Just back from supper with friends, I was in our garden ten minutes ago looking at the night sky. It’s a crisp, cloudless night here, and in the countryside there are no lights to spoil the stars. Looking south, the Milky Way bisected the  blackness; at the point roughly south south-east was the small plough, and to the left and down a bit (as we expert astronomers say) was a very bright planet. I’d guess it was Mars, but I don’t know. Anyone out there who does?

I look at the sky on nights like these – it’s something I’ve been doing since I was a kid – and never cease to be amazed at how constant it all seems, yet somehow impenetrable: and above all, how ridiculous all the gesticulating, shouting, prancing about and self-importance of the human species is in an infinite three-dimensional universe.

We really do not matter: we’ve been shunted into some evolutionary siding, and no doubt within a hundred years or so we’ll be gone forever…..either attracted by the lure of Einstein’s long-predicted electro-magnetic rope travelling instantly to everywhere, or because we’ve been annihilated by some pointless war or deadly pandemic.

Earlier I was working on something big taking shape in Greece, and before that on a tip-off about sexual nastiness in the Humberside region. Tomorrow things will be clearer. They might even seem important. But at the moment – even though the horror of what we do to each other is gnawingly real – in the context of our galaxy, of far-off nebulae, and constellations a billion light years away, it is nothing at all. A fleeting pain as part of an illusion called time – a thing that feels local and real only because of another illusion called space.

Somehow, around 2600 years ago the Buddha worked out that separation was a fake effect, Now was the only reality, everything is completely connected, and the Answer Lies Within.

Six hundred years later, the prophet Jesus told his followers that the physical world and all the wealth within it was about the worst way to try and make it to the next part.

And just over a hundred years ago, a more secular sage explained relativity to a largely apathetic world via the elegant simplicity of e = mc2.

None of this suggests a random universe to me. None of the theories about the universe – not even big bang – suggest spontaneity. Evolution, natural selection, nuclear physics, neuroscience, genetics and social anthropology all suggest intelligence at work. And in the very first instance, you cannot have intelligence without life: life, the thing that by some miracle transforms inanimate matter into consciousness.

Somewhere beyond our minds is a consciousness without matter. For all I know, one of those conscious unthings was given weekend homework to do, and accidentally set off big bang: ever since when, other unthings have been trying to shut down the reactor with one hand, while giving the student a thick ear with the other.

But more likely, I think, is that e = mc2 is simply a form of clever system designed to make ‘travel-space’ escape from the physical to the purely conscious impossible. Major prophets seem to want to show that what’s here isn’t reality, that physical travel isn’t the way out of it, and that the only way to achieve perfect tranquility is to operate on that principle as often as possible.

You may call it religion, although I no longer do. The answer does lie within, and it consists of mastering the art of achieving chemical change through concentration. As many Buddhist monks have demonstrated over the decades, become expert at doing that and you can deal with anything.

There is a purpose. And if we could rediscover the importance of that purpose, we could take the most important step of all towards evolving through our own efforts. We could end the misery and suffering into which our undisciplined minds cast us, and change the very nature of existence.

We just have to hope that the good guys work out how to do this before the gargoyles do. Otherwise, the future doesn’t bear thinking about.