The challenge here will be to translate these experiences into a language that allows the larger context to emerge so that it can be articulated and inspire us to create a destiny for ourselves that does justice to the effort that has gone into the making of us.

This effort is not easily understood – and if we even understood just the tiniest fraction of it I’m not so sure we would be much further ahead in gaining an insight into the larger picture.   No doubt I will be writing more  about that in a future piece …

For now we describe our arrival here on earth in terms of an evolutionary process over billions of years.  Nothing is explained in terms of why or how or where this process is heading for, and so we are left with a mystery. Being at the receiving end of this process, we can look back to some extent and infer that apparently this has been about the gradual enablement of what we call “consciousness”, and achieved by the development of ever more complex organizational structures within matter, reaching its current summit in the grey matter of our brains. Now what?

The one thing that this did bring about was the transition of life’s apparently intrinsic evolutionary pressures from a strictly internal process over billions of years to an external one, as evidenced by the ingenuity of our species to manipulate and restructure matter into ever increasing organizational complexity as reflected by the various aspects of technology that we are familiar with today. Through us, nature has achieved a quantum leap in the creativity department, now being able to push its evolutionary objectives over significantly shorter time frames. In this sense, human beings function as nature’s evolutionary agents, pushing these objectives along at a breakneck speed for no other reason than that it seems to be the natural thing to do …

Smart enough to move it along, yet not smart enough to know why, and that is probably a wise thing as far as nature is concerned, given our tendency to self-destruct, a function of being an intermediate, transitional and demonstratively unstable life-form, schizoid, capable of being both intellectually brilliant and emotionally brittle, or logical and illogical, and the latter most likely caused by that aspect of ourselves that is still very much the predatory, primitive beast in the field that we descent from.

So yes, where do we go from here?

In this role we are driven along an evolutionary path of unknown origins, taking us who knows where – and that leaves us to figure out for ourselves where we are heading to. And in light of the human and environmental wreckage we continue to leave in our wake  it would be difficult to accept that homo sapiens is at or near the pinnacle of evolution. We clearly still have some way to go if the roughly two thousand years of our recorded history are anything to go by; and not until such time we are no longer our own worst enemy in trying to move ourselves ahead from our troubled past. You have to believe in something like this if you think we can much better than that, even if all we have to show for to date is little more than a blood-stained past.

But setting aside our self-disgust for a moment, let us look at this again with a less jaundiced eye. The arrival of homo sapiens introduced a volatility and a riskiness to the world which could be indicative reaching a critical stage in the evolution of the world. That such risk-taking would be justified can be seen in the context of fending off entropy – at least here on earth, and for the time being  – should that be the ultimate fate of the universe. And thus there will be an urgency to the evolutionary thrust to get done what needs to get done before time runs out, and to take some risks along the way. A risk management process by any other name.

You see, something very unique and significant happened with the introduction of homo sapiens to the planet: homo faber – man, the toolmaker – arrived on the scene. And while hitherto the spectacular creativity demonstrated by evolution manifested itself only from the inside out – through the incredible diversity of life-forms encountered here on earth, from the simplest plants and smallest single cell organisms to the largest or most complex ones – through a human being the creative forces of evolution are for the very first time being applied externally. With our hands – and with the tools made by our hands – we are able to reshape matter directly, and through us the creativity pressure of evolution goes to work in a greatly accelerated fashion – if not at breakneck speed – to whatever end it needs to get to …

Initially with primitive stone axes, then forged iron implements, followed by mechanized devices, and eventually through the ability to derive electricity from material processes and the huge array of material resources extracted from the earth we have been creating things of unimaginable potential if their development continues at the current pace. Technology is the only area in which our species has made substantive and measurable progress since we first opened our eyes as a creature capable of  reflective thought – knowing that one knows – and we have done so in a hurry.

Most importantly, we have made significant advances in the area of information technology, such as the internet, to the point that all knowledge we have accumulated of the world can be shared instantly at any time and potentially from anywhere. As such we have gone beyond the layer of our planet’s biosphere to create a dynamic layer of knowledge which is about the world, and which belongs to the world. In a sense, this layer of knowledge functions as the conscious mind  of the world.

(Some philosophers such as Theilhard de Chardin have referred to this layer of knowledge as the “noösphere” – meaning “sphere of reason” – and after the geosphere and biosphere it would be the  next evolutionary geological layer in the life of the planet.)