I would like you to come with me on a great adventure, an exploration of humanity’s potential as seen through the eyes of the planet, and to share with me a vision of our evolutionary future. The journey will take us beyond this place and time, allowing us to stand back and behold humanity afresh, to consider new ways of seeing ourselves in relation to the whole evolutionary process.
Humanity could be on the threshold of an evolutionary leap, a leap that could occur in a flash of evolutionary time, a leap such as occurs only once in a billion years. The changes leading to this leap are taking place right before our eyes—or rather right behind them, within our own minds.
We alive today might be standing on the threshold of an evolutionary development as significant as the emergence of life on Earth some 3,500 million years ago.
The image a society has of itself can play a crucial role in the shaping of its future. If we fill our minds with images of gloom and destruction, then that is likely to be the way we are headed. Conversely, more optimistic attitudes can actually help promote a better world. A positive vision is like the light at the end of a tunnel, which, even though dimly glimpsed, encourages us to step on in that direction.
This transition would be occurring at the same time that the rapid accelerations in many areas of human endeavor are pointing to a major evolutionary transition; at the same time that the population approximates the crucial size of 1010; and at the same time that the connectivity within the human race is reaching a similar complexity to that found in the human brain.
We alive today could witness the beginnings of the emergence of a high-synergy society, a healthy social superorganism.
Before the boiling point is reached, the water molecules behave collectively as a liquid. But as the water boils and turns to steam, the behavior of the molecules changes radically; they behave collectively as a gas rather than a liquid. The individual molecules, however, have not changed at all, and the laws of quantum physics that apply to each molecule have not changed. It is the relationships between the molecules that have changed. As a result, the laws of steam are very different from those of water. There has been what physicists call “a change of state.”
The essence of high synergy is that the goals of the individual components are in harmony with the needs of the system as a whole. As a result there is minimal conflict between components, as well as between these components and the overall system.
If humanity were to evolve into a healthy, integrated, social superorganism, this transformation could signal the maturation and awakening of the global nervous system. Gaia might then achieve her own equivalent of self-reflective consciousness, and a fifth level of evolution, the Gaiafield, might emerge. Gaia would become a conscious, thinking, perceiving being, a being functioning at a new evolutionary level with faculties quite literally beyond our imagination.
Over the last two decades Gaia’s nervous system has begun to sense the space around. A few thousand artificial satellites have been sent up; a hundred men have been put into space, some of them to the moon; probes have been sent to take close looks at Mars, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter, some looking for life; and other missions are planned for the sun and for comets. Seen from space, it would look as if Earth were beginning to grow nerves out into the solar system, fine tendrils sensing her immediate environment.
As far as the Earth is concerned, once the conditions for the emergence of life were right, life appears to have dawned very rapidly; it seems to have been a virtual inevitability.
Ten billion seems to be the approximate number of units required in a system before a new level of evolution can emerge. Could the possibility of ten billion living planets in our galaxy herald the emergence of some galactic superorganism whose cells are awakened Gaias?
This next evolutionary step would signify the transition to a galactic superorganism. The galaxy would become its equivalent of conscious. With this might come the emergence of a sixth level of evolution, one as different from the Gaiafield as the Gaiafield is from consciousness, consciousness from life, and life from matter.
Could the universe as a whole be headed toward becoming a single universal being?
If, over thousands of millions of years, the ten billion galaxies in the universe not only evolved into galactic superorganisms, but also began to interact and communicate with each other, then there might come a final stage of evolution: a universal superorganism.
Beginning from a unity of pure energy, the universe would have evolved through matter, life, consciousness, Gaias, and galaxies to a final reunion in Brahman. From a unity of total nondifferentiation it would have evolved, through the most multifarious diversities, to a unity of total integration. From Brahman to Brahman.