Reading another book by one of the best of New Age writers, Ervin Laslo, "The Dawn of the Akashic Age." Laslo is no slouch: a concert pianist turned PhD theoretical physicist; a Renaissance man who can take difficult subjects and make them understandable for the likes of me. In this tome, he combines social theory with quantum physics to posit the probability that we are on the cusp of a new age, the Akashic Age, where sustainable living will combine with global interaction to create the new human - one who is advanced technologically and intellectually and one who can also reach beyond tribal boundaries and live in the inner connected world once inhabited only by gurus and shamans.
This story is certainly not new and is, in fact, a template of New Age thought, a look at a possible and much healthier and rosier world. It is the one most of us want. The book, however, has given me something else between the lines, a sort of intelligent design by default. Intelligent Design, a concept begun (as far as I know) by Tielhard de Chardin, claims (among other things) that evolutionary changes are preformed by a cosmic intelligence. Laslo certainly seems to move along that line, and perhaps will be explicit about it by the end of the book, but so far he gives only hints along the way as he describes human social development. He takes the standard route: we first moved from hunters and gatherers to farmers to skilled craftsmen to industrialists to chips in the electronic, or post-industrial, world. The movement, as anthropologist Leslie White wrote, has always been towards the capture of more energy, which demands greater technology, which creates a greater level of social complexity. This has led to the emergence of the world culture and the need for another way of life.
But that is not what has stuck me. It is, rather, the inevitability of our situation - some would say our plight - brought about by our own biology. Yes, we are thinking beings and one might see it as inevitable that we would transcend the constraints of living first-hand with nature. But we are also biological beings who like what our biology does - a lot - because it is so much fun. In a word, we enjoy to the extreme what creates other human beings, and although contraception has become very effective in recent decades, that time span has been too short. Combined with our skill set that has removed us from the direct competition of Man against Beast, we have become overpopulated and, by definition, are straining our natural resources to the limits. In other words, our natural tendencies have forced us into this conundrum. In more other words, it appears that an intelligent designer has prefigured our current predicament. Since it is also a fact of human nature that most of us will work very little if we don't have to, it seems that this designer wants us to be challenged so that all of us will be involved in the necessary global change. Social welfare will not be enough, for there will not be enough in the present trajectory to go around. We, all of us, will be forced to get our butts in gear.
And so, we get intelligent design by default. But one can also see that the outcome of the struggle is not set - that at this point in our history, we have the choice of changing as we must - as Laslo would have it, to either to a more "horizontal" or shared/transpersonal world; or changing as we shouldn't , towards Armageddon, by maintaining our current mode of "vertical" or hierarchical social systems.
But there are other alternatives, and one in particular very dark; there is, besides chaos, the possibility of the development of the most intrusive and vast world totalitarian state ever seen. We will see what Laslo has to offer in coming pages, but according to templates of history spelled out in various holy texts, including the Bible, we must first come face to face with this nemesis, the apparent unifier who is, in reality, the ultimate slave master. It may indeed be inevitable that we are destined to unite, just as the cosmos is united by "quantum entanglement," but as far as this writer understands human nature, it is the holy texts rather than Laslo and the hopeful New Age that seems to have the edge. FK
This story is certainly not new and is, in fact, a template of New Age thought, a look at a possible and much healthier and rosier world. It is the one most of us want. The book, however, has given me something else between the lines, a sort of intelligent design by default. Intelligent Design, a concept begun (as far as I know) by Tielhard de Chardin, claims (among other things) that evolutionary changes are preformed by a cosmic intelligence. Laslo certainly seems to move along that line, and perhaps will be explicit about it by the end of the book, but so far he gives only hints along the way as he describes human social development. He takes the standard route: we first moved from hunters and gatherers to farmers to skilled craftsmen to industrialists to chips in the electronic, or post-industrial, world. The movement, as anthropologist Leslie White wrote, has always been towards the capture of more energy, which demands greater technology, which creates a greater level of social complexity. This has led to the emergence of the world culture and the need for another way of life.
But that is not what has stuck me. It is, rather, the inevitability of our situation - some would say our plight - brought about by our own biology. Yes, we are thinking beings and one might see it as inevitable that we would transcend the constraints of living first-hand with nature. But we are also biological beings who like what our biology does - a lot - because it is so much fun. In a word, we enjoy to the extreme what creates other human beings, and although contraception has become very effective in recent decades, that time span has been too short. Combined with our skill set that has removed us from the direct competition of Man against Beast, we have become overpopulated and, by definition, are straining our natural resources to the limits. In other words, our natural tendencies have forced us into this conundrum. In more other words, it appears that an intelligent designer has prefigured our current predicament. Since it is also a fact of human nature that most of us will work very little if we don't have to, it seems that this designer wants us to be challenged so that all of us will be involved in the necessary global change. Social welfare will not be enough, for there will not be enough in the present trajectory to go around. We, all of us, will be forced to get our butts in gear.
And so, we get intelligent design by default. But one can also see that the outcome of the struggle is not set - that at this point in our history, we have the choice of changing as we must - as Laslo would have it, to either to a more "horizontal" or shared/transpersonal world; or changing as we shouldn't , towards Armageddon, by maintaining our current mode of "vertical" or hierarchical social systems.
But there are other alternatives, and one in particular very dark; there is, besides chaos, the possibility of the development of the most intrusive and vast world totalitarian state ever seen. We will see what Laslo has to offer in coming pages, but according to templates of history spelled out in various holy texts, including the Bible, we must first come face to face with this nemesis, the apparent unifier who is, in reality, the ultimate slave master. It may indeed be inevitable that we are destined to unite, just as the cosmos is united by "quantum entanglement," but as far as this writer understands human nature, it is the holy texts rather than Laslo and the hopeful New Age that seems to have the edge. FK
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