CHALLENGES

To be an organism is, inescapably, to be challenged.

As long as one is alive, the “struggle for existence” is an imperative condition lasting until one reverts to inert matter.

Before that collapse, the essence of life is to succeed in meeting all the various, ceaseless challenges that threaten oblivion. Thus organisms are by nature strugglers and fighters, no matter how pacific or serene some may seem. While there appears to be an implicit imperative in the cosmos that births life from non-life, nonetheless, once animation emerges from inorganism, its continuing existence is challenged.

Although we are the most complex and sophisticated species we know, we humans are no less challenged than any other creature and must learn to struggle successfully or die. It is therefore no surprise that we are combative, that we are prone to contending and fighting so as to secure and protect the means of our survival and our flourishing. To expect us to be peaceable and loving is to thwart our essential combative instincts for security.

Only when human society has developed secure means to protect its members may individuals relax enough to attend to more “humane” enterprises transcending the fundamental need for safety. Even so, we remain “wired” for challenge, contention, and combat; and we’re likely to lash out to protect our egos, our turf, or whatever contributes to our sense of well-being.

Therefore, the road to sagacity and sainthood is rugged and steep, and few find the Way of the Buddha or Jesus: the serenity, loving-kindness and inner security that surpasses the instinct of self-preservation.

*

WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES
ONE OUGHT TO DEVELOP IN ONESELF
TO BECOME A GOOD PERSON?

• kindness and love
• clear thinking
• emotional balance
• health and fitness of body and brain
• strong expressive and communicative skills
• wide and various knowledge
• philosophical and spiritual wonder and consideration
• creative thinking and problem solving
• collegiality (“pondering together”)
• enjoyment and appreciation of truth, beauty and goodness, and the dedication to serve those values
• keen discrimination between what is important or worthy and what is trivial or frivolous
• judicious decisiveness
• taking active responsibility for the well-being of others

*

WITH BUDDHA’S BRAIN . . .

Your neural networks you’ll retrain;
In time you’ll learn not to complain;
You’ll modulate distress and pain;
Strife and anger you’ll disdain;
From old addictions you’ll abstain
And slowly grow kind and humane,
Finding in time how to be sane,
And last—enlightenment attain.

*

PRESTO!

Out of the dissolution of my mind
Precipitates the crystal of a thought,
And thus a verse begins, which then may bind
With other bits until a poem is wrought.

Where nothing was but a chaotic storm,
As if by magic, here appears a form.

Or is it, rather, being lost in woods
No path or track or trace to find my way,
Or being swept along by turbulent floods
Pounded and confounded and astray?

But then a light appears, a hand descends,
I come to ground, and my confusion ends.

*

MIND MATTERS

Old intimations I have felt suggest
A universe more intimate than that
My science textbooks taught: a Cosmos blessed
With consciousness, a holy habitat.

Though for so long I’ve bowed to science’ sway,
Denying what I’ve known in my heart,
I’m ready now to follow feeling’s way
Intuiting which is the horse, the cart.

The horse is mind, which draws all matter after,
Implicit with designs that time unfolds;
That matter causes mind—what could be dafter?
Chaotic mass is shaped by mental molds.

Just so it is that words in verse take form,
Selected from the dictionary’s swarm.

*

VISIONS OF THE HUMAN FRONTIER

Course Rationale

What will the world be like in ten or fifty years? We can guess, we can suppose, we can extrapolate, project and predict—but we cannot know. And we are most likely to be surprised in many ways, as we always have been.

Even so, many of us wish to know in advance what the future will bring and, in fact, many of our present wishes and hopes will shape the course of events to drive the forces that determine how matters evolve and turn out. The future will not simply befall us; we are helping right now to make it happen.

Why not, then, go about the business of creating the future more consciously, intentionally and wisely—to the greatest extent we can—though never supposing arrogantly that we hold all the cards? By becoming humble, hopeful and humane co-evolutionists, collaborating prudently with the forces of nature, we may hope to add our expanding intelligence and agency to the other factors that determine the state of Earth’s biosphere and (if Teilhard de Chardin is correct) noosphere—the mental coding that affects earthly events.

Such is the premise of this course: that it is a worthy academic enterprise to envision a desirable future for human beings and other Earthlings, a future that happily accommodates our ever-burgeoning consciousness and our capacity for effecting events at will—or willfully. Because our species has long been inclined to domineer over other (presumed lower) species, it is important for us to reconsider our motives and actions in the world at large and determine if our collective past properly represents our highest potentials for thriving within a flourishing ecosystem.

We will do well in this course if we can radically examine both our past and our prospects, prospects that at present seem tenuous, owing to humanity’s imperious attitudes and ideas. Our very worldview—or that expressed by Earth’s most powerful inhabitants—is arguably askew and in need of revising. Many thinkers now believe we must transcend prevailing conceptual paradigms and make a profound mental shift as radical as that which Copernicus introduced at the end of the Middle Ages. The era of modernist, materialist scientism (potent and revolutionary though it has been) must now concede supremacy to a more comprehensive and wiser perspective that fathoms deeper than the classic physics of matter and energy and connects with the ultimate source of consciousness, which some call spirit.

This leading-edge, revisionist cosmology, articulated and promoted by increasing numbers of well-credentialed, widely-respected exponents, deserves examination in academia, even though—but also because—it challenges the prevailing orthodoxy. We now know that human thought advances by means of shifting paradigms, or conceptual schemas that evolve to accommodate increasing knowledge and resolve paradoxes that require radically different perspectives to comprehend.

Therefore, this course, Visions of the Human Frontier, aims to attend closely and critically to reasonable sources that challenge current orthodoxies and present alternative paradigms or emerging worldviews. Think of this course as a search for, a scouting out of hopeful passages to the future. Think of us as pioneers seeking promising prospects to secure a sustainable and thriving global ecosystem that promotes the flourishing of our highest human potentials, the evolution of our species toward optimal functioning, toward realization of the grandest capacities and capabilities we can grow up to express.

As futurist Marilyn Ferguson once said, “Our past is not our potential.” It thus behooves us in academia to explore what may be possible and to promote our own wise evolution.

*

FOR BETTER AND FOR VERSE

It isn’t poetry I write, but verse,
Because it doesn’t so much sing as speak,
Yet know that writing merely prose is worse
Since verse still has the means to sound unique.

I grant, for reaching lyric heights in song
And touching hearts and souls with melody,
The passion of true poetry is strong,
As this pedestrian verse will never be.

But still I think the lilt of metric lines
And the expected placement of each rhyme
Will lift you into subtler designs
Of form that no mere paragraph can climb.

So though you may be settling for less,
There’s worse than verse, I think you must confess.

*