FOR STARTERS, WHAT'S A NOOSPHERE?

[Michael Grove]

As John Hazard has so succinctly provided the following explanation,

in his article Manifesting the Noosphere ... "IT’s best described as a layer

of collective human intelligence that is part of the planet Earth, like an

atmosphere, only it’s mental. Noos comes from the Greek, it means mind.

It’s a concept that first appeared in the early ferment of the 20th century.

There was a lot of intellectual activity at that time. That’s when Einstein

offered a description of reality that ushered in the era of the modern mind,

a mind that was forced to consider mind expanding concepts like the speed

of light, or the quantum nature of reality, or the size of an atom, or the age

of mankind. The idea of the noosphere was percolating at that moment, the

way other ideas like the theory of evolution, or the design of the automobile

were being worked on simultaneously by several forward thinking and unique

individuals. There was a Russian named Vernadsky, and he was in touch

with a Jesuit paleontologist named Chardin, and between them they took

the idea very far, especially Teillard de Chardin, who is my source for the

idea. 

Chardin’s way of describing the Noosphere was introduced in the West at

the time of his death in the mid-1950’s, but he and Vernadsky were working

it out back in the 20’s and 30’s. Chardin was trained as a scientist, and also,

as a priest. He was a French Jesuit paleontologist who was present in China

in the 1920’s when archeologists first discovered proto-human remains

that pushed the known age of human ancestors back hundreds of thousands

of years. Chardin was a restless intellectual, he had a predilection for rigorous

training and mystical perception, and the result was a body of written work

that is staggeringly brilliant, though densely filagreed with detailed exposition

that endeavors to draw associations to stages of evolution and to stages of

being. I read his book, “The Phenomenon of Man” during my summer break

between my freshman and sophomore years at college, and though I’ve only

read the book that one time, I’ve been guided in my thinking these last forty

years by the ideas I discovered between the covers of that book." 

Down in Zucotti Park, the locus of origin of the movement known as

Occupy Wall Street, an unemployed carpenter refers to the way the

protesters have to communicate with each other as “an architecture of

consciousness.” He’s not trying to be poetic, he wants to be descriptive.

The police have forbidden the use of bullhorns, so the OWSers spread the

message one person at a time. But there is definitely poetry here. OWSers

are criticised for having an incoherent message, but I see the message in

the medium, just as Marshall McLuhan surmised.

The medium, in this case, is the crowd of humanity itself. The message is

the creation of a new architecture of consciousness. That is the goal, but

it’s hard to imagine how we get there from here.

An Architecture of Consciousness exactly defines the Noosphere.

The Noosphere IS a design for an architecture of global consciousness.

The handful of individuals who have endeavored to give definition to the

Noosphere concept suggest we’re in for a dawning of a new type of

awareness. Human beings are going to activate a dormant element of their

psychic infrastructure and find it is inhabiting a NEW [MIND]space. One of

the strongest lessons that people are learning from the use of psychoactive

entheogens is the direct perception and the deep understanding of just

how gloriously embedded we are in the bosom of  Mother Nature. In the

1970’s the two scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis introduced

the Gaia Hypothesis to describe the behaviour of the planet as it is observed

through scientific measurement. 

A generation later, the Gaia Hypothesis is NOW Gaia Theory, because

more time and observation have strengthened the core idea. Science now

has a comfort level with the body of GAIA, and now some scientists

are using hallucinogenic plants to explore the Mind of GAIA.

                                                                               John Hazard

.