Statement of the Problem

“... it is unscientific to accept the concept of a biosphere and to reject the concept of a noosphere. The noosphere is as much a part of earth as any other sphere, such as the hydrosphere. Indeed, by virtue of its being the cause of most ecological woes and the seat of all ecological action, the noosphere should, from the ecologist’s standpoint, be the most crucial layer. Its health and its protection from man’s own perversity should be one of his concerns. For obviously noospheric pollution is the source of all pollution.”

P. R. Masani, “The Ecology of the Noosphere ...” (1995)

When it is said that “noospheric pollution is the source of all pollution,” we are speaking of the role of the human thinking layer in the whole system scheme of the planetary design. This design constitutes an evolving dynamic. By bringing the noosphere into a discussion of the biospheric crisis, we are recognizing that unless we bring our minds to bear on the meaning and nature of the noosphere that we will not solve the biospheric crisis. First of all, this means recognizing the impact of the human thinking layer on all of the evolutionary and dynamic biogeochemical cycles of Earth’s system.

“BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED.” The April 3, 2006, Time magazine special report on global Warming cover story shouts for your attention: “Climate change isn’t some vague future problem - it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace. Here’s how it affects you, your kids and their kids as well.”

The way Time pitches this story you would think climate change was the villain, thereby deflecting attention from the idea that global warming might be a function of noospheric pollution. The damage emanating from human depletion of resources and consequent emission of greenhouse gases would not have come about if the human thinking layer - as the noosphere - had not first engineered the concepts of machine technology, and the fossil fuel consumption or atomic energy required to operate this vast complex, the technosphere. We must understand that the distinguishing feature of the human element in the biosphere is the capacity to simultaneously evolve and then participate in the thinking layer of the planet, the noosphere.

Without understanding the meaning and evolutionary purpose of the noosphere as the self-reflective mind or mental layer of the planet, we will not truly comprehend the kinds of solutions necessary to reestablish a viable future for the planet. As P. R. Masani points out, thus far,” the ecological movement falls short, the common stumbling back being the neglect of the noosphere.” This is very much to the point. Just as most humans are barely conscious of being a functioning - or malfunctioning - member of the biosphere, even fewer are aware of participating in a collective mental field called the noosphere.

This noosphere is the mental field that we take for granted as the psychological environment common to all. This unconsciously enclosing mental environment is charged with assumptions, and, depending upon what part of the world you might be in, it may be filled with glaring contradictions. The mental assumptions of a farmer in Iowa may be very different from those of a farmer in the interior provinces of China, much less of one in Iran. Yet, no matter where we are, we generally assume that what we assume every one else assumes, and that if someone assumes differently, it is they who are wrong and not we. This is the unconsciousness of the noosphere.

Considering Earth as a whole system, we must now take responsibility for the thoughts we create that charge the mental field or thinking layer of the Earth with the actual causes for everything that ails us and the planet today. Not only must we take responsibility for our own thoughts, we must also realize the relativity of our thinking and our assumptions in relation to everybody else’s thinking and assumptions - and perhaps rethink our whole program. If we could see our species-wide thinking layer as a sphere covering the whole planet we would see it as a faulty patchwork web, politically, religiously and ideologically divided, morally obtuse, saturated by the effects of profit making greed - and anything but unified. It is the wildly inconsistent and incoherent play of forces within this thinking layer, the noosphere, that perpetuates and propels the political, religious, nationalistic and corporate decision making that shapes the everyday world. Until we truly become conscious of it, it will remain out of control and continue to wreak havoc on the biosphere.

It is not just the ecologist’s neglect of the noosphere that is a stumbling block to the solution of the world problem, but the reluctance of scientists in general to admit that human thinking and its subsequent endeavors within the biosphere might have an effect - such as global warming. This is because most scientists are reluctant to really examine and own what is in their own minds. If human industry - the biospheric disrupting and destroying needs of the technosphere - is the root of the environmental problem, than the root of human industry is in the human mind. The dolphin didn’t invent the clock, but man did. And the clock came from the human mind. When man invented the clock and made it an inextricable part of the noosphere, he let loose a pandora’s box of mechanization and monetary politics that swiftly transformed himself, his mind and his world, making him the indisputable predator-dominator of the planet, ruthlessly plundering the Earth for what his machine demanded of him.

We would like to see a magazine cover bearing the headline:

“Special Report - Noospheric Pollution

BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. Noospheric pollution isn’t some vague future problem - it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace. Here’s how you create and perpetuate it, and how your kids and their kids will do the same - unless we change our mind now.”

The radiation of man is the hominization of the Earth. By technologically radiating out over the planet the homo sapiens has inadvertently brought the noosphere into manifestation, or rather, has spread it out as an unconscious twilight mental zone covering the entire world. The human noosphere has had an impact on the planet that is geological in nature, causing species wide extinctions and unprecedented climate change, not to mention depletion of vital resources like rain forests, oil, plankton, and coral reefs.

It is the world wide impact of human thought and its transformation into machine technology that has made the noosphere a planetary phenomenon, albeit an unconscious one. Now this noosphere is in the process of becoming conscious. As slowly more humans come to terms with the fact that it is our thinking that is at the root of the destruction of the world, the noosphere comes that much closer to becoming conscious. But first it must go through an intermediate phase - the cybersphere. As the externalization of the noosphere into an electronic network, the cybersphere is the virtual nervous system of the planet.

The exteriorization of the noosphere - the planetary thinking layer - first began through the printed medium. Then through the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computer, fax, PC, cell phone and internet, the homo sapiens exteriorized the thinking layer into the cybersphere, turning it into the virtual noosphere. But the artificial extension of the thinking layer still allows man to avoid realizing that he is only dealing with his own mental manipulations, clever projections that simulate at gigabyte hyperspeed some as yet unacknowledged mechanisms and processes of his own mind. What if man turned his attention to the mind itself as a collective self-reflective medium, the noosphere, and deglamorizing himself of his ingenious inventions, turned inward to see the root of his cleverness in himself? What if in dealing with the biospheric crisis, the human recognized that in reality he was dealing with a noospheric emergency - an emergency in the sense of something needing immediate attention, but also in the sense of something imminently emerging - the noosphere becoming conscious of itself?

It is not so much that the biosphere is in crisis, as it is the noosphere having a nervous breakdown - a good sign that it is about to grow up.

The Biosphere-Noosphere Transition: biosphere technosphere cybersphere

“It is the human species alone within the biosphere which induces the moment of biogeochemical climax. Only the human enters the transition zone of conscious civilization which, by power of self-reflective thought, becomes an increasingly artificial construct of projected forms dispersed throughout the biosphere.”

Postulate 5.2, Dynamics of Time

Though the present-day environmental and political chaos might look like an unmanageable aggregate of runaway forces and events, in actuality all that is occurring is the function of a larger program unfolding in a predictable evolutionary mutational sequence. This sequence is referred to as the biosphere-noosphere transition. If we understand that the evolution of the noosphere from an unconscious to a conscious state is a cosmic or universal phase in the greater cosmic evolution of mind and spirit producing a datum referred to as “planets with noosphere,” (to use Teilhard de Chardin’s phrase), then we may look at the present terrestrial condition as a type of critical growing pain. We are dealing with a case study in the evolution of a planet with life to that of a planet with noosphere, that is to say the emergence of a mental field of genuinely planetary consciousness.

