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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

A. Historic Prescience: Individual Homo Sapiens

Vernadsky, Vladimir. The Biosphere. New York: Copernicus, 1997. A full translation and annotation by Mark McMenamin and a team of scholars of the 1929 French edition, La Biosphere. Vernadsky was an internationally respected scientist who strongly rejected Marxism. He spent a good part of the 1920s at the Sorbonne in Paris with Teilhard and Edouard LeRoy, who together formed the concept of a noosphere. Vernadsky was more scientifically based but as a friend of Leo Tolstoy shared his spiritual values. In his view, life is a cosmic and geological force engaged in the progressive transformation of “living matter” into complex organisms and the phenomenon (a word he used) of a unified humankind by the collective action of thought and reason. Vernadsky agreed with Teilhard that such a phase would at the same time be beneficial for and liberate individual persons.

Wagner, Roger and Andrew Briggs. The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. A premier British artist and a scientist achieve a unique millennial retrospect of human inquiry and wonderment about this Earthly and cosmic place that sapience has found itself. This luminous vista can then serve to illustrate a central, nascent theme for these mid 2010s. Ten parts and 50 chapters course from earliest inklings to Greek and Egyptian prescience, the heights of Islamic wisdom, onto Galilean and Newtonian physics and mathematics, and the familiar recount up to the Large Hadron Collider. After noting via Joseph Needham that China does not have a similar history, the work proposes that a driving motive for the West was a religious quest to seek and affirm Divine tracings and auguries in the natural realm. In this regard, as many website listings aver, this perennial “majus opus” task (Roger Bacon) came to realize that Nature appears to have its own textual language, a “universal law,” which we human beings (as ever all men herein) are meant to learn to read and behold.

Wallace, Alfred Russel. Man’s Place in the Universe. London: Chapman and Hall, 1912. The younger co-author (1823-1913) of the theory of natural selection, by Charles Darwin’s gracious inclusion, in later years took a cosmic and mystic turn in his interests. This much reprinted volume recounts an arduous yet teleological evolution toward an intended purpose of its self-aware, spiritual human phase. Within the starry cosmos of the day, our sun at its center, earthly humankind may be unique in all the (pre-galactic) universe. For a fine study of his wider vision, see "The Universe and Alfred Russel Wallace" by Steven Dick in Natural Selection and Beyond (Oxford, 2010). But a century of carnage later, any such promise has long been discarded and negated by a seemingly capricious, entropic multiverse. Such is our great 21st century task.

All nature tells us the same strange, mysterious story, of the exuberance of life, of endless variety, of unimaginable quantity. All this life upon our earth has led up to and culminated in that of man. Much of infinite variety of form and structure, the exquisite grace and beauty in bird and insect, in foliage and flower, may have been mere by-products of the grand mechanism we call nature – the one and only method of developing humanity. (265)

Lastly, I submit that the whole of the evidence I have brought together leads to the conclusion that our earth is almost certainly the only inhabited planet in our solar system, and - in the conception that, in order to produce a world that should be precisely adapted in every detail for the orderly development of organic life culminating in man, such a vast and complex universe as that which know exists around us, may have been absolutely required. (306)

Wells, H. G. World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia. https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html. A 2011 Book TV interview with James Gleick, author of The Information, concluded that the prime 20th century precursors of our worldwide webwork would be H. G. Wells’ “World Brain” and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere.” In 1937, Wells wrote this essay as an entry for the new Encyclopedie Francaise. In his luminous style, he envisioned the outlines of an enveloping, salutary repository of knowledge as an accessible resource in service of a common, peaceable civilization. Sadly, a horrific world holocaust soon engulfed, which drove HGW to despair and death in 1945. Over seven decades later national sovereignties, now with nuclear arsenals, still rail and vie in a cacophony of righteous ignorance and vengeance. How and when will we ever learn?

Wells, H. G., et al. The Science of Life. London: Cassell, 1931. Written in collaboration with Julian Huxley, a classic four-volume treatise and synthesis of biology, evolution, history and human culture at the time. By a holistic perspective, the concluding volume foresees the eventual formation of a collective, super-organic global mind. Wells broached this consummation in other works, and Huxley took up its occasion in later writings with his endorsement of Teilhard de Chardin’s vision.

West, Geoffrey. Scale and Dimension: From Animals to Quarks. Cooper, Necia Grant and Geoffrey West, eds. Particle Physics: A Los Alamos Primer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Around the mid 1980s, in the high altitudes of northern New Mexico, the LANL physics group began to broach a sense of something going on beyond subatomic depths. In this lead chapter, team leader West begins with an apt phrase from Hosea 7:10: “I have multiplied visions and used similitudes.” With the Santa Fe Institute just opening close by, chapters that join “quantum field theory, phase transition theory, and the dynamics of complex systems,” tried to glimpse a more vibrant nature on the horizon. At the time, by way of 1970s “renormalization” theories, outlines of an intrinsic “scale invariance” were starting to be perceived. Search Geoffrey West for a 2011 TED talk and 2012 Lancet article decades later to evince how this prescience has now in fact been borne out.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1969. . A philosophical principia of an organic cosmos still in creation. In his prolific period at Harvard in the 1920s, Whitehead envisioned a worldly and universal organism in a process of developing lately through its conscious entities. His original essays employed terms and phrases which limit accessibility but many subsequent works have elucidated a profound vision which presciently translates into complex system theory. A recent book Physics and Whitehead cited in An Organic Universe. The endeavor is carried on in a school known as process philosophy and in a journal, Process Studies.

