Synopsis of book by Peter Russell.

Note: This was prepared for a science and religion study group. It repeats much of what has been said in other essays in this collection but is included here as a good summary.

When humankind first caught a glimpse of Earth from space, there was a genuine feeling of awe and surprise. Beyond the beauty of the image lay something even deeper – a feeling that the whole planet is alive. Like a flea sitting on an elephant, we had been aware, up to this point, only of a small spot of our immediate surroundings. But as we jumped off the elephant’s skin and gained some distance and perspective, we began to wonder if the elephant could be actually a giant living creature.

Then James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which postulated that the Earth is a living organism in some sense, because it possesses several mechanisms of homeostasis, i.e. maintaining certain parameters constant, in spite of changes in the surroundings. For instance, it has kept its temperature within limits favourable to life over 4.5 billion years in spite of the fact that the Sun generated much less energy at the early time than it does now. Also, in the atmosphere we have oxygen and methane coexisting, when normally they would react to produce water and carbon dioxide. The salt content of the ocean also has not increased since very early times, although rivers keep on washing more salt into the oceans from the land. There are more such cases that can be cited. It is very similar to our bodies keeping a constant temperature, and our blood keeping a constant concentration of glucose and salt, for example, and other such homeostatic mechanisms. These are the well-recognized properties of living entities. (Regarding this see also the essay “Religion for the Coming Age” in Section VIII.)

Living systems, in the definition of James Miller, comprise not only bacteria, protozoa, fungi, plants, and animals (the 5 recognized Kingdoms of living organisms on Earth), but also societies (anthills and beehives as well as human societies), ecological systems, and the biosphere as a whole. They have certain properties in common, and certain subsystems or organs. Miller enumerated these as the ingestor (mouth), distributor (blood), converter (stomach and intestines), producer (protein synthesis or growth of new cells), storage (fat, bones), extruder (anus, lungs), motor (muscles), supporter (skeleton), input transducer (eyes, ears), internal transducer (part of the brain), channel and net (neural and hormonal system), decoder (retina, visual cortex), associator (parts of the brain), memory, decider, encoder (other parts of the brain), output transducer (voice box), reproducer (sexual organs), and boundary (skin). The items in brackets indicate examples of these from the human body, but these types of mechanisms also exist in societies and in the biosphere, which makes all these systems comparable.

Possession of these 19 subsystems is necessary, but not sufficient, to prove that these are living systems. Most machines and engines have many of these (though not reproduction, except the hypothetical Turing machine), but are not considered alive. They evolve (e.g. motor cars and computers), but only with human intervention, not spontaneously. The other two properties systems need to have, besides the 19 subsystems enumerated above, in order to be considered alive, are maintaining homeostasis and being spontaneously self-organizing; and the biosphere does have these. (Gaia still lacks a reproductive system, but this would happen ifwe establish space colonies or colonize other planets.)

So what is humanity’s role in the Gaia system? There are two choices: we could become the global brain, or we could become a cancer that will kill the system. There is some evidence of the latter: aerial photographs of urban sprawl look remarkably like microscope pictures of cancer tissue; and we are obviously damaging the system in many ways. But there is also evidence for becoming Gaia’s brain: cities are like nerve ganglia, mail and telecommunications are like nerve fibers, libraries are like memory. The cultures of East and West are. comparable to right brain and left brain hemispheres. Humans are late additions to the biosphere, just like complex brains are late additions to animal bodies.

Where do we come from, in space and time? Ancient religions and cultures tell various creation stories, and science has some of its own to tell. None of them are necessarily THE definitive, final story. because all our knowledge, from whatever source, is to some degree tentative and hypothetical. But the science-derived creation story is very inspiring, nevertheless.

Once I saw a McLaren cartoon from the National Film Board of Canada, entitled “The Cosmic Zoom”. It starts with a mosquito alighting on the bare arm of a boy sitting in a small boat on the Ottawa river in the city of Ottawa. From this image, the camera zooms up to the whole city of Ottawa, a map of the surrounding area, a map of Canada, of North America, the Earth from space, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the local galaxy cluster, the super-cluster, the structure of “bubbles and voids” and the “Great Wall”, the whole visible Universe…Then back we zoom to the boy in the boat, and down to the mosquito, the boy’s red blood cell which the mosquito has just swallowed, the protein and heme molecules, the amino acid units, the atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen…the electrons and atomic nuclei, the protons and neutrons, the quarks within them…Then zoom up again to the boy in the boat who had just been bitten by a mosquito.

