechanised cart. But basically, it has the same purpose.

So you have to accept this fact that you are a monkey fast-forwarded.

And this is not merely about recognising our physical resemblance to other creatures. It is also about acknowledging the long evolutionary journey of which we are a part.

In the same way, if a snake had the awareness and consciousness just like we humans, it could see a bit of itself in an earthworm.

An earthworm, a slow, harmless, lethargic crawler, going around, stretching its body to reach its destination, exposed to the sun's factors, to being trampled and mowed to death, not able to strike back in any way, and always there to be struck by anything, ranging from determined ants to chance footfalls of a human being.

And that pain, that helplessness, that possibility of always being a victim at any moment by any type of situation, has given it a thirst.

And with evolution, propelled by that thirst, there you have a snake, fast, furious, able to take care of its survival in a better way, being scared and being scary for others, not just like an earthworm that is there to be mowed to death by accidental footfalls or curiously merciless plays of children or nibbling ants.

If a bird, if an eagle, the majestic hunter of the skies, with its claws and talons, strong feathers, hawk eye, ready to tear away at the prey, had the same capability of observing and looking back into its evolutionary chain, it would find that there is a bit of it in a small ladybird.

A beautiful speckled beetle taking tiny flights, spreading its small wings, hiding among the leaves, always at the risk of being hunted by sparrows.

And that urge to be something more than just a ladybird, a beautiful speckled creature. There it grows and evolves over a period of time, and you have a ferocious hunter of the skies, an eagle.

Or a vulture can look back and find a bit of itself in a butterfly fluttering beautifully with its colours, so fragile that even a gust of wind will change its course and destiny.

And that incapability, that being limited, that confinement of life expands to become a vulture, a strong scavenger ready to tear away at carcasses, making harsh sounds, the denizen of the stenching meat, carcasses, bones.

Of course, these are not necessarily direct lines of evolutionary descent. I am looking at them as illustrations of the larger tendency of life to acquire new capabilities, shapes and possibilities. The perpetual urge to 'become' something more than one is -- be it a stone or a human being. The eternal restlessness of existence, the cosmic churning from amoeba to artificial intelligence. Basically, it's a universe that can't remain still. We can see it from primordial life to cosmic frontier. In this ever-restless cosmos, there is this forever-unfinished journey of 'becoming' something more than one is (sentient or insentient). Even galaxies are mere drops in the cosmic sea, in this infinite drama of 'being'. 

So each and every species that has evolved, acquired a more sophisticated shape to have a bigger role in the arena of existence, in this game of life on Earth, will find a bit of itself in the smaller crawlers among insects, beetles, little birds.

So basically, it means there is an elemental force that is always acquiring different shapes, having more sophisticated roles, responsibilities, a very strange restructuring over the prevailing structures to have more and more complex roles and responsibilities in the domain of life, from raw playfulness to more and more shapes and sizes.

Things are going just from merely raw physicality into more sophistication in minds, so typically symbolised by Homo sapiens.

And this tendency does not seem to be confined to living species alone. It seems to me to be part of something much larger.

So when we look at the cosmos as such, I think there is an urge to manifest in something new.

And why does it want to manifest into something new instead of just resting with the established structure, be it in the form of a species or in the structure of matter?

I think there is some cosmic restlessness, the inherent cosmic discontentment, as if it just cannot stay paused.

It has to cascade out and storm into being something beyond what it already is.

There is something which is always trying to cross the boundaries and leap over into the uncharted zones and become something completely different, something new.

So that is the mystery, this mystery of not being restful and acquiring some new shape, size, structure, some new role, some new responsibility in this game, in this cosmic play.

And perhaps what we experience as our own dissatisfaction is just another expression of that same restlessness.

So when it comes to our being very restless, not feeling complete, always finding something missing, always trying to be something more than we are, not even being able to enjoy the present of our existing state, we inherited it fundamentally from that primordial restlessness that is driving more and more sophistication in different ways across species.

And since we carry the inherent core of that same restlessness, which gives rise to galaxies, black holes sucking mammoth stars, a million times bigger than the Sun, ghost particles, millions of which are crossing even our fingernails at this time, particles so small that they would cross over the entire thickness of Earth.

So what does it signify?

It signifies there is something ever running, perpetually restless, continuously riotous, forever running away from its present state to be something else.

And if that restlessness is inherent in the very nature of existence, how can we humans remain untouched by it?

So aren't we helpless in being restless, in not being satisfied with whatever we have achieved?

Go and ask anybody in any domain of life. You will find he or she is not satisfied with the state of being.

Go to poor people. Obviously, the natural concern there is making more money.

If somebody is staying in a hut, he is always thinking of staying in a big pucca house, a house of cement and mortar, not exposed to weather elements.

