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A NEW FRAME OF REFERENCE: THE EARTH BEING & THE FUNCTION OF HUMANITY WITHIN IT
The Development of Frames of Reference
If the character and quality of a specific type of knowledge and the expectable results of its application are being discussed, the most fundamental factor to be considered is the frame of reference used in the organization of the data this knowledge correlates. Knowledge implies data interrelated according to a few basic principles which the collective mind of humanity or a group or class of human beings accepts. These principles serve to define the place, the relative importance, and the meaning of the data within a frame of reference which is not only organizational but selective, inasmuch as it eliminates and excludes data which do not "belong," just as it provides patterns of integration for those that do.
Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary defines "frame of reference" as "the principles, circumstances, facts, values, etc., needed to inform or orient a person when thinking about, judging or interpreting something." In other words, a frame of reference establishes the basis on which a human mind operates when it attempts to deal with a situation in terms of data, principles, etc. which it considers true and reliable. Knowledge is not provided by the mere succession or simultaneous occurrence of unrelated events. It presupposes a principle of organization according to which the events or data or information have a specific place, and in many instances a function definable in terms of "law." This law is not only related to the frame of reference constituting the background of cosmic, natural, psycho-spiritual, or sociocultural order on which the law operates. Its usefulness and the value of its application are determined by the validity of the selective character of the frame of reference.
In the approach to everyday realities often spoken of as "commonsense," human beings deal with the information provided by the senses of their biological organism as it reacts to various kinds and levels of vibratory energy. These impacts reach numerous brain-centers where they become sensations. Persistent groups of sensations are interpreted by various mental processes as material entities, organic or inorganic, moving in an outer world. By entitizing repetitive groups of sensations into bodies it is possible for a person to operate more or less safely or successfully at either the biological or sociocultural level of actions and reactions. The more human beings "know" about the behavior and probable reactions of these entities, the greater their feelings of security, comfort, and presumably happiness, and also the greater their pride at seemingly being able to "control" the energies generated by motion — particularly through heat, gravity, or atomic disruption.
In the process of gaining the kind of control known as technology (and in a broader, more ambiguous sense, civilization), our Western world during the last centuries has used a specific frame of reference for knowledge: modern science and the scientific method. This has proven amazingly effective in organizing the results of an immense variety of data of observation. Nevertheless, this method, at least in the way it has operated since the seventeenth century, is highly selective. It excludes all information which does not conform to certain principles of acceptance and even to undemonstrable assumptions. Data for the development of the kind of knowledge approved by our official elite of university professors and scientists have to be obtained exclusively through the senses of the material human body, or through instruments extending the field of operation of these senses, according to rigorously defined procedures requiring a high degree of professional and academic specialization guaranteed by the State. Moreover, these data are considered useable at any time and everywhere in space. They are believed to provide a totally reliable basis on which "laws" and "constants" can be formulated. These mathematical formulations are abstractions which are then managed and correlated through intellectual processes which, in their togetherness, constitute "reason." Reason, at least as understood and used by the classical Greek and European cultures, is a principle of organization assumed to be strictly human and so superior as to be considered by many people as "God given," and greater than any other mode of mental activity. The language of higher mathematics is the rigorously precise by-product of the frame of reference established by the rationalistic mind under the name of logic. This frame of reference is exclusivistic insofar as it considers valid only what has reached the human consciousness, directly or indirectly through the physical senses, and can be interpreted in terms of the activity — the measurable motion — of material entities.
The rationalistic and scientific frame of reference used by Western science may be traced back to Aristotle and some of his predecessors, but it only began to dominate European civilization after the Renaissance and the spread of Francis Bacon's ideas. It certainly was not the primordial type of organization of knowledge that developed in tribal cultures operating at the level of almost entirely biological considerations. Nevertheless, the use of the scientific method may be claimed to mark the beginning of mental maturity after a period of naive, childlike assumptions. One may also believe that mental maturity implies the superseding of a subjective type of interpretation of reality by an objective approach to existential data; yet this may be an only partially correct assumption. This kind of objectivity may represent the first stage of maturity — a reaction against the earlier (and not yet entirely vanished) condition of knowledge. This often violent reaction may inevitably produce very dangerous end-results. Because mankind has now to deal with them, it finds itself in a state of global crisis. In order to avoid a planetary disaster — and not only the collapse of all human values or even actual existence — a new frame of reference has not only to be formulated intellectually, but consciously and meaningfully lived. This frame of reference should be planetary, but the adjective planetary now has to be given a new and widely encompassing meaning. I have used the term "Earth-being" in order to suggest some of the implications of that meaning, which are still very difficult for even "New Age" persons to understand, and especially to accept as guiding factors in their lives.
A: Biocultural Frames of Reference
The development of a new type of organism — homo sapiens — in which new desires and a new mind were slowly taking form started from the strictly biological foundation of instinctual responses to vitalistic needs. The satisfaction of these needs was the one fundamental concern of whatever type of group-organization human beings established. As the specifically human capacity to communicate and to transmit the results of biological experiences to successive generations came to take enduring forms, these forms became the foundation of a particular culture. It was a particular type of foundation utterly conditioned by the character of the collective experiences the early tribesmen had in a strictly local ecosystem. These experiences were related to the seasonal processes of vegetation and the actions of animals capable not only of aggression but also of providing the food needed for survival.
A culture establishes a frame of reference for the experiences of a group of people intent on developing a more secure and pleasant way of surviving in an often inimical environment. This frame of reference enables the members of the culture to deal in as satisfying a way as possible with a more or less expectable series of recurrent changes and external events, the possibility being related to and limited by the "human condition" as this condition is experienced and understood at any particular level of human evolution. Whenever this evolution occurred from an animal state without any helpful and instructive contact with the remnants of a slowly-disappearing earlier and fully developed humanity, the earliest cultural frame of reference to be established by a human tribe constituted the attempt to define some kind of stable and effective relations, not only with animals and plants, but with rather mysterious transcendent entities assumed — and in some cases, actually perceived — to be responsible for either helpful or disastrous environmental changes. Such a frame of reference has been referred to as animism.
Animism is a system of organization enabling a community of human beings to meet in a relatively effective manner with daily and yearly recurring events identified as the actions of recognizable entities to which names could be given. A human person is also an entity having a definable character and a particular amount of usable energy. This energy is basically biological but when belonging to a well-developed culture, a person is able to control events and processes of change through the development of the technical mind. At the animistic stage of mental understanding, and in terms of the knowledge which animistic cults and ways of life transmit and gradually make more effective, control operates on the basis of force against force. A biologically inferior force, however, may develop mental strategies (such as cunning, deception, sacrifice, and prayer) which can be expected to produce tangible results in relation to a superior force, especially if the latter is assumed to have an inherently beneficent character or to gain some kind of advantage from the operation.
