Uncredited blog excerpts are from The Urantia Book.
To read The Urantia Book, go to: http://www.urantia.org/urantia-book/read-urantia-book-online
To see all of the books available at Amazon books by A. Cercatore, the author of this blog, go to Amazon books and search for "finding god cercatore." Click "See all XX Results."
To read The Urantia Book, go to: http://www.urantia.org/urantia-book/read-urantia-book-online
To see all of the books available at Amazon books by A. Cercatore, the author of this blog, go to Amazon books and search for "finding god cercatore." Click "See all XX Results."
Thinking Cosmically
Nearness to God
Mortals may enjoy contemplation, and talk to our immanent God (a fragment of the transcendent Universal Father) that indwells each normal human mind after the age of six. This is the "still small voice" referred to in 1 Kings 19:11-13 (King James Version of the Bible). This consultation with god is possible without clergy, confession to others, dogma, idols, or superstition.
Of course, many enjoy sharing their religion in social situations. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Matthew 18:20. (King James Version)
Amalgamation
The most contentious problems of mortal society are caused by differences in race; gender; religion; and ownership of property.
These problems will be resolved only when mankind achieves the goals of one race, gender equality, one language, one religion, one global government, the shared distribution of wealth and Earth's resources, and the segregation or elimination of inferior humans until the gene pool is purged of defectives.
Realization of these goals will require millenniums of growth in man's outreach for brotherhood.
Human Origin and Destiny
Humans have evolved from seeds of force energy that had no beginning and will have no end as our unending transformations continue from their origin in pre-time, through Time and Space, continuing in Transcendent Time and Space, and eventually returning to the absolute state as spiritual beings (fully fledged gods).
The book explaining this process (Transformations Without Beginning or End, written by A. Cercatore) is available from Amazon.
Science and Religion
Leonard Miodinow, in speaking of the universe models of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and Quantum Physics, feels the existence of God cannot be proven or dis-proven by science since the scientist is operating within the confines of the "box" of his epoch's model for science in time and space. (Reference Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's discussion of "model-dependent realism" in their book, The Grand Design.)
Science may expound on the governing of matter, but religion deals with the conservation of men's souls and their experience with spiritual realities and eternal values.
There is an intervening level of worlds between the flesh and the spirit. Man's difficulty in arriving at a more harmonious coordination between science and religion is due to his ignorance of this intervening domain of things and beings.
The experience of the soul in these intervening worlds will erase all divergence between the findings of the physical sciences and the functioning of the spirit in religion.
Unity in Diversity
The folly of arguing differences between religions such as Unitarianism and Trinitarianism is irrational. Both positions are correct. Unitarianism points to the fact that all the persons of god are united in oneness of mind. Trinitarianism demonstrates the persons of the Paradise Trinity working together in the manner of a corporation for a given purpose - creation of the universes.
Differences in the dogmatic positions of Earth's religions are too trite to merit discussion. Certainly, these man made suppositions do not justify war or killing.
Education
Education is a conditioning of the mind to accept the views of a particular society and way of life. Consequently, education often restricts one's thinking, for to believe one teaching entails a disbelief in other teachings that appear to be contradictory.
Man's Spiritual Ministers
Guardian angels constantly hover near mortals to aid the “spiritualization of matter.” The angels encourage man to concern himself with his immortality.
Guardian angels are mind stimulators. They seek to promote elevating decisions in the human mind. They do this, not like the Thought Adjuster operating from within and through the soul, but rather from the outside, working through the social, ethical, and moral environment of human beings.
Guardian angels guide men’s footsteps into paths of new and progressive experiences. Acceptance of seraphic guidance rarely means attaining a life of ease. In following the angelic leading, men, if they have the courage, traverse the rugged paths of moral choosing and spiritual progress.
The Thought Adjuster is the essence of man's eternal nature. The guardian angel is the teacher of man's evolving nature.
Midway creatures (created at a level slightly above men) act as liaison between the angels and favorably constituted mortals. The midwayers collaborate with the Thought Adjusters in the minds of receptive humans.
The Universe’s Caste System
In God’s eyes, there are only two classes of mortals; those sons of the Father who desire to do His will and those who do not. Those who do not wish to do the Father’s will rank as animals.
Veils
Few mortals feel they warrant the arrangements made for their endless life. From man's perspective, his value to the universe appears negligible. Still, there is a reason behind the life experience. The phenomenal world veils something of infinite value, of which mortals are a part. (See Amazon publications of A. Cercatore's, Transformations Without Beginning or End.)
Cosmogony
Earth and the other worlds of time are not tumbling haphazardly through uncharted space. Our local universe is a fragment of one of the seven super universes that are traversing a counterclockwise course around a vast ellipse that encircles Paradise and the central universe.
Earth is an infinitesimally small part of Super Universe 7 that travels between super universes 1 and 6. Today, Super Universe Seven is a few billion years past the swing around the southern curvature of a great ellipse and is moving swiftly along the long straight northern path. Super Universe 7 will pursue this direct northerly course for untold ages.
Earth is now passing through the very same space that its predecessors traversed ages ago. In the remote future, Earth, or its successors, will again traverse this identical space.
The Levels of Existence
Existential:
Infinitude - (Level of the Existential and Infinite “I AM”)
Paradise Level - (Absolute Existential Perfection)
Mid Level Between the Existential and Experiential Level:
Havona Level - Transcendentally (Above Time and Space) Perfect Central Universe
Experiential (Evolutionary) Creation:
Super Universes (1 through 7) Level
Major Sectors Level
Minor Sectors Level
Local Universes Level
Constellations Level
Star (Solar) Systems Level
Planets Level
Earth's Mother Super Universe
When Super Universe 7 (in which Earth is a planet) is complete, it will contain one-seventh of the numbers of units planned for the seven super universes:
Major Sectors…………………………...7
Minor Sectors………………………..100
Local Universes…………………100,000
Constellations……………….10,000,000
Local Systems……………1,000,000,000
Inhabitable Planets….1,000,000,000,000
The Metamorphosis of Force-Energy
Force-energy derived from self-existent Deity is also ever-existent. Force-energy is imperishable. The manifestations of the Infinite may be subject to unlimited transmutation into and through the matter of time-space, endless transformation to higher forms, and eternal metamorphosis; but in no sense could they suffer extinction.
Force-energy ever responds to the all-embracing grasp of Infinity. Having departed from Paradise, they must return in a transformed spiritual condition, even if age upon age is required for the completion of the ordained circuit through the circular, orderly, and widely distributed universe of universes.
Feeling Energy
Energy is the foundation of existence. One’s thoughts about the idea of energy should feel as real as the feeling about any solid appearing object. A person should concentrate upon feeling energy, as knowledge alone cannot provide an understanding of energy.
Even when man accepts the truth that there is only one energy, this is not enough for progress. Men must learn to picture the incalculable qualities of energy. Man limits his understanding when he allows a too guarded narrowness of thought to limit his perception of the attributes of energy.
Lofty thinking helps escape mortal limitation, but many men feel it is too difficult to maintain a suitable level of lofty thought amidst life's disappointments and misfortunes. Life's difficulties assist lofty thinking. Nature (life) is flux and transformation (transcending matter through evolution).
Everyone can feel kinship with the eternal by learning to perceive the elusive chimerical properties of fundamental energy.
Quarantine
In the hope of conserving and safeguarding God’s precious presence, when some planets (or even systems) plunge into spiritual darkness, they are partially isolated from intercourse with the larger units of creation. This is a spiritually defensive reaction of the majority of the worlds to save themselves from suffering the alienating acts of a rebellious minority.
For two hundred thousand years all the worlds of Satania (Earth's Star System) have been under the spiritual ban of our Constellation level overlords as a consequence of the Lucifer rebellion. Earth continues to pursue an irregular and checkered career as a result of the double tragedy of our rebellious Planetary Prince (Caligastia) and the default of Adam and Eve.
The development of civilization on Earth has not differed so greatly from that of other worlds that have sustained the misfortune of spiritual isolation. But, when compared with the loyal worlds of the universe, Earth seems very confused and greatly retarded in all phases of intellectual progress and spiritual attainment.
Culture requires quality of mind. Culture cannot be enhanced unless mind is elevated. Superior intellect will seek a noble culture and find ways to attain such a goal. When presented to them, inferior minds will rebuff a higher culture.
Human Government
The only sacred feature of any human government is the division of statehood into a trinity of executive, legislative, and judicial functions.
The universe itself is administered in accordance with such a plan of segregation of functions and authority. Aside from this divine concept of effective social regulation or civil government, it matters little what form of state a people may elect to have (provided the citizenry is ever progressing toward the goal of augmented self-control and increased social service).
The intellectual keenness, economic wisdom, social cleverness, and moral stamina of a people are all faithfully reflected in statehood.
Evolution of Statehood
Statehood evolves from level to level in the following manner:
1. Creation of a threefold government of executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
2. Freedom of social, political, and religious activities.
3. Abolition of all forms of slavery and human bondage.
4. Ability of the citizenry to control the levying of taxes.
5. Establishment of universal education - learning extended from the cradle to the grave.
6. The proper adjustment between local and national governments.
7. The fostering of science and the conquest of disease.
8. Recognition of sex equality and the coordinated functioning of men and women in the home, school, and church, with specialized service of women in industry and government.
9. The elimination of toiling slavery by machine invention and the subsequent mastery of the machine age.
10. The conquest of dialects - the triumph of a universal language.
11. The ending of war - international adjudication of national and racial differences by continental courts of nations
presided over by a supreme planetary tribunal automatically recruited from the periodically retiring heads of the
continental courts. The continental courts are authoritative; the world court is advisory - moral. The continental courts
are authoritative in civic matters; the world court is advisory - moral. This reflects the original
intended relationship of monarchs and popes.
12. The world-wide vogue of the pursuit of wisdom - the exaltation of philosophy and the evolution of a world religion.
Earth is far from the realization of these exalted ideals of statehood, but the civilized races have made a beginning. Mankind is progressing toward higher evolutionary destinies.
Life Experience
Life in any form increases in quality through experience. This is true of individual atoms or compounded compositions of atoms.
The experience of every mortal creature or spirit being throughout creation is a part of an ever-expanding consciousness.
There is purpose and direction underlying everything known. Everything that occurs is the outcome of the conscious will of some entity. Everything has purpose. Thought fashions all levels of reality.
While the will of God will ultimately dictate true reality, each mortal personality makes a voluntary unforced choice to follow the will of God or not.
Mortals are responsible for the development and maintenance of their physical bodies, emotional nature, and mentality. Since humans are the energizing force within their own bodies, when they withdraw from those bodies, the bodies disintegrate. The same thing applies to the life force in forms of every kind (frogs, nations, religions, and civilizations).
Body, Mind, Soul, and Personality
The qualities of reality (think spiritual manifestation) occur in human experience in the physical electrochemical mechanism (body) and in the thinking, perceiving, and feeling mechanism (the total conscious and unconscious experience of the mind).
The intelligence related to the emotional life assists in the upward evolution to the soul and spiritual levels.
The soul of man matures through altruistic experience. Since altruism (service to one’s fellows) is essential for soul development, then life experience must provide encounters with social inequalities.
Just as the soul of mortal man is not part of the body, mind, or spirit, neither is the personality. Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience. Personality fuses all of the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive with the soul.
Prayers of mortals should be requests for meaningful life experiences.
The Value of Time
There is grave danger in postponing entrance into the kingdom of heaven (which will inevitably occur in some future personality life) while pursuing the transitory pleasures of immaturity and selfishness. Jesus said, “Salvation is not for those who are unwilling to pay the price of wholehearted dedication to doing my Father's will.”
While recognizing the necessity for most men to master some vocation, Jesus deplored overspecialization; narrow-mindedness and time squandered living an idle life. While warning against the dangers of mediocrity, Jesus warned that any virtue becomes a vice when carried to extremes. (Too much self-pity deteriorates into emotional instability. Too much enthusiasm leads to fanaticism.) As Aristotle maintained, life’s problems require proportional adjustments.
Jesus said: "Be brave of heart as well as of hand [physically]. Dare to do justice and be big enough to show mercy. Compel your lower nature to obey your higher nature.... Revere goodness and exalt truth. Choose the beautiful in place of the ugly. Love your fellows and reach out for God with a whole heart.”
To the Pharisees, Jesus asked: “Do not you foolish men understand that the God of heaven looks at the inner motives of the soul as well as on your outer pretenses and your pious professions? Think not that the giving of alms and the paying of tithes will cleanse you from unrighteousness and enable you to stand clean in the presence of the Judge of all men.”
Time is priceless. No one may avoid accounting for the expenditure of his or her time.
Love As Service
The myriads of solar systems and their planets were created as habitat for the countless types of intelligent creatures who could know God, accept the Father’s affection, and love him in return.
Genuine appreciation of infinite qualities far exceeds the limited capacity of the human mind. However, there lives within each mortal mind a spiritual fragment of the Paradise Father, the Thought Adjuster. Man's approach to loving the transcendent God of all creation is through love for this immanent spiritual guide. The unique relationship of each human with his Thought Adjuster provides an experience in celestial sociology, the Creator/creature, Father/child relationship with its appropriate devotion.
The Creator Son of our local universe, Michael the Christ (Jesus), embodied the motivating power of love while living a mortal life on this planet. His exemplary life demonstrated the truth that love and intelligence fulfill the Will of God.
Until the world has evolved to the stage where the concept of love is universal, it means mortals must find less fortunate brothers whom they can love and assist. Special attention should focus on those most capable of returning service to humanity.
Gender Relationship
To the human who has not experienced spiritual rebirth, the emphasis of life remains upon the relationship of the sexes.
The creativity of these mortals expresses itself mainly through the propagation of the race, brought about through the sexual relations of males and females (the positive and negative poles in the human family). This is a proper part of the divine plan.
After an individual’s re-birth in Christ, the entire sex relationship shifts gradually into its proper place as a more temperate appetite.
Instead of male and female, there emerges a relationship of magnetism (as between angel couples) between the newly negative personality and the positive soul, with consequent creativity upon the higher planes. The personality becomes soul-infused.
With growth, the two genders become responsive to the soul (the reflection of the divine intention), the spiritual counterpart of eroticism.
Love and Sex
The words love and sex convey the relationship and the union between God and His universe, between man and God, between a man and his soul, and between men and women.
When spirit and matter met, the universes came into being. The Christ was born. When an individual man and his soul come together, the Christ is born again in the heart of the man (this is known as rebirth). When a man and a woman come together, a new child of the Father is born.
Spiritual Rebirth
Eternal life begins at the moment of spiritual rebirth. "And all who trust Him (God's Son) to save them have eternal life; those who don't believe and obey Him shall never see heaven...." (John 3:36.)
Spiritual rebirth brings changes in our lives and goals. "The person who has been born into God's family does not make a practice of sinning because now God's life is in him; so he can't keep on sinning, for this new life has been born into him and controls him - he has been born again." (1 John 3:9.)
The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him.
The Role of Males and Females
The difference in nature, viewpoint, and thinking in men and women is highly beneficial to mankind, both individually and collectively. Dual phases of personality manifestation characterize many orders of universe creatures.
Male and female describes this difference in mortals. Positive (aggressive) and negative (passive) describes the gender difference among the angels. Such dual associations greatly multiply versatility and overcome the inherent limitations in each sex.
Men and women need each other in their mortal as well as in their mansion and spiritual world careers. The gender differences in viewpoint remain throughout eternity. The male and female differences will always intrigue, stimulate, and encourage them. The two sexes will always depend upon each other in the solution of perplexing universe problems.
Marriage
Marriage, with its sundry family relationships, produces higher motives indispensable to developing strong character.
Men and women find their highest service and joy in setting up homes for birthing and training children. In creating children, parents become co-partners with the makers of heaven and earth.
A man and a woman warmly embracing the highest ideals of time is an experience worthy of any price or sacrifice necessary for its attainment.
Transmutation of Sex
The activity or the inactivity of certain centers in the human body condition the personality. The soul works through the endocrine system to control and direct the energies and forces that the centers channel.
The sacral center, which represents the sex organs, is the center most implicated and active at the time of the rebirth initiation. The sacral center is the focal point for life force energy, creative energy, and sexuality.
The energy of the sacral center rises to higher centers transforming the physical sexual creative act into a creative process for producing the good, the beautiful and the true. This is the transmutation of sex.
Childhood
Childhood is the period during which a mortal develops a materialistic (selfish) point of view. One sees a corresponding stage of childhood in the lesser-evolved races and people of the world. The early lessons of childhood experience are necessary for the survival, development, and perpetuation of the human race. This characteristic occurs in both individuals and races.
The selfish period of childhood should nurture a second stage, which is the awakening of responsibility. A third stage is the time when a mortal is meant to have realized the purpose of his life with a plan for achievement that he is working out through his intellect and his controlling spirit, the Thought Adjuster. The maturing human should realize that he or she is part of a greater universal life; a Supreme Self Who is the synthesis of all.
The time is coming to study all children medically (with special attention to the endocrine system), vocationally (to place them in activities where their gifts and capacities may find fullest expression), and spiritually (to unify the child in brain, mind, and soul).
Children who die before the arrival of a Thought Adjuster (at age five) are resurrected concurrent with the arrival of either parent or a surrogate in the mansion worlds nursery. This is true regardless of any baptismal ritual performed by a church. At age sixteen, if the young mortals raised in worlds beyond Earth elect to pursue the path to perfection, they immediately translate to the first mansion world.
No ascending mortal can escape the experience of rearing children, either their own or others. Parenting may occur on the material worlds or subsequently on advanced worlds. It is a mistake to think of child culture as primarily the task of mothers. Fathers must pass through this essential experience as well as mothers.
Just as advanced individuals have personal angels, so do groups of human beings. Jesus referred to these angels when he said: "Take heed that you despise not one of these little ones, for I say to you, their angels do always behold the presence of the spirit of my Father."
Evolution
Evolution is the process of adjusting the matter aspect to the Spirit aspect, so that matter proves adequate as a body of expression for Spirit.
This evolvement comes through countless cycles within time and space before and after the mortal level of life.
On Earth, both persons and events reveal a determined plan for a wondrous evolution of the human race.
The Urge for Salvation
The urge to work for salvation underlies all the evolutionary processes, particularly in the human family. The instinct to betterment, the compulsion to progress, the steady effort to improve conditions, are all expressions of the instinct for salvation.
While the urge for salvation also drives humanity forward into its wild struggle for material well-being, instinct eventually urges man to turn his back upon the world. The new urge to serve, to relinquish selfishness for service, is the underlying story of evolution.
All Life Is Opportunity
Individual reaction to opportunity is one of the factors that show soul growth. Spiritual work can only go forward because of the free choice and self-initiated effort of individuals, but the effort to understand spiritual teaching carries its own reward. The attempt to grasp and comprehend the soul leads inevitably to an unfolding of the mental apparatus with a subsequent development of the brain cells. This unfolding produces a coordination of the thinking faculty and resultant illumination.
The study of revelation increases one’s responsibility to work for the implementation
of the divine plan for mankind. Deity gives revelation to man to achieve group cooperation and understanding not for individual benefit.
Through sincere study, group interplay is established both on the physical and super material levels.
Men see only a tiny portion of the divine plan. The revelators see the plan as it unfolds for a series of lives ahead. This is the reason they seek men who will work in groups. A group constitutes an active unit participating in the vast happenings that lie ahead. The same organizational groupings often continue after death.Soul
Each soul is one with all souls within the Over-soul of God the Supreme (the God of Time and Space), part of the one essential unity, the one all-pervading life.
The will of each mortal (the personality’s power of decision and choice), is resident in the material mind circuits, not the soul.
During life in mortal flesh, the evolving soul reinforces the higher material decisions of the mortal mind.
The soul may make final decisions only if the material mind delegates such authority freely and willingly to the soul.
Just as a butterfly emerges from the caterpillar stage, the personalities of former human beings appear on the mansion worlds divested of their cloak of material flesh.
Soul
Each soul is one with all souls within the Over-soul of God the Supreme (the God of Time and Space), part of the one essential unity, the one all-pervading life.
The will of each mortal (the personality’s power of decision and choice), is resident in the material mind circuits, not the soul.
During life in mortal flesh, the evolving soul reinforces the higher material decisions of the mortal mind.
The soul may make final decisions only if the material mind delegates such authority freely and willingly to the soul.
Just as a butterfly emerges from the caterpillar stage, the personalities of former human beings appear on the mansion worlds divested of their cloak of material flesh.
Soul and Personality Survival
The human soul and the personality survive mortal death by identity association with the spiritual Thought Adjuster, who indwells the human mind.
The second generation of the soul and personality is in the mansion worlds.
Spiritual Identity
When animal consciousness transitions to self-consciousness in man, the process is termed individualization. Man gains a spiritual identity when he develops a soul.
Humanity is the fourth kingdom of nature. It exists between the three lower kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, and animal) and the three higher kingdoms (Soul, Thought Adjuster (the spirit fragment of the Universal Father who lives in the human mind), and deity).
Man stands at a point of balance between opposites - deity and animal (reality and misleading appearance).
Every person in time and space is a lesser god of his own universe, which consists of his physical, soul, and mental bodies. These bodies comprise the lesser lives.
Quintessential Brotherhood
Man's never-ending search is for unification (a bringing together of individuality together as one).
The far-flung physical universe coalesces in the isle of Paradise (analogous to the atomic nucleus).
The intellectual universe coheres in the God of mind the Infinite Spirit.
The spiritual universe (beginning with the soul of man) is coherent in the personality of the Eternal Son.
The isolated mortal of time and space coheres in God the Father through the direct relationship between the indwelling Thought Adjuster and the Universal Father. Man’s Adjuster is a fragment of God and everlastingly seeks for divine
unification; it coheres with, and in, the Paradise Deity of the First Source and Center (the begetter of all existence
beginning with the Paradise Trinity).
Mortal Survival
The continuing survival of mortal creatures is dependent on developing an immortal soul within the human mind. The soul is the bridge between matter and spirit.
Meditation and service to God align the soul, the mind, and the brain. When a man performs as soul, the soul is the intermediary between the plane of divine truth and the mental plane.
Divine truth, the thought of deity, is a living organism. Man may know the truth, live the truth, experience the growth of truth in the soul, and enjoy its enlightenment in the mind. Role of Soul
The objective of the soul is participation in divine creation.
Forward spiritual movement happens in spiraling cycles across ever enlarging levels of consciousness.
In Time, the soul and the personality fuse with spirit (the Thought Adjuster). The new identity begins to blend with Life itself and becomes a part of the Supreme Reality (Time and space).
Care of the Soul
For rest and relaxation, Jesus sometimes took his apostles away by themselves for short periods to engage in meditation and prayer. Largely, he kept them serving the multitudes. The soul of man needs both spiritual nourishment and exercise.
Through communion with God comes deliverance from the world’s illusions of evil and material restraints. When man knows God, he frees the soul to prepare for the spirit struggle of immortality. As the mortal life is ending, man must not hesitate to abandon the body. He will awaken in a more fitting and beautiful form in the Supreme realms where there is no fear, sorrow, hunger, thirst, or death. Evil remains behind in this world. Virtue alone follows the soul to heaven.
Intimacy
The soul receives and registers shadows of ideas through intuition. In further contemplation, the thinker receives the image of a subjective skeleton and identifies the form that it should take.
Powerful support received in implementing an idea proves the service is the will of the Father. A son of God cooperates in all to which he may contribute. Meditation and service provide satisfactory expression for all the powers of the personality and soul.
Participation in the creation requires the thinker to discard all conceited and selfish thoughts.
Spiritual ambition or a fondness for personal power hinders true service. Any emphasis on the personality will distort the pure light of the soul as it seeks to pour through the lower self.
Expressing Soul
Men who do not falter in their search for light and for a field in which to serve their soul prove their devotion to their comrades and the greater Sons of God who guide the destiny of men.
A son of God accepts all the demands of loyalty that son-ship in the Kingdom of God involves. He seeks expression as a soul recognizing that all souls are one in the Supreme.
In dealing with Deity, man knows God through His nature, which is Spirit (Life) and Soul (love).
Man does not yet know the Universal Father. The Father remains inscrutable, unseen and unknown, except as revealed through the life of His deity sons, and by the revelation given by the incarnated son of of our universe, Jesus Christ. Soul Consciousness
Humanity must shift its consciousness away from its aggressive acquisitive material wants into soul consciousness. This is true of individuals, of nations, and of races. As each individual works out his own problems in life, he is helping to solve world problems.
Adequate Time
Baring accident, every will creature receives enough time to ensure survival. A person squanders time by failing to use it to guarantee the survival of his soul.
Echoing William Wordsworth
The time of youth with all its aching joys
And dizzy raptures is past.
Other gifts have followed
With abundant recompense.
I have learned to live my life
Not as in the hour of thoughtless youth,
But listening for the still, sad music of humanity,
Which chastens and subdues.
In my maturity, I apologize to all my brothers
For any misbehavior of mine towards them.
I also forgive all my brothers
For any mischief of theirs' toward me.
Integration
There is no separation in the planetary life of mortals and the other forms on the planet. Soul relates all forms and organisms. Plants, dogs, and people share life's circulation as it streams through the mass of forms that, as a group, make up our planet.
The difference in organisms is levels of consciousness.
Growth of the Soul
Nothing can prevent the progress of the human soul on its long ascent from ignorance to wisdom, from mortal death to immortality.
If the churches of all faiths fail to offer spiritual guidance and help, humanity will find another way. Nothing can keep the spirit of man from God.
The qualities of reality (spiritual expression) occur in human experience in the physical electro-chemical body and in the thinking, sensing, and feeling experience of the mind.
Intelligence related to the emotional life helps in the upward evolution to the soul and spiritual levels.
The soul of man matures with altruistic experience. Since altruism is essential for soul development, life experience must provide encounters with social inequalities.
Assisting Soul Growth
Soul is not a part of a man's initial body, mind, or spirit. Neither is personality. Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience. Personality fuses all the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive with the soul.
To aid evolution, prayers of mortals should be for life experiences.
Professional Soul Growth Assistance
The time is coming when medical doctors will study all children (with special attention to the endocrine glands). Vocational experts will also study children to place them where their gifts and abilities can find fullest expression. Spiritual counselors will seek to unify the child in brain, mind, and soul.
Through a person’s own choosing within his or her short life span, a mortal may elect to transfer his or her identity from the temporary physical-intellect organism to the more enduring soul. To make a choice, it is important the individual collects all the knowledge and wisdom that he or she can gain in a lifetime.
It is important the civilization that humans live in progresses from the material plane to the spiritual plane as fast as possible to make the learning experience of individuals easier.
Fountainhead of Cosmic Law
Mind is the cosmic instrument on which each mortal can play the music of God or the strident chords of self-destruction.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle taught that virtue is knowledge, goodness, and health of the soul. It is better, they said, to suffer injustice than to be guilty of it, and it is wrong to return evil for evil. Jesus warned his followers against the evil of even holding a grudge.
For mortals with freewill, the soul is the fountainhead of the highest and best values of human life.
The soul within all forms obeys cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise. Still, the soul does not impinge the freewill of the individual. Resistance to the values of the soul in humans comes from the material portion of humans. (This resistance is the basic cause of all physical disease as well.)
Laws of Nature and the Soul
The Laws of Nature (inherent in the life of the physical form) carry the seeds of mortal death. The Laws of the Soul supersede the Laws of Nature. The laws of the soul are the highest laws to which humanity can respond.
When the flood tides of human misfortune, selfishness, cruelty, hate, malice, and jealousy rage around the mortal soul, the soul, which is the citadel of the spirit, is unassailable.
The challenge of this age is for progressive men and women to erect a new and appealing philosophy of living out the soul’s integrated ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness. A new and righteous vision of morality will beckon all that is good in the mind of man and best in the human soul.
Law of the Soul
Basically, a law is an expression or process whereby some thinker or group of thinkers, manifests and applies a compelling force.
Cosmically, a law is the effect of the life of a greater entity as it encloses a lesser being within its living processes. The law embodies the formulated purpose or organized will of the encompassing life. The enfolded purpose or will complies.
For mortals with freewill, the soul is the source of the highest and best values (potential laws) of human life.
The soul itself within all forms freely obeys and follows cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise. The soul does not infringe upon the freewill of the individual within which it resides. Resistance to the values of the soul in humans comes from the "not-self" or the material aspect of humans. As stated earlier, this resistance is the basic cause of all disease.
The Laws of the Soul are superior to the Laws of Nature. They are the highest laws to which humanity can respond. American Legal System
America’s legal system interferes with the proper adjudication of justice when it uses laws for selfish gain. This interference arises when an individual or group disregards the fact that laws are meant to serve the common good.
The increasingly litigious nature of American society has created a fear of being sued. As an example, the ramifications of this concern have forced doctors to practice medicine defensively rather than using their professional judgment.
Similarly, the threat of lawsuits by parents has undermined the authority of teachers to maintain student discipline. In every country, there are those who seek to over-extend the intended meaning of the law for their own advantage. They avoid the legitimate responsibilities of citizenship through "loopholes" in legislation.
Non-conformity to law causes social maladies as well as individual illnesses.
Rebirth
When spiritual rebirth occurs in an individual (whether by gradual growth or crisis), there follows a new orientation of personality and development of new standards of values.
Spirit-born individuals are so motivated in life that they can serenely watch their fondest earthly ambitions and hopes crash. They realize that catastrophes must wreck their temporal creations before raising more enduring and sublime realities.
Material World Law Makers
Normally the intellectual elite, the prevailing majority, and the the wealthy make the laws in the materialistic worlds.
Their subordinates may rewrite the laws if they are sufficiently aggrieved and aggressive.
Values
The religion of Jesus is not a technique for gaining a static and blissful peace of mind. It is an impulse for organizing the soul for service. It is enlisting self-hood in the loyal service of loving God and serving man.
In pondering values, men must think about their pleasures and how to integrate them into higher levels of human experience.
Meaning is what experience adds to value. It is the conscious appreciation of values. A purely selfish pleasure may mean a devaluation of meanings bordering on relative evil.
The worth of human life consists in the growth of values, progress in meanings, and realization of the cosmic relationship of both of these experiences. This experience is God-consciousness. Such a mortal is becoming superhuman as his immortal soul evolves.
Strife
Religious perplexities are unavoidable in mortal life. There can be no growth without mental conflict and spiritual agitation.
The human intellect resists weaning from the material energies of temporary existence. The lazy animal mind rebels at the effort demanded in wrestling with cosmic problem solving.
The compensation is that new religious insights arise out of conflicts that need new and better reaction habits in place of the older and inferior reaction patterns. Conflict merely persists in any refusal to adopt the higher values suggested by superior meanings.
The Evolutionary Ladder to Personality Status
The mineral kingdom is the densest point of concretion for physical forms. The vegetable kingdom is unique in the economy of our solar system as it is vital to all lives.
Though the mineral kingdom has a consciousness of its own, sensation is more recognizable in the vegetable kingdom.
Man/God
Man is a god to the lower kingdoms, but due to his immaturity, man's beneficial oversight as opposed to exploitation of his brothers is meager.
Individual mortals may expend a great deal of time re-incarnating due to their failure as personalities to qualify for advancement to the mansion worlds.
The question of pre-existence is often tied to the religious issue of reincarnation, a belief that individuals now living on earth have had a series of previous human lives as they have moved from body to body. This position is expounded in the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita.
Sir Oliver Lodge (1851 - 1940), a world-renowned physicist and a fearless champion of survival sought to bring together the transcendental world with the physical universe. He wrote in Phantom Walls (1929): "When the question of pre-existence arises I should say that the individual as we know him is a fresh apparition, a new individualisation of something preexisting… a fragment of the Absolute Father."
