The Age of Nations is Past
"The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would
not perish, is to build the Earth."
"The phrase 'Sense of the Earth' should be understood to mean the passionate concern for our common destiny which draws the thinking part of life ever further onward. The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion. "We have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion. . . To continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the Spirit of the Earth to its limits."
So wrote Teilhard de
Chardin the visionary Jesuit author, geologist, paleontologist,
and philosopher-theologian in 1955. 8 years prior in his 1947 work
"La formation de la Noosphère" he elaborated upon
Verdansky's notion of the noosphere
"No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947)
The term garnered much popularity with science fiction writers,
technofuturists, transhumanists, cyberpunks and other denizens of
the cyber-realms, but was coined long before the notion of a globe
spanning digital data network became anything near a physical
reality. My point in raising the idea is that the notion that
collective human action and intention can have profound material
consequence is not a new one, nor is it a singularly "spiritual"
one. Terrence McKenna in
one of his many entheogenically inspired ramblings
suggested.
"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had over 4 billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain forests and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance."
Phillip K Dick, the
visionary science fiction writer who gained much noteriety after
his untimely death suggested in his Man,
Android and Machine that;
...the noosphere...no longer served as a mere passive repository of human internal information (the "Seas of Knowledge" which ancient Sumer believed in) but, due to the incredible surge of charge from our electronic signals and information-rich material therein, we have given it power to cross a vast threshold; we have, so to speak, resurrected what Philo and other ancients called the internal linkLogos. Information has, then, become alive..."
This understanding has reproduced itself again and again throughout
history, clothed in various metaphors and devices. The notion of
the noosphere is today studied in Ivy League institutions who find
hard rationalist
evidence for it's existance. Something deep within the human
psyche propels thought and deed to bring into manifest reality what
has long been intuited and heartfelt...That humans are intricately
connected with each other and with the Mother Earth who gives them
the ground stuff, the physical being, the biology, the brain, the
opposable thumbs to spin these ideas out of the ethers and bring
them to fruition in matter.
We have been made intimately aware of the capacity of humanity to
turn this potential for manifestation into the 'dark Satanic mills'
of Blake's
visions, or the scarred war torn landscapes which are available for
our vicarious viewing from the safety of our loungerooms at the
flick of a switch. One must look considerably deeper than the
monolithic, corporate state's vision of reality to see the vision
of hope and faith in the potential for good in the species which
has appeared again and again in the history of thought, art and
deed. Nonetheless that vision remains.
We stand at a crucial moment in the evolution of the species, and
it is well within our power in this moment to realise our
interconnectivity, our place within the species and upon the planet
and bring to bear our considerable personal power within that
process to realise that which has been intimated by many who have
come before us. If we do not, it seems, we acquiesce to a social
order which believes it can only be maintained by 'external
violence' and control and in doing so denigrate the very great gift
of life that we are offered.
in Peace
Simon
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