MANIFESTO FOR THE NOOSPHERE : THE NEXT STAGE IN THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESSPart 1 – Noosphere, the Conscious Earth
Biosphere-Noosphere TransitionFor the late – he died in March, 2011 - Mexican-American artistvisionary, Jose Arguelles (1) humanity’s transformation of the Earth
accelerated 500 years ago with the advent of mechanisation, empirical inquiry and scientific rationalism. The possibilities of progress has since seemed infinite. As the external world changed rapidly, so did the internal psychic environment, which turned toward the separation of man’s mind, soul and psyche from the natural order. The more the human felt separate from nature, the more easily he despoiled nature in search of fuel to drive his machine and increase profit. In the wake of mechanisation came an unprecedented biochemical change, industrial waste.
This sheath of mechanical artifice that has come to envelop the biosphere is known as the techno-sphere. The machine from its innermost recesses has evolved a brain and nervous system of its own. Humanity’s separation from the natural order, today for Arguelles, has reached a limit. This is at the root of our mega crisis. When we come to understand the scale of this crisis, we will realise that there is nothing that can be done within the old system. The only meaningful response to such a transition as is now occurring is to shift our consciousness to meet it.
Beyond 2012The ethno-sphere, the sum aggregate of human cultures, for Arguelles, as a planetary phenomenon, is the psycho-social medium flowering from the biosphere, providing the marketplace for the techno-sphere, ultimately to be transformed into the noosphere. The ethno-sphere only becomes a global phenomenon with the processes of industrialisation and globalisation, when materialist progress comes into contact with the vast array of human cultural diversity.
As such, the final stage of hominisation has been completed. We have spread all over the planet like a swarm of predators, taking what we could wherever we found it, often leaving destruction and desolation in its wake. We must now take responsibility, Arguelles reckons, for the Earth. This concern must take precedence over all other priorities.
Time is Money to Time is ArtPre-history of the NoosphereThe whole of nature is governed and synchronized, for Arguelles, by a natural timing frequency. The birds and the animals are up with the sun and go to sleep when night falls and the sun s set. Early human also followed the rhythms of nature, the cycles of the moon, the seasons, the planets and the stars. Insofar as the biosphere as a whole exists in accordance with these natural universal rhythms, it has been participating in what her terms a fourth dimension, unconsciously and instinctively. This is because the consciousness of the planet remained static and Earth-based until some 400 years ago.
While the Babylonians, Egyptians and Hindus attempted to create calendars based on the 365 day solar cycle, generally creating twelve months of thirty days with each cycle having an extra five days, this measure was not based on natural rhythms but on a geometry of space : the division of a circle into twelve parts, which is also the basis of the clock. These measures are the root of what is known as the 12:60 frequency of artificial (mechanistic) time. In fact, as the basis of the clock, this modern division is the foundation of the machine and the industrialized world of the techno-sphere. It was some four hundred years ago, then, that the unconscious planetary noosphere became unified and controlled by a particular ideology and ruling class of people : European Christianity. This mindset had been established with the Vatican’s Doctrine of Discovery of 1452, stating that if any Christian came across the land of a non-Christian, the former had the right to dispossess the latter of his land. There is, according to Arguelles, no system to the Gregorian calendar. It is an irrational and arbitrary measure, which does not synchronize.