Sleeping Survivors
All mortals of survival status, in the custody of personal guardian angels, pass through the portals of natural death and, on the third day, personalize on the mansion worlds.
Other accredited beings who have, for any reason, been unable to attain that level of intelligence mastery and endowment of spirituality which would entitle them to personal guardian angels, cannot go directly to the mansion worlds. Such surviving souls must rest in unconscious sleep until the judgment day of a new epoch.
When Christ Michael ascended on high at the conclusion of his work on earth, "He led a great multitude of captives." These captives were the sleeping survivors from the days of Adam to the day of the Master's resurrection on Earth.
These sleeper classes of world pilgrims are utilized for group activities in the work of the local universes. There is a great advantage in the mobilization of such enormous groups. They are kept together for long periods of effective service.
The Roman Catholic Church mistakenly identified the status of sleeping survivors as being in Purgatory, a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who died not entirely free from venial sins.
Man's Learning
Man’s learning occurs through three stages of mental development. These stages are the three ages through which the soul of man must progress.
1. In cycles of generations as an infant human, man passes through an age of ignorance on the physical plane. The longest period of a lifetime is spent in the age of ignorance.
2. Average people pass through an age of learning on the emotional plane. A spiritual man enters the age of wisdom on the mental plane.
3. The concluding period in the age of learning is called the probationary path. In this age of wisdom, man draws near the Thought Adjuster, the immanent fragment of the transcendental Universal Father.
The Human Tabernacle
In his physical shell, man is both an animal and a lesser God.
Man is the macrocosm for the animal. He contains all that is meant by the term animal.
The animal forms the base and the contrast for the divine.
Each individual contains every element found in the physical universe. Everything in nature is directed towards one point, Man.
On the ascending arc of evolution, Spirit asserts itself at the expense of the material. This is true of Gods and of men.
In man, Intelligence (mind) links Spirit and matter.
Anticipating Final Judgment
Religions have frightened humanity with their dogmas of final judgment, and have thereby deprived men of adventuresome daring.
Whoever submits blindly to an authoritarian religion is like a beast of burden staggering under excessive weight imposed upon it. Why should one accept on faith the decisions of strangers who take fees for intervening with god?
Humans live only for the perfecting of their souls.
Help in the form of salvation assistance may come at the moment of death. It is impossible to stem this flow of energy if it proceeds correctly in the mind of a receptive individual.
However, since suicide is the greatest crime, any severance of the life-striving energy is equally harmful.
Your Personal Account
The Memory of Mercy angels are a living trial balance, a current statement of your account with the supernatural forces of the realms.
The Memory of Mercy are the living records of mercy ministration that are read into the testimony of the courts of the seventh super universe when each individual's right to unending life comes up for adjudication when the Ancients of Days are seated.
The "books" that are opened on such a momentous occasion are living records of these high angels of the super universes.
The Highest Service - Brotherhood
The source of brotherhood is love of the Universal Father. God the Father loves all of his children equally. His family is the brotherhood of His children.
This qualified brotherhood establishes the relationship of every personality in existence with every other personality.
In time and space, all souls are becoming one with the Supreme Over-soul. Eventually, brotherhood will be a living relationship between all conscious beings.
Individual Relationships
There is little room for individual life in serving the brotherhood. Increasingly the bonds of unselfish devotion must control the life of the individual.
Anger and Brotherhood
Anger indicates a lack of brotherly love as well as a lack of self-respect and self-control. Anger reveals the inability of the spiritual nature to gain control of the intellectual and physical natures.
Outbursts of animal anger are inconsistent with divine son-ship.
Even though another human may physically attack, the victim may not retaliate. If a witness observes someone attacking another human, the witness must restrain the attacker without striking him.
In brotherhood, to attack another is to attack one’s real all inclusive Self, the Thought Adjuster.
Family Relations – A Stepping Stone
Jesus exalted family life as the highest human duty. He noted, however, that the earthly family relationship does not survive mortal death.
Without God, without religion, secularism can never coordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races, and nationalisms.
Despite its unparalleled materialistic achievement, our secularistic human society is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace.
Relations of Nations
National patriotism, when colored by the feeling of superiority, class hatreds, and racial antagonisms, constitutes a barrier to the proper development of humanity.
The great principles of brotherhood are being widely distorted because there is no general human knowledge of the great concepts, and no understanding of the guidance of the Most Highs (the rulers of the constellation) who are guiding humanity towards brotherhood.
Living within the kingdom of God, all mortals become better citizens of the secular government, and rulers of earthly governments become better managers and statesmen.
Earth will attain lasting worldwide peace only when nations surrender their sovereign powers into the hands of the brotherhood of men, a government of all planetary mankind. The interim United Nations can only prevent minor wars and control smaller nations. They cannot control the powerful governments.
Relations of Religions
Many people are agnostic or atheistic while others are uneasy about the control of theological authority. The spiritual truths of Earth’s religions are gradually linking together showing them all to be of equal progressive value, but all lack the essential element of Christ’s brotherhood of man teachings.
Religions must become more than social organizations. The objective of earth’s religions must be to foster the growth of spiritual consciousness.
Many people in the world today believe in an ecumenical brotherhood of religions. The day is coming when all religions will acknowledge one spiritual source. A universal world religion will emerge. All religions will accept the same truths, not as theological concepts, but as the essence of spiritual living. All will recognize the brotherhood of divine son-ship.
The Religion of Jesus
Today’s Sons of God (spiritually advanced mortals) work silently for order founded on love and brotherhood.
Scarcely knowing how or why, humanity plays its part in the work of evolutionary creation. The true church, the brotherhood of Jesus, has no temples. It is invisible, spiritual, and characterized by unity, but not uniformity.
Even corporations are a tool provided by deity to accelerate the development of world brotherhood and global peace. The Trinity of Three Persons in One is an archetype of corporate deity. The corporate structure involves a oneness of the mind and purpose of many individuals.
What Is This Thing Called Love?
"What is this thing called love
This crazy thing called love
Just who can solve its mystery?....
That's why I ask the Lord up in heaven above
Just what is this thing called love?"
(Excerpt from"What Is This Thing Called Love?" a 1929 popular song written by Cole Porter.)
Love is the the universal tendency to feel affection, show mercy, manifest patience, and minister forgiveness to others.
All true love is from God. Man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows. Man can never take the love of the Father and withhold it to himself. The Father’s love can become real to mortal man only by passing through that man’s personality as he in turn bestows this love upon his fellows.
Inter-Racial Relations
Religions follow racial viewpoints. Every race has its own perspective of human existence.
The spiritual Creator Sons create the spectrum of worlds (such as Earth) that foster the birth and growth through the kingdoms that nurse:
Inter-Species Relations
Brotherhood recognizes the intrinsic value of all life.
Humans are just one level in the web of life. Man’s evolving brothers in the lesser kingdoms are just a little behind him.
Man's work is to raise the lower levels of mankind, to bring brotherhood into manifestation, and to transmit divine energy to a waiting world of still lesser life forms.
Worship
Worship is the technique of looking to the Oneness of Brotherhood for inspiration to serve the many.
A mortal candidate for survival is more than the result of the evolutionary process. He is a cause of the evolutionary process.
While simultaneously evolving upon three planes (the physical, emotional, and mental), man is the intended synthesis of the two poles of spirit and of matter. The result of the union of spirit and matter will be an individualized Son of God, a unit of the Supreme.
You can best discover values in your associates by discovering their motivation. If someone irritates you, causes feelings of resentment, you should sympathetically seek to discern his viewpoint, his reasons for such objectionable conduct. If once you understand your neighbor, you will become tolerant, and this tolerance will grow into friendship and ripen into love.
Perspective and Compassion
Conjure up a picture of one of our primitive ancestors of cave-dwelling times – imagine a short, misshapen, filthy, snarling hulk of a man standing with legs spread, club upraised, breathing hate and animosity as he looks fiercely just ahead.
This picture doesn't depict the divine dignity of man. But now, enlarge the picture. In front of this fierce man crouches a saber-toothed tiger. Behind the man are a woman and two children. You realize the scene stands for the beginnings of much that is fine and noble in the human race. The man is the same in both pictures. Only, in the enlarged picture you discern the motivation of this evolving mortal. His attitude becomes praiseworthy because you understand him.
If we could fathom the motives of our brothers, we would understand them much better. In knowing our fellows, we learn to love them.
Love is only born of thoroughgoing understanding of our neighbor’s motives and sentiments. It is not so important to love all men today as it is that we learn to love one more human being each day.
If each mortal could become a focus of dynamic affection, this benign virus of love would soon pervade the sentimental emotion-stream of humanity to the extent that all civilization would be encompassed by love, and that would be the realization of the brotherhood of man.
The Unending Struggle for Brotherhood
The fused fragments of the Infinite Spirit and the Father (ex-mortals and their Thought Adjusters) will return to time and space to administer newly forming universes in the outer space belts beyond the seven super universes where the fragments of energy-matter (the Unqualified Absolute) will continue their evolution.
The Kingdom of God
The kingdom of God is the totality of individuals who declare their unconditional commitment to doing the will of God. This family of individuals comprises the spiritual brotherhood of man.
The Kingdoms of Man
Man must realize that there is a spiritual sovereignty that rules over all the governments of men.
The Most Highs rule in the kingdoms of men.
The rule of the Most Highs fosters the greatest good to the greatest number of all men for the greatest length of time. Mortals will not find peace or happiness until all mortals, religions and nations transfer supreme authority to the superhuman level.
Relations of Religion and Government
Religion makes it spiritually possible to realize the brotherhood of men, but the governments of mankind must regulate the social, economic, and political problems associated with the brotherhood goals of human happiness and efficiency.
Major Stages of Man's Growth
Deity’s plan for man’s further growth on Earth calls for brotherhood, sharing, internationalism, and other such expressions of unity.
Mortal Sons of God are agents of the divine will who work towards the implementation of the plan for Earth. The first intimation of the divine plan alters the entire life of a son of God.
The struggle for brotherhood on Earth continues in ever expanding situations and environments throughout thelevels of the universe ascension plan.
Separateness
The whole spectrum of human wickedness is attributable to man's choice of separateness from God and his brothers. Choosing separation from God allows an individual to consider his selfish interests as supreme.
It is because of the sex urge that selfish man is lured into making something better than an animal of himself.
Why?
Yeats wondered in his poem, Crazy Jane why: "... Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement."
After having sex with another man, Anglican Bishop Pike questioned why, "...nothing seemed to fit together as it should."
The human body design - why does putting the nose and tongue in close proximity seem to serve as a deterrent to some exotic sexual relations?
The Phenomenon of Man
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955) was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist.
The book was finished in the 1930s, but was published posthumously in 1955. (The Roman Catholic Church initially prohibited the publication of some of Teilhard’s writings on the grounds that they contradicted orthodoxy.)
Teilhard views evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity. From the cell to the thinking animal, a process of psychical concentration leads to greater consciousness. The emergence of Homo sapiens marked the beginning of a new age, as the power acquired by consciousness to turn in upon itself raised humankind to a new sphere. Echoing Huxley, Teilhard described humankind as evolution becoming conscious of itself.
In Teilhard's conception of the evolution of the species, a collective identity begins to develop as trade and the transmission of ideas increases. Knowledge accumulates and is transmitted in increasing levels of depth and complexity. This leads to a further augmentation of consciousness and the emergence of a thinking layer that envelops the earth. Teilhard calls the new membrane the “noosphere” (from the Greek “nous”, meaning mind).
The noosphere is the collective consciousness of humanity, the networks of thought and emotion in which all are immersed.
The development of science and technology causes an expansion of the human sphere of influence, allowing a person to be simultaneously present in every corner of the world. Teilhard argues that humanity has thus become cosmopolitan, stretching a single organized membrane over the Earth. The rapid expansion of the noosphere requires a new domain of psychical expansion, which "is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it".
In Teilhard’s view, evolution will culminate in the Omega Point, a sort of supreme consciousness. Layers of consciousness will converge in Omega, fusing and consuming them in itself. The concentration of a conscious universe will reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all that we are conscious of.
Teilhard emphasizes that each individual facet of consciousness will remain conscious of itself at the end of the process. Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness.
In the June 1995 issue of Wired, Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg said, "Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived."
In July 2009, during a vespers service in Aosta Cathedral in northern Italy, Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on the Epistle to the Romans noted, "St. Paul writes that the world itself will one day become a form of living worship."
(This information on The Phenomenon of Man is paraphrased from Wikipedia.)
Learning to be Human
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
The Divine Milieu
Teilhard's second comprehensive work is The Divine Milieu, in which he stressed the importance of human endeavor.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a belief among some Catholics and other Christians that in order to be “holy” one had to devote oneself to purely religious activity and that secular work had no lasting value. Teilhard wanted to demonstrate that secular work is an integral element of creation and the Incarnation, so that for religious reasons, Christians should be committed to whatever work they are doing and offer it up as a service to God.
Teilhard showed how all human activities and efforts toward personal growth and human progress can be used to help the growth and development of the Body of Christ (all creation).
Not only are human efforts useful in this regard, they are vital. Even though people perform these actions as ordinary human beings, and they look like ordinary human actions, they are simultaneously being transformed in the divine milieu (ambience) and become actions done in, with, and through Christ.
Teilhard's life work was predicated on the conviction that human spiritual development is moved by the same universal laws as material development. He wrote, "...everything is the sum of the past and ...nothing is comprehensible except through its history. 'Nature' is the equivalent of 'becoming', 'self-creation;' this is the view to which experience irresistibly leads us....There is nothing, not even the human soul, the highest spiritual manifestation we know of, that does not come within this universal law."
One particularly poignant observation in Teilhard's book entails the notion that evolution is an increasingly optional process. Teilhard points to societal problems as huge inhibitors of evolution. He states that "no evolutionary future awaits anyone except in association with everyone else."
Teilhard argued that the human condition necessarily leads to the volitional psychic unity of humankind.
(Paraphrased from a Wikipedia article.)
Picturing God
In addition to the two classical ways of picturing God - either far away in heaven (transcendent) or living within your heart (immanent) - Teilhard’s spirituality presents a third, much more comprehensive way to view our relationship with God: God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being.
A Shared Destiny
Teilhard takes traditional individual spirituality and expands it to become part of the grand project envisioned by God for humanity - a shared planetary destiny.
"The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration."
Role of Human Effort
Teilhard de Chardin explains that humankind is involved in a collective awakening.
He shows how all our human efforts to create a better world are really ways to further God’s planetary project, and so individual actions are much more significant than just ways to get higher grades on our heavenly spiritual report card, as some traditional religions infer.
Present to Future
The human race has struggled through long ages to reach its present position. The motto used as a guiding principle for action in the universes is “progress.” Action can be regressive. Progress can be negated.
For example, in the ideals of pair marriage, woman has finally won recognition, dignity, independence, equality, and education. Today, woman is undergoing a crucial test of her long world struggle.
New Paradigms and Patterns
Universe difficulties must be met and planetary obstacles must be encountered as a part of the experience training provided by Earth's spiritual overseers for the growth and development and the progressive perfection of the evolving souls of mortals on Earth.
The spiritualization of the human soul requires intimate experience with the solving of a wide range of real universe problems. The animal nature and the lower forms of will creatures do not progress favorably in environmental ease.
Problematic situations, coupled with exertion stimuli, conspire to produce those activities of mind, soul, and spirit which contribute mightily to the achievement of worthy goals of mortal progression and to the attainment of higher levels of spirit destiny.
Great Global Changes
The world has changed dramatically during the past five hundred years.
Because of the growth of man's intellectual and machine assisted powers, change will continue to accelerate very rapidly in the the coming decades and centuries.
The coming changes will be unimaginable to this generation. Even the outer appearance of the world will be profoundly altered.
Presently undeveloped vegetable and animal forms will be created through the intelligent manipulation of the energies that create and constitute all forms.
The social structure of Earth will change with spectacular results. It is happening now.
Adjusting to Change in a World Advancing Towards Universal Brotherhood
Huge global transitions are occurring. These changes will alter man’s conditions of living and change his outlook upon world and local affairs.
People must amplify their thinking to allow a better attitude towards cooperation rather than competition.
Further, people must comprehend the interrelationship of all things.
The tumult of global chaos will eventually propel man towards global brotherhood as man resorts to cooperation for survival.
In An Ideal World
Change is unavoidable, so it must be managed.
Planned changes should be small, incremental and gradual. Significant changes must allow for a time of recovery, reconstruction and rebuilding between major adjustments.
Governing bodies must be composed of those who work for the greatest good of the greatest number of people while offering opportunity to all. Individuals must be free to make choices not harmful to society.
One global goal should be a steady and regulated disarmament of all nations or armed groups. No nation or group should pose a threat to any other nation or group.
No single type of government or religion should be imposed upon the citizens of the world. Only in the field of education, should there be any attempt to produce consistency.
While man controls mineral wealth and the resources of the sea, the harvest belongs to every citizen of Earth. It is not the property of one group, nation or race. To overcome inequality, a plan must be developed for the distribution of the innate wealth of the planet based upon the needs of each nation in relation to the whole.
The world will still have many selfish and self-absorbed people, but public opinion must force higher ideals upon governments and corporations.
Sharing and bartering should be the fundamental premises in material exchanges not manipulable currencies.
Manipulable national currencies should be replaced not only by a system of barter, but by a universal monetary exchange based upon a scale of related values using national resources and commodities.
A governing international group should own public utilities and the major material resources. National groups chosen by the people under international direction should determine the consumption levels of each nation.
The Components of Chaos
World Problems such as resource depletion, climate change with hurricanes and floods, blizzards, tsunamis, drought, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, aquifer depletion, species destruction, over-population, illegal economic immigration, ecological damage from pesticides and herbicides, unregulated globalization, war, genocide, nuclear and biological weapon threats, terrorists, E. Coli, Ebola, national debt, trade deficits, the high cost of medical care, drug addiction, drug cartels, political and corporate opportunists, unethical advertising, dependency on high-energy usage, the wasting of resources in an unsustainable life style while parents and teachers battle the false expectations of the young as well as the insidious advertising that targets them are a plague on Earth.
The misuse of technology is the fuel for societal destruction if used for crime or war.
The world must concentrate upon developing the technical tools that make society and life better. The misuse of tools such as using the internet for pornography and identity theft rather than education and decent entertainment is evil.
Catastrophic Threats to Civilization
Evolutionary climate change (nature and man's pollution) threatens to increase terrorism and war and even to cause the collapse or spiritual strengthening of civilization.
Global health is endangered as a result of the catastrophic consequence of global warming as communities worldwide compete for scarce resources.
Inequality over access to resources, such as water and food, breed desperation and resentment, sparking terrorism and war.
World health conditions will interact with terrorism and stimulate conflict and potentially the regression of civilization.
Global terrorism is a reaction to global inequality. In the event of a massive drought, where food and water became scarce, desperate people, who see the world as unfair will turn to terrorism groups.
While the impacts of global warming on human health and the physiological effects of drought, famine, heat and cyclones are more tangible, the broader social consequences could be calamitous.
Revisting Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man
(Extracted From the Introduction to the book by Sir Julian Huxley)
The Phenomenon of Man is a very remarkable work by a very remarkable man. Pere Teilhard de Chardin was both a Jesuit priest and a distinguished scientist in the field of paleontology.
In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard effected a threefold synthesis:
Teilhard showed how the different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, and attaining new levels of existence and organization.
He used terms like hominization (the evolutionary development of human characteristics) to denote the process by which the original human stock became, and is still becoming, more truly human, the process by which man realizes more and more of his potential.
Teiljard did not discuss the evolutionary value of cultural variety in any detail, but he maintained that East and West are culturally complementary, and that both are needed for the further synthesis and unification of world thought.
Teilhard's Concept of Complexification
This concept includes the genesis of increasingly elaborate organization during cosmogenesis (the origin or evolution of the universe), as manifested in the passage from subatomic units to atoms, from atoms to inorganic and later to organic molecules, then to the first sub-cellular living units or self-replicating assemblages of molecules, and then to cells, to multi-cellular individuals, to cephalised metazoa with brains, to primitive man, and now to civilized societies.
(Note: Cephalization is considered an evolutionary trend whereby nervous tissue, over many generations, becomes concentrated toward one end of an organism. This process eventually produces a head region with sensory organs.)
Pere Teilhard maintained that complexification by convergent integration leads to the evolution of progressively more conscious mind. According to Teilhard, we must envisage the intensification of mind (the raising of mental potential), as being the necessary consequence of complexification, operating by the convergent integration of increasingly complex units of organization. (Perpetual transformation.)
Teilhard Linked Evolution and Energy
Teilhard linked the evolution of mind with the concept of energy. He envisaged two forms of energy - energy in the physicists' sense, measurable or calculable by physical methods, and psychic energy, which increases with the complexity of organized units.
Complexity is a necessary prerequisite for mental evolution rather than its cause. Some biologists, would claim that mind is generated solely by the complexification of certain types of organization, namely brains. However, such logic appears too narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation.
Mind is generated by or in complex organizations of living matter, capable of receiving information of many qualities or modalities about events both in the outer world and in itself, of synthesizing and processing that information in various organized forms, and of utilizing it to direct present and future action - in other words, by higher animals with their sense-organs, nerves, brains, and muscles.
Evolution to Greater Mind Is a Team Effort
In Pere Teilhard's view, the increase of human numbers combined with the improvement of human communications has fused all the parts of the noosphere (the sphere of human thought).
In the process of convergence and coalescence, mankind as a whole will accordingly achieve more intense, more complex, and more integrated mental activity, which can guide the human species up the path of progress to higher levels of hominization. Technology will abet this hominization.
Lifetime learning advances spirituality individually and for all mankind.
Earth's Spherical Shape and Greater Human Habitation Aid Evolution
Pere Teilhard saw that the sphericity of man's environment causes an intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environment, man's thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would diffuse outwards. However, confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organized web of thought, a noetic (of or relating to mental activity or the intellect) system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy.
When Huxley read this discussion, he visualised this selective web of living thought as the bounding structure of evolving man, marking him off from the rest of the universe and yet facilitating exchange with it: playing the same sort of role in delimiting the human unit of evolution and yet encouraging the complexification of its contents, as does the cell-membrane for the animal cell.
A parallel may be drawn with the cyclotron that generates immense intensities of physical energy in the inwardly accelerating spiral orbits of its fields of force, and the entire noosphere (the sphere of human thought) with its fields of thought curved round upon themselves to generate new levels of psychical energy. The modern laser is an even more potent tool in the advancing Age of Light.
Evolution From the Past to Present and Beyond
Pere Teilhard, extrapolating from the past into the future, envisaged the process of human mental convergence as tending to a final state, which he called point Omega. He termed the convergence of elementary material particles and their energies, the Alpha point. He considers these two factors as cooperating to promote this further complexification of the noosphere.
One convergence is the increase of knowledge about the universe at large, from the galaxies and stars to human societies and individuals.
The other is the increase of psychosocial pressure on the surface of our planet. The result of the one is that the noosphere incorporates ever more facts of the cosmos, including the facts of its general direction and its trends in time, so as to become more truly a microcosm. The result is the increased unification and the increased intensity of the system of human thought.
The combined result will be the attainment of point Omega, where the noosphere will be intensely unified and will have achieved a "hyperpersonal" organization.
Teilhard equates this future hyperpersonal psychosocial organization with an emergent Divinity.
Importance of Personality (Individual Experience)
The concept of a hyperpersonal mode of organization (discussed above) sprang from Pere Teilhard's conviction of the supreme importance of personality. A developed human being is not merely a more highly individualized individual.
He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration - integration of the self with the outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other. He is a person, an organism that has transcended individuality in personality.
The attainment of personality was an essential element in man's past and present evolutionary success. Accordingly, its fuller achievement is an essential aim for man's evolutionary future.
Mankind is an active participant in the entire process of reality as a system of interrelations.
Teilhard realized that the appearance of human personality was the culmination of two major evolutionary trends - the trend towards more extreme individuation, and towards more extensive interrelation and cooperation.
Persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation in reality.
Cephalization
Teilhard's understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualized and then personalized depends on cephalization. (Recall cephalization is considered an evolutionary trend whereby nervous tissue, over many generations, becomes concentrated toward one end of an organism. This process eventually produces a head region with sensory organs).
The differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense organs provides information about the outer world and is also the main organ of coordination or brain.
Teilhard points out that the process of evolution on earth is itself now in the process of becoming cephalized. Before the appearance of man, life consisted of a vast array of separate branches, linked only by an unorganized pattern of ecological interaction. The incipient development of mankind into a single psychosocial unit, with a single noosystem or common pool of thought, is providing the evolutionary process with the rudiments of a head [the evolving God of Time and Space, the Supreme].
It remains for our descendants to organize this global noosystem more adequately, so as to enable mankind to understand the process of evolution on earth more fully and to direct it more adequately.
The Noosystem
The idea of a noosystem is taken from the concept of the noosphere. The noosphere is a complex, uniquely human system of activity where individual minds use meditational tools to engage in the transfer of information and problem solving activities.
The Internet has given the idea of a noosphere new vibrancy, creating a platform that is capable of augmenting and extending humans minds so that they are capable of engaging in joint activity in ways that transcend traditional boundaries of time and space.
Teilhard implies that we should consider inter-thinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny is to realize new possibilities for evolving life on this planet.
Accordingly, man should endeavor to equip the new type of organism with the mechanisms necessary for the proper fulfillment of its task - the psychosocial equivalents of sense-organs, effector organs, and a coordinating central nervous system with dominant brain. Man's aim should be the gradual personalization of the human unit of evolution - its conversion, on the new level of cooperative inter-thinking, into the approximation of a person.
Teilhard's Accomplishment
In the Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard opened up vast territories of thought to further exploration.
Once Teilhard grasped and faced the fact of man as an evolutionary phenomenon, the way was open towards a new and comprehensive system of thought. It remained to draw the fullest conclusions from this central concept of man as the spearhead of evolution on earth, and to follow out the implications of this approach in as many fields as possible.
The biologist may perhaps consider that in The Phenomenon of Man he paid insufficient attention to genetics and the possibilities and limitations of natural selection; the theologian that his treatment of the problems of sin and suffering was inadequate or at least unorthodox; the social scientist that he failed to take sufficient account of the facts of political and social history. Teilhard saw that what was needed was a broad sweep and a comprehensive treatment.
As stated earlier, concentrated individual effort is vital to man's further evolution.
All our human efforts to create a better world are really ways to further God’s planetary project.
Jesus never said, come to me all you who are indolent and all who are dreamers. But he said repeatedly, “Come to me all you who labor, and I will give you rest - spiritual strength.” The Master’s yoke is, indeed, easy, but even so, he never imposes it; every individual must take this yoke of his own free will.
The Laser in the Age of Light
(Excerpted from World Goodwill Newsletter, October, 2014)
Perhaps the most significant symbol foreshadowing a new Age of Light in human life is the laser. Created in 1960, these potent instruments of light are now used in a multitude of ways. In particular, they are intimately bound up in the storage, retrieval and the world-wide transmission of knowledge. The Internet is largely made of fibre optic cables powered by lasers, and every CD and DVD player contains a laser.
It is easy to overlook the laser's ubiquitous presence, for the light generated within these devices remains hidden.
The laser is a powerful tool with the potential for both creative and destructive uses. The responsibility for right choices depends upon human decisions.
Al Gore's The Future
(http://newbooksinbrief.com/2013/02/12/29-a-summary-of-the-future-six-drivers-of-global-change-by-al-gore/)
Our world is becoming increasingly integrated and complex, and changing faster and faster. Out of the morass of elements involved here, Al Gore identifies six factors that are emerging as the major drivers of change.
The factors are:
(http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Second-Machine-Age/)
In The Second Machine Age, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reveal the forces driving the reinvention of human lives and the economy. As the growing impact of digital technologies is felt, Earth will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology (such as the interconnected Internet of Things), advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.
This bounty will accompanied by wrenching change. Professions and jobs of all kinds - from lawyers to truck drivers - will be upended. Companies will be forced to transform themselves or cease to exist. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.
Drawing on research and the study of trends, the authors identify strategies for survival and a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that combine brute processing power with human ingenuity while embracing policies that conform to a radically transformed landscape.
The new macro and microscopic frontiers mean that "students" and teachers alike are locked into a perpetual mode of catching up with what is happening in a world being changed by technology.
Humanization and Divinization of the World
While scientific and technological progress is inevitable, many difficult problems involving cooperation and collaborative effort of people and organizations must be overcome.
The Internet of Things (IoT) serves as an example. The IoT is the concept of connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and to each other). This includes everything from cell phones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices, and even components of machines, such as the jet engines of airplanes or the drill of an oil rig.
The Internet of Things is expected to consist of over 9 billion devices by 2018. This is far more than the total number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers and personal computers in use today. For the IoT to scale quickly, many intervening hurdles involving basic infrastructure, inter-connectivity standards, security and privacy protection must be overcome. The ultimate goal is to turn the collected information into intelligence that aggregates data to generate valuable insights, create new products and services, and optimize scenarios while driving costs down.
The Internet of Things is a minuscule but apt metaphor for man's never-ending search for unification.
The problems faced by humanity in producing an Internet of Things exemplifies a problem whose solution will require the collaborative effort and Earth resources that will lead to the humanization and divinization of the world.
(The reference for IoT is https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141030181835-509139-12-hurdles-hampering-the-internet-of-things?trk=tod-home-art-list-small_3)
Humanization Status of Man
Competitiveness is the current level of man's humanization. While striving for perfection is good, working or playing to injure others physically, emotionally, or financially is potentially evil at both the personal and national levels.
Planetary Stability
The universe is not static.
Stability is the product of balanced energies, cooperative minds, coordinated morontia souls, spirit over-control, and personality unification.
Stability at the universe or planetary level is wholly and always proportional to divinity.
Righteousness of Divinity
Mediocre effort is repugnant to perfect beings.
Philosophical Uniformity Unattainable
The unity (divinity) of religious experience among a social or racial group derives from the identical natures of the God fragments (the Thought Adjusters) indwelling individuals.
However, since personality is unique (no two mortals are alike), it follows that no two human beings can interpret the leadings and urges of the Thought Adjuster (who is the spirit of divinity that lives within their minds) alike.
A group of mortals can experience spiritual unity, but they can never attain philosophic uniformity. In reality, every human being defines religion in the terms of his own experiential interpretation of the divine impulses emanating from the Thought Adjuster.
The religious philosophy of each mortal is unique and wholly different from the religious philosophy of all other human beings.
Endless Exploration and Personal Transformation
Sooner or later, all universe personalities realize that the quest for eternity is an endless exploration of infinity, a never-ending voyage of discovery into absoluteness.
Eventually, everyone becomes aware that all creature growth is proportional to identification with the Father.
In time, everyone understands that living the will of God is the eternal passport to the endless possibilities of infinity itself.
In this universe age, the realities of the Father are revealed within the qualities of divinity. The qualities of divinity are personally appropriated by universe creatures in the experience of living divinely. To live divinely means to live the will of God.
Faith Is the Kindling
Faith in God acts to release the superhuman activities of the divine spark of divinity (the Thought Adjuster), that lives within the mind of man, and is the potential conductor of eternal survival.
Plants and animals survive in time by the technique of passing on identical particles of themselves from one generation to another.
The human soul (conveying the personality of man) survives mortal death by identity association with the immortal Thought Adjuster, and functions to perpetuate the human personality upon a continuing and higher level of progressive universe existence.
No Substitute for Experience
There is no cosmic substitute for actual living experience.
No amount of divine endowment can absolve mortals from the necessity of securing life experience.