To be precise, this mutational sequence is referred to as the biosphere-noosphere transition. Vladimir Vernadsky, one of the co-originators of the term noosphere (1926), and the greatest proponent of the biosphere, consistently defines the noosphere as the inevitable result of the crisis of the biosphere. This is a biogeochemical crisis brought on by the human mechanization of productivity and the economical apparatus evolved to facilitate the subsequent global industrialization. For Vernadsky this massive human alteration of the biosphere was only the mechanism auguring a larger geological change.

In Vernadsky’s paper, “The biosphere and noosphere,” published in American Scientist (1945), the Russian scientist declares that “... the noosphere is the last of many stages in the evolution of the biosphere in geological history ...” He goes on to define this “...noospheric evolution as a qualitative pinnacle associated with humankind’s mental development.” But here we must ask, what is actually meant by mental development?

From the definition of the biospheric transformation into a noosphere, it must be concluded that all of life tends towards consciousness and ever more evolved mental states. Technology cannot be the conclusion to life, but merely an intermediate stage facilitating the emergence of a planetary consciousness - first as the cybersphere, and then as a qualitatively altered condition, the actual noosphere. This means evolution is directed toward the refinement of human mental sensibility and consciousness. By defining the next geological age as the psychozoic era (the spiritualization of matter), Vernadsky is able to assert that the emergence of the noosphere is equal to major geological events of the past. The cause of this is the impact, in particular, of modern scientific thought and its technological applications.

According to Vernadsky, the biosphere of the 20th century is being transformed into the noosphere, which has been created, above all, by the growth of science, scientific understanding and the social activities of mankind based on such understanding. Since the commencement of the era of mechanization - the advent of the 12:60 frequency of mechanistic time - scientific thought has cumulatively increased its potential to influence in a fundamental way, the geological evolution of the Earth. Therefore, the emergence to the noosphere could only occur with the concomitant emergence of “scientific reason.”

In 1938, Vernadsky suggested “the restructuring of the biosphere by scientific thought through organized human labor is not an accidental phenomenon dependent on the will of humankind, but an elementary natural process with deep roots prepared by an evolutionary process with a duration of hundreds of millions of years...” The noosphere is then a function of higher laws of evolution rather than random selection and survival of the fittest. If to attain higher mental development is the purpose of biological evolution, then the standards and priorities of life must be shifted accordingly. Vernadsky thus declares that “... humankind can and must reconstruct the domain of its life by its work and thought, reconstruct it radically in comparison with the past ...” A truly radical reconstruction would have to begin with envisioning a paradigm beyond economic man. Instead of homo economicus, how about homo noosphericus? Then we would be on truly radical ground.

If the process of transformation of biosphere into noosphere is according to natural law - what is the nature of this transition and what do we know about it already? Are there not, then, some underlying principles governing the mutational sequence, biosphere-noosphere transition, that we can determine and so better guide ourselves through the turbulent years that lie immediately before us?

In Vernadsky's neo-Marxist social perception, a new, transformed stage of human society will emerge conforming to the noosphere. Of course, the advent of the noosphere would produce such a new society, but that is an effect. What is the nature of the cause - the noosphere? Though Vernadsky speaks of a coming psychozoic era (the era of the noosphere) he does not really define the noosphere as a mental structure, other than to speak of the triumph of genuinely rational thought - i.e. thought that is consistent with the laws governing the nature and the evolution of the biosphere.

However, up to the time of his death early in 1945, Vernadsky was at pains to point out, at least to his own Russian politicians and statesmen, that the process of the biosphere-noosphere transition was an inevitable one, and that they should take heed of it and plan accordingly. The implication was that the noosphere would not be in conformity with present principles of economic determinism and so its emergence would necessitate a rethinking of the present political socioeconomic order of human civilization. The question is whether humanity, immersed ever more profoundly in a materialism without bounds or precedent that would have staggered even Vernadsky, has any longer the will or the capacity to unify and make such a change of its own accord. This is the real issue, and something that the Second Planetary Congress of Biospheric Rights is “putting on the table,” as it were, for the deliberation and innovative thinking of the participants.

In the meantime, in 1968, well after Vernadsky’s death, UNESCO sponsored a major symposium on the biosphere - the only such event ever officially convened. Following that, in 1972 the United Nations convened the first Summit on the Environment in Stockholm. While this spurred a certain amount of concern in the direction of environmental awareness, the actual decision of humanity was set at the Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” conference the following year. It was then determined by the corporate elite to maintain the standard world model, that is, to continue at the present rate of industrial growth, though it was perceived that by 2020, this trend would be leading to a major crisis. Due to human moral weakness, the standard world model has been exceeded by the triumph of monetary politics and its offspring, globalization. As a consequence, we are now experiencing that predicted crisis - a few years “early.”

Due to the acceptance of the standard world model, it was not until 1992, 20 years after the first UN Environmental conference that the UN (under the guidance of Maurice Strong) called for the second environmental affair, the Rio Earth Summit. From this event came the concept of “sustainable development.” Essentially a modification of the “standard world model” sustainable development promotes the “greening of industrial society,” fostering the economic exploitation of less developed countries with such new concepts as “eco-tourism,” but without compromising the present standard of living of the affluent nations. The Rio Summit occurred at the point the G-7 (Group of Seven most Industrialized nations) was just coming into its power as the controlling power elite - the new world order - governing the affairs of globalized society. This ushered in the era of the triumph of monetary politics.

Following the 1992 Summit, came the GATT and the WTO and the annual G-7 summits. Never before in history had the wealthy emerged so victorious on a global scale. The evolutionary determinism of capitalism became the accepted dogma of a new kind of imperialism - monetary politics. It must be understood what a profound contradiction exists between monetary politics and sustainable development. Monetary politics can only be at the expense of the biosphere, while increasing the division between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots.

As was stated at the First Planetary Congress of Biospheric Rights in 1996, what is good for business is bad for the biosphere. This is because what business supports is the megacomplex of industrial society, the artificial technosphere. This technosphere is defined and maintained by an ever-devouring consumerism that is dependent on the transformation of natural resources and commodities into industrial goods, a global transportation industry, urban complexes, massively polluting energy systems, and a vast electronic communications network.

The technosphere, as an artificial sheathe, is but the intermediary system between the biosphere and the emergence of the noosphere. However, only in Russia in the 1990s was the link being made between current economic policies and the emerging noosphere.

A Russian 1996 presidential decree concerning the transition to sustainable development reflected some need to incorporate Vernadsky’s concern into national policy. In this 1996 sustainable development policy statement, the noosphere was defined as the “sphere of reason,” the stage that emerges from the biosphere. According to this official declaration, the noospheric emergence describes an imminent condition of the human on the Earth “...when the spiritual values and understanding of humankind, existing in harmony with the environment, will become the principle criterion of national and individual wealth.” Such a change in social values is defined as a qualitative shift in the nature of (Russian) society from one based on “economic and material values” to one “founded on ecological, spiritual and moral values.” Some of the principles of the Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly (NSEWA, World Assembly) which was developed in Moscow in 2000, are derived from or grew out of this policy statement. (Ministry for Economic Development and Trade, 2002)

Two other recent events marked some kind of awakening of global consciousness: the 1997 “Kyoto Protocol” - which set standards for decrease in greenhouse emissions for 2012 to be reduced to 1990 levels; and the 2002 Johannesburg UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, marking the tenth anniversary of the 1992 Rio Summit. It is notable that these latter two events were held in sites south of the equator. However, between the unabated “triumph” of monetary politics - whose policies have been formalized as the globalization of free market economics - and the “War on Terror,” which emerged in 2001, the actual situation of the world, socially, and environmentally has only intensified the biosphere-noosphere transition. The clock is now about to strike evolutionary midnight - December 21, 2012, the much-touted end-date of the Mayan calendar “Great Cycle.” It seems that something more must be done before then, if only to demonstrate a certain collective moral will and resolve to comprehend a higher, more comprehensive solution to the now devastating problem of noospheric pollution.