The Gregorian calendar is also determined by a fixed position in time – the birth of Christ. The perception of time that we are taught in our systems of education has a profound effect on our entire existential and psych-social orientation to life. The prevailing view that the present era began 2010 years ago (as of 2010), and that before that moment lies the past spinning back in time billions of years into some inconceivable big bang – presupposes a Eurocentric value system. This perception of time keeps the noosphere in the unconscious, subjected to a value system that emphasizes monetary power (time is money), individual self interest, competitive struggle, war, nationalism, and the pursuit of novelty and capricious whims (e.g. better iPhones). “Time is money” easily emerged, then, as the propelling fuel of the 12 : 60 frequency. Before the scientific revolution was complete, the first stock exchanges were established (Amsterdam, London, Paris), commencing the industrialized transformation of the biosphere into a commodity market to sustain consumerism and uphold the prevailing order of the capitalist philosophy : profit, competition and the winner takes all. While money is the fuel of the 12 : 60 frequency, the machine is literally the engine driving what is in the end called globalisation – the complex of techno/spheric materialism as a global psycho-social order f reality in which monetary politics is the triumphant force, and the bankers the high priests of it all. From locomotives to steam ships to automobiles to airplanes to rockets and then finally to the computer moving gigabytes of information in the blink of an eye, the human chases the machine, like a horse chasing the carrot, becoming infatuated with every mechanical device as soon as it is invented and dangled before its face. The accelerated multiplication and expansion of the machine and human everywhere on the planet has been at the expense of the biosphere. Communism dismantled adopts capitalism, and even China, communist on paper, becomes the biggest capitalist engine of all. Only Islamic so societies attempt to hold out against the onslaught of monetary politics, but even nations like Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia, and Indonesia become more and more capitalistic, while the more conservative Muslim societies struggle to control the Internet. All the whole the global temperature is rising and the seas are burning. The stage is set, according to Arguelles, for a conscious activation of the Noosphere through a species-wide act of selfreflection.
1952 : Year of SynchronicityThe world of artificial time is a time warp, a little bubble within the larger consciousness of the planet, and indeed of the cosmos. The rest of the universe has remained in the frequency of synchronization – only the human mind and its projection, the techno-sphere, remained apart and separate from it, but even then only to a limited degree. In 1952 Jung published his paper on “Synchronicity – an a/causal principle”, which states : “Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world”. Safe to say then that this year of 1952, sixty years before the end of linear time, marked the beginning of the return to understanding that synchronicity is the normative value of natural time flowing in conformity with the great cycles of the universe. That is the time of the noosphere. Unlike the time of the Gregorian 12 : 60 mindset, the Law of Time is not a fixed point perspective; it is centred and cyclical. It is always the eternal now, and the cycles it measures have no fixed beginning. They only denote different stages and phases in the grand drama of cosmic evolution. When we elevate the artistic nature in humanity according to the intrinsic harmonics of universal synchronisation, according to Arguelles, we will realize that the function of human society and the purpose of our existence on this Earth is to create a master work of art.
Part 11 : Noosphere : Evolutionary Ascent, Spiritual Descent
Ascension to the Supermind : Cosmo/physical Fields of IntelligenceThe Spiritual Nature of the NoosphereWhereas France’s Teilhard de Chardin and Russia’s Vernadsky saw the noosphere – the planetary mind – as an imminent possibility resulting from inevitable tendencies in bio/geological evolution, in Sri Aurobindo’s perception of the Overmind, the divine descent of super-mental consciousness is as significant as the upward aspiration of the human spirit, currently trapped in the lowest states of material evolution.
Over-mind and Conscious Evolution
Enlightenment then is not the last stop of human potential, but merely the waking up from ignorance to our true nature. However, that is not only on an individual level. Now we are advancing to the unified planetary mind and, for Arguelles, the condition of postenlightenment civilisation. The next step in this evolutionary journey is the Noosphere. The noosphere is a world of harmony and cooperation, while the present world of egoic ignorance is one of disharmony and struggle. Researchers in another part of the world explore from a scientific perspective the same possibilities of the human transcending the entropy of the present world crisis, that is through Russian Cosmism.
Super-mind and CosmismIn Russia, following Vernadsky’s death in 1945, the noosphere gained much greater currency in scientific academic circles, where it spawned the scientific-philosophical school known as Cosmism, which has had, according to Arguelles, and enormous influence in political circles. Russian cosmism looks at issues of planetary and universal evolution as a function of the emergence of “living intellectual latter” on the planet. Cosmism begins where Vernadsky leaves off, and most schools of thought base their fundamental promises on Vernadsky’s notion that the biosphere is the region of the earth for the transformation of cosmic energies.
