"We're analogous to the single-celled organisms when they were turning into multicellular organisms. We're the amoebas, and we can't quite figure out what the hell this thing is that we're creating."

"Two hundred conscious people could change the evolution of the whole of humanity on earth."

We live in a time of rapid, widespread change. All of our institutions seem to be remaking themselves, if not actually dying out and being replaced by others. The nuclear family, though not extinct, has evolved into many new forms. The workplace is far different from what it was just a few decades ago; for many people, it no longer even is a physical place. Ethnic movements are erupting all over the globe, challenging the authority of older nations in increasingly violent ways. The internet has flooded the world with an incomprehensible amount of information.

To many people, including most scientists and academics, these changes have no apparent connecting pattern. While all of these ongoing transitions certainly can be explained, in the sense that we can pick out a large number of social, cultural, economic and historical factors that have preceded them, these factors are generally considered to be highly contingent. That is, there is nothing inevitable about what is happening on earth today. If our past had been a little different, our present might be very much different.

This view is deeply embedded in the older Darwinian concept of change that is such a predominant part of our worldview today. Evolution is blind, and therefore largely unpredictable and full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant. While we can look back at the past and have some understanding of why different forms of life evolved, we can never be sure of what will come next.

In the previous chapters, I have tried to show that while there is a certain amount of contingency in evolution, the process does lead inevitably to a holarchical organization of existence, in which higher levels emerge that include and transcend the lower. In the holachical view, therefore, what is happening on earth today, regardless of all its contingent details, is the further evolution of this holarchy. Many different types of holarchical changes are occurring, but the central one may in fact be the emergence of a new, planetary level of existence, one transcending and including all physical, biological and mental life on earth. This possibility has long been suggested by others (Teilhard de Chardin 1959; Ouspensky 1961; Aurobindo 1985; Russell 1995).

In Chapter 6 I discussed evidence for the existence of a higher level of existence, in the form of experiences of those who have claimed to come into contact with it. What I propose to do in this, the concluding chapter of this book, is discuss the dynamic implications of this higher level--that is, how its evolution may be affecting the rest of life on earth. This discussion, as we shall see, will not only elucidate the relationship of the higher level to the ordinary world we are most familiar with, but will provide further evidence that there is indeed a higher level emerging. The experiences of mystics, of course, are not readily available to everyone, and their meaning, if not their reality, can certainly be challenged. In contrast, most of the features of civilization I will be discussing here are freely observable to all of us in our ordinary consciousness. To the extent they are consistent with the holarchical model I have been developing, they provide further support for this model.

The Organization of Civilization

As I noted at the outset of this chapter, tremendous changes are occurring in the social, economic and cultural institutions of our societies. A striking feature of most of these changes is that they are resulting in both greater unity, in some respects, and more diversity, in other ways. Businesses, for example, are at once growing larger and more monopolistic, through corporate mergers and multinational ventures, and smaller and more people-oriented, as more and more individuals become entrepreneurs. Nations are forming larger super-governmental organizations, such as the European Economic Union, and new alliances of Western and Eastern countries; but ethnic or nationalistic movements are also more prominent, both within and outside of established nations. The Internet has brought together hundreds of millions of people on earth in a historically unprecedented manner, but it has also made it easier for some people to become more independent of current social systems.

As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, a defining feature of any level of existence is that it both transcends and preserves the properties of its component holons. In the cell, atoms, small molecules and larger molecules all can exist in semi-autonomous forms as well as components of immediately higher-stage holons. In the organism, the same is true of cells and various forms of multicellular organization. The term semi-autonomous is critical here; all lower order holons within cells are constrained to some extent, as are all lower order holons within organisms. They can't freely move in and out of the cell or organism, for example. Yet their properties are very different from those of equivalent holons that are not semi-autonomous. Individual atoms within cells move about much as they do outside of cells; atoms that are part of higher stage holons do not. And the same for cells in organisms.

In light of these observations, the emergence of human social organizations in which some individuals and some organizations of individuals are relatively autonomous is thus consistent with the presence of a higher level of existence transcending all human existence. In such a higher level, it is to be expected that there is room for all kinds of holons. All individuals do not have to be part of a family, as they invariably were in older societies; all families do not have to be part of a large, local social organization; still larger societies do not have to be part of a modern nation. All individuals and societies are constrained by virtue of being part of the earth, but within that constraint they may behave largely indepedently of larger social organizations.

