We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar


6. The Earth as an Organism


The most fundamental features of a human society are derived from the characteristic manner in which the members of society sense, understand and express their relationship to nature — which means, in modern terms, to the planet Earth within the biosphere of which they live, act, feel and think. We have only to consider the attitudes which Native Americans, on the one hand, and New England Puritans and the Frontier men, on the other, had toward nature to see how drastically different people's approach to their environment — and to the natural forces within their own bodies and psyches — can be.

While the Native Americans felt themselves to be integral parts of their natural environment and sought to live in perfect harmony with it, the basic attitude of Western man has been and still is that he is a special creature made by God to rule over, to transform and to use as he sees fit all that exists in this world. Man has a Soul created in God's image and the whole universe is created by this personal God for the sake of this Soul, somewhat as the objects in a college laboratory or a kindergarten are made to provide the student or the child with means to learn specific lessons.

This concept of the relationship of man to all that he finds on this planet, and to the universe as a whole, is basic in the Bible, and it was given an even more essential meaning and force in the Christian doctrine of a radical opposition between "this world" and "the other world," between soul and body, or divine and human natures.

We all know that our Christian-Western civilization is based on such a clear-cut dualism; but the vast majority of people even today do not seem as yet to understand how deeply and vitally this spiritual-material dichotomy affects every phase of the existence of men, women and children whose consciousnesses have been forcibly stamped since infancy with all its implications. Very little that is truly effective can be done to transform our Western society and its collective mentality until this dualistic approach to nature and the universe is at least radically modified — until it is understood to be the result of a temporary historical need, a need referring to the evolutionary process of individualization of consciousness. Such a process — as we have already seen — began to operate especially around 600 B.C., and it is then that the dualistic concept acquired its most characteristic form. It was not unknown before; but Greek and Christian thinkers invested it with a tremendous feeling-value. The Cartesian philosophy of the European Classical era sought to justify the dichotomy, man vs. the universe, on intellectual grounds, opposing man's soul and "reason" to a universe conceived as a vast machine — something, therefore, that man could play with and use in order to satisfy his greed.

Philosophy and science have modified their attitudes, particularly since Bergson and the development of the new physics;(1) and the ecological crisis which now nearly the whole of mankind is facing has publicized the dire results of our typical Western approach to Nature, in communist as well as free-enterprise nations. Yet relatively few people are willing and ready to accept, or even to discuss openly the basic change of consciousness which alone could go to the roots of the world situation.

I re-state this fact because it is quite futile to try to envision how a truly new society could function unless one straightforwardly faces the issue upon which everything else at the psychological as well as the social level depends — that is, unless man reintegrates himself in nature; unless he sees himself totally one with the planet Earth, and eventually with the solar system and our galactic universe; unless the concept of Soul-transcendence is reinterpreted in terms of a new cosmological picture of existence. There are, no doubt, several levels of activity and consciousness in man as in the whole universe; but all these levels constitute an integral whole.

I have discussed these point in my book, The Planetarization of Consciousness. Here our main task is to see what today and in the years just ahead, such a cosmology, psychology and sociology actually and concretely imply in terms of man's existence. The first fact we must face and understand in all its implications is that the Earth is an organized system of activities and that mankind is a functional sub-system operating within the planetary organism.

Mankind is a functional part of the Earth. Unless we understand mankind and its specific activities in such a role, we can never give a fully constructive meaning to these activities. However, the statement that mankind is a functional part of the Earth can have validity only if we radically alter our understanding of what the Earth, and by extension the solar system and the galaxy, constitute. We have to cease thinking of the Earth as a huge mass of matter on the surface of which chance happenings led to the development of living organisms and of mankind. We have to cease thinking of the evolution of such organisms as a purposeless process in terms of some kind of Darwinian or post-Darwinian natural selection. We have to realize that all the kingdoms we have neatly classified (mineral, vegetable, animal, human) are functional systems within the total planetary system of activities which includes them all. Because they are all interrelated and interdependent, the Earth is to be considered an "organism." We should not limit this Earth to merely physical substances — no more than a man should be thought of as only a body of flesh and bones. The Earth's electro-magnetic field may indeed extend as far as the Moon's orbit; and it may include a variety of activities of which, as yet, we are not aware, activities which perhaps are organized into more or less stable entities endowed with some kind of consciousness and purpose beyond man's normal range of perceptions.

Man — especially the Western man of science — has been blind to all kinds of possibilities concerning the nature of the Earth-as-a-whole, so strong has been his dependence upon empirical sense-perceptions as the sole criterion of reality. He has also been blind to possibilities relative to his own body. Western man has refused to admit within his total organism the existence of what he still calls supernatural powers, so eager he has been to accept the separation of divine Soul from natural physical body. Such a separation, in a sense, assuredly exists, but not as understood by the traditional Christian doctrine. And though Western man accepts the idea that a Soul is incarnated in a human body, he refuses to extend this idea and to believe that the Earth, as a planetary organism, may also have a Soul, and indeed some kind of planetary Mind.

