Intelligence of the Planet

O Thou maker of the Universe, build our temple, for Thy divine Message of love, harmony and beauty.
~ Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

“A new spirituality is emerging out of the religions of the past, free from dogmas, prescriptions, gurus, and the institutionalization of religions. It is calling upon us to take responsibility, honor our values, celebrate the marvel of life and realize the privilege of participating in the cosmic celebration right in the middle of the drama of humanity. You may recognize this vision for the future of spirituality. It is the Universal—the message for the Millennium of spiritual freedom, honoring the divinity of the human status, mastery through accomplishment. It carries a heartening energy: re-enchantment.

It would be a truism to say that Planet Earth, and we as the decision-making members of the planetary population, are right in the midst of a revolution. For the evolutionary thrust of which we are the beneficiaries to advance, the status quo has inevitably to break down; our concern is whether a radical breakthrough will outweigh the breakdown, or whether the breakdown will reach a point of no return. Clearly we and we only have the answer in our hands. But who are we? I hope I am not making too judgmental a statement by saying that only a very small portion of the population of the Planet are prepared to prioritize the interest of the whole over their greed, failing to see that the well being of the whole does reflect upon the living standard of the individual.

The troubling increase in crime, violence, vulgarity, lack of charity, sacrilege, abuse, and the ruthless exploitation of the environment is an indication that a growing portion of humanity is in trouble. Moreover we have the bigotry of fundamentalists, and perhaps a large majority of well-meaning people are still into their personal thing, not having the foggiest sense of what the global perspective could possibly mean! We have the irresponsible population explosion. On the other hand, we have the few whose intuition gives them some clues as to what measures we need to take to avert a catastrophe.

Paradoxically, the very technology which is destroying the environment could be harnessed to save it. But our way of thinking and more so our values are the determining factors. We have not grown on a par with the potentialities that, like the apprentice sorcerer, we have unleashed. It is really a matter of both consciousness and conscience. Vested interests have sabotaged technological breakthroughs that could have helped. There is also simply a habit-forming complacency, and sectarianism. Sometimes one wonders how things could ever change for the better. Yet indeed we never cease to be amazed by the dramatic upheavals in our day and age. This being so, there is hope.

The evolutionary forward thrust has not reached its culmination in Homo sapiens such as we are at present. Looking back gives us some clues as to how we could improve. Species progress through an increase in the scope of their consciousness. Whereas the tree is locked in the immediate environment, the awareness, the thinking of pioneers amongst us encompasses the galaxies. Thinking big will get us out of the rut. Global consciousness means understanding that we are all in this together; that the well-being of the whole promotes our personal interest.

There seem to be two issues: promoting global awareness and thwarting the abusers. Granted, the media have alerted people throughout the globe of the hazards we are running into; yet the people and industries simply go on abusing the Planet and other people as though they had not been warned. This cuts right into the political field where religious parochialism has caused the death of thousands of innocent people and wreaked havoc on the environment. In many areas, advocating tolerance in the interest of a global religious vision would be interpreted as treason. How can we reach a global sense of the unity of the human family if we cling to our divisions? To advance we must not, like the wife of Lot, look back, which risks sclerosed thinking. It is a positive vision of the way the future could be, the way we could make the future, that will propel us forward.

It takes courage to let go of all that one has built up over the years without any guarantee that a new light will dawn upon one’s horizon. But we find ourselves sometimes confronted with the choice between situations which progress gradually like a bud unfurls, or where things remain at a standstill and run the chance of reversing into decay, or again where nature proceeds by leaps and bounds. There are situations which one cannot change in their outer circumstances, but will change by one’s changing oneself, or by a new way of handling them. In exceptional cases and perhaps the most meaningful, there is no slow transition from one perspective to the other—the transit is sudden. Here lies the difference between the moment of time where there is an overlap between past and future, and the instant where there is a sudden and irreversible break of continuity.

The holistic paradigm has revolutionized science, but in our commonplace thinking, most people still think in categories. If you think holistically, you are not a fraction of the totality, but a relatively permanent expression of that totality in its wholeness, which is potentially present in you. Should we apply this way of thinking to our relationship with the environment, we would not think of it as something one can exploit without spoiling one’s very underpinning from right under one’s feet.