This view has some rather serious implications. As I emphasized in Chapter 4, our degree of mental development is closely related to the degree of our social organization. The highest human mental features, such as the ability to think logically, emerge only in individuals who participate in large, complex social organizations. It follows that individuals who don't participate in these organizations will be, by our modern view, somewhat regressive. That regressive behavior is very evident in the world today. As Ken Wilber points out, much of the world has not reached the stage of rational, logical consciousness, and this is that part of the world that is less developed socially (1995). Much of the strife we see in the world is the product of a worldview that first emerged several thousand years ago, one that has a fundamentalist view of God and leadership.

So the holarchical model I am presenting here predicts that we will continue to have individuals and societies of various degrees of mental development. Not everyone will participate in the higher social stages of the mental level. The emerging new level of existence has room for individuals and societies like this; it can tolerate such diversity. Indeed, the holarchical view implies that such individuals and societies are as necessary to the higher level as the higher stages are. They wouldn't persist if they weren't.

Compression of Information.

In Chapter 7 I pointed out that while information in human societies has increased enormously during the computer age, so, too, has its compression. Indeed, each of the major information ages defined by Robertson (1998) has been characterized not only by a new medium of information--oral, written, printed, and electronic--but also by a new process of information compression. This significance of this compression is easily missed, precisely because it does go hand in hand with an increase in total information. That is, while our ability to compess information has increased dramatically over the past several thousand years, the amount of information we need to compress has increased far more so.

From its very beginnings, human language compressed information into words. Confronted with an enormously rich sensory environment, we learned to pack much of our experience of that environment into signs and symbols. Words, which are just the intersubjective forms of these symbols, abstract certain features from this experience--as when we say an object is red, or tastes sweet, or feels rough--which to a partial extent can be regenerated or expressed by combining many words according to certain rules. This is the essence of compression.

Printed language extends the abstraction process begun by written language. Concepts that are too complex to be expressed in one or even in a few words now find a home in a new unit--the printed book or document. Now it becomes possible to communicate not just with words, but by reference to immense collections of words. A book such as this one is an example. By citing other authors, I compress, in a few words, an enormous amount of information contained in the works of these authors.

Finally, there is electronic information. Computers, and particularly the internet, have the potential to continue this abstraction process still further. The pioneering unit here, it seems to me--though it's not likely to be the final form that the unit will take--is the Web page. A Web page, whether it be of an individual or an organization, can compress information from an enormous variety of sources, including oral, written and printed, as well as other electronic information. Though Web pages are not a standard of communication yet, they are clearly heading in this direcion.

Notice that each of these major transitions in human information processing is associated with a new holon composed of many former holons. Oral words are composed of many aspects of human experience, in the sense that each word can refer to some human experience. Written works are composed of oral words, and may refer to oral events. Printed works are composed of many written words, and may refer to both oral and written forms of communication. Electronic language has the potential to encompass all the others. Thus each stage is composed of repeating units of the preceding stage.

Electronic information, however, bears a somewhat different kind of relationship to what preceded it, much the same kind of relationship that we have seen levels of existence bear to their stages. Electronic communication not only transforms the previous stages, but transcends them. It not only includes them within higher order holons, but makes it possible for each of the earlier stages to exist autonomously.

This is not true of the earlier stages. Written information uses the words of oral information, but it's a different process. Communicating by writing is not the same as communicating by speaking. The words are all there, but constrained; some of their properties, evident in direct speech, are not retained. In the same way, printed information uses both oral and written information, but again the process is different. To communicate by writing a book is not the same thing as to communicate by speaking, nor is it the same as communicating by writing in a form that does not employ reproduction and mass distribution. Relationships like these, as we saw in Part 1, are typical of relationships between different stages on the same level of existence.

Electronic information, however, does allow all the other forms of information to coexist within itself. That is to say, one can (or soon will be able to) communicate both orally and electronically at the same time, by the same process, using the sound capacities of computers. One can also communicate simultaneously by written information and electronic information, as for example in e-mail. And one can communicate by a process that involves both printed and electronic information, using mass mailings or by Web sites, for example.