That it is man's function to build the conscious aspect of this planetary Mind should be a conclusion evident to anyone who is able to think of the Earth as a planetary organism, and of mankind as a functional part of this organism rather than as a special divine creation essentially external to the Earth. I say "conscious" because, just as man's mind has vast unconscious depths — and also super-conscious heights — we should expect the Earth to have a subconscious Mind, using the term "subconscious" to refer to the consciousness existing in atomic, molecular, cellular and subhuman biological organisms.(2)

This planetary conscious Mind is being built by mankind since the days when man began to develop what Teilhard de Chardin calls "reflective consciousness"; that is, when human beings began to reflect upon the repetitive character of a vast number of sensations and experience — a kind of feedback process — thanks to which predictions and generalizations of seeming cause-and-effect sequences ("laws of nature") could be made. These generalizations were made by individuals, then organized and perpetuated in the forms of symbols by tribal and later on social groups; and by symbols I mean all instrumentalities enabling men to communicate their experiences and even more their responses to experiences. These instrumentalities include, first of all gestures, cries, words and ever more complex and abstract languages; then all forms of religions and magical hieroglyphs, representations of especially significant scenes reflecting the community life, portraits and the many kinds of art-objects.

A culture is constituted by the sum total of these means of communication, and by the way they are handled and diffused among the people living in a particular region. A culture is, indeed, a means of "in-formation"; that is, it is meant to form the responses — and indeed the supposedly spontaneous reactions — of the people accepting this particular culture. Every culture refers to a particular set of experiences and living conditions, thus to a particular complex of geographical, magnetic-telluric, climatic, faunal and floral circumstances, i.e., to a particular environment. This environment is not only physical and biospheric, but as well — in any relatively stable culture — psychical, mental and moral; but the pressure and formative power of the biospheric environment comes first.

Human groups are first direct products of the Earth-environment in which they live; they are like ova attached to the planetary womb which feeds them. Yet an impregnated ovum implies the action of a male sperm, and we should not leave out of the picture of human evolution the fecundant power of cosmic energies which operate within the large wholes in which the Earth has its being — i.e., the solar system and the galaxy. The many energies radiating from the sun and filling in the spaces of the solar system, then being modified and added to by the currents of induction produced by the periodic motions of all the planets within this highly charged space, are undoubtedly responsible for telluric events which affect the growth and decay and perhaps the initial formation of all life-species on our planet, and as well of tribes and cultures. Glacial periods and various kinds of upheavals — such as changes in the positions of the poles and the rise or sinking of continents — establish the basic rhythms that control the evolution of mankind. They do so in a way which presumably parallels — though the actual energies at work obviously differ — the manner in which glandular changes and the aging process in the body of a man affect the condition of his nervous systems and the responses of his brain to experiences and life-challenges.

The way in which. these apparently periodic lithospheric, biospheric, atmospheric and ionospheric events act upon the evolution of mankind and of its various culture-wholes is still not known at the present time, even though a few general patterns are beginning to appear; but, I repeat, if Western thinkers have shied away from realizing that the evolution of human collectivities — whether primitive or organized as what Toynbee calls societies or civilizations — depends on planetary rhythms, it is because these thinkers have been conditioned by the religious belief that man is not to be considered really a product of the Earth, and that this Earth also is somehow a unique case in the solar system.

Such a belief has of late greatly disintegrated; yet the old concept that "life" may exist only on this Earth and that Earth-born man occupies a very special place in the universe — a universe without purpose and without any kind of cosmic formative agencies — such a belief is still so deeply rooted in the collective unconscious of Western man that it blocks the path to a truly cosmic — or as I wrote before, “cyclocosmic" –- understanding of basic factors in human evolution. When man realizes fully that the Earth is a planetary organism and that, as in every organism, the activities of its component parts — cells and organs — have a definite place and function in the total field of forces which constitute the dynamic reality of this organism, then many new ideas, and some old concepts now considered by science to be archaic or puerile, will gain acceptance.

Man Within the Earth-field

The statement that the Earth and the solar system as a whole should be thought of as organisms, even in the broad sense of this term, will be objected to by a great many people on the basis that there are vast and basic differences between what we normally call a living organism and a solar system or a planet. It will be said that the more evolved organisms originate in some kind of seed and that this seed or fecundated ovum then divides into a vast number of other cells which, though structurally and functionally differentiated, retain at their core the same original genetic pattern. In other words, the multiplicity of cells in a full-grown organism originates in a state of unity — the original seed — and this unity remains operative in every one of the cells insuring as it were the harmonious interdependence and holistic rhythm of the whole organism. I shall then be asked if I really believe that a planet is born in the same way and that there is an integrating power active at the core of every existent within the field of forces of that planet.

This could be answered by asking whether we can really be sure that we know how a solar system began. Do we really know how planets were formed out of the original solar mass? One cosmological theory succeeds another in modern science. None may be true. If all planets were originally parts of the solar mass, would this not imply an original unity? Of course, not exactly the kind of unity found at the start of a plant or a human body, but unity just the same. And how was the sun formed? Who knows? We can think of a whirling mass of hydrogen atoms; but a whorl has a center, and a specific rhythm. Why do planets rotate around their axes? Again a whirling motion, originally. If there is no organizing power operative throughout the Earth, how could every component part of this Earth so amazingly interact with every other part within very narrow limits of possible variations?

I certainly do not wish to over-stress the significance of similarities where so many differences are evident; but external differences should not blind one to what the basic processes undertoning these differences have in common. There is as much "prejudice" in a strictly empirical and materialistic approach as there is in accepting as a working hypothesis a concept inspired by the perception of fecund analogies — that is, when such a concept can be seen to provide a foundation for an approach to crucial existential problems which old attitudes to life and society can no longer solve.

