June - July 2005 Page 1

The United Nations:

The United Nations, a manifestation of the deepest thinking of our brightest and most loving brothers and sisters, represents Humanity’s best and perhaps only bridge to a planet of peace and plenty for all beings.

The paintings in this months issue are some of the winners of a Worldwide Painting Competition and were part of a United Nations World Art Exhibit. "The competition was to be inclusive rather than exclusive, open to as many people in the world as possible, irrespective of age, sex, cultural background, and artistic training." 22,000 paintings were entered in the competition.

http://www.ourworldin2000.com/pages/12winners/Piaguajemain.html

Service is an inherent soul urge, a soul attitude. And the soul is, by its very nature, group conscious. 

Service, then, is the spontaneous effect of soul contact and works out as right group relations (whether in the family, city, nation, or world community). 
Tom Carney

The Significance and Value of The United Nations In The Age of Gold
by Tom Carney

There are many things about The United Nations that are not so obvious but that upon closer inspection are extremely important and revelatory. Perhaps the most important of all of these is the realization that The UN is one of the most recent and advanced manifestations of humanity’s evolving consciousness that we have. The starting point for such a realization is to understand that civilizations and cultures including all values, institutions and art forms are nothing more than the out picturing of the dominant consciousness of the time. Thus, by looking at the world wide evolution of the institution we call government, we get a very clear idea of the direction and progress of the evolution of humanity’s consciousness.
 

In general, the direction of evolution, as far as we can track it with relative data, has been from a separative self-conscious vision and notion of reality to a realization of the fact of the wholeness or unity, or oneness of reality. In terms of government the evolution of consciousness has patterned out over the centuries as a kind of pendulum movement between the notion of the divine right of kings to rule the world, to the realization of the collective right of the larger whole to determine its own destiny and progress. There have been periods of startling movement from the rule of Kings and Nobles toward a more collective kind of rule, and then lots of back sliding and then another jump forward.

The “divine right” of the King to rule was probably derived from the belief that in very, very ancient times a “King” was actually a highly evolved being who was acting as a messenger of God. This Being incarnated into the human race and was assigned the task of leading, by example and wisdom, an infant humanity into its maturity. When we look at humanity as a whole we can see that it has indeed evolved into a place where it can take on the rule and guidance of itself. It becomes apparent not only that humanity can, but that it must rule itself, for self direction and regulation is the sign of maturity and adulthood.
 

Thus, this evolutionary development can be clearly seen in the gradual development of power sharing with larger and larger groups of individuals and the shifting of “rights” from an exclusive individual or group of individuals to the collective whole. One of the amazing things to realize about this expansion of power and rights sharing is that as the size of the collective grew, the power to achieve and create also grew. The principle of evolution that is noted here is that as consciousness expands through the inclusion of larger and larger segments of the field, power is shared. As power is shared it does not, as has been assumed from the separative self-conscious perspective, become weaker. As power expands it too becomes more powerful. This is an example of how synthesis or as it is known in physics, fusion, works.
 

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The crystallization of the government of the Catholic Church--which, to this day, still depends upon the ancient notion of the Divine Right of a Pope to rule--with its “Princes” of the Church, the College of Cardinals and Bishops and other lesser “nobles” is a major problem of relevance for that particular religious format. This crystallization, which is in an advanced stage, accounts for the fractures in the Church’s membership and in many cases the outright abandonment of the Church’s proclamations by the planetary intelligentsia and consequently its diminishing importance on the world political and economic stage.

The product of a group conscious mindset and point of view, the United Nations is humanity’s first ever international/global cultural and governmental structure or institution.

The Shifting Worldview of Science

Worldviews are our beliefs about how things are; vistas are worldviews plus the values that order our beliefs. They are the source of our reality, both individually and collectively as a culture. The changing story or worldview of science is extremely important because science is the modern "priesthood" that tells us how things are. As we bring science and spirituality back together, as they were originally, we will have a much better story.

Let's start with a simple fact that Western science has ignored: There is no experience outside consciousness. (If you've ever had an experience outside consciousness, I'd love to be the first to know.) This simple truth tends to elude many scientists. Now couple this with another inescapable fact: None of us has ever had an experience outside of right now. Actually, everything outside the present moment is just stories—and the stories that make up science and technology seem to be changing faster than anything else in our culture.

For example, back in 1918, Nobel physicist Max Planck had recognized there was something deeply peculiar about the way energy gets distributed: It doesn't flow continuously, as had been expected, but radiates in tiny indivisible bundles or packets he called "quanta." Not long after he discovered the quantum, a whole new branch of physics came into being, a new physics that strained the limits of imagination, and, according to some of the early pioneers in the discipline, a physics that required science to take account of consciousness for the first time. Planck himself assumed a conscious and intelligent mind as the matrix of all matter. It is not an overstatement to say that the discovery of the quantum has not only changed physics and science, it has also changed our world, and has contributed to a very different understanding of the way things are related and interact, including the relationship between consciousness and matter.

Years later, another Nobel laureate, Harvard biologist George Wald assumed there had to be some kind of creative mind making this whole universe happen. Although science hasn't been totally blind to this idea, it still hasn't become mainstream--though I believe it's rapidly on the way.