Electronic communication, therefore, has an inclusive nature to it that suggests to me that it might be the emerging informational holon of a new level of existence. It is not, of course, identical to the new holon on a higher level, any more than the genome is the same as the cell, or the brain is the same as the organism. But it is the locus of information needed to specify that level, at least to the extent that we have seen lower levels are specified by their informational holons.

Energy Efficiency.

In the past few decades, we have witnessed an increasing tendency for human societies to use natural resources more efficiently. In America and other Western nations, this is occurring at all levels of society, from recycling of paper and other consumable packagings by individuals and families to national policies on energy use. There is obviously no mystery about why this is happening. There is a growing awareness of the scarcity of resources, that we can't afford to waste anything. There is an equal awarenes of the limited space we have in which to discard wastes.

In the previous chapter, I suggested that selection be defined as survival of the most efficient. Energy efficiency is critical for evolution at all times. But it becomes particularly essential when a higher level is emerging, because different holons are now no longer competing with one another, but cooperating. One way they do this is by not dumping their waste in their neighbor's backyard, so to speak, but by using it. Thus we saw that a set of chemical reactions springs into an autocatalytic network when the products of one reaction are not discarded into the environment, but are recycled back into the system.

This is exactly what human societies are now doing. The point is not that the autocatalytic model, as developed by Stuart Kauffman, is an accurate portrayal of human civilization today. The point is simply that the general concept of autocatalysis applies to any system when what it previously considered "other" becomes part of its sense of self. The distinction between ourselves and our environment is breaking down. Many people, of course, have been saying this for a long time, urging us to respect the earth as a single system or Gaia. In the holarchical view, though, this is not a matter of choice. It has to happen. At a certain level of evolution, the earth becomes a new level of existence, because there is no other way for it to survive.

The Doomsday Scenario.

One of the strangest and most macabre ideas to be proposed by serious scientists and philosophers in recent years is the so-called doomsday scenario. Its adherents argue that it strongly suggests the human race is near the end of its existence; that we will soon become extinct. What I would like to show here is that the same argument can used in support of the emergence of a new level of existence..

The doomsday argument, first proposed by physicist Brandon Carter, and subsequently further elaborated by philosopher John Leslie, goes as follows (Leslie 1996). The total population of human beings on earth has been increasing at an exponential rate for a very long period of time, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Because of this increase, the total number of people currently alive on earth is about 10% of all the people who have ever lived, in the entire history of the planet. But likewise, the total number of people on earth today is an even smaller percentage of all the projected number of people who will have lived as of some later date. Since we expect that the population of the earth will continue to grow, each succeeding generation will be larger than that before it, and the further back in time any generation is, the smaller the percentage of the total number of people--past, present, and future--it represents is. Even if the population should eventually stabilize, reproduction of this limiting number of people generation after generation will swamp the planet in cumulative numbers dwarfing those present now.

Seeing these projections, the doomsday theorists ask: isn't highly improbable that we would just happen to be alive, and conscious, and thinking of this issue, right now? Given that all the people on earth today are such a tiny fraction of all the people who will have inhabited the planet during the entire projected course of humanity, isn't it strange that we should find ourselves where we do? Of course, some people have to be alive in each generation, just as a few individuals win the lottery. But the probability of finding ourselves in any particular generation is very low at every point in time except at or near the very end, when the largest number of people exist. That is to say, in any population of organisms that increases over time until some endpoint when the population becomes extinct, the great majority of the organisms will be found near the end. And so the doomsday logic leads to this frightening conclusion: the projected population increase of humanity is not going to happen. The human race is near the end of its existence.

The doomsday argument, strange as it is, is made even stranger, but also perhaps more compelling, in light of the modern view of physics that space and time form a continuum. This implies that the entire population of earth, not just today, but past and future, is all there. We are not talking about a population that is constantly growing so much as a large mass of life extending through time as well as space. We could be anywhere in this mass, but if it extends very far into time, then, to repeat, the probability is very high that we will find ourselves near the end of the space-time mass of humanity.