The value of concepts is, after all, essentially pragmatic. If a particular approach to the relationship between man and the universe proves to be destructive of human values and lead to a kind of collective insanity or potential suicide, this approach is not valid, whatever superficially observed facts may seem to be. These facts may well be only pseudo-facts, or at best incomplete expressions of much larger realities which the official mentality of a particular culture at a particular time can only partially apprehend. That is "true" which is a constructive answer to the need of man, or of a specific type or group of men, at a definite time. Truth is relative to the time and place in which it is formulated by a human mind. What counts is whether or not a statement or idea is valid — whether or not it serves the purpose of actual existence, that is, whether or not it helps a conscious individual person and/or a collectivity to take the next step in their evolution.

Man is a conscious being extracting from his everyday experience — and the collective experience of his community and of past generations of men — concepts and principles of action. The only real question is whether they are valid or invalid in terms of his present situation. Some general principles seem to be valid in already known situations — and we like to claim that they are true. Yet if we do not know how a new situation will turn out, can we really speak of absolute truth? If this new situation leads us to experience a much vaster range of phenomena, how could the old truths remain valid?

The men of science of the Renaissance had to picture the world in a materialistic way because this was then a valid picture. It served to free man's mind from theological dogmas which were obstacles to the evolution of human consciousness. Now we are emerging from bondage to the very concepts which were valid three or four centuries ago, and the world pictured by the progressive scientist of the present day hardly resembles that of Descartes and Newton. But old ideas and institutions have tremendous inertia. Fundamentalistic churches still control the consciousness and emotions of many millions of Americans, and scientific materialism still dominates the mind of the average educated middle-aged person. A subconscious combination of these two attitudes is responsible for most people's relationship to their environment.

Today, as we face probable ecological tragedies, we need new mental images which will at least gradually transform man's picture of his relationship to the planet-as-a-whole. The image of the Earth as an organism is thus of great value today. Exactly what, in this instance, should be meant scientifically and analytically by the term, organism, is of secondary importance. What is important is the image and the feeling-value it conveys. This image of a living organism then can lead to the next one: that of mankind-as-a-whole fulfilling a definite function within this Earth-organism. What could this function be? The most obvious answer: a function similar in many ways to that which the cerebro-spinal system — and particularly the brain — fulfills in a human body.

Biologists usually interpret the evolution of animal species by referring to the gradual development of the brain, especially the forebrain which seems to provide the most typical instrumentality for an objective, reflective and generalizing kind of consciousness. The entire cerebro-spinal nervous system is involved in this gradual development which leads to the intellectual achievements of modern man. This nervous system has its ramifications everywhere and its operations affect directly or indirectly the entire human body. It receives impressions, organizes them into mental percepts and images or thoughts, and it rapidly conveys to all parts of the body definite messages and directives for action — receiving in turn a feedback from the recipients.

There is also an automatic nervous system whose function it is to direct, balance, harmonize the operations of the basic endocrine glands and organs of the body, and the rhythm of the various circulatory systems which link, feed and repair these organs.

The very fact that the mineral, vegetable and animal departments — or "organs" — of the Earth are so remarkably adjusted to each other and constantly interacting in terms of planetary health, should suggest that there are agencies which act on the globe as the automatic nervous system acts in a human body. What these agencies are we do not know, though the occult traditions of many cultures refer to them in various ways. Something is operating in the biosphere which normally adjusts the various forms of biological activity — vegetable, animal and, at least up to a certain point, human — so that they interact healthfully and, wherever possible, transform themselves when challenged to do so by periodical changes in the magnetic field of the Earth, in the climates, and the morphology of continents and seas.

When mankind reaches the stage of individualized consciousness and the human mind develops the kind of faculties which make possible technological achievements of great magnitude, a factor of disharmony is introduced in the ecology of the entire planet. This parallels what occurs in a human body when the cerebro-spinal nervous system begins to interfere with the normal workings of the automatic system. If the interference is strong enough — that is, if various forms of unnatural tensions, emotional or glandular frustrations, psychological complexes, etc., develop which are directly expressed through the cerebro-spinal system — psychosomatic results occur and the health of the entire organism may be seriously impaired.

Any form of strongly directed thinking, concentration and study or creative activity at the intellectual level produces a certain amount of tension in 'the entire human body. If a harmonious cooperation can be established between the cerebral and the automatic nervous systems, the tensions concomitant with the thinking processes can be absorbed and adjusted to by the various organs of the body; but if the mental processes are in sharp conflict with the automatic organic functions — as in the case of frustrated organic drives and appetites, or when conscious mental efforts are prolonged for long periods or under particularly strenuous and fear-producing conditions — some form of breakdown of organic activity is inevitable.

Such a breakdown, under certain conditions, may produce various chemical reactions which represent the response of the organism-as-a-whole to the mental stress. This may in turn react upon the cerebro-spinal system and effect — and indeed it may transform, at least temporarily — the individual's field of consciousness, his mind. The organism-as-a-whole thus challenges that which originally caused the tensions and the catabolic stress, i.e. the conscious mind ruled by the ego.

When man begins to develop his conscious and mind-centered individuality, the latter at first is not able to disturb too strongly the inertial harmonic balance of the autonomic nervous system and the organs — and it is, indeed, a "balance", for it operates in every instance through the interaction of two systems or organs acting in opposite ways. Likewise, when men began to disassociate their consciousness from their instinctive sense of close participation in the activities of nature — when they began to think of themselves as transcendent Souls essentially unrelated to the Earth and sent to our "dark planet" to expiate some mysterious sin or to learn some difficult lessons — the results over the environment of such a disassociation were minimal. Health is an inertial power — i.e., it tends to maintain itself with deep-acting obstinacy. However, soon enough the conscious mind of man and his Promethean spirit that loves to play with the fire of the gods, or to eat of the fruit of the Tree of good and evil, became adept at upsetting the inertial strength of health and planetary harmony. The results are the present state of generalized neurosis and the potential ecological disaster which, under our politics of aggressiveness and our economy of greed, may be imminent.