In describing and defining the events and nature of the biosphere-noosphere transition, including the development and emergence of the technosphere since the end of World War II, one other factor not considered by Vernadsky must be taken into account, and that is the emergence of the cybersphere. Though inclusive of mobile phones and computer electronic communications industry in general, the Internet is the ultimate form defining the cybersphere. Though foreseen ever since the era of Sputnik in 1957, (something called the ARPANET was created by the US Department of Defense in 1969) it was the development of the World Wide Web in late 1990 that brought the Internet, as we know it today, into manifestation and officially launched the cybersphere.

As the consolidation of human mentation and communication into a single planetary, technologically driven field, the cybersphere is the final artificial stage prior to the emergence of the noosphere as the actual governing structure of the next stage of evolution. But as it is now, the cybersphere, and the Internet in particular, is the chief purveyor of noospheric pollution. As the final cacophonous blast of the Tower of Babel, the Internet makes everything available from the most esoteric teachings to the most blatant forms of pornography - the ultimate democratization of values and global marketplace. The result is the final loss of meaning altogether, if only because everybody is talking at once and no one can tell what is the point of the conversation.

The present cybersphere is essentially what Marshall McLuhan envisioned in the 1960s as “the global village.” As McLuhan wrote in the introduction to his most famous text, Understanding media, (1964) “Today after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our electronic nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness ... ” Some thirty years ahead of his time, McLuhan's global village is equally a definition of the cybersphere - “the technological simulation of consciousness.”

Even before McLuhan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who along with Vernadsky and Jules LeRoy coined the word, noosphere, also perceived that the next evolutionary stage would be intermediated by a global electronic communication network. In the process of attaining the mystical transmaterial state of the noosphere, Teilhard de Chardin clearly foresaw the phase of the cybersphere and the global village as the gestation of the mystical body of Christ, the culmination or Omega Point of human evolution. In his vision, Teilhard saw the entire planet “dotted with luminous points, each one of those stars corresponding to some laboratory or some apparatus around which the human, through its charge of energy and its union, was here and now being transformed into some neo-human ‘isotope’ until the hitherto dark face of the planet had begun to sparkle with ultra-humanity ... stirring into motion: not with the monotonous motion of a firmament, but with the creative movement of an involutive galaxy.” (Teilhard de Chardin, The Activation of Energy, pp. 352-53)

The Internet performs this function, the creation of a global village, where around some apparatus - the PC or cell phone - the human is transforming itself into a neo-human (the Ethnosphere) or more appropriately, homo noosphericus. The cybersphere produced by the Internet, cell phone, and fax is a skeletal noosphere, a wildly random self-organizing slice of human consciousness talking to itself in an anarchic diversity of voices. But for evolution to occur in consciousness on a scale equal to the breadth of the planet, it requires far more intentionality than the laissez faire gigaplex of the Internet. Psychotechnical unification of a sort has been achieved that abolishes all national boundaries, but a yet higher state of mind must be attained. After all, the Internet is only a tool, and while it deploys a randomly ideated noosphere in the accumulation of virtually every bit of knowledge there ever was, it does not really, in and of itself, define the future, the noosphere.

Of necessity, as the evolved condition of the consciousness of the whole of life itself (and not just the historical human’s encyclopedic regurgitation of knowledge), the noosphere is above and beyond any tool. The noosphere is truly of the mind, the invisible mental or intelligence sheathe of the planet as a whole celestial body. As such, the noosphere is wholly of the mind and of a dimension of mind that we have scarcely been able to think about or grasp.

Elsewhere, Teilhard de Chardin put forth another provocative image, defining the noosphere “as one single vast cyclotron whose specific effect was to produce instead of and in place of nuclear energy, psychic energy in a continually more reflexive state ... to produce the ultra human {homo noosphericus}”(de Chardin, Activation of Energy, p. 349)

This envisioning posits the noosphere as an actual structure, or as an energetic expression requiring a structure - psychic cyclotron, as it were - to produce “psychic energy in a continually more reflexive state.” While Vernadsky’s noosphere is neo-Marxist, Teilhard de Chardin’s is neo-Christian, and decidedly psychospiritual in nature. The release of the psychic energy, the plasma of the noosphere, we might say, is to approximate the “Christing” of humanity. Elsewhere (Human Energy, p. 51, 1969), the Jesuit paleontologist writes:

“The world would leap high towards God if all the sick together were to turn their pain into a common desire that the kingdom of God should come to rapid fruition through the conquest and organization of the earth.” That is, the conquest of aberrant human structures which are the cause of the sickness, and consequent reorganization of the Earth according to supermental principles.

Here we must now pause to consider that the noosphere is a type of organism or structure, but of a purely fourth dimensional (mental) nature which has escaped our proper comprehension because our lower noospheric cloud has been thoroughly immersed in the intolerant one-dimensionality of third dimensional physicalist paradigms. The noospheric pollution is nothing but the multiply jabbering thought forms - the jabberwocky - crowded into this lower dimensional illusion that the physical is the sole reality. It is this illusion that grips the mind of humanity to this very day, the cause of all its ills and woes. Assuming this to be the case, then the noospheric emergence augured by the climax of the biospheric crisis in 2012, is more than a qualitative shift in human society, but a dimensional shift of consciousness for which most of us are ill prepared to comprehend or even entertain - a true Omega Point.

Furthermore, if the biosphere is regulated by certain laws consistent with the biogeochemical processes intrinsic to the structures of living matter and its support, must there not also be laws that govern the functioning of the noosphere? If living matter is defined as the totality of all living organisms present on Earth at any one time, what about living consciousness? What if consciousness is actually a cosmic structure inherent to evolving conditions of life that attain to a planetary scale of interactiveness? This noospheric structure is actually already in place, invisibly, and has been moderating the evolutionary and geological cycles since the emergence or appearance of life on this planet. It has been awaiting the maturation of the human consciousness to be properly fitted into the next evolutionary line - the superhuman, homo noosphericus, now waiting in the wings of the world stage ready to make its debut.

The human thinking layer which functions throughout this noospheric envelope as a haphazard mass of unexamined contradictions, now translated into the electronic “noise” of the cybersphere, is obedient only to the laws of historical determinism. But the noosphere is really not a function of historical determinism. It is the potentiality of a kind of mentation -higher vibrational thought processes - that become evident once the historical deterministic lower thinking processes have been exhausted - then there will be an end to noospheric pollution. Beyond that peak moment, the noosphere, latent with its own laws, will manifest in a way inconceivable now. Humanity, for one, will function as a single unitary organism coordinated by telepathy, until now only virtual and inherent, covered over by mechanistic and technologically artificial mental structures and deeply embedded, historically conditioned emotional processes.

Thinking about the Noosphere - The Noospheric Solution.

The Age of Nations has passed.
Now, unless we wish to perish
we must shake off our old prejudices
and build the earth.

Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy, 1969 p. 37

The Second Planetary Congress of Biospheric Rights actually represents the critical point in the biosphere-noosphere transition, when it is clearly understood that the actual solution to the biospheric crisis is the emergence of the noosphere - hence noospheric emergency.

