Rising Psychological Temperature of the Planet's Noopshere
Contextual Quote
"It is important to understand that what stops humanity from living in a world of justice and abundance — a world in which collective enlightenment is common — is not a lack of necessary technology and science. The culture of late-capitalism would have us believe that only scientific miracles will save humanity, and preferably those that will turn a profit and help maintain economic growth (so-called “disaster capitalism’). But the truth is that new technological innovations without genuine social miracles will not save us. There is no saving of humanity without social miracles. What stops humanity from living in a world of justice and abundance are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the rules we have made up that now govern our cooperation, and the legacies of illusion and dishonesty that continue to blind us to our actual situation as a species. A truly “collectively enlightened society” would not just find opportunities for expanding consciousness and capacity within existing systems of law, culture, and labor markets, but create whole new systems guided by the idea of maximizing educational opportunity for lifelong learning and cooperative endeavors. This is the simple concrete utopian vision we are offering here: educational abundance resulting from the repositioning of learning and human development as a dominant social value. To put it quite simply: most of our major social structures, such as labor markets and legal systems, are designed to promote economic growth, period.17 We are asking: what if they were designed to promote human development and learning instead? What if the goal of society—as encoded in its very legal structures— was not endless accumulation of wealth but the endless actualization of human potential? What if we designed the basic structures of our social systems to catalyze collective enlightenment?"
- Zachary Stein and Marc Gafni [1]
Discussion
Marc Gafni and Zachary Stein:
"Teilhard wrote about the “psychological intensities of the Earth” in terms of “the rising temperature of the Noosphere.”9 He believed humanity was folding in upon itself in a divine process of planetization. Evolutionary conditions are such that they create an ever rising temperature within the noosphere, a process involving cultural convergence and conflict, proliferating technologies of communication and transportation, scientific discoveries, religious revelation and revival, all playing on upon an increasingly small and crowded global stage. Teilhard believed this would climax in an intensification of the collective consciousness of humanity so unprecedented as to be incomprehensible before its occurrence: the so-called Omega Point, beyond which are possibilities for human evolution that we cannot even conceive. That is to say, the noosphere will keep “heating up,” humanity will keep increasing its psychological temperature, until the result is essentially a state change or phase shift in the nature of consciousness itself. This is a vision of the eschaton as collective enlightenment, held in the mind and heart of a Christian evolutionary mystic.
Teilhard’s vision echoes ideas found elsewhere in Western esotericism, such as the Trans-Himalayan Tradition, which tells of the emergence of a “6th post-Atlantean” planetary epoch, characterized as involving new forms of collective consciousness and communion between people and the other sentient races of the Earth.
Teilhard's boiling over (literally state-change) of the consciousness of the noosphere also echoes the conception of God’s evolution found in process theology, stemming from Alfred North Whitehead. Evolution is God in motion, unfolding toward intensities and polarities, a rising of awareness and energy, an always-increasing contrast and dynamism within the prehensive scope of actual occasions. The eschatology of process theology the characterizes climax of sacred history as the evolution of a totalizing or integral consciousness in which humanity is transformed by Divine Self-Awareness and thus lifted into widespread participation mystique.
The great Indian sage and political revolutionary Sri Aurobindo put forward a similar vision, which included the descent of the Divine Super-Mind and the accent of human consciousness through individual and socio-political evolution, resulting in the birth of a new being following the collective enlightenment of humanity.
Similarly, the Jewish visionary scholar, activist and mystic, Abraham Kuk, calls forth a vision of an enlightened polis where human beings awaken en masse, incarnating in their collective personhood, as the leading edge of evolution.
More recently, the cultural leadership of Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni has taken up this lineage; partnered at the Center for Integral Wisdom, an expanding praxis of Conscious Evolution explicitly takes up the vision of Teilhard, Aurobindo, and Kuk, a form of post-post-modern evolutionary mysticism, activating souls in the catalyzing of a Planetary Awakening in 2020. These provocative esoteric ideas showcase one of several ways to understand the meaning of collective enlightenment. They characterize it as a rare historical or evolutionary event during which massive numbers of humans are simultaneously lifted into a new more enlightened state of consciousness and cooperation. Another way to understand collective enlightenment is as a sate of consciousness and capacity that is always already present and immanent in the field of human relationship, which can emerge spontaneously during profound mutual understanding and interactions. While both (and other) definitions of collective enlightenment are good, we are interested in exploring a deeper understanding of the former, i.e., the world-historical consciousness-shift definition.
This is why we are interested in “social miracles” that will catalyze both a transition beyond capitalism and the emergence of a society that is more enlightened.
So to conclude here we want to engage in some concrete utopian theorizing.15 While the majority of speculation about the future focuses on great leaps in science and technology, the futures scenarios we are interested in instead focus on great leaps in human morality and political consciousness. Our thinking departs from the dystopian techno-scientific futures that dominate public consciousness."