White and Wild by wilshire|oneI am You
About ten years ago, I was browsing through an excellent but now disappeared bookshop in Golden Square, Soho, London. I saw a book called ‘Essays and Poems’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson – a name I had heard in connection with the transcendentalist movement. I slipped the book from the shelf and looked at the cover – a beautiful painted scene of forests and mountains in 19th century America. Judging the book by the cover alone, I purchased it and took it home to read. Over the course of the following years, that book has rarely left my side. The breadth of ideas presented in the pages is simply amazing, and almost unbelievable coming from a man who has been dead for over 120 years.
The first Essay in the book is entitled ‘History’ and opens with the following paragraph:
“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”
In those words I could sense something that I knew intuitively to be true. Something that also seems to be inherent to the psychedelic experience – the sudden realisation that ‘I’ am not ‘me’ in quite the same exclusive sense as is supposed by the majority of ‘modern’ humans.
Since my visit to that bookshop and the purchase of Emerson’s book, I have encountered the same or similar ideas again and again, often from surprising sources, including the late, great comedian Bill Hicks, and the famous French Jesuit Palaeontologist, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin.
Bill Hicks’s famous quote, taken from a sketch about there being no positive drugs stories on the news:
“Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the Weather…”
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin was certainly not a comedian. He was a man with a dilemma – an ordained priest and devout Catholic who was also a passionate scientist and fossil hunter, which brings to mind the Bill Hicks sketch about God planting dinosaur bones to test the faithful. But Theillard De Chardin was not your average priest. Instead of giving up one of his passions because of the obvious conflict between the two, he strove to unite the separate worlds of Catholic scripture and science by writing a series of amazing books. The most famous of these – ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ makes a fascinating read, even though the heavily Christian tone does make atheists and and people of other faiths uncomfortable. One of the concepts that Teilhard De Chardin refers to a lot in the book is the idea of ‘Noosphere’, which refers to the idea that the earth would evolve a whole new layer of ‘mind’ or consciousness, derived from the greek ‘Noos’ or mind.
“By the very fact that it represents the distinct emergence of a universal property, the Phenomenon of Man acquires an unbounded quantitative value. But we may say more than this. Humanity (and this is one of its most unusual physical aspects) evolves in such a way as to form a natural unity whose extension is as vast as the earth. Our concern with the ordinary business of men prevents us from appreciating the significance of this tremendous event. And yet it is taking place under our very eyes. From day to day the human mass is ‘setting’; it is building itself up; it is weaving around the globe a network of material organisation, of communication and of thought. Submerged as we are in this process, and accustomed to regard it as non-physical, we pay little attention to it. Suppose that we at last come to look at it as we would a crystal or plant: we immediately realise that, through us, the earth is engaged in adding to its lithosphere, its biosphere and its other layers, one more envelope – the last and most remarkable of all. This the thinking zone, the ‘noosphere’.” Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ‘Science and Christ’ p93
He believed that far from being proof that god does not exist, evolution itself was proof of intelligent design, and that the universe is headed towards an ‘Omega Point’ that is roughly equivalent to the christian rapture – a state in which pure love and beauty eclipse all other human or universal realities – which is pretty heady stuff, but if you read between the lines, not a million miles away from what people like Terrence Mckenna or Daniel Pinchbeck have been saying for years about the approaching ‘singularity’ that may or may not arrive on or around December 21st 2012.
Perhaps Teilhard’s noosphere is taking shape in a faster and more concrete fashion than ever before. The fact that I can now publish my ideas without the permission of a publisher or editor is amazing, regardless of whether anybody reads them or not. It seems to me that this idea of humanity as a single entity is the idea of the future – after all – who wants to go to war with themselves?
This is also why I am so passionate in my belief that the Free Software movement represents a leap in evolution in and of itself. If we are to overcome our differences and come together as a species in order to embrace the future as one, communication must be the key. The tools that make this communication possible are far too important to be left in the hands of a few large American corporations, not least because they will try to bend them to suit their own un-evolved needs. All the other things that we need to do in order to save the planet and each other rely on our ability to communicate freely.
“After having been regarded for many years as a scientifically subsidiary or anomalous element of the universe, mankind will in the end be recognised as a fundamental phenomenon – the supreme phenomenon of Nature: that in which, in a unique complexity of material and moral factors, one of the principal acts of universal evolution is not only experienced but lived by us.” Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ‘Science and Christ’ p97
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays are available for free download here