Noosphere is actually the advent of a qualitative/dimensional shift in our evolutionary make-up - the passage from a technical civilization into a psychotechnical consciousness, the transition from electronic hardware and software to telepathy and the cultivation of telepathic technologies. This is the real meaning of the noosphere. In this sense the noosphere is the structure of the future evolving consciousness of the planet - that is, the consciousness of all of life, but this only when humankind assumes its responsibility for the role it plays in relation to the whole of life of which it is the cosmic intelligence reflecting agent.

While the biospheric crisis demands that we take action on a third dimensional level, in order for that action to be ultimately effective it must be informed from the highest, most synthesizing level of consciousness. That is why it is imperative that we study and understand the meaning of the noosphere, the key term in the evolutionary passage known as the biosphere-noosphere transition.

At present there is no agreed upon definition of the noosphere above and beyond the most generic level - planetary mental sphere, that which emerges from the biosphere. This is because there is as yet no coherent field of study, noospherics - the scientific investigation of the nature and structure of the noosphere. Surely, just as there is a science of the biosphere, there is a science of the noosphere, and all the time we waste today in creating smart bombs and rocketry we will, in the very immediate future, transform instead into a scientific investigation of the laws and principles governing the noosphere.

Presently, we may extrapolate that the noosphere represents the sum of all human thought aggregated as a planetary structure or sphere, along with the cognitive capacity contained within its own intrinsic processes. Just as the mind has its laws of logic and reason, and language and grammar, so the noosphere has its determining and guiding logic and grammar as well, which may have much to do with intrinsic mathematical functions and laws regulating the multiplication and propagation of life as well as hitherto unknown principles of morphogenetic resonance. In fact, we may come to understand the necessity of the noosphere as the underlying unconscious regulatory or guiding mechanism of the biospheric evolutionary process. This is the actual function of what is described as the psi bank - {Earth Ascending (1984), Mayan Factor (1987) Time and the Technosphere (2002)}. What we are witnessing on the present world stage is the noosphere becoming manifest or being made conscious.

If the noosphere is the stage of evolution that supersedes the biosphere, then it must be envisioned as being a stage or mutational sequence radically apart from all of our current conceptualizations, burdened as they are by the millennial development of the historical materialism which has created the present stage of civilization - globalization. From a planetary whole system perspective, this globalization is actually an unstable equilibrium in a process of emerging into a planetocosmic coherence - the noosphere.

Seen in this way, the biosphere-noosphere transition is actually the crisis of unconsciously convergent civilizational streams producing a planet-altering technospheric sheathe, unified by an intermediate stage known as the cybersphere. At this moment the entire chaotic dynamism has not yet been resolved into the noosphere. It is at this point that we must be ready to accept an elevated point of view in order to place ourselves in alignment with a comprehension of the noosphere from its own perspective. Only then will we begin to see the possibility, and even the necessity, of evolving a noospheric science to complement a science of the biosphere which would restore a morally normative sensibility among the human species. Or, perhaps through such a science, we could even envision our mutation into a new species altogether, homo noosphericus.

In such a complete re-envisioning of the solutions to our present crisis, we must advance our thinking to the level of cosmic consciousness. From this perspective, which is genuinely extraterrestrial - outside of or beyond the earth - the noosphere is the chief characteristic of a Type I cosmic civilization. That is, the advent of the noosphere is what characterizes the first or planetocosmic stage of cosmic civilization. Here we must understand that Cosmic Civilization is a unity, uniformly distributed and dispersed throughout the cosmos. When a civilization of intelligent beings attains the heightened mental condition of the noosphere it means it has allowed itself to mutate its collective cognitive functions into a psychotechnical, all unifying planetary mental sheathe. This is the noospheric foundation of a Type I or first stage of cosmic civilization. Such first stage civilizations are always planetary in nature, that is the intelligent organism has realized itself as a unifying planetary organism, having finally overcome its sense of separation or territorial and tribal (nationalistic) divisiveness.

Seeing the biospheric crisis in this light we may be capable of resolving it. This crisis is a natural transition from a purely third-dimensional materialist consciousness of competing ideologies and nationalisms - but poorly equipped for entertaining a planetary whole systems perspective - to the emergence into the noosphere, a fourth dimensional time field incorporating third dimensional functions into a higher order. Known as the synchronic order, this new cosmic organizational structure has for its purpose the establishment of a telepathic circuit for advancing collective psychic functions beyond the cybersphere. Yes, the noosphere is the thinking layer of the planet. It is not some vague amorphic phenomenon but a cosmically normative evolutionary structure with its own ‘grammar,’ logic and modes of expression. It is the currency of a galactic mode of consciousness and being, an inevitable stage in the evolution of biological life into a metabiological mental organism - the cosmoplanetary order of galactic being.

Though it may seem we have strayed far from concerns like global warming, the Kyoto Protocol, or the social and psychological effects of the War on Terror, sustainable development, species wide extinction etc., the point is that we cannot resolve any of these issues without invoking a higher state of consciousness. And it may be that invoking this higher sate we must acknowledge that we are not alone, that our global civilization is not the only stage I cosmic civilization in the entire universe. And that in acknowledging this, we may elevate our consciousness to a higher probability of becoming genuinely planetary. Clearly only a higher more elevated consciousness and moral sensibility is really going to help us.

Years ago (1971), the CETI (Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Conference was held in Yerevan, USSR by a critical group of mostly Soviet and American scientists headed by Ioseph Shklovski and Carl Sagan, but also including DNA discoverer, Francis Crick. At that time these scientists speculated that there existed numerous higher civilizations in the cosmos. They also believed that this higher civilization (or any higher civilization, for that matter), could only be defined as technological in scale and nature. Their underlying premise was that all biological life tends to increase in intelligence and in doing so, always evolves into technological civilizations that seek contact with other technological civilizations throughout the universe. Such was the assumption of the CETI project. Nowhere in their proceedings is there mention of telepathy or any other paranormal means of communication. Nonetheless, in its interdisciplinary synthesis, the CETI project must be credited for making an advance in the direction of cosmic civilization and consciousness.

The CETI project evolved side by side with the SETI project- Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This search was carried out by very large array (VLA) radio transmitters and receivers, the thinking being that the most likely ways higher civilizations would try to contact us would be by radio transmissions encoded with some type of order or pattern that other intelligent species in the universe might be able to pick up and decode. It was also believed by this group of scientists that only an intensifying machine technology could solve our problems. But with the imminent advent of the noosphere we must reconsider whether or not all higher civilization in the universe must be technological in nature.

The very notion of the noosphere as a mental sphere indicates a direction of evolution from the physical to the nonphysical, from the material to the mental. To solve our problems we need to raise our intelligence, not develop more technology. And if we cannot raise our own intelligence we must consider whether or not there is some intelligence elsewhere in the universe that might not be capable of responding to our crisis and give us some assistance. Not necessarily material assistance, but assistance in the form of some mental spiritual shock or boost, altering our perceptions radically and causing us to find solutions where before none existed.

Only a newly evolved or mutated human could carry out the scale and nature of the transformation we are required to make in order to meet the challenges facing us. There is a higher vision and a higher context available to us and that is what we refer to as cosmic consciousness. It may be that cosmic consciousness is only the consequence of weathering the biosphere-noosphere transition, but unless we consider it now, we may miss the opportunity altogether. We are in need of organs of self-governance and self-regulation not based on prior assumptions of nationalism and territoriality, but which fully incorporate principles of the biosphere and the evolving noosphere into corresponding decision making structures that reflect a comprehension of the Earth as a whole system. A new beginning must be made somewhere and somehow. Let it begin here.