Many of you could imagine for a moment that we're playing on a wonderful keyboard in which matter is represented by the low keys, and electromagnetic energy is in the midrange; beyond that, we've got mind, spirit, and consciousness up in the high keys. Not everyone, I know, would accept the keyboard metaphor because it implies a continuous spectrum from gross matter at one end, all the way up to consciousness at the other, which can raise some tricky philosophical problems. But if we think of reality--both matter and mind--as essentially made up of vibrations, then the metaphor seems to work. We can see, then, that spiritually-oriented people have been playing in the high keys, not recognizing they were on the same keyboard with the more scientifically-oriented. And most scientists have certainly not recognized what's up at the high end, because they can't yet apprehend what's there. They don't know how to measure it. Nevertheless, Einstein showed us how to transpose the music between the mid-range and the low-range with his E=mc2, and now we're looking for a comparable transform between energy and the high end of the keyboard.

—Elisabet Sahtouris

Globalization: An Evolutionary Leap?

by Elisabet Sahtouris

This article is adapted from Elisabet Sahtouris's plenary talk, "Understanding Globalization as an Evolutionary Leap" at IONS' Conference, "Spirit Rising: Taking the Next Step," in Palm Springs, California.

A printable version

I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour of how a spiritual universe embodies itself—not only in you and me, but in planet Earth and all its inhabitants.

I will talk about three important matters: One, we are part of a living planet, in a living universe; two, the patterns of Earth's evolution actually help us understand the current human process of globalization; and three, we're in a process of species maturation. We are moving now from competition to cooperation, from fear-based economies to love-based economies.

Another Side of Life

Advances in physics, biology, and complexity theory, in recent decades, have shifted science toward a worldview where nature is understood to be composed of self-organizing energy or information.

Biologists call this autopoiesis which is a Greek word meaning literally "self-creation," which is now becoming a new definition of life: Anything that continually creates itself is a living entity. Notice that machinery doesn't do that. It's now obvious from many perspectives in science that the universe is not a giant clockwork. Also notice that that term autopoiesis doesn't say anything about reproduction or size—so if you never have any children, it's okay, you're still alive. I know they told us in seventh-grade biology that all living systems must reproduce, but with this new definition of life, we can now look at the whole universe and say: "It's alive!"

We now know that life is not a thing, it's a process—and a living entity that continually creates and maintains itself is engaged in a process known in physiology as metabolism. It's a two-phase cycle that involves anabolism, building things up, and catabolism, breaking things down. A similar process is occurring at the cosmic level—though hardly yet recognized by science. Whereas the biological sciences acknowledge the two-way process of building up and breaking down, in the physical sciences the universe at large is assumed to be dominated by a one-way process of breaking down into ever-increasing disorder. It's called "entropy"—often referred to as the "heat death of the universe"—where everything that exists will eventually decay into thermodynamical mush.

But perhaps entropy is only the catabolism side of a universal cycle. The other side of entropy is syntropy: the build-up of order and life, a kind of cosmic anabolism. Newer cosmology theories show that besides black holes that consume matter, there are also white holes in space that spew out newly created matter and energy. With the full cycle of entropy and syntropy we can now meaningfully talk about a living universe. The Hubble telescope is giving us wonderful images of star-births and star-deaths—bearing witness to the grand cosmic recycling of energy and information, of universal anabolism and catabolism.

That's how our solar system came into being: A great supernova explosion, somewhere around five billion years ago, gave birth to a new star-system, one that included our Earth, formed out of the heavier elements that came from that ancient star's great forge. Remember, neither size nor reproduction contribute any longer to the definition of life, so we can now begin to see the Earth as an autopoietic entity, itself organizing stardust with metabolic cycles.

On an intermediate scale, we can see that our planet also is involved in metabolic recycling. One of Earth's great cycles is what I call "geo-metabolism"—where the planet continually turns itself inside-out. Hot magma, for example, rises to the surface from deep within the Earth through rifts in the seafloor, and through volcanoes, forming new crusts. There's almost no original rock remaining on the surface of our planet.

Another kind of geo-metabolism is climate and weather. In great hemispheric systems around the equator—in Indonesia, Africa, South America—rainforests are taking moist air and pumping it high into the atmosphere, sending it to the poles where it comes down as snow, driving the ocean currents, the wind currents, and keeping our climate healthy and in balance.

Yet another kind of very rapid geo-metabolism, noted by Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, occurs in locust plagues. Sometimes, cubic miles of animal matter are suddenly created out of plant matter, itself created out of soil and seeds. Then, just as quickly, the locust plague collapses as the swarm runs out of food, and what was once living animal matter turns back into living earth. It's a wonderful and dramatic symbol of life itself: Always, over time, all life recycles itself through geology. Since we know that life comes from and returns to "dust," perhaps we should not be surprised to realize that the line between biology and geology is very fine. Life on Earth comes from the earth, and then recycles itself back into the living tissue of the mother planet.

The First World Wide Web

Now I want to turn to the characteristics of a cycle of evolution that occurs all over, across time and space, at the tiniest levels of biology, and in the largest cosmic processes. It always begins with unity that then individuates—as in the ancient Vedic creation story in which a little wavelet forms in a smooth sea, and forever after is torn between loving its own individuality and wanting to merge back into the One. This universal tension between part and whole, and among parts, drives evolution. Individuation always leads to a kind of tension and conflict. And if the parts don't kill each other, they start negotiating. Negotiations can lead to resolutions of some of the tensions, moving from conflict to cooperation, and then to some new level of unity.

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"Says Francis Childe: "Like the different spokes of a wheel emanating from some central hub of shared truth, cultures are most different from one another in their outward manifestations, yet appear to grow more and more alike as we penetrate into their inner significance and meaning. So let us put our cards on the table: When we speak of 'cultural' development we are perforce also implying spiritual development."