There is that undeniable sense in which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is to say, the observed process through which each lifeform develops from a single fertilized egg cell to a mature animal form is broadly similar to the inferred evolutionary steps of its ancestors. This is not easy to explain.

The egg holds the DNA pattern, which is clearly very similar to the DNA of all ancestors, but the way the pattern is expressed to create a complete animal is not obviously included in that pattern. Egg cells and their immediate progeny are undifferentiated and are called stem cells. In a developing embryo, stem cells differentiate into the forms needed to produce the various body organs. But isolated stem cells cultured in vitro will remain stem cells.

Fish and amphibians produce masses of eggs that appear to mature unattended. Birds lay fewer eggs but tend and guard them. Mammals of course have eggs that mature internally, safe from harm.

All of these eggs have a shell, soft or hard, that protects them from potentially harmful outside substances. In mammals, this shell is the placenta, which allows essential nutrients to enter and wastes to leave. There is no way for any external material influence to guide the organ development of the little animal inside the egg.

If the DNA pattern does not guide cellular differentiation, then what does? Biological morphogenesis theory presumes that mechanical stress gradients within the developing organism are sufficient, but this is difficult to demonstrate in detail.

This leaves room to suggest the idea that morphogenesis is guided by a form of active intelligence, one that can be aptly described as spirit. It is a spirit that itself develops as the animal develops. The spirit of a heart is not the same as the spirit of a brain. They may be similar in nature, but they have different jobs.

The idea of spirit is easy to understand. Each of us human people knows and does things that are quite outside the realm of physical interactions. We dream. We make up stories that never happened. We invent new things that didn't develop by natural evolution. We talk to each other using complicated sounds or tiny pictures, called words, that we can only understand by learning what they mean from other people. And many of those words have no physical meaning. Like the word 'spirit'.

On top of that, people can often communicate in ways that seem to have no physical manifestation. Colonies of ant people. Schools of fish people. Flocks of bird people. (The notion of mechanical stress gradients can pop up again here. But the people don't even have to be in the same city. Rupert Sheldrake calls this sort of biological action at a distance morphic resonance. He also calls it the presence of the past.)

To explain any influence of spirit on morphogenesis we have to attribute spirit to others than only our fellow human people. That's actually not too hard to do when it comes to dog people and cat people. Many of us know some horse people and cow people, even bird people and fish people, who we are pretty sure have spirits of their own. It is easy to believe that you have a stomach spirit who demands to be fed.

Now about that morphogenesis. In people it starts with a single cell. So there must be a cell spirit there to get things going.

Actually, that also is not so hard to believe, once you learn that every cell is at least as busy and complicated as a small city, with messenger molecules running back and forth all over the place telling other molecules what to do. All this activity inside the cell pretty well implies that there are molecule spirits too.

Getting back to your own personal experience, the clincher in all this is memory. From experience you know a lot about memory. So you can see that every cell must have some kind of memory, a file system of automatic responses that tell its parts what to do in the event of any contingency. Without memory we would all be flying blind.

In fact it turns out that every atomic particle has memory, in the form of entanglements that link it to other particles it has encountered. These entanglements have been shown to defy the logic of mechanistic science that insists particles cannot interact at a distance. Such entanglements are real, as real as any of the quantum phenomena that govern the behavior of modern electronic devices.

There is no easy explanation for quantum behavior. But one word that seems to apply is random. Another good word for it is opportunistic. Another way to characterize the quantum realm is to call it the realm of ideas. Unrealized ideas, ideas of the possible and the probable. Ideas of possible futures that may become your Now.

We all tend to think in terms of past, present, and future events, spread out across time. But reality for each of us exists only in Now. Memory is the faculty which allows us to integrate past events into our present Now, smearing our awareness in Now out across a span of time. This Now we live in involves our faculty for focusing on past events that help anticipate our future, helping us to discern the probable among the possible, and to choose from among the probable what we want to become part of our actual next Now.

Thus for each of us, at any moment, Now is all there is, comprising all the awareness of our past that we can bring into focus in the moment as we contemplate our future. Now is our reality. Now is our world as it has taken shape inside our minds.

