II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

Once again, the working premise for this website is that humankind altogether seems just now to achieve its own discovery. This Part II will glimpse its worldwide cerebral and cognitive dimension, set within a historical background. As a person’s brain assimilates and accommodates new findings by matching them with prior memory, so it is vital that new cosmological and traditional religious perspectives agree. For this purpose, three sequential encounters are introduced: a common wisdom of antiquity, the regnant scientific enterprise, and its novel planetary phase. Across this longview, our composite awakening traverses from an initial period of individual narrative from prehistory to circa 1500, an emergent transition by increasingly linked studies to circa 2000 when the witness of a cognizant humanity occurs in earnest.

A. Original Wisdom

At the outset, a Rosetta Cosmos concept is proposed as a pathway to ecumenical rapport. Mythic Animism next surveys an indigeneous, mystic immersion within and stories of a living, personified, magical realm. From this milieu arose independently in many places a sense of a stratified creation as the result of a creative iconic principle, by which the world is made humanly comprehensible. Various receptions both east and west are noted The Anthropocosmic Code. The great world religions are entered later on in Part VI, The Phenomenon of Humankind, with regard to how each manifests a universal, complementary truth. The Renaissance project to read the natural cosmos as a testament of God’s works by and its accord with God’s word in scripture is reviewed in The Book of Nature. Its recent revival is covered in Part VI, Religion and Science. A brief section on Western Philosophy is lastly included.

1. Rosetta Cosmos

The original Rosetta stone found in 1799 contained three versions of the same passage: two forms of Egyptian hieroglyphics and a third in Greek. By this unique find the Egyptian script could at last be translated. Today when religions and cultures vie over textual and historical heritage, when postmodernism says comparison is not possible, a Rosetta-like universe is suggested whereby each transcription, whether myth, religion, philosophy, literature, art or science, would necessarily describe the same reality. A renewed imagination that we indeed live in a literal, narrative creation made to be deciphered and read could be of much value. By this view, each language and dialect ought to reflect and report, in translation, the one, same message. A few works are noted here that convey this approach. The Book of Nature, An Informational Source and Emergent Genetic Information sections also contain apropos citations.

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2. Mythic Animism

For the Maya, the Universe was an exuberant celebration of fractals. Everything repeated itself in an endless variety of forms and sizes and all things were mirror-image transformations of the same underlying life force. Douglas Gillette

An eclectic selection of an immense literature about a primal, archaic, milieu and dreamtime as the human species stirs to comprehend and narrate a fantastic, magical abode and drama. This indigenous wisdom springs from and communes with a living, personal realm that we are in much need of remembrance today.

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3. An Anthropocosmic Code

As noted earlier, by the Rosetta Cosmos theme we gain the ability to translate each iconic version into every another because they all reflect the same creation. To jump ahead some two millennia, it is an intent of this website, especially in Part IV, A Cosmic Code, to show how its latest encounter in terms of complex adaptive systems can again convey the one numinous, self-similar genesis. These next sources are various entry points to its traditional expression

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4. The Book of Nature

A novel dispensational realm of discovery and knowledge by a global humankind ought to have a familiar, traditional identity. In 1987 Pope John Paul II wrote to George Coyne, SJ, Director of the Vatican Observatory, stating that “the matter is urgent” for a rapprochement between theology and science. In the first lecture set up in response, Danish historian Olaf Pedersen advised that the best means to achieve this may be to recover the ancient concept of nature as a second testament.

Two distinct modes of revelation are said to inform the religious encounter. One is God’s word in received scripture – the Bible, Torah, Koran; the other God’s works in the created world. This textual metaphor has deep roots going back to Plato, Aristotle and Augustine. Each creature was a sign or emblem, a living word, an exemplary presence. The mission to discern a Divine design motivated Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and the 16th and 17th century Renaissance natural theologians. “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed” famously advised Galileo.

This open book, variously sought by each religion, once sufficiently deciphered, by mathematics per Galileo, will surely accord with God’s given word. But in the 19th and 20th century as the cosmos burst into evolutionary space and time, life and the human became irrevalent to its blind mechanism. At a time when peoples of the book are locked in violent confrontation, often over misunderstandings between God and Human, heaven and earth, the advent of a natural scripture could be of much advantage.

