April 14th, 2010

A few days ago I blogged that I wanted to write a book of poetry which has to do with the growth and evolution of human consciousness, and the spark of intellectual curiousity and how magic, religion, science and art were, at the dawn of intelligence, not necessarily differentiated, and animal shrieks and natural bodily reactions, such as widening of eyes, raising of hands, shifting of balance gradually became words, and words became oral history, and then somebody came along and invented an alphabet and things got written down and their were records and history and then eventually, thank his noodly appendages, fiction and gradually things began to solidify, stories became legends, then fairy tales,  then a part of the human psyche, then somebody invented the printing press, then somebody invented the computer and now we have a swiftly developing universe which is entirely imaginary, or maybe something between imaginary and real, the noosphere, and we need to build a bridge out to it, find some kind of transition to it.

The next day I wrote to add to that that I wanted to write something that actually raises consciousness to a different level, that addresses the choices of futures we have in front of us, where do we go from here, how does the real world relate to the noosphere, how do we want it to relate, what is the next stage in human consciousness and how do we get to there from here.

Today I realized that there’s one important part of it I left out which is the whole family of man thing, because by tracing DNA scientists know that we are all descended from a single ancestor.

Anyway, to keep this from totally being a big cheat, where I just cut and paste previous columns, I have written the introductory sonnet to the book.

This is meant for future generations

It is to them this humble book belongs

The past is gone, despite our lamentations

And the present isn’t going to last too long

We didn’t start the fire, the poet said

It has been burning since the dawn of man

Just trying to survive and get ahead

Everybody does the best they can

When I was young, I thought the world would change

I felt our true potential was untapped

The future could be perfectly arranged

And all good hippie children could adapt

And so it changed, but not as I’d foreseen

History’s a complex situation

We didn’t do so well is what I mean, so,

This is meant for future generations

My kids, my kids’ kids and my kids’ kids’ kids

I hope that you do better than we did