Wolfram, Stephen. Statistical Mechanics of Cellular Automata. Reviews of Modern Physics. 55/3, 1984. An initial paper by the polymath originator, then at IAS, Princeton, of this computational cosmos which has since informed so many areas and uses via his Mathematica software and much more. See also in the same issue The Renormalization Group and Critical Phenomena by the Cornell University Nobel physicist Kenneth Wilson.

Cellular automata are used as simple mathematical models to investigate self-organization in statistical mechanics. A detailed analysis is given of "elementary" cellular automata consisting of a sequence of sites with values 0 or 1 on a line, with each site evolving in discrete time steps according to rules involving the values of its nearest neighbors. With simple initial configurations, the cellular automata either tend to homogeneous states, or generate self-similar patterns with fractal dimensions. With "random" initial configurations, the cellular automaton evolution leads to several self-organization phenomena. Statistical properties are found to lie in two universality classes, independent of the details of the initial state or rules. (Wolfram Abstract)

Russian Cosmism: Traditional Religion as Futuristic Science. www.college.harvard.edu/russian-cosmism-traditional-religion-futuristic-science. An April 2018 talk at Harvard Divinity School by the University of New England historian and author of The Russian Cosmists (2012 herein). Its capsule next cites this early 20th century breakout from feudal confines onto imagined universal human and Solar-Earth destinies. While drawn from a mythic spirituality, as opposed to Western fixations on a fallen past, human flaws and doomed planet, this alternative Eastern penchant envisioned infinite palliative and creative vistas. Instead of repentance, a participatory purpose is extolled as a great task to take up and fulfill this numinous genesis creation.

The HDS Theosophical Society presents a discussion on Russian Cosmism. Russian Cosmism emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a tendency in Russian thought to view traditional Russian Orthodox Christianity as a futuristic task of social activism and scientific technology. Nikolai Fedorov, the first-and-foremost Russian Cosmist, transformed the central Christian doctrine of the Resurrection into an all-encompassing universal project featuring, among other things, space travel, colonization of other planets, genetic engineering, and the infinite extension of the human life span. Those who contributed to the Cosmist tendency include the poet and philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov; the founder of Russian space science Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; the Marxist economist and Orthodox theologian, Sergei Bulgakov; the polymath priest Pavel Florensky; and the renowned bio-geologist and theoretician of the noosphere, Vladimir Vernadsky.

Young, George M.. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. A University of New England, Biddeford, Maine, professor of Russian cultural philosophy brings together for the first time a comprehensive history of these non-Western thinkers and sages deeply rooted in their geographic expanse and integral, life-affirming, numinous mindset. Along with the visionary mystic Fedorov (1829-1903) are notably 18th century forerunners, religious cosmists Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev, scientific cosmists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Vladimir Vernadsky, among many others. Their unique contribution, in contrast to a “pan-Atlantic” mechanical, individualist myopia, is an abidance in an holistic, teleological fertile milieu whereof human and universe dynamically contain and reflect each other. In regard, a materialist totalitarianism is to be rejected, rather the human purpose is much about “God-building.” Through diverse imaginations, our activities are seen as crucial to the success and furtherance of the whole genesis creation. This is the “common task,” a universal plan and project to “refashion” and complete the cosmos. Pierre Teilhard, as a rare western exemplar, is cited as a colleague of Vernadsky, indeed their collaborative “noosphere” of intentional reason is often its leading edge. See Michael Hagemeister above for a rare preview of this luminous vision.

Thus, in (Svetlana) Semenova’s definition, Cosmism not only shifts our perspective from an earth-centered to a cosmos-centered view, not shifts our self-image from earth dweller to cosmic citizen, but emphasizes that present humanity is not the end point of evolution, that in addition to its long past the evolutionary process also has a long future, and that humanity is now is a position to direct and shape its own future evolution. (8)

All the Cosmists have followed Fedorov’s teaching that knowledge must be active, whether spiritual or scientific. All have subscribed to a sense of wholeness, a view that man and the cosmos are interrelated, that the individual and the community complete fulfill each other, that life is in one or another present throughout the cosmos, that whether called God or aether or some other term, a supreme source and support of life and energy is present throughout the cosmos, that we and our planet are not alone. (235)

Younghusband, Francis. The Living Universe. New York: Dutton, 1933. An example of the persistent vision of an embryonic cosmos which innately spawns life and consciousness in a sympathetic fashion.

If the universe is an organism of the kind described above, with each of its component parts also an organism, then, as Whitehead shows, each part will repeat in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm - each unit will be a microcosm repeating in itself the entire all-inclusive macrocosm. (144)

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