For this reason the Second Planetary Congress of Biospheric Rights advocates the establishment of two organs of governance: A Planetary Biospheric Congress, to establish rules of trade, commerce and economics in accord with principles of the biosphere (bioregionalism and ecological energy principles), and a Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly, a governing or deliberating body based upon the assumption that cosmic consciousness is inevitable, therefore begin now to prepare for the ways to advance humanity into this stage of evolution - the noosphere.

To open the lens even wider and propel our thinking into stages beyond the present scope in order that we may be inspired to transcend our present self-perceived and self-imposed limitations, let us envision that the crisis we are currently experiencing is merely to evolve us completely into a first stage of cosmic civilization. Beyond this incipient noospheric psychozoic stage of planetocosmic civilization, there are three other stages beckoning us on in our evolutionary ascent toward supreme intelligence. In and of itself the planetocosmic represents a new stage in our thinking and self-perception.

In order to impart to us an understanding regarding the stage of evolution in which we find ourselves, this planetocosmic perspective aligns the four defining bodies and levels of the galactic order with the four different levels or stages in the evolution of cosmic civilization. In this way an analogical bridge is created, allowing our present mental ceiling to be raised by degrees. Accordingly we define:

The four types or stages of cosmic civilization

I.    Planetocosmic - Psychotechnical unification - the noosphere. Era of great Earth changes and readjustment of human community to new environmental conditions. Cyberspheric network transits to telepathic structures. Incipient galactic consciousness and galactic seed culture. Transformation of historical materialism into non-materialist ideology of cosmic consciousness. Human self-perception as planetary whole organism - homo noosphericus.

II.   Heliocosmic (Stellar) - “New Solar Age”, emergence of homo noosphericus as biosolar telepathic being. Stabilized galactic consciousness, psycho-solar technology, psychozoic regeneration of the terrestrial biosphere; extended two-way galactic communication; sun fully realized to be an evolving star system - the heliosphere or heliocosm. Terrestrial civilization fully powered by solar-plasmic energy.

III.  Galactocosmic - Omnigalactic Supermind - Galactic Federation. Harnessing of galactic energy for transformation of material reality. Capacity for surveillance of developing subsystems, such as our own. Purely transcendent order of being no longer dependent solely on material means. Mastery of Timespace travel.

IV.  Omnicosmic - Metagalactic transcendental universal telepathic consciousness. Capacity for planetary and biological design engineering according to principles of higher evolutionary advancement. Purely fifth or higher dimensional operations with mastery and control over lower dimensional orders of being.

In considering this ascending order of stages of cosmic civilization, we must further add that it is an important stage in our own mental-spiritual evolution to envision an alternative future reality, one that is not based on projections of the present stage of technological civilization. Such an envisioning is also a critical step in the elimination of noospheric pollution. Once we see through the haphazard currents of the unconscious noosphere, we will find a higher order of reality awaiting us, beckoning us to the next stage of the evolution of our terrestrial intelligence.

Seven Steps Toward the Noosphere - Emergence of Homo Noosphericus Omega Point 2012

Planets with Noosphere. Planets arrive at this distinction through a final, critical evolutionary stage referred to as biosphere-noosphere transition. Such a transition is always preceded by what appears to be an almost insurmountable crisis. The successful passage of such a transition depends on the comprehensive whole system evaluation of the key factors contributing to the crisis, and then applying the correct whole system design engineering solution.

Planetary engineering refers to the subtle skill and crafting of solutions appropriate to the perception of the planet as a cosmoelectrical transduction unit operating within a stellar (solar) system which is the actual managing agent of the planet’s affairs.

“Planetary Engineering Project, Noosphere II” Galactic Research Institute

When we comprehend that we are just now entering the first stage of cosmic civilization we have a context both to understand our situation and a reason for rising to a higher level in our commitment to resolve the problems facing us, beginning with the elimination of noospheric pollution. The very act of rising to this higher level is the noosphere enacting itself through us. Once we have envisioned taking these steps to reorient the purpose and direction of life on Earth, the higher stages of cosmic civilization might be willing to become interactive with us, though not necessarily in ways that we can now imagine.

There are practical steps that we can take in this enactment or embodiment of the noosphere which constitute an unprecedented resolve of the human will acting in accord with higher - divine - intentionality. These steps are all an intricately integrated unity and cannot be conceived of as separate from each other. They are the concrete action measures that we need to take as a unified body in consequence of participating in the Second Planetary Congress of Biospheric Rights. These steps are organized taking into consideration the root problems and present causal factors defining the biospheric crisis. In that way they go directly to the target.

It is recognized that in the eyes of many, the steps we herewith envision may seem outlandish, naive or unrealistic; but rather than balk at the possibility or debate endlessly on how realistic or unrealistic such steps might be, it is better to exercise the imagination and begin to determine how they could occur, where to begin and who to begin with. To dream the impossible and attempt to act upon it is far better than not trying at all. In that regard these seven steps are merely touchstones to get us to think in new ways. After all, given the present state of things on the world stage, what do we have to lose?

Seven Steps Toward the Noosphere

1. Universal ceasefire and disarmament. The original tenet of the Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Plan states that for the purpose of observing the adoption of a new global harmonic timing standard - the 13 Moon 28-day calendar - the calendar change is the perfect opportunity to call for a universal ceasefire and disarmament . All existing lunar calendars would be respected and synchronized by this reform. It is merely the present global civil calendar that is being replaced. To enact this long overdue reform is now a planetary necessity for establishing a thoroughly new and common foundation and covenant in time, free of all previous conditionings, for the emerging species - homo noosphericus. Changing the calendar is an act of collective will that would demonstrate our resolve to enter into a new time of peace. To be effective, such a ceasefire should be called for a minimum duration of one year. After a year of living with such a ceasefire, even if only with limited success, the people would not want to give up what they had already experienced of peace.

The Banner of Peace and the principles of peace through culture play an important role in this process. As a universally recognized and recognizable symbol, flying or exhibiting the Banner of Peace would come to indicate a demilitarized zone in the process of cultural restoration, as well as the protection of any biospheric site or cultural monument. At the same time, during the cease fire, skilled mediators of every kind wearing banner of peace arm bands could begin negotiations with all parties involved in any kind of military or paramilitary conflict so that a general disengagement of conflicting parties from each other could commence. Here, we must consider that there must be a principle of universal pardon and forgiveness where everybody can equally be given a fresh start.

All parties controlling nuclear weapons or weapons capability would be called together at a neutral site to begin discussions on how to begin the elimination of such weapons. Existing peacekeeping and disarmament agencies within the United Nations and other governmental and non-governmental organizations would be called upon to participate in this process. The control of so-called conventional arms, would then be the next step. To imagine a world without war, imagine a world without guns. If everybody lays down their arms at the same time, then everyone can walk away in peace at the same time.

2. Denationalization of the Earth. The creation of arbitrary nations with fictitious and disputable boundaries is in complete disregard of the intrinsic and integral unity of the biosphere and bioregionalism in general, and is actually a major obstacle to the attainment of human unity. To attain the dissolution of national boundaries and supervise the methods of arriving at a new denationalized bioregionalism is a chief purpose of the newly formed Planetary Biospheric Congress. At the same time that consideration is given to the denationalization of the biosphere, the study and enumeration of the natural bioregions intrinsic to the Earth should be undertaken along with the formulation of equitable principles governing these regions. These principles should be inclusive of the trade and economic agreements which are to be established with all due speed.