Does this mean that we should return to the natural state of semi-primitive man, and put to sleep our individualized consciousness whose tool — the technology-breeding intellect — has become a sadistic monster? Such a "return" should not be necessary. Nevertheless, a more constructive alternative will not be easy; and the automatic systems of the Earth-as-an-organism may sooner or later react violently so as to shock mankind into retracing its steps to a considerable extent, or at least compelling our society to reassess its cherished values. Nature, indeed, can force "agonizing reappraisals" upon collectivities (communities, nations, and corporations) as well as upon individual persons. The question is how man meets the crisis, how conscious he is of its basic (and not only superficial) causes, and indeed how frightened he is — though obviously panicky moves are not satisfactory solutions, nor are, in most cases, emotional revolutions born of despair and of a sense of utter futility and boredom.

What then should be done — or indeed can be done?

Essentially to convince people everywhere that their traditional and religious concepts of the relationship of man to the Earth — and, psychically, of the relationship between their conscious ego and the totality of their organism as individual persons — must be radically transformed.

One never truly convinces anyone — especially a collectivity or class of people — of the need for a radical transformation of their stand and deepest beliefs until they have become "sick and tired" of their everyday existence and emotionally shocked by crude attempts at preserving the status quo by the exercise of force. Also, to try to convince anyone of the hopelessness and evil of a situation without presenting at least a relatively clear direction following which a wholesome alternative could be reached — if all goes well in the process — is never satisfactory. Such an alternative may be called a utopia; but this does not matter. What matters is that a concrete basis for a thorough revaluation of ideas and ideals should be presented as a substitute for the social and personal foundations upon which our Western society was built.

Many young people today try to find such a concrete basis in the glorification of the human body and of its deepest instincts or drives. They, and a few of their older mentors, speak of the wisdom of the body. They hope to build in terms of this wisdom a new sense of livingness, spontaneity and creativity, and a new freshness of response to interpersonal meetings, freed from traditional social patterns and "ego-games."

What the body is to the individual, the planet — in some sense at least — is to mankind as a whole, once we realize that the Earth is an organism within which mankind has a definite function to fulfill. Yet one must handle such analogical concepts carefully and wisely, and one reason for this is that we know as yet so little concerning the actual relationship between consciousness and body, between mind and organic functions. What now follows may throw a revealing light on at least some aspects of the analogy just stated.

A Geomorphic Approach to Civilization

If we consider archaic man, and still today a very large number of communities which live close to the soil and attune their activities to the rhythm of the seasons, there is hardly any question that a symbiotic relationship between them and the Earth exists as a dominant factor in their lives and consciousness. The Earth is for them the great Mother, the "good earth." They are rooted in the land and molded in depths by climate and vegetation — just as animals are. The Native Americans are a good example of this stage of development; but so are still most of the Asiatic peasants. It is only as human beings become individualized, and their responses to existence intellectualized and socialized in terms of large states dominated by big cities, that man's symbiotic relationship to the Earth and the rootedness of his consciousness in ancestral traditions and regional religions cease to become a controlling force.

This much we have already seen: but now we have differentiate clearly between two types of human attachments to his natural Earth-environment: the local and the global types.

In the past, man lived in a very close and compulsive relationship of dependence to the land and its products; and this land was a particular, locally defined land — the land of his ancestors, the land to be bequeathed to his progeny. Man was nearly as rooted in his land as an animal species is linked to a particular region and type of vegetation. Trees grow exactly up to a certain altitude and latitude; their symbiotic relationship to the Earth has a definitely local character. Likewise, human cultures of the pre-Christian past developed in terms of local conditions in a particular bio-geological environment. Indeed, we can say that, strictly speaking, culture as a definite phenomenon implies a basic and vital relationship between a community of human beings and their local environment. It is an essentially binding relationship. Nevertheless some factors developed by a culture which grew out of a particular region can be transferred to another culture.

These transferable factors belong mainly to the realm of mind; they are symbols, ideas, or in some cases special behavior-patterns. Yet when these are transferred from one culture to another they acquire a rather different feeling-value in the recipient community which gradually transforms and, as it were, metabolizes them. One can consider these transferable factors the seed of the plant of a culture. The seed can be blown by the winds to distant lands, and as it grows there into a plant, this plant will tend to be somewhat transformed by its new environment — and in turn it may act upon this environment.

What is to be stressed at this stage of our discussion is the particular and local character of cultures — i.e., of their collective ways of living, feeling and thinking — and their rootedness in a particular region. Indeed they can be seen so related to that region as to be considered products of it, in very much the same sense as a certain type of plant may grow exclusively in a particular locality. The interesting thing is that by considering the shapes of characteristic sections of the continents (for instance, the distribution and shapes of peninsulas, of the patterns of mountain ranges and vast plains, etc.) one often may find them related to the type of cultures which have developed in these regions. In other words the morphology of continents seems to be related to the character of what the particular racial groups living in certain specific sections of these continents is able to build as a "culture-whole": i.e., as a consistent set of basic images and symbols, and as institutions derived from the latter.

This general concept can be best illustrated by referring to the basic morphology of what we call Asia and Europe. Both Asia and Europe have three peninsulas jutting in a southward direction. In Asia, Indochina, India and Arabia; in Europe, Greece, Italy and Spain. Indochina is prolonged, as it were, by Sumatra, Java and other islands; Greece, by Crete and various small islands — and one might even relate the large island of Rhodes to Australia. India is accompanied by Ceylon just as Italy by Sicily. Arabia is a basically rectangular land mass with a central desertic plateau; partially desertic Spain is square in shape — a square is a particular kind of rectangle.