In common with all beings living and functioning within the present time and space sphere of the Supreme, even Thought Adjusters must acquire experience. They must evolve from the lower, inexperienced, to the higher more experienced groups of Thought Adjusters.
The first stage of Adjuster evolution is attained in fusion with the surviving soul of a mortal being. While men are evolving inward and upward from man to God, the Adjusters are evolving outward and downward from God to man.
The final product of this union of divinity and humanity will eternally be the son of man and the son of God.
Joyful Living
Many mortals spend too much time and thought on the trifles of living, while overlooking the attainments necessary to develop a more harmonious working agreement between themselves and their Thought Adjusters.
The goal of human existence is to attune to the divinity of the indwelling Adjuster.
A devoted and determined effort to realize eternal destiny is wholly compatible with a light-hearted and joyous life and with a successful and honorable career on earth.
Cooperation with the Thought Adjuster does not entail self-torture, mock piety, or hypocritical and ostentatious self-abasement.
The ideal life is one of loving service rather than a lifetime of fearful apprehension.
Explanation of Fragment
A fragment is a small detached portion of the Whole.
The basic fragments of the Unqualified Absolute (ultimaton particles of energy), like mortals and their brothers in the lower kingdoms, are working towards deification through evolution.
The eventual unity of the Supreme Whole (all Time and Space) is dependent on the progressive unification of the finite parts. The unity actualization of the Supreme is resultant from, and productive of, these very unifications of the factors of supremacy (the creators, creatures, intelligences, and energies of the universes).
In time and space, a fragment of the Spirit Father (called a Thought Adjuster) fuses with one qualifying fragment of non-spirit (the personified mortal soul) to continue the advancement to Paradise.
The Destiny of Fragments
Every life that exists outside the Absolute level is a fragment of that Absolute. All fragments will eventually become personified and deified in the Oneness of the Absolute I AM.
The Root of Evil
The body is not evil.
Man’s misuse of free will is the root of evil.
The body is the consort and ally of the soul.
The Crucifixion
The salvation plan of God for the mortals of Earth would have been just as effective and unerringly certain if Jesus had not been put to death at the malevolent hands of unperceiving mortals.
If the Master had been favorably received by the mortals of earth and had departed from Earth by voluntarily relinquishing his life in the flesh, the fact of the love of God and the mercy of the Son would not have been affected.
Mortals are the sons of God, and only one thing is required to make that a truth factual in each mortal personal experience, and that is a silent declaration of faith in the spirit.
A Short Study of the Soul
The Adjuster and the Soul
The presence of the divine Adjuster in the human mind makes it impossible for either science or philosophy to ever attain a satisfactory comprehension of the evolving soul of the human personality.
The morontia (the energy level between flesh and spirit) soul is a child of the universe and may be known only through cosmic insight and spiritual discovery.
Spiritual Identity
When animal consciousness transitions to self-consciousness in man, the process is termed individualization.
Man gains a spiritual identity when he develops a soul parented by the human mind (the energy level of flesh) and the Thought Adjuster (the energy level of spirit).
Humanity is the fourth kingdom of nature. It exists between the three lower kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, and animal) and three higher superhuman kingdoms. Man stands at a point of balance (harmony) between opposites (deity and animal, i.e., reality and spurious appearance).
Every person in time and space is a lesser god of his own universe (his physical, mental, and emotional selves). These bodies in the "personal universe" are comprised of lesser lives.
Human Personality Survival
The continuing survival of mortal personalities is dependent on developing an immortal soul within the human mind. The soul is the bridge between matter and spirit.
Meditation and service to brothers align the soul, the mind, and the brain. When a man performs as soul, the soul acts as the intermediary between the plane of divine truth and the mental plane.
Divine truth, (the thought of deity), is a living organism. Man may know the truth, live the truth, experience the growth of truth in the soul, and enjoy its enlightenment in the mind.
Role of Soul
The objective of the soul is participation in divine creation.
Progressive spiritual movement happens in spiraling cycles across ever enlarging levels of consciousness.
In Time, the soul and the personality fuse with spirit (the Thought Adjuster). The new identity begins to blend with Life Itself and becomes a part of the Supreme Reality.
Souls and Brotherhood
Producing new bodies for incoming souls is the highest service given to mortals by the Universal Father. Of course, this service imposes the need for continuing care giving and education for those new souls within a home.
Man’s progress will be slow until people realize there is a living relationship between all conscious beings, the universal brotherhood. Brotherhood shows all souls are one with the Supreme.
Living within Time, man’s thoughts eventually shift to a higher mental plane with greater alignment to the urgings of the soul.
Care of the Soul
While Jesus mainly kept his apostles serving the multitudes, for rest and relaxation he sometimes took his apostles away by themselves for short periods to engage in meditation and prayer. The soul of man needs both spiritual nourishment and exercise.
Deliverance from the world’s illusions of evil and material hindrances comes through communion with God. When man knows God, he frees the soul to prepare for the spirit struggle of immortality.
As the mortal life is ending, man must not hesitate to abandon the body. He will awaken in a more fitting and beautiful and less physical form in the Supreme realms where there is no fear, sorrow, hunger, thirst, or death. Evil remains behind in this world. Only virtue follows the soul to heaven.
Guidance and Support
The soul receives and registers shadows of ideas through intuition. In contemplation, the thinker receives the image of a subjective skeleton and identifies the form that it should take.
The powerful follow-up support provided by supernatural beings such as angels proves the service is the will of the Father. A son of God cooperates in all to which he may contribute. Meditation and service provide satisfactory expression for all the powers of the personality and soul.
In the chain of life's events, there are many angel choreographed links, which instigate progress towards the fulfillment of each person's destiny.
Participation in creation requires the thinker to discard all conceited and selfish thoughts.
Spiritual ambition or any penchant for personal power hinders true service. Any emphasis on the personality will distort the pure light of the soul as it seeks to pour through into the lower self.
Expressing Soul
Men who do not falter in their search for light and for a field in which to serve their soul prove their devotion to their comrades and the greater Sons who guide the destiny of men.
A mortal son of God accepts all the demands of loyalty that sonship in the Kingdom of God involves. He seeks expression as a soul recognizing that all souls are one in the Supreme God of Time and Space.
In dealing with Deity, man knows God through His nature, which is Spirit (Life) and Soul (love).
Man does not yet know the Universal Father. The Father remains inscrutable, unseen and unknown, except as revealed through the life of His incarnated sons, and their revelations (given to Earth by Jesus Christ, our incarnated universe-Creator Son).
Soul Consciousness
Humanity must shift its consciousness away from its aggressive acquisitive material appetites into soul consciousness. This is true of individuals, of nations, and of races.
As each individual works out his own problems in life, he is helping to solve world problems.
Every will creature receives enough time to ensure his or her survival. A person squanders time by failing to use time to guarantee the survival of his soul. Nothing else matters.
Integration
There is no separation in the planetary life of mortals and the other life forms on the planet. Soul relates all forms and organisms.
Plants, dogs, and people share life's circulation as it streams through the mass of forms that, as a group, make up our planet.
The difference in organisms is levels of consciousness.
Soul Progress
Nothing can prevent the progress of the human soul on its long ascent from ignorance to wisdom, from mortal death to immortality.
If the churches of all faiths fail to offer spiritual guidance and help, humanity will find another way. Nothing can restrain the spirit of man from finding God.
The qualities of reality (spiritual expression) occur in human experience in the physical electrochemical body and in the thinking, sensing, and feeling experience of the mind.
Intelligence related to the emotional life helps in the upward evolution to the soul and spiritual levels.
The soul of man matures with altruistic experience. Since altruism is essential for soul development, life experience must provide encounters with social inequalities.
Soul Growth
Soul is not a part of a man's initial body, mind, or spirit. Neither is personality.
Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience. Personality fuses all the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive mortal life along with the soul.
To aid the cause of evolution, prayers of mortals should be for life experiences.
Flowering of the Personality and the Soul
Neither personality or soul is a part of a man's initial body, mind, or spirit.
Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience.
Personality fuses all the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive mortal life (along with the soul).
To aid in the evolution of the personality and the soul, prayers of mortals should be for significant life experiences.
Assisting Soul Growth
The time is coming when medical doctors will study all children. Vocational experts will also study children to place them where their gifts and abilities can find fullest expression. Spiritual counselors will seek to unify the child in brain, mind, and soul.
Through a person’s own choosing within his or her short life span, a mortal may elect to transfer his or her identity from the temporary physical-intellect organism to the more enduring soul.
To make a choice, it is important the individual collects all the knowledge and wisdom that he or she can gain in a lifetime.
It is equally important that the civilization that humans live in progresses from the material plane to the spiritual plane as fast as possible to make the learning experience of individuals easier.
Soul Is The Fountainhead of Virtue
Mind is the cosmic instrument on which each mortal can play the music of God or the discordant noise of self-destruction. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle taught that virtue is knowledge, goodness, and health of the soul. They said it is better to suffer injustice than to be guilty of it, and it is wrong to return evil for evil. Jesus warned his followers against the evil of even holding a grudge.
The human soul is a fragment of the Supreme God of Time and Space. So, for mortals with freewill, the soul is the source of the highest and best values of human life.
The soul within all forms obeys cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise. Still, the soul does not impinge upon the freewill of mortals. Resistance to the values of the soul in humans comes from the material portion of human forms. (This resistance is the basic cause of all physical disease as well.)
Laws of Nature and the Soul
The Laws of Nature (inherent in the life of the physical form) carry the seeds of mortal death. The Laws of the Soul supersede the Laws of Nature. They are the highest laws to which humanity can respond.
When the chaos of human misfortune, selfishness, cruelty, hate, malice, and jealousy rage around the mortal soul, the soul, as the citadel of the spirit, is unassailable.
The challenge of this age is to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the soul’s integrated ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness.
A new and righteous vision of morality will beckon all that is good in the mind of man and best in the human soul.
Law
The law of man is an expression or process whereby an individual thinker or group of thinkers, manifests and applies a compelling force.
Cosmically, a law is the effect of the life of a greater entity as it encloses a lesser being within its living processes. The law embodies the formulated purpose or organized will of the enfolding life. The enfolded purpose or will complies.
For mortals with freewill, the soul is the source of the highest and best values (potential laws) of human life.
The soul itself within all forms freely obeys and follows cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise.
Justice System
America’s legal system interferes with the proper adjudication of justice when it uses laws for selfish gain. This interference arises when an individual or group disregards the fact that laws are meant to serve the common good.
The increasingly litigious nature of American society has created a fear of being sued. As an example, this concern has forced doctors to practice medicine defensively rather than using their professional judgment. Similarly, the threat of lawsuits by parents has undermined the authority of teachers to maintain student discipline.
In every country, there are those who seek to over-extend the intended meaning of the law for their own advantage. They avoid the legitimate responsibilities of citizenship through "loopholes" in legislation. Non-conformity to law causes social maladies as well as individual illnesses.
Rebirth
When spiritual rebirth occurs in an individual (whether by gradual growth or crisis), there follows a new orientation of personality and development of new standards of values.
Spirit-born individuals are so motivated in life that they can serenely watch their fondest earthly ambitions and hopes crash. They realize that catastrophes wreck their temporal creations before raising more enduring and sublime realities.
Adding Value to Life
The religion of Jesus is not a technique for gaining a static and blissful peace of mind. It is an impulse for organizing the soul for service. It is enlisting selfhood in the loyal service of loving God and serving man.
In pondering values, men must think about their pleasures and how to integrate them into higher levels of human experience.
Meaning is what experience adds to value. It is the conscious appreciation of values. A purely selfish pleasure may mean a devaluation of meanings bordering on relative evil.
The worth of human life consists in the growth of values, progress in meanings, and realization of the cosmic relationship of both of these experiences. This experience is God-consciousness. Such a mortal is becoming superhuman as his immortal soul evolves.
Conflict
Religious perplexities are unavoidable. There can be no growth without psychic conflict and spiritual agitation.
The human intellect protests weaning from the material energies of temporary existence. The lazy animal mind rebels at the effort demanded in wrestling with cosmic problem solving.
New religious insights arise out of conflicts that need new and better reaction habits in place of the older and inferior reaction patterns.
Conflict persists in any refusal to adopt the higher values suggested by superior meanings.
Spiritual Progress
Spiritual work must go forward through the free choice and self-initiated effort of individuals.
The effort to understand carries its own reward. The attempt to grasp and comprehend the Soul whether cosmic, universal, planetary, or individual, leads inevitably to an unfolding of the mental apparatus with a development of the brain cells.
This unfolding eventually produces a coordination of the thinking faculty and resultant illumination.
The Way
Man’s path, the long upward and inward spiraling path from personality to soul to Spirit begins for man in this world.
On this path of probation and evolution, a man arrives at a knowledge of his individual soul.
Later, on the path of discipleship, man glimpses the quality and purpose of his planetary life. He discovers himself as a part of the Life of a Spirit Consciousness that embodies an aspect of the divine purpose and energy.
After more growth, man discerns the quality and purpose of his life and energy as a part of the greater whole.
The Power to Discriminate
The soul is each man’s ideal.
The characteristics of the soul’s intelligence are mind and mental awareness that provide the power to discriminate, and to choose or to reject. As long as a man identifies himself with matter and forms, this choice continues the heresy of separateness (independent individualism).
Nature romances and deludes man in his fleshly form. A man identifying himself with form, considers himself as insatiable. He identifies with his appetites.
If man discovers the nature of the soul and shifts his emphasis from form to the quality of the life that produced form, the identification of quality grows steadily until the fusion of quality and appearance is so perfect that appearance no longer veils the reality. The soul dominates.
Consciousness corresponds to our universe Creator Son’s Spirit of Truth (his spiritual presence) and not with form. Given sufficient time and experience, the soul itself is superseded by the Thought Adjuster (the fragment of the Universal Father in our minds), and the Thought Adjuster becomes, in reality, embodied purpose.
Body and Soul
Every form in manifestation in any of the four kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, animal or human), does two things relative to soul.
First, each form appropriates as much of the over soul of the Supreme Being as the capacity of the form permits. The form of every molecule and every cell has soul, but not to the same degree as the form of an animal. Similarly, an animal has soul, but not to the degree of a human, and so on up the scale.
Secondly, through the interaction between the indwelling soul and the form, two things occur: sentiency (consciousness); and quality (soul attributes). These are expressed according to the type of body and its evolutionary status.
Soul Surge
The soul thrusts the form body into activity forcing the form forward along the path of development.
The human body provides a field of experience for the soul. Reciprocally, the body has the opportunity to adjust itself to the higher impulses of the soul.
The oversoul achieves individual status in a human through the combined wills of the Thought Adjuster and the personality of the human.
The soul is very skilled in the technique of contacting the form. Contact is the goal of the soul in every life form.
All Is Lost
Rescue of a man's personality is the subject of the symbols and metaphor employed in Robert Redford's latest film entitled, All Is Lost.
After the testing of his life, the story concludes with the hand of God, (the soul), metaphorically reaching into the water to retrieve the drowned man portrayed by Redford.
Just prior to this scene, the audience is given an underwater look from the viewpoint of the drowning man. He sees his burning raft above him as a wheel of fire.
Flaming wheels of fire, often surrounding God’s head, have been used as religious symbols for thousands of years.
The Problems of Civilization Serve Evolution
Planetary Management
Attempts by man to manage the planet without spiritual intent are unachievable.
All of today's global problems are intrinsically related. Solutions to resolve Earth's problems are doomed to failure without sincere collaborative (brotherhood) objectives.
Factors Influencing Civilization
While biologic evolution has proceeded ever upward, much of cultural evolution that originated in the Euphrates valley (the two Gardens of Eden) weakened as time passed.
This cultural civilization must be maintained and fostered, for no new sources of culture exist.
The civilization that is now evolving on Earth grew out of, and is predicated on, the following factors:
1. Natural circumstances. The nature and extent of a material civilization is in large measure determined by the natural resources available. Climate, weather, and numerous physical conditions are factors in the evolution of culture.
The Andites (the descendants of Adam and Eve) were a great people, but the crucial factor in determining the course of their civilization was the increasing aridity of Iran and Turkestan, which forced them to invent and adopt new and advanced methods of wresting a livelihood from their decreasingly fertile lands.
The configuration of continents and other land-arrangement situations are very influential in determining peace or war. (Very few Earthlings have ever had such a favorable opportunity for continuous and unmolested development as has been enjoyed by the peoples of North America - protected on both sides by vast oceans.)
2. Capital goods. Culture is never developed under conditions of poverty. Leisure time is essential to the progress of civilization. Individual character of moral and spiritual value may be acquired in the absence of material wealth, but a cultural civilization is only derived from those conditions of material prosperity which foster leisure combined with the ambition to develop the arts and sciences.
Harsh Living Conditions
During primitive times, life on Earth was a serious and sober business. It was to escape this incessant struggle and interminable toil that mankind constantly tended to drift toward the salubrious climate of the tropics. While the warmer zones of habitation afforded some remission from the intense struggle for existence, the races and tribes who sought the ease of warmer climates seldom utilized their unearned leisure for the advancement of civilization.
Invariably, social progress has come from the thoughts and plans of those races that have, by their intelligent toil, learned how to wrest a living from the land with less effort and shorter days of labor. Consequently, they have been able to enjoy more leisure time to advance their culture.
Scientific Knowledge
The material aspects of civilization must await the amassing of scientific data. That is happening rapidly now using massive data storage, search engines, and the world-wide internet.
It was a long time after the discovery of the bow and arrow and the utilization of animals for power before man learned how to harness wind and water (with wind and water mills), followed by the employment of steam and electricity.
Weaving, pottery, the domestication of animals, and metalworking were followed by the highly progressive age of writing and printing.
Knowledge is Power
Invention always precedes the acceleration of cultural development on a world-wide scale.
Science and invention benefited most of all from the printing press. The interaction of cultural and inventive activities accelerated the rate of cultural advancement enormously.
Mathematics
Science teaches man to speak the new language of mathematics and trains his thoughts along lines of exacting precision.
Science also stabilizes philosophy through the elimination of error, while it purifies religion by destroying superstition.
The Evolution of Earth Is Being Steered
The material in this section blends the leadership of Machiventa Melchizedek (the acting God of this planet) as recorded it in The Urantia Book, Paper 81, Section 6, and the actual events of the recent technological history of Earth as recorded by Thomas Friedman in his book The World Is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.
Machiventa Melchizedek was appointed Earth's planetary God by our universe's Creator Son (Michael). Michael deposed the traitorous former God of Earth, Caligastia (lead by Lucifer), following Michael's incarnation on Earth as Jesus of Nazareth.
All the above material in this section, The Problems of Civilization Serve Evolution, is excerpted from writings describing the development of a civilization. From this point forward these writings will be interlaced with excerpts from Friedman's book to illustrate how Earth's supernatural leader's words and leadership are being implemented in the management of Earth by fostering brotherhood through collaborative efforts.
The title of Frieman's book alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies, and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Friedman's Recognition of Change
"...we are entering a phase where we are going to see the digitization, virtualization, and automation of almost everything. The gains in productivity will be staggering for those countries, companies, and individuals who can absorb the new technological tools. And we are entering a phase where more people than ever before in the history of the world are going to have access to these tools - as innovators, as collaborators, and even as terrorists. ... the real information revolution is about to begin."
"...this new era of globalization will prove to be such a difference of degree that it will be seen, in time, as a difference in kind. Everywhere you turn, hierarchies are being challenged from below or transforming themselves from top-down structures into more horizontal and collaborative ones."
Human Resources
Manpower is indispensable to the spread of civilization.
With no other complicating factors, a larger population of people will always dominate the civilization of a smaller race or nation.
Failure to increase in numbers up to a certain point prevents the full realization of national destiny, but there comes a point in population increase where further growth is suicidal.
Multiplication of numbers beyond the optimum of the normal man-land ratio means either a lowering of the standards of living or an immediate expansion of territorial boundaries either by peaceful penetration or by military conquest.
A Double Edged Sword
Many mortals are shocked at the ravages of war, but people should recognize the necessity for producing large numbers of mortals to afford abundant opportunity for social and moral development.
However, with planetary fertility there occurs the serious problems of overpopulation.
The optimum stabilization of national population enhances culture and prevents war. It is a wise nation that knows when to cease growing.
Attempts at Population Control in China and India
(Extracted from The Economist)
China and India are the two most populous countries in the world. It would be interesting to examine the role played by the state in these two demographic giants in regulating the birth rate.
China's one-child policy formulated in 1979 has been a misadventure.
Such a policy distorts the age structure: the proportion of population in the younger age groups goes down and proportion of the elderly increases. It is much more expensive for the state to take care of health care of the elderly than to take care of children.
In 1977, Indira Gandhi's government with imprudent confidence ordered a general election. At this election, the Congress was wiped out and the Janata government came to power. The lesson learned was that the state can interfere with the private lives of people only at its peril. The Janata government issued a Population Policy Statement on April 18, 1977, which said: "We wish to make it abundantly clear that in this task there is no room for compulsion, coercion or pressures of any sort.
Genesis of Technological Brotherhood - Fiber Optic Cable
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
The first commercial installation of a fiber-optic system was in 1977, after which fiber slowly began to replace copper telephone wires, because it can carry data (words, music, pictures, and digitized voices) much farther and faster in larger quantities.
Fiber-optic cables work by converting data or voices into light pulses and then transmitting them down fiber lines, instead of electronic pulses to transmit information through copper wires.
The Internet stock boom and bust produced unexpected consequences. The boom sparked a huge over-investment in fiber-optic cable companies who laid massive amounts of fiber-optic cable on land and under the oceans. This dramatically drove down the cost of phoning or transmitting data across continents and oceans.
Collaboration Gathers Momentum
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
In the the mid-1990's, a full fledged platform for technological change and collaboration started to emerge. The removal of the divisive wall in Berlin, the new Microsoft software for Windows, the digitization of content, and the the Internet browser seamlessly connected anyone with a computer to other people as never before.
Soon, standardized work flow software seamlessly connected applications to applications, so that people could manipulate all their digitized content, from different manufacturer's computers and the Internet.
This was the Genesis moment for world-connectivity and collaboration. Suddenly, more people from more different places in the world found they could collaborate with more people on more different kinds of work and share more different kinds of knowledge than ever before.
Digitization (Analog Information Converted to Binary for Computer Programs)
The term digitization is often used when diverse forms of information, such as text, sound, image or voice, are converted into a single binary code. Digital information exists as one of two digits, either 0 or 1. These are known as bits (a contraction of binary digits) and the sequences of 0's and 1's that constitute information are called bytes.
Revisiting Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu
Teilhard argued that "our divine milieu" is the "host of Christ" (the collective sons of the Universal Father and the Eternal Son) who create the universes of Time and Space. This under estimates the divine milieu.
A close reading of The Book of Urantia reveals the divine milieu is the presence of the Infinite Spirit (the Action God of the Paradise Trinity) who actualized the Creative Daughter of our local universe.
Our Creator Son is known as Michael of Nebadon (the name of our universe). His co-creator (the Creative Daughter) is Nebadon in name and person along with her divine milieu of angels and Michael's Spirit of Truth Christ brotherhood, which includes all the Master Creator Sons.
Open Source Misinterprets the Ideal of Free Software
(Paraphrased from an article by Richard Stallman)
When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the user's essential freedoms: the freedom to run the software, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom (free speech).
These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual user's sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity - that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.
Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software.
The free software movement has campaigned for computer users' freedom since 1983.
The two terms (open source and free software) describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Warning
The continent (North America) richest in natural deposits and the most advanced mechanical equipment will make little progress if the intelligence of its people declines.
Knowledge can be had by education, but wisdom, which is indispensable to true culture, can be secured only through experience and by men and women who are innately intelligent.
Intelligent people are able to learn from experience, eventually becoming truly wise.
Effective Use of Resources
Civilization depends on the wisdom displayed in the utilization of natural resources, scientific knowledge, capital goods, and human potentials.
The chief factor in early civilization was the force exerted by wise social leaders.
Primitive man had civilization literally thrust upon him by his superior contemporaries (superhumans).
Well-organized and superior minorities have always ruled this world.
The Impact of Mechanical Devices
The progress of civilization is directly related to the development and possession of tools, machines, and channels of distribution.
Improved tools, ingenious and efficient machines, determine the survival of contending groups in the arena of advancing civilization.
Artificial Intelligence - Tom Simonite
(Edited)
Last year saw major strides in machine learning software that (like humans) can gain abilities from experience.
The most striking research results in AI came from the field of deep learning, which involves using crude simulated neurons to process data.
Work in deep learning often focuses on images, which are easy for humans to understand but very difficult for software to decipher. Researchers at Facebook used this approach to make a system that can tell whether two different photos depict the same person. Google showed off a system that can describe scenes using short sentences.
IBM is about to launch a version of its Jeopardy!-winning Watson software to help cancer doctors use genomic data to choose personalized treatment plans for patients . Applying machine learning to a genetic database enabled one biotech company to invent a noninvasive test that prevents unnecessary surgery.
Using artificial intelligence techniques on genetic data will likely get a lot more common now that Google, Amazon, and other large computing companies are storing digitized genomes.
The Ethics of Might and Right
Might does not make right, but might does make what is and what has been Earth's history.
Only recently has Earth reached the point where society is willing to debate the ethics of might and right. Much of this discussion has been triggered by social websites.
Effectiveness of Language
The spread of civilization depends upon language.
Live and growing languages insure the expansion of civilized thinking and planning.
There is a great need for further linguistic development to facilitate the expression of evolving thought.
Barrier to World Peace
Language differences have always been the great barrier to the spread of peace.
The conquest of dialects must precede the spread of a culture throughout a race, over a continent, or to a whole world.
A universal language promotes peace, insures culture, and augments happiness.
Even when the tongues of a world are reduced to a few, the mastery of these by the leading cultural peoples mightily influences the achievement of world-wide peace and prosperity.
India Benefits From Fiber Cable
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
From its years as a British colony, India gained the near universal language of English. From its fiber cable connection to the United States, India was the first to benefit from out sourcing. (Outsourcing is an effective cost-saving strategy. It is sometimes more affordable to purchase a good from foreign companies with comparative advantages than it is to produce the good internally).
India is a country with few natural resources, but it became efficient at mining the brains of its own people by educating a relatively large slice of its elite students in the sciences, engineering, and medicine.
In 1951, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, set up the first of India's seven Indian Institutes of Technology. In the sixty plus years since then, hundreds of thousands of Indians have graduated from these IITs and the six Indian Institutes of Management, which teach business administration.
Given India's 1 billion-plus population, this training produces a phenomenal knowledge advantage. India has some of the most gifted engineering, computer science, and software talent on the globe.
International Scholarly and Commercial Exchanges
While some progress has been made on Earth toward developing an international language, much has been accomplished by the establishment of international scholarly and commercial exchanges.
All these international relations should be fostered, whether they involve language, trade, art, science, competitive play, or religion.
Displacement of Workers
In a more remote period of man's development, the only energy applied to land cultivation was man power. It was a long struggle to substitute oxen for men since this threw men out of employment.
More recently, machines have begun to displace men. The good news is that every such advance contributes directly to the progress of society because it liberates man power for the accomplishment of more valuable tasks.
Science Governed By Wisdom
Science, guided by wisdom, may become man’s great social liberator.
A mechanical age can prove disastrous only to a nation whose intellectual level is too low to discover wise methods and techniques for adjusting to the transition problems arising from the loss of employment by large numbers due to the too rapid implementation of new types of laborsaving machinery.
Marx and Engels – The Communist Manifesto
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
The need to discover wise methods and techniques for successfully adjusting to the transition difficulties caused by the loss of employment by large numbers due to the too rapid invention of new types of laborsaving machinery were first identified by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto, published in 1848.
In his writings on capitalism, Marx described the inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restraints to global commerce.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx defined capitalism as a force that would dissolve all feudal, national, and religious identities, giving rise to a universal civilization governed by market imperatives.
Marx considered it inevitable that capital would have its way – negative and positive for society. Because once capitalism destroyed all national and religious allegiances, Marx thought, it would lay bare the struggle between capital and labor.
Forced to compete in a global race to the bottom, the workers of the world would unite in a global revolution to end oppression.
Torchbearers
Social inheritance enables man to stand on the shoulders of all who have preceded him.
In the work of passing on the cultural torch to the next generation, the home will ever be the basic institution. The play and social life comes next, with the school last but equally indispensable in a complex and highly organized society.
The ideals of one generation carve out the channels of destiny for immediate posterity. The quality of the social torchbearers will determine whether civilization goes forward or backward. The homes, churches, and schools of one generation predetermine the character trend of the succeeding generation. The moral and spiritual momentum of a race or a nation largely determines the cultural velocity of that civilization.
The German Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Adolf Hitler (German: 20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party.
Hitler gained popular support by attacking the World War I Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. Hitler denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy.
Hitler's Nazi Party became the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, leading to his appointment as chancellor in 1933. He transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism.
Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain and France. His first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the denunciation of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, and the annexation of territories that were home to millions of ethnic Germans, actions which gave him significant popular support.
Under Hitler's leadership and racially motivated ideology, the regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews, and millions of other victims whom he and his followers deemed racially inferior.
The Russian Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Joseph Stalin, Georgian: 18 December 1878 - 5 March 1953) was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.
Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed general secretary of the party's Central Committee in 1922. He subsequently managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin. He remained general secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 onward.
Under Stalin's rule, the concept of "socialism in one country" became a central tenet of Soviet society. He replaced the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in the early 1920s with a highly centralised command economy, launching a period of industrialization and collectivization that resulted in the rapid transformation of the USSR from an agrarian society into an industrial power.
Stalin's economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in correctional labor camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–1933.
Between 1934 and 1939 he organized and led a massive purge of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the Soviet people" were imprisoned, exiled or executed, in a period that lasted from 1936 to 1939.
The Chinese Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976), was a Chinese Communist revolutionary and the founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he governed as Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976.
Supporters credit Mao with modernising China and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, and increasing life expectancy as China's population grew from around 550 to over 900 million during the period of his leadership.
Critics consider Mao a dictator who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, perpetrated systematic human rights abuses, and who is responsible for an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation, forced labor and executions.
Mao's tenure is ranked as the top incidence of genocide in human history.
The Cambodian Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Pol Pot, 19 May 1925 - 15 April 1998), was born Saloth Sar. He was a Cambodian communist revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until 1997. From 1963 to 1981, he served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. He became the leader of Cambodia on 17 April 1975, when his forces captured Phnom Penh.
He presided over a totalitarian dictatorship that imposed a radical form of agrarian socialism on the country. His government forced urban dwellers to move to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects. The combined effects of executions, forced labour, malnutrition and poor medical care caused the deaths of approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian population.
In all, an estimated 1 to 3 million people (out of a population of slightly over 8 million) died due to the policies of Pol Pot's four-year premiership.
Parag Khanna Maps the Future of Countries
Social changes should always be controlled by those who are fully conversant with the history of social evolution; and always should these innovators be counseled by the wisdom of those who have had practical experience in the domains of contemplated social or economic experiment.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRWTyUVh0BQ for an excellent short lecture by a present day expert on social changes.
More on How to Run the World
In his 2011 book, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, Parag Khanna - Director of the Global Governance Initiative at the New America Foundation - outlines a vision for the future in which mega corporations, NGO’s and governments team up to govern the globe. Khanna includes an array of experts as the new rulers of the world, including many powerful technological NGOs such as the Gates Foundation.
Khanna argues that governments are going broke. Globalist influences have supplanted national borders. Tax exempt foundations and mega corporations are filling the gap.
These groups are essentially annexing national governments' policies and advancing a top down, authoritarian system of control.
