Posts
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Global consciousness ,the noosphere Pt II
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
- - Mahatma Gandhi
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one"
- - John Lennon, Imagine
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The warrior of light is aware of his or her immense strength, and will never fight with anyone who does not deserve the honor of combat.
- - Paulo Coelho, Ode , channeling Gandhi
Everything is about direction and consciousness. You can be wrong about the details. ... I don't know what it will look like 200 years from now. But I know if we keep moving towards -- again, it is somewhat spiritual, but if we keep moving toward a recognition of our common humanity and the necessary conscquences that flow from that, ... [the world] will certainly be more integrated.
... the main thing that we all have to do is put all the pieces together and sell it so that the world moves in the right direction. We can make a lot ot mistakes. That's what people do. But we ought to be stumbling in the right direction.
- - Bill Clinton, Fortune, Nov 11, 2001
Nearly 70 years ago, a Soviet geochemist, reflecting on his world, made a startling observation: through technology and sheer numbers, he wrote, people were becoming a geological force, shaping the planet's future just as rivers and earthquakes had shaped its past.
Eventually, wrote the scientist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky, global society, guided by science, would soften the human environmental impact, and earth would become a "noosphere," a planet of the mind, "life's domain ruled by reason."
Today, a broad range of scientists say, part of Vernadsky's thinking has already been proved right: people have significantly altered the atmosphere and are the dominant influence on ecosystems and natural selection. The question now, scientists say, is whether the rest of his vision will come to pass. Choices made in the next few years will determine the answer.
- - Andrew Revkin
Fiction leads us, as much as we are willing to be led, and it may be that there is no better guide. David Brin's science fiction novel, Earth, is about a future not very distant, in which it is necessary for a global consciousness to arise and become aware, to save the earth from the consequences of our unending folly, our destruction of our nest and thus, ultimately, ourselves. At one point a bright, though uneducated young man (whose given name is Nelson) says,
In other words, the ideal government should be like a sane person's conscious mind! The World Data Net is the ultimate analog.
Like a person, it too consists of a myriad of tiny subselves (the eight billion subscribers), all bickering and negotiating and cooperating semi-randomly. Subscriber cliques and alliances merge and separate ... sometimes by nationality or religion, but more often nowadays by special interest groups that leap all the old borderlines ... all waging minuscule campaigns to sway the world's agenda and to affect their lives in the physical world.
Our Earth Proclamation, contributed by Alan D. Moore
WE ARE ONE PEOPLE...
WE SHARE ONE PLANET...
WE HAVE ONE COMMON DREAM...
WE WANT TO LIVE IN PEACE...
WE CHOOSE TO PROTECT AND HEAL THE EARTH...
WE CHERISH THE EARTH'S BIO AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY...
WE WILL CHOOSE TO CREATE A BETTER WORLD FOR ALL...
WE WILL BECOME STEWARDS FOR THE PLANET'S THREATENED AND ENDANGERED SPECIES...
WE WILL DEFEND AND PROTECT THE RAIN FORESTS, REDWOODS, AND OTHER SACRED PLACES...
WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO MAKE THIS DREAM COME TRUE...
WE WILL DO THIS FOR OUR CHILDREN, AND OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN...
WE WILL TRANSFORM WHAT NEEDS TO BE TRANSFORMED...
WE WILL BREAK FREE OF OUR CHRYSALIS LIMITATIONS...
WE WILL JOYFULLY LOVE, SHARE, AND FORGIVE...
SO THAT PEACE MAY PREVAIL ON EARTH!
MAY PEACE PREVAIL ON EARTH!
"We think the world apart," said educator Parker Palmer. "What would it be like to think the world together?" The philosopher Teilhard de Chardin had a word -- unfurling -- to describe that "infinitely slow, spasmodic movement toward the unity of mankind." He saw education and love as the twin pillars of progress. At this amazing point in history, we have the opportunity to get things right.
