HOMO SAPIENS TO THE THIRD POWER

Ours is a time of crisis, a word that implies both danger and opportunity.

The dangers facing our Earth community—the ecosphere and its inhabitants—are many and urgent, and the list is a familiar litany to anyone who scans the headlines.

Our human population swells toward seven billion and our appetite for resources is ravaging the planet’s lungs (its rain forests), depleting and poisoning its fertile soils, killing its oceans, polluting and draining its fresh waters, carbonizing its over-heated atmosphere, and fomenting violent rivalries planet-wide.

Collectively, we have governed ourselves unwisely and have been bad stewards to the planet that births and nurtures us, our Mother Earth. It’s an easy analogy to liken the rapacious spread of our species around the planet to a consumptive, cancerous growth in its ecosystem.

So much for danger.

As for opportunity, it’s hopeful that we seem to be wising up (if all too slowly) to the danger our depredations pose to Earth’s viability. A major shift in human consciousness appears imminent and has begun to manifest itself in some harbingers of a New Humanity, a generation of people whose prime perspective is global, not provincial, and who see this planet not as a treasure trove to be plundered, but as a living being, the womb and nurse of all Earthlife— Gaia.

This new breed of Harmonious Humanity, instead of wreaking mindless havoc, like an autistic teenager, has grown mindful of the intricate and delicate interconnections among all Earth’s beings, comparable to those among all the cells in one’s body, woven in synchrony by a network, a mind-web of collective interconnections.

Our technological World Wide Web of electronic communications offers a metaphor for the psychic mind-field now manifesting in our consciousness as we mature into Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens (humanity to the third power)—our third power being not merely consciousness and self-consciousness, but wisdom.

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