We are located in space about midway in this range of sizes; that is the only world we know directly through our senses. The extremes of the very large and the very small are known only from scientific inference, but we have come to believe them, provisionally, because there is a considerable body of converging evidence. Yet there is never a water-tight “proof’; theories change with time as new evidence comes in. Also we should remember that actually even the data derived directly from our sense organs are already interpreted and elaborated a great deal by our brain processes, so that we never really observe “things in themselves”, reality in the raw. Everything is only a reasonable but uncertain inference on the basis of converging lines of evidence.

Where can we place ourselves in the time dimension? Cosmologists now believe (again tentatively, but with some consensus) that the universe began with the Big Bang, an explosive expansion from an incredibly small, dense, and hot place about 15 billion years ago, and that it has been expanding ever since. In the very early stages there was a superfast expansion stage called “inflation”, but then normal expansion continued. At first all the 4 forces of nature (strong nuclear, weak nuclear. electromagnetic, and gravitational) were united as a single force, but very quickly they split off, one by one, in a process called “symmetry-breaking”.

Note: The following paragraphs should be read in conjunction with “Eons of the Universe” (Section X) and “The Temperature Zoom” (Section III).

By 10 ^-43 sec the universe had cooled to 10 ³² K, and the gravitational force separated out.

Matter and energy were not yet separate entities. By 10 ^-34 sec the temperature was 10 ²⁷ K. Quarks and electrons and their anti-particles formed as the first form of T8tter (fermions rather than bosons) and the strong force (which holds quarks 3ogether) split off By 10 ^-10 sec the weak and electromagnetic forces separated from each other. By 10 ^-5 sec the temperature was down to 10 ¹² K, and quarks were able to stick together as protons and neutrons. (They have been “confined” there ever since and no one has ever observed them outside.) At some stage the particles and anti-particles annihilated each other producing photons of light; but there was a small excess of particles over anti-particles, and from this small excess all the matter which now exists in the universe is derived. The bulk of the initially existing matter and anti-matter was changed into energy in the form of photons (which are bosons, not fermions). [“Let there be light” said the Lord and there was light.]

Note: Fermions differ from bosons by the fact that no two fermions can be in the same place at the same time (matter is impenetrable), while bosons can. Still, matter and energy are inter-convertible by E = Mc ² , where c is the velocity of light. And while fermions are primarily particles with some wave properties, and bosons are primarily waves with some particle properties, yet both partake of both modes of being some of the time.

Continuing our story: By 1 sec, electron-positron annihilation produced more photons. By 1 minute, nuclei of the three lightest atoms, hydrogen (H), helium (He), and lithium (Li) formed – but mainly hydrogen. By 300,000 years, and at 3000 OK, nuclei captured electrons and formed the first atoms. Photons were now free to travel great distances in the form of light, no longer being squeezed in by the material particles and buffeted about by them in multiple collisions as in a thick soup. The universe suddenly cleared as intermediate empty spaces became available. This event is called “matter-energy decoupling”. (One could compare it to “illumination” or “enlightenment”, but that is poetic licence.)

After 1 billion years galaxies formed. After 3 billion years stars were formed within galaxies. Both these processes were due to the gravitational collapse of large masses of gases (mainly hydrogen) because of initial inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter. (Evidence for this was just very recently obtained from slight inhomogeneities in the background radiation left over from the Big Bang.) As the first generation of stars went through their lifetime sequence (rather shorter than that of presentgeneration stars, because the first stars were more massive and used up their thermonuclear fuel much faster) and burned out in massive supernova explosions, the nuclei of all the heavier atoms all the way up to uranium were formed, in a process called nucleosynthesis. All future generations of stars after that contained these heavier elements as well as the primordial H, He and Li, since the expanding shells of debris from the stellar explosions blew this new “star-dust” all over the universe. (Compare this with “Nucleosynthesis – Then and Now” in Section III.)