In the terminology of modern philosophy — particularly the philosophy of science — atomism is taking the place of animism. The vibratory types of energy to which material atoms and particles have been reduced are not essentially different from the "spirits" with which shamans and ancient seers have dealt However, while the concepts and practices of primitive animism had a strictly biological and ecological basis, modern scientific atomism assumes the objective existence of a non-living substratum called "matter." As we shall presently see, the possibility of measuring and dividing this matter leads to the development of a new and radically different frame of reference.
Spirits are identifiable entities to the extent that they act in a characteristic manner. A great multiplicity of spirits were believed to act in the life-environment of human beings, each spirit producing experienceable changes according to its specific quality and the form it would take while releasing its energy. However, when the approach to the collective experience of human beings took the form often known as vitalism, a new type of relationship to the environment (and by extension to an imagined, all-inclusive environment, the universe) developed in a variety of ways. Vitalistic cults gave a ritualized form to human experience when agriculture and cattle-raising came to provide a stable and effective structure for communal survival and expansion. The new vitalistic frame of reference was no longer essentially based on the conflicts between spirits, and in general between warring entities involved in force-against-force situations; it referred to the cyclic interaction of two universally present modes of operation — two polarities of a single, all-inclusive "reality" always in motion. This motion, however, was understood to be inherently equilibrated and harmonic; and the purpose of a culture was to establish in a community of human beings a similar type of harmony and balance of power in terms of interpersonal relatedness and fully organized functional coactivity.
This did not mean that all conflicts between spirits, or between the still force-determined, aggressive, and ambitious elements in a community, could be resolved. But vitalistic cults sought to offer means of adjustment in terms of the frame of reference provided by the cyclic and balanced operation of the "One Life" manifesting in the interaction of two great tides of sexual energies.
Biological activity and life's command to "increase and multiply" had been developed in the prehuman, vegetable, and animal phases belonging to the involutionary arc of the great cycle, long before the great reversal of the Noon point. Thus, I refer not to this but to the evolutionary development of homo sapiens and of levels of culture, each of which provides a basic frame of reference for the operations of societies in terms of a fundamental principle of organization.
When the ideal of personhood became incorporated in the vitalistic frame of reference, the concept of autonomous entities responsible for individually definable activities acquired a new meaning. In the new picture, "spirits" were replaced by "individual Souls," and the One Life was replaced by the one and only God who created them. Having become "great religions," the ancient cults were deeply concerned with these Souls which somehow had become attached to human bodies. As a result the human body acquired a fundamental importance. Yet vitalistic cultures gave hardly any value to what happened to individual bodies. The biological species mattered, not any one of its specimens. The quality of Life was what counted, not the amount of happiness or degree of well-being of any living organism. The latter always was considered expendable.
B: Transcendental and Abstract Frames of Reference
The vitalistic and the transcendentally religious frame of reference became radically transformed when the concept and the practice of measurement, as well as various analytical processes, were given a place of fundamental importance in culture. Numbers and the simple use of measures in transactions were known long before the classical age of Greece, but a knowledge of the structural meaning of Numbers was considered sacred and reserved to initiate members of "occult Brotherhoods." The men who became known in Greece as Chaldeans were probably not an ethnic group, but members of such Brotherhoods; only at a later time did their name refer to their degenerated followers. Pythagoras probably studied in Chaldean and Egyptian sanctuaries, and there learned most of what he made relatively public in his Krotona school as a knowledge to be imparted only to long-tested applicants who had proven their ability to use the knowledge constructively.
By identifying the successive vocal tones of a magical (Le. vitalistic) incantation with a series of measurable lengths of vibrating strings, Pythagoras at least appeared to reduce the tone-quality of a sound to a quantitative value — a number of vibrations per second (the sound's frequency). Numbers, however, did not originally refer only to the counting of "how many" entities or factors were being experienced. Numbers had of themselves a profound meaning as principles of organization; one might say a holistic meaning. The number of factors in a situation, and of phases in a complete process, was in itself significant, irrespective of what the factors or phases were. This meaning could be referred to inherent characteristics of the human mind understood as a universal formative principle; but number deals with the relatedness of everything to everything else. It is implied in the concept of order. The act of measuring constitutes an analytical approach to such a concept. At a vitalistic and holistic level of conceptualization, however, the type of order being studied in analytical processes and in basic measurements is the functional interaction of parts within a whole system.
Numbers originally have a functional character. As they become intellectual entities with which the mind can play, regardless of any experienceable reality in an existential field in which a human person may consistently operate, numbers cease to have meaning in terms of human reality. Yet as products of the rational activity of the human mind, they belong to a new frame of reference which, since the days of ancient Greece, has made "Reason" the supreme principle of organization. The application of this principle to causal sequences of statements or operative processes is "logic." Mathematics and algebra have been developed as special languages to interpret not only experienceable changes but the logical possibility of events in situations no human consciousness could possibly experience, even if the human intellect could imagine them.
Logical reasoning and mathematical equations indicate only the possibility of such non-experienceable, non-human situations, in terms of the now generally accepted new frame of reference; yet most scientists claim that what is possible is "real" It is real in an abstract sense; but abstraction is confused with universality.
The concept of universality did not belong to the animistic interpretation or even to the early vitalistic levels of human experience, because experience had then a local character. It referred to the responses of an integrated group of human beings to an at least relatively finite field of possible common activity. Travel, commerce, and intertribal marriage extended that field, as did the concept of an area of organized and integrated activity including all human beings and all their possible experiences. Though beyond local situations and experiences, this field came to be understood as a transcendent reality and not merely an abstract possibility.
Greek culture and its diffusion by Alexander's conquests used and glorified Reason as builder of a universally valid frame of reference. But in order to be universally valid it had to transcend the concreteness of experiences conditioned by local features. While the great religious movements of India had given a divine character to locality-transcending experiences, the scientific approach of the leaders of Greek culture operated in terms of abstract statements. These became rigorously formalized during the European classical age. Abstract formulations in mathematical terms provided not only data of apparently universal validity, but a reliable foundation for the control of material transformations. At first these proved to be extremely valuable in insuring greater comfort and better chances of survival The ability to control became, and today is usually considered, the most glorious characteristic of the human condition. Such an ability nevertheless requires for its operation a definite set of limiting factors. Mankind is now beginning to realize the potential danger of the universal-abstract frame of reference, accepted by an ever-increasing mass of human beings who are unfortunately still dominated by, if not geographically local, at least doctrinally and emotionally divisive religions and cultures. The deepest implications of the worldwide crisis humanity is now facing is that a new frame of reference is needed which can be experienced as a concrete reality. The term concrete, however, should be given a broader than physical meaning. The new frame of reference should not only be "planetary" in a geographical sense: it should refer to a being, the Earth-being.
