The Danish explorer and founder of Project Pressure, Klaus Thymann, was overcome with emotion returning to camp after an expedition documenting the near complete loss of rare tropical ice sheets in West Papua Indonesia. They were called “eternity glaciers.”
“It might be weird to have an emotional reaction to an inanimate object,” he said, but “it raises some very interesting philosophical questions around the little speck we are in geological time, and what amount of chaos we’ve managed to do in such little time.”
Though Thymann didn’t spell out the philosophical questions, I think they’re the ones I began asking over 50 years ago in my youth. They are questions I shared with the late David Bohm, the physicist Einstein called his “spiritual son,” and who favorably critiqued my insights into the contradiction of man in nature.
The core question is: How did nature, in which all life evolves in seamless wholeness over billions of years, evolve a creature, Homo sapiens, that’s fragmenting the Earth beyond the breaking point in a few hundred years?
This is the question that preoccupied the first 15 years of my adult life. Before climate change became a thing, I saw that man was quickly destroying the Earth’s fragile ecosystems. Before the term Sixth Extinction was coined, I saw that humans were driving many of the creatures with which we shared the planet to extinction.
And before the Anthropocene Age was named, I saw that Homo sapiens had become a huge force of destructiveness on Earth. I had to find out how and why that came to be, and what could change humankind’s disastrous course.
The insights, when they finally came, were so simple and elegant that I heard the music of the spheres and felt the compassion of the cosmos for what the American poet Robinson Jeffers called “the poor doll humanity.”
Bohm agreed that chemistry and biology, like physics, almost certainly follow essentially the same laws throughout the universe. That means single cell life is common, multicellular life is rare, technological species very rare, and genuinely intelligent species exceptionally rare.
So do technological species pass through the same planetary crisis that has come to a head on Earth with humankind? Probably, but some make the transition to authentic intelligence sooner, some later, and some not at all.
Homo sapiens has been an incorrigibly unintelligent species to this point, and whether we will flame out or ignite the cumulative dark matter in our consciousness remains to be seen. Though perhaps not for much longer, since everything but the immeasurable has a limit.
Given these insights are valid, time and space are secondary, not the unsurpassable restrictions we assume they are given humankind’s present state of science and technology. The crucial factor is the emergence of true consciousness, enabling a technological species like Homo sapiens to live in basic harmony with its planet and the cosmos.
The prevailing idea that the Earth is a meaningless speck in the incomprehensible vastness of space is a fundamental existential error, as is the idea that humankind is a little speck in geological time. Both terrestrial and cosmic evolution have a lot invested in evolving brains like ours, and they (though not the creatures that house them) matter in the universe…to a point.
The key to making the transition to an intelligent species and living in basic harmony with our planet and the universe is gaining insight into the evolution of our brain’s misused power of conscious symbolic thought.
“Higher thought” is both the sine qua non of our exponentially expanding scientific and technological prowess on Earth, as well as the source of man’s literally Earth-shattering fragmentation.
Thought is inherently separative. That is its function. Carried over psychologically however, thought becomes increasingly alienating and conflict-ridden. Attaining an abiding understanding of the nature and operation of thought is therefore essential to our survival and growth as both a terrestrial and celestial species.
I’m certainly not trying to recapitulate the Christian falsehood that “God created man in his own image.” That would make God, even as an inseparable and immanently whole creative cosmic power, a small thing. The brain matters a great deal, but man matters little in the scheme of things.
Though another direction for humanity is possible, it took billions of years for the Earth to evolve, through random processes, a brain with the power to appallingly terraform this planet, and stupidly replicate thought and self with AI.
Near the end of his life, David Bohm became deeply depressed. He realized that his “Dialogue Proposal” for bringing insight into the core of human consciousness through questioning and listening together, and thereby changing the disastrous course of man, had made no difference, and that the rapaciousness and inequity of man would accelerate.
For some years after his death in 1992, I didn’t understand why David became so depressed that he was hospitalized, suffering a depression so severe that only electroshock brought him out of it. (I talked with a man in England that knew him well and visited him in the mental institution formerly known as Bedlam. He said he had never seen anyone as depressed.)
Bohm was only a year older than I am now when he died. Having grappled with clinical depression as a young man myself, I’ve feared deep depression would return in older age.
Though that danger still exists, I understand now why David became so depressed. He was so intellectually brilliant that I don’t think he ever truly meditated and stopped thinking, thereby allowing the mind and heart to be clarified and cleansed.
Klaus Thymann said, “On a philosophical level, you take eternity — something that’s an abstract, human construct — and we are even now killing our own constructs.”
What we’re killing is not a man-made “construct” however, but the brain’s capacity for direct perception of the immeasurable, which is beyond space and time. Brains like ours are essential to awaken the cosmic mind within, though thought must be completely, attentively silent.
Even if man destroys the Earth and humanity, that potential exists within each of us. Not as escape, but as the fulfillment of the universe’s intrinsic intent.
The evolution of conscious, symbolic thought is therefore both the threshold for the brain’s capacity for total awareness, and the greatest impediment to it. (That central insight is why Bohm said I had resolved what used to be called “the riddle of man,” though he strongly advised, “Don’t make another philosophical system out of it.”)
David Bohm died of a heart attack shortly after the electroshock treatments brought him out of the abyss of depression. As I walk the razor’s edge, and fall and am cut but still stand and proceed, I think of him, and wish I could talk to him again.
Then again, the dialogue continues. But where are they? It isn’t ET’s we’re really looking for, but awakened human beings.
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