Mae-Wan Ho is a brilliant and interesting researcher and Dr. at the bioelectrodynamics laboratory at the Open University, UK - see the site 'Co-globalize' for links to some of her articles. In a recent article with Fritz-Abert Popp called 'Gaia and the evolution of coherence' the conclusion was:

"Living systems are thus neither the subjects alone, nor objects isolated, but both subjects and objects in a mutually communicating universe of meaning. In contrast to the neo-Darwinist point of view, their capacity for evolution depends, not on rivalry or on might in the struggle for existence. Rather, it depends on their capacity for communication. So in a sense, it is not individuals as such which are developing but living systems interlinked into a coherent whole. Just as the cells in an organism take on different tasks for the whole, different populations enfold information not only for themselves, but for all other organisms, expanding the consciousness of the whole, while at the same time becoming more and more aware of this collective consciousness. Human consciousness may have its most significant role in the development and creative expression of the collective consciousness of nature."

The last line is significant, so I repeat - 'Human consciousness may have its most significant role in the development and creative expression of the collective consciousness of nature.'

Again, another example of our intimate relationship with the holistic world around us.

All that is going on around us is a catalyst, or reaction, to our accelerating social change.

The well-known writer Doris Lessing has said:

'But is it possible that all the bad things going on are a reaction, a dragging undertow, to a forward movement in the human social evolution that we can't easily see? Perhaps, looking back, let's say in a century or two centuries, is it possible people will say, "That was a time when extremes battled for supremacy. The human mind was developing very fast in the direction of self-knowledge, self-command, and as always happens, as always has to happen, this thrust forwards aroused its opposite, the forces of stupidity, brutality, mob thinking"? I think it is possible. I think that this is what is happening.'
('Prisons We Choose To Live Within)

I also think this is what is happening - a struggle between movements: intelligence increase and the brutality that strives to contain the primitive in us.

It seems a little strange that despite all the information we have, the knowledge gathered and claimed from centuries of historical experience, that we still haven't found how to put theory into action. The world both produced us and is produced by us. As was highlighted by the Gaia Theory - James Lovelock - the world came into being as a self-regulating organism in line with parameters of existence/maintenance set up by biological requirements. So , the world in this sense is a product of the needs of our earliest biological ancestors. Likewise, we, as a species, are born into a world with physiological faculties adapted to the existing environment: so we are also a product of the pre-existing environmental parameters - taken together, this suggests that both we and our world are symbiotically linked: we are one functioning organic whole. We are made in the image of the Universe itself. Yet why do we act as if we are separate from it?

Our understanding of the world must come through our perceptions - if we do not change the manner of our thinking, the world will not 'appear' to change for us. In this way, in order to 'change the world', we must first change ourselves. Or rather we need to change our way of thinking - this is why it is crucial to shift from a mechanistic Newtonian viewpoint, from one of separate parts, to a holistic understanding where everything fits in as part of ever dynamic processes and relationships that form an organic wholeness. If this can be achieved, then a perception of a sustainable world in balance will emerge. Our thinking at times is barbaric, held in check by fossilised beliefs and out-moded dogmas.

We are often unwilling to change because certainty is safe for us. Well, it used to be. Now it is in danger of becoming our downfall, because if we do not change our way of thinking and behaving, our global world is in danger of large-scale rape and instability. Certainty and static-ness is no longer a viable evolutionary trait.

We need to move our conscious into evolutionary drive in order to educate our thinking processes into better understanding the needs of our global predicament. We, as conscious custodians, must press the evolutionary process forward, and deliberately.

Check out the Worldwatch website in terms of ecological sustainability.

Marshall McLuhan, the prescient commentator on culture expressed the rise of our electronic age, over 30 years ago, as:

'the electronic age is the age of ecology. It's the study and projection of the total environment of organisms and people, because of the instant coherence of all factors, made possible by moving information at electric speeds. Such speed of synchronise information has rendered, for example, both wheel and assembly line obsolescent... the age of implosion is the reverse of expansion. We begin to realise in the depths of our involvement in one another as a total Human community.'(Counterblast: 36-7)

-'the effect of extending the central nervous system is not to create a worldwide city of ever expanding Dimensions but rather a global village of ever-contracting size... the globe becomes a community of continuous learning, a single campus in which everybody, irrespective of age, is involved in learning a living. In the global village of continuous learning and of total participation in the human dialogue, the problem of settlement is to extend consciousness itself and to maximise the opportunities of learning.'(Counterblast:40-1)

Here, McLuhan is correctly envisioning how our technology is able to create a greater ecology by synchronising information between humans in order to foster an implosion of connectedness towards a 'total Human community'. Further, this global Human community is for the purposes of extending our consciousness towards increasing and maximising upon our opportunities for learning - yet learning together within a more coherent social mind.

Not only is this optimistic, prescient, and intuitive - it is also highly humanitarian, visionary - and a possible future scenerio if we - as a community of global thinkers - work towards the increased dissemination of information, knowledge, and activities towards an active participation in our own personal, and later social, evolution.

This is not a fantasy - it is a very real and great possibilitiy. We no longer have to live and die within forces beyond our control. We can learn how to push the buttons - yet the right buttons.

I said in a previous post that 'As we witness this important transformational stage in sociocultural evolution, we see that both diversity and integration is necessary' - the words I used here to denote our position - 'as we witness' are misleading as it suggests that the evolutionary process is out of our hands, out of our choice, and importantly is a process that we are passive too.

This misleads us into viewing the evolutionary journey as being beyond us or outside of us - this is incorrect. We are the evolutionary journey: evolution is a creative transformation that involves us now as active participants.

We have arrived at a stage upon this long drawn-out process that we have the perceptive faculties to understand the processes of which we engage. It is about an evolution of our own intelligence, of our own conscious thinking, decisions, actions, as well as our involvement with the world around us.

The renowned ecologist Gregory Bateson wrote that:
"Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the units of survival was either the family line or the species or sub-species or something of the sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The units of survival is organism Plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. If, now, we correct to the Darwinian a unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind."

Our choice is one of a collective 'unit of mind' - this is our social mind, one that is inherently in touch in a global sense due to our rapidly evolving communication systems - our future evolution is one that must take into account 'the environment and the interaction between organism and environment'. We are not separate from our surroundings, nor are our actions free from responsibility to our environment.

It is our choice: as Ervin Laszlo stated (see 'Club of Budapest') - it is either Evolution or Extinction.

The evolving social mind requires our consciously evolved intelligence to guide the future direction and future goals. We can be co-creators now, as we co-evolve.