C: The Earth-being as All-inclusive Planetary Frame of Reference
When speaking of the Earth-being I do not mean a globe of dense matter, or a vast organism animated by the life-force, or an immensely powerful and perfect person, or the universal God of the great religion) reduced to a terrestrial size. The Earth-being is all these concretely experienceable factors in a total, all-inclusive planetary situation in which the whole of mankind participates. It participates in it, and therefore is able to affect it. The Earth-being is an immense field of activity and consciousness organized at several levels. All human beings operate at some of these levels. The important fact today is that if the meaning and purpose of these operations are understood in relation to the Earth-being as a frame of reference, they may acquire a new quality. Mankind has now to understand what this quality is in a realistic sense, and to accept it consciously, not only as an intellectual or "psychological" interpretation (which may turn out to be an evasion) but as the product of a workable relationship with a concrete Being.
The formulation of what is implied in this understanding nevertheless poses difficult problems. The realization that a workable relationship with the Earth-being can operate at several levels, all of which are "real" yet of limited scope, is an essential factor in the human situation as it has developed during many millenia of history and prehistory. No level of activity can be omitted or bypassed. "Man" as measurer and mathematician has an essential function in the earth-field. He constitutes a level of activity not only in, but of, the Earth-being. How he uses that function and to what purpose are the crucial questions.
The individual and collective interpretation given to personhood in relation to the karma of ancient failures, and the way in which consciousness and human desires approach or respond to the idea of a Supreme Person, are basic issues. The Supreme Person and the avataric beings who are the sources of the various cultures, may be considered incarnations of an essentially transcendent God external to the universe He created, or (when the time comes for the potentially transformative activity) component factors in the evolutionary reality of the Earth-being. Their Presence in the whole planetary field is not only an "ideal" interpreted by various religious systems, but a catalytic (or "in-spiriting") reality — an element necessary to the evolution of mankind.
This evolution takes place within the all-inclusive field of the Earth-being's activity and consciousness. Everything human, as well as sub- and super-human, should be referred to this planetary field of being. But this field is not an abstract, mathematically and quantitatively formulatable frame of reference. It is a concrete, multilevel reality to which equally concrete and multilevel human individuals can totally relate. The relation is material and molecular, biological in a functional way, personal in an ecological-cultural sense, then gradually more and more specialized and individualized. After a drastic period of reorganization and transmutation of personal desires, the relation may take on a super-personal or transpersonal character in terms of participation in the unified activity and unanimous consciousness of the planetary Pleroma. This participation can be, and in time should become effective in a concrete and realistic sense, if the beingness of the planetary Being is totally accepted as a "truth" whose self-evidence has become increasingly objective and unchallengeable. It can be as unchallengeable as a causally linked series of mathematical propositions, but in terms of another quality of conscious response to a situation.
The basic issue is what meaning is given to the word reality. There is material reality in the explosion produced by the coming together of certain kinds of molecules. There is biological reality in the nearly uncontrollable mating of a stallion and a mare, or in the illness resulting from the spilling on one's body of a test-tube filled with active viruses. There is reality in a personal initiative, which nets social success, fame, or wealth. But we should not limit reality to this personal, sociocultural, and financial level of power. Our total being may be involved in another kind of reality — one which we not only have to interpret intellectually, but to which we should respond at a level of beingness transcending matter, life, culture, personhood, and even a seemingly incontrovertible feeling-experience of separate individuality.
If we are fully to understand and attribute "reality" to such feeling-experience, it has to be given a thoroughly consistent frame of reference. A mathematical frame of reference may be assumed to be universal because, being abstract, it is not conditioned by and attached to any particular experience, but the possibility of any formulation being "universal" in such a mathematical sense is a highly questionable assumption. This kind of assumption may change. The universality of Euclid's geometry was declared invalid by non-Euclidean geometry. A pantheistic God could be considered universal, because He-It would be not only a creative but also a maintaining factor present in some incomprehensible manner in every mode of being. Nevertheless, the belief that a merely human individual is able really to experience, and indeed hold a dialogue with such a God, implies a situation actually beyond imagining. It would require the interaction not only of a human mind but of a whole human field of biological and sociocultural activity, with a supreme Universal Being whose beingness extends over billions of light-years as well as structures the infinitesimal period of billionths of seconds.
The possibility of such a situation is actually inconceivable, except through the use of symbols (words or algebraic equations) which can be played with but not experienced. Yet such situations apparently occur and produce realistic changes. If they do, can it not be that they are given a confusing and erroneous interpretation by the sociocultural mind, and that what is believed to be "universal," because expressed in abstract and formalistic terms, is in fact only planetary? The God of the universalistic religions, and the universal "laws" of mathematically formulated science, may be realities experienceable at the human stage of culture on this or any dense planet. They may be "true" in relation to Man and to the field this Man-stage of the Movement of Wholeness is able to encompass, and from which it may extract meaning. The universal constants measured by modern science may indeed be fully reliable values "in the neighborhood of" the present level of the human space of existence which conditions the structures and boundaries of the human mind. But assuming that they are universally true may indeed be unjustifiable and a form of generic pride.
When able to operate at the level of abstractions opened up through the practice of measurements and the intellectual correlation of rational thinking, the human mind can assuredly have remarkable realizations of what it perceives as universal order. The scientist speaks of "elegant solutions" to mathematical problems, just as the artist enjoys the "beauty" of natural or manmade forms, and the moralist is inspired by the "good" embodied in the fabric of some interpersonal relationships. Greek culture left us the trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as a potent legacy. But each culture has its own definition of these ideals, even if one may discover beyond the differentiated interpretations and realizations a general set of "perennial" principles which seem to be valid everywhere and at all times. What is really meant by "everywhere and at all times" are the evolutionary phases of the Movement of Wholeness after the symbolic Noon. These phases refer to the development of personhood and culture, which in turn constitute only a particular level of the total field of activity and consciousness of the Earth-being.
As previously stated, the function humanity has to perform at the level where specifically human situations arise may be significantly interpreted in terms of the neutralization or absorption of the karma of past failures. Such a function, however, has an ambivalent potential; it inevitably includes the possibility of new failures as the result of the "freedom" inherent in human situations. Where and when there is "success," new and more-than-human situations take form as the power of the principle of Unity increases within the field of the Earth-being. Then the development of the planetary Pleroma gradually takes place. This development may become clearer if we use as an intellectual tool the concept of planetary spheres — even if today its use is limited to a difference in material conditions.
The Planetary Spheres
When a geologist speaks of the size or the age of the earth, he has in mind a globe of material substances which he assumes to exist in several continuous states from the surface regions of the biosphere to a central core. This core is geometrically and thus abstractly definable, but whatever reality it possesses does not belong to the field of human experience and human knowledge. The two-dimensional cross-section of the earth-globe depicted in typical earth-science books reveals a circle whose radius is about 6,370 kilometers. The solid surface region — like the shell of an egg — is very thin. Directly or indirectly we know very little of what takes place a few kilometers beneath the soil we walk on.
