Meetings > Meeting Notes > December 2, 2007
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December 2, 2007
The Global Brain
Resources
Peter Russell, The Global Brain video (35 minutes) explores the idea that the Earth is an integrated, self-regulating living organism and asks what function humanity might have for this planetary being.
Peter Russell, Towards a Global Brain, Chapter 8 in The Global Brain Awakens.
Steven Vedro "Our Evolving Global Brain," Shift, Sept. - Nov. 2007, pp. 24-29.
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CAT-Scan of the Global Brain (part 1) by Deepak Chopra on The Huffington
Post of October 29, 2007.
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2, Nov. 2
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3, Nov. 5
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4 , Nov. 9
Video: "Shift Happens" rattles off one trend after another -- such as the fact that there are more school kids with high IQs in China than there are school kids in the United States. Or that a single week of the New York Times contains more information than the average person absorbed in a lifetime in the 18th century. The overall message is that the world is changing exponentially.
Andrea opened the meeting with a quote from Edward Carpentier, a 19th century social scientist and poet:
"If you inhibit thought (and persevere) you come at length to a region of consciousness below or behind thought ... and a realization of an altogether vaster self than that to which we are accustomed. And since the ordinary consciousness, with which we are concerned in daily life, is before all things founded on the little local self ... it follows that to pass out of that is to die to the ordinary self and the ordinary world.
"It is to die in the ordinary sense, but in another it is to wake up and find that the 'I,' one's real, most intimate self, pervades the Universe and all other things — that the mountains and the sea and the stars are a part of one's body and that one's soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures."
And Albert Einstein, who said:
"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
"Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Peter Russell, an IONS fellow, coined the term "The Global Brain" in 1983 in a book by that title. In 2000, he updated his original work in "The Global Brain Awakens: Our Next Evolutionary Leap," and a newer edition is to be available in early 2008.
Russell argues that global communications and the Internet are helping to link the minds of humanity together to form a single, global brain and consciousness with remarkable potential.
Some snippets from his book:
p. 25 Material well-being and comforts are nice but they aren't the sole source of inner well-being.
p. 27 The unexpected will come upon us faster and faster. We can't plan for the unexpected but we can develop greater stability with, so that the unexpected doesn't arouse our fears and throw us so easily.
p. 111 Never before has a product of evolution participated so actively in accelerating the evolutionary process.
Ch. 7 Growing complexity: (1) increasing diversity (variety & numbers), (2) increasing organization (tribes to states to nations to groups like the European Union), (3) increasing connectivity.
Ch. 8 Language allowed us to shift from biological evolution to the much faster evolution of the mind.
p. 140 Is Gaia growing herself a nervous system?
p. 148 Humanity is growing together mentally, however distant physically. A new evolutionary level.
p. 158 Russell calls the new evolutionary phenomenon the Gaiafield, which will occur at the planetary level. It will likely possess characteristics unimaginable to our consciousness.
p. 164 The spearhead of evolution is now self-reflective consciousness... The evolutionary process has now become internalized within each of us.
p. 171 Self models: The "skin-encapsulated ego" -- "I" am "in here" the rest of the world is "out there." Another one is "a universal self not bounded by the skin or distinguishable from other selves"
p. 174 When an externally derived sense of identity is our only sense of identity, it becomes the most prescious of posessions.
p. 202 Waking up: you are already enlightened; all you have to do is wake up to the fact.
p. 203 We need to realize our essential oneness with nature, not just with our intellect and reason but with our feelings and with our souls.
p. 221 Conscious inner evolution is the particular phase of evolution that we are currently passing through.
p. 297 A growing experience of synchronicity throughout the population could be the first major indication of the emergence of a global level of organization -- an increase in ESP.
Deepak Chopra says "The global brain is more than the sum of all individual brains. It's a web of collective intelligence, a single entity that each of us is plugged into. It would seem that the global brain is taking an evolutionary leap at this very minute." In his articles on The Huffington Post, he describes some of the features that are common to the individual human brain and the global brain and asks: What is the best way to participate in the global brain? This isn't a theoretical problem, because global warming, over-population, and pandemic disease are forcing us to think outside old boundaries.
Respectfully submitted,
Andrea Drury