Once the deliberating body of the Biospheric Congress has reached a sufficient degree of clarity concerning the principles and procedures involved in the process of denationalization the representatives of the 180 plus nations that currently exist as the general Assembly of the United Nations, should be called into session with the Biospheric Congress. In this way the delegates of the existing nation states could find ways to begin to cooperate with each other to consider how a new body of human governance operating in respect of the laws of the biosphere could begin to operate in establishing a planet free of boundaries, and hence in no need of armies to protect them.

To get to this stage, we are aware that we must overcome our present phobia of terrorism and all of the ‘security’ issues related with this phenomenon. But if there were no nation states there would be no terrorism. If there were no elite G-8, WTO and European Union nations controlling the wealth of the world there would be no need of terrorism. We must be willing to disengage ourselves from the ideologies that are part and parcel of the nationalism that is ingrained in our present, now collapsing world order. We must be able to face the fact that the nation state was but a brief passing phase in our evolution towards our becoming a genuine planetary organism. The wind blows and the trees grow free of national distinction. Let humanity in its great step into tomorrow likewise be a creature free of the constraints of artificial boundaries that promote only fears and suspicion.

3. Disincorporation of means and resources - Operation Earth Rescue and the role of the Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly. Currently all world goods and services are mediated by giant cartels, banks and energy monopolies which disempower the user, and amass great profits for the elite few who control them. These structures and processes must be decentralized and placed in the hands of local bioregionally organized companies. At the same time, it is the large cartels and corporations that are responsible for the maintenance of the technosphere and the depletion of the Earth’s resources. While global warming and natural disaster cannot be placed completely as their responsibility, the multinational corporations and cartels must share the burden of the cost of Operation Earth Rescue. What might be the incentive to gather the corporate elite to put their wealth and means to the restoration of the planet by decentralizing themselves? Global catastrophe.

Increasing attention is being given to the probability of greater and greater world catastrophes. It is these catastrophes that make Operation Earth Rescue a necessary stage in the emerging noosphere. Books like Lee Clarke’s Worst Case: Terror and Catastrophe in the popular Imagination (2003) and Richard Posner’s Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004) begin to anticipate everything from asteroids hitting the Earth to a much faster than expected global warming. Note that these two books are the product of serious “academic” presses, the University of Chicago Press and Oxford University Press, respectively. Even a staid journal like the University of Chicago Magazine features as its June 2006 cover story “Grave New World, Catastrophe experts Plan for the Big one.”

It is no longer merely for the doom-sayers and prophets to predict the “end of the world.” Writes the University of Chicago Magazine, “Exploring the catastrophic possibilities of the modern world, scientists and sociologists explain why the sky, in fact, may be falling.” In other words, in the coming years a principle job or work force activity must be involved in the likes of an Operation Earth Rescue. The multinational corporations would be put to good use in marshaling such a work force, and in the process decentralize themselves, yielding the reins of power to bioregional partner groups. A fundamental aspect of this process, of course is equalization of wealth, of returning the wealth to the source, to the land and the people from whom the resources have been taken in the first place. In this way the issue of world poverty would also be confronted head on with an obvious solution. Too long have we been dominated by selfish values and corporate ego, it is time for the tide to turn in the direction of altruism, cooperation, forgiveness and compassion.

The Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly (L.Gordina, "From Biosphere to Noosphere", Moscow-Toropets, 2005, p.138) in coordination with the World Bank would adjudicate this process according to the guidance of an ecumenical spiritual council of wise elders. Already the World Assembly has developed a Noosphere Spiritual-Ecological Constitution for Mankind (NSECFORM) for the realization of the scientific concept of life. The NSEWA recognizes that the human spirit in its malignant spiritual ecological condition is the trigger of the terrestrial cataclysms. To this end, and in recognition of the emerging noosphere, the NSEWA has already, through its constitution, set forth many objectives, tasks, fields of regulation and legal norms to be considered in the process of establishing the new order of reality. The empowerment of this body by the Second Planetary Congress of Biospheric Rights is essential for the safeguarding of the most harmonious transition possible out of the old order into the new time.

4. The establishment of the principles of Galactic Citizenship. Dependent on the preceding three steps, the fourth, that of granting free and equal galactic citizenship to all humans is absolutely mandatory. Incorporating the fundamental principles of human rights as set forth in the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, galactic citizenship would liberate all humans from any nationalistic allegiances. This is referred to as “galactic citizenship,” because it is in recognition that the Earth is in reality an orbiting satellite of a star, the sun, which is a member of the local galaxy, “Milky Way.”

By emphasizing the galactic nature of terrestrial-solar reality, we could begin to attune ourselves as a species to the fact that through our crisis and pulling together globally, that we were entering the first stage or becoming a Type I cosmic civilization, that we had graduated from the old nationalistic order of strife and competition, and were in a new era of cosmic consciousness and planetary cooperation. In line with the process of noospheric emergence we would begin to understand and see ourselves as a single planetary organism, no longer in need of committing suicide by violence and strife, but eager to heal ourselves. In this shift in mental climate resulting from our understanding the nature and meaning of our galactic citizenship, we could entertain a far more ennobling reason for our existence. For instance, a new, higher vision and purpose for living on this Earth could be provided by everyone being assigned a role in the care taking and custodianship of the Earth as a “Galactically Federated Planetary Park and Cultural Preserve.”

The principle here is that, once upon a time, our elders and ancestors all held the Earth to be a sacred realm, a divine playground, a garden of plenty. The advent of secularism and materialist industrialization of means and production put an end to the prevalence of that perception. But can we say that there was not truth to that Indigenous perception, or that like the sun shining behind the clouds of materialism, the sacred reality of the Earth does not yet prevail? If we survive the coming years we will certainly come to see the wisdom of regarding the Earth as galactic theme park and cultural preserve. Our Indigenous elders may come to guide us in this process. If we become a denationalized species, bioregionally organized, all of us holding galactic citizenship and no longer engaged in war and the protection or expansion of our boundaries, then as custodians and caretakers of the Galactically Federated Planetary Park and Cultural Preserve, we might be aroused to new levels of creative endeavor and cooperative ingenuity.

This proposal is but a logical extension of the move that has recently been made to transform the Autonomous Republic of Altai (Russian Federation) into a Noospheric Reserve and Planetary Peace Through Culture Center. This is being done essentially to preserve the remote Siberian land and culture from the effects of globalization and noospheric pollution. Since it is globalization that has been the cause of the final desecration of the Earth, in the post-globalization era it might be wise to assure the renewed sacredness of the whole Earth, to transform it, likewise, into a Noospheric Preserve - A Galactically Federated Planetary Park and Cultural Preserve, a shrine to intergalactic peace!

5. Development of garden communities and alternative technology network. This is mandatory in order to begin the descaling of green house emissions, as well as providing new community bases for millions of refugees and displaced marginal citizens living in the massive urban ghettos. According to the UN Human habitat report (Nairobi) issued in 2003, by 2030 one in every three humans will be living in one of these sprawling slums. To consider the implications of this statistical projection for more than a moment is intolerable. Why is not a massive campaign now launched to address and remedy this issue? We must act now and begin to create the habitats for humanity that are the most critical human component of the vision of Operation Earth Rescue.