Below this dense shell of soil and rocky substances a larger region (often called magma) may extend to a depth of some 2,000 kilometers, leading to a core estimated to have a radius of 3,000 kilometers. While the density of the various regions of the globe is apparently known, the determination of the levels of heat and perhaps even pressure to which the materials of the globe are subjected are almost entirely speculative. It has been assumed that the core of the earth-body is made of nickel and iron, but this is very controversial. Actually we have no reliable, direct knowledge of what is at the center of the globe. We have in fact no knowledge of what is at the core of any planet or star. All human knowledge is surface knowledge — knowledge referring to changes taking place at the surface of planets and stars. As material inhabitants of the biosphere, human beings are surface beings. Whatever refers to the centrality of being is unknown.
Scientists assume that there is matter at the center of the globe, but they can only speculate on the state of that matter. Yet at the center, there may be "nothing" understandable and still less describable in human terms. A state of perfect equilibrium may be imagined, but beyond what human beings can experience as materiality in terms of the experience of an Earth-being, it may nevertheless be matter. It may be a condition of being in which opposite gravitational pressures neutralize one another — a condition to which Indian seers or metaphysicians may refer when speaking of a laya center. It would be easy to think of the core of the earth-globe as the "heart-center" of the planetary Being, but in Kundalini yoga the chakras (or energy-centers) are not to be found at the level of materiality of biological processes and organs. These only reflect or resonate to corresponding "etheric" whorls of energy. The use of such correspondences, even if intellectually sound, can confuse far more than enlighten.
To speak of the Earth-being as a living organism is indeed confusing, because in the total field of experience of such a being, the biosphere — and all that solely refers to "life" — is only one among several levels of activity and consciousness. The biosphere is the place, on both sides of the surface soil of the globe, where the specific features of the biological conditions of existence can develop to their full extent. The lithosphere (rocks and minerals) and the hot magma of the next deeper region of the earth's crust — plus the atmosphere, stratosphere, and ionosphere surrounding the dense and light-obscuring materials of the earth's surface — are all necessary factors in the development of human persons. Personhood adds a new dimension to the field of activity of the Earth-being, but one should not think of the Earth-being either as only a living organism planetary in scope, or only as a person. Whether as an experienceable concrete reality or as an abstract frame of reference for all human situations, the Earth-being encompasses several levels of activity and consciousness.
The first of these is the level of materiality. At that level, the Earth-being is a dense and massive globe made of a multitude of molecules that are complex and integrated factories in which a relatively few atomic elements are continually at work, releasing energy. The next level of being is what is usually meant by "life."
A life-field (biosphere) develops at the surface of the material globe because biological processes apparently require for their optimum actualization the interaction of the internal matter of the earth's globe and the many external radiations whose frequencies cover a vast spectrum, from ultrasonic radio and heat waves to light, x-rays, and beyond. The boundaries of a field separate that field from its environment, yet they are also the place where inside and outside can meet and interact. Life, as the principle of biological organization using molecular matter as a foundation, is presumably the result of the kind of interactions which have occurred and are still occurring at the surface of the earth-mass.
While this surface region (the biosphere) is an extremely thin layer of activity, its importance in the total constitution of the Earth-being cannot be measured and evaluated in such spatial terms. This importance acquires its essential meaning only when seen in the perspective of the cyclo-circular structure of the Movement of Wholeness, and in terms of the Godhead's purpose for creating a new universe. As already stated, in order to be fully actualized, such a purpose requires the eventual development of human situations allowing the many patterns of ancient karma to become "neutralized," or rather re-absorbed into the rhythms of Wholeness from which a very large number of the components of the humanity of a long-past universe had estranged themselves.
Such a karma-dissolving process cannot be accomplished at the strictly biological level, where instinctual reactions preclude any possibility of freedom of choice. The process requires the operation of the principle of personhood; first within the collective frame of reference of a culture, then in individualized modes of thinking-feeling and behavior. Personhood, however, demands for its concrete actualization a material foundation, as well as the use and at least partial control of biological processes and their derivatives at the level of the collective psychism of a culture. A person unable to resist powerful biological impulses and their translated forms at the sociocultural level (egocentricity, ambition, lust, and greed for material possessions) generates forces and psychic-emotional by-products which fill the realm of the Earth-being to which I have given the name of psychosphere. Such a realm may be considered the lower level of the noosphere; but the different basic meanings of the two Greek words, psyche and nous (often believed to be nearly synonymous) should be clearly understood.
Psyche is the human soul operating in the relatively dark regions where predominantly unconscious and compulsive responses are still rooted in biological impulses and organic feelings. In order to deal with the situations produced by these responses, the discursive intellect devises its formalized interpretations through the uncertain chiarascuro of mental processes. Nous, on the other hand, is the rational Soul which, for many philosophers and theologians, strictly characterizes the human condition and reveals its divine origin. At the noetic level, human consciousness reaches, or at least should be able to reflect, the archetypal forms previously created by the celestial Hierarchies. Nous, when understood in its true nature, is the sphere of principles from which the "higher Self" draws its essential inspiration.The psychosphere is filled with the often discordant results of the activity of human egos. Interpersonal tensions, conflicts, and frustrations generate a variety of products which accumulate in a repressed, but often still very dynamic, subconscious state in the psychosphere. This level of the Earth-being's existence refers, at least to some extent, to what is popularly understood as the "astral world." It is a "personal" realm in the sense that it is filled with the products of interpersonal relationships. Some of these may be very beautiful, perhaps exalting images of love and happiness; yet they are conditioned by the prototypes, the myths and rituals of the culture. Other contents of the psychosphere are the emotional-mental by-products of culture-shock, collective fears, individual failures of nerve, interpersonal conflicts, tragic disappointments, and biopsychic weariness. An acute feeling of futility may oppress an individual-in-the-making as he or she realizes only too clearly — yet still in a "personal" way not entirely free from egocentric desires and/or expectations — the weakness of his or her position in relation to the masses of so slowly evolving human beings.
The psychosphere acquires a positive character when it opens itself up to the downflow of archetypal images, and the individualized person accepts the role of self-dedicated agent for the incorporation of the energies of the noetic realm into a consistent series of artistic, scientific, or sociopolitical achievements. But it should be stressed again that what today is so often meant by creativity is most of the time the result of a yearning for self-expression. In most instances, self-expression follows traditional or recently publicized patterns of organization. The self involved in that activity is usually the ego seeking to achieve sociocultural prestige or to release dammed-up psychic energies. In its most negative and dangerous aspect, the psychosphere is also the field of operation of dark Forces, called Asuras by Sri Aurobindo and Mother Mira, "agents of Ahriman" by Rudolph Steiner, and in popular Christianity "devils" or Satanic beings.