A person going on a bicycle is always thinking that life is only about acquiring a car someday.

A person who has been an aspirant at the grassroots political level and is just able to become a village administrator is thinking that life is only about becoming the Prime Minister or President of the country.

So on and so forth. I mean, it's only about becoming something more.

And even those whom people consider to be lucky.

The person who is staying in a wealthy, big palatial house, he has got his own ways of discontentment.

Either he is thinking about people who have got more money, or if he is at the top platform, the plateau where he sees the top position with a few hundred people of his level, there is a discontentment born of cutting each other's interests.

But those hundreds within a country or thousands on the entire Earth, the people on the peak, not the pointed peak but the plateaued peak, where there is no further possibility of going beyond that because the institution, the bearing capacity of Earth won't allow that.

So there is a plateau.

Now there the discontentment is not about achieving more than that. There the discontentment manifests in different other ways, like there are corporate wars they are fighting among themselves, and to manage that position itself is a source of very big restlessness, fear, discontentment.

At one level, the struggle is to rise. At another, it is to retain the position already acquired. But the restlessness remains.

So that perpetual element of restlessness, of not being sufficient, of being something more, is always there, be it the smallest of persons to the biggest of persons on Earth.

It just manifests in different ways.

Now if we look at the core principle here, that is a cosmic instability, always, always fighting against a stable state.

And if at all there is a stable state, obviously there is, that is just a very little pause, a kind of reflection before going full force with even more restlessness to become something completely different.

And I don't think there is any pause in nature anywhere around.

You will find there is a big flux going on around.

And this is not merely the visible restlessness of human ambitions or living organisms. Even apparently lifeless matter is subject to processes of change.

Even in a stone, the subatomic particles are in a flux, and they are maintaining that cloud, that molecular structure.

That structure of the stone is dependent upon a very forceful defence, forcefully defending its fort, the rocky fort, against the forces of decay, destruction, entropy, which are trying to make it into something else, that is, to break into smaller particles and then dust and then earth, and out of which the trees will grow, grass will sprout.

So where is pause and stability in all this?

It's a massive churning pot forever. Always, from each and every pore of existence, there is a tendency to become something more or maintain its status quo and then fight to become something bigger.

And how long has it been going on?

Infinity, they say, is something beyond the measures of space and time in the form that we have so far come to understand it.

But these are concepts, theoretical concepts.

Infinity, in the real sense, cannot be defined by limited sense perception-based models and theories.

But the beauty of infinity is that, being so open-ended, it will give certain bragging rights to a scientist to arrive at a theory which gets proven as well.

Even with the limited subset of elements, parameters considered, it gets proven because infinity is open-ended.

What I mean is that a theory may explain a particular range of reality within the parameters it considers, while the larger mystery remains open.

Had it been closed, only then a methodology which was not appropriate to define it would have failed if it had not fulfilled all the conditions.

But infinity, being something absolutely undefined, something absolutely without any established absolute value, leaves enough scope for mankind to set up a model or a theory with its assumption of a few absolute values even, and prove that yes, that's how infinity is possible.

So mankind's ability to prove infinity is a proof of infinity itself, that it can be defined in infinite ways.

Had it been a different kind of most established mind instead of Einstein, he would have defined it in some other way, which now, according to Einstein's law, seems like fundamentally it would have been totally different from what Einstein has established, and things would have served the same purpose.

Still the world would have run.

So what I want to say is this is a mysterious game, and it will always keep opening up more and more avenues, even for the artificial intelligence that we will have in future, artificial intelligence-driven, call them robots or half-human or half-artificial machines.

And if human intelligence itself is one manifestation of this expanding complexity, then artificial intelligence can be seen as another extension of it.

Artificial intelligence is not a crop that has arrived on the scene randomly or out of nowhere.

It is a symbol.

It's a representative entity of all that sophistication-driven force in nature.

Now it wants to expand even more.

Now, since we have just not been satisfied with doing things first with our mind and simple arithmetic calculations, then we had mathematical tools to arrive at more manual calculations, later on we had rudimentary computers.

Now we have artificial intelligence-driven models and agents which can do almost superlative calculations in a flash of a second or milliseconds.

So what does it mean?

It's just the extension of that willingness to grasp more, calculate more, marvel at things in different ways.

So let us see where it ends up, because things won't stop even with so-called superlative capabilities of artificial intelligence-driven ultra-modern systems.

They will keep diverging into different ways, and it's as good as there is a riot of energy in a supergalaxy.

So even here on this tiny bit of Earth that is our planet, it's always a replica of that riotous energy, randomly cascading around, a storm of energy, restless, trying to manifest in different ways.

And out of that are established temporary patterns fighting against each other, trying to overpower the supposed or apparently rival things.