To this basic argument, doomsday theorists add some other relevant points. There was only a relatively limited window of opportunity for intelligent life to evolve on earth. The process of evolution could not begin until the planet was formed, and had cooled down sufficiently to permit the existence of cells and higher forms of life. On the other hand, evolution could not have begun too much later than it did, nor taken much longer than it has, for if it had, human beings would not have had time to emerge before the sun, proceeding through the typical phases of stellar evolution, blows up and finally burns out. So it appears, in this scenario, that the emergence of human beings evolved to the point where they could reflect on their own existence would have to occur near the end of the species.

The flaw in the doomsday conclusion, it seems to me, is that it assumes that human beings are completely autonomous holons, with no connections to one another. This assumption is explicit in any line of reasoning based on probability. If we are going to say that the probability of existing at one point in time and space is greater than the probability at some other point of time and space, we have to have a concept of existence as a discrete entity in time and space. We are basically counting beans, and saying that the more beans there are in one place at one time, the greater the likelihood that any one bean will be in that place at that time.

But as it should be obvious from the holarchical view, we are not beans! We have connections to each other, in our social organizations, that extend not only into space but also into time. As I discussed in Chapter 4, through these connections we participate in the properties of our societies, most clearly in our ability to form repeating thoughts and images in our minds. These mental patterns give our world a sense of permanence, and ourselves and other people an identity. By definition, these patterns don't confine us to one time and one place, but give us a rather diffuse existence, one extending into the past as well as the future.

Again, it may help to illustrate the point by considering a lower level of existence. The doomsday argument could also be applied to a growing population of cells. According to this argument, most cells, like most people, will be found near the end of the lifetime of the population, when the size of the population has reached its maximum. This works fine for a largely disorganized mass of cells, like bacteria growing in a culture flask, for example. But suppose the cells are part of a higher-order holon--an organism. In this form, the individual cells also continue to grow and reproduce. But would we say that the probability of finding a particular cell is greater at one time in the life of the organism than at another? No, because the concept of a particular cell is no longer very clear in an organism. As discussed in Chapter 3, tissues in organisms are cell lineages, the extension in time of a single cell reproducing through many generations. It makes little sense to point to any one cell as a discrete identity, because part of its existence is in both the past, in the cell that gave rise to it, and in the future, in the cells it will in turn give rise to.

Another way to make this point is to say that the very process by which we observe ourselves as living in this particular time and place--which is critical to the doomsday argument of probability--is not a property of individual human beings. It is a property of social organizations. We participate in these properties,but we neither create nor possess them. So when the doomsday theorist says to himself: why am I conscious now of being a particular human being on earth?--he is simply realizing a property that extends far beyond him in space and time.

The doomsday logic, then, doesn't work when applied to organisms with a complex social structure. And it's particularly inadequate if that structure is part of a higher level of existence. So the observation that our civilization continues to exist when, from a probabilistic point of view, it should be near its termination, could be taken as a further argument for the emergence of a higher level of existence. The presence of this higher level above our own mental level implies a further extension of our identities in space and time.

While an emerging new planetary holon will have the greatest impact on the mental level immediately below it, it may also be associated with changes in the biological features of the planet. I pointed out in Part 1 that evolution of the physical level is essentially complete. As far as we know, no new atoms or molecules are being created in nature, nor are new cells evolving. Human beings, however, have created several new kinds of atoms, and innumerable new molecules, some of which have found their way into the larger environment. These chemicals, and other products of human civilization, are having a major impact on the evolution of other organisms. Furthermore, we have just recently developed the ability to clone certain organisms (Kolata 1998). So the biological level of the planet, along with the mental level, is also changing. Can we find any direction in these changes?

As I said earlier, I regard human societies as analogous, on our mental level of existence, to the brain of an organism. Like the brain, they are composed of the most communicative fundamental holons on their level--human beings--and like the brain, societies are capable of creating and storing vast amounts of information that affect the development of a larger holon encompassing the entire earth. Pursuing the implications of this analogy further, it would seem that all other forms of life, animal and plant, ecosystems large and small, would form the higher-level equivalent of tissues and organs of a postulated super-organism.