Most modern psychologists, eager to operate as psychotherapists and thus as "healers of the soul," find it impossible or unwise to concretize subconscious psychic and noetic processes into post-mortem "astral" entities able to affect (and even to control or totally possess) living human beings, and in some instances a whole crowd of fascinated people. This attitude is consistent as long as the psychologist takes the individual person as a frame of reference for whatever occurs in the inner life and mind of human beings acting within an organized society and its culture. Unfortunately such a systematized approach always tends to over-emphasize the ego level of subjectivity and desires. Similarly, the exclusive concern of physicists with the most easily analyzed and seemingly forever divisible foundation of existence, matter, leads to a kind of reductionism according to which every transformative process taking place in biological organisms and every change in the development of a person has a knowable molecular basis.
If, on the other hand, the Earth-being is assumed to be the most valid and fruitful frame of reference, a much larger picture emerges which allows an all-inclusive interpretation and an effective grasp of the nature and purpose of the situations with which human beings have continually to deal. In terms of such a planetary picture humanity can discover its dharma — its place of destiny. The discoverer is mind. The discovery is the essential meaning of whatever is, and of the cyclic process structurally defining the relation of this "isness" with all other phases of the Movement of Wholeness.
The full development of personhood does not refer only to the possibility of making at least relatively free and autonomous decisions and eventually to act as an individual who is more or less separate from other individuals as well as from the mass of the people in the environment: it implies the capacity to extract a meaning from a series or a group of inner experiences or outer changes.
The concept of meaning may be difficult to define; but however defined, it deals with the relatedness of any experience within or in terms of a general frame of reference which mind has established. Human evolution can indeed be understood as the progressive development of the human capacity to give meaning to existence, and thus to everything that happens within the field of our planet accessible to human experience. This is the reason for the remarkable ability of human beings to adapt to extremely varied circumstances and living conditions. Such a power of adaptation had to exist as a potential factor in human nature in order for humanity to fulfill its planetary function within the Earth-being. The actualization of that power requires the progressive development of a series of cultures, because each successive culture provides the persons born and educated in it with a specialized capacity to discover and formulate the meaning of its basic experiences. Moreover, within each culture different groups can be educated or inwardly led to give broader-than-average meanings to individual or collective experiences. Any historical event, such as an action starting a world war, can be given meaning according to the psychological state of a particular person or class of persons, to the mass-consciousness and karma of a nation, or to the planetary evolution of mankind.
While humanity's function is to instill the noosphere with the quality of meaning, in the undeveloped state of personhood still conditioned by biological needs and their psychic overtones, many of the meanings extracted from human experiences are drawn toward the psychosphere rather than to the higher regions of the noosphere. The meanings have to be attuned to (or reflect) the realities of the archetypal level if the higher regions of the noosphere are to be developed. A mind that reveals such meanings acts as builder of a foundation for the beyond-the-human level of being which I have called the Pleroma.
In terms of the Earth-being, one can refer to the field of activity of Pleroma beings as the pneumosphere. But it may be confusing and unwise to imagine this "sphere" in terms of position and spatial extension. If one does, one might think of the pneumosphere as the whole orbit of the earth. This orbit, like those of all the planets, is an ellipse; and an ellipse has two foci. At one of them the sun — the common focus of the orbits of all the planets — is located. The position of the other focus differs in each planetary system. In terms of a geometric kind of symbolism, this second focus may represent the individualizing subjectivity factor in each planetary system; and it should be related in a super-physical manner to the center of the planet's globe. A planet's orbit — its precise shape and position in the series of planets — refers to the function it is fulfilling in the whole solar system (the heliocosm). This solar system represents in symbolic terms the next greater frame of reference for beings whose experience already transcends the planetary and metacultural level.
The Pleroma state to which I am referring operates within the Earth-being; one might speak of it as the "Soul" of the planet. But the word soul is quite ambiguous. If one thinks of the Soul as incarnating in a living human organism, the process is involutionary. It refers to the descent of a spiritual entity able to operate in and theoretically to control the biological energies of the body and their psychic derivatives or overtones. As an organization of consciousness and releasable willpower, the Soul is also the result of an evolutionary process, the consummation of personal efforts. Similarly, the activities taking place in the field of operation represented by the archetypal level of the noosphere and the pneumosphere have an involutionary and an evolutionary character. In the first case these activities deal with the impressing and the maintaining of structural patterns of organization (archetypes); in the second case, an evolutionary process is at work through human cultures and individual persons. Its aim is the neutralization of karma and the realization of "meaning." Such an evolution in consciousness is organized in response to the ascendency of the principle of Unity.
When students of quasi-esoteric doctrines speak of the "occult Hierarchy" of the planet, they refer to an involutionary process — the embodiment of the many archetypal aspects of the great Solution envisioned by the Godhead at the symbolic Midnight, and concretized at an "etheric" level in the Supreme Person. The Hierarchy should be thought of as a series of "Offices." Each Office is concerned with a specific kind of structural process through which an archetype is stamped, as it were, upon the development of homo sapiens. A certain type of energy (often called a "Ray") is managed by the beings "performing" functionally in such Offices. In biological terms, the Hierarchy as a whole might be compared to the genetic code directing the activity of molecules within a living cell, or even more to what the biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls a "morphogenetic field." The beings operating in the fulfillment of these hierarchical offices are normally invisible structuring powers, not persons; they are "personages" performing an archetypal role in a completely impersonal sense.
In order to perform such roles, these personages should have reached a level of development beyond that of earth-born mankind barely emerging from the biological state of the animal kingdom. Therefore this development had to take place in a pre-terrestrial scheme of evolution — which may mean on another planet or during a cycle antedating that of our present humanity. I tend to believe that at any particular time in a solar system, only one planet provides the conditions necessary for the development of life and later of personhood. The beings who at first perform involutionary archetypal roles as the occult Hierarchy of our present humanity therefore had to be pre-terrestrial beings. A time presumably came, however, when a few individuals who, as products of mankind, had reached on this earth the planetary Pleroma state, were able to perform these archetypal roles or similar functions related to the maintenance and further development of human evolution — and thus to the growth of the Earth-being as a whole.
Reaching the Pleroma state is essentially an evolutionary process. This process takes place over many millennia within a series of cultures; and it involves the succession of many persons, all linked in an increasingly effective degree to a particular "spiritual Quality" which constitutes one of the myriad Letters of the creative Word. It involves going through the difficult and stressful process of reorganization usually called the Path of discipleship, because it implies a two-way process in which the determined conscious aspiration (and imagination) of an individualized person becomes related to the compassionate guidance of a being having already reached the Pleroma state. All Pleroma beings form a partly objective but predominantly subjective "Communion of being," the White Lodge — a Communion in consciousness in which individuality and unanimity are combined.