Two points merit notice. First, it is humankind altogether whom is reading a cosmic Book of Nature, just becoming legible. As sections such as Part III, An Informational Source, and others imply, the universe can be known as fundamentally literal in kind. The second is that whereas in its earlier sense, nature’s orderly essence was primarily seen as proof of its Creator, today its common comprehension can reveal a phenomenal, sacred purpose for this earth and its human participants.

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5. World Philosophy

This subject has a huge literature, a few current books of interest are listed as a start. A note at this point is that contrary to postmodernism, we are indeed proposing a metanarrative but with the large difference that it is being achieved by a regnant, holistic humankind. Its venerable storyline is that the “novanarrative” of an organically developing cosmos and the “nanonarrative” of an individual life are still one and the same. At a cumulative moment in world history, macrocosm and microcosm again converge within a temporal genesis in an affinity of universe and human.

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B. The Spiral of Science

With the realization that the natural world possessed regular, discernible properties instead of capriciousness, that these can be investigated and codified, the Renaissance enterprise of science and technology began its exploratory and empirical quest which reaches global fruition only today. This project necessarily engaged in quantification: to name, count, measure, test and arrange an awesome creation of atomic depth, celestial size and evolutionary duration. But with each expansion over the past centuries, its human observer vanished into insignificance.

This agenda led to philosophical consequences quite opposed to the original initiative. As nature was taken apart and reduced piecemeal, the world came to appear more like a machine than an organism. A material paradigm took over which divorced people from nature, mind and spirit from matter. A first scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th century equated with natural philosophy and theology gave way to a second stage in the 19th century as it split into many specialties and subdisciplines - biochemistry, neuropsychology, ethnobotany, solid state physics and so on. This parcellation led to isolated fragments; the living realm was disassembled, dissected and embalmed. The endeavor to read sacred nature that began with such promise wound up with a cosmos of profane pointlessness.

A reintegration began in the 20th century when quantum physics and relativity theory set aside a billiard ball model for a seamless, interrelated unity. This conceptual shift is still working itself out and lately percolating into biological and social realms. For most of its tenure science was concerned with infinitesimal particles and infinite sidereal reaches. By means of fast, networked computers and graphic visualizations, a “third infinity” of directional, recurrent, dynamic complexity and consciousness can be now studied and expressed. The section is called The Spiral of Science because in retrospect the reconstruction of how universe and human came to be proceeds from separate investigators to an increasing dialogue and collaboration and onto a worldwide, interdisciplinary community. In the 21st century, an international project to reassemble, qualify and see whole has commenced, which this website hopes to document and communicate.

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C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Is it reasonable to consider the world order as being at all like that of the brain? Yes. What we observe is a similarity of order expressed at different levels, at all levels from cells to animals and from animals to societies. One wonders if this is perhaps a universal law….. Rodolfo Llinas

With life’s evolutionary emergence becoming known as a nested sequence of whole entities, (please see Part V) its next phase of planetary proportions seems much underway. In this regard, many observers perceive a metamorphosis to a diverse yet unified super-organic entity presently enveloping spherical earth. Its biological features of anatomy and physiology are covered in Part VI, The Phenomenon of Humankind. What is of great interest for us is the formation of a global cerebral faculty, a brain that learns. Since evolution repeats the same pattern at each ascendant stage, by extrapolating onto a worldwide scale a neural network structure, hierarchical thought processes and cognitive activity similar to a human brain can be recognized. A notable property is its analogous semblance of bilateral hemispheres, which are also considered in Part VI.

While these capacities have often been noted, as the references cite, a consequence of achieving its own consummate knowledge has not been followed up. If the advent of a planetary locus of learning and discovery can be admitted and translated, it could gather and integrate the so many fragments now at odds. At a time of vested parochial dissention, leading to hostility and violence, a common, inclusive edification would be of much service. This is the reason for our annotated bibliography and anthology format. Once again in this context, readers are invited to recommend works through our earthlearn@charter.net address.

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