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Gaia or the Man Machine?

This is an excerpt from the e-book The Gaian-Ego Hypothesis. Also see The Man Machine - Organisms to Organisation, Consciousness or Materialism and Survey of the Central Idea.

Some have countered the idea of the planet as a holistic organism with comments such as: "But the question for us as individuals is: do we want our descendants to become like the cells of organs, organs which in turn comprise some larger entity - that is, totally dependent on the functioning of our civilised system as a whole, mere cogs in wheels? Is it inevitably to this end that the human pattern, like the metazoan and the social insect patterns before it, had to evolve? Lastly, if we should not want to evolve this way, are we still able to halt the trend that is already in progress, and if so how?" [FR].

W. D. Hamilton [FR], the author of this comment was a leading evolutionary biologist who was a forerunner to sociobiology and the scientific study of society as a natural evolutionary phenomenon. But in subtle ways, like most of his contemporaries, he was caught in a mechanistic view of the world and didn't have enough systemic insight to comprehend what it means to form a collective organism out of ourselves. Through collective integration we cannot but help form a super-system of some kind, we implicitly recognise that fact through the word 'civilisation'. It is the nature of systems to integrate and create super-systems and we are not beyond the fundamental systemic 'laws' of the cosmos. The only way to avoid creating beyond ourselves would be to cease all communication and cooperation and become isolated individuals or small fragmented tribes living close to nature, but for that the population would need to be massively reduced, the ecosystem massively regenerated and strict prohibition of all cooperation must be enforced. But in our current situation it is the case that for a long time we have already been "totally dependent on the functioning of our civilised system as a whole". We have already become sub-systems inextricably integrated into a super-system. But the important question is what kind of a super-system do we create out of ourselves, will it nourish us or devour us?

That depends on what ideas flow through our minds, what ideas flow through the culture and the way that we structure ourselves and come together in order to interact and integrate. These factors determine whether we create a fascist machine that enslaves us as "mere cogs in wheels" or whether we create a vibrant healthy living organism that can thrive and glow with health, where its health is our collective health, its intelligence is our collective intelligence and its joy is our collective joy.

Integration is inevitable and cannot be avoided, it is inherent in our social nature. But by dwelling in shallow ignorance of the situation, clinging to confused agendas and imposing materialist mechanistic delusions upon the world we will objectify the world and ourselves as mere resources to be consumed by a vast automated industrial machine that will kill the life within us and thereby inevitably destroy itself and the life of the planet with it, perhaps leaving only some insects and bacteria to rebuild and try again amidst the fallout of a nuclear Armageddon. Or by embracing integration openly and opening our minds to the deep systemic nature of ourselves, of the world and of our future we can intelligently and compassionately direct the transition toward and beatific result and create something that nurtures and nourishes our potential, that makes full and productive use of the best that we have to offer each other and the world and that brings us together in harmony and creative abundance.

We are fast approaching the stage where we must make this decision. The machine is tightening its grip and life is welling up from deep within. We are in the midst of the greatest authoritarian scourge of all time, driven by advanced technology and advanced mass manipulation but at the same time we are in the midst of the greatest flowering of real understanding and real awareness, we are on the brink of a holistic scientific revolution and well into the greatest, longest and deepest spiritual awakening of all time. Forces are converging and something is about to happen, but ultimately the choice is ours and we each make that choice in our own hearts and minds, in the way we live our lives, they way we think and communicate and interact and come together to manifest this civilisation each and every moment of our lives. The egoic mechanistic nightmare is drawing to a close at which point we will wake up and realise that it was all just an agitated delusion, that the sun is shinning and a vast and beautiful world holds us in its embrace.

This change in the seasons is beyond anyone’s control but each of us in our own way plays a vital part. Be true to yourself and the life that flows from within, and trust in the unfolding of the process of life on Earth; it is bigger and stronger than we know; it is alive, it is conscious and it wants to not just survive but to thrive. In the end our ignorance has no power over reality, and although some may face individual suffering and sacrifice, the life of the world will continue as it has already done for billions of years and that life is our greater Life that we live despite the egoic illusion of separate isolated existence.

Best wishes : )
John Ringland

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