And that competition is evident from the raw, naked game of survival at the level of organisms to more and more sophisticated artificial intelligence tools fighting against themselves to establish predominance over institutions, over Earth.

So it will go on and on and on.

So we just cannot freak out at the latest emergence of things as something negative.

We cannot just look at it from the binary of positive or negative.

It just is.

Just that we are wonderstruck at the moment, because now the rate of change is becoming shorter and shorter.

In future it will be even shorter, and then the domain of life will go into... the Earth will become very, very small for the manifestation of aspirations to contain that restlessness of all those emerging patterns of institutions, humans, machines.

That interface will be too big to contain life limited to Earth only.

And once the capabilities expand beyond what can be accommodated here, the geographical boundaries of human activity will also have to expand.

Then we will go for interplanetary things.

That is just expansion, like in older times we had people who were geographically segregated.

There were no means of communication, so people stayed in isolation.

And even crossing the seas was a big issue.

That is why we have the milestones of Columbus and Vasco da Gama discovering new lands.

So that was monumental.

Now similarly, the new rate, the new definition of being something very monumental in discovery will be just like Columbus discovering the new continents.

It will be like astronauts and scientists discovering ways and means of travelling to far-off planets and later on even galaxies, and making those places habitable with their scientific knowledge and equipment.

Just like the colonisers, they were able to cross over to different geographical lands and then they established their systems there.

So we will be space colonisers.

We will be spreading out in different directions.

We will have more efficient spacecraft.

We will have more scientific ways of putting bodies into a sort of hibernation across years, decades, so that when they land up at a distant planet many light-years away, they can resume their lives and begin establishing themselves there.

Just like colonisers have established their institutions, their economic models, their system of education in the new lands, similarly, the space colonisers will be taking up their versions of reality and institutions and setting them up there.

And it will continue expanding until it comes into interaction or collision with other forms of life doing the same from some other corners of the far-off cosmos.

And that will again give rise to more possibilities of happenings.

Like there will be clashes, just like here, between colonisers and the natives of the occupied lands.

There were clashes, there was strife, there were give-and-takes, there were even adjustments, accommodations, learning, relearning at both ends.

The same will be happening on a far bigger scale.

It is happening here on Earth.

It has happened in very, very small geographical locations.

Earlier little tribes would fight over dominance and territories and try to impose their version of reality over each other within a small forest.

Then the domain increased to involve bigger geographies.

We had little kingdoms within the present-day countries, and they fought each other.

Then countries are fighting against each other.

Continents are also sort of in a tussle against each other.

And then sophistication required more rivalries across different other fronts, in economies, in education, in politics, in religions, name anything, whatever defines modern life.

It's a kind of rivalry going on, pushing against each other, trying to overpower others, trying to impose their version of things, and then expanding like this.

So similar things will happen in exponentially larger, millions of times larger ways in far-off space, at different distant stars, galaxies, habitable planets.

So if we think that things will just, you know, end up with Earth not being habitable at all?

No, that's not possible because we are expanding the zone of churning, the interactive zone of all these fights among different elements competing for dominance, etc.

It will be taking place in a far bigger arena, covering even stars millions of kilometres away.

So there is restlessness.

Whatever we are witnessing now is just born of all that, and it has been going like this.

And it is going on at so many points in distant galaxies and far-off planets.

Because this is the same energy moving around everywhere.

And if this restlessness is a universal phenomenon, then why should its manifestation in the form of life remain confined to this one planet?

So if it is happening here, it cannot happen in isolation.

How can it happen?

Just like a drop in the ocean cannot exist in isolation and manifest something very, very different from the rest of the sea.

Is it possible?

Not at all.

Now to assume that we have life here on Earth only would be to assume that a drop can have an exclusive existence in an entire sea.

It just cannot.

So this is the same cosmic soup.

This is the same cosmic energy cascading around.

And if we have this type of life manifesting here, it's just like a drop in the cosmic sea.

So it must be happening somewhere else as well.

Yeah, that is possible that it might be happening in different ways, because we have this particular type of environment that has given rise to, incidentally, this form of life.

Some other planet in some other galaxy may be something similar, possibly, or very dissimilar, having completely different concepts of what it means to be aware of one's worth or one's life.

Maybe things are fundamentally different somewhere else.

And more sophistication would only mean that there will be zones of convergence between these distant manifestations of life.

And that itself will create more fronts for creating something completely different.

So perhaps this is the very nature of that cosmic restlessness I have been talking about. From the smallest organism struggling to survive to the most sophisticated intelligence reaching out into distant galaxies, it is the same mysterious tendency to go beyond what already exists.

The forms may change, the arenas may expand, but the churning continues.

And who knows what entirely new manifestations might emerge when these distant currents of the same cosmic sea finally meet?