This is an intricate issue, as we can see, tied to the entire biospheric disrupting and destroying nature of the technosphere as a planetary scale machine organism. The gluttonous consumption of nonrenewable energy is intrinsically related to the rise in population, the growth of the transportation industry and the subsequent rise of the urban slums:

“The abundance of energy has allowed the human population to expand greatly, multiplying threefold during the lifetime of the present Queen of England {Elizabeth II}. A new subspecies, called Homo hydrocarbunum, evolved ... (and) will certainly be extinct by the end of this century ... We are not about to run out of oil, but production is close to peak. The transition will represent an unparalleled discontinuity as the growth of the past gives way to the decline of the future.”

(C. J. Campbell, “Petroleum and People,” Population and Environment {vol. 24, no. 2), pp. 193-207 (November 2002), cited in Andrew McKillop and Sheila Newman (editors), The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, London 2005, p.154.

The fact is that the oil production peak will occur by 2010. This means that by 2012 the world will be in a headlong spin over its energy consumption. And in 2035, by present projections, the population will be soaring past eight billion, while the available oil production will have fallen as much as 75 percent from present day levels. This will create an effect which Andrew McKillop refers to as “apocalypse 2035.” Who will possess this remaining oil, and what will the increasing numbers of have-nots be doing?

It is virtually impossible to imagine the world in this kind of situation without conjuring the word “apocalypse.” This apocalypse, however, is based on the statistical projections of just one trend without necessarily considering numerous other trends. If one takes other trends into consideration - global warming, natural catastrophes, nuclear confrontation, disease, increased solar flare activity - the apocalypse may be much sooner than 2030. A more likely date is 2012, humanity’s Omega Point. Do we want to wait for that or do we wish to take action?

It is not just a matter of cutting down emissions of existing industrial plants, but of vigorously moving forward in the development of technologies and production methods which are nonpolluting and which envision a decentralization of human population away from congested urban centers. Brazil, as a nation, is at least presently switching to ethanol. That is but a start. The billions now spent on war and armaments industries must be channeled for this two fold purpose: investment in alternative nonpolluting energy and technology, and the creation of the garden communities which will be powered by these technologies. We must begin now to create a global network of the alternative energy technologies and their capacity to deliver to a carefully staged exodus away from the urban centers toward a new kind of decentralized garden culture.

In the consideration of the new garden culture, we must also look at the economical and ecological impact of an evolutionary trend toward vegetarianism. If cows were no longer the staple of the human diet, the land now used for pasture could be reclaimed by the rain forest. Still there are many complex issues to be considered in light of the intricacies of the food chains sustained by the biosphere. The point is that energy, food production and the kind of economic structure that exists in the world are all interdependent. This is why we must bring genuine whole systems thinking to bear on the resolution of the biosphere-noosphere transition.

6. Centers for the Restitution of the Natural Mind. Infatuation with machine technology is linked to the immediate effects of new technologies. That is, once introduced into the life stream, the new technologies make us feel like we couldn’t live without them. Witness the automobile, the internet, the mobile phone - life without them is unthinkable, or so it seems. Is it true, as some scientists have hypothesized, that the human civilization that has produced the technosphere is really only an unstable intermediary stage to an even more purely technological level of evolution? In 1971 Ioseph Shklovski speculated along these lines: “I would also underscore the development of such advanced cybernetic civilizations may be described as a logical abiological development of life as we know it. It may be that what we call civilization is merely an intermediate stage on the road to a far more advanced civilization, an intermediate and unstable step, moreover.” CETI. p. 150

Of course, the future civilization imagined by Shklovski and his colleagues was purely technological and dominated by machines in which the biological human had disappeared. In this view machines are not only extensions of human biology, but the actual next stage of biological evolution, an evolution in which artificial intelligence replaces human intelligence and the human is no longer necessary.

In order to fulfill our total human potential, we must look at the other side of this. What if it is technological civilization that is an intermediate and unstable stage in the evolution of higher consciousness? What if the sole propose of the development of the technosphere was simply to radiate the human out across the planet as a genuinely planetary organism, merely in preparation for a mutation into an advanced unitary stage of consciousness? What if the biological evolution actually tends toward the evolution of mind and spirit? And the ultimate goal of biological evolution is its own transcendence - not replacement by robots -but supreme mental spiritual transformation and transcendence into a realm of pure spirit or radiance and light?

In such a view, we must entertain the possibility that telepathy and the paranormal now deemed by scientific skeptics as fraudulent self-deceptions, might be the actual pointers toward the next stage of our evolution, the telepathic unification of consciousness and hence of our biological being as a single planetary organism. Is this not the meaning of the noosphere? At the very least we should consider that this is equally as possible as being replaced by a race of robots. That being the case, such a possibility merits focused attention and increased research support.

The purpose of the CREST program (Centers for the Restitution, Investigation and Education of the Natural Mind) of the Galactic Research Institute (GRI) is to establish a telepathic network to anticipate the noosphere as an actual mutation of consciousness. When its first stage is completed by mid-2009, this planetary engineering project will consist of thirteen centers strategically located in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres (six in each half of the globe, the thirteenth near Mt. Kilimanjaro on the equator). Through a program that first trains the researchers in the recognition of natural mind, that is, mind free of ego and all conceptualizations, the planetary engineering project then advances the mind to coordinated telepathic exercises with researchers in the other twelve centers.

The purpose of this GRI project is twofold: first, to explore the possibility of creating a collectively functioning telepathic network - a noospheric safety net - and secondly, to conduct experiments testing the capacity of a unified telepathic mental field to interact with the Earth's electromagnetic field, in particular with the plasmic flows from the two magnetic poles - the aurora borealis and the aurora australis. Pioneering experiments in this direction have already been conducted by the ISRICA group (Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk. It may well be that such globally organized experiments may have a profound effect in stabilizing the Earth as the acceleration of events approaches the 2012 climax point. (See V.P. Kaznacheev and A.V. Trofimov, Cosmic Consciousness of Humanity, Problems of New Cosmogony, Tomsk 1992, especially “The ‘Polar Circle’ Global experiment” pp. 87-94 and “The ‘Aurora Borealis’ Global Experiment Distant-Informative Interactions in the Noosphere and their Role in the Planetary-Biospheric homeostasis of the Earth,” pp. 129-138.)

7. Moral Rearmament. If there is any issue that plagues the modern global civilization it is the adherence to the belief of relativism - at the expense of a belief in the Absolute. This relativism is part of the inheritance of the split between science and theology that occurred in the eighteenth century. It is also an aspect of what we might call the democratization of consciousness which, like the doctrine of the progress of the machine, greater material comforts, and free market liberal capitalist economics, is seen as an inevitable and irreversible factor in the mental and cultural make up of the present day civilization of globalization.

The sum effect of these tendencies results in a totally secular society dominated by a culture of choice, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a remarkably anarchic diversity of forms of expression, epitomized by the Internet. The multiplicity of choices - just walk down a supermarket aisle in an industrialized shopping center and count how many choices in breakfast cereal you might find - and the equal multiplicity of forms of expression and voices expressing themselves together create a mass mental quagmire known as moral relativism. In moral relativism, everybody is right so nobody is right. If you talk about the absolute you are either a fascist or a fundamentalist and more than likely will become a terrorist. In this way moral relativism is its own form of tyranny, just like modern science which adamantly refuses to accept any hypothesis that suggests that there is a higher principle, God, intelligent design etc., much less that the paranormal is an actual field of study.