There are scales of reality. Less space means faster flow of time, a more tightly focused view of reality. More space means slower flow of time, a broader compass to our view of reality. Events on the atomic scale occur rapidly, more rapidly than we can comprehend. Events on our human scale occur more slowly, often on the scale of a second or so. Larger events, like clouds drifting across the sky or an ocean tide advancing up a beach, move so slowly as to be nearly impossible to see happening from our human scale.

The turning of the Earth, with the apparent movement of the sun across the sky by day or the stars at night, also happen too slowly for us to detect directly. Events on a cosmic scale occur still more slowly, far more slowly than we can easily imagine.

Cosmic distances are often conveyed in terms of light travel time, often as the number of years it takes for light to travel from one point to another. These numbers are often tens of years, hundreds of years, even thousands, millions, billions of years.

We may pretend that we understand such distances, and the long periods of time it takes for light to move between them. But who, in their lifetime, can actually experience the tiniest fraction of this cosmic reality. Astronomers, cosmologists, may spend much of their lives looking at the stars, contemplating the cosmos. But even they must settle for the merest glimpse of what is there, and can only speculate on how long it takes.

More ordinary mortals by and large take the word of these devoted observers and thinkers for what actually lies beyond what our eyes can see. Most of us settle for actually seeing only a tiny part of this one world we live on.

It is hard for human people to conceive what it would be like to live on a different time scale. Most insect people live for no more than a month or two. Mouse people live only a few years, rabbit and squirrel people about a dozen, dog and cat people maybe two dozen. Our human body cells and organs are repaired or replaced at similar rates.

These are familiar time scales for us. We can observe that smaller creatures actually live at a faster rate. Most people who are not trained athletes have trouble moving fast enough to catch a fly or a mouse. But dogs and cats can do it. Dogs and cats react faster than we do. This probably means that they think faster too. So subjectively it may be that a dog's life seems about the same length to a dog as ours does to us. What feels like about one hour to us may feel like about seven hours to a dog. And a cell's sense of time may be stretched out even more. There's really no way to compare subjective experiences.

Conversely, bigger things tend to have slower time scales. The movement of our planet defines a year for us. Our whole solar system circles around our Milky Way galaxy about four times in a billion of our Earth years. It has circled the galaxy only about 18 times since it was formed. We could say that a galactic year is about 250 million Earth years. According to the best estimates, the whole observable universe was formed less than fourteen billion Earth years ago, or about 56 galactic years. Does a galactic year feel to a galaxy like a solar year seems to us? What can this possibly mean?

The whole universe exists in what is called spacetime. Space by itself is the most nebulous of possible ideas. It is a kind of dream place, a realm where all possible places exist as what they can be, but with no temporal or causal links between them. It is space without time, a dream space. Spacetime begins with the creation of links between points in dream space.

Our observable universe is the part of the dream universe in which such temporal links have formed. It is actually a multiverse, because it comprises all the universes of individual observers like you and me, and cats and dogs, and all interacting particles that together agree on what comes before what in their dream neighborhood. That is to say, the physical universe actually exists only as an assumed agreement among dreams in dream space.

Life is a dream. I dream you. You dream me. Perhaps each of us originally comes from a single point in dream space. From there we find links to other dreamers, located at other points in dream space. As these links accumulate, they define for each of us a unique path through dream space. And this path in turn defines our personal sense of time. It is our ontogeny as dreamers.

Thus our past is our dream. It is the accumulation of all the spacetime events we have encountered on our path from then to now. It is our personal concept of reality. It is a single perspective, unique. Yours is not mine, mine is not yours.

In the stream of possibilities, we can grasp only one at a time. Other people's local possibilities pass us by. But so many of these are nearly the same that it usually doesn't matter. And so many parts of our paths are nearly the same that the path of another person may be very similar to our own. Similar enough that together we agree that the path we are both on must exist independent of either of us. And indeed it must, because there are always many others who have similar dreams, and similar agreements. It is the combined strength of all these agreements that makes the physical universe seem so real. And it is the apparent reality of the physical universe that gives strength to these agreements.

The ontogeny of the universe is the phylogeny of us all.