A problem with this view, however, is that a higher-level holon of this sort is not quite analogous to the organism. In the latter, all cells are genetically identical; that is, they possess the same deep structure of genomic information. As we saw in Chapter 3, differences in tissues and organs result from differences in genetic surface structure, that is, in the way the genome is expressed in different cells. In contrast, in the planetary holon as I have postulated it, each tissue or organ is composed of holons with different deep structures, that is, organisms with different genetic makeup as well as different brains. Indeed, most tissues or organs, as I have defined them for the planetary holon, are composed of many different kinds of organisms. For ecosystems, as I discussed in Chapter 4, are highly heterogeneous.

There are several possible ways to account for this lack of analogy. First, of course, there may be no emerging planetary holon. Life on earth has gone about as far as it can go. Human societies may grow more complex, and a few individuals may experience higher consciousness, but a physical/biological/mental holon corresponding to this consciousness will never fully evolve. This might occur because of some pathology that prevents further evolution, or because further evolution simply is not possible.

A second explanation is that the emerging planetary holon is simply not analogous in this respect to the organism. In fact, it might be analogous not to the level immediately below it--the organism and its biological stages--but to existence two levels below it--the cell and its physical stages. For the cell, as we have seen, is composed of many different kinds of atoms. Though I have not discussed the composition of atoms themselves, we can regard the atomic nucleus, with its protons and neutrons, as the deep structure of information in the atom. So a cell is, in an important sense, composed of atoms in a way very different from the way an organism is composed of cells. Its fundamental holons are heterogeneous in a way that the fundamental holons of the organism are not.

However, pursuing this idea further leads us to another problem. For even the genome of a cell is composed of different kinds of atoms--chiefly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. A planetary holon based on this model would contain a brain-like structure consisting of not only human societies, but those of several other species as well. A possibility, perhaps, but certainly not the most likely view of our future.

So neither the cell nor the organism seems to serve as a very good model of the planetary holon, as I have postulated it. Perhaps this reflects a basic lack of analogy among these three levels of existence. Perhaps the planetary holon will have some entirely new kind of organization. There is another possibility, however. We could reformulate our view of the planetary holon so that it would be more consistent with what we know about holarchical organization at lower levels of existence. We could postulate that the evolving new level of existence will consist of the earth with only one major species, presumably ourselves. In this model, not only the brain of the planetary holon, but all its "tissues" and "organs" (by which I simply mean those parts of this form of life that carry out the processes of assimilation, adaptation and communication) would be composed of human beings. This kind of planetary holon would be much more analogous to the organism than the first model I proposed.

In this planetary holon, human beings would therefore fill a variety of roles. Those who were part of the higher-level holon's brain would be intellectuals, and perhaps even more, individuals capable of transrational or transpersonal experiences, of the kind discussed in Chapter 6. Other people would be primarily responsible for obtaining energy (assimilation) and other functions related to growth of the planetary holon, and perhaps in a very far future, communicating with other planets of a similar stage of evolution.

In this respect, the organization of the higher-level holon, I believe, would not be terribly different in principle from that of the earth today. People are members of different kinds of social institutions and play different roles within those institutions. The unwelcome implications of this model, of course, arise from the lack of other species of life. This view of the planetary holon suggests that a large number of forms of life on earth will go extinct. Some forms of plant and animal life might remain in order to supply us with oxygen and food, and to regulate the temperature and other weather conditions on earth--somewhat, perhaps, as the otherwise genetically identical cells of the human organism share their space with numerous kinds of bacteria.

This vision of the future, I emphasize, is based solely on a fairly strict devotion to the principle of analogy between holarchical levels of existence. I'm not so enamored of this principle, and so confident of its correctness, that I'm about to begin predicting, let alone campaigning for, the extinction of other forms of life. But we all know that species are becoming extinct at a rate literally thousands of times greater today than they did during most periods of the past, and some scientists estimate that as many as one half of the believed thirty million species present on earth could disappear by the end of the next century (Diamond 1992). The conventional wisdom among most scientists is that extinction of this magnitude is pathological; there are very good arguments to be made that it would lead to collapses of ecosystems world-wide, and threaten our survival (Wilson 1992; Perry 1992; Eldredge 1998). Yet there is a strong correlation between human social development and extinction of species. Not only has extinction accelerated as human societies have become more complex, but today, evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson notes:

The developed countries, it's true, live off the backs of the undeveloped nations; they need the resources of the latter. But their development also seems to require that they maintain a relatively low ratio of wilderness to developed areas within their own borders. Economist Julian Simon would explain this in terms of value:

I'm not saying I personally look forward to a future with more people and less wilderness. I am saying that we don't have enough understanding of what a higher level of existence might be like to be sure that such a future is not compatible with the continued existence of human societies, that it may not even be pathological. Because of our emerging ability to clone organisms, one could easily imagine a future in which we have gene banks for many if not most of the organisms on earth today, making it possible to recreate these species at any time. Having this form of extinction insurance, as it might be called, we may be more willing to experiment on a large scale with doing away with certain ecosystems, knowing that we can reconstitute them if necessary.

In any case, we must remember that evolution at every level of existence is a highly selective process. A few new forms of life persist; a great many fall by the wayside. If the earth really is in the throes of the birth of a higher level of existence, as new and as different from everything before it as cells and organisms in their time were, then our future is sure to surprise us. The essence of surprise is that it doesn't fulfull our expectations, of what will be or what should be.

An emerging higher-level holon should be associated with a higher-level of consciousness. We might therefore expect that the most straightforward way of determining whether this holon really is emerging would be to look at the evidence that individual human beings are increasing in consciousness. I addressed this question earlier, in Chapter 6, where I came to the conclusion that while numerous polls suggest that large numbers of people have had some experience with a higher state of consciousness (Austin 1998), it's difficult to say whether this experience is any more common than it was in the past. Part of the problem is that we have no records of this kind from earlier civilizations for comparison; in addition, there is the question of whether what people report as experience of a higher state in fact really is.

It is fairly clear that there is much more interest in higher states of consciousness today than there was only a few decades ago. Regardless of how many people have actually had significant experience with these states, a great many people say they want to. To some, this in itself is evidence of a major transition in human civilization. The assumption underlying this view, expressed in endless numbers of books on meditation flooding the shelves of bookstores today, is that higher consciousness is accessible to anyone who wants it. From this belief, it's only a short step to the conclusion that our entire species is destined at some time in the near future to undergo a major evolutionary change. Isn't that what the emergence of a planetary holon is all about?

There are really two issues here. First, is it possible for everyone, at any rate very large numbers of people, to realize a significantly higher state of consciousness? And second, is it necessary for this to occur for a new, planetary level of existence to emerge? These two questions, in my view, are far and away the most critical ones facing the human race today. Anyone who understands the reality of higher consciousness ought to be asking them, again and again and again. Let's examine them one at a time.

The notion that higher consciousness is for everyone is not new. As I pointed out in Chapter 12, many Oriental philosophers have long adopted an evolutionary view in which it's assumed that all of life is destined to merge with a universal consciousness that is the source of everything. However, we should be aware that this belief has been far from universal. It is not only a social construct, but one that has been reinvented at many points in history, apparently to further the aims (sometimes material aims) of particular religious movements. When this reinvention process wasn't going on, a much different story appears. The Bible advises that many are called, but few are chosen. The early, Hinayana school of Buddhism taught that enlightenment was for an elite, the relatively rare individuals able to endure the rigors of struggling with one's desires (Ch'en 1968; Corlett 1991). Only with the later Mahayana school, bent on winning new converts, did the idea emerge that enlightenment was for everyone, and even now, some branches of the Buddhist tree take the older view. In this century, Gurdjieff not only emphasized that higher consciousness was for the few, but formulated this message in terms of his holarchical view. His words make a useful counterpoint to the contemporary assumption that higher consciousness is the birthright of everyone:

To most people, the notion that the experience of higher consciousness should be confined to an elite few is not simply undemocratic, but dangerous. It raises the spectre of the Chosen people, the holier-than-thou attitude that has been the source of so much religious conflict over the centuries. On that basis alone, we might want to reject it. However, the issue here is not whether the spiritual path is open to everyone; there is no argument over that. The question is whether most people actually can or will follow it.