In an interview with the Seattle Times, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was asked whether the emergence of super rich philanthropies like the Gates Foundation has undermined the effectiveness of the U.N. and its member organizations, like the World Health Organization. Moon replied, “On the contrary, that is what we really want - contributions from the business community as well as philanthropies..."
Education
Insects are born fully educated and equipped for life - a very narrow and purely instinctive existence.
The human baby is born without an education; therefore man possesses the power, by controlling the educational training of the younger generation, to greatly modify the evolutionary course of civilization.
Transforming Civilization
The greatest modern influences contributing to the furtherance of civilization and the advancement of culture are the marked increase in world travel and the unparalleled improvements in methods of communication.
However, the improvements in education have not kept pace with the expanding social structure. The modern appreciation of ethics also has not developed relative to the growth along more intellectual and scientific lines.
And, modern civilization is at a standstill in spiritual development and the safeguarding the institution of the home.
Weakness of Communism
In the earlier days of social evolution the apportionment of individual earnings among the group was virtually a form of slavery. The worker was made slave to the idler.
This was the lethal weakness of communism: The improvident habitually lived off the thrifty.
Even in modern times the improvident depend on the state (diligent taxpayers) to take care of them. Those who have no capital still expect those who have assets to feed them.
Dystopia or Pax Technologica
Whether the future of Earth's civilization is a dystopian global class struggle over technology (i.e. a society characterized by human misery, oppression, and overcrowding), or a planet promoted by technology into world peace will depend on spreading technological advances to all people, which explains the route to world peace through technology.
Several of the following blogs are paraphrased from the book Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization by Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna.
(The term "hybrid" is used in the book in the sense of an amalgamation or combination.)
Technology is Additive
(Paraphrased from the book Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization by Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna.)
Technology has evolved from man's Stone Age invention of tools and the Neolithic cultivation of crops to the harnessing of steam power in the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the Internet in the Information Age.
The great disruptive global trends of the 21st century - the shift to multipolarity (numberless polar connections), the shrinking of space (both through fiber-optic cables and growing population), economic convergence, and new forms of collaboration - all have technology at their root.
Technology has always been a driver of history. In the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels, in their Communist Manifesto, blamed their era of great disruption on the results of workers’ need to shift to the new instruments of production, which caused “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.”
The chief driver of the social uncertainty is not culture, geography, or climate. It is technology. Technology today is even transforming the earlier technological engines of history. From the printing press to penicillin and now Twitter and genomics, technology ceaselessly demonstrates its morphing impact.
Dystopia or Pax Technologica
(Paraphrased from the book Hybrid Reality)
Whether the future of Earth's civilization is a dystopian global class struggle over technology (i.e. a society characterized by human misery, oppression, and overcrowding), or a planet promoted by technology into world peace will depend on spreading technological advances to all people.
The Imperative of Social Ideals
Ideals elevate the source of the social stream.
No stream can rise higher than its source no matter what technique of pressure or directional control is employed.
The driving power of even the most material aspects of a cultural civilization is resident in the least material of society’s achievements.
Intelligence may control the mechanism of civilization, wisdom may direct it, but spiritual idealism is the energy which really uplifts and advances human culture from one level of attainment to another.
Initially, life was a struggle for existence; now, for a standard of living; next it will be for quality of thinking, the coming earthly goal of human existence.
Social Revolution
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
Marx taught that the essence of capitalism places the bourgeoisie (the wealthy entrepreneurs) in opposition to the proletariat (the working classes).
Marx also stated that when the proletariat are deprived of their consoling distractions such as patriotism and religion, the proletariat will realize their exploitation and revolt.
The wealthy bourgeoisie, by rapid improvement of all instruments of production, and by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization.
The resulting cheap prices of commodities compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what is termed civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
Pro and Con
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
The developments in information technology are enabling companies to squeeze out all the inefficiencies and friction from their markets and business operations.
A frictionless world is a mixed blessing. It may be good for global business. Or it may, as Marx believed, augur well for a proletarian revolution.
It may also pose a threat to the distinctive places and communities that locate us in the world.
From the first stirrings of capitalism, people have imagined the possibility of the world as a perfect market - unimpeded by protectionist pressures, disparate legal systems, cultural and linguistic differences, or ideological disagreement. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride. If global markets and new communications technologies minimize those differences, we may lose something important.
That is why the debate about capitalism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barriers, and boundaries are mere sources of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect.
The Materialistic Viewpoint
(Excerpted from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter.)
Schumpeter wrote: "The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates." (P. 83.)
Schumpeter was advocating the continuous development of new products, new services and the pursuit of profit - or growth. He believed that growth is an evolutionary process that continually creates increasing amounts of wealth.
Barter
The earliest traders were women. They were employed as spies, carrying on commerce as a side line. Presently trade expanded, the women acting as intermediaries.
Then came the merchant class, charging a commission, profit, for their services. Growth of group barter developed into commerce; and following the exchange of commodities came the exchange of skilled labor.
Money - Progress in Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Initially, there was commodity money (barter), the exchange of goods or services for other goods or services.
Then came gold and silver - precious metals that people imbued with value simply because they were rare and coveted.
People began exchanging commodities and goods and services for gold and silver because they knew other people would accept their gold and silver in exchange for their commodities, goods, and services.
Gold and silver coins were measured and stamped and became the first widely accepted money.
Goldsmiths, in Europe and elsewhere, offered safe storage of depositors' gold and silver and issued receipts for precious metals in their safekeeping. These receipts were evidence that the bearer had gold in safekeeping, and, since carrying around receipts was easier and safer than toting heavy metals, receipts became the new currency.
Bankers Quicken Global Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Goldsmiths evolved into bankers. The word banker itself comes from the Old Italian word banca or bench. The goldsmiths' benches were covered with green cloth, and transactions were conducted there.
The early goldsmith-bankers began to lend out their depositors' gold (without the depositors knowledge). These "loans" were in the form of actual gold or depositors' receipts. The borrower would then pay a fee, "interest," on the amount borrowed.
Soon, the original gold depositors, becoming aware of the practice, demanded a portion of the interest being earned on the lending of their their gold.
There, as if by alchemy, fractional banking (the foundation of our modern banking system) was born.
Fractional banking is what propels money and the creation of credit today.
Fractional-Reserve Banking Explained
(Wikipedia)
Fractional-reserve banking is the practice whereby a bank holds reserves (to satisfy demands for withdrawals) that are less than the amount of its customers' deposits. Reserves are held at the bank as currency, or as deposits in the bank's accounts at the central bank, i.e. The Federal Reserve System in the United States.
Because bank deposits are considered money in their own right, fractional-reserve banking permits the money supply to grow beyond the amount of the underlying reserves of the base money originally created by the central bank.
The Multiplier Effect of Fractional Reserve Banking
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
The magic of fractional reserve banking is that it multiplies money because banks have only a 10% reserve requirement and they re-loan depositors' money over and over.
Formerly, receipt money could be exchanged for gold - that's the definition of the gold standard. Lenders loaned gold and extended credit by issuing receipts. But sometimes, depositors wanted their gold and there wouldn't be enough to pay them back because it had all been loaned out, by means of fractional banking.
The consequence was banks went out of business, panics ensued, and many people were financially ruined.
The same system was re-established many times with the same outcome.
The Paper for Gold Solution - Coercive Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
To solve the gold reserve problem, the United States and other governments around the world made "legal tender" laws that forced paper money, which the government printed in amounts determined by the Federal Reserve (central bank), be used without question "for all debts public and private."
Today, no country backs its paper currency with gold or silver. Rather, money is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government that is printing that money. This is called fiat (authorized) money.
Governments made legal tender laws to make it illegal for citizens to not use their paper money. In addition, legislation also granted private bankers the right to lend governments as much money as they "needed."
Birth Pangs of Banking in the United States
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
In 1781, before the U.S. Constitution was drafted, the Continental Congress granted a charter to Robert Morris, a member of Congress, to establish the Bank of North America, the nation's first central bank.
It was hoped that the new bank, which was granted a monopoly to issue bank notes and become the official depository for all federal funds, would facilitate commerce and establish some order out of the fractured banking schemes that plagued the country.
But, the new Bank of North America was undercapitalized, and, through the elusive elixir of fractional reserve banking, loaned out more than it had in reserves.
The new bank's paper money was technically redeemable in specie; however, the public lost confidence in the bank and began aggressively discounting its notes because of the vast quantity the bank had issued. The nation's first central bank had its charter revoked and reverted to a struggling commercial bank two years after it opened.
Central Banking and the U.S. Constitution
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
The Constitution makes no direct mention of paper money or banks, but the Founding Fathers were intimately aware of banking problems in the individual states of the union.
To ensure that states wouldn't ruin themselves financially like banks were doing, in addressing the limitations on the power of the states Article 1, Section 10, the Constitution says, "No States shall emit [issue] Bills of Credit."
The states couldn't issue paper money that wasn't redeemable in gold or silver, and they couldn't print money to pay their bills.
This begged the question whether the Federal Government itself could issue bills of credit.
While that debate raged, Alexander Hamilton, the Country's first Secretary of the Treasury, came up with a constitutionally acceptable maneuver to pay the country's Revolutionary War debts.
In 1791 Hamilton's concept, the First Bank of the United States was chartered by Congress to lend money to the federal government so the country didn't have to beget its own money.
The government got all the money it needed from the bank by issuing bonds (treasury bonds). The First Bank of the United States bought the government's bonds with the bank's printed paper money.
What's in a Name? - Self-serving Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Unfortunately, the First Bank of the United States was badly undercapitalized. Through the illusion of fractional reserve banking, with no real reserves, it printed so much money that the money lost its purchasing power.
In 1816 the Second Bank of the United States was chartered.
However, the Second Bank was bitterly opposed by newly elected President Andrew Jackson, who made the existence of the Bank, and its power over the people, a central issue in his campaign.
In 1836, Jackson allowed the charter of the Second Bank of the United States' charter to expire.
Undaunted, the federal government next set the stage for the conception and creation of the Federal Reserve System, now the world's most powerful central bank. ("The Federal Reserve System" is a euphemism for the controversial title of a central bank.)
Legal Currency – A World-Wide Unifier
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Countries throughout the free world do not own their money.
The money that we think of as bills and coins is "created" and owned by banks.
Governments manufacture the physical medium that people exchange, but it is not the government's money.
The American model of banking, which is an alliance between America's big banks and the American government, is the hub around which most world banking systems revolve.
Coordination of Specialists
Civilization has been enormously advanced by the early division of labor and by its later corollary of specialization.
Civilization is now dependent on the effective coordination of specialists.
As society expands, ever better methods of drawing together various specialists must be found.
Friedman on Specialization
(Friedman – The World Is Flat synopsized)
In his book, Friedman shows how, as services and goods become increasingly tradable, more jobs are likely to become outsourced, digitized, or automated (tradable).
Friedman predicts that untouchable jobs in the new interconnected world will fall into three, broad categories: 1. people who are “special or specialized” (e.g. artists, athletes, or brain surgeons); 2. people who are “localized and anchored” (e.g. waitresses, lawyers, plumbers, nurses, etc.); and 3. “the old middle jobs” (e.g. people in the middle class who are under pressure because their jobs are becoming tradable).
Friedman explores what he thinks the new middle-class jobs will be in the connected world, calling the people who will occupy those jobs, “the new middlers” [middle class workers].
Friedman outlines several action areas for compassionate flatism (the digitized competitive global economy).
The goal of compassionate flatism is to reconfigure our existing welfare state to give Americans the outlook, education, skills, and safety nets they will need to compete against other individuals in the flat world. The action areas range from leadership to social activism, and parenting.
More Social Concern for Displaced Workers
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
The American sociologist Lewis Mumford, in his Technics and Civilization (1934), emphasized that technology must be more than just objects seen as ends in themselves; it must be a collection of ideas and methods that improve society.
Mumford's concept of "Technik" unites the scientific and mechanical dimensions of technology with a necessary concern for its effect on humans and society
Wassily Leontief (an American economist notable for his research on how changes in one economic sector may have an effect on other sectors) agreed, stating in 1983 that “the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”
Technological Unemployment
(The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee)
"We can’t know for sure, but our reading of technology tells us that the power of exponential, digital, and combinatorial forces, as well as the dawning of machine intelligence and networked intelligence, presage even greater disruptions."
History of Technological Revolutions
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
Technological revolutions have been reshaping the world’s workforce acutely since the Industrial Revolution.
Factories and machines, steam engines and railways, megastructure engineering, electrical lighting and equipment, oil production and automobiles, chemical products, and information technology have created billions of jobs over the centuries as they spread around the world in tsunami-like waves. Along the way, the number of distinct professional specializations has multiplied from dozens to hundreds. It is as if technology advanced to keep pace with the need to employ an ever more populated world — until now.
Employment is no longer keeping pace with economic growth, increasingly because intelligent machines have become part of the labor force itself. New professional niches are constantly emerging in the Hybrid Age, such as time banker, body part maker, avatar coach, space guide, bio-informatician, and roboticist, to name a few.
Moving into a World of More Specializations and Less Work
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
To leverage the coming waves of technological disruptions rather than succumb to deeper inequality and dislocation will require individuals to secure a niche in the increasingly generative economic system.
This means empowering individuals to harness technologies as they come, rather than being sideswiped by them. The elements of digitization, modularity, and sharing platforms are accelerating and spreading, meaning that more and more people should be able to harness cheap data access, small-scale 3-D manufacturing, and new peer-to-peer currencies.
Our capitalist model could be transformed from an imposed-value system into one in which value is ultimately determined by each individual.
Vulnerability of Specialists in All Endeavors
Social, artistic, technical, and industrial specialists will continue to multiply and increase in skill and dexterity.
This diversification of ability and dissimilarity of employment will eventually weaken and disintegrate human society if effective means of coordination and cooperation are not developed.
But the intelligence that is capable of such inventiveness and such specialization should be sufficiently competent to devise adequate methods of control and adjustment for all problems resulting from the rapid growth of invention and the accelerated pace of cultural expansion.
Forewarned
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
A century ago, leading Western philosophers appreciated the promise and peril of mass industrialization technologies.
Oswald Spengler’s Der Mensch und die Technik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens (1931) proposed to integrate technology into a philosophy of life, arguing that Technik is a process that unites our economic, political, educational, and cultural systems.
The Dispersion of Authority and Allegiance
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
Through technology, movements acquire undeniable political, economic, and social weight.
Social media expert Clay Shirky foreshadows the dispersion of authority when he says, “Behavior is just motivation filtered through opportunity.”
As technology multiplies our tribes, it makes identity a competitive marketplace. Free-agent talent plays arbitrage over taxes and citizenship, leading to shifting loyalty between cities, companies, countries, and communities - or any combination of them. Bank accounts and bandwidth come to matter as much as citizenship. Your present nationality, occupation, and geography may no longer be optimal.
The Re-Emergence of City States, Etal
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
New York, Dubai, and Shanghai conduct their own diplomacy around trade, investment, even intelligence and security: Their growth and stability is too important for them to wait for their capitals to set policy.
New York City Global Partners is something of a multiagency foreign ministry for New York, enabling the mayor to have his own commercial and climate policies, coordinated directly with those of other resourceful mayors.
Rather than petro-states, the Hybrid Age will be led by such city-centric info-states.
Borders Are No Longer Just Lines on a Map
Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
New technologies have both undermined national sovereignty and redefined it.
If, as the German sociologist Max Weber argued, only the state holds a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence, then why are there more than 1,700 autonomous armed militia groups active around the world today, when we have only 200 nations?
In fact, we are witnessing the birth of a blended real and virtual battle-space that features national armies as well as autonomous guerrillas, diaspora fighters, private companies, organized criminals, cyber-hackers, and other self-interested parties on an increasingly level technological, financial, and ideological playing field.
They are all competing to provide secure connectedness: Whoever provides access to information, resources, and leverage coupled with protection from exploitation will gain authority and loyalty.
Decaying National Borders
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
Security is not just about national borders, but about data networks, DNA, and minds.
DARPA’s (America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) 2030 vision reveals that the past decade’s fad of debilitating counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts have given way to an emphasis on drones, self-directed munitions, high-energy lasers, swarming nanobots, and even “super-soldiers” augmented by robotic exoskeletons and neural prostheses.
Anything that can be illicitly accessed is at risk. The National Security Agency (NSA) is building facilities capable of storing yottabytes (one million exabytes) of data it collects from telephone communications and secret stations abroad. Today, the FBI stalks cyber-hackers, but it needs to prepare for tomorrow’s hunt for covert bio-labs where criminals steal and implant DNA codes to change their identity.
Employment Opportunity Locators
The next age of social development will be embodied in a better and more effective cooperation and coordination of ever-increasing and expanding specialization.
As labor more and more diversifies, some technique for directing individuals to suitable employment must be devised.
Machinery is not the only cause for unemployment among the civilized peoples of Earth. Economic complexity and the steady increase of industrial and professional specialism add to the problems of labor placement.
Retraining Workers Is Not Enough
It is not enough to train men for work.
In a complex society there must also be provided efficient methods of placement finding.
Before training citizens in the highly specialized techniques of earning a living, they should be trained in one or more methods of commonplace labor, trades or callings which could be utilized when they were transiently unemployed in their specialized work.
No civilization can survive extended periods of harboring large classes of unemployed. In time, even the best of citizens will become bowed and demoralized by accepting support from the public treasury. Even private charity becomes devastating when over-extended to able-bodied citizens.
Degrees of Slavery
A highly specialized society will not tolerate the ancient communal and feudal practices of the past.
Some common services (such as infrastructure maintenance) can be acceptably and profitably socialized, but highly trained and ultra-specialized human beings can best be managed by some technique of intelligent cooperation.
Modernized coordination and fraternal (brotherhood) regulation will be productive of longer-lived cooperation than will the older and more primitive methods of communism or dictatorial regulative institutions based on force.
Stages of Cooperation Leading to Brotherhood
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
The triad of geotechnology, geopolitics and geoeconomics must be studied as a singularity to understand effective global change.
The author, Upton Sinclair, noted the difficulty of achieving this unity of purpose, saying: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The Willingness to Cooperate
One of the great hindrances to the progress of human society is the conflict between the interests and welfare of the larger, more socialized human groups and of the smaller, contrary-minded asocial associations of mankind, not to mention antisocially-minded single individuals.
No national civilization can endure unless its educational methods and religious ideals inspire a high type of intelligent patriotism and national devotion.
Without this quality of intelligent patriotism and cultural solidarity, all nations tend to disintegrate as a result of provincial jealousies and local self-interests.
India leads the Way in Social Education
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
It is quite common in India for people to pursue education through their twenties. Self-improvement is a big theme and actively encouraged by parents and companies. Many companies sponsor MBA programs for talented employees with full-day classes over the weekend.
New Learning Techniques
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
The emerging beneficial and productive learning system will be peer-to-peer in the way students engage with each other, teachers, parents, communities, and technology.
There need not be any opposition between lifelong learning and formal education, real and virtual classrooms, academic and applied knowledge.
The “two cultures” debate of the 1950s that pitted sciences against humanities has swung toward science, but its resolution lies in a synthesis of the two, not the dominance of one over the other. It is easier than ever today to learn both Newton and Shakespeare. A “third culture,” then, would be one of disciplined creativity. We will see more Montessori Institute of Technology schools, which use the Montessori sense of experimentation and “poking” with reality combined with the rigorous research of MIT. “Serious games” will be played at all ages.
The Self vs. The Soul
The maintenance of world-wide civilization is dependent on human beings learning how to live together in peace and fraternity.
Without effective coordination, industrial civilization is jeopardized by the dangers of ultraspecialization: monotony, narrowness, and the tendency to breed distrust and jealousy.
Evolving Government
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
“If the decent are not willing to rule, they are punished by being ruled by worse men.” - Plato.
The political consequences of globalization and the Information Revolution are now playing out: a broader set of empowered players (including governments, companies, NGOs, and more) and competing ambitions (territory, market monopoly, and mind-share - which relates generally to the development of consumer awareness or popularity, and is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion).
Each now has access to the deep source of power (authority) to build the constituencies that legitimize their influence.
The dominant players of any era emerge at the intersection of resources (natural or financial), identity (a community of members or followers), authority (recognition and deference), and technology (military or informational).
Citizen groups, consumers, and social movements can all increasingly alter the parameters of politics. As a result, even our one social system that is the most hierarchical by design (government) is becoming self generating featuring novel assemblages of diverse players that associate freely in ways that will reshape our basic federal institutions.
This new governance design may ultimately supersede democracy as the most successful system for the Hybrid (composite) Age.
The Radical Hybrid Age
(Dr.Thomas R. Horn - edited)
In recent years, astonishing technological developments have pushed the frontiers of humanity toward far-reaching morphological transformation that promises in the very near future to redefine what it means to be human.
What science has already done by genetically modifying plants and animals will soon apply to Homo sapiens. An international, intellectual, and fast-growing cultural movement known as transhumanism supports this vision, as does a flourishing list of U.S. military advisors, bioethicists, law professors, and academics that intend the use of genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology as tools that will radically redesign our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and our civilization.
Transhumanist Values
Nick Bosstom, Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy - Ethical Issues for the 21st Century, ed. Frederick Adams (Philosophical Documentation Center Press, 2003, excerpt)
Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities. Other transhumanist themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition. The scope is not limited to gadgets and medicine, but encompasses also economic, social, institutional designs, cultural development, and psychological skills and techniques.
Forecasted Transhumanistic Technologies
Webpage http://io9.com/5967896/us-spy-agency-predicts-a-very-transhuman-future-by-2030 - edited
The National Intelligence Council has published its forecasting report, a 140-page document that outlines major trends and technological developments that they expect in the next 20 years.
The NIC foresees the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a growing middle class that will increasingly challenge governments, and ongoing shortages in water, food and energy. They also envision a future in which humans are significantly modified by technology.
By 2030, the NIC predicts, prosthetics as good or even better than organic limbs. By this stage, the military will increasingly rely on exoskeletons to help soldiers carry heavy loads.
Many of these same technologies will also be used by the elderly to maintain more youthful levels of strength and energy, and as a part of their life extension strategies.
Brain implants will also allow for advanced neural interface devices bridging the gap between minds and machines. These technologies will allow for brain-controlled prosthetics, some of which may be able to provide "superhuman" abilities like enhanced strength, speed and completely new functionality.
Other advances will include retinal eye implants to enable night vision and other previously inaccessible light spectrums. Advanced neuropharmaceuticals will allow for vastly improved working memory, attention, and speed of thought.
Many of these technologies will only be available to those who are able to afford them. The authors warn that this could result in a two-tiered society comprising enhanced and nonenhanced persons, a dynamic that would likely require government oversight and regulation.
Effective and Wise Leadership
In civilization much depends on an enthusiastic shared load-pulling spirit.
Ten men are of little more value than one in lifting a great load unless they lift together - all at the same moment. Such teamwork - social cooperation - is dependent on leadership. The cultural civilizations of the past and the present have been based upon the intelligent cooperation of the citizenry with wise and progressive leaders.
Until man evolves to higher levels, civilization will continue to be dependent on wise and vigorous leadership.
Concern for the Interests of Humankind
(The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, Al Gore - edited)
With the future of human civilization hanging in the balance, both democracy and capitalism are failing badly to serve the deepest interests of humankind. Both are unwieldy and both are in a state of disrepair.
But if the flaws in our current version of democracy and capitalism are addressed, if the barnacles of corruption, corporate control, and domination by elites can be scraped away, both of these systems will be invaluable in turning world civilization in the right direction before it is too late.
Yet this difficult policy transition will require leadership and political courage that is presently in short supply, particularly in the United States.
Divisiveness
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
In the United States the concentration of power in private hands has fueled the resentment of Occupy Wall Street. Power in public hands riles the Tea Party. A shadow government of super Political Action Committees (PACs) squared off against a viral web community led by Google and Wikipedia, which stopped the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation.
Technology is a tool but also a battlefield of ferocious politics.
Consequence of National Internal Power Struggles
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
The 21st century will not be dominated by the United States or China, Brazil, or India, but by cities.
Today, most of the world’s population lives in cities, and just 600 cities comprise three-quarters of the world economy. By 2050, 70 percent of the world population will live in cities - and the U.N. estimates that we need to build 9,000 new cities around the world to cope.
It is not only the giant urbanization wave sweeping the planet that forces us to focus on the city as the prime geographic unit, but also trends in the spread of technology and collective brotherhood identity.
Great Civilizations and Metadata
High civilizations are born of the sagacious interdependence of material wealth, intellectual greatness, moral worth, social cleverness, and cosmic insight.
Metadata is data that describes other data. Meta is a prefix that in most information technology usages means "an underlying definition or description."
There are two "metadata types;" structural metadata, about the design and specification of data structures or "data about the containers of data"; and descriptive metadata about individual instances of application data or the data content. (Metadata was traditionally evident in the card catalogs of libraries.)
For example, the metadata base in this blog may be described as an integration of time, space, truth, beauty, goodness, science, religion, evolution, sex, rebirth, origin, destiny, cosmos, government, body, soul, personality, philosophy, love, life, education, experience, transformation, brotherhood, personality survival, matter, spirit, deity, mind, man, and metamorphosis.
Social Changes
Society is not a divine institution. It is a phenomenon of progressive evolution.
Advancing civilization is always delayed when its leaders are slow in making those changes in the social organization which are essential to keeping pace with the scientific developments of the age.
Not withstanding that, things must not be despised just because they are old, neither should an idea be unconditionally embraced just because it is novel and new.
The Prevention of Transitional Breakdown
Society is the offspring of age upon age of trial and error. It is what survived the selective adjustments and readjustments in the successive stages of mankind’s agelong rise from animal to human levels of planetary status.
The great danger to any civilization is the threat of breakdown during the time of transition from the established methods of the past to those new and better, but untried, procedures of the future.
Great Leadership Is Vital to Social Progress
Wisdom, insight, and foresight are indispensable to the endurance of nations. Civilization is never really jeopardized until able leadership begins to vanish.
The quantity of wise leadership has never exceeded one per cent of the population.
The Bottomline
This completes the history of the long, long struggle of the peoples of earth to establish civilization since the age of Adam.
Present-day culture is the net result of this strenuous evolution. Before the discovery of printing and more recently, the world-wide internet, progress was relatively slow since one generation could not so rapidly benefit from the achievements of its predecessors. Today human society is plunging forward under the force of the accumulated momentum of all the ages through which civilization has struggled.
Spreading Technik
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
Growing access to technologies could bring about a great convergence in quality of life across the globe. Meeting the grand challenge of improving equity on a crowded planet requires spreading Technik more than it requires spreading democracy.
Emphasis on technology as not only things (which are increasingly cheap) but also processes (which are increasingly shareable), it is technology access that is crucial to achieving economic and political empowerment. Access to the universal Internet will likely become a human reality before any consensus emerges as to whether it is a human right.
The same is true of the “right to food” and “right to water” and “right to education.” Technology is delivering these far more quickly than half-hearted laws.
Strengthening the Technik of others is the intervention needed for humanity to thrive in the 21st century. By enhancing the Technik of underdeveloped societies, Technik can cure the “accident of birth” by which 90 percent of our fate is determined because of location and family income when we are born.
Reasons for Optimism
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
Over the next decade, generic drugs and genetically modified foods could drastically improve the efficiency of meeting mankind’s basic needs. The combination of 3-D manufacturing and bioengineering at portable scale could result in the printing of seeds and food.
Graphene technology could be used to produce lighter aircraft, longer-lasting batteries, electricity-conducting plastics, and microfiltration water systems.
Centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven’t lifted Africa’s fortunes the way technology can. Money may flow in and out, while technology infrastructure stays and spreads, allowing the poor to spend less on survival and more on productivity.
The struggle to achieve Technik is an opportunity to make the geotechnology playing field win-win as innovations created by one can quickly be accessed by all. For example, China’s leading position in the world’s solar cell market is not a threat but a reminder of the huge opportunity to engage in a market that has only just begun to take off.
As with globalization, the more societies there are that climb the Technik ladder, the greater the potential for mutual exchange and profit through spreading technologies rather than hoarding them.
Finis
Mortals may enjoy contemplation, and talk to our immanent God (a fragment of the transcendent Universal Father) that indwells each normal human mind after the age of six. This is the "still small voice" referred to in 1 Kings 19:11-13 (King James Version of the Bible). This consultation with god is possible without clergy, confession to others, dogma, idols, or superstition.
Of course, many enjoy sharing their religion in social situations. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Matthew 18:20. (King James Version)
Amalgamation
The most contentious problems of mortal society are caused by differences in race; gender; religion; and ownership of property.
These problems will be resolved only when mankind achieves the goals of one race, gender equality, one language, one religion, one global government, the shared distribution of wealth and Earth's resources, and the segregation or elimination of inferior humans until the gene pool is purged of defectives.
Realization of these goals will require millenniums of growth in man's outreach for brotherhood.
Human Origin and Destiny
Humans have evolved from seeds of force energy that had no beginning and will have no end as our unending transformations continue from their origin in pre-time, through Time and Space, continuing in Transcendent Time and Space, and eventually returning to the absolute state as spiritual beings (fully fledged gods).
The book explaining this process (Transformations Without Beginning or End, written by A. Cercatore) is available from Amazon.
Science and Religion
Leonard Miodinow, in speaking of the universe models of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and Quantum Physics, feels the existence of God cannot be proven or dis-proven by science since the scientist is operating within the confines of the "box" of his epoch's model for science in time and space. (Reference Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's discussion of "model-dependent realism" in their book, The Grand Design.)
Science may expound on the governing of matter, but religion deals with the conservation of men's souls and their experience with spiritual realities and eternal values.
There is an intervening level of worlds between the flesh and the spirit. Man's difficulty in arriving at a more harmonious coordination between science and religion is due to his ignorance of this intervening domain of things and beings.
The experience of the soul in these intervening worlds will erase all divergence between the findings of the physical sciences and the functioning of the spirit in religion.
Unity in Diversity
The folly of arguing differences between religions such as Unitarianism and Trinitarianism is irrational. Both positions are correct. Unitarianism points to the fact that all the persons of god are united in oneness of mind. Trinitarianism demonstrates the persons of the Paradise Trinity working together in the manner of a corporation for a given purpose - creation of the universes.
Differences in the dogmatic positions of Earth's religions are too trite to merit discussion. Certainly, these man made suppositions do not justify war or killing.
Education
Education is a conditioning of the mind to accept the views of a particular society and way of life. Consequently, education often restricts one's thinking, for to believe one teaching entails a disbelief in other teachings that appear to be contradictory.
Man's Spiritual Ministers
Guardian angels constantly hover near mortals to aid the “spiritualization of matter.” The angels encourage man to concern himself with his immortality.
Guardian angels are mind stimulators. They seek to promote elevating decisions in the human mind. They do this, not like the Thought Adjuster operating from within and through the soul, but rather from the outside, working through the social, ethical, and moral environment of human beings.
Guardian angels guide men’s footsteps into paths of new and progressive experiences. Acceptance of seraphic guidance rarely means attaining a life of ease. In following the angelic leading, men, if they have the courage, traverse the rugged paths of moral choosing and spiritual progress.
The Thought Adjuster is the essence of man's eternal nature. The guardian angel is the teacher of man's evolving nature.
Midway creatures (created at a level slightly above men) act as liaison between the angels and favorably constituted mortals. The midwayers collaborate with the Thought Adjusters in the minds of receptive humans.
The Universe’s Caste System
In God’s eyes, there are only two classes of mortals; those sons of the Father who desire to do His will and those who do not. Those who do not wish to do the Father’s will rank as animals.
Veils
Few mortals feel they warrant the arrangements made for their endless life. From man's perspective, his value to the universe appears negligible. Still, there is a reason behind the life experience. The phenomenal world veils something of infinite value, of which mortals are a part. (See Amazon publications of A. Cercatore's, Transformations Without Beginning or End.)
