(They call me not Chicken Little for nothing.)
The day draws nigh. We can watch on-line as the mind is being rediscovered by the Tucson Consciousness Conferees. Our minds went missing at about the time that civilization began its long march into materialism. Modern scientific cosmology is the reductio ad absurdam of that inexorable thought process. Descartes was just the advance man for the final, scientific stage of the process.
The mind is sneaky and slippery. You give it an inch and it will take the extra mile. You crack open that door, and next thing you know it will have taken over the whole neighborhood. All of human history is the story of how we managed to keep a lid on the Pandora's Box of our minds, or more accurately our cosmic spirit. The end of history, and actually the end of the world is when, inevitably, we let that genie out of its bottle.
Another way to put this is that if the mind is not an accident of the world, then the world is a construct of the mind. What is constructed will be deconstructed and reconstructed. As we awaken to this situation, that will be the task before us. Materialism has bequeathed to us a cosmic class communication web that will greatly facilitate the earliest stages of the transformation of ourselves and our world.
One is allowed to be ambivalent about the end of history and the world, but there is no use crying. Life will go on in some mysterious fashion, and we must busy ourselves with maximizing the continuity and minimizing the traumatic discontinuities of consciousness.
Also, let it be known that we are not alone in confronting our spiritual destiny. We are not the sum total of the great spirit. A reasonably successful outcome of our natural transformation is as inevitable as the transformation itself. History has been one long preparation for this day. In our final hour, those preparations have been accelerating, mostly without our direct knowledge, but some humans have been given that knowledge down through the ages. Now that knowledge is for all of us. Let us use it wisely.
| Introduction | Contents | Glossary |