A corollary cosmist premise is that the world is a living organism and not a colossal mechanism (a clock), and that the universe is an imperceptible living organism in which life is regarded as living matter, and the human as living intellectual latter. Key in the evolution of cosmism was the work of Kozyrev (1908-1983), and astronomer and astrophysicist, who came to the conclusion that not everything could be explained by exchanges of heat, light, electromagnetic and gravitational fields. There are forces at work, he inferred, faster than the speed of light, which he defined as timeenergy, vibrating at a different frequency that affects the evolution of matter.
According to cosmism, at one point in Earth’s evolution, homo sapiens emerged, representing the manifestation of intellectual matter – intellectual, through not yet fully conscious, like of Earth – thus creating a “cosmo-physical” field of intelligence developing in resonance with the unconscious noosphere. Autotrophs are plant life from plankton to rainforests that passively subsist on photosynthesis and internal metabolic transformation of water and minerals; heterotraphs are all animal types from insects to humans that feed on the environment, either by eating animals or plants or both. Through its accessing the universal faculty of technical intelligence but lacking fully evolved moral intelligence, much less a comprehension of its planetary role and place in the evolutionary process, the human transformed everything from petroleum to uranium atoms, heedlessly destroying or altering vast stretches of the biosphere.
In light of this critical imbalance, and following the work of Kozyrev, for more then forty years a team of researchers from the Novosibirsk Centre for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (CCEM) and the International Scientific Research Institute for Cosmic Anthropoecology (ISRICA), studied the nature of living substance and human intelligence, further developing the theory of cosmism to explain the evolution of the plant and its living substance. Cosmic anthropoecology, then, comprehensively considers problems of axiology, the ontological properties of phenomena, and the social prospects of mankind’s survival at the beginning of the 21st century. Ultimately, to correct our perilous situation and ensure the proper genesis and continuity of the Noosphere, the future evolution of humanity must tend towards a new kind of autrophy, or supreme self-sustainability. To restore the balance and survive on Earth, the human in the Noosphere will realize and study the nature of autotrophy – a genuine and thoroughly economical and waste-free form of selfsustainability – and orient his own evolution in that direction. Such is the cosmist premise of the solution to the mega crisis and of the evolution of intelligent matter in the life of the noosphere.
Synchronised CommunitiesWe are currently witnessing, for Arguelles, the final stages of the techno-sphere, through the virtual medium of the cybersphere, the planetary human held together by Internet and mobile phones. This is a pseudo-synchronisation. Through this technology and its attendant social networks, each individual finds his or her individual world compressed into an electronic instrument the size of the palm of the hand. This is the technological analogy or precursor of the noospheric concept of psychic compression and interiorization. The new threshold of technological innovation also desensitizes and abstracts the individual form the surrounding world. Each being becomes surrounded in his/her own electronic bubble. The connecting with the world is done by a single “me” in an egoic bubble, a one-way universe that leads to five billion versions of You – and nobody else. Rather than unification or synchronization, this phase of the biosphere represents a maximum divergence of interests. The mobile, exemplifying the cybersphere, is the tool of synchronization – everyone is synchronized by the same technology – but it is maximum divergence because it amplifies the individual ego.
Noosphere is the stage of consciousness beyond the ego. To prepare for it we must practice synchronization exercises that bring together group consciousness, to counteract billions of egospheres. Gordina and Yu, as such, President and Vice President of the Moscow based Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly, growing out of earlier legislative efforts presented in the Dumas, the Russian parliament, over seven years by creative thinkers, lawyers and cultural specialists. In 2005, Gordina published her book From Biosphere to Noosphere, in which she calls for an International Foundation for the Living Earth. The purpose of this foundation is to promote development in the fields of :
noospheric-ecological education
alternative and renewable technologies
technologies for the purification of the air, water and soil
ecologically clean technologies in agriculture
reprocessing industrial waste into useful human life activity
... altogether through a Noo-Constitution.