After 10.4 billion years the solar system was formed; the sun as a middle-sized star like many others in one of the spiral arms of one of the spiral galaxies. But our star, the Sun, had a planetary system formed at about the same time. The inner 4 planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) were largely made of the heavier elements, with the hydrogen mainly blown off because their weak gravity could not hold this very light element (except when combined with oxygen as water or with nitrogen as ammonia or with carbon as methane, etc.). It is not known how many stars in our own galaxy or in other galaxies also have planetary systems, because we are not able to observe planets (except in our own solar system) with our telescopes. Probably there are many, but likely not around the binary star systems, where two stars orbit around each other.

In another 2 billion years after the creation of the solar system (that is 12.4 billion years after the Big Bang) life began on Earth, first as bacteria, i.e. prokaryotic cells (without cell nuclei). Life on Earth has now lasted for 4.6 billion years. We have not been able to find any life on any other planet or satellite in the solar system, but we know nothing about other possible planetary systems. (This would make the universe 17 billion years old rather than 15, as we originally said, but there is still much uncertainty about the age of the universe.)

Stars are too hot to have atoms assemble into molecules, but on the much cooler planets this process went on. (So remember: we had quarks going together to form protons and neutrons, the latter to assemble into atomic nuclei, the nuclei and electrons forming atoms, and now atoms going together into molecules; but the aggregation process continues from there, as we shall now see.) (Cf. “Radical Vitalism” in Section VIII.) On Earth water became very common; this has been called the water planet, since the oceans cover 2/3 of the surface, and importantly, the water is in liquid form, because the Earth receives just enough solar radiation to keep much of the water from freezing to ice (though some of it does), but not so much radiation to make the oceans vaporize (though there is some water vapour in the atmosphere). The Earth is located in a fairly narrow belt around the sun where water can exist in the liquid form. Without this, life as we know it could not exist. (“As we know it” is an important qualification; we know nothing about the possibility of silica-based life or other forms.) Simple compounds also form on asteroids, comets, and as clouds and dust in interplanetary space (in very dilute form, since this is a near-vacuum), but perhaps not in interstellar and inter-galactic space – again, we don’t know.

In all these places and on Earth as well, simple carbon compounds assemble themselves into straight or branched chains and rings, since carbon is unique in its ability to bond to itself into larger molecules. Some of these simple carbon molecules contain not only carbon and hydrogen, but also oxygen (like sugars and fats) and nitrogen and sometimes sulfur (as in amino acids) and phosphorus (as in nucleotides) and occasionally iron, manganese, copper, zinc, etc. Energy is needed to assemble some of these molecules, since the most stable form of carbon is carbon dioxide; but in a reducing atmosphere, such as existed on the pre-biotic Earth, this did not take too much energy – it could have been derived from lightning or volcanism, for example. (See “The Origin of Life” in Section VIII.)

The further step to macromolecules also requires energy: here amino acids assemble themselves into long chains of proteins, and nucleotides to nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) by polymerization. Again, from the energy point of view, this process is quite feasible, though it is “uphill). But there is a bigger problem: in order to create proteins and nucleic acids that can function in living cells, they have to have very particular and specific sequences of the 20 amino acids and the 4 kinds of purine and pyrimidine bases on the nucleic acids, because the proteins have to function as enzymes and so have to have very particular folding configurations and conformations. These sequences are very “improbable”, in the sense that only a few from among incredibly huge permutations and combinations would “work”. The problem is, how were these “selected” from among all the possibilities? It goes against the law of entropy to have them assemble purely by chance. You say that there were billions of years of time to achieve this? Yes, but is this enough time? According to some calculations, it is not. There might have been some short-cut, or a way to speed it up, by preferred selection. (Cf. Psyche’s first labour in “Reinterpretation of Psyche’s Labours” in Section VIII.)

Nobody really knows how life started. (Notice how often in this story we have to say “we don’t know”? But this is healthy, far better than pretending that there is certainty and making it into a dogma. It leaves room for further learning.) Some say it had to start with the nucleic acids, because only they can self-replicate. But then, in living things as they are now, proteins are needed to help nucleic acids replicate, and in turn proteins are made from the information stored in nucleic acids as genes. So we seem to have a closed cycle which could not start by itself, like the question about chickens and eggs. In fact the “dogma” in biology is “omne vivum ex vivo”, life comes only from life, i.e. no spontaneous generation.

Except the very first time, somehow.