- - Mary Pipher, Nebraskan
To sense that behind anything that can be experienced, there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.
- - Albert Einstein
Noosphere: The mental envelope of the planet above and discontinuous with the biosphere.
"The first stage was the elaboration of lower organisms, up to and including man, by the use and irrational combination of elementary sources of energy received or released by the planet. The second stage is the super-evolution of man, individually and collectively, by use of the refined forms of energy scientifically harnessed and applied in the bosom of the Noosphere, thanks to the coordinated efforts of all men working reflectively and unanimously upon themselves...In becoming planetized humanity is acquiring new physical powers that will enable it to super-organize matter. And, even more important, is it not possible that by the direct converging of its members it will be able, as though by resonance, to release psychic powers whose existence is still unsuspected?"
- - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Future of Man"
Global consciousness,THE NOOSPHERE PT 1
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
Subtle interactions link us with each other and the Earth
When human consciousness becomes coherent and synchronized, the behavior of random systems may change. Quantum event based random number generators (RNGs) produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. The probability is less than one in a billion that the effect is due to chance. The evidence suggests an emerging noosphere, or the unifying field of consciousness described by sages in all cultures.
I don't know for sure when I first read Père Teilhard de Chardin's The Future of Man; probably more than 40 years ago, in the 60's, but this gentle and deeply passionate vision of purpose and possibility for human beings rang true, and settled deep within. Even though it may be premature to expect the full measure of our potential, we are growing fast, and as Teilhard observed, long before the age of the Internet, we are becoming one world; we have no other choice: "The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth."
You may be interested in a brief account of Teilhard de Chardin and his thought. The idea and implications of a noosphere were described even earlier by Vernadsky, and I suspect by other far-seers before him. But today we can almost touch the future they envisioned.
The GCP idea began to gestate about four years before the birth of the project, according to a logbook entry from December, 1994, just before a stimulating Esalen meeting on intentionality and consciousness. Not only the meeting, but the time surrounding it brought synchronistic interactions which powered delightful insights and intellectual extrapolations. In a premonitory description of the GCP, some of these connections were noted the logbook.
Dec 26 01:30 (1994) How much web linkage would be required to to create an aware consciousness à la Chardin? If Hameroff is right, the fundamental necessary (and sufficient?) requirement is coherence of quantum optical events, which should be ... analogous to quantum coherence of other physical/electrical events. ...
The web analogy needs a fundamental unit, which might be a node, more likely a personal page, which has a self-organzing capacity, under the influence of the web field, i.e., the possibility of connectedness.
The conditions need to be right to establish coherent ideas, or maybe even to establish a coherent EM field phenomenon... In either case, if the coherence length and hence the capacity to interact with and stimulate relevant activity [is present] in ... the web, then a larger scale coherence will result, leading to an increase in the global coherence until a collapse [into consciousness] is self-induced ...
We experience the world with beautiful immediacy, and with a quality of direct participation that seems completely natural. And yet it is quite magical. We take meaning from music, we know our loved ones from afar, and we leap in thought to the stars. Sometimes we sense that we have dissolved ourselves into a group or a larger whole. And we always have prayed as if it could make a difference.
Three years after the Esalen meeting, at a mini-conference in Freiburg in late November 1997, several of us were talking with psychophysiologists about anomalies of consciousness, and thinking about measures, and trying to get closer to the live subtleties. During a hallway break conversation, Dick Bierman, Dean Radin, and I were playing with the links of psychophysiology and REG technology and consciousness, and Dean concentrated the notion, saying, "we could make a World EEG".
AGE OF MOSCHIACH , PREDICTS AN UPSURGE OF THIS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE HASTENING OF THE MESSIAH,RESOLVING PAADOXES,WISOM OF THE MASTERS ALL SALIENT AND SILENT PARTNERS IN THE HOPEFUL UPSURGE OF UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS
With a little planning, mainly talking with Greg Nelson, Dean, Dick, Jiri Wackermann, and John Walker, we decided it not only could be done, but would be fun. We began building an "electrogaiagram," to trace coherent thought and feeling in the world.
