I think of the universe as the body of God, and the creative capability we see and can exhibit as the mind of God. I will use this phrase to describe our system, that it's a creative, intelligent, self-organizing, learning trial-and-error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system.

Unfortunately, religions have become a part of the problem instead of part of the solution. We have fought our wars in the name of God, questioning whose God is the best God and whose exploration of this deeper reality is the best explanation. That defies everything that this deeper reality teaches.

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.

Eventually we must leave Earth-at least a certain number of our progeny must as our sun approaches the end of its solar life cycle. But just as terrestrial explorers have always led the way for settlers, this will also happen extraterrestrially. Earth is our cradle, not our final destiny.

We have to learn that service to the greater good is the greatest satisfaction. That idea is at the basis of all the great traditions dating back into history. When you get inside yourself - and you really find that deep inner peace that's rooted in love - then you can't live a life that we see being manifested in the large parts of the world right now.

On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.

Most 20th century academic physicists, and academia as a whole, simply did not want to touch the subject of consciousness. We have seen psychology grow up, and we've seen the development of neurophysiology and other much more sophisticated science, but only in the recent years have the tools of quantum mechanics been applied to anything representing human scale size.