Over the Indian peninsula the Himalaya Mountains form a concave crescent, open as it were to the currents streaming from the Northern regions; and above the Himalayas we find Tibet. In Europe, Italy is topped by a convex chain of mountains, the Alps, and Switzerland duplicates Tibet. Europe is Asia on a smaller scale, almost as in some full-grown navel oranges one sees a small orange jutting out as a replica of the mother fruit. And the "geomorphic" parallelism can be carried further, for above Tibet we find the vast plain of the Gobi desert, and above Switzerland a quite flat Germany. To the east of Germany we see Russia which to some extent corresponds to China and Siberia.

This structural parallelism is certainly interesting; but what makes it particularly significant is the fact that the type of cultures developing in their respective regions in Asia and Europe bear a strong resemblance. Both India and Italy — the median peninsulas — have been the sources or centers of the basic religious movements that influenced the people of their respective continents. Greece produced great art, just as did Indochina (the Angkor Wat temples) and Java (the Borobuddhur, etc). Arabia gave birth to a strong, aggressive and emotional race and culture; so did Spain, and Arabs become magnetically pulled toward Spain where the great Mozarabic culture developed.

One can establish a parallel between the war-like Mogol races and the Germanic, and especially Prussian people — between the Russian and the Chinese peasantry. France, just west of Switzerland, bears in her culture some resemblance to Persia, and further to the west the shape of Asia Minor is not unlike that of Brittany, where a strong Celtic culture could be seen paralleling that of ancient races in Turkey. The Zoroastrian culture of ancient Persia found a clear reflection of itself in the tragically destroyed culture of Southern France under the Manichaean influence of the Cathars and Albigenses, and other Gnostic communities in South-Eastern France.

Another way of looking at the Eurasian land-mass is to see it as one shape extending from 10° longitude west (Ireland and Portugal) to 180° longitude east (eastern tip of Siberia). Dividing into two this span of 200° longitude, we find longitude 90° east as the pivotal meridian; and it passes through Calcutta, Tibet, near Kassa and near the highest mountain of the globe, just west of the Gobi Desert and the Mongolian People's Republic, through a most important part of Siberia (Sibirsk region) and along the great Ienisei river which may become a great trade route in the future. Around the pivot of this 90° east meridian we might see soon the t otal population of the Eurasian world almost evenly divided; even now the combined population of India, Persia and the U.S.S.R. balance approximately that of China, Japan, Indochina and Indonesia. And there is a general similarity of position between the Scandinavian peninsula and Kamchatka, the British Isles and Japan — the correlation between the last two island-groups being particular significant in terms of world history and racial background.

One can significantly think of Europe as a miniaturized progeny of the vast Motherland of Asia — or as a specialized reproduction of Asia for a particular evolutionary purpose — because European cultures are to Asiatic cultures as the conscious and intellectual part of man's total psyche is to the vast collective unconscious. The conscious is a differentiated organ of the unconscious in the sense that the forebrain is a differentiated part of the human body, charged with the development of reflective consciousness structured by an individualized ego. Religion is the product of the collective unconscious (Asia); science, that of the rational intellect (Europe).An interesting point is the difference between the concave and convex shape of respectively the Himalayas and the Alps crowning the peninsulas which focused the religious drives in Asia and Europe. The Asiatic religious consciousness is receptive and open to the North — always a symbol of the downflow of spiritual energies in the cultures of the North hemisphere — while the typical religious spirit of Europe is intensely personalized, thus closed upon the concept of self.

If, after considering the structural relationship between Asia and Europe, we now focus our attention upon the entire surface of the globe, we find also much that is of significance in terms of geomorphic patterns or gestalt; and the importance of this type of observation lies in that it enables us not only to visualize and indeed to "feel" the globe as one vast whole with a characteristic and significant structure, but also to acquire an intuitive and holistic realization of the fact that the entire process of human civilization is somehow definitely connected with the morphology of the Earth-surface, i.e., of the biosphere. Obviously we cannot think only of continents or land-masses of any size, but must try to feel the global significance of the sea and its powerful currents, for land and sea constitute a Yang-Yin kind of coupling when considered from a global perspective.

The first point that should strike us when we look at this land-sea coupling is that while there are a number of continents and islands there is actually only one ocean. We human beings, conditioned by our normal existence as land-creatures, often give to this one ocean in the vicinity of our land a specific name, for instance the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea or Black Sea, the North Sea, the China Sea. When we venture farther from our familiar shores we speak of Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean; yet there is only One Ocean — the great symbol of the planetary Yin, the global Feminine; and, alas, today mankind is poisoning this Ocean, this feminine Principle. Contemporary men crossing the Atlantic on a boat made of papyrus — proving thus the possibility of very ancient human contacts between Europe-Africa and the Americas — told us the water they crossed was most often so polluted, far away from land, that they did not want to bathe in it; and this is only the beginning of an ever-accelerating process of contamination by oil, industrial and atomic waste materials, not to mention instruments of submarine warfare.

Looking at the globe as a whole we see thus one Ocean and, rising from its vast expanse teeming with lives, two main continental masses: the sprawling form of what should be named Eurasiafrica, and the two south-pointing triangles of North and South America curiously linked by the diminishing form of Central America. Beside these two land masses, we may have to add Australia and the islands surrounding it, and Antarctica.