It is very possible that this moral relativism is responsible for the breakdown of modern society, for where moral relativism prevails there is a loss of discrimination, a degradation of taste, a loss of aesthetic perception, a bland mediocrity dominated by a cyberculture of geeks, and an entertainment industry that is always flirting with pornography, while introducing you to ever more graphic violence. In 2006, 30% of American teenagers won’t finish high school, and the drop outs are seen in increasing numbers looking lost and freaky in select neighborhoods and parks of the urban centers. In Tokyo, on the other hand, one in every four school children say they have never seen the full moon. These are the facts of relativistic alienation.

The basic premises of globalization further this process of relativism and alienation. China is Wal-Mart’s production base, while India is Microsoft’s software producer. As often as not the shoes you are wearing were made in some Southeast Asian country. The disconnect between means and production, laborer and producer has never been greater. This is because everyone is fundamentally disconnected from life and is living an abstract fiction dominated by the cellphone, internet and the automobile.

Perhaps it is too late to salvage the present day human from the illusions of relativism and the spiritual poverty of life in the fast lane. The glamour of technology continues unabated, and, it seems, only natural catastrophe or an extraterrestrial visit from beyond will put an end to it. Yet, if we were to consider a moral rearmament campaign, where would we begin? The mind, of course. If we really understood the nature of our mind, we wouldn’t do ninety per cent of what we do today. This again is to the point of the noosphere and the idea of the Centers for the Restitution of the Natural Mind. Techniques of mindfulness exist and are well used, mostly by buddhist monks, a few Hindu adepts and some Sufis. What if the techniques of mindfulness training were introduced in mass education? Or in Islamic societies, if the techniques of Dhikr - remembrance of God - became an integral part of the education of every child and young adult?

Perhaps the time has come to consider whether or not we are spiritually rich or spiritually poor. If we know our own minds, or recognize the remembrance of God as our true self, factionalism would greatly decrease and tolerance and compassion would greatly increase. Perhaps reading the Quran along with Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, complemented by mindfulness training would induce an inquiring mind and a naturally evolving discriminative mental faculty. We might even begin to evolve a genuinely planetary spirituality appropriate to our globalized species and this too would be an incipient function of the noosphere. In the Western school system at least, the idea of any kind of spirituality in the classroom is not tolerated. This is a closed minded fascist approach in itself. What are we afraid of?

Putting the best human foot forward, maybe it will be matched with aid from Beyond, some kind of Galactic Marshall Plan to eradicate spiritual poverty in out of the way and errant planetary systems like our own.

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“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

John Lennon, “Imagine”

By even considering these foregoing steps and how to begin with each of them, we are enacting the first laws or principles of the noosphere as the new, evolved unified state of the mind and consciousness of the Earth. By enumerating and detailing in some degree the issues contained in the foregoing seven topics we are in a direct way, “taking the bull by the horns.” Everyone knows that there is a problem with the environment, the biosphere. Everyone knows what is causing the problem. No one, generally speaking, is willing to directly identify the leverage points for dealing with the problem. And generally no one is willing to suggest solutions which directly confront the agencies in charge of perpetrating the problem. On the one hand, there is too much fear of being controlled by the powers that be, and on the other, those with vested interests are generally unwilling to let go of their power. But, ladies and gentlemen, we are in a planetary emergency. Let us not mince our words nor flinch from the truth.

Let us say the doctor has told us we have just six years to live - unless we want to do something about it. Change our habits and lifestyle, get rid of our addictions, eliminate the stress in our life, stop hoarding our wealth and develop a charitable and spiritual attitude. Slow down, take some time to meditate and reflect on our life. Spend more time in nature. Do good works that help repair the damage caused by our greed. Provide for orphans and the needy dispossessed by war and natural disaster. Stop killing people gratuitously, and think of how we can mend fences and become good neighbors. Stop spending money on weapons of destruction and invest instead in new ways of doing things that will help the Earth and the human race. If we did all of this - and more - the doctor would tell us, well then maybe you’ll live more than six years. Who knows how long you could live if you did all of these things to improve the quality of your life and return you to good health.

To assure that we can remain steadfast in our new health program, we might convene a Biospheric Congress to take care of our body and relations to the Earth, and a Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly to repair our mind and see what new directions our mind and spirit might wish to evolve. We could establish a 2012 timetable to meet our new self-help goals and when, as a planetary organism, we might expect the new bill of health - the one that says, “You are no longer homo sapiens. You have graduated. You are now homo noosphericus!”

® Galactic Research Institute, 2006. All rights reserved.

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Select Bibliography: (Please note, this is by no means comprehensive and fundamentally focuses on some recent literature on the noosphere available in English. Other linguistic/culture groups are invited to add to this with publications in their own languages.)

Allen, John. “Ethnospherics: Origins of human cultures, their subjugation by the Technosphere, the beginning of an ethnosphere, and steps needed to complete the ethnosphere.” Inter-Research 2003. www.int-res.com

Arguelles, Jose. Earth Ascending, An Illustrated Treatise on the Law Governing Whole Systems. Bear & Co., Rochester VT, 3rd edition, 1996

____________. The 260 Postulates of the Dynamics of Time, Showing the Evolution of Time as Consciousness. Galactic Research Institute. www.lawoftime.org, 1996

____________. Time and the Technosphere, The Law of Time in Human Affairs. Bear & Co., Rochester, VT, 2002.

____________ with Stephanie South, Cosmic History Chronicles, Volume I Book of The Throne: Law of Time and the Reformulation of the Human Mind. Law of Time Press- Galactic Research Institute, 2005.

________________________, Cosmic History Chronicles, Volume II, Book of the Avatar: Harmonic History, Cosmic Science and the Descent of the Divine. Law of Time Press-Galactic Research Institute, 2006.

Coats, Callum. Living Energies. Gateway Books, Bath UK. 1996

Communities Directory, A Guide to Cooperative Living. Fellowship for Intentional Community, Rutledge, Missouri, 1995.

“A Complete Guide to the First Planetary Congress of Biospheric Rights.” Galactic Research Institute, www.lawoftime.org, 1996

“Design and Action for a New World,” World Constitution and Parliament Association, Lakewood, CO, 1982-96.

Gibson, Lydialyle, “The Big One, exploring the catastrophic possibilities of the modern world” University of Chicago Magazine, June 2006, pp. 30-37

Gordina, Liubov. “Noosphere Spiritual Ecological Constitution for Mankind - Realization of the Scientific Concept of the Life Cosmogenesis.” Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly, www.newhumanity.org.ru

Hugget, R.J.. “Ecosphere, biosphere, or Gaia? What to Call the global ecosystem.” Blackwell Science Ltd. www.blackwell-science.com/geb, (1999)

Kaznacheev, V. P. and A. V. Trofimov, Cosmic Consciousness of Humanity - Problems of New Cosmogony. Elendis-Progress, Yomsk, 1992.

Kuri, Laura. Bienvenidos a casa. Vivencia y pensamiento bioregional. Ayotl, AC. Mexico, D.F.. 2003

Masani, P.R. “The ecology of the noosphere: where the ecological movement falls short.” Kybernetes, Vol. 24, no. 9 1995, pp. 13-34

McKillop, Andrew with Sheila Newman, editors. The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, London and Ann Arbor, 2005.

“Planetary Engineering Project, Noosphere II.” Galactic Research Institute. www.lawoftime.org, 2005

Oldfield, Jonathan D. and Denis J.B.. Shaw, “V.I. Vernadsky and the noosphere concept: Russian Understandings of society-nature interaction.” Geoforum, www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum, 10 November 2004.

The Roerich Pact and the Banner of Peace. The Roerich Pact and Banner of Peace Committee, New York, 1947

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