So…what if the extra-terrestrial life we seem to be in search of is not extra-terrestrial at all, but extra-dimensional? What if there’s a form of being or existence right here with us that we are simply not equipped to detect? Our eyes and ears and other physical senses have evolved to enable us to live in our planetary environment. We have invented instruments to extend our capacity to look deep into the micro-universe and far out into space. Out there, we have become aware of something we call dark energy and dark matter—exerting profound influence on the processes of the universe, but still extremely mysterious.

What if there is a life form of which we may receive occasional glimpses but are for the most part unequipped to know? Are we, as a life form, evolving in the direction of someday connecting with it?

You are here. On Planet Earth. By an accident of evolutionary pressure, you (and I) got born. We have to keep ourselves busy for the seventy or eighty or a hundred years we may hang around, potentially more with improvements in biological management. And that alone, keeping busy in a non-destructive way, might constitute the “meaning of life.” But I wonder, is that extra-dimensional form of being the next leap in human evolution as we gradually–say in six or seven hundred million years–develop the physical means to detect it and perhaps become it? Like the unexplained evolutionary leap that produced consciousness in humans, and language, and culture, surely something more lies ahead.

No single one of us can evolve that fast. But if we are patient, and kind to each other, survivors may become “life as we know it” in quite interesting ways, a new fork in the evolutionary tree producing almost unimaginable beings. Technology in the form of bionics and genetics is working to extend our human capacity right now. But I’m talking about pure biological evolution. I might call it, for lack of a better definition, the spiritual being. I’ve always been interested in the evolutionary perspective of priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He called that being “Omega Man.” Perhaps we should pay attention to the evolutionary clues that have no physical evidence.

When you spend seventy-five days on an island with a lot of books and no internet, you begin to think like this. My favorite book of the many I read during this year’s stay on Dickinson Island in Ontario is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Currently, I’ve launched into his subsequent book Homo Deus. Harari gives me an accessible springboard to further speculation. I might add that the Bearly Used Bookstore in Parry Sound provided an overwhelming physical experience of the human capacity to produce ideas. And words.

Human imagination is a wonderful thing. We do well to note, as Harari explains, that concepts like money, corporations, and religion are merely operational agreements, forms of belief, and perhaps even irrational trust. Why not imagine ourselves, each one, as significant, albeit extremely small, bits of a universe that invites us to participate with every sense we have on the way to more.