Some people think that the first precursor might have been RNA, because it has been shown that it can sometimes act as an enzyme as well as being able to replicate itself, so it could have pulled itself up by its bootstraps, so to speak. Freeman Dyson (“Infinite in All Directions”) thinks that life started with proteins: natural selection would produce partially functioning enzymes (though inefficient by modern standards) which could catalyze energy production and keep these very primitive proto-cells operating as Prigoginian self-organizing structures (it would take us too far afield to explain this). (But see “The Origin of Life” in Section VIII.) Later, he thinks, the primitive energy-storing nucleotide A TF “accidently” polymerized to the first nucleic acid, which for a time made the host proto-cell “sick” because it was like a virus (viruses are also nucleic acids) – but then the proteins and nucleic acids developed a symbiosis to form the first true (bacterial) cells. Ingenious, but is it true? No one knows.

The first cells that formed did not have cell nuclei and are called prokaryotes. These are the bacteria, the earliest and still most abundant form of Earth life. The whole very long pre-Cambrian era had nothing but bacteria, for almost 3/4 of the whole history of life on Earth. They derived energy from various forms of fermentation, i.e. breaking up methane, sulfur compounds etc. to liberate energy, but when these energy supplies ran low, producing the very first energy crisis, the cyanobacteria (blue-green “algae”) invented photosynthesis, a process which uses the sun’s energy to build sugars from carbon dioxide and water, while liberating oxygen. The sugars could then be used for energy production, at firST by fermentation while atmospheric oxygen was still low. But eventually the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere built up to its present levels of 21 %, largely derived from photosynthesis, though the weathering of certain minerals might have helped. For some so-called anaerobic bacteria oxygen was a poison (so to them this was the very first pollution catastrophe), and they retired to remote corners of habitat where air could not penetrate, such as marshes and hotsprings and the ocean bottom. But other bacteria (aerobic ones) and higher forms of life which now got a chance to develop learned how to use oxygen in respiration. Using the same molecule of the simple sugar glucose, respiration liberates ten times the amount of energy than is available from fermentation. (The respiratory cycle of reactions, the Krebs cycle, is still attached as an afterthought at the end of anaerobic glycolysis, because this is how ir happened historically in evolution.)

Cell biologist Lynn Margulis (1982) has a marvellous theory of the origin of the bigger, more complex type of cell, the eukaryotic cell. (Notice: we are still assembling larger and larger units from smaller components.) The eukaryotic cell, she thinks, formed by a symbiosis of various kinds of simpler, smaller prokaryotic cells. The photosynthetic unit called the chloroplast, which green plants have, is derived from cyanobacteria; the respiratory units called the mitochondria which all eukaryotes have are derived from aerobic bacteria; the host unit in which the other two are incorporated is derived from a cell which first segregated its genetic material (DNA) in a distinct cell nucleus, from having been scattered throughout the cytoplasm. The presence of a nucleus then made possible true cell division by mitosis, and eventually sexual reproduction. (Bacteria can conjugate to exchange genetic materials, but not really fuse as in fertilization.)

Another great advance resulted from the creation of the eukaryotic cell: multicellular organisms appeared for the first time. This was the signal for the beginning of the Cambrian era, sometimes called “the Cambrian explosion” of the great diversity of (especially) animal life. Living forms on Earth are now generally divided into five Kingdoms, of which the bacteria are the first. The next one up, consisting of eukaIyotic unicells, is the protists or protozoa, like Amoeba and Paramecium. Three multicellular kingdoms sit on top of the protists: fungi, plants, and animals. Animals and fungi depend on plants for energy supplies, since only plants among the multicellular kingdoms carry on photosynthesis. Plants are the primary producers, fungi and animals are the parasites or exploiters. Plants are the chemical virtuosos, able to synthesize everything they need, plus a lot of drugs that we can use or abuse. Animals are particularly good in locomotion and in having a nervous system, so that they can develop various increasing forms of consciousness. (But they can also feel pain.)

Diagram: copy of the “5 Kingdoms hand”. (Margulis 1982)

In multicellular organisms, cells differentiate to perform various functions (nerve, muscle, skin, blood cell), but that also means that most of these cells become dependent on the others, no longer capable of independent existence, like the bacteria and the protists. In sponges and slime moulds, tIi.e cells come back together again after they separate or are artificially separated, but in the higher multicellular beings this is no longer possible. Multicellular organisms also need broad highways for transporting materials, like the blood of animals and the sap of plants, and ways of communication, as in the immune, hormone, and nervous systems of animals.