The revolution in the thinking at the prow of the evolutionary advance has moreover changed our way of looking at causality. Instead of the simplistic view, it is now understood that each wave in the ocean is not simply the result of the previous one. The whole ocean rises as each wave, and each wave is interjected back into the ocean. The whole ocean then arises as each new wave. Generalizing, we realize the implications of our interventions not only in the hardware, but also the software of the universe. Also we see how intervening in one area of the psycho-ecosystem affects every other area. Therefore our free-wheeling into the future must integrate a greater compass and complexity than ever before. We need to shift between several vantage points. By integrating the know-how of creative thinkers, consciousness at the leading edge is becoming stereoscopic.

To network with those who are not in the race, we even need to integrate old ideas into the wider web of new ideas rather than rejecting the old like a baby being thrown out with the bathwater. We will even need to find common ground between thinking in the reductionist way and the holistic way. We will even need to account for further dimensions of time in our understanding of causal inference, for example including a transcendental vector of time to the simplistic process of becoming, as illustrated in Jung’s syn-chronicity. We will be learning to see how the “everywhere and always” manifests in the forward march of becoming. If we hoist our vantage point from the commonplace narrow range in the act of self transcendence, we will grasp things in a wider context. This is where some of the skills of meditation are proving useful to people.

The whole universe has contributed to the way humanity thinks today; if the Planet had no intelligence, it could not have intelligent beings on it. The collective working of many minds as one single idea, and the activity of the whole world in a certain direction are governed by the intelligence of the Planet.             ~ Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Our way of considering the cosmos and the Planet Earth in particular, has taken a quantum leap. Instead of looking at the stars as viewed from Planet Earth, we are now able to imagine how Planet Earth looks as viewed from the stars. This has surreptitiously revolutionized our way of considering our Planet, which in turn revolutionizes our way of seeing ourselves. We imagine outer space to be “out there,” but has it ever occurred to you that actually Planet Earth is in outer space? It all depends on how you look at it. Since we can now see our live cells in powerful microscopes, our whole perception of the fabric of our body has undergone a dramatic change. Instead of dismissing our bodies as other than ourselves, we are beginning to honor the involvement of our innate sense of meaningfulness with the very fabric of our bodiness.

In the realm of psychology, by the same token, we realize that our sense of personal inadequacy or our pessimistic judgment in our assessment of a situation is due to our mind’s having got entrapped in a way of thinking from which we failed to see a way out. Yes, one can get trapped in one’s thinking and ascribe the prison to one’s fate. The bind is in the mind. More than ever, people find themselves willy-nilly enrolled in the inexorable machinery constructed generation after generations, conditioning them and robbing them of their creativity. At what cost our modern efficiency! People suffer from the total lack of opportunity to harness their creative urge as was the case before arts and crafts were replaced by machined standardization—now computerized. Our experiments with political institutions have proven how crucial freedom is to promote progress—in fact freedom from conformity generates creativity. On the other hand, there is nothing in the world more abused than freedom. We see its consequences in the decadence, vulgarity, slovenliness and permissiveness of our modern societies. There is no accounting for taste!

One could define creativity as the act of exploring uncharted regions of the mind, while grasping a correspondence between the mental constructs thus gleaned and forms or configurations or scenarios in the fabric of matter. Creativity is a congruent conjunction between the timeless and the transient, the heavenly and the earthly. It is a sudden sense of meaningfulness that sparks our innovative faculty. What we mean by our sense of meaningfulness is our mind’s ability to click when it grasps a correspondence between two thoughts which had hitherto appeared unrelated. To be creative rather than just fanciful, one’s vision needs to click with the possibility of its actual realization at the existential level. The grasp of congruence sparks our being with delight because it gives us a sense of thinking in sync with the thinking of the universe, and of feeling in resonance with the emotion of the cosmos, and hence makes us aware of our holistic connectiveness with the totality which we call God, not just at the physical level but at all levels.”

~ Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan (1916-2004), Life is a Pilgrimage