Cosmogony
Earth and the other worlds of time are not tumbling haphazardly through uncharted space. Our local universe is a fragment of one of the seven super universes that are traversing a counterclockwise course around a vast ellipse that encircles Paradise and the central universe.
Earth is an infinitesimally small part of Super Universe 7 that travels between super universes 1 and 6. Today, Super Universe Seven is a few billion years past the swing around the southern curvature of a great ellipse and is moving swiftly along the long straight northern path. Super Universe 7 will pursue this direct northerly course for untold ages.
Earth is now passing through the very same space that its predecessors traversed ages ago. In the remote future, Earth, or its successors, will again traverse this identical space.
The Levels of Existence
Existential:
Infinitude - (Level of the Existential and Infinite “I AM”)
Paradise Level - (Absolute Existential Perfection)
Mid Level Between the Existential and Experiential Level:
Havona Level - Transcendentally (Above Time and Space) Perfect Central Universe
Experiential (Evolutionary) Creation:
Super Universes (1 through 7) Level
Major Sectors Level
Minor Sectors Level
Local Universes Level
Constellations Level
Star (Solar) Systems Level
Planets Level
Earth's Mother Super Universe
When Super Universe 7 (in which Earth is a planet) is complete, it will contain one-seventh of the numbers of units planned for the seven super universes:
Major Sectors…………………………...7
Minor Sectors………………………..100
Local Universes…………………100,000
Constellations……………….10,000,000
Local Systems……………1,000,000,000
Inhabitable Planets….1,000,000,000,000
The Metamorphosis of Force-Energy
Force-energy derived from self-existent Deity is also ever-existent. Force-energy is imperishable. The manifestations of the Infinite may be subject to unlimited transmutation into and through the matter of time-space, endless transformation to higher forms, and eternal metamorphosis; but in no sense could they suffer extinction.
Force-energy ever responds to the all-embracing grasp of Infinity. Having departed from Paradise, they must return in a transformed spiritual condition, even if age upon age is required for the completion of the ordained circuit through the circular, orderly, and widely distributed universe of universes.
Feeling Energy
Energy is the foundation of existence. One’s thoughts about the idea of energy should feel as real as the feeling about any solid appearing object. A person should concentrate upon feeling energy, as knowledge alone cannot provide an understanding of energy.
Even when man accepts the truth that there is only one energy, this is not enough for progress. Men must learn to picture the incalculable qualities of energy. Man limits his understanding when he allows a too guarded narrowness of thought to limit his perception of the attributes of energy.
Lofty thinking helps escape mortal limitation, but many men feel it is too difficult to maintain a suitable level of lofty thought amidst life's disappointments and misfortunes. Life's difficulties assist lofty thinking. Nature (life) is flux and transformation (transcending matter through evolution).
Everyone can feel kinship with the eternal by learning to perceive the elusive chimerical properties of fundamental energy.
Quarantine
In the hope of conserving and safeguarding God’s precious presence, when some planets (or even systems) plunge into spiritual darkness, they are partially isolated from intercourse with the larger units of creation. This is a spiritually defensive reaction of the majority of the worlds to save themselves from suffering the alienating acts of a rebellious minority.
For two hundred thousand years all the worlds of Satania (Earth's Star System) have been under the spiritual ban of our Constellation level overlords as a consequence of the Lucifer rebellion. Earth continues to pursue an irregular and checkered career as a result of the double tragedy of our rebellious Planetary Prince (Caligastia) and the default of Adam and Eve.
The development of civilization on Earth has not differed so greatly from that of other worlds that have sustained the misfortune of spiritual isolation. But, when compared with the loyal worlds of the universe, Earth seems very confused and greatly retarded in all phases of intellectual progress and spiritual attainment.
Culture requires quality of mind. Culture cannot be enhanced unless mind is elevated. Superior intellect will seek a noble culture and find ways to attain such a goal. When presented to them, inferior minds will rebuff a higher culture.
Human Government
The only sacred feature of any human government is the division of statehood into a trinity of executive, legislative, and judicial functions.
The universe itself is administered in accordance with such a plan of segregation of functions and authority. Aside from this divine concept of effective social regulation or civil government, it matters little what form of state a people may elect to have (provided the citizenry is ever progressing toward the goal of augmented self-control and increased social service).
The intellectual keenness, economic wisdom, social cleverness, and moral stamina of a people are all faithfully reflected in statehood.
Evolution of Statehood
Statehood evolves from level to level in the following manner:
1. Creation of a threefold government of executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
2. Freedom of social, political, and religious activities.
3. Abolition of all forms of slavery and human bondage.
4. Ability of the citizenry to control the levying of taxes.
5. Establishment of universal education - learning extended from the cradle to the grave.
6. The proper adjustment between local and national governments.
7. The fostering of science and the conquest of disease.
8. Recognition of sex equality and the coordinated functioning of men and women in the home, school, and church, with specialized service of women in industry and government.
9. The elimination of toiling slavery by machine invention and the subsequent mastery of the machine age.
10. The conquest of dialects - the triumph of a universal language.
11. The ending of war - international adjudication of national and racial differences by continental courts of nations
presided over by a supreme planetary tribunal automatically recruited from the periodically retiring heads of the
continental courts. The continental courts are authoritative; the world court is advisory - moral. The continental courts
are authoritative in civic matters; the world court is advisory - moral. This reflects the original
intended relationship of monarchs and popes.
12. The world-wide vogue of the pursuit of wisdom - the exaltation of philosophy and the evolution of a world religion.
Earth is far from the realization of these exalted ideals of statehood, but the civilized races have made a beginning. Mankind is progressing toward higher evolutionary destinies.
Life Experience
Life in any form increases in quality through experience. This is true of individual atoms or compounded compositions of atoms.
The experience of every mortal creature or spirit being throughout creation is a part of an ever-expanding consciousness.
There is purpose and direction underlying everything known. Everything that occurs is the outcome of the conscious will of some entity. Everything has purpose. Thought fashions all levels of reality.
While the will of God will ultimately dictate true reality, each mortal personality makes a voluntary unforced choice to follow the will of God or not.
Mortals are responsible for the development and maintenance of their physical bodies, emotional nature, and mentality. Since humans are the energizing force within their own bodies, when they withdraw from those bodies, the bodies disintegrate. The same thing applies to the life force in forms of every kind (frogs, nations, religions, and civilizations).
Body, Mind, Soul, and Personality
The qualities of reality (think spiritual manifestation) occur in human experience in the physical electrochemical mechanism (body) and in the thinking, perceiving, and feeling mechanism (the total conscious and unconscious experience of the mind).
The intelligence related to the emotional life assists in the upward evolution to the soul and spiritual levels.
The soul of man matures through altruistic experience. Since altruism (service to one’s fellows) is essential for soul development, then life experience must provide encounters with social inequalities.
Just as the soul of mortal man is not part of the body, mind, or spirit, neither is the personality. Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience. Personality fuses all of the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive with the soul.
Prayers of mortals should be requests for meaningful life experiences.
The Value of Time
There is grave danger in postponing entrance into the kingdom of heaven (which will inevitably occur in some future personality life) while pursuing the transitory pleasures of immaturity and selfishness. Jesus said, “Salvation is not for those who are unwilling to pay the price of wholehearted dedication to doing my Father's will.”
While recognizing the necessity for most men to master some vocation, Jesus deplored overspecialization; narrow-mindedness and time squandered living an idle life. While warning against the dangers of mediocrity, Jesus warned that any virtue becomes a vice when carried to extremes. (Too much self-pity deteriorates into emotional instability. Too much enthusiasm leads to fanaticism.) As Aristotle maintained, life’s problems require proportional adjustments.
Jesus said: "Be brave of heart as well as of hand [physically]. Dare to do justice and be big enough to show mercy. Compel your lower nature to obey your higher nature.... Revere goodness and exalt truth. Choose the beautiful in place of the ugly. Love your fellows and reach out for God with a whole heart.”
To the Pharisees, Jesus asked: “Do not you foolish men understand that the God of heaven looks at the inner motives of the soul as well as on your outer pretenses and your pious professions? Think not that the giving of alms and the paying of tithes will cleanse you from unrighteousness and enable you to stand clean in the presence of the Judge of all men.”
Time is priceless. No one may avoid accounting for the expenditure of his or her time.
Love As Service
The myriads of solar systems and their planets were created as habitat for the countless types of intelligent creatures who could know God, accept the Father’s affection, and love him in return.
Genuine appreciation of infinite qualities far exceeds the limited capacity of the human mind. However, there lives within each mortal mind a spiritual fragment of the Paradise Father, the Thought Adjuster. Man's approach to loving the transcendent God of all creation is through love for this immanent spiritual guide. The unique relationship of each human with his Thought Adjuster provides an experience in celestial sociology, the Creator/creature, Father/child relationship with its appropriate devotion.
The Creator Son of our local universe, Michael the Christ (Jesus), embodied the motivating power of love while living a mortal life on this planet. His exemplary life demonstrated the truth that love and intelligence fulfill the Will of God.
Until the world has evolved to the stage where the concept of love is universal, it means mortals must find less fortunate brothers whom they can love and assist. Special attention should focus on those most capable of returning service to humanity.
Gender Relationship
To the human who has not experienced spiritual rebirth, the emphasis of life remains upon the relationship of the sexes.
The creativity of these mortals expresses itself mainly through the propagation of the race, brought about through the sexual relations of males and females (the positive and negative poles in the human family). This is a proper part of the divine plan.
After an individual’s re-birth in Christ, the entire sex relationship shifts gradually into its proper place as a more temperate appetite.
Instead of male and female, there emerges a relationship of magnetism (as between angel couples) between the newly negative personality and the positive soul, with consequent creativity upon the higher planes. The personality becomes soul-infused.
With growth, the two genders become responsive to the soul (the reflection of the divine intention), the spiritual counterpart of eroticism.
Love and Sex
The words love and sex convey the relationship and the union between God and His universe, between man and God, between a man and his soul, and between men and women.
When spirit and matter met, the universes came into being. The Christ was born. When an individual man and his soul come together, the Christ is born again in the heart of the man (this is known as rebirth). When a man and a woman come together, a new child of the Father is born.
Spiritual Rebirth
Eternal life begins at the moment of spiritual rebirth. "And all who trust Him (God's Son) to save them have eternal life; those who don't believe and obey Him shall never see heaven...." (John 3:36.)
Spiritual rebirth brings changes in our lives and goals. "The person who has been born into God's family does not make a practice of sinning because now God's life is in him; so he can't keep on sinning, for this new life has been born into him and controls him - he has been born again." (1 John 3:9.)
The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him.
The Role of Males and Females
The difference in nature, viewpoint, and thinking in men and women is highly beneficial to mankind, both individually and collectively. Dual phases of personality manifestation characterize many orders of universe creatures.
Male and female describes this difference in mortals. Positive (aggressive) and negative (passive) describes the gender difference among the angels. Such dual associations greatly multiply versatility and overcome the inherent limitations in each sex.
Men and women need each other in their mortal as well as in their mansion and spiritual world careers. The gender differences in viewpoint remain throughout eternity. The male and female differences will always intrigue, stimulate, and encourage them. The two sexes will always depend upon each other in the solution of perplexing universe problems.
Marriage
Marriage, with its sundry family relationships, produces higher motives indispensable to developing strong character.
Men and women find their highest service and joy in setting up homes for birthing and training children. In creating children, parents become co-partners with the makers of heaven and earth.
A man and a woman warmly embracing the highest ideals of time is an experience worthy of any price or sacrifice necessary for its attainment.
Transmutation of Sex
The activity or the inactivity of certain centers in the human body condition the personality. The soul works through the endocrine system to control and direct the energies and forces that the centers channel.
The sacral center, which represents the sex organs, is the center most implicated and active at the time of the rebirth initiation. The sacral center is the focal point for life force energy, creative energy, and sexuality.
The energy of the sacral center rises to higher centers transforming the physical sexual creative act into a creative process for producing the good, the beautiful and the true. This is the transmutation of sex.
Childhood
Childhood is the period during which a mortal develops a materialistic (selfish) point of view. One sees a corresponding stage of childhood in the lesser-evolved races and people of the world. The early lessons of childhood experience are necessary for the survival, development, and perpetuation of the human race. This characteristic occurs in both individuals and races.
The selfish period of childhood should nurture a second stage, which is the awakening of responsibility. A third stage is the time when a mortal is meant to have realized the purpose of his life with a plan for achievement that he is working out through his intellect and his controlling spirit, the Thought Adjuster. The maturing human should realize that he or she is part of a greater universal life; a Supreme Self Who is the synthesis of all.
The time is coming to study all children medically (with special attention to the endocrine system), vocationally (to place them in activities where their gifts and capacities may find fullest expression), and spiritually (to unify the child in brain, mind, and soul).
Children who die before the arrival of a Thought Adjuster (at age five) are resurrected concurrent with the arrival of either parent or a surrogate in the mansion worlds nursery. This is true regardless of any baptismal ritual performed by a church. At age sixteen, if the young mortals raised in worlds beyond Earth elect to pursue the path to perfection, they immediately translate to the first mansion world.
No ascending mortal can escape the experience of rearing children, either their own or others. Parenting may occur on the material worlds or subsequently on advanced worlds. It is a mistake to think of child culture as primarily the task of mothers. Fathers must pass through this essential experience as well as mothers.
Just as advanced individuals have personal angels, so do groups of human beings. Jesus referred to these angels when he said: "Take heed that you despise not one of these little ones, for I say to you, their angels do always behold the presence of the spirit of my Father."
Evolution
Evolution is the process of adjusting the matter aspect to the Spirit aspect, so that matter proves adequate as a body of expression for Spirit.
This evolvement comes through countless cycles within time and space before and after the mortal level of life.
On Earth, both persons and events reveal a determined plan for a wondrous evolution of the human race.
The Urge for Salvation
The urge to work for salvation underlies all the evolutionary processes, particularly in the human family. The instinct to betterment, the compulsion to progress, the steady effort to improve conditions, are all expressions of the instinct for salvation.
While the urge for salvation also drives humanity forward into its wild struggle for material well-being, instinct eventually urges man to turn his back upon the world. The new urge to serve, to relinquish selfishness for service, is the underlying story of evolution.
All Life Is Opportunity
Individual reaction to opportunity is one of the factors that show soul growth. Spiritual work can only go forward because of the free choice and self-initiated effort of individuals, but the effort to understand spiritual teaching carries its own reward. The attempt to grasp and comprehend the soul leads inevitably to an unfolding of the mental apparatus with a subsequent development of the brain cells. This unfolding produces a coordination of the thinking faculty and resultant illumination.
The study of revelation increases one’s responsibility to work for the implementation
of the divine plan for mankind. Deity gives revelation to man to achieve group cooperation and understanding not for individual benefit.
Through sincere study, group interplay is established both on the physical and super material levels.
Men see only a tiny portion of the divine plan. The revelators see the plan as it unfolds for a series of lives ahead. This is the reason they seek men who will work in groups. A group constitutes an active unit participating in the vast happenings that lie ahead. The same organizational groupings often continue after death.Soul
Each soul is one with all souls within the Over-soul of God the Supreme (the God of Time and Space), part of the one essential unity, the one all-pervading life.
The will of each mortal (the personality’s power of decision and choice), is resident in the material mind circuits, not the soul.
During life in mortal flesh, the evolving soul reinforces the higher material decisions of the mortal mind.
The soul may make final decisions only if the material mind delegates such authority freely and willingly to the soul.
Just as a butterfly emerges from the caterpillar stage, the personalities of former human beings appear on the mansion worlds divested of their cloak of material flesh.
Soul
Each soul is one with all souls within the Over-soul of God the Supreme (the God of Time and Space), part of the one essential unity, the one all-pervading life.
The will of each mortal (the personality’s power of decision and choice), is resident in the material mind circuits, not the soul.
During life in mortal flesh, the evolving soul reinforces the higher material decisions of the mortal mind.
The soul may make final decisions only if the material mind delegates such authority freely and willingly to the soul.
Just as a butterfly emerges from the caterpillar stage, the personalities of former human beings appear on the mansion worlds divested of their cloak of material flesh.
Soul and Personality Survival
The human soul and the personality survive mortal death by identity association with the spiritual Thought Adjuster, who indwells the human mind.
The second generation of the soul and personality is in the mansion worlds.
Spiritual Identity
When animal consciousness transitions to self-consciousness in man, the process is termed individualization. Man gains a spiritual identity when he develops a soul.
Humanity is the fourth kingdom of nature. It exists between the three lower kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, and animal) and the three higher kingdoms (Soul, Thought Adjuster (the spirit fragment of the Universal Father who lives in the human mind), and deity).
Man stands at a point of balance between opposites - deity and animal (reality and misleading appearance).
Every person in time and space is a lesser god of his own universe, which consists of his physical, soul, and mental bodies. These bodies comprise the lesser lives.
Quintessential Brotherhood
Man's never-ending search is for unification (a bringing together of individuality together as one).
The far-flung physical universe coalesces in the isle of Paradise (analogous to the atomic nucleus).
The intellectual universe coheres in the God of mind the Infinite Spirit.
The spiritual universe (beginning with the soul of man) is coherent in the personality of the Eternal Son.
The isolated mortal of time and space coheres in God the Father through the direct relationship between the indwelling Thought Adjuster and the Universal Father. Man’s Adjuster is a fragment of God and everlastingly seeks for divine
unification; it coheres with, and in, the Paradise Deity of the First Source and Center (the begetter of all existence
beginning with the Paradise Trinity).
Mortal Survival
The continuing survival of mortal creatures is dependent on developing an immortal soul within the human mind. The soul is the bridge between matter and spirit.
Meditation and service to God align the soul, the mind, and the brain. When a man performs as soul, the soul is the intermediary between the plane of divine truth and the mental plane.
Divine truth, the thought of deity, is a living organism. Man may know the truth, live the truth, experience the growth of truth in the soul, and enjoy its enlightenment in the mind. Role of Soul
The objective of the soul is participation in divine creation.
Forward spiritual movement happens in spiraling cycles across ever enlarging levels of consciousness.
In Time, the soul and the personality fuse with spirit (the Thought Adjuster). The new identity begins to blend with Life itself and becomes a part of the Supreme Reality (Time and space).
Care of the Soul
For rest and relaxation, Jesus sometimes took his apostles away by themselves for short periods to engage in meditation and prayer. Largely, he kept them serving the multitudes. The soul of man needs both spiritual nourishment and exercise.
Through communion with God comes deliverance from the world’s illusions of evil and material restraints. When man knows God, he frees the soul to prepare for the spirit struggle of immortality. As the mortal life is ending, man must not hesitate to abandon the body. He will awaken in a more fitting and beautiful form in the Supreme realms where there is no fear, sorrow, hunger, thirst, or death. Evil remains behind in this world. Virtue alone follows the soul to heaven.
Intimacy
The soul receives and registers shadows of ideas through intuition. In further contemplation, the thinker receives the image of a subjective skeleton and identifies the form that it should take.
Powerful support received in implementing an idea proves the service is the will of the Father. A son of God cooperates in all to which he may contribute. Meditation and service provide satisfactory expression for all the powers of the personality and soul.
Participation in the creation requires the thinker to discard all conceited and selfish thoughts.
Spiritual ambition or a fondness for personal power hinders true service. Any emphasis on the personality will distort the pure light of the soul as it seeks to pour through the lower self.
Expressing Soul
Men who do not falter in their search for light and for a field in which to serve their soul prove their devotion to their comrades and the greater Sons of God who guide the destiny of men.
A son of God accepts all the demands of loyalty that son-ship in the Kingdom of God involves. He seeks expression as a soul recognizing that all souls are one in the Supreme.
In dealing with Deity, man knows God through His nature, which is Spirit (Life) and Soul (love).
Man does not yet know the Universal Father. The Father remains inscrutable, unseen and unknown, except as revealed through the life of His deity sons, and by the revelation given by the incarnated son of of our universe, Jesus Christ. Soul Consciousness
Humanity must shift its consciousness away from its aggressive acquisitive material wants into soul consciousness. This is true of individuals, of nations, and of races. As each individual works out his own problems in life, he is helping to solve world problems.
Adequate Time
Baring accident, every will creature receives enough time to ensure survival. A person squanders time by failing to use it to guarantee the survival of his soul.
Echoing William Wordsworth
The time of youth with all its aching joys
And dizzy raptures is past.
Other gifts have followed
With abundant recompense.
I have learned to live my life
Not as in the hour of thoughtless youth,
But listening for the still, sad music of humanity,
Which chastens and subdues.
In my maturity, I apologize to all my brothers
For any misbehavior of mine towards them.
I also forgive all my brothers
For any mischief of theirs' toward me.
Integration
There is no separation in the planetary life of mortals and the other forms on the planet. Soul relates all forms and organisms. Plants, dogs, and people share life's circulation as it streams through the mass of forms that, as a group, make up our planet.
The difference in organisms is levels of consciousness.
Growth of the Soul
Nothing can prevent the progress of the human soul on its long ascent from ignorance to wisdom, from mortal death to immortality.
If the churches of all faiths fail to offer spiritual guidance and help, humanity will find another way. Nothing can keep the spirit of man from God.
The qualities of reality (spiritual expression) occur in human experience in the physical electro-chemical body and in the thinking, sensing, and feeling experience of the mind.
Intelligence related to the emotional life helps in the upward evolution to the soul and spiritual levels.
The soul of man matures with altruistic experience. Since altruism is essential for soul development, life experience must provide encounters with social inequalities.
Assisting Soul Growth
Soul is not a part of a man's initial body, mind, or spirit. Neither is personality. Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience. Personality fuses all the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive with the soul.
To aid evolution, prayers of mortals should be for life experiences.
Professional Soul Growth Assistance
The time is coming when medical doctors will study all children (with special attention to the endocrine glands). Vocational experts will also study children to place them where their gifts and abilities can find fullest expression. Spiritual counselors will seek to unify the child in brain, mind, and soul.
Through a person’s own choosing within his or her short life span, a mortal may elect to transfer his or her identity from the temporary physical-intellect organism to the more enduring soul. To make a choice, it is important the individual collects all the knowledge and wisdom that he or she can gain in a lifetime.
It is important the civilization that humans live in progresses from the material plane to the spiritual plane as fast as possible to make the learning experience of individuals easier.
Fountainhead of Cosmic Law
Mind is the cosmic instrument on which each mortal can play the music of God or the strident chords of self-destruction.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle taught that virtue is knowledge, goodness, and health of the soul. It is better, they said, to suffer injustice than to be guilty of it, and it is wrong to return evil for evil. Jesus warned his followers against the evil of even holding a grudge.
For mortals with freewill, the soul is the fountainhead of the highest and best values of human life.
The soul within all forms obeys cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise. Still, the soul does not impinge the freewill of the individual. Resistance to the values of the soul in humans comes from the material portion of humans. (This resistance is the basic cause of all physical disease as well.)
Laws of Nature and the Soul
The Laws of Nature (inherent in the life of the physical form) carry the seeds of mortal death. The Laws of the Soul supersede the Laws of Nature. The laws of the soul are the highest laws to which humanity can respond.
When the flood tides of human misfortune, selfishness, cruelty, hate, malice, and jealousy rage around the mortal soul, the soul, which is the citadel of the spirit, is unassailable.
The challenge of this age is for progressive men and women to erect a new and appealing philosophy of living out the soul’s integrated ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness. A new and righteous vision of morality will beckon all that is good in the mind of man and best in the human soul.
Law of the Soul
Basically, a law is an expression or process whereby some thinker or group of thinkers, manifests and applies a compelling force.
Cosmically, a law is the effect of the life of a greater entity as it encloses a lesser being within its living processes. The law embodies the formulated purpose or organized will of the encompassing life. The enfolded purpose or will complies.
For mortals with freewill, the soul is the source of the highest and best values (potential laws) of human life.
The soul itself within all forms freely obeys and follows cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise. The soul does not infringe upon the freewill of the individual within which it resides. Resistance to the values of the soul in humans comes from the "not-self" or the material aspect of humans. As stated earlier, this resistance is the basic cause of all disease.
The Laws of the Soul are superior to the Laws of Nature. They are the highest laws to which humanity can respond. American Legal System
America’s legal system interferes with the proper adjudication of justice when it uses laws for selfish gain. This interference arises when an individual or group disregards the fact that laws are meant to serve the common good.
The increasingly litigious nature of American society has created a fear of being sued. As an example, the ramifications of this concern have forced doctors to practice medicine defensively rather than using their professional judgment.
Similarly, the threat of lawsuits by parents has undermined the authority of teachers to maintain student discipline. In every country, there are those who seek to over-extend the intended meaning of the law for their own advantage. They avoid the legitimate responsibilities of citizenship through "loopholes" in legislation.
Non-conformity to law causes social maladies as well as individual illnesses.
Rebirth
When spiritual rebirth occurs in an individual (whether by gradual growth or crisis), there follows a new orientation of personality and development of new standards of values.
Spirit-born individuals are so motivated in life that they can serenely watch their fondest earthly ambitions and hopes crash. They realize that catastrophes must wreck their temporal creations before raising more enduring and sublime realities.
Material World Law Makers
Normally the intellectual elite, the prevailing majority, and the the wealthy make the laws in the materialistic worlds.
Their subordinates may rewrite the laws if they are sufficiently aggrieved and aggressive.
Values
The religion of Jesus is not a technique for gaining a static and blissful peace of mind. It is an impulse for organizing the soul for service. It is enlisting self-hood in the loyal service of loving God and serving man.
In pondering values, men must think about their pleasures and how to integrate them into higher levels of human experience.
Meaning is what experience adds to value. It is the conscious appreciation of values. A purely selfish pleasure may mean a devaluation of meanings bordering on relative evil.
The worth of human life consists in the growth of values, progress in meanings, and realization of the cosmic relationship of both of these experiences. This experience is God-consciousness. Such a mortal is becoming superhuman as his immortal soul evolves.
Strife
Religious perplexities are unavoidable in mortal life. There can be no growth without mental conflict and spiritual agitation.
The human intellect resists weaning from the material energies of temporary existence. The lazy animal mind rebels at the effort demanded in wrestling with cosmic problem solving.
The compensation is that new religious insights arise out of conflicts that need new and better reaction habits in place of the older and inferior reaction patterns. Conflict merely persists in any refusal to adopt the higher values suggested by superior meanings.
The Evolutionary Ladder to Personality Status
The mineral kingdom is the densest point of concretion for physical forms. The vegetable kingdom is unique in the economy of our solar system as it is vital to all lives.
Though the mineral kingdom has a consciousness of its own, sensation is more recognizable in the vegetable kingdom.
- The distinction between the consciousnesses of the mineral kingdom and that of the animal kingdom is so vast that their respective consciousnesses are barely related.
- The vegetable kingdom is the bridge between the mineral kingdom and the animal kingdom.
Man/God
Man is a god to the lower kingdoms, but due to his immaturity, man's beneficial oversight as opposed to exploitation of his brothers is meager.
- Even eating, digesting and excreting liberates entities to higher planes within kingdoms.
- Such lives will themselves later be raised, and developed to the human stage.
- Man in his lower nature, and in his three vehicles, is an aggregate of lesser lives, dependent upon him for their group nature, for their type of activity, and collective response.
Individual mortals may expend a great deal of time re-incarnating due to their failure as personalities to qualify for advancement to the mansion worlds.
- Personality is the character profile of the individual determined by decisions made in the experience of life.
- Successful mortals are judged and their souls progress to the mansion world kingdom that separates the material and spiritual kingdoms.
- Individual salvation is determined by the Ancients of Days (who speak for the Paradise Trinity). Unsuccessful personalities are damned to repeat human lives to acquire different personalities (life experiences) by beginning again with rebirth into another body.
- The punitive damnation may even begin again in a lower kingdom depending upon the severity of the censure judgment following death.
- A new soul is born in the relationship between the new personality and the fragment of the Universal Father (the Thought Adjuster).
- The souls of personalities damned to repeat human lives may profit by their experience passing on into a higher human race after many years of subliminal "training."
The question of pre-existence is often tied to the religious issue of reincarnation, a belief that individuals now living on earth have had a series of previous human lives as they have moved from body to body. This position is expounded in the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita.
Sir Oliver Lodge (1851 - 1940), a world-renowned physicist and a fearless champion of survival sought to bring together the transcendental world with the physical universe. He wrote in Phantom Walls (1929): "When the question of pre-existence arises I should say that the individual as we know him is a fresh apparition, a new individualisation of something preexisting… a fragment of the Absolute Father."
Sleeping Survivors
All mortals of survival status, in the custody of personal guardian angels, pass through the portals of natural death and, on the third day, personalize on the mansion worlds.
Other accredited beings who have, for any reason, been unable to attain that level of intelligence mastery and endowment of spirituality which would entitle them to personal guardian angels, cannot go directly to the mansion worlds. Such surviving souls must rest in unconscious sleep until the judgment day of a new epoch.
When Christ Michael ascended on high at the conclusion of his work on earth, "He led a great multitude of captives." These captives were the sleeping survivors from the days of Adam to the day of the Master's resurrection on Earth.
These sleeper classes of world pilgrims are utilized for group activities in the work of the local universes. There is a great advantage in the mobilization of such enormous groups. They are kept together for long periods of effective service.
The Roman Catholic Church mistakenly identified the status of sleeping survivors as being in Purgatory, a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who died not entirely free from venial sins.
Man's Learning
Man’s learning occurs through three stages of mental development. These stages are the three ages through which the soul of man must progress.
1. In cycles of generations as an infant human, man passes through an age of ignorance on the physical plane. The longest period of a lifetime is spent in the age of ignorance.
2. Average people pass through an age of learning on the emotional plane. A spiritual man enters the age of wisdom on the mental plane.
3. The concluding period in the age of learning is called the probationary path. In this age of wisdom, man draws near the Thought Adjuster, the immanent fragment of the transcendental Universal Father.
The Human Tabernacle
In his physical shell, man is both an animal and a lesser God.
Man is the macrocosm for the animal. He contains all that is meant by the term animal.
The animal forms the base and the contrast for the divine.
- Man is literally the Tabernacle, the vehicle of his God. The outer court is symbolic of animal sacrifice and purification. This is man’s life of the personality.
- The Holy place in his tabernacle of God is the location of his consecration and service. This corresponds to his life in the soul.
- The Holy of Holies in his tabernacle corresponds to the life and home of the indwelling Thought Adjuster, or Divine Self.
Each individual contains every element found in the physical universe. Everything in nature is directed towards one point, Man.
- Man unites all forms in himself. The potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is contained in Man. While developing as an embryo in the womb, man replicates every form he has lived in his evolving lives.
- Like every other atom in the universe, man tends to become a God.
- Human beings are Intelligences who have reached the equilibrium between Spirit and Matter. Spirit and matter meet in man.
On the ascending arc of evolution, Spirit asserts itself at the expense of the material. This is true of Gods and of men.
In man, Intelligence (mind) links Spirit and matter.
Anticipating Final Judgment
Religions have frightened humanity with their dogmas of final judgment, and have thereby deprived men of adventuresome daring.
Whoever submits blindly to an authoritarian religion is like a beast of burden staggering under excessive weight imposed upon it. Why should one accept on faith the decisions of strangers who take fees for intervening with god?
Humans live only for the perfecting of their souls.
Help in the form of salvation assistance may come at the moment of death. It is impossible to stem this flow of energy if it proceeds correctly in the mind of a receptive individual.
However, since suicide is the greatest crime, any severance of the life-striving energy is equally harmful.