Some of the multicellular organisms associate themselves into societies (ants, bees, birds, lions, apes, and humans). (We are still building bigger and bigger units.) Even among non-social animals, a family unit sometimes stays together to protect the young.

Humans are late-comers on the scene: if the history of life on Earth is represented as one year, humans evolved less than a minute before midnight on December 31. (See also “Twelve Hours from Noon to Midnight” in Section I.) But humans have the largest and most complex brains, and they form loosely organized and often chaotic societies which are still evolving.

Summarizing then: Through time, there is a succession of sizes of aggregates along the cosmic zoom axis:

1. From the very large to the middle-sized, we go from universe to galaxy to star/solar system to a planet like Earth.

1. From the very small to the middle-sized, we go from quarks to protons/neutrons to simple atomic nuclei to the bigger atomic nuclei to atoms to small molecules to macromolecules to prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells to multicellular organisms to societies, with a side branch in which individual nerve cells (neurons) form complex brains.

We have selected only some of the multiple aggregation processes which occur, of course; but our skeleton scheme is designed to come together at the human size, like the double zoom on the boy in a boat on the Ottawa river. This is an anthropomorphic view (and Canadian ethnocentric as well), but nevertheless meaningful and valid for us.

Peter Russell stresses the sequentially emergent entities (hidden orders) becoming manifest: energy, matter, life, mind, consciousness. The evolving complexity occurs through three mechanisms: diversity, organization (i.e. pattern), and connectivity. This could also be described as simultaneous differentiation and integration, as observed e.g. in a developing embryo. (See “Social Development”, Section IX.) But evolution differs basically from embryonic development, in that it is being done for the first time, laying down (pioneering) a pattern, not following a pattern. The first-time pattern-formation (evolution) can be likened to the leader stroke of lightning, faint but ionizing the air, preparing it for the powerful main stroke, the repeated pattern reproduction along a previously smoothed path, followed during embryonic development. The overall process has been called morphogenesis, the creation of form, by Rupert Sheldrake.

Russell also stresses the critical threshold number of 10 billion. There are about 10 billion atoms in a living cell, about 10 billion neurons (nerve cells) in a human brain, and he predicts that, when there are about 10 billion people on the Earth (as there already almost are), Gaia’s brain will come together as a higher functioning integrated whole, a new emergent quality. This does, however, depend on our choice whether we want to function in this integrated spiritual way, or be a disorganized and disorganizing cancer on Gaia, of which she would have to cure herself by arranging for our extinction, or succumb herself.

Russell explains the principles of self-organization in Prigoginian dissipative structures. These are open systems (i.e. with inflow and outflow of matter and energy), far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and containing self-reinforcement (positive feedback) cycles as well as homeostatic (negative-feedback) cycles. The most primitive ones, like the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction (a system of chemicals which periodically turns blue and colourless as it cycles through repeating stages) are in no sense alive, though they seem to have some precursor properties of life, namely self-organization and pattern maintenance.

The most interesting part of the behaviour of dissipative structures is how they can further evolve. If fluctuations from the strictly repetitive periodic behaviour occur, they will subside if they are weak and allow the system to revert to its previous state. However, if fluctuations accumulate or become stronger beyond a certain limit, the system either breaks down and returns to thermodynamic equilibrium (a process equivalent to death), or reorganizes itself spontaneously to a more complex state, in which it can again persist and maintain itself. (This is called “bifurcation”.) This is the process of evolution through repeated breakdown-or-breakthrough crises, which accounts for the “punctuated evolution process” with its rapid step-ups and intermediate plateau stages of consolidation (the staircase or rise-andrun process pattern). (See Rise and Run in Section X.) In yet another view, the state of high fluctuations or rapid change or crisis can be seen as a passage through “chaos”, in the new physical-mathematical theories of that name, on the way from the old order to a new order (or to oblivion). (The world political process of human history is passing through a stage of Chaos right now, with the New World Order as yet undetermined as to its characteristics.)

Russell then makes the point that the tempo of evolution has been increasing. The age of the prokaryotes took a very long time, more than half the time of life on Earth. When the more complex eukaryotes developed, it did not take too long for them to give rise to multicellular organisms in the higher kingdoms. Jumping ahead to human evolution, most of the time of human existence on Earth was spent in stages of hunter-gatherer societies. But cultural evolution is very much faster than biological evolution, because information gathered in a life-time can be passed on through language and other instruction to the young, so that we have something akin to the inheritance of acquired characters like Lamark’s old theory, which was disproved by Darwin in biological evolution, but is flourishing in cultural evolution.

