While in college in the mid 1970’s I read the book Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton. Written in 1937 as the forces that caused World War II were already brewing, Stapleton described a mind-only astral trip through the space-time of the universe. Along the way he encountered numerous highly evolved, highly self-aware species with a level of consciousness and technology analogous to our own.
I have always remembered the main point: the planetary civilizations that survived all evolved a collective “species consciousness” (my term) at a point when they were in a global crisis. A powerful meme of recognition took the form of “a widespread passion for a new social order which should be just and should embrace the whole planet.”1
“Tribal prestige, individual dominance, military glory, industrial triumphs lost their obsessive glamour, and instead the happy creatures delighted in civilized social intercourse, in cultural activities, and in the common enterprise of world-building.”2 In the book, civilizations that continued on this path eventually developed a “psychically unified community.”3
Flash forward to today where a new meme is beginning to propagate. This meme begins with a belief that through meditation we can still the machinery of the individual mind long enough to make contact with the universal mind—the vast void of infinite consciousness that animates our true, authentic selves and all life in the cosmos. The meme continues with the thought that this universal mind is the force that is driving evolution in the direction of higher and higher consciousness (i.e. single-celled organism to human).
Finally, the meme concludes with this thought expressed by Andrew Cohen, evolutionary scholar and editor of the magazine EnlightenNext: “The next evolutionary leap, as I see it, is the leap from the individual to higher collective, a ‘higher we.’”4
In other words, humans will not only begin to see themselves as one, they will literally be one through a common sense of immersion and experience of the cosmic mind. Who is to say if this is true? But it feels true. And it feels necessary if we are to avoid a future of planetary suffering, strife and death.
1-3 from Chapter 9, Part 1 of Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton, Busy Utopias.
4 from page 32 of EnlightenNext, Issue 46, Spring/Summer 2010.