The White Lodge is not the product of an involutionary process of structured differentiation. Its gradual formation is conditioned by the ascendancy of the principle of Unity. Century after century, culture after culture, human being after human being having successfully undergone the tests of the Path — the rite of passage leading to the Pleroma state — the White Lodge is being "built" (an inadequate term!) as an integrated Company of radiant centers of consciousness and compassionate activity. When considered as the Soul of the Earth-being, the Pleroma may include more than our "human, all too human" minds can comprehend today. As the great cycle of the Movement of Wholeness reaches the symbolic Sunset phase, a new type of situation develops beyond the present state of materiality which generates predominantly subjective experiences transcending what we know today as the condition of planethood.
We can call such a predominantly subjective level of experience "divine"; and we can speak of a state of "starhood" transcending that of planethood. These are speculations and the imagery of minds for which even a planetary frame of reference is too narrow. The basic difference between the type of vision evoked by the all-inclusive Movement of Wholeness and the characteristically religious interpretation of reality is that, in the philosophy of Operative Wholeness, the "divine" state is an integral part of the whole cycle of being, but not an external utterly transcendent reality. The human state evolves into the divine. The immense multiplicity of human persons becomes increasingly unified. This unification process always has some kind of material basis, but as previously stated, matter is a stabilized form of energy, and energy exists at many levels as do the formative processes of mind.
The human mind interprets the factor of subjectivity as "spirit" in contrast with objectively perceptible "matter." Subjectivity is related to unity (or the experience of oneness), because when the principle of Unity becomes more powerful than that of Multiplicity (after the symbolic Sunset phase when the two principles are of equal strength) the objective world vanishes into predominantly subjective states. To embodied human beings, these states are "spiritual."
In its spiritual state the Earth-being is the planetary Subject. Wherever this subject operates, there is the pneumosphere — the field of Spirit at the level of consciousness of planethood. It is a field of radiant energy beyond the normal capacity of perception of the human senses. Yet one does not have to infer from such a transcendent condition that the Earth-being is a god, or even less, the only God. The subjective factor in the experience of the Earth-being has the potentiality of reaching the divine state as it remains attuned to the momentum of the Movement of Wholeness; but so ha the subjective factor in a human being. Of course, a human person operates at a lower level of wholeness than the Earth-being; yet both are "lesser wholes" participating in the field of existence of "greater wholes," and both fulfill a function as participant in the vaster organism. For the human individual this organism is the Earth-being. For the Earth-being it is the solar system or the Milky Way galaxy as an organization of stars.
The factor of size is not what determines the spiritual or divine state. The passage from the condition of individual person to that of Pleroma being does not mean that the person becomes a bigger human being. He or she reaches a state representing a more advanced phase in the cycle of Wholeness — one in which the principle of Unity is more powerful, more able to balance the influence of the principle of Multiplicity. This phase is more responsive to the principle of Unity in the sense that it implies a more profound feeling- realization of relatedness to other beings operating not only at the same level, but at levels below and above personhood. The divine state is not reached as a separate individual, even if the traveler on the Path that leads to the Pleroma feels that he or she is tragically alone. The whole Earth-being is involved in his or her success or failure. Yet at the human stage as a subject having gained the power to detach itself from experienced situations, the success or failure is his or her own, because it is related to some ancient individual karma.
This karma had also involved other beings. A mystic may dream of the return of "a one" to "the One"; but this is only the subjective aspect of the process of transcendence. In its full meaning for a human being, transcendence requires that a more inclusive level of being actually be reached — a phase of the Movement of Wholeness in which the principle of Unity is more powerfully at work.
The concept of levels of reality is indeed basic in the whole picture of the cycle I am presenting. Reality is not to be defined only in terms of the factor of subjectivity and the desire for absolute oneness. It is the product of the full triune experience of being, at whatever level an experienceable situation has taken form as one of the many phases of the Movement of Wholeness.
The Relation of Culture to Continent
Every level of activity of the' Earth-being is related to every other. The shaping of the materials of the planetary globe at its surface where it reacts to solar and galactic radiations follows rhythms to which present-day geologists cannot give a purposeful evolutionary meaning. Being modern scientists, they build complex and attractive theories, such as the theory of plate tectonics, to explain the formation of present-day continents and their mountains, but they cannot relate the results of the motion of these large masses of matter to the conditions of life which will develop on land or in the ocean — conditions which in turn will make characteristic types of cultures possible. For the geo-scientist, the shapes of the earth's surface — the geomorphism of continents and seas — are not related to the development of biology and culture which will occur in the biosphere. There can be no relation because the gradual evolution of matter, life, and culture is not understood as one vast evolutionary process. This process can hardly constitute a consistent and purposeful scheme of development unless it is given meaning in terms of a planetary frame of reference; thus, in relation to an Earth-being in which (or whom) continents, biological species, human cultures and persons participate, each affecting the others to some extent It is not only that science is concerned with the "how" and not the "why" of existence. The "how" it studies is fragmentary. Only a vision of the wholeness of a whole can reveal the reality of the interactions of its parts by giving them a functional significance.
The biosphere is the first whole to be considered. It includes three main components: the large expanse of water (roughly three-fifths of the earth's surface), the land masses (continents and islands), and the atmosphere surrounded by the stratosphere and still more tenuous layers of substance, reaching to circum-planetary regions filled with electromagnetic particles (ionosphere, etc.). It seems that originally the globe was entirely covered with water, and then gradually masses of molten materials emerged to form what now constitute our continents. When we look at a global map we are used to seeing several distinct continents, as well as names given to several oceans and seas (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, etc.). Yet in fact there is only one ocean. It is only because we see it from the perspective of the continental regions bordering it that we use different names for this one, single expanse of water. Land-areas have developed according to the rhythm of multiplicity, but the ocean remains the one basic foundation of terrestrial existence.
In a still more evident manner the earth's atmosphere is one single whole. All living organisms breathe this same air which circulates rapidly around the globe. All human beings are indeed united, in the very depth of their biological nature (in their lungs), by this one atmosphere they have to breathe. We might not wish to have tactual relationships with some human beings of another color, race or class, but we breathe the same air, whether or not we are conscious of or like the fact. Therefore, when a civilization pollutes what it may still call its own atmosphere, it in fact poisons the entire gaseous realm of the biosphere, while the waste-products of European, American, and now Asian factories are filling the one worldwide ocean.