Your Personal Account
The Memory of Mercy angels are a living trial balance, a current statement of your account with the supernatural forces of the realms.
The Memory of Mercy are the living records of mercy ministration that are read into the testimony of the courts of the seventh super universe when each individual's right to unending life comes up for adjudication when the Ancients of Days are seated.
The "books" that are opened on such a momentous occasion are living records of these high angels of the super universes.
The Highest Service - Brotherhood
The source of brotherhood is love of the Universal Father. God the Father loves all of his children equally. His family is the brotherhood of His children.
This qualified brotherhood establishes the relationship of every personality in existence with every other personality.
In time and space, all souls are becoming one with the Supreme Over-soul. Eventually, brotherhood will be a living relationship between all conscious beings.
Individual Relationships
There is little room for individual life in serving the brotherhood. Increasingly the bonds of unselfish devotion must control the life of the individual.
Anger and Brotherhood
Anger indicates a lack of brotherly love as well as a lack of self-respect and self-control. Anger reveals the inability of the spiritual nature to gain control of the intellectual and physical natures.
Outbursts of animal anger are inconsistent with divine son-ship.
Even though another human may physically attack, the victim may not retaliate. If a witness observes someone attacking another human, the witness must restrain the attacker without striking him.
In brotherhood, to attack another is to attack one’s real all inclusive Self, the Thought Adjuster.
Family Relations – A Stepping Stone
Jesus exalted family life as the highest human duty. He noted, however, that the earthly family relationship does not survive mortal death.
- The greater brotherhood concept will replace the earthly family on the mansion worlds.
- The relationship of family has consequences. No person can escape the advantages or disadvantages that result from family ties. The good effort of each man benefits his family and all men. Conversely, the evil of each man contributes to the tribulation of his family and all men. The inertia or the momentum of the whole will retard or accelerate all parts of the brotherhood.
- The children of the world should learn two major ideas. They are the value of the individual and the fact of the one humanity (brotherhood). By teaching the futility of hate and war, there is hope of a better and safer world.
Without God, without religion, secularism can never coordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races, and nationalisms.
Despite its unparalleled materialistic achievement, our secularistic human society is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace.
Relations of Nations
National patriotism, when colored by the feeling of superiority, class hatreds, and racial antagonisms, constitutes a barrier to the proper development of humanity.
- The continuing desire to increase possessions and material wealth is a deterrent to cultural growth.
- True development will occur only when a brotherhood of nations based on mutual need, mutual understanding, and mutual helpfulness comes into being.
The great principles of brotherhood are being widely distorted because there is no general human knowledge of the great concepts, and no understanding of the guidance of the Most Highs (the rulers of the constellation) who are guiding humanity towards brotherhood.
Living within the kingdom of God, all mortals become better citizens of the secular government, and rulers of earthly governments become better managers and statesmen.
Earth will attain lasting worldwide peace only when nations surrender their sovereign powers into the hands of the brotherhood of men, a government of all planetary mankind. The interim United Nations can only prevent minor wars and control smaller nations. They cannot control the powerful governments.
Relations of Religions
Many people are agnostic or atheistic while others are uneasy about the control of theological authority. The spiritual truths of Earth’s religions are gradually linking together showing them all to be of equal progressive value, but all lack the essential element of Christ’s brotherhood of man teachings.
Religions must become more than social organizations. The objective of earth’s religions must be to foster the growth of spiritual consciousness.
Many people in the world today believe in an ecumenical brotherhood of religions. The day is coming when all religions will acknowledge one spiritual source. A universal world religion will emerge. All religions will accept the same truths, not as theological concepts, but as the essence of spiritual living. All will recognize the brotherhood of divine son-ship.
The Religion of Jesus
Today’s Sons of God (spiritually advanced mortals) work silently for order founded on love and brotherhood.
Scarcely knowing how or why, humanity plays its part in the work of evolutionary creation. The true church, the brotherhood of Jesus, has no temples. It is invisible, spiritual, and characterized by unity, but not uniformity.
- The objective of earth’s religions must be to foster the growth of spiritual consciousness. While religious differences are the hardest to bridge, progress continues haltingly.
- No evolutionary world can progress rapidly spiritually until it achieves one language, one religion, and one philosophy. Being of one race will greatly facilitate the goal of brotherhood.
Even corporations are a tool provided by deity to accelerate the development of world brotherhood and global peace. The Trinity of Three Persons in One is an archetype of corporate deity. The corporate structure involves a oneness of the mind and purpose of many individuals.
- Money is a form of energy often misdirected to the selfish aspirations and ambitions of relatively few people.
- As brotherhood progresses, the energy inherent in money will be redirected from concretized energy into the channels of light.
What Is This Thing Called Love?
"What is this thing called love
This crazy thing called love
Just who can solve its mystery?....
That's why I ask the Lord up in heaven above
Just what is this thing called love?"
(Excerpt from"What Is This Thing Called Love?" a 1929 popular song written by Cole Porter.)
Love is the the universal tendency to feel affection, show mercy, manifest patience, and minister forgiveness to others.
- Love is a dynamic force. It can never be captured; it is alive, free, thrilling, and always in motion.
- Motion is the action of transformation. It is happening constantly in all kingdoms.
- While everything is in flux, constantly changing, all creation is not changing at the same rate due to metabolism, metamorphosis, evolution, mutation or volition of persons.
All true love is from God. Man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows. Man can never take the love of the Father and withhold it to himself. The Father’s love can become real to mortal man only by passing through that man’s personality as he in turn bestows this love upon his fellows.
- The great circuit of love is from the Father, through sons to brothers, and henceforth to the Supreme.
- The love of the Father appears in the mortal personality by the ministry of the indwelling Adjuster.
Inter-Racial Relations
Religions follow racial viewpoints. Every race has its own perspective of human existence.
- The racial differences are the reason that organized religions of human authority can never unite.
- The destiny of human brotherhood can only be realized when the different religions become impregnated with the unifying religion of the spirit.
- The religion of the spirit does not demand uniformity of intellectual views, only unity of spirit feeling.
The spiritual Creator Sons create the spectrum of worlds (such as Earth) that foster the birth and growth through the kingdoms that nurse:
- The individual fragments of non-spiritual energy into aggregations that evolve into human personalities who may qualify for advancement to the mansonian worlds (the schools midway between matter and spirit), and,
- The souls of mortal personalities through the mansonia worlds to the worlds of spirit growth beyond the local universes.
Inter-Species Relations
Brotherhood recognizes the intrinsic value of all life.
Humans are just one level in the web of life. Man’s evolving brothers in the lesser kingdoms are just a little behind him.
Man's work is to raise the lower levels of mankind, to bring brotherhood into manifestation, and to transmit divine energy to a waiting world of still lesser life forms.
Worship
Worship is the technique of looking to the Oneness of Brotherhood for inspiration to serve the many.
- True worship and world service transpires on four cosmic levels: mind, soul, and spirit, with unification in personality.
A mortal candidate for survival is more than the result of the evolutionary process. He is a cause of the evolutionary process.
While simultaneously evolving upon three planes (the physical, emotional, and mental), man is the intended synthesis of the two poles of spirit and of matter. The result of the union of spirit and matter will be an individualized Son of God, a unit of the Supreme.
- Brotherhood is destined to be a living organism just as creation itself is a living organism.
- Life in the universes is an ocean of forces in which all participate, move, and share a part of totality. All individuals will merge into groups.
- Groups will eventually merge into a group of one. The Oneness of Fatherhood will transcend brotherhood.
- There is a gradation of oneness (divinity) up to the Absolute level. The Absolute is a great inclusive Consciousness, Total Abstraction, and Total Deity.
You can best discover values in your associates by discovering their motivation. If someone irritates you, causes feelings of resentment, you should sympathetically seek to discern his viewpoint, his reasons for such objectionable conduct. If once you understand your neighbor, you will become tolerant, and this tolerance will grow into friendship and ripen into love.
Perspective and Compassion
Conjure up a picture of one of our primitive ancestors of cave-dwelling times – imagine a short, misshapen, filthy, snarling hulk of a man standing with legs spread, club upraised, breathing hate and animosity as he looks fiercely just ahead.
This picture doesn't depict the divine dignity of man. But now, enlarge the picture. In front of this fierce man crouches a saber-toothed tiger. Behind the man are a woman and two children. You realize the scene stands for the beginnings of much that is fine and noble in the human race. The man is the same in both pictures. Only, in the enlarged picture you discern the motivation of this evolving mortal. His attitude becomes praiseworthy because you understand him.
If we could fathom the motives of our brothers, we would understand them much better. In knowing our fellows, we learn to love them.
Love is only born of thoroughgoing understanding of our neighbor’s motives and sentiments. It is not so important to love all men today as it is that we learn to love one more human being each day.
If each mortal could become a focus of dynamic affection, this benign virus of love would soon pervade the sentimental emotion-stream of humanity to the extent that all civilization would be encompassed by love, and that would be the realization of the brotherhood of man.
The Unending Struggle for Brotherhood
The fused fragments of the Infinite Spirit and the Father (ex-mortals and their Thought Adjusters) will return to time and space to administer newly forming universes in the outer space belts beyond the seven super universes where the fragments of energy-matter (the Unqualified Absolute) will continue their evolution.
The Kingdom of God
The kingdom of God is the totality of individuals who declare their unconditional commitment to doing the will of God. This family of individuals comprises the spiritual brotherhood of man.
The Kingdoms of Man
Man must realize that there is a spiritual sovereignty that rules over all the governments of men.
The Most Highs rule in the kingdoms of men.
The rule of the Most Highs fosters the greatest good to the greatest number of all men for the greatest length of time. Mortals will not find peace or happiness until all mortals, religions and nations transfer supreme authority to the superhuman level.
Relations of Religion and Government
Religion makes it spiritually possible to realize the brotherhood of men, but the governments of mankind must regulate the social, economic, and political problems associated with the brotherhood goals of human happiness and efficiency.
- This world aligns good and evil into two factions: spiritualists and materialists. Mortals who embrace the spiritual forces work selflessly for brotherhood and right human relations. They support spiritual values, human freedom and kindness.
- The forces of materialism oppose spiritual tendencies. They inject selfish acquisitiveness, material interests, brutal aggression and cruelty into human affairs. The forces of materialism grasp what they want, irrespective of the rights of others.
Major Stages of Man's Growth
- Family (followed by innumerable levels of group associations)
- Brotherhood (followed by ages of development)
- Oneness within the Absolute.
Deity’s plan for man’s further growth on Earth calls for brotherhood, sharing, internationalism, and other such expressions of unity.
Mortal Sons of God are agents of the divine will who work towards the implementation of the plan for Earth. The first intimation of the divine plan alters the entire life of a son of God.
The struggle for brotherhood on Earth continues in ever expanding situations and environments throughout thelevels of the universe ascension plan.
- The purpose of life in the universes of time and space is to master the art of living together. The concept of brotherhood is merely the first step. Jesus urged his advanced followers, the apostles, to practice fatherly rather than mere brotherly love.
- Brotherly love consists of loving your neighbor as you love yourself. That would be adequate fulfillment of the less important, "golden rule." Fatherly affection requires that you love your fellow mortals as Jesus and the Father in Heaven love mortal men, as their sons.
Separateness
The whole spectrum of human wickedness is attributable to man's choice of separateness from God and his brothers. Choosing separation from God allows an individual to consider his selfish interests as supreme.
- Human separateness emphasizes material acquisitiveness. It obstructs happiness, places man against man, religion against religion, and nation against nation.
- Separateness emphasizes national boundaries, trade barriers, and the exploitation of fellow human beings. It guarantees extremes of poverty and wealth and leads to wasteful and merciless wars.
- The kingdom of heaven on Earth established by Jesus is a government of divinity (oneness). Since God is spirit, the kingdom is spiritual (not simply material or intellectual). It is the spiritual bond between God and man.
- Similarly, the brotherhood of men is based upon the common father of all men - God the Father, Who loves all of his children equally.
- Mortals will not find peace or happiness until all mortals, religions and nations transfer supreme authority to the superhuman level. God alone is spiritual sovereign.
It is because of the sex urge that selfish man is lured into making something better than an animal of himself.
- The self-regarding and self-gratifying sex relationship entails the certain consequences of self-denial and insures the assumption of altruistic duties and numerous race-benefiting home responsibilities.
- Sex is the unrecognized and unsuspected civilizer of the savage; for this same sex impulse automatically and unerringly compels man to think and eventually leads him to love.
Why?
Yeats wondered in his poem, Crazy Jane why: "... Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement."
After having sex with another man, Anglican Bishop Pike questioned why, "...nothing seemed to fit together as it should."
The human body design - why does putting the nose and tongue in close proximity seem to serve as a deterrent to some exotic sexual relations?
The Phenomenon of Man
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955) was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist.
The book was finished in the 1930s, but was published posthumously in 1955. (The Roman Catholic Church initially prohibited the publication of some of Teilhard’s writings on the grounds that they contradicted orthodoxy.)
Teilhard views evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity. From the cell to the thinking animal, a process of psychical concentration leads to greater consciousness. The emergence of Homo sapiens marked the beginning of a new age, as the power acquired by consciousness to turn in upon itself raised humankind to a new sphere. Echoing Huxley, Teilhard described humankind as evolution becoming conscious of itself.
In Teilhard's conception of the evolution of the species, a collective identity begins to develop as trade and the transmission of ideas increases. Knowledge accumulates and is transmitted in increasing levels of depth and complexity. This leads to a further augmentation of consciousness and the emergence of a thinking layer that envelops the earth. Teilhard calls the new membrane the “noosphere” (from the Greek “nous”, meaning mind).
The noosphere is the collective consciousness of humanity, the networks of thought and emotion in which all are immersed.
The development of science and technology causes an expansion of the human sphere of influence, allowing a person to be simultaneously present in every corner of the world. Teilhard argues that humanity has thus become cosmopolitan, stretching a single organized membrane over the Earth. The rapid expansion of the noosphere requires a new domain of psychical expansion, which "is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it".
In Teilhard’s view, evolution will culminate in the Omega Point, a sort of supreme consciousness. Layers of consciousness will converge in Omega, fusing and consuming them in itself. The concentration of a conscious universe will reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all that we are conscious of.
Teilhard emphasizes that each individual facet of consciousness will remain conscious of itself at the end of the process. Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness.
In the June 1995 issue of Wired, Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg said, "Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived."
In July 2009, during a vespers service in Aosta Cathedral in northern Italy, Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on the Epistle to the Romans noted, "St. Paul writes that the world itself will one day become a form of living worship."
(This information on The Phenomenon of Man is paraphrased from Wikipedia.)
Learning to be Human
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
The Divine Milieu
Teilhard's second comprehensive work is The Divine Milieu, in which he stressed the importance of human endeavor.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a belief among some Catholics and other Christians that in order to be “holy” one had to devote oneself to purely religious activity and that secular work had no lasting value. Teilhard wanted to demonstrate that secular work is an integral element of creation and the Incarnation, so that for religious reasons, Christians should be committed to whatever work they are doing and offer it up as a service to God.
Teilhard showed how all human activities and efforts toward personal growth and human progress can be used to help the growth and development of the Body of Christ (all creation).
Not only are human efforts useful in this regard, they are vital. Even though people perform these actions as ordinary human beings, and they look like ordinary human actions, they are simultaneously being transformed in the divine milieu (ambience) and become actions done in, with, and through Christ.
Teilhard's life work was predicated on the conviction that human spiritual development is moved by the same universal laws as material development. He wrote, "...everything is the sum of the past and ...nothing is comprehensible except through its history. 'Nature' is the equivalent of 'becoming', 'self-creation;' this is the view to which experience irresistibly leads us....There is nothing, not even the human soul, the highest spiritual manifestation we know of, that does not come within this universal law."
One particularly poignant observation in Teilhard's book entails the notion that evolution is an increasingly optional process. Teilhard points to societal problems as huge inhibitors of evolution. He states that "no evolutionary future awaits anyone except in association with everyone else."
Teilhard argued that the human condition necessarily leads to the volitional psychic unity of humankind.
(Paraphrased from a Wikipedia article.)
Picturing God
In addition to the two classical ways of picturing God - either far away in heaven (transcendent) or living within your heart (immanent) - Teilhard’s spirituality presents a third, much more comprehensive way to view our relationship with God: God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being.
A Shared Destiny
Teilhard takes traditional individual spirituality and expands it to become part of the grand project envisioned by God for humanity - a shared planetary destiny.
"The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration."
Role of Human Effort
Teilhard de Chardin explains that humankind is involved in a collective awakening.
He shows how all our human efforts to create a better world are really ways to further God’s planetary project, and so individual actions are much more significant than just ways to get higher grades on our heavenly spiritual report card, as some traditional religions infer.
Present to Future
The human race has struggled through long ages to reach its present position. The motto used as a guiding principle for action in the universes is “progress.” Action can be regressive. Progress can be negated.
For example, in the ideals of pair marriage, woman has finally won recognition, dignity, independence, equality, and education. Today, woman is undergoing a crucial test of her long world struggle.
New Paradigms and Patterns
Universe difficulties must be met and planetary obstacles must be encountered as a part of the experience training provided by Earth's spiritual overseers for the growth and development and the progressive perfection of the evolving souls of mortals on Earth.
The spiritualization of the human soul requires intimate experience with the solving of a wide range of real universe problems. The animal nature and the lower forms of will creatures do not progress favorably in environmental ease.
Problematic situations, coupled with exertion stimuli, conspire to produce those activities of mind, soul, and spirit which contribute mightily to the achievement of worthy goals of mortal progression and to the attainment of higher levels of spirit destiny.
Great Global Changes
The world has changed dramatically during the past five hundred years.
Because of the growth of man's intellectual and machine assisted powers, change will continue to accelerate very rapidly in the the coming decades and centuries.
The coming changes will be unimaginable to this generation. Even the outer appearance of the world will be profoundly altered.
Presently undeveloped vegetable and animal forms will be created through the intelligent manipulation of the energies that create and constitute all forms.
The social structure of Earth will change with spectacular results. It is happening now.
Adjusting to Change in a World Advancing Towards Universal Brotherhood
Huge global transitions are occurring. These changes will alter man’s conditions of living and change his outlook upon world and local affairs.
People must amplify their thinking to allow a better attitude towards cooperation rather than competition.
Further, people must comprehend the interrelationship of all things.
The tumult of global chaos will eventually propel man towards global brotherhood as man resorts to cooperation for survival.
In An Ideal World
Change is unavoidable, so it must be managed.
Planned changes should be small, incremental and gradual. Significant changes must allow for a time of recovery, reconstruction and rebuilding between major adjustments.
Governing bodies must be composed of those who work for the greatest good of the greatest number of people while offering opportunity to all. Individuals must be free to make choices not harmful to society.
One global goal should be a steady and regulated disarmament of all nations or armed groups. No nation or group should pose a threat to any other nation or group.
No single type of government or religion should be imposed upon the citizens of the world. Only in the field of education, should there be any attempt to produce consistency.
While man controls mineral wealth and the resources of the sea, the harvest belongs to every citizen of Earth. It is not the property of one group, nation or race. To overcome inequality, a plan must be developed for the distribution of the innate wealth of the planet based upon the needs of each nation in relation to the whole.
The world will still have many selfish and self-absorbed people, but public opinion must force higher ideals upon governments and corporations.
Sharing and bartering should be the fundamental premises in material exchanges not manipulable currencies.
Manipulable national currencies should be replaced not only by a system of barter, but by a universal monetary exchange based upon a scale of related values using national resources and commodities.
A governing international group should own public utilities and the major material resources. National groups chosen by the people under international direction should determine the consumption levels of each nation.
The Components of Chaos
World Problems such as resource depletion, climate change with hurricanes and floods, blizzards, tsunamis, drought, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, aquifer depletion, species destruction, over-population, illegal economic immigration, ecological damage from pesticides and herbicides, unregulated globalization, war, genocide, nuclear and biological weapon threats, terrorists, E. Coli, Ebola, national debt, trade deficits, the high cost of medical care, drug addiction, drug cartels, political and corporate opportunists, unethical advertising, dependency on high-energy usage, the wasting of resources in an unsustainable life style while parents and teachers battle the false expectations of the young as well as the insidious advertising that targets them are a plague on Earth.
The misuse of technology is the fuel for societal destruction if used for crime or war.
The world must concentrate upon developing the technical tools that make society and life better. The misuse of tools such as using the internet for pornography and identity theft rather than education and decent entertainment is evil.
Catastrophic Threats to Civilization
Evolutionary climate change (nature and man's pollution) threatens to increase terrorism and war and even to cause the collapse or spiritual strengthening of civilization.
Global health is endangered as a result of the catastrophic consequence of global warming as communities worldwide compete for scarce resources.
Inequality over access to resources, such as water and food, breed desperation and resentment, sparking terrorism and war.
World health conditions will interact with terrorism and stimulate conflict and potentially the regression of civilization.
Global terrorism is a reaction to global inequality. In the event of a massive drought, where food and water became scarce, desperate people, who see the world as unfair will turn to terrorism groups.
While the impacts of global warming on human health and the physiological effects of drought, famine, heat and cyclones are more tangible, the broader social consequences could be calamitous.
Revisting Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man
(Extracted From the Introduction to the book by Sir Julian Huxley)
The Phenomenon of Man is a very remarkable work by a very remarkable man. Pere Teilhard de Chardin was both a Jesuit priest and a distinguished scientist in the field of paleontology.
In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard effected a threefold synthesis:
- of the material and physical world with the world of mind and spirit;
- of the past with the future; and
- of diversity with unity.
Teilhard showed how the different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, and attaining new levels of existence and organization.
He used terms like hominization (the evolutionary development of human characteristics) to denote the process by which the original human stock became, and is still becoming, more truly human, the process by which man realizes more and more of his potential.
Teiljard did not discuss the evolutionary value of cultural variety in any detail, but he maintained that East and West are culturally complementary, and that both are needed for the further synthesis and unification of world thought.
Teilhard's Concept of Complexification
This concept includes the genesis of increasingly elaborate organization during cosmogenesis (the origin or evolution of the universe), as manifested in the passage from subatomic units to atoms, from atoms to inorganic and later to organic molecules, then to the first sub-cellular living units or self-replicating assemblages of molecules, and then to cells, to multi-cellular individuals, to cephalised metazoa with brains, to primitive man, and now to civilized societies.
(Note: Cephalization is considered an evolutionary trend whereby nervous tissue, over many generations, becomes concentrated toward one end of an organism. This process eventually produces a head region with sensory organs.)
Pere Teilhard maintained that complexification by convergent integration leads to the evolution of progressively more conscious mind. According to Teilhard, we must envisage the intensification of mind (the raising of mental potential), as being the necessary consequence of complexification, operating by the convergent integration of increasingly complex units of organization. (Perpetual transformation.)
Teilhard Linked Evolution and Energy
Teilhard linked the evolution of mind with the concept of energy. He envisaged two forms of energy - energy in the physicists' sense, measurable or calculable by physical methods, and psychic energy, which increases with the complexity of organized units.
Complexity is a necessary prerequisite for mental evolution rather than its cause. Some biologists, would claim that mind is generated solely by the complexification of certain types of organization, namely brains. However, such logic appears too narrow. The brain alone is not responsible for mind, even though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation.
Mind is generated by or in complex organizations of living matter, capable of receiving information of many qualities or modalities about events both in the outer world and in itself, of synthesizing and processing that information in various organized forms, and of utilizing it to direct present and future action - in other words, by higher animals with their sense-organs, nerves, brains, and muscles.
Evolution to Greater Mind Is a Team Effort
In Pere Teilhard's view, the increase of human numbers combined with the improvement of human communications has fused all the parts of the noosphere (the sphere of human thought).
In the process of convergence and coalescence, mankind as a whole will accordingly achieve more intense, more complex, and more integrated mental activity, which can guide the human species up the path of progress to higher levels of hominization. Technology will abet this hominization.
Lifetime learning advances spirituality individually and for all mankind.
Earth's Spherical Shape and Greater Human Habitation Aid Evolution
Pere Teilhard saw that the sphericity of man's environment causes an intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environment, man's thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would diffuse outwards. However, confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organized web of thought, a noetic (of or relating to mental activity or the intellect) system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy.
When Huxley read this discussion, he visualised this selective web of living thought as the bounding structure of evolving man, marking him off from the rest of the universe and yet facilitating exchange with it: playing the same sort of role in delimiting the human unit of evolution and yet encouraging the complexification of its contents, as does the cell-membrane for the animal cell.
A parallel may be drawn with the cyclotron that generates immense intensities of physical energy in the inwardly accelerating spiral orbits of its fields of force, and the entire noosphere (the sphere of human thought) with its fields of thought curved round upon themselves to generate new levels of psychical energy. The modern laser is an even more potent tool in the advancing Age of Light.
Evolution From the Past to Present and Beyond
Pere Teilhard, extrapolating from the past into the future, envisaged the process of human mental convergence as tending to a final state, which he called point Omega. He termed the convergence of elementary material particles and their energies, the Alpha point. He considers these two factors as cooperating to promote this further complexification of the noosphere.
One convergence is the increase of knowledge about the universe at large, from the galaxies and stars to human societies and individuals.
The other is the increase of psychosocial pressure on the surface of our planet. The result of the one is that the noosphere incorporates ever more facts of the cosmos, including the facts of its general direction and its trends in time, so as to become more truly a microcosm. The result is the increased unification and the increased intensity of the system of human thought.
The combined result will be the attainment of point Omega, where the noosphere will be intensely unified and will have achieved a "hyperpersonal" organization.
Teilhard equates this future hyperpersonal psychosocial organization with an emergent Divinity.
Importance of Personality (Individual Experience)
The concept of a hyperpersonal mode of organization (discussed above) sprang from Pere Teilhard's conviction of the supreme importance of personality. A developed human being is not merely a more highly individualized individual.
He has crossed the threshold of self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some degree of conscious integration - integration of the self with the outer world of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each other. He is a person, an organism that has transcended individuality in personality.
The attainment of personality was an essential element in man's past and present evolutionary success. Accordingly, its fuller achievement is an essential aim for man's evolutionary future.
Mankind is an active participant in the entire process of reality as a system of interrelations.
Teilhard realized that the appearance of human personality was the culmination of two major evolutionary trends - the trend towards more extreme individuation, and towards more extensive interrelation and cooperation.
Persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation in reality.
Cephalization
Teilhard's understanding of the method by which organisms become first individualized and then personalized depends on cephalization. (Recall cephalization is considered an evolutionary trend whereby nervous tissue, over many generations, becomes concentrated toward one end of an organism. This process eventually produces a head region with sensory organs).
The differentiation of a head as the dominant guiding region of the body, forwardly directed, and containing the main sense organs provides information about the outer world and is also the main organ of coordination or brain.
Teilhard points out that the process of evolution on earth is itself now in the process of becoming cephalized. Before the appearance of man, life consisted of a vast array of separate branches, linked only by an unorganized pattern of ecological interaction. The incipient development of mankind into a single psychosocial unit, with a single noosystem or common pool of thought, is providing the evolutionary process with the rudiments of a head [the evolving God of Time and Space, the Supreme].
It remains for our descendants to organize this global noosystem more adequately, so as to enable mankind to understand the process of evolution on earth more fully and to direct it more adequately.
The Noosystem
The idea of a noosystem is taken from the concept of the noosphere. The noosphere is a complex, uniquely human system of activity where individual minds use meditational tools to engage in the transfer of information and problem solving activities.
The Internet has given the idea of a noosphere new vibrancy, creating a platform that is capable of augmenting and extending humans minds so that they are capable of engaging in joint activity in ways that transcend traditional boundaries of time and space.
Teilhard implies that we should consider inter-thinking humanity as a new type of organism, whose destiny is to realize new possibilities for evolving life on this planet.
Accordingly, man should endeavor to equip the new type of organism with the mechanisms necessary for the proper fulfillment of its task - the psychosocial equivalents of sense-organs, effector organs, and a coordinating central nervous system with dominant brain. Man's aim should be the gradual personalization of the human unit of evolution - its conversion, on the new level of cooperative inter-thinking, into the approximation of a person.
Teilhard's Accomplishment
In the Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard opened up vast territories of thought to further exploration.
Once Teilhard grasped and faced the fact of man as an evolutionary phenomenon, the way was open towards a new and comprehensive system of thought. It remained to draw the fullest conclusions from this central concept of man as the spearhead of evolution on earth, and to follow out the implications of this approach in as many fields as possible.
The biologist may perhaps consider that in The Phenomenon of Man he paid insufficient attention to genetics and the possibilities and limitations of natural selection; the theologian that his treatment of the problems of sin and suffering was inadequate or at least unorthodox; the social scientist that he failed to take sufficient account of the facts of political and social history. Teilhard saw that what was needed was a broad sweep and a comprehensive treatment.
As stated earlier, concentrated individual effort is vital to man's further evolution.
All our human efforts to create a better world are really ways to further God’s planetary project.
Jesus never said, come to me all you who are indolent and all who are dreamers. But he said repeatedly, “Come to me all you who labor, and I will give you rest - spiritual strength.” The Master’s yoke is, indeed, easy, but even so, he never imposes it; every individual must take this yoke of his own free will.
The Laser in the Age of Light
(Excerpted from World Goodwill Newsletter, October, 2014)
Perhaps the most significant symbol foreshadowing a new Age of Light in human life is the laser. Created in 1960, these potent instruments of light are now used in a multitude of ways. In particular, they are intimately bound up in the storage, retrieval and the world-wide transmission of knowledge. The Internet is largely made of fibre optic cables powered by lasers, and every CD and DVD player contains a laser.
It is easy to overlook the laser's ubiquitous presence, for the light generated within these devices remains hidden.
The laser is a powerful tool with the potential for both creative and destructive uses. The responsibility for right choices depends upon human decisions.
Al Gore's The Future
(http://newbooksinbrief.com/2013/02/12/29-a-summary-of-the-future-six-drivers-of-global-change-by-al-gore/)
Our world is becoming increasingly integrated and complex, and changing faster and faster. Out of the morass of elements involved here, Al Gore identifies six factors that are emerging as the major drivers of change.
The factors are:
- 1) Work - the movement of labor from West to East (outsourcing); and, at the same time, a shift towards much more automation (robosourcing, which threatens to eventually deprive a large portion of the world’s population of gainful employment).
- 2) Power - the shifting of power from West to East; and, at the same time, the shifting of power from national governments to smaller players, such as businesses and corporations, but also rogue players, such as guerrilla and terror organizations.
- 3) Communications - the rise of the internet that has led to a wild proliferation of information, and the ability of the world’s population to instantly connect with one another for a host of purposes–and the increasing reach of the internet from the developed to the developing world.
- 4) Biotechnology - the manipulation of DNA to produce not only new organisms with novel features, but new materials and fuels as well.
- 5) Demographics - the enormous increase in the world’s population, and the movement of peoples both within and across national borders.
- 6) Climate Change - the increase in world temperatures caused by the continuing build-up of CO2, with numerous other climate effects caused by deforestation, desertification, etc.
(http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Second-Machine-Age/)
In The Second Machine Age, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reveal the forces driving the reinvention of human lives and the economy. As the growing impact of digital technologies is felt, Earth will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology (such as the interconnected Internet of Things), advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.
This bounty will accompanied by wrenching change. Professions and jobs of all kinds - from lawyers to truck drivers - will be upended. Companies will be forced to transform themselves or cease to exist. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.
Drawing on research and the study of trends, the authors identify strategies for survival and a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that combine brute processing power with human ingenuity while embracing policies that conform to a radically transformed landscape.
The new macro and microscopic frontiers mean that "students" and teachers alike are locked into a perpetual mode of catching up with what is happening in a world being changed by technology.