At Huehuecoyotl, outside Tepoztlan, in Mexico, is a free-spirited ecovillage founded some thirty years ago by a travelling artistic group, the Illuminated Elephants, under the leadership of Alberto Ruz Buenfils. The so called “Rainbow Gatherings” have now spread all over the world.
Somewhere Over the RainbowWe have to imagine, Arguelles maintains, that the structural basis of the entire planetary social order is reorganized so that the highest priority is given to artistic expression – not just individual artistic expression but collective expression as well. Art is not merely an activity practiced during leisure time; on the contrary it is the very essence of all human activity, including economic. This means that the human is no longer a passive consumer of packaged entertainment but an active participant in the whole co-creative process of being alive in the universe.
Regimented schools or institutions, as such, need to be replaced by individual an group learning paced by the needs of the community in its expansion into the noosphere, including a heightened respect for and integration of indigenous values and lifestyles. Above all, a new quality of cooperation, compassion and sympathy with all that lives will characterize the atmosphere of the noospheric community. Economics itself, for Arguelles, will be regulated by the moderating principle of empathy with creation. It is this power of collective sympathy, an integration of mind and spirit, that will make the communicative phenomenon of telepathy both normal and worldwide. The art of nature is the nature of art, we could say then, for in nature, by divine design, all is a harmony of purpose, proportion and function. This is because all of nature is in conformity with the universal frequency of synchronization where the operative equation is : energy factored by time = art : T (E) = Art.
In the human, however, the art of nature becomes conscious, such that nature of art becomes a mindful enactment of the cosmic or universal program of existence. This view recalls the original purpose of art as practiced in the pre-literate and early religious societies when art, ritual performance, and cosmological enactment created one whole of reality or social experience. Each belief system, in fact and as such establishes itself as a cultural-spiritual whole. With the advent of 12 : 60 the different art wholes came under attack, whereby for Arguelles, both pre-literate and literature cultures disintegrated. Each one, instead, sought to acclaim fame and fortune.
Appendix Theory of the Noosphere
At the root of the primary definition of “noosphere” is a dual perception : that life non Earth is a web of unity constituting a whole system known as the biosphere ; and that the mind or self-reflective consciousness of life – the noosphere, Earth’s thinking layer, constitutes a unity that is presently discontinuous but coextensive with the whole system of life on earth – the noosphere, earth’s thinking layer - constitutes a unity that is presently discontinuous but coextensive with the entire system of life on Earth, including its inorganic support systems. A third critical premise arising from the first two is that the noosphere defines the inevitable next stage of a terrestial evolution, which will subsume and transform the biosphere, while making the noosphere continuous with the biosphere.
The French theologian Pierre de Chardin (1881-1955) foresaw the complex emergence of the Noosphere. Thus he wrote of a “network of links .. more and more literally present, in the immensity of the organism, and the image of a nervous system”. This nervous system would be the function of a “geo-technology extending a closely interdependent network of its enterprises over the whole earth”. Since his death in 1955, the advance of the biosphere into a transitional stage, the technosphere, has created a global information network, the Internet, as a geo-technology. The Russian scientist Vernadsky (1863-1945) was a key theoreticians of the biosphere, which he took as his point of departure toward the noosphere. His thought, as such, has influenced almost all Russian science, spawning cosmism, the study of cosmic processes in terrestial affairs. The work of Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875-1961) on synchronicity and archetypal theory is a natural adjunct to a theory of the noosphere that would assume a common “collective unconscious” – a common collective conscious field of the earth.
In contemporary Russia, the noosphere has advanced to the political stage of establishing the notion of a Noospheric Congress. In Altai, neighbouring Mongolia, an effort has been launched to develop within the government a higher-consciousness steering group. Finally, for Arguelles himself, the crux of his contribution is that the Noosphere can only come into being through a conscious collective effort on the part of n informed and enlightened humanity.
Bibliography1 Arguelles J (2011) Manifesto for the Noopshere : The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness. Berkeley. Evolver Editions.