Even when it was most difficult, it was fun. And there are allies to help make matters including paradoxes and contradictions understandable, dreams, for example, and ancient wisdom like that of the I Ching, to help us stay on the path with a heart. There's modern wisdom too, as some simple recomendations attributed to the Dalai Lama help us see. Indeed we can touch the perennial wisdom. Or consider A Congressman's Prayer, by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). And then there is Talking with Angels, who say "What could be more natural than our talking with each other?" And what could be more natural than a poem to ask a deeper question?
When the power of love
Overcomes the love of power
The world will know peace.
- - Jimi Hendrix
According to the 20th-century American philosopher Susanne Langer,
under the influence of love, the "membrane of individuality" becomes porous.
- - From ODE
VISION AND POWER TO FORM A SYNERGISM
The truth is that all search for knowledge is essentially a form of prayer. The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer. Although at present he follows only the footprints of the musk-deer, and thus modestly limits the method of his quest, his thirst for knowledge is eventually sure to lead him to the point where the scent of the musk-gland is a better guide than the footprints of the deer. This alone will add to his power over Nature and give him that vision of the total-infinite which philosophy seeks but cannot find. Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture. Power without vision tends to become destructive and inhuman. Both must combine for the spiritual expansion of humanity.
It is a psychological truth that association multiplies the normal man.s power of perception, deepens his emotion, and dynamizes his will to a degree unknown to him in the privacy of his individuality
The real object of prayer, however, is better achieved when the act of prayer becomes congregational. The spirit of all true prayer is social. Even the hermit abandons the society of men in the hope of finding, in a solitary abode, the fellowship of God. A congregation is an association of men who, animated by the same aspiration, concentrate themselves on a single object and open up their inner selves to the working of a single impulse. It is a psychological truth that association multiplies the normal man.s power of perception, deepens his emotion, and dynamizes his will to a degree unknown to him in the privacy of his individuality. Indeed, regarded as a psychological phenomenon, prayer is still a mystery; for psychology has not yet discovered the laws relating to the enhancement of human sensibility in a state of association.
- - Muhammad Iqbal
And when we dance together, we will save ourselves.
This is the message Dancing Matt brings us in such a joyful way that we feel our interconnection.
Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men and women treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
- - Hermann Hesse
Religion is hard. But then you begin to lose the hard edges of yourself and start to glimpse the other. All of the Axial Agers practiced what the Chinese called jian ai or concern for everybody. Not just for your own group, but for everybody. And if we don't do that, I don't see how we can save our planet.
- - Karen Armstrong
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you put a thing in order, and give it a name, and you are all in accord, it becomes.
- - From the Navajo, Masked Gods, Waters, 1950
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feeling as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
- - Albert Einstein
There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.
- - Werner Heisenberg
Now, if the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the cooperation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.
- - J.B.S. Haldane
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Père Teilhard de Chardin's Phenomenon of Man is, as are his other writings, filled with poetic expression, even for simple and scientific understandings. Here he speaks of elemental matter:
"Observed from this special angle, and considered at the outset in its elemental state (by which I mean at any moment, at any point, and in any volume), the stuff of tangible things reveals itself with increasing insistence as radically particulate yet essentially related, and lastly, prodigiously active.
"Plurality, unity, energy: the three faces of matter."
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
-- William James
Ask yourself. Is the Earth, teeming with organic populations, an organism? Are we billions of humans, who make up the primary intelligence of the Earth as an organism, fulfilling our potentialities? Are we doing well? Is the Earth well?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And again from William James, one of the clearest statements of how much we have to learn about consciousness, scientifically and experientially.