Humanization and Divinization of the World
While scientific and technological progress is inevitable, many difficult problems involving cooperation and collaborative effort of people and organizations must be overcome.
The Internet of Things (IoT) serves as an example. The IoT is the concept of connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and to each other). This includes everything from cell phones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices, and even components of machines, such as the jet engines of airplanes or the drill of an oil rig.
The Internet of Things is expected to consist of over 9 billion devices by 2018. This is far more than the total number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers and personal computers in use today. For the IoT to scale quickly, many intervening hurdles involving basic infrastructure, inter-connectivity standards, security and privacy protection must be overcome. The ultimate goal is to turn the collected information into intelligence that aggregates data to generate valuable insights, create new products and services, and optimize scenarios while driving costs down.
The Internet of Things is a minuscule but apt metaphor for man's never-ending search for unification.
The problems faced by humanity in producing an Internet of Things exemplifies a problem whose solution will require the collaborative effort and Earth resources that will lead to the humanization and divinization of the world.
(The reference for IoT is https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141030181835-509139-12-hurdles-hampering-the-internet-of-things?trk=tod-home-art-list-small_3)
Humanization Status of Man
Competitiveness is the current level of man's humanization. While striving for perfection is good, working or playing to injure others physically, emotionally, or financially is potentially evil at both the personal and national levels.
Planetary Stability
The universe is not static.
Stability is the product of balanced energies, cooperative minds, coordinated morontia souls, spirit over-control, and personality unification.
Stability at the universe or planetary level is wholly and always proportional to divinity.
Righteousness of Divinity
Mediocre effort is repugnant to perfect beings.
Philosophical Uniformity Unattainable
The unity (divinity) of religious experience among a social or racial group derives from the identical natures of the God fragments (the Thought Adjusters) indwelling individuals.
However, since personality is unique (no two mortals are alike), it follows that no two human beings can interpret the leadings and urges of the Thought Adjuster (who is the spirit of divinity that lives within their minds) alike.
A group of mortals can experience spiritual unity, but they can never attain philosophic uniformity. In reality, every human being defines religion in the terms of his own experiential interpretation of the divine impulses emanating from the Thought Adjuster.
The religious philosophy of each mortal is unique and wholly different from the religious philosophy of all other human beings.
Endless Exploration and Personal Transformation
Sooner or later, all universe personalities realize that the quest for eternity is an endless exploration of infinity, a never-ending voyage of discovery into absoluteness.
Eventually, everyone becomes aware that all creature growth is proportional to identification with the Father.
In time, everyone understands that living the will of God is the eternal passport to the endless possibilities of infinity itself.
In this universe age, the realities of the Father are revealed within the qualities of divinity. The qualities of divinity are personally appropriated by universe creatures in the experience of living divinely. To live divinely means to live the will of God.
Faith Is the Kindling
Faith in God acts to release the superhuman activities of the divine spark of divinity (the Thought Adjuster), that lives within the mind of man, and is the potential conductor of eternal survival.
Plants and animals survive in time by the technique of passing on identical particles of themselves from one generation to another.
The human soul (conveying the personality of man) survives mortal death by identity association with the immortal Thought Adjuster, and functions to perpetuate the human personality upon a continuing and higher level of progressive universe existence.
No Substitute for Experience
There is no cosmic substitute for actual living experience.
No amount of divine endowment can absolve mortals from the necessity of securing life experience.
In common with all beings living and functioning within the present time and space sphere of the Supreme, even Thought Adjusters must acquire experience. They must evolve from the lower, inexperienced, to the higher more experienced groups of Thought Adjusters.
The first stage of Adjuster evolution is attained in fusion with the surviving soul of a mortal being. While men are evolving inward and upward from man to God, the Adjusters are evolving outward and downward from God to man.
The final product of this union of divinity and humanity will eternally be the son of man and the son of God.
Joyful Living
Many mortals spend too much time and thought on the trifles of living, while overlooking the attainments necessary to develop a more harmonious working agreement between themselves and their Thought Adjusters.
The goal of human existence is to attune to the divinity of the indwelling Adjuster.
A devoted and determined effort to realize eternal destiny is wholly compatible with a light-hearted and joyous life and with a successful and honorable career on earth.
Cooperation with the Thought Adjuster does not entail self-torture, mock piety, or hypocritical and ostentatious self-abasement.
The ideal life is one of loving service rather than a lifetime of fearful apprehension.
Explanation of Fragment
A fragment is a small detached portion of the Whole.
The basic fragments of the Unqualified Absolute (ultimaton particles of energy), like mortals and their brothers in the lower kingdoms, are working towards deification through evolution.
The eventual unity of the Supreme Whole (all Time and Space) is dependent on the progressive unification of the finite parts. The unity actualization of the Supreme is resultant from, and productive of, these very unifications of the factors of supremacy (the creators, creatures, intelligences, and energies of the universes).
In time and space, a fragment of the Spirit Father (called a Thought Adjuster) fuses with one qualifying fragment of non-spirit (the personified mortal soul) to continue the advancement to Paradise.
The Destiny of Fragments
Every life that exists outside the Absolute level is a fragment of that Absolute. All fragments will eventually become personified and deified in the Oneness of the Absolute I AM.
The Root of Evil
The body is not evil.
Man’s misuse of free will is the root of evil.
The body is the consort and ally of the soul.
The Crucifixion
The salvation plan of God for the mortals of Earth would have been just as effective and unerringly certain if Jesus had not been put to death at the malevolent hands of unperceiving mortals.
If the Master had been favorably received by the mortals of earth and had departed from Earth by voluntarily relinquishing his life in the flesh, the fact of the love of God and the mercy of the Son would not have been affected.
Mortals are the sons of God, and only one thing is required to make that a truth factual in each mortal personal experience, and that is a silent declaration of faith in the spirit.
A Short Study of the Soul
The Adjuster and the Soul
The presence of the divine Adjuster in the human mind makes it impossible for either science or philosophy to ever attain a satisfactory comprehension of the evolving soul of the human personality.
The morontia (the energy level between flesh and spirit) soul is a child of the universe and may be known only through cosmic insight and spiritual discovery.
Spiritual Identity
When animal consciousness transitions to self-consciousness in man, the process is termed individualization.
Man gains a spiritual identity when he develops a soul parented by the human mind (the energy level of flesh) and the Thought Adjuster (the energy level of spirit).
Humanity is the fourth kingdom of nature. It exists between the three lower kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, and animal) and three higher superhuman kingdoms. Man stands at a point of balance (harmony) between opposites (deity and animal, i.e., reality and spurious appearance).
Every person in time and space is a lesser god of his own universe (his physical, mental, and emotional selves). These bodies in the "personal universe" are comprised of lesser lives.
Human Personality Survival
The continuing survival of mortal personalities is dependent on developing an immortal soul within the human mind. The soul is the bridge between matter and spirit.
Meditation and service to brothers align the soul, the mind, and the brain. When a man performs as soul, the soul acts as the intermediary between the plane of divine truth and the mental plane.
Divine truth, (the thought of deity), is a living organism. Man may know the truth, live the truth, experience the growth of truth in the soul, and enjoy its enlightenment in the mind.
Role of Soul
The objective of the soul is participation in divine creation.
Progressive spiritual movement happens in spiraling cycles across ever enlarging levels of consciousness.
In Time, the soul and the personality fuse with spirit (the Thought Adjuster). The new identity begins to blend with Life Itself and becomes a part of the Supreme Reality.
Souls and Brotherhood
Producing new bodies for incoming souls is the highest service given to mortals by the Universal Father. Of course, this service imposes the need for continuing care giving and education for those new souls within a home.
Man’s progress will be slow until people realize there is a living relationship between all conscious beings, the universal brotherhood. Brotherhood shows all souls are one with the Supreme.
Living within Time, man’s thoughts eventually shift to a higher mental plane with greater alignment to the urgings of the soul.
Care of the Soul
While Jesus mainly kept his apostles serving the multitudes, for rest and relaxation he sometimes took his apostles away by themselves for short periods to engage in meditation and prayer. The soul of man needs both spiritual nourishment and exercise.
Deliverance from the world’s illusions of evil and material hindrances comes through communion with God. When man knows God, he frees the soul to prepare for the spirit struggle of immortality.
As the mortal life is ending, man must not hesitate to abandon the body. He will awaken in a more fitting and beautiful and less physical form in the Supreme realms where there is no fear, sorrow, hunger, thirst, or death. Evil remains behind in this world. Only virtue follows the soul to heaven.
Guidance and Support
The soul receives and registers shadows of ideas through intuition. In contemplation, the thinker receives the image of a subjective skeleton and identifies the form that it should take.
The powerful follow-up support provided by supernatural beings such as angels proves the service is the will of the Father. A son of God cooperates in all to which he may contribute. Meditation and service provide satisfactory expression for all the powers of the personality and soul.
In the chain of life's events, there are many angel choreographed links, which instigate progress towards the fulfillment of each person's destiny.
Participation in creation requires the thinker to discard all conceited and selfish thoughts.
Spiritual ambition or any penchant for personal power hinders true service. Any emphasis on the personality will distort the pure light of the soul as it seeks to pour through into the lower self.
Expressing Soul
Men who do not falter in their search for light and for a field in which to serve their soul prove their devotion to their comrades and the greater Sons who guide the destiny of men.
A mortal son of God accepts all the demands of loyalty that sonship in the Kingdom of God involves. He seeks expression as a soul recognizing that all souls are one in the Supreme God of Time and Space.
In dealing with Deity, man knows God through His nature, which is Spirit (Life) and Soul (love).
Man does not yet know the Universal Father. The Father remains inscrutable, unseen and unknown, except as revealed through the life of His incarnated sons, and their revelations (given to Earth by Jesus Christ, our incarnated universe-Creator Son).
Soul Consciousness
Humanity must shift its consciousness away from its aggressive acquisitive material appetites into soul consciousness. This is true of individuals, of nations, and of races.
As each individual works out his own problems in life, he is helping to solve world problems.
Every will creature receives enough time to ensure his or her survival. A person squanders time by failing to use time to guarantee the survival of his soul. Nothing else matters.
Integration
There is no separation in the planetary life of mortals and the other life forms on the planet. Soul relates all forms and organisms.
Plants, dogs, and people share life's circulation as it streams through the mass of forms that, as a group, make up our planet.
The difference in organisms is levels of consciousness.
Soul Progress
Nothing can prevent the progress of the human soul on its long ascent from ignorance to wisdom, from mortal death to immortality.
If the churches of all faiths fail to offer spiritual guidance and help, humanity will find another way. Nothing can restrain the spirit of man from finding God.
The qualities of reality (spiritual expression) occur in human experience in the physical electrochemical body and in the thinking, sensing, and feeling experience of the mind.
Intelligence related to the emotional life helps in the upward evolution to the soul and spiritual levels.
The soul of man matures with altruistic experience. Since altruism is essential for soul development, life experience must provide encounters with social inequalities.
Soul Growth
Soul is not a part of a man's initial body, mind, or spirit. Neither is personality.
Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience. Personality fuses all the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive mortal life along with the soul.
To aid the cause of evolution, prayers of mortals should be for life experiences.
Flowering of the Personality and the Soul
Neither personality or soul is a part of a man's initial body, mind, or spirit.
Personality is an unchanging reality in the ever-changing human experience.
Personality fuses all the associated energies of matter, mind, and spirit that survive mortal life (along with the soul).
To aid in the evolution of the personality and the soul, prayers of mortals should be for significant life experiences.
Assisting Soul Growth
The time is coming when medical doctors will study all children. Vocational experts will also study children to place them where their gifts and abilities can find fullest expression. Spiritual counselors will seek to unify the child in brain, mind, and soul.
Through a person’s own choosing within his or her short life span, a mortal may elect to transfer his or her identity from the temporary physical-intellect organism to the more enduring soul.
To make a choice, it is important the individual collects all the knowledge and wisdom that he or she can gain in a lifetime.
It is equally important that the civilization that humans live in progresses from the material plane to the spiritual plane as fast as possible to make the learning experience of individuals easier.
Soul Is The Fountainhead of Virtue
Mind is the cosmic instrument on which each mortal can play the music of God or the discordant noise of self-destruction. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle taught that virtue is knowledge, goodness, and health of the soul. They said it is better to suffer injustice than to be guilty of it, and it is wrong to return evil for evil. Jesus warned his followers against the evil of even holding a grudge.
The human soul is a fragment of the Supreme God of Time and Space. So, for mortals with freewill, the soul is the source of the highest and best values of human life.
The soul within all forms obeys cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise. Still, the soul does not impinge upon the freewill of mortals. Resistance to the values of the soul in humans comes from the material portion of human forms. (This resistance is the basic cause of all physical disease as well.)
Laws of Nature and the Soul
The Laws of Nature (inherent in the life of the physical form) carry the seeds of mortal death. The Laws of the Soul supersede the Laws of Nature. They are the highest laws to which humanity can respond.
When the chaos of human misfortune, selfishness, cruelty, hate, malice, and jealousy rage around the mortal soul, the soul, as the citadel of the spirit, is unassailable.
The challenge of this age is to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the soul’s integrated ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness.
A new and righteous vision of morality will beckon all that is good in the mind of man and best in the human soul.
Law
The law of man is an expression or process whereby an individual thinker or group of thinkers, manifests and applies a compelling force.
Cosmically, a law is the effect of the life of a greater entity as it encloses a lesser being within its living processes. The law embodies the formulated purpose or organized will of the enfolding life. The enfolded purpose or will complies.
For mortals with freewill, the soul is the source of the highest and best values (potential laws) of human life.
The soul itself within all forms freely obeys and follows cosmic law. It does not have the slightest wish to do otherwise.
Justice System
America’s legal system interferes with the proper adjudication of justice when it uses laws for selfish gain. This interference arises when an individual or group disregards the fact that laws are meant to serve the common good.
The increasingly litigious nature of American society has created a fear of being sued. As an example, this concern has forced doctors to practice medicine defensively rather than using their professional judgment. Similarly, the threat of lawsuits by parents has undermined the authority of teachers to maintain student discipline.
In every country, there are those who seek to over-extend the intended meaning of the law for their own advantage. They avoid the legitimate responsibilities of citizenship through "loopholes" in legislation. Non-conformity to law causes social maladies as well as individual illnesses.
Rebirth
When spiritual rebirth occurs in an individual (whether by gradual growth or crisis), there follows a new orientation of personality and development of new standards of values.
Spirit-born individuals are so motivated in life that they can serenely watch their fondest earthly ambitions and hopes crash. They realize that catastrophes wreck their temporal creations before raising more enduring and sublime realities.
Adding Value to Life
The religion of Jesus is not a technique for gaining a static and blissful peace of mind. It is an impulse for organizing the soul for service. It is enlisting selfhood in the loyal service of loving God and serving man.
In pondering values, men must think about their pleasures and how to integrate them into higher levels of human experience.
Meaning is what experience adds to value. It is the conscious appreciation of values. A purely selfish pleasure may mean a devaluation of meanings bordering on relative evil.
The worth of human life consists in the growth of values, progress in meanings, and realization of the cosmic relationship of both of these experiences. This experience is God-consciousness. Such a mortal is becoming superhuman as his immortal soul evolves.
Conflict
Religious perplexities are unavoidable. There can be no growth without psychic conflict and spiritual agitation.
The human intellect protests weaning from the material energies of temporary existence. The lazy animal mind rebels at the effort demanded in wrestling with cosmic problem solving.
New religious insights arise out of conflicts that need new and better reaction habits in place of the older and inferior reaction patterns.
Conflict persists in any refusal to adopt the higher values suggested by superior meanings.
Spiritual Progress
Spiritual work must go forward through the free choice and self-initiated effort of individuals.
The effort to understand carries its own reward. The attempt to grasp and comprehend the Soul whether cosmic, universal, planetary, or individual, leads inevitably to an unfolding of the mental apparatus with a development of the brain cells.
This unfolding eventually produces a coordination of the thinking faculty and resultant illumination.
The Way
Man’s path, the long upward and inward spiraling path from personality to soul to Spirit begins for man in this world.
On this path of probation and evolution, a man arrives at a knowledge of his individual soul.
Later, on the path of discipleship, man glimpses the quality and purpose of his planetary life. He discovers himself as a part of the Life of a Spirit Consciousness that embodies an aspect of the divine purpose and energy.
After more growth, man discerns the quality and purpose of his life and energy as a part of the greater whole.
The Power to Discriminate
The soul is each man’s ideal.
The characteristics of the soul’s intelligence are mind and mental awareness that provide the power to discriminate, and to choose or to reject. As long as a man identifies himself with matter and forms, this choice continues the heresy of separateness (independent individualism).
Nature romances and deludes man in his fleshly form. A man identifying himself with form, considers himself as insatiable. He identifies with his appetites.
If man discovers the nature of the soul and shifts his emphasis from form to the quality of the life that produced form, the identification of quality grows steadily until the fusion of quality and appearance is so perfect that appearance no longer veils the reality. The soul dominates.
Consciousness corresponds to our universe Creator Son’s Spirit of Truth (his spiritual presence) and not with form. Given sufficient time and experience, the soul itself is superseded by the Thought Adjuster (the fragment of the Universal Father in our minds), and the Thought Adjuster becomes, in reality, embodied purpose.
Body and Soul
Every form in manifestation in any of the four kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, animal or human), does two things relative to soul.
First, each form appropriates as much of the over soul of the Supreme Being as the capacity of the form permits. The form of every molecule and every cell has soul, but not to the same degree as the form of an animal. Similarly, an animal has soul, but not to the degree of a human, and so on up the scale.
Secondly, through the interaction between the indwelling soul and the form, two things occur: sentiency (consciousness); and quality (soul attributes). These are expressed according to the type of body and its evolutionary status.
Soul Surge
The soul thrusts the form body into activity forcing the form forward along the path of development.
The human body provides a field of experience for the soul. Reciprocally, the body has the opportunity to adjust itself to the higher impulses of the soul.
The oversoul achieves individual status in a human through the combined wills of the Thought Adjuster and the personality of the human.
The soul is very skilled in the technique of contacting the form. Contact is the goal of the soul in every life form.
All Is Lost
Rescue of a man's personality is the subject of the symbols and metaphor employed in Robert Redford's latest film entitled, All Is Lost.
After the testing of his life, the story concludes with the hand of God, (the soul), metaphorically reaching into the water to retrieve the drowned man portrayed by Redford.
Just prior to this scene, the audience is given an underwater look from the viewpoint of the drowning man. He sees his burning raft above him as a wheel of fire.
Flaming wheels of fire, often surrounding God’s head, have been used as religious symbols for thousands of years.
The Problems of Civilization Serve Evolution
Planetary Management
Attempts by man to manage the planet without spiritual intent are unachievable.
All of today's global problems are intrinsically related. Solutions to resolve Earth's problems are doomed to failure without sincere collaborative (brotherhood) objectives.
Factors Influencing Civilization
While biologic evolution has proceeded ever upward, much of cultural evolution that originated in the Euphrates valley (the two Gardens of Eden) weakened as time passed.
This cultural civilization must be maintained and fostered, for no new sources of culture exist.
The civilization that is now evolving on Earth grew out of, and is predicated on, the following factors:
1. Natural circumstances. The nature and extent of a material civilization is in large measure determined by the natural resources available. Climate, weather, and numerous physical conditions are factors in the evolution of culture.
The Andites (the descendants of Adam and Eve) were a great people, but the crucial factor in determining the course of their civilization was the increasing aridity of Iran and Turkestan, which forced them to invent and adopt new and advanced methods of wresting a livelihood from their decreasingly fertile lands.
The configuration of continents and other land-arrangement situations are very influential in determining peace or war. (Very few Earthlings have ever had such a favorable opportunity for continuous and unmolested development as has been enjoyed by the peoples of North America - protected on both sides by vast oceans.)
2. Capital goods. Culture is never developed under conditions of poverty. Leisure time is essential to the progress of civilization. Individual character of moral and spiritual value may be acquired in the absence of material wealth, but a cultural civilization is only derived from those conditions of material prosperity which foster leisure combined with the ambition to develop the arts and sciences.
Harsh Living Conditions
During primitive times, life on Earth was a serious and sober business. It was to escape this incessant struggle and interminable toil that mankind constantly tended to drift toward the salubrious climate of the tropics. While the warmer zones of habitation afforded some remission from the intense struggle for existence, the races and tribes who sought the ease of warmer climates seldom utilized their unearned leisure for the advancement of civilization.
Invariably, social progress has come from the thoughts and plans of those races that have, by their intelligent toil, learned how to wrest a living from the land with less effort and shorter days of labor. Consequently, they have been able to enjoy more leisure time to advance their culture.
Scientific Knowledge
The material aspects of civilization must await the amassing of scientific data. That is happening rapidly now using massive data storage, search engines, and the world-wide internet.
It was a long time after the discovery of the bow and arrow and the utilization of animals for power before man learned how to harness wind and water (with wind and water mills), followed by the employment of steam and electricity.
Weaving, pottery, the domestication of animals, and metalworking were followed by the highly progressive age of writing and printing.
Knowledge is Power
Invention always precedes the acceleration of cultural development on a world-wide scale.
Science and invention benefited most of all from the printing press. The interaction of cultural and inventive activities accelerated the rate of cultural advancement enormously.
Mathematics
Science teaches man to speak the new language of mathematics and trains his thoughts along lines of exacting precision.
Science also stabilizes philosophy through the elimination of error, while it purifies religion by destroying superstition.
The Evolution of Earth Is Being Steered
The material in this section blends the leadership of Machiventa Melchizedek (the acting God of this planet) as recorded it in The Urantia Book, Paper 81, Section 6, and the actual events of the recent technological history of Earth as recorded by Thomas Friedman in his book The World Is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.
Machiventa Melchizedek was appointed Earth's planetary God by our universe's Creator Son (Michael). Michael deposed the traitorous former God of Earth, Caligastia (lead by Lucifer), following Michael's incarnation on Earth as Jesus of Nazareth.
All the above material in this section, The Problems of Civilization Serve Evolution, is excerpted from writings describing the development of a civilization. From this point forward these writings will be interlaced with excerpts from Friedman's book to illustrate how Earth's supernatural leader's words and leadership are being implemented in the management of Earth by fostering brotherhood through collaborative efforts.
The title of Frieman's book alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies, and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Friedman's Recognition of Change
"...we are entering a phase where we are going to see the digitization, virtualization, and automation of almost everything. The gains in productivity will be staggering for those countries, companies, and individuals who can absorb the new technological tools. And we are entering a phase where more people than ever before in the history of the world are going to have access to these tools - as innovators, as collaborators, and even as terrorists. ... the real information revolution is about to begin."
"...this new era of globalization will prove to be such a difference of degree that it will be seen, in time, as a difference in kind. Everywhere you turn, hierarchies are being challenged from below or transforming themselves from top-down structures into more horizontal and collaborative ones."
Human Resources
Manpower is indispensable to the spread of civilization.
With no other complicating factors, a larger population of people will always dominate the civilization of a smaller race or nation.
Failure to increase in numbers up to a certain point prevents the full realization of national destiny, but there comes a point in population increase where further growth is suicidal.
Multiplication of numbers beyond the optimum of the normal man-land ratio means either a lowering of the standards of living or an immediate expansion of territorial boundaries either by peaceful penetration or by military conquest.
A Double Edged Sword
Many mortals are shocked at the ravages of war, but people should recognize the necessity for producing large numbers of mortals to afford abundant opportunity for social and moral development.
However, with planetary fertility there occurs the serious problems of overpopulation.
The optimum stabilization of national population enhances culture and prevents war. It is a wise nation that knows when to cease growing.
Attempts at Population Control in China and India
(Extracted from The Economist)
China and India are the two most populous countries in the world. It would be interesting to examine the role played by the state in these two demographic giants in regulating the birth rate.
China's one-child policy formulated in 1979 has been a misadventure.
Such a policy distorts the age structure: the proportion of population in the younger age groups goes down and proportion of the elderly increases. It is much more expensive for the state to take care of health care of the elderly than to take care of children.
In 1977, Indira Gandhi's government with imprudent confidence ordered a general election. At this election, the Congress was wiped out and the Janata government came to power. The lesson learned was that the state can interfere with the private lives of people only at its peril. The Janata government issued a Population Policy Statement on April 18, 1977, which said: "We wish to make it abundantly clear that in this task there is no room for compulsion, coercion or pressures of any sort.
Genesis of Technological Brotherhood - Fiber Optic Cable
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
The first commercial installation of a fiber-optic system was in 1977, after which fiber slowly began to replace copper telephone wires, because it can carry data (words, music, pictures, and digitized voices) much farther and faster in larger quantities.
Fiber-optic cables work by converting data or voices into light pulses and then transmitting them down fiber lines, instead of electronic pulses to transmit information through copper wires.
The Internet stock boom and bust produced unexpected consequences. The boom sparked a huge over-investment in fiber-optic cable companies who laid massive amounts of fiber-optic cable on land and under the oceans. This dramatically drove down the cost of phoning or transmitting data across continents and oceans.
Collaboration Gathers Momentum
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
In the the mid-1990's, a full fledged platform for technological change and collaboration started to emerge. The removal of the divisive wall in Berlin, the new Microsoft software for Windows, the digitization of content, and the the Internet browser seamlessly connected anyone with a computer to other people as never before.
Soon, standardized work flow software seamlessly connected applications to applications, so that people could manipulate all their digitized content, from different manufacturer's computers and the Internet.
This was the Genesis moment for world-connectivity and collaboration. Suddenly, more people from more different places in the world found they could collaborate with more people on more different kinds of work and share more different kinds of knowledge than ever before.
Digitization (Analog Information Converted to Binary for Computer Programs)
The term digitization is often used when diverse forms of information, such as text, sound, image or voice, are converted into a single binary code. Digital information exists as one of two digits, either 0 or 1. These are known as bits (a contraction of binary digits) and the sequences of 0's and 1's that constitute information are called bytes.
Revisiting Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu
Teilhard argued that "our divine milieu" is the "host of Christ" (the collective sons of the Universal Father and the Eternal Son) who create the universes of Time and Space. This under estimates the divine milieu.
A close reading of The Book of Urantia reveals the divine milieu is the presence of the Infinite Spirit (the Action God of the Paradise Trinity) who actualized the Creative Daughter of our local universe.
Our Creator Son is known as Michael of Nebadon (the name of our universe). His co-creator (the Creative Daughter) is Nebadon in name and person along with her divine milieu of angels and Michael's Spirit of Truth Christ brotherhood, which includes all the Master Creator Sons.
Open Source Misinterprets the Ideal of Free Software
(Paraphrased from an article by Richard Stallman)
When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the user's essential freedoms: the freedom to run the software, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom (free speech).
These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual user's sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity - that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.
Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software.
The free software movement has campaigned for computer users' freedom since 1983.
The two terms (open source and free software) describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Warning
The continent (North America) richest in natural deposits and the most advanced mechanical equipment will make little progress if the intelligence of its people declines.
Knowledge can be had by education, but wisdom, which is indispensable to true culture, can be secured only through experience and by men and women who are innately intelligent.
Intelligent people are able to learn from experience, eventually becoming truly wise.
Effective Use of Resources
Civilization depends on the wisdom displayed in the utilization of natural resources, scientific knowledge, capital goods, and human potentials.
The chief factor in early civilization was the force exerted by wise social leaders.
Primitive man had civilization literally thrust upon him by his superior contemporaries (superhumans).
Well-organized and superior minorities have always ruled this world.
The Impact of Mechanical Devices
The progress of civilization is directly related to the development and possession of tools, machines, and channels of distribution.
Improved tools, ingenious and efficient machines, determine the survival of contending groups in the arena of advancing civilization.
Artificial Intelligence - Tom Simonite
(Edited)
Last year saw major strides in machine learning software that (like humans) can gain abilities from experience.
The most striking research results in AI came from the field of deep learning, which involves using crude simulated neurons to process data.
Work in deep learning often focuses on images, which are easy for humans to understand but very difficult for software to decipher. Researchers at Facebook used this approach to make a system that can tell whether two different photos depict the same person. Google showed off a system that can describe scenes using short sentences.
IBM is about to launch a version of its Jeopardy!-winning Watson software to help cancer doctors use genomic data to choose personalized treatment plans for patients . Applying machine learning to a genetic database enabled one biotech company to invent a noninvasive test that prevents unnecessary surgery.
Using artificial intelligence techniques on genetic data will likely get a lot more common now that Google, Amazon, and other large computing companies are storing digitized genomes.
The Ethics of Might and Right
Might does not make right, but might does make what is and what has been Earth's history.
Only recently has Earth reached the point where society is willing to debate the ethics of might and right. Much of this discussion has been triggered by social websites.
Effectiveness of Language
The spread of civilization depends upon language.
Live and growing languages insure the expansion of civilized thinking and planning.
There is a great need for further linguistic development to facilitate the expression of evolving thought.
Barrier to World Peace
Language differences have always been the great barrier to the spread of peace.
The conquest of dialects must precede the spread of a culture throughout a race, over a continent, or to a whole world.
A universal language promotes peace, insures culture, and augments happiness.
Even when the tongues of a world are reduced to a few, the mastery of these by the leading cultural peoples mightily influences the achievement of world-wide peace and prosperity.
India Benefits From Fiber Cable
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
From its years as a British colony, India gained the near universal language of English. From its fiber cable connection to the United States, India was the first to benefit from out sourcing. (Outsourcing is an effective cost-saving strategy. It is sometimes more affordable to purchase a good from foreign companies with comparative advantages than it is to produce the good internally).
India is a country with few natural resources, but it became efficient at mining the brains of its own people by educating a relatively large slice of its elite students in the sciences, engineering, and medicine.
In 1951, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, set up the first of India's seven Indian Institutes of Technology. In the sixty plus years since then, hundreds of thousands of Indians have graduated from these IITs and the six Indian Institutes of Management, which teach business administration.
Given India's 1 billion-plus population, this training produces a phenomenal knowledge advantage. India has some of the most gifted engineering, computer science, and software talent on the globe.
International Scholarly and Commercial Exchanges
While some progress has been made on Earth toward developing an international language, much has been accomplished by the establishment of international scholarly and commercial exchanges.
All these international relations should be fostered, whether they involve language, trade, art, science, competitive play, or religion.
Displacement of Workers
In a more remote period of man's development, the only energy applied to land cultivation was man power. It was a long struggle to substitute oxen for men since this threw men out of employment.
More recently, machines have begun to displace men. The good news is that every such advance contributes directly to the progress of society because it liberates man power for the accomplishment of more valuable tasks.
Science Governed By Wisdom
Science, guided by wisdom, may become man’s great social liberator.
A mechanical age can prove disastrous only to a nation whose intellectual level is too low to discover wise methods and techniques for adjusting to the transition problems arising from the loss of employment by large numbers due to the too rapid implementation of new types of laborsaving machinery.
Marx and Engels – The Communist Manifesto
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
The need to discover wise methods and techniques for successfully adjusting to the transition difficulties caused by the loss of employment by large numbers due to the too rapid invention of new types of laborsaving machinery were first identified by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto, published in 1848.
In his writings on capitalism, Marx described the inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restraints to global commerce.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx defined capitalism as a force that would dissolve all feudal, national, and religious identities, giving rise to a universal civilization governed by market imperatives.
Marx considered it inevitable that capital would have its way – negative and positive for society. Because once capitalism destroyed all national and religious allegiances, Marx thought, it would lay bare the struggle between capital and labor.
Forced to compete in a global race to the bottom, the workers of the world would unite in a global revolution to end oppression.
Torchbearers
Social inheritance enables man to stand on the shoulders of all who have preceded him.