The idea that most of us can seems to fit nicely with the evidence that we have evolved an increasingly higher degree of consciousness during our history on earth. Transpersonal philospher Ken Wilber has developed an extremely detailed model of this evolution, in which it unfolds in a series of stages (Wilber 1980, 1981). In the case of our ordinary consciousness, both the existence and the general features of these stages are very well documented from studies of child development by Piaget (1992) and others. The nature of the stages above our ordinary consciousness obviously is somewhat more open to debate. However, drawing from a large number of sources, Eastern and Western, Wilber has attempted to abstract some common denominators, and on the basis of these argues that human development has the potential to continue above our current level of existence much as it proceeded to where it is now.

The use of the word "unfolding" here, it seems to me, is problematic, because it implies that the potential to develop higher consciousness is present in all human beings, simply waiting for the right conditions for it to be expressed. In the case of the stages of ordinary consciousness--the various degrees of perceptual, moral, cognitive, and interpersonal qualities that humans develop--the potential is clearly there. All human beings, given the appropriate environment, will move through these stages, at least most of them. But can the same be said of higher consciousness? Is realizing higher consciousness really--as in Wilber's neat scheme--simply a matter of further unfolding higher stages? To say that it is to suggest that there is a certain set of social conditions in which people can be placed that will more or less guarantee that they reach higher consciousness.

All I can say is that no one has ever discovered such conditions. We really have no reason to believe that they exist at all. Any reading of the lives of the great mystics should quickly disabuse one of the notion that realizing higher consciousness is fast, easy or natural. It's the most difficult thing that a human being can do, so much more difficult than even the greatest of human mental, emotional and physical accomplishments that there really is no basis for comparison. No other human activity requires that one constantly oppose the very process that distinguishes us from other species, which is thinking. No other human activity must be pursued every waking moment, throughout one's entire life. No other human activity requires that we constantly, day in and day out, suffer, live awkwardly and uncomfortably, struggle with our desires, our motivations, and our most basic sense of self. No other human activity forces us to face death again and again and again, throughout our lives. No other human activity provides no outer rewards whatsoever--nothing that other people can see and appreciate--but must be done sheerly for its own sake. Does this sound like a process of natural unfolding? It may be in some sense, but it surely is conceptually quite distinct from the unfolding of the lower stages of consciousness that a child experiences in its development.

Of course, we can only speak about the world as it exists now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the human race will change, so that future generations will consist of large numbers of meditative adepts. But how? The biological evolution of our species appears to be complete. The deep structure of our brain emerged fifty to one hundred thousand years ago, and that of the genome probably long before that. While we still know relatively little about the relationship of the brain to the process of meditation (Wallace, 1993; Austin, 1998), it seems clear to me, at least, that in the absence of further changes in the brain, this process will be just as difficult for future generations as for our own. The experiences of thousands of people in the 1960s demonstrated that while glimpses of higher consciousness can be achieved through the use of certain drugs, these drugs can't bring one to this state permanently. Nor can any of the various gadgets that are being marketed for this purpose, like biofeedback machines (Schwartz 1998). There is no known substitute for a life of struggle and suffering.

It's conceivable that we will succeed in re-engineering the brain, through genetic manipulations, or perhaps through the creation of human-computer hybrids. In theory, this might make it possible to create individuals capable of pursuing higher consciousness--who have that quite apparently rare combination of qualities needed both to understand what needs to be done and to put that understanding into practice. But both technical and nontechnical obstacles to this would be immense. To take the latter first, can we really imagine that any human society is going to make the decision that henceforth all its members will be designed to certain very fine specifications? That no set of parents can have children of their own choosing--that perhaps people won't even create children in the biological way any more? As for the technical obstacles, it's enough to note that one could not, for example, simply clone someone whom society has somehow managed to recognize as a good example of a meditator. A successful meditator not only has a certain genetic and nervous system endowment, but is the product of certain experiences. It's probably safe to say that none of the great mystics of the past that we know about would have followed her path if her life history had been just a little different.