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
Our most prodigious thinkers have seen us, humanity, as the culmination of creation, and this may be an acceptable view if we somehow fulfill our creative destiny. But there may be very little time, really, for growing up and reaching for the best we can be. The Earth, the beautifully balanced ecosystem, is badly damaged already from our point of view (whenever we look beyond the ends of our material noses to our future). Ironically and sadly, all the responsibility for the damage is ours -- we have grown too quickly capable and too slowly wise -- and rescue and repair are up to us, entirely.
We are not, thank goodness, utterly without insight. A small number of voices have always spoken out to teach, and to urge necessary actions. Here, a poignant and striking, terribly clear description of where we are and what we must now do, is presented as Four Prophecies given in 1920 by the American Indian medicine man, Stalking Wolf.
And here, a more recent note expressing a deeply felt dismay that we can hope will stimulate more and more of us to turn away from the Mauling of America that we have been teaching ourselves as if it were a good way of life.
Buckminster Fuller maintained, eloquently, that we have the power to think about and understand where we live, and ultimately to organize the materials of our world so that there is plenty for all of us, even for more of us if we intelligently decide that's what we want.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And Erwin Schroedinger regarded science as the best bet for our future:
I consider science an integrating part of our endeavour to answer the one great philosophical question which embraces all the others ... who we are? And more than that: I consider this not only one of the tasks, but the task, of science, the only one that really counts.
Albert Einstein concurs, with an even stronger emphasis on the inevitability of a spiritual aspect:
Sensation of the Mystical
The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is
the sensation of the mystical.
It is the sower of all true science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead.
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty,
which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms -
this knowledge, this feeling,
is at the center of true religion.
Your fervent wishes can only find fulfillment in you succeed if attaining love and understanding of men, and animals, and plants, and stars, so that every joy becomes your joy and every pain your pain.
- - Albert Einstein
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subtle interactions link us with each other and the Earth
When human consciousness becomes coherent and synchronized, the behavior of random systems may change. Quantum event based random number generators (RNGs) produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. The probability is less than one in a billion that the effect is due to chance. The evidence suggests an emerging noosphere, or the unifying field of consciousness described by sages in all cultures.
I don't know for sure when I first read Père Teilhard de Chardin's The Future of Man; probably more than 40 years ago, in the 60's, but this gentle and deeply passionate vision of purpose and possibility for human beings rang true, and settled deep within. Even though it may be premature to expect the full measure of our potential, we are growing fast, and as Teilhard observed, long before the age of the Internet, we are becoming one world; we have no other choice: "The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth."
You may be interested in a brief account of Teilhard de Chardin and his thought. The idea and implications of a noosphere were described even earlier by Vernadsky, and I suspect by other far-seers before him. But today we can almost touch the future they envisioned.
The GCP idea began to gestate about four years before the birth of the project, according to a logbook entry from December, 1994, just before a stimulating Esalen meeting on intentionality and consciousness. Not only the meeting, but the time surrounding it brought synchronistic interactions which powered delightful insights and intellectual extrapolations. In a premonitory description of the GCP, some of these connections were noted the logbook.
Dec 26 01:30 (1994) How much web linkage would be required to to create an aware consciousness à la Chardin? If Hameroff is right, the fundamental necessary (and sufficient?) requirement is coherence of quantum optical events, which should be ... analogous to quantum coherence of other physical/electrical events. ...
The web analogy needs a fundamental unit, which might be a node, more likely a personal page, which has a self-organzing capacity, under the influence of the web field, i.e., the possibility of connectedness.
The conditions need to be right to establish coherent ideas, or maybe even to establish a coherent EM field phenomenon... In either case, if the coherence length and hence the capacity to interact with and stimulate relevant activity [is present] in ... the web, then a larger scale coherence will result, leading to an increase in the global coherence until a collapse [into consciousness] is self-induced ...
We experience the world with beautiful immediacy, and with a quality of direct participation that seems completely natural. And yet it is quite magical. We take meaning from music, we know our loved ones from afar, and we leap in thought to the stars. Sometimes we sense that we have dissolved ourselves into a group or a larger whole. And we always have prayed as if it could make a difference.