A fascinating theory, increasingly substantiated by recent discoveries, was first formulated in 1915 by the German geographer Alfred Wegener. According to Wegener all the land masses once were parts of one huge continent. This continent broke away into several parts along still clearly observable long lines of stress (faults); and gradually through millions of years the present land masses reached their present position. Whether or not this concept of the slow motion of continents is to be accepted in its totality may be questionable, yet one has only to look at the shapes of the Western shore of Eurasiafrica and of the Eastern shores of the Americas to realize how they could easily have once fitted into one piece. What is more striking still is that there exists at the bottom of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean a long ridge of sharply rising mountains in a north-south direction, which seems to indicate the line along which the separation of the two continents would naturally have occurred. This line is strangely reminiscent of a human spine with two accentuated curves; and it roughly duplicates the shape of the long line of mountains which extend from Alaska to Patagonia and constitutes what is called "the Great Divide."

I have often speculated that the almost universal tradition of an ancient division of a primordial united mankind into two collective groupings — the fall into duality, in a metaphysical sense — may be linked with a telluric process which sundered one original land mass into two continents. The legend (?) of Atlantis and the struggle between White and Black forces ending with a catastrophic collapse of this continent may be a more or less mythical reference to some particularly severe phase of such a telluric process. The process itself would no doubt have lasted at least a million years; and this is the figure given by H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. What is mentioned by Plato certainly does not refer to such a vast process, but the catastrophe of which he wrote might have been superimposed upon the vague remembrance of an occurrence marking the final phase of the process — a phase which, it has been suggested, took place ten thousand years ago, an important cycle.

Recent prophecies, the validity of which is most questionable in spite of the exaggerated publicity given to them and to Edgar Cayce, announce imminent important changes in the structure of continents, and the emergence of new lands in one or two oceans. Such telluric upheavals, including a drastic change in the location of the Earth's poles, are obviously not impossible; nor are they likely to occur just as they have been described. If the Earth can be regarded indeed as an organism, whose growth operates according to definite rhythms, there can obviously the times at which structural changes of major importance occur, and perhaps in some cases relatively suddenly. But the time-scale of planetary transformations is immensely vaster and the changes slower than we are likely to imagine them, especially under conditions of world-wide emotional stress which make men's imagination feverish; and clairvoyants are naturally over-sensitive to collective feelings and either images of doom or glowing expectations of a Millennium — and therefore not trustable.

What interests us here, however, is not to speculate on what may or may not happen locally in terms of events over which mankind has presumably no control — and perhaps because it is too late to reverse the momentum of the past. It is rather to try and understand what exists now and the structural significance of the Earth-surface in terms of an organic approach to the relationship of man to the Earth as a whole. Here again I have to stress the meaning of the distinction between "culture" and "civilization."

These two terms have been used very carelessly, and they have rather different meaning in different languages. Spengler's stress on Kultur and his negative interpretation of what he calls the civilization phase of a cycle of Kultur are characteristically German; and Toynbee reacted to this by interpreting "civilization" in a different way. I have already discussed the contrast between culture based on the process of "seed"-multiplication, and civilization resulting from the conscious and willful use of fire. The important point at this stage of our discussion is that while culture has always primarily a local character, being rooted in a particular region of the globe, civilization has, potentially at least, a universalistic or "global" meaning.

This distinction between culture and civilization, and between local and global factors refers to a fundamental difference in levels of human consciousness and organic rhythm; and today it is of a particularly crucial importance because modern technology — the ultimate product of "civilization" — has actually made possible a truly global organization of "civilized" mankind. Yet the fact that this global organization of society is now possible does not decrease the significance of particular cultures. It may substitute abundance for scarcity in the fields of these cultures, but it should not take away from that which is characteristic of, and remains eminently valuable in, local-regional cultures.

As we shall see presently, a two-fold rhythm should be clearly established in any really effective and harmonic type of global organization of human society — a culture-rhythm and a civilization-rhythm. It should be established in an organic and holarchic manner because it corresponds to a fundamental dualism of human temperament. The existence of these two types of temperament and consciousness-centering implies also a certain kind of Yang-Yin polarization in human nature — at least in the social aspect of human nature.

In terms of what I have been discussing in this chapter, the culture-type of person finds his basic interests focused upon the region of the globe to which he feels himself related in a close, vitalistic, cultural, ethnical and (to some extent at least) binding relationship. The civilization-type of individual, on the other hand, acts and reacts essentially in terms of a vivid sense of "belongingness" to the whole Earth and the whole of mankind; a particular culture and a particular collectivity of human beings constitute, not only to his mind but even in terms of his feeling-responses, only an organic part of the whole of mankind. He evaluates their problems as well as their meaning in terms of the organic function they perform within the integrated organism of humanity and, if the individual is spiritually oriented, in terms of "Man," as I have defined this capitalized word; thus in terms of the evolutionary potential — already actualized and as yet to be realized and actualized — of mankind.

We shall soon return to these points, but they were briefly mentioned to bring a more psychological and vivid reality to the concept that a global organization of mankind should be based both on the structural and the ecological character of every region of the globe, and on an over-all holistic realization of the significance of the geomorphic configurations produced by the shapes of all land-masses and seas constituting the Earth's surface. One might say poetically that this global configuration is the visage of the Earth-being, or, in Medieval alchemical terms, its "Signature." From this geomorphic Signature a mind endowed with a holistic sense — or an intuitive consciousness — should be able to deduce the essential or archetypal character of the function of every region of the globe in the ideal organic activity of the whole.