The book shows exponential curves of agricultural development (not shown in the figure), then an even steeper curve of rising incl.ustrial development, and now the superfast growth of information technologies (computers etc.), each curve crossing the previous one in its rise, though it began later. (Somehow that reminds me of the crescendo of excitement in the rising stages of Ravel’s Bolero.) Finally he appends one more curve, which he sees rising even faster than computers – the curve of rising interest in spiritual development of human faculties. It is this which could save us, in his view.

First of all, the linking up of us 5 to 10 billion humans around the world with telecommunications, fax machines and e-mail can be likened to the development of the embryonic brain, in which nerve fibers grow out rapidly to link up with each other in synapses until the whole brain becomes integrated into one vast communications machine. We are now engaged in this linking up process with all humanity as a whole. But when we are all interconnected, the final outcome will still depend on the content and the quality of our communications. If we remain each of us separate as a “skinencapsulated ego”, the process will fail. We have to become aware of our interconnectedness at a spiritual level. Only then will a new emergent quality appear – from consciousness to supermind. This is happening not so much to humans as to Gaia.

Thus we have the following main transitional stages (emergence through emergency): energy to matter through symmetry-breaking (but remaining related through wave-particle duality and interconversion); matter to life by self-organization; life to mind and consciousness through brain organization; persons to planet through communication and spirituality.

From Peter Russell The Awakening Earth, p.168.

This last step, which is the main point of Russell’s book, means a transition from a low-synergy society to a high-synergy society. Low synergy is due. to the self-defensiveness of individuals, evident in models such as “economic man” and “rational (game) player”, both meaning a maximizer of individual gain. We now know that this leads to certain paradoxes of rationality, such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons. Adam Smith thought that it leads to the common good “as if by an invisible hand”, but this is true only under some special circumstances, not always. It works in certain systems when there are many small buyers and sellers of approximately equal power, but not when economic bargaining power is concentrated in only a few hands. As well, the safeguarding of collective goods, such as clean water and air and a fertile soil, must be done by collective policies, to eliminate the problem of free-riders (people who benefit without contributing). All this means that we need to transform ourselves from maximizing our individual good to maximizing the collective good. This will overcome the above-named paradoxes of rationality and lead to the high-synergy society. It does mean a paradigm change in our concept of self and who we are in relation to others and to nature as a whole. (See also “0. Common Essence” in Section IX.)

Our deeper identity is the greater Self; the process of attaining it was called “individuation” by C. Jung, “self-actualization” by Maslow, “enlightenment” by Buddhists, and “being born again” by Christians. All is one in the Perennial Philosophy of mysticism (Aldous Huxley), and in general systems theory as well. Individuals relate to each other in a “I-Thou” relationship (not “I-it”), according to Buber. The observer and the observed are not separate. David Bohm’s “implicate order” is like a hologram – every pixel contains the whole image. We need experience of this, not only intellectual knowledge. This would be the new Copernican revolution. It would lead to enlightenment, to unconditional love. Maslow discussed the “peak experience” which is attainable by many. Transcendental meditation, Zen, biofeedback, sensory isolation, and hypnosis are some of the “psychotechnologies” that people are using to achieve it.

Are minds directly affecting each other? If not yet, can they eventually? Do exceptional individuals do this already? Are they the wave of the future? Is enlightenment contagious? Transcendental meditators ™ claim that they have decreased crime and violence rates in a city through meditation (Hagelin and Johnson). Is this the effect of some kind of “coherence” of minds, like the light in a laser beam being all in phase? (Superconducting materials, superfluid liquids like helium, and ferromagnetism are other, physical examples of coherence, with different “emergent” properties, Why not minds?) The TM theorists themselves refer to “the unified field”. (Compare these with the super-cold turning into the super-hot in “Eons of the Universe”, Section XII.)

These are some of the questions being asked. It is too early to tell. We are in one of those rapid transitions, in “the rapids of change” (Theobald’s phrase). We must be open to change, while remaining critical and careful evaluators of the evidence. Both imaginative innovation and use of accumulated experience and wisdom are needed to be able to steer safely through the white-water rapids in our frail craft.