Perhaps the conditions themselves will evolve. In Chapter 9 I argued that the difference between the mental development of a modern human being and one living ten or twenty thousand years ago is very difficult to account for. Evolutionary science says that our brain is biologically no different from the brain of a human being of that period, implying that the differences are only social. Yet these social differences are difficult to identify. Advancement through most of the early stages, ones that take the child well beyond our ancestors, does not seem to require direct instruction. As I concluded in Chapter 9, the key factor seems to be that the child is embedded in a much more complex society that it actually perceives with its mind.

Arguably, a similar situation might exist with respect to higher consciousness. Human beings today are, from this perspective, like our ancestors of many thousands of years ago. Though we have the proper biological brain for realizing higher consciousness, we require a more complex social organization in order for the process to develop naturally. Only when this organization emerges, gradually over a period of perhaps many centuries, will higher consciousness truly become accessible to large numbers of people.

In any case, it's surely safe to conclude that there is not going to be a massive ascent to higher consciousness at any time soon. Does this mean that the emergence of a planetary holon is very far in the future? This brings us to the second question I raised. Is it necessary for the emergence of a new level of existence that large numbers of people realize higher consciousness? The quote from Gurdjieff I presented earlier implies that not only is it unnecessary for the further evolution of the earth that everyone realize higher consciousness, but that it might actually be necessary that most people don't. Gurdjieff suggested the existence of higher-level forces designed to prevent most people from reaching this state. What could he have meant by this?

If we examine how evolution of lower levels of existence has taken place, we immediately realize that the emergence of a new level is never made at the expense of most lower forms of life. The evolution of cells did not mean the end of atoms and molecules, nor did cells become extinct when organisms came on the scene. Cells simply reorganized atoms and molecules in a new way, as organisms then did to cells. In the same way, it seems most plausible to me that if a higher level of existence really is in the process of evolving, it will require the survival of human beings as a species. Humans are the cells of this planetary holon, as essential to its existence, I believe, as real cells are to organisms, as atoms and molecules to cells.

In conclusion, it seems to me that there are several good reasons for believing that if a higher level of existence is emerging, a planetary holon, it will not be associated with the end of the human race as we know it. Human beings and their societies will be required not only to bring it into existence, but to sustain it. Whether all of us, or even very many of us, will fully participate in this higher level is very much less certain.

What about some participation? Isn't it possible that many people could at least increase their degree of consciousness somewhat, even if not realizing a genuinely higher level? Isn't that actually happening now? Aren't people all over the earth, very slowly but surely, experiencing an increase in their consciousness?

This belief reflects a basic misunderstanding about what higher consciousness is all about. While one can be enriched by the ideas of higher consciousness, one can't participate in the experience peripherally. This, I believe, is very hard for most people to understand. We all recognize that Einsteins are exceedingly rare, but this doesn't mean there can't be other scientists of various degrees of brilliance, as well as informed non-scientists who can have some understanding of complex scientific ideas. Likewise, there may be only one Michael Jordan, but just about anyone can not only play basketball, but get better at it with practice. In the same way, isn't is possible for people to differ in their ability to meditate, and thus in the degree to which they realize higher consciousness?

Much of this statement applies to genuine meditators as well, but the meditator is very definitely looking for the cure, striving towards it, even if it's not realized in his lifetime.

But even if most people will never realize higher consciousness, as the planetary holon continues to evolve, most if not all of us will be touched by it. The re-organization of society implied by the emergence of a new level will complete the highest stages of mental existence, making new mental properties available to those who participate in these stages. The highest of these properties--perhaps what Ken Wilber (1995) calls "vision logic", a stage above rational/logical and now associated with only the most creative people in our society--will perhaps become as widely accessible as rationality is today. Just as large numbers of people in contemporary Western civilization are capable of reasoning powers that would have been incomprehensible to our tribal/villager ancestors, we can reasonably speculate that at some time in the distant future masses of people--not majorities, but substantial pluralities--will routinely use in their daily lives complex acts of creative imagination.

Beyond this, there will be, as I have emphasized throughout this book, a growing degree of freedom. Human beings in modern societies, like holons in the highest stages of lower levels of society, escape the rules and laws that apply to lower-stage holons. From the very beginnings of our organization into social groups and our parallel realization of mind, we began to free ourselves from the purely physical and biological existence that is the fate of most organisms. This process will find its culmination in the emergence of the planetary holon.