Because Eurasiafrica is such a vast and sprawling land-mass, its human and cultural products have a certain general character. We saw already how the structural similarity between little Europe and vast Asia suggests the character which European countries have played in the intellectual-rational evolution of mankind. The greatly spread out littorals of these countries made possible a variety of differentiated contacts with the sea — thus, contacts of the developing conscious ego with the vast expanse of the unconscious. The Mediterranean Sea, as a nearly closed sea, has had a special significance in this sense — while the widely open Indian ocean into which the three peninsulas of Asia just at relatively great distances from each other, and which is only bordered in its southern part by Antarctica, perhaps suggests other possibilities of planetary unfoldment. It could be that Antarctica was the original cellular structure (i.e., the first continent) and that mankind appeared there, even before it operated in South-East Africa — which it is now fashionable to accept as the birth-place of mankind. Coal beds found in Antarctica have been estimated to date 250 million years ago at a time when this continent, now covered by an incredibly huge mass of ice often two miles deep, had a warm climate (National Geographic, Feb. 1963).

If, in contrast with Eurasiafrica, we look at the remarkably triangular shapes of down-pointing North and South America, we at once get the feeling of a totally different pattern of human evolution and racial destiny. We see the "descent" of the cosmic or planetary power which all traditions say is flowing through the Arctic regions and the Earth's magnetic North pole. The long chain of mountains which extends from Alaska to Patagonia with a characteristic break in the Panama region can be seen as the spinal column of the Americas. The Gulf of Mexico can be identified with the mouth-cavity of a giant planetary human head and trunk seen in profile and looking to the East. Yucatan is almost formed like the epiglottis; Cuba stretches like a tongue.

Below the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil is shaped like a woman's breast in profile, and curiously enough it grows milk trees which feed many of the natives. The Amazon drains outward an all-tropical and intensely biological region. At the southern tip of Patagonia has a truly coccygeal shape. The Rio de la Plata's wide estuary could refer to a sexual opening.

Coming back to North America, Southern California would correspond to .the thalamus region and the vision centers (Movies!?) and Alaska to the top of the vast profiled head; while the Great Lakes suggest a reference to the ventricles of the brain, and the New York to Washington region could be associated with the pituitary body area and the mythical "third eye."

Such an analogy will obviously seem extremely far-fetched to the sober analytical mind of geographers, anthropologists, historians or geopoliticians. Yet the latter, in the early days of Nazi Germany and following the trend initiated by the Englishman McKinder, spoke likewise of the Heartland in Central Asia and based some of their theories upon concepts in which geography, history and politics blended significantly. Our modern American intellectual may scorn such investigations, but geopolitics is not dead — or perhaps it is the decomposed corpse which poisons the air in the Pentagon!

What I am speaking of, however, is not geopolitics as formulated by the German Haushofer and his Munich School in the early Thirties, but what I have called twenty-five years ago, "geotechnics." Geotechnics could be defined as the science dealing with the harmonious and holarchic management of the whole planet in terms of the optimum development of a planetary human consciousness. Optimum, rather than maximum, for too much of a certain kind of mental focusing may be suicidal; and what is to be stressed is management instead of politics.

Management vs. Politics

Politics deals with the use of power — power over human beings. The word itself comes from the Greek term (polis, which means "city." Political power is sought and used by an individual in order to make a small or large number of human beings act — and if possible feel and think — in ways determined by this individual.

However, in archaic times and in the tribal state of society the person who wielded authority and influenced group-decision did so at least theoretically in the name of the god of the community — i.e., as his mouthpiece or agent. We already stated that, at this stage of evolution, human beings were not truly individualized. They experienced the group (or the tribe) as an integral whole encompassing them totally. They experienced psychically their common rootedness in a particular land, ancestry and life-ritual. No one had power except as a channel for the expression of the sustaining energy and consciousness enfolding every member of the tribal organism. Because of this, decisions could be reached by real consensus. "Root-unanimity" prevailed; therefore, in this sense at least, politics did not exist.

Politics per se was born in the Greek city because in the city-state men were gathered who were intent upon thinking and acting as "individuals." The moment individualism triumphs and ambitious persons or special groups seek and use social power for self-aggrandizement and self-glorification, politics becomes a way of life. The craving for political power must be differentiated from acquisitiveness and greed for money or material things. A man can become satiated with possessions; but there are no limits to the thirst for political power, because it is power over other human beings, and until all human beings become, in their inner and outer lives, subservient to the man seeking such a power there can be no total satisfaction. Whether any man could psychologically stand such an all-encompassing power is another matter.

The Austrian statesman Metternich defined politics as "the art of the possible." He probably meant that the successful politician, in a world of opinionated individuals jealous of their prerogatives and likewise eager to use power, is a man who realistically evaluates how far he can go in dealing with such a kind of individual and social group. He knows how to play the game with unscrupulous skill. Sometimes, however, the play for power is camouflaged under pretense of humbly serving the interests of the whole community, of obeying the will of the people, of sacrificing one's life for a great Cause, etc. Indeed a politician may become self-hypnotized by his own declarations and begin to believe they are genuine realities. To the extent that they might be genuine realities and that he is actually an "agent" for the operation of the consciousness or unconscious purpose of the social whole he ceases to be a politician and becomes a statesman.

