Saturday 2 December 2006

Pic of the day: With this screenshot from the anime Stellvia of the Universe, the circle is closed. It was a song from this science fiction series that first caused me to think about the upcoming change in human consciousness... a change that will forever make meaningless the way we think about space today.

No stellar wars

Have you read science fiction? It seems very likely to me that the kind of people who read my journal would also be the kind of people who read some science fiction, at least in the past. You are intelligent, curious and not afraid of the unknown. Sounds like a science fiction reader to me! Perhaps you don't have time for it any longer, but you probably still remember it fondly... even though the future is no longer what it was.

Whether we think of science-fiction books, movies or computer games, there is usually war or the prospect of war. The war could be between factions of humans, or between humans and alien species. The weapons are a bit ahead of those we have today, but fundamentally similar, and the tactics and strategies are identical to those of recent history. The motivations of everyone is fairly easy to know, although one of the parts is usually just plain wrong.

This all seemed quite reasonable to me until a year or two ago, I guess. After all, in a manner of speaking we really are the end product of evolution: Natural selection no longer has that much power over us. With the invention of glasses, moderately bad eyesight no longer became a hinder for living a full life. The same thing is now happening to more and more afflictions. And with the coming of gene therapy, and genetic engineering, natural selection has entirely lost its dominion over us, being replaced by unnatural selection. Presumably this would happen to any kind of intelligent creature with fingers, tentacles or some such appendage, at roughly the same evolutionary level as ourselves. So it all makes sense. We come this far, and we remain like this until the stars burn out. Only our technology progresses for a while, allowing us to harness greater power. But we remain fundamentally us, and all starfaring aliens are also fundamentally us, only with slight differences in physiology. Or perhaps big differences in physiology, but not in psychology. This is it.

I don't think so anymore.

***

It seems to me that I first thought of it by myself, although that is not true. I must have noticed some thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin who thought that we would continue to evolve in a more fundamental way, but I guess it was very vague to me. In fact, even after I wrote the series of grey entries I called The Next Big Thing, I must admit that my own thoughts were still somewhat vague, though much clearer than before.

And then I happened upon the works of Ken Wilber, through a web surfing coincidence so small that I cannot even remember it. I believe the search string was "Atman project", but I am not sure why I was looking at that. I found that he partially based his later views on the Spiral Dynamics theory. Looking at it, I understood it immediately... indeed, it was as if I should have come up with it myself, but had somehow failed to. By this I realized that Wilber was not just the random run-of- the-mill New Age kook channeling dead people from Atlantis. If he recognized Spiral Dynamics on sight, like I did, he was probably an intelligent person with experience of upgrading his own thinking. (This turned out to be very true. He is bluntly honest about the fact that his earlier thinking is incomplete. And so am I.)

Wilber is active in various forums, including the magazine What Is Enlightenment?. Remarkably, the question is not rhetoric: It is an actual honest inquiry into the nature and causes of enlightenment. They seem to be homing in on it, but still have several different fronts of study open, some of which are normally at odds with each other, such as contemplative Christianity and Tantric holy sex. Also scientists are invited. In fact, there seems to be more and more of those. The tentative image that starts to form is that of Evolutionary Enlightenment. The founder and editor of the magazine, Andrew Cohen, is himself very active in this.

***

Andrew Cohen is quite possibly the most disturbing writer I have ever read. It is true that Carl Gustaf Jung shocked me much more in my mid 20es, but then my soul was small and fragile and immature. Now I am strong, elastic, experienced. I thank God that I did not meet a challenge like this back then. Though one can always hope that I would simply not have understood it. I'm afraid I would, though, because what he does using a scientific approach is eerily similar to my own experiences within a group of honest Christian mystics. His claims are very disturbing because his Authentic Self is eerily similar to what we called the Holy Ghost. And a human should not be able to bring that into the world by scientific means.

The important part for today, however, is the descriptions from his students who took part in this new experience of the Authentic Self as operating not just inside each of them but between and among them as a group. They reported that they were still fully conscious, only more so than usually, and fully personal. But at the same time they were part of a greater mind that (temporarily, so far) replaced the ego and cooperated seamlessly across their different bodies.

Yes, this is exactly what I claimed would be the next step in human development, the Next Big Thing, the step that would take us as far from today again as when we parted ways with the Neanderthals. I insist that the challenges of today can not be solved as long as each of us thinks his own body and his own genes are the most important thing in the universe, as long as each of us is willing to sacrifice the happiness or even the life of any random stranger in order to gain some small benefit for ourselves. But if the Authentic Self manages to get established, not just for a few hours or weeks but for years in a row, then any random person should be able to walk into a group of people talking in the Authentic Self, and immediately realize that here was something far greater than his own little ego. If this comes to pass, the Authentic Self could sweep the planet much like Language did during the ice age, replacing the conventional ego in most people and leaving the others to die out quietly.

Could this already be happening? I find it hard to believe. I just don't think we are ready for it yet. And so far, it seems to only last with a few select people who have made extreme sacrifices in the fight against their ego. The ego need to be weakened through years of relentless honesty and moral integrity before the Authentic Self is able to take over. The intriguing part is the claim by Cohen in the latest issue of WIE: Any experience of the Authentic Self is sure to have a permanent and irreversible impact, although it only manifests when the ego is set aside. This implies that the sheer presence of a group of people living in the Authentic Self could simply convert those who come into contact with them regularly, by strengthening the Authentic Self that is repressed within them.

We shall have to wait and see if this is the Next Big Thing, or just a feeble parody. Given the similarity to Jesus and the events of the early Church, I find it suspicious that Cohen seems to be unaware of the connection, or unwilling to admit it. This does not necessarily mean that he is the Antichrist. It could be that he sees any association with Christianity as a liability, because Christianity today is a stinking corpse, a failed attempt to get a higher consciousness into a world that was not ready for it. Cohen may well think that Jesus failed where he, Cohen, intends to succeed.

You can probably guess what I as a Christian think about that. I think we should not replace but RESUME Jesus. Time is not really that big a barrier. But yes, the nominal Christianity is a problem. People have distorted ideas of Jesus' message based on the superficial religiosity that brandishes his name while reveling in hate, condemnation, arrogance and injustice. There is no way the casual observer today would think of Jesus and the Pentecost as the Next Big Thing. But when some other guy engineers his own Pentecost, people may take note. The question is whether it is the real thing or just his own spirit, which will fade when he dies or is discredited due to some misstep. I intend to let time be the judge of his attempt. Luckily he seems fine with that.

But if not now, if not him (and I think probably not) then it will happen in the future, or we will fail as a species and all die. The current stage of humanity is not just "not worthy", it is literally not able to take the next steps into the future. We cannot even survive on our own planet, much less bring life and consciousness to the galaxy and beyond, if we continue to squabble like apes. The challenges ahead are such that we cannot afford war. We cannot even afford cold war. We have to cooperate seamlessly, or die trying. The universe is designed in such a way that a cancer such as our current society cannot blight the cosmos. The distances are too large to be bridged by raging hordes of talking apes. And thank the Intelligent Designer for that. It is bad enough what we have done to our own planet.

In fact, a year from now there is the small but distinct possibility that our planet no longer exists. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will start in November 2007, according to current plans. It is intended to create microscopic black holes on Earth. Today we simply don't know what gravity is, so we don't know for sure whether such a black hole will evaporate or absorb the whole planet. We are playing dice with God, and if we lose, the Earth is gone and all things on it. We don't have a moment more than we need, to take the next step.