Three years after the Esalen meeting, at a mini-conference in Freiburg in late November 1997, several of us were talking with psychophysiologists about anomalies of consciousness, and thinking about measures, and trying to get closer to the live subtleties. During a hallway break conversation, Dick Bierman, Dean Radin, and I were playing with the links of psychophysiology and REG technology and consciousness, and Dean concentrated the notion, saying, "we could make a World EEG".
AGE OF MOSCHIACH , PREDICTS AN UPSURGE OF THIS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE HASTENING OF THE MESSIAH,RESOLVING PAADOXES,WISOM OF THE MASTERS ALL SALIENT AND SILENT PARTNERS IN THE HOPEFUL UPSURGE OF UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS
With a little planning, mainly talking with Greg Nelson, Dean, Dick, Jiri Wackermann, and John Walker, we decided it not only could be done, but would be fun. We began building an "electrogaiagram," to trace coherent thought and feeling in the world.
Even when it was most difficult, it was fun. And there are allies to help make matters including paradoxes and contradictions understandable, dreams, for example, and ancient wisdom like that of the I Ching, to help us stay on the path with a heart. There's modern wisdom too, as some simple recomendations attributed to the Dalai Lama help us see. Indeed we can touch the perennial wisdom. Or consider A Congressman's Prayer, by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). And then there is Talking with Angels, who say "What could be more natural than our talking with each other?" And what could be more natural than a poem to ask a deeper question?
When the power of love
Overcomes the love of power
The world will know peace.
- - Jimi Hendrix
According to the 20th-century American philosopher Susanne Langer,
under the influence of love, the "membrane of individuality" becomes porous.
- - From ODE
VISION AND POWER TO FORM A SYNERGISM
The truth is that all search for knowledge is essentially a form of prayer. The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer. Although at present he follows only the footprints of the musk-deer, and thus modestly limits the method of his quest, his thirst for knowledge is eventually sure to lead him to the point where the scent of the musk-gland is a better guide than the footprints of the deer. This alone will add to his power over Nature and give him that vision of the total-infinite which philosophy seeks but cannot find. Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture. Power without vision tends to become destructive and inhuman. Both must combine for the spiritual expansion of humanity.
It is a psychological truth that association multiplies the normal man.s power of perception, deepens his emotion, and dynamizes his will to a degree unknown to him in the privacy of his individuality
The real object of prayer, however, is better achieved when the act of prayer becomes congregational. The spirit of all true prayer is social. Even the hermit abandons the society of men in the hope of finding, in a solitary abode, the fellowship of God. A congregation is an association of men who, animated by the same aspiration, concentrate themselves on a single object and open up their inner selves to the working of a single impulse. It is a psychological truth that association multiplies the normal man.s power of perception, deepens his emotion, and dynamizes his will to a degree unknown to him in the privacy of his individuality. Indeed, regarded as a psychological phenomenon, prayer is still a mystery; for psychology has not yet discovered the laws relating to the enhancement of human sensibility in a state of association.
- - Muhammad Iqbal
And when we dance together, we will save ourselves.
This is the message Dancing Matt brings us in such a joyful way that we feel our interconnection.
Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men and women treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
- - Hermann Hesse
Religion is hard. But then you begin to lose the hard edges of yourself and start to glimpse the other. All of the Axial Agers practiced what the Chinese called jian ai or concern for everybody. Not just for your own group, but for everybody. And if we don't do that, I don't see how we can save our planet.
- - Karen Armstrong
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you put a thing in order, and give it a name, and you are all in accord, it becomes.
- - From the Navajo, Masked Gods, Waters, 1950
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feeling as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
- - Albert Einstein
There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.
- - Werner Heisenberg
Now, if the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the cooperation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.