A statesman is in fact a sensitive, imaginative and effectual manager. He manages power for the whole community — whether it be a business firm, a public enterprise or a whole nation. The power he uses is the power of the whole — collective power. This gives him "authority." If he misuses this power he should be considered more criminal than the person who, in an emotional fit of temper, kills another man. The tragic fact which we face today in the world of nations as well as in the business world is that everywhere politics is the determining factor. Our modern nations, and the states in a federal republic, are political units. Their boundaries have been determined in the past by politics, by the marriages of kings or by fortuitous events, usually related to war. Nations are often built as the result of a change from colony status to so-called freedom. The resulting boundaries are most of the time quite senseless; they have little or no relation to geographical features and ecological values. They are created by men who had no feeling for the Earth, no realization of its organicity — very often no regard for racial or tribal realities. These men were essentially conquerors respecting nothing but their own ego-will and selfish or group interests; they were not managers of the natural energies and products of the biosphere.

Such a state of affairs has been the inevitable result of the general process of individualization and of the development of the ego and of its power-games. One hears now a great deal about overcoming the ego; but how can this be done on a large scale, so that the mentality of an epoch may be radically affected? This is the crucial question.

Interestingly enough the concept of "nation" is actually an answer to the need for overcoming the collective ego of human groups, races and cultures — just as the modern marriage can be considered a method by which two individual egos are given the opportunity, if not to destroy themselves, at least to smooth out their roughest edges and overcome their most stubborn forms of self-centeredness.

A modern nation is almost never constituted only by one racial group, or by people of the same cultural background and often the same religion. We have only to look at Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia and of course the United States to see this to be a fact. Just because a nation is a political whole built by conquest and more or less integrated by force — or by expediency in order to resist external force (as in the case of the United States) — it is obvious that such a nation must inevitably experience internal conflicts and constantly face the threat of disruption. This fact leads us unavoidably to the exercise of a strong, often ruthless, centralizing power. It is "power over" the various groups which react centrifugally and often violently to each other. It is political power which calls for ambitious and ruthless people to use it. It calls also, in our theoretically democratic world, for the concept of majority rule, and/or political compromises.

Where the desire for political power dominates any group situation — and this applies also in a similar sense to the marriage situation — the values which refer to the wholesome and harmonious development and cultivation of all the potentialities offered to mankind by the biosphere are either largely neglected, misused or abused. They are pawns in the political power-struggle. They are forgotten or scoured in the establishment of political boundaries and spheres of influence. Everything depends upon the ego-will of individuals, nations and classes — upon the more or less naked play for power. And how many modern families witness such a play!

To think that human beings, as today constituted, will give up this ego-striving for political power as long as the concept of unbridled individualism dominates everything is naive. Unless the welfare of the whole is believed to be superior in value to the power-drive of individuals, no basic change can be accomplished. But the crucial question, is, of course, what is to be meant by "welfare of the whole" and how are the means effectively to pursue this welfare to be decided upon. If the decision rests solely on the games of power-politics, whether it be associated with majority-rule in Parliaments or special Committees, or it manifests in the peculiar ways of totalitarian States, very little can be fundamentally changed.

The reader may recall the story told in the first or second chapter of this book about the Swiss peasant who followed a time-consuming practice in caring for his vineyard because "the vine likes it this way." If human beings could act collectively in relation to a vast number of basic issues because the Earth "likes it this way" much trouble would be spared to mankind.

Reintegrating man within the whole planet does not imply diminishing in any way man's stature and making the role of mankind less significant. The brain is not less important because it acts upon a healthy organism. Man's basic function is to extract consciousness from all that he experiences; and, because of this, man has an extraordinary ability to adjust to the most diverse natural environment, so that experiencing everything in them, he may bring to the Earth organism an immense variety of conscious knowledge. Moreover, it was logical for man to attempt to leave the gravitational field of the planet — just as it is logical for the yogi to train his consciousness to leave his physical body and to be able to experience, in some as yet not too clearly understood manner, occurrences in distant places and conditions of existence at senses-transcending levels.

To say that man is the conscious mind of the Earth does not forever bind him to the globe, and certainly not to some specific locality on our planet. But just as long fasting and certain chemical substances, while producing sometimes valuable transcendent states of consciousness, may also produce serious illnesses, psychosis and death — likewise, for man to poison the Earth in order to develop a social state of affairs which, first, satisfies his craving for power and his pride, then only secondarily gives him the ability to leave the planet for perhaps insignificant results, can turn out to be a senseless and even disastrous process.

As it is used and abused today, technology is just as much a drug as amphetamine or "speed." Our technocentric society is a drugged society. It exists in an unnatural state of feverish acceleration and over-excitement. Considered as a total planetary phenomenon it shows definite characteristics of hysteria and quasiparanoia. Paranoiac individuals may at times achieve spectacular feats. But the end-result is always a crisis.

It could be in the long pull, a crisis of growth. But the planetary toxins generated by this world-crisis are so virulent that the time allowed mankind to realize the total implications of the forced conditions which individualism and technology have produced, and how the momentum could be reversed through steady and determined efforts, is probably very short. A realization that the Earth is an organism and that mankind is a functional part of it will not solve all our problems, but it may produce a fresh grasp of the basic meaning of these problems. It could establish a frame of reference in relation to which the jumbled pieces of the great puzzle of modern society might fall into a pattern of order, allowing a significant picture of human destiny and planetary evolution to emerge.


1. cf. particularly Robert Linssen, La Spiritualize de la Matiere, Edition Planete, Paris.    Return

2. The Earth may indeed also have a superconscious Mind which refers to the activities of superhuman levels of consciousness — and thus to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind. In The Planetarization of Consciousness I have spoken of "eonic consciousness," a consciousness which encompasses the whole cyclic process of existence, from the alpha to omega states. This is the unity aspect of consciousness and of being, which undertones the consciousness of all individualized units of existence..    Return


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