What were once considered several distinct continents may initially have been one single land mass. But traditions and modern theories present several different pictures. The relatively recent theory of plate tectonics has its critics, and the manner in which vast masses of matter have risen from the molten depths of the planet is a controversial issue. Nevertheless it seems evident that continents are drifting and that the geomorphic features of land and sea are very slowly but continuously changing — and some theories give the process of transformation a periodically catastrophic character.*
*For a popularized compendium and discussion of the various theories see John White's book Poleshift (Doubleday, New York, 1980).
The idea of drifting continents apparently had been suggested by Francis Bacon and the French naturalist Buffon, but the theory of plate tectonics was developed during this century, at first by a Danish geographer Alfred Wegener. He believed that all present-day continents once formed a huge mass he called Pan-Gaea. This continental mass then divided into what are now known as Eurasia, Africa, Antarctica, Australia and the Americas. Wegener s theory was later reformulated and two original land masses were postulated instead of one. The northern continental group centered around Greenland was called Laurasia, and the southern one around Antarctica was called Gondwana. As these two masses moved in opposite directions and (one might say) attacked each other, heavy geological disturbances occurred such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Their powerful horizontal embrace gave rise to vertically surging high mountain ranges. Then the two masses apparently bounced away from each other. They remained separated during a long period of quiescence, and the conflict began again. Several periods of intense mountain-creating occurred. They led to the formation of the Laurentian mountains of Canada about one billion years ago. Another group of Canadian and Midwestern United States mountains, now largely flattened, were formed half a billion years afterward. Then the Appalachian mountains of North America, and finally (some 150 million years ago) the Alps, the Himalayas, the Rocky mountains, and the Andes. This last upheaval occurred during the Cretaceous Age which theoretically began about 125 million years ago; and it may not yet be ended, as several mountain peaks (for instance Mount Everest) are still rising.
The idea of two continental plates moving toward each other as integral units and colliding rather spectacularly nevertheless is not universally accepted. Some geologists believe that what travels from one region of the globe to another is a number of small masses breaking off from their region of origin, and somehow being pulled by and integrating themselves with the much larger land formations. These small wandering masses, imbedded at the margin of continents, are called "terranes." They are identified by geologists because their composition and the fossils they contain do not match those of their geological surroundings. David Howell of the United States Geological Survey believes that the movements of the terranes are "the only process involved at a fundamental level determining the growth and shape of continents." The basic question, however, at least from the point of view I have adopted, is not how the process of formation of our present continents occurred, but the meaning its results have had and are having in terms of the development of the Earth-being at all levels of existence — and of course more specifically at the human level. At that level, biology is the foundation of cultures and personhood.
Can we actually relate the shape of continental landmasses and islands to the kind of culture that has developed at their surface? We know how cultures are affected by the climate, the resources of the land and the behavior of all that lives on it, but is there a morphological relationship between, on the one hand, the shape of the land and its location within a continental mass, and on the other hand the type of culture born in that region?
Many years ago, while looking at a map of the world, I was struck suddenly by the fact that what is usually called the European continent, west of the Urals in modern Russia, could be considered a miniature of the much larger Asian continent to which it is attached. I realized that the shape of the landmasses at the earth's surface could be related in an archetypal manner to the basic cultures having developed in these geographical areas. I saw Europe protuberating from Asia somewhat as, in a California navel orange, a small replica of the main fruit emerges out of it as a newborn from a maternal womb to which it would remain attached.
The homological relationship becomes obvious when we see that the three basic Asian peninsulas — Indo-China, India and Arabia — are matched in Europe by Greece, Italy, and Spain. Indo-China is prolonged by Sumatra, Java and Bali, somewhat as the Greek peninsula leads to a chain of islands extending as far as Rhodes which could be considered a miniature Australia. On the south of India we find Sri Lanka; on the south of Italy, Sicily. Even the Italian river Po and the plain it crosses can be compared to the Ganges and its region. North of these plains we find in Asia the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, and in Europe the Alps and Switzerland. Farther north the plains of Germany match the Gobi and Mongolian deserts. China in the east corresponds to Poland and western Russia, and in the west, Afghanistan and Iran to the massif central in France. The shape of Asia Minor reminds us of the rectangular north-south Brittany. The Rhone valley separates the Alps from France's ancient central mountains, as the Khyber Pass separates Tibet from Afghanistan. On the southwestern slopes of the Auvergne mountains an ancient culture many thousands of years ago decorated caves with magical drawings, and southwest of Persia (now Iran), Mesopotamia (now Iraq), Syria, and Palestine were the scene of important historical, cultural, and religious developments. Later on in southwest France a culture, tragically destroyed during the thirteenth century A.D., gave rise to new concepts of interpersonal relationships.
The remarkable fact is that the cultures which developed in the three peninsulas of Asia have characteristics which match those of the corresponding European peninsulas. The central ones, Italy and India, became the sources from which new religious movements flowed in all directions. The Indian emperor Asoka spread Buddhism just as the Roman emperor Constantine spread an) institutionalized Christianity. Buddhism took new forms in China, and Christianity became more individualistic in Protestant Germany. The eastern-most peninsula of Asia, Indo-China, was the seat of remarkable artistic developments (such as Angkor Wat) and so was ancient Greece. Java likewise matches Crete in this respect. On the other hand, rugged desert Arabia has been inhabited by a proud race which can be significantly compared to the Spanish people which also conquered large areas of the world in which older cultures were disintegrating. As I wrote nearly forty years ago in Modern Man's Conflicts:
Indo-China with her highly developed art and music, and Java with her rich culture, reminds one forcibly of Greece and the earlier Cretan civilizations. India has been the center of religious doctrines for Asia, just as Italy has been for Europe. The ancient city of Nasik, sacred to Rama, stands (near Bombay) where Rome is in Italy; Benares, where Florence grew. Curiously enough the Arabs settled in Spain (Arabia's structural equivalent in Europe), and both Arabia and Spain are rugged lands, angular shaped, with fanatic, intense, proud populations. As significant are the historical-cultural correspondences between the nations which grew respectively in Persia and in France (Zoroastrian civilization matching the old Celtic culture), in Mongolia and in Germany (military and mystical peoples avid for space-conquest in an organic sense), in China and Russia (lands of the "good earth" and of robust peasantry long controlled by a small aristocracy). (P. 176)
In another sense, of real historical-cultural validity, we might say that Europe is to Asia as the conscious and intellectual part of man's total psyche is to the vast collective unconscious. The conscious is a differentiated organ of the unconscious, in the sense that the brain and the cerebrospinal nervous system constitute differentiated organs of the total human organism. Religion is the progeny of the collective unconscious (Asia); science, that of the rational conscious (Europe).