- - J.B.S. Haldane
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Père Teilhard de Chardin's Phenomenon of Man is, as are his other writings, filled with poetic expression, even for simple and scientific understandings. Here he speaks of elemental matter:
"Observed from this special angle, and considered at the outset in its elemental state (by which I mean at any moment, at any point, and in any volume), the stuff of tangible things reveals itself with increasing insistence as radically particulate yet essentially related, and lastly, prodigiously active.
"Plurality, unity, energy: the three faces of matter."
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
-- William James
Ask yourself. Is the Earth, teeming with organic populations, an organism? Are we billions of humans, who make up the primary intelligence of the Earth as an organism, fulfilling our potentialities? Are we doing well? Is the Earth well?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And again from William James, one of the clearest statements of how much we have to learn about consciousness, scientifically and experientially.
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
Our most prodigious thinkers have seen us, humanity, as the culmination of creation, and this may be an acceptable view if we somehow fulfill our creative destiny. But there may be very little time, really, for growing up and reaching for the best we can be. The Earth, the beautifully balanced ecosystem, is badly damaged already from our point of view (whenever we look beyond the ends of our material noses to our future). Ironically and sadly, all the responsibility for the damage is ours -- we have grown too quickly capable and too slowly wise -- and rescue and repair are up to us, entirely.
We are not, thank goodness, utterly without insight. A small number of voices have always spoken out to teach, and to urge necessary actions. Here, a poignant and striking, terribly clear description of where we are and what we must now do, is presented as Four Prophecies given in 1920 by the American Indian medicine man, Stalking Wolf.
And here, a more recent note expressing a deeply felt dismay that we can hope will stimulate more and more of us to turn away from the Mauling of America that we have been teaching ourselves as if it were a good way of life.
Buckminster Fuller maintained, eloquently, that we have the power to think about and understand where we live, and ultimately to organize the materials of our world so that there is plenty for all of us, even for more of us if we intelligently decide that's what we want.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And Erwin Schroedinger regarded science as the best bet for our future:
I consider science an integrating part of our endeavour to answer the one great philosophical question which embraces all the others ... who we are? And more than that: I consider this not only one of the tasks, but the task, of science, the only one that really counts.
Albert Einstein concurs, with an even stronger emphasis on the inevitability of a spiritual aspect:
Sensation of the Mystical
The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is
the sensation of the mystical.
It is the sower of all true science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead.
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty,
which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms -
this knowledge, this feeling,
is at the center of true religion.
Your fervent wishes can only find fulfillment in you succeed if attaining love and understanding of men, and animals, and plants, and stars, so that every joy becomes your joy and every pain your pain.
- - Albert Einstein
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
body and soul
http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/article_cdo/aid/60776/jewish/Body-Soul.htm
Body and soul
The human being is a composite of body and soul. Consequently, all our affairs and activities likewise contain elements of both body and soul--the material and the spiritual.
One's mundane and routine activities are generally motivated by material and physical gain. Yet the "soul" within all these mundane affairs calls out for recognition--for the infusion of these ordinary affairs with an awareness of greater objectives and a higher purpose. The giving of charity, and the support of Torah education for Jewish children--these are the spiritual incentives that ought to motivate one in his daily activities.
Each one of us is a microcosm of all Creation. The achievement of harmony between one's soul and one's material life, is the achievement of harmony between the heaven and earth.
4 Comments
Body and soul
The human being is a composite of body and soul. Consequently, all our affairs and activities likewise contain elements of both body and soul--the material and the spiritual.
One's mundane and routine activities are generally motivated by material and physical gain. Yet the "soul" within all these mundane affairs calls out for recognition--for the infusion of these ordinary affairs with an awareness of greater objectives and a higher purpose. The giving of charity, and the support of Torah education for Jewish children--these are the spiritual incentives that ought to motivate one in his daily activities.
Each one of us is a microcosm of all Creation. The achievement of harmony between one's soul and one's material life, is the achievement of harmony between the heaven and earth.
4 Comments
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