In the work of passing on the cultural torch to the next generation, the home will ever be the basic institution. The play and social life comes next, with the school last but equally indispensable in a complex and highly organized society.
The ideals of one generation carve out the channels of destiny for immediate posterity. The quality of the social torchbearers will determine whether civilization goes forward or backward. The homes, churches, and schools of one generation predetermine the character trend of the succeeding generation. The moral and spiritual momentum of a race or a nation largely determines the cultural velocity of that civilization.
The German Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Adolf Hitler (German: 20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party.
Hitler gained popular support by attacking the World War I Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. Hitler denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy.
Hitler's Nazi Party became the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, leading to his appointment as chancellor in 1933. He transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism.
Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain and France. His first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the denunciation of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, and the annexation of territories that were home to millions of ethnic Germans, actions which gave him significant popular support.
Under Hitler's leadership and racially motivated ideology, the regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews, and millions of other victims whom he and his followers deemed racially inferior.
The Russian Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Joseph Stalin, Georgian: 18 December 1878 - 5 March 1953) was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.
Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed general secretary of the party's Central Committee in 1922. He subsequently managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin. He remained general secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 onward.
Under Stalin's rule, the concept of "socialism in one country" became a central tenet of Soviet society. He replaced the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in the early 1920s with a highly centralised command economy, launching a period of industrialization and collectivization that resulted in the rapid transformation of the USSR from an agrarian society into an industrial power.
Stalin's economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in correctional labor camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–1933.
Between 1934 and 1939 he organized and led a massive purge of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of so-called "enemies of the Soviet people" were imprisoned, exiled or executed, in a period that lasted from 1936 to 1939.
The Chinese Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976), was a Chinese Communist revolutionary and the founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he governed as Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976.
Supporters credit Mao with modernising China and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, and increasing life expectancy as China's population grew from around 550 to over 900 million during the period of his leadership.
Critics consider Mao a dictator who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, perpetrated systematic human rights abuses, and who is responsible for an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation, forced labor and executions.
Mao's tenure is ranked as the top incidence of genocide in human history.
The Cambodian Social Experiment
(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Pol Pot, 19 May 1925 - 15 April 1998), was born Saloth Sar. He was a Cambodian communist revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until 1997. From 1963 to 1981, he served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. He became the leader of Cambodia on 17 April 1975, when his forces captured Phnom Penh.
He presided over a totalitarian dictatorship that imposed a radical form of agrarian socialism on the country. His government forced urban dwellers to move to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects. The combined effects of executions, forced labour, malnutrition and poor medical care caused the deaths of approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian population.
In all, an estimated 1 to 3 million people (out of a population of slightly over 8 million) died due to the policies of Pol Pot's four-year premiership.
Parag Khanna Maps the Future of Countries
Social changes should always be controlled by those who are fully conversant with the history of social evolution; and always should these innovators be counseled by the wisdom of those who have had practical experience in the domains of contemplated social or economic experiment.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRWTyUVh0BQ for an excellent short lecture by a present day expert on social changes.
More on How to Run the World
In his 2011 book, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, Parag Khanna - Director of the Global Governance Initiative at the New America Foundation - outlines a vision for the future in which mega corporations, NGO’s and governments team up to govern the globe. Khanna includes an array of experts as the new rulers of the world, including many powerful technological NGOs such as the Gates Foundation.
Khanna argues that governments are going broke. Globalist influences have supplanted national borders. Tax exempt foundations and mega corporations are filling the gap.
These groups are essentially annexing national governments' policies and advancing a top down, authoritarian system of control.
In an interview with the Seattle Times, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was asked whether the emergence of super rich philanthropies like the Gates Foundation has undermined the effectiveness of the U.N. and its member organizations, like the World Health Organization. Moon replied, “On the contrary, that is what we really want - contributions from the business community as well as philanthropies..."
Education
Insects are born fully educated and equipped for life - a very narrow and purely instinctive existence.
The human baby is born without an education; therefore man possesses the power, by controlling the educational training of the younger generation, to greatly modify the evolutionary course of civilization.
Transforming Civilization
The greatest modern influences contributing to the furtherance of civilization and the advancement of culture are the marked increase in world travel and the unparalleled improvements in methods of communication.
However, the improvements in education have not kept pace with the expanding social structure. The modern appreciation of ethics also has not developed relative to the growth along more intellectual and scientific lines.
And, modern civilization is at a standstill in spiritual development and the safeguarding the institution of the home.
Weakness of Communism
In the earlier days of social evolution the apportionment of individual earnings among the group was virtually a form of slavery. The worker was made slave to the idler.
This was the lethal weakness of communism: The improvident habitually lived off the thrifty.
Even in modern times the improvident depend on the state (diligent taxpayers) to take care of them. Those who have no capital still expect those who have assets to feed them.
Dystopia or Pax Technologica
Whether the future of Earth's civilization is a dystopian global class struggle over technology (i.e. a society characterized by human misery, oppression, and overcrowding), or a planet promoted by technology into world peace will depend on spreading technological advances to all people, which explains the route to world peace through technology.
Several of the following blogs are paraphrased from the book Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization by Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna.
(The term "hybrid" is used in the book in the sense of an amalgamation or combination.)
Technology is Additive
(Paraphrased from the book Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization by Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna.)
Technology has evolved from man's Stone Age invention of tools and the Neolithic cultivation of crops to the harnessing of steam power in the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the Internet in the Information Age.
The great disruptive global trends of the 21st century - the shift to multipolarity (numberless polar connections), the shrinking of space (both through fiber-optic cables and growing population), economic convergence, and new forms of collaboration - all have technology at their root.
Technology has always been a driver of history. In the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels, in their Communist Manifesto, blamed their era of great disruption on the results of workers’ need to shift to the new instruments of production, which caused “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.”
The chief driver of the social uncertainty is not culture, geography, or climate. It is technology. Technology today is even transforming the earlier technological engines of history. From the printing press to penicillin and now Twitter and genomics, technology ceaselessly demonstrates its morphing impact.
Dystopia or Pax Technologica
(Paraphrased from the book Hybrid Reality)
Whether the future of Earth's civilization is a dystopian global class struggle over technology (i.e. a society characterized by human misery, oppression, and overcrowding), or a planet promoted by technology into world peace will depend on spreading technological advances to all people.
The Imperative of Social Ideals
Ideals elevate the source of the social stream.
No stream can rise higher than its source no matter what technique of pressure or directional control is employed.
The driving power of even the most material aspects of a cultural civilization is resident in the least material of society’s achievements.
Intelligence may control the mechanism of civilization, wisdom may direct it, but spiritual idealism is the energy which really uplifts and advances human culture from one level of attainment to another.
Initially, life was a struggle for existence; now, for a standard of living; next it will be for quality of thinking, the coming earthly goal of human existence.
Social Revolution
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
Marx taught that the essence of capitalism places the bourgeoisie (the wealthy entrepreneurs) in opposition to the proletariat (the working classes).
Marx also stated that when the proletariat are deprived of their consoling distractions such as patriotism and religion, the proletariat will realize their exploitation and revolt.
The wealthy bourgeoisie, by rapid improvement of all instruments of production, and by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization.
The resulting cheap prices of commodities compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what is termed civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
Pro and Con
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
The developments in information technology are enabling companies to squeeze out all the inefficiencies and friction from their markets and business operations.
A frictionless world is a mixed blessing. It may be good for global business. Or it may, as Marx believed, augur well for a proletarian revolution.
It may also pose a threat to the distinctive places and communities that locate us in the world.
From the first stirrings of capitalism, people have imagined the possibility of the world as a perfect market - unimpeded by protectionist pressures, disparate legal systems, cultural and linguistic differences, or ideological disagreement. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride. If global markets and new communications technologies minimize those differences, we may lose something important.
That is why the debate about capitalism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barriers, and boundaries are mere sources of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect.
The Materialistic Viewpoint
(Excerpted from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter.)
Schumpeter wrote: "The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates." (P. 83.)
Schumpeter was advocating the continuous development of new products, new services and the pursuit of profit - or growth. He believed that growth is an evolutionary process that continually creates increasing amounts of wealth.
Barter
The earliest traders were women. They were employed as spies, carrying on commerce as a side line. Presently trade expanded, the women acting as intermediaries.
Then came the merchant class, charging a commission, profit, for their services. Growth of group barter developed into commerce; and following the exchange of commodities came the exchange of skilled labor.
Money - Progress in Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Initially, there was commodity money (barter), the exchange of goods or services for other goods or services.
Then came gold and silver - precious metals that people imbued with value simply because they were rare and coveted.
People began exchanging commodities and goods and services for gold and silver because they knew other people would accept their gold and silver in exchange for their commodities, goods, and services.
Gold and silver coins were measured and stamped and became the first widely accepted money.
Goldsmiths, in Europe and elsewhere, offered safe storage of depositors' gold and silver and issued receipts for precious metals in their safekeeping. These receipts were evidence that the bearer had gold in safekeeping, and, since carrying around receipts was easier and safer than toting heavy metals, receipts became the new currency.
Bankers Quicken Global Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Goldsmiths evolved into bankers. The word banker itself comes from the Old Italian word banca or bench. The goldsmiths' benches were covered with green cloth, and transactions were conducted there.
The early goldsmith-bankers began to lend out their depositors' gold (without the depositors knowledge). These "loans" were in the form of actual gold or depositors' receipts. The borrower would then pay a fee, "interest," on the amount borrowed.
Soon, the original gold depositors, becoming aware of the practice, demanded a portion of the interest being earned on the lending of their their gold.
There, as if by alchemy, fractional banking (the foundation of our modern banking system) was born.
Fractional banking is what propels money and the creation of credit today.
Fractional-Reserve Banking Explained
(Wikipedia)
Fractional-reserve banking is the practice whereby a bank holds reserves (to satisfy demands for withdrawals) that are less than the amount of its customers' deposits. Reserves are held at the bank as currency, or as deposits in the bank's accounts at the central bank, i.e. The Federal Reserve System in the United States.
Because bank deposits are considered money in their own right, fractional-reserve banking permits the money supply to grow beyond the amount of the underlying reserves of the base money originally created by the central bank.
The Multiplier Effect of Fractional Reserve Banking
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
The magic of fractional reserve banking is that it multiplies money because banks have only a 10% reserve requirement and they re-loan depositors' money over and over.
Formerly, receipt money could be exchanged for gold - that's the definition of the gold standard. Lenders loaned gold and extended credit by issuing receipts. But sometimes, depositors wanted their gold and there wouldn't be enough to pay them back because it had all been loaned out, by means of fractional banking.
The consequence was banks went out of business, panics ensued, and many people were financially ruined.
The same system was re-established many times with the same outcome.
The Paper for Gold Solution - Coercive Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
To solve the gold reserve problem, the United States and other governments around the world made "legal tender" laws that forced paper money, which the government printed in amounts determined by the Federal Reserve (central bank), be used without question "for all debts public and private."
Today, no country backs its paper currency with gold or silver. Rather, money is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government that is printing that money. This is called fiat (authorized) money.
Governments made legal tender laws to make it illegal for citizens to not use their paper money. In addition, legislation also granted private bankers the right to lend governments as much money as they "needed."
Birth Pangs of Banking in the United States
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
In 1781, before the U.S. Constitution was drafted, the Continental Congress granted a charter to Robert Morris, a member of Congress, to establish the Bank of North America, the nation's first central bank.
It was hoped that the new bank, which was granted a monopoly to issue bank notes and become the official depository for all federal funds, would facilitate commerce and establish some order out of the fractured banking schemes that plagued the country.
But, the new Bank of North America was undercapitalized, and, through the elusive elixir of fractional reserve banking, loaned out more than it had in reserves.
The new bank's paper money was technically redeemable in specie; however, the public lost confidence in the bank and began aggressively discounting its notes because of the vast quantity the bank had issued. The nation's first central bank had its charter revoked and reverted to a struggling commercial bank two years after it opened.
Central Banking and the U.S. Constitution
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
The Constitution makes no direct mention of paper money or banks, but the Founding Fathers were intimately aware of banking problems in the individual states of the union.
To ensure that states wouldn't ruin themselves financially like banks were doing, in addressing the limitations on the power of the states Article 1, Section 10, the Constitution says, "No States shall emit [issue] Bills of Credit."
The states couldn't issue paper money that wasn't redeemable in gold or silver, and they couldn't print money to pay their bills.
This begged the question whether the Federal Government itself could issue bills of credit.
While that debate raged, Alexander Hamilton, the Country's first Secretary of the Treasury, came up with a constitutionally acceptable maneuver to pay the country's Revolutionary War debts.
In 1791 Hamilton's concept, the First Bank of the United States was chartered by Congress to lend money to the federal government so the country didn't have to beget its own money.
The government got all the money it needed from the bank by issuing bonds (treasury bonds). The First Bank of the United States bought the government's bonds with the bank's printed paper money.
What's in a Name? - Self-serving Collaboration
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Unfortunately, the First Bank of the United States was badly undercapitalized. Through the illusion of fractional reserve banking, with no real reserves, it printed so much money that the money lost its purchasing power.
In 1816 the Second Bank of the United States was chartered.
However, the Second Bank was bitterly opposed by newly elected President Andrew Jackson, who made the existence of the Bank, and its power over the people, a central issue in his campaign.
In 1836, Jackson allowed the charter of the Second Bank of the United States' charter to expire.
Undaunted, the federal government next set the stage for the conception and creation of the Federal Reserve System, now the world's most powerful central bank. ("The Federal Reserve System" is a euphemism for the controversial title of a central bank.)
Legal Currency – A World-Wide Unifier
(Paraphrased from an article by Shah Gilani, Money Report Press.)
Countries throughout the free world do not own their money.
The money that we think of as bills and coins is "created" and owned by banks.
Governments manufacture the physical medium that people exchange, but it is not the government's money.
The American model of banking, which is an alliance between America's big banks and the American government, is the hub around which most world banking systems revolve.
Coordination of Specialists
Civilization has been enormously advanced by the early division of labor and by its later corollary of specialization.
Civilization is now dependent on the effective coordination of specialists.
As society expands, ever better methods of drawing together various specialists must be found.
Friedman on Specialization
(Friedman – The World Is Flat synopsized)
In his book, Friedman shows how, as services and goods become increasingly tradable, more jobs are likely to become outsourced, digitized, or automated (tradable).
Friedman predicts that untouchable jobs in the new interconnected world will fall into three, broad categories: 1. people who are “special or specialized” (e.g. artists, athletes, or brain surgeons); 2. people who are “localized and anchored” (e.g. waitresses, lawyers, plumbers, nurses, etc.); and 3. “the old middle jobs” (e.g. people in the middle class who are under pressure because their jobs are becoming tradable).
Friedman explores what he thinks the new middle-class jobs will be in the connected world, calling the people who will occupy those jobs, “the new middlers” [middle class workers].
Friedman outlines several action areas for compassionate flatism (the digitized competitive global economy).
The goal of compassionate flatism is to reconfigure our existing welfare state to give Americans the outlook, education, skills, and safety nets they will need to compete against other individuals in the flat world. The action areas range from leadership to social activism, and parenting.
More Social Concern for Displaced Workers
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
The American sociologist Lewis Mumford, in his Technics and Civilization (1934), emphasized that technology must be more than just objects seen as ends in themselves; it must be a collection of ideas and methods that improve society.
Mumford's concept of "Technik" unites the scientific and mechanical dimensions of technology with a necessary concern for its effect on humans and society
Wassily Leontief (an American economist notable for his research on how changes in one economic sector may have an effect on other sectors) agreed, stating in 1983 that “the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”
Technological Unemployment
(The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee)
"We can’t know for sure, but our reading of technology tells us that the power of exponential, digital, and combinatorial forces, as well as the dawning of machine intelligence and networked intelligence, presage even greater disruptions."
History of Technological Revolutions
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
Technological revolutions have been reshaping the world’s workforce acutely since the Industrial Revolution.
Factories and machines, steam engines and railways, megastructure engineering, electrical lighting and equipment, oil production and automobiles, chemical products, and information technology have created billions of jobs over the centuries as they spread around the world in tsunami-like waves. Along the way, the number of distinct professional specializations has multiplied from dozens to hundreds. It is as if technology advanced to keep pace with the need to employ an ever more populated world — until now.
Employment is no longer keeping pace with economic growth, increasingly because intelligent machines have become part of the labor force itself. New professional niches are constantly emerging in the Hybrid Age, such as time banker, body part maker, avatar coach, space guide, bio-informatician, and roboticist, to name a few.
Moving into a World of More Specializations and Less Work
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
To leverage the coming waves of technological disruptions rather than succumb to deeper inequality and dislocation will require individuals to secure a niche in the increasingly generative economic system.
This means empowering individuals to harness technologies as they come, rather than being sideswiped by them. The elements of digitization, modularity, and sharing platforms are accelerating and spreading, meaning that more and more people should be able to harness cheap data access, small-scale 3-D manufacturing, and new peer-to-peer currencies.
Our capitalist model could be transformed from an imposed-value system into one in which value is ultimately determined by each individual.
Vulnerability of Specialists in All Endeavors
Social, artistic, technical, and industrial specialists will continue to multiply and increase in skill and dexterity.
This diversification of ability and dissimilarity of employment will eventually weaken and disintegrate human society if effective means of coordination and cooperation are not developed.
But the intelligence that is capable of such inventiveness and such specialization should be sufficiently competent to devise adequate methods of control and adjustment for all problems resulting from the rapid growth of invention and the accelerated pace of cultural expansion.
Forewarned
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
A century ago, leading Western philosophers appreciated the promise and peril of mass industrialization technologies.
Oswald Spengler’s Der Mensch und die Technik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens (1931) proposed to integrate technology into a philosophy of life, arguing that Technik is a process that unites our economic, political, educational, and cultural systems.
The Dispersion of Authority and Allegiance
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
Through technology, movements acquire undeniable political, economic, and social weight.
Social media expert Clay Shirky foreshadows the dispersion of authority when he says, “Behavior is just motivation filtered through opportunity.”
As technology multiplies our tribes, it makes identity a competitive marketplace. Free-agent talent plays arbitrage over taxes and citizenship, leading to shifting loyalty between cities, companies, countries, and communities - or any combination of them. Bank accounts and bandwidth come to matter as much as citizenship. Your present nationality, occupation, and geography may no longer be optimal.
The Re-Emergence of City States, Etal
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
New York, Dubai, and Shanghai conduct their own diplomacy around trade, investment, even intelligence and security: Their growth and stability is too important for them to wait for their capitals to set policy.
New York City Global Partners is something of a multiagency foreign ministry for New York, enabling the mayor to have his own commercial and climate policies, coordinated directly with those of other resourceful mayors.
Rather than petro-states, the Hybrid Age will be led by such city-centric info-states.
Borders Are No Longer Just Lines on a Map
Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
New technologies have both undermined national sovereignty and redefined it.
If, as the German sociologist Max Weber argued, only the state holds a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence, then why are there more than 1,700 autonomous armed militia groups active around the world today, when we have only 200 nations?
In fact, we are witnessing the birth of a blended real and virtual battle-space that features national armies as well as autonomous guerrillas, diaspora fighters, private companies, organized criminals, cyber-hackers, and other self-interested parties on an increasingly level technological, financial, and ideological playing field.
They are all competing to provide secure connectedness: Whoever provides access to information, resources, and leverage coupled with protection from exploitation will gain authority and loyalty.
Decaying National Borders
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
Security is not just about national borders, but about data networks, DNA, and minds.
DARPA’s (America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) 2030 vision reveals that the past decade’s fad of debilitating counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts have given way to an emphasis on drones, self-directed munitions, high-energy lasers, swarming nanobots, and even “super-soldiers” augmented by robotic exoskeletons and neural prostheses.
Anything that can be illicitly accessed is at risk. The National Security Agency (NSA) is building facilities capable of storing yottabytes (one million exabytes) of data it collects from telephone communications and secret stations abroad. Today, the FBI stalks cyber-hackers, but it needs to prepare for tomorrow’s hunt for covert bio-labs where criminals steal and implant DNA codes to change their identity.
Employment Opportunity Locators
The next age of social development will be embodied in a better and more effective cooperation and coordination of ever-increasing and expanding specialization.
As labor more and more diversifies, some technique for directing individuals to suitable employment must be devised.
Machinery is not the only cause for unemployment among the civilized peoples of Earth. Economic complexity and the steady increase of industrial and professional specialism add to the problems of labor placement.
Retraining Workers Is Not Enough
It is not enough to train men for work.
In a complex society there must also be provided efficient methods of placement finding.
Before training citizens in the highly specialized techniques of earning a living, they should be trained in one or more methods of commonplace labor, trades or callings which could be utilized when they were transiently unemployed in their specialized work.
No civilization can survive extended periods of harboring large classes of unemployed. In time, even the best of citizens will become bowed and demoralized by accepting support from the public treasury. Even private charity becomes devastating when over-extended to able-bodied citizens.
Degrees of Slavery
A highly specialized society will not tolerate the ancient communal and feudal practices of the past.
Some common services (such as infrastructure maintenance) can be acceptably and profitably socialized, but highly trained and ultra-specialized human beings can best be managed by some technique of intelligent cooperation.
Modernized coordination and fraternal (brotherhood) regulation will be productive of longer-lived cooperation than will the older and more primitive methods of communism or dictatorial regulative institutions based on force.
Stages of Cooperation Leading to Brotherhood
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
The triad of geotechnology, geopolitics and geoeconomics must be studied as a singularity to understand effective global change.
The author, Upton Sinclair, noted the difficulty of achieving this unity of purpose, saying: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The Willingness to Cooperate
One of the great hindrances to the progress of human society is the conflict between the interests and welfare of the larger, more socialized human groups and of the smaller, contrary-minded asocial associations of mankind, not to mention antisocially-minded single individuals.
No national civilization can endure unless its educational methods and religious ideals inspire a high type of intelligent patriotism and national devotion.
Without this quality of intelligent patriotism and cultural solidarity, all nations tend to disintegrate as a result of provincial jealousies and local self-interests.
India leads the Way in Social Education
(Friedman – The World Is Flat paraphrased)
It is quite common in India for people to pursue education through their twenties. Self-improvement is a big theme and actively encouraged by parents and companies. Many companies sponsor MBA programs for talented employees with full-day classes over the weekend.
New Learning Techniques
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
The emerging beneficial and productive learning system will be peer-to-peer in the way students engage with each other, teachers, parents, communities, and technology.
There need not be any opposition between lifelong learning and formal education, real and virtual classrooms, academic and applied knowledge.
The “two cultures” debate of the 1950s that pitted sciences against humanities has swung toward science, but its resolution lies in a synthesis of the two, not the dominance of one over the other. It is easier than ever today to learn both Newton and Shakespeare. A “third culture,” then, would be one of disciplined creativity. We will see more Montessori Institute of Technology schools, which use the Montessori sense of experimentation and “poking” with reality combined with the rigorous research of MIT. “Serious games” will be played at all ages.
The Self vs. The Soul
The maintenance of world-wide civilization is dependent on human beings learning how to live together in peace and fraternity.
Without effective coordination, industrial civilization is jeopardized by the dangers of ultraspecialization: monotony, narrowness, and the tendency to breed distrust and jealousy.
Evolving Government
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna)
“If the decent are not willing to rule, they are punished by being ruled by worse men.” - Plato.
The political consequences of globalization and the Information Revolution are now playing out: a broader set of empowered players (including governments, companies, NGOs, and more) and competing ambitions (territory, market monopoly, and mind-share - which relates generally to the development of consumer awareness or popularity, and is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion).
Each now has access to the deep source of power (authority) to build the constituencies that legitimize their influence.
The dominant players of any era emerge at the intersection of resources (natural or financial), identity (a community of members or followers), authority (recognition and deference), and technology (military or informational).
Citizen groups, consumers, and social movements can all increasingly alter the parameters of politics. As a result, even our one social system that is the most hierarchical by design (government) is becoming self generating featuring novel assemblages of diverse players that associate freely in ways that will reshape our basic federal institutions.
This new governance design may ultimately supersede democracy as the most successful system for the Hybrid (composite) Age.
The Radical Hybrid Age
(Dr.Thomas R. Horn - edited)
In recent years, astonishing technological developments have pushed the frontiers of humanity toward far-reaching morphological transformation that promises in the very near future to redefine what it means to be human.
What science has already done by genetically modifying plants and animals will soon apply to Homo sapiens. An international, intellectual, and fast-growing cultural movement known as transhumanism supports this vision, as does a flourishing list of U.S. military advisors, bioethicists, law professors, and academics that intend the use of genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology as tools that will radically redesign our minds, our memories, our physiology, our offspring, and our civilization.
Transhumanist Values
Nick Bosstom, Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy - Ethical Issues for the 21st Century, ed. Frederick Adams (Philosophical Documentation Center Press, 2003, excerpt)
Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities. Other transhumanist themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition. The scope is not limited to gadgets and medicine, but encompasses also economic, social, institutional designs, cultural development, and psychological skills and techniques.
Forecasted Transhumanistic Technologies
Webpage http://io9.com/5967896/us-spy-agency-predicts-a-very-transhuman-future-by-2030 - edited
The National Intelligence Council has published its forecasting report, a 140-page document that outlines major trends and technological developments that they expect in the next 20 years.
The NIC foresees the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a growing middle class that will increasingly challenge governments, and ongoing shortages in water, food and energy. They also envision a future in which humans are significantly modified by technology.
By 2030, the NIC predicts, prosthetics as good or even better than organic limbs. By this stage, the military will increasingly rely on exoskeletons to help soldiers carry heavy loads.
Many of these same technologies will also be used by the elderly to maintain more youthful levels of strength and energy, and as a part of their life extension strategies.
Brain implants will also allow for advanced neural interface devices bridging the gap between minds and machines. These technologies will allow for brain-controlled prosthetics, some of which may be able to provide "superhuman" abilities like enhanced strength, speed and completely new functionality.
Other advances will include retinal eye implants to enable night vision and other previously inaccessible light spectrums. Advanced neuropharmaceuticals will allow for vastly improved working memory, attention, and speed of thought.
Many of these technologies will only be available to those who are able to afford them. The authors warn that this could result in a two-tiered society comprising enhanced and nonenhanced persons, a dynamic that would likely require government oversight and regulation.
Effective and Wise Leadership
In civilization much depends on an enthusiastic shared load-pulling spirit.
Ten men are of little more value than one in lifting a great load unless they lift together - all at the same moment. Such teamwork - social cooperation - is dependent on leadership. The cultural civilizations of the past and the present have been based upon the intelligent cooperation of the citizenry with wise and progressive leaders.
Until man evolves to higher levels, civilization will continue to be dependent on wise and vigorous leadership.
Concern for the Interests of Humankind
(The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, Al Gore - edited)
With the future of human civilization hanging in the balance, both democracy and capitalism are failing badly to serve the deepest interests of humankind. Both are unwieldy and both are in a state of disrepair.
But if the flaws in our current version of democracy and capitalism are addressed, if the barnacles of corruption, corporate control, and domination by elites can be scraped away, both of these systems will be invaluable in turning world civilization in the right direction before it is too late.
Yet this difficult policy transition will require leadership and political courage that is presently in short supply, particularly in the United States.
Divisiveness
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
In the United States the concentration of power in private hands has fueled the resentment of Occupy Wall Street. Power in public hands riles the Tea Party. A shadow government of super Political Action Committees (PACs) squared off against a viral web community led by Google and Wikipedia, which stopped the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation.
Technology is a tool but also a battlefield of ferocious politics.
Consequence of National Internal Power Struggles
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
The 21st century will not be dominated by the United States or China, Brazil, or India, but by cities.
Today, most of the world’s population lives in cities, and just 600 cities comprise three-quarters of the world economy. By 2050, 70 percent of the world population will live in cities - and the U.N. estimates that we need to build 9,000 new cities around the world to cope.
It is not only the giant urbanization wave sweeping the planet that forces us to focus on the city as the prime geographic unit, but also trends in the spread of technology and collective brotherhood identity.
Great Civilizations and Metadata
High civilizations are born of the sagacious interdependence of material wealth, intellectual greatness, moral worth, social cleverness, and cosmic insight.
Metadata is data that describes other data. Meta is a prefix that in most information technology usages means "an underlying definition or description."
There are two "metadata types;" structural metadata, about the design and specification of data structures or "data about the containers of data"; and descriptive metadata about individual instances of application data or the data content. (Metadata was traditionally evident in the card catalogs of libraries.)
For example, the metadata base in this blog may be described as an integration of time, space, truth, beauty, goodness, science, religion, evolution, sex, rebirth, origin, destiny, cosmos, government, body, soul, personality, philosophy, love, life, education, experience, transformation, brotherhood, personality survival, matter, spirit, deity, mind, man, and metamorphosis.
Social Changes
Society is not a divine institution. It is a phenomenon of progressive evolution.
Advancing civilization is always delayed when its leaders are slow in making those changes in the social organization which are essential to keeping pace with the scientific developments of the age.
Not withstanding that, things must not be despised just because they are old, neither should an idea be unconditionally embraced just because it is novel and new.
The Prevention of Transitional Breakdown
Society is the offspring of age upon age of trial and error. It is what survived the selective adjustments and readjustments in the successive stages of mankind’s agelong rise from animal to human levels of planetary status.
The great danger to any civilization is the threat of breakdown during the time of transition from the established methods of the past to those new and better, but untried, procedures of the future.
Great Leadership Is Vital to Social Progress
Wisdom, insight, and foresight are indispensable to the endurance of nations. Civilization is never really jeopardized until able leadership begins to vanish.
The quantity of wise leadership has never exceeded one per cent of the population.
The Bottomline
This completes the history of the long, long struggle of the peoples of earth to establish civilization since the age of Adam.
Present-day culture is the net result of this strenuous evolution. Before the discovery of printing and more recently, the world-wide internet, progress was relatively slow since one generation could not so rapidly benefit from the achievements of its predecessors. Today human society is plunging forward under the force of the accumulated momentum of all the ages through which civilization has struggled.
Spreading Technik
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
Growing access to technologies could bring about a great convergence in quality of life across the globe. Meeting the grand challenge of improving equity on a crowded planet requires spreading Technik more than it requires spreading democracy.
Emphasis on technology as not only things (which are increasingly cheap) but also processes (which are increasingly shareable), it is technology access that is crucial to achieving economic and political empowerment. Access to the universal Internet will likely become a human reality before any consensus emerges as to whether it is a human right.
The same is true of the “right to food” and “right to water” and “right to education.” Technology is delivering these far more quickly than half-hearted laws.
Strengthening the Technik of others is the intervention needed for humanity to thrive in the 21st century. By enhancing the Technik of underdeveloped societies, Technik can cure the “accident of birth” by which 90 percent of our fate is determined because of location and family income when we are born.
Reasons for Optimism
(Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna, edited)
Over the next decade, generic drugs and genetically modified foods could drastically improve the efficiency of meeting mankind’s basic needs. The combination of 3-D manufacturing and bioengineering at portable scale could result in the printing of seeds and food.
Graphene technology could be used to produce lighter aircraft, longer-lasting batteries, electricity-conducting plastics, and microfiltration water systems.
Centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven’t lifted Africa’s fortunes the way technology can. Money may flow in and out, while technology infrastructure stays and spreads, allowing the poor to spend less on survival and more on productivity.
The struggle to achieve Technik is an opportunity to make the geotechnology playing field win-win as innovations created by one can quickly be accessed by all. For example, China’s leading position in the world’s solar cell market is not a threat but a reminder of the huge opportunity to engage in a market that has only just begun to take off.
As with globalization, the more societies there are that climb the Technik ladder, the greater the potential for mutual exchange and profit through spreading technologies rather than hoarding them.
Finis