In such a parallelism differences are as significant as similarities. We spoke of Italy and India, Switzerland and Tibet as occupying similar places in the two geomorphic structures. But we should notice at once the fact that the Alps describe a convex arc of mountains above the Northern Italian plains, while the Himalayas describe a concave arc over the plains of Northern India. If we consider the two mountainous masses of Switzerland and Tibet as the "geo-spiritual" centers of their respective continents, we get the idea of the European center radiating outward, while the Asiatic center is focused inward; and we see how well this describes the difference between the European and Asiatic types of spirituality. Another way of looking at the Eurasian landmass is to see it as one shape extending from 10° longitude west (West Ireland) to 170° longitude west (Eastern tip of Siberia). Dividing into two this span of 200 degrees of longitude, we find 90° east as the pivotal meridian; and it passes through Calcutta, Tibet, near Lhasa and near the highest mountain of the globe, just west of the Gobi desert and the Mongolian People's Republic, through a most important part of Siberia (Sibirsk region) and along the great Lenisi river which may become a great trade-route in the future. Around the pivot of this 90° east meridian we might see soon the total population of the Eurasian world almost evenly divided; even now the combined population of India, Persia and the U.S.S.R. balances approximately that of China, Japan, Indo-China and Indonesia. And there is a general similarity of position between the Scandanavian peninsula and Kamchatka, the British Isles and Japan — the correlation between the last two island-groups being particularly significant in terms of world-history and racial background. (pp. 177-178)
It is now usual to speak of seven or eight continents, but I believe this does not provide a sound basis for a geomorphic interpretation of the meaning of landmasses and cultures developing upon them. Asia, Europe and Africa actually constitute one vast, spread-out geomorphic whole I call Eurasiafrica. This whole is polarized by the Americas whose overall geometric shape suggests two inverted triangles. The planetary function of these north-and-south triangular masses may be to establish in biospheric and cultural terms a basic dynamic relationship between the north and south poles — the north pole acting as a positive area releasing the global magnetism which may result from the dynamic relationship between the sun and the core of the earth.
The northern span of the two continental masses, Eurasiafrica and the Americas, encircle the Arctic regions, the extensive coast of Canada and Alaska confronting the vast expanse of northern Siberia and Greenland. A chain of undersea mountains in the mid-Atlantic is an eloquent witness to the fact that the two landmasses were once united in one vast continent (perhaps the fabled Atlantis) which, by breaking apart, engendered a basic bi-polarity. The Eurasiafrican Mediterranean sea, on whose shores various cultures grew and the conflict between Islam and Christianity has been and still is staged, polarizes the Gulf of Mexico, which is as filled with islands as the Eastern Mediterranean; and Central America (Mexico included) has been a fertile field for the rise of important cultures and religions. Horizontally elongated Cuba parallels Crete.
Such geomorphic similarities may seem insufficient to establish a causal and teleological link between the recent results of the motion of continental masses and the cultures developing on these areas of the globe. For the same reasons the Medieval doctrine of "Signatures" and the so often mentioned Hermetic principle of Correspondence (as above, so below) cannot be accepted as a reliable basis for data to be used in rigorous scientific thinking. Such non-scientific observations do not tell the nature of forces producing precisely definable results with or against which human beings can work in order to satisfy individual and collective desires for greater comfort, security, and happiness — the implicit purpose of a technology-oriented modern science. They nevertheless pose questions which may sooner or later impel us to adopt a new frame of reference, providing an integrating structure which adds another level of reality to that of the limiting procedures now considered exclusively valid in the acquisition of knowledge.
The basic issue is whether we should attribute "reality" to abstract mathematical relations because they "work" effectively as predicted if applied at the level of the type of matter we can experience. What is implied in their "working"? Atom bombs work; but what value does it have for human beings to know that Einstein's famous equation works if the working destroys the biosphere and the realm of existence at which mankind has a specific function to perform in the Earth-being? Can such a value be significantly called "real"? What is at stake is the quality of the type of experiences to which the mathematical frame of reference (as a way of knowledge and a source of activity) gives predictability and effectiveness in terms of material transformations. But why does mankind, or a particular society, desire to deal with such situations? It may indeed be that these situations, made possible by the development of the abstract intellect are desired because another type of situation at a higher, more inclusive level of reality has not been given a correct interpretation. The mathematical frame of reference and its ability to give causal meaning to sequences of events presumably is a valid step in the direction of a superior planetary level of reality. But if its value is glorified above that of all other processes, it may throw out of balance the consciousness and basic desires of a culture. And the results may be tragic. Man may die of "abstractions" in his quest for concepts and formal relations to which modern science attributes a universal character. However, this kind of universality had to be given as a foundation — an ambiguous space-time which, though based on measurement, eludes dimensionality.
Seen from a historical point of view, the restless search of European man for causal "laws" determining the operation and possible use of an energy able to satisfy his always more complex desires, was a revolt against the personalization of the elemental forces experienced as "Nature" — a nature to which, at the time, long journeys were giving an as yet unexperienced, non-local, and challenging character.* In fact, the rise of Humanism and the development of an empirical science intent on proving its validity against the authority of a supposedly revealed tradition was not psychologically different from the modern rebellion of teenagers against their church-going but ambitious and profit-greedy parents. The so heavily-praised philosophers of classical Greece were also intellectual rebels against the mythic personification of natural processes in the essentially vitalistic Mysteries which had spread from the East. But transforming the very personal and all-too-human ways of gods into mathematically expressed sequences of events reduced to abstractions might not be a permanently workable or convincing solution, however successful the transformation may be at first in terms of material results.
*The influence of a particular locality during formative years can hardly be exaggerated, insofar as the deep structures of the psyche are concerned.
The frame of reference which I believe may emerge from the necessity to meet and understand an extremely dangerous, worldwide situation in which all human beings are involved includes not only the separately identifiable levels of matter, life, and personhood; it refers to their interpenetration in a person-transcending reality, the Pleroma. When that stage is reached, the Earth-being may cease to be a globe of dense, light-obscuring matter needed for the development of cultures and individual persons; it may glow like a star. Most people would consider such a possibility as a science-fiction Utopia, not worth thinking seriously about. Yet what now is indeed a Utopia may become concrete actuality if we deliberately give to its eventual realization not only our collective thinking and behavior, but also our feeling-responses as individualizing persons aware of the need for a truly new frame of reference. This new frame of reference may indeed be the next potentiality which has to be developed through a slow but consistent evolutionary process. Do we prefer the mathematical structures that led Einstein to postulate E=mc2, and the counter-Utopia of nuclear devastation? Before World War II Einstein had been quoted as saying that he could not conceive of any practical use for his formula.
It has had a practical use! An uncompromising, sustained, and transformative belief in the necessity of postulating an all-inclusive Earth-being as a foundation for the participation and conscious coactivity of human beings everywhere has also today a practical use. The crucial issue may be whether this new frame of reference will have to take the institutionalized form of a more or less rigid "world religion," or if it will embody as much as is today possible of the Pleroma state.
The Fullness of Human Experience
