With the discovery of fire—dated by the late Isaac Asimov in Asimov’s Chronology of Science & Discovery at about 500,000 B.C.—we humans had our first fledgling clues, if only unconsciously, to the geometry of abundance.
Fire empties the darkness. Pushes the shadows back. And expands the space where We, the People, can move about. Where we can apply our skills and our energies—and give sway to our inquisitiveness and passions. Fire expands space and time and complexity, and that is the linchpin to our story.
We began to discern the importance of controlling our surroundings and what can happen as we add to our understanding and our mastery, our outreach and our results. And We, the People, with the brain that we are blessed with, were on our way.
Our technological capacities—our tools—slowly moved from the fundamentally simple to the edges of the already unfathomably complex. By the arrival of the Twenty-First Century, We, the People, were ready to formulate a veritable litany of new technological achievements, and we have been busy doing just that.
Alongside the technological trek—intertwined inseparably with it, actually—We, the People, had another expedition of discovery under way. This one was a psychological trek.
Thus far, as I have noted in detail elsewhere, there have been four blockbuster discoveries dominating our progress through the existential time, space and complexity of our psychological self-development. We, the Species, have moved at the leading edges from carp mind to shark mind to not-quite-flying fish mind to dolphin mind, each time adding valuable new skills of perceiving, valuing and action built around four central quests.
(1)
It look the longest time to begin to persuade ourselves that
we each have a right to be a “me”—an autonomous,
empowered individual. Not only to survive, but to thrive.
Not only to have things the way we need them but also
the way we want them. To overcome the doubt that each of
us is entitled to win. Not once, but generally,
on most occasions. This is, even yet, the struggle facing
the carp mind.
(2)
What came next was a test of a different kind: the challenge
of dealing humanely with an overpowering surge of acquisitiveness and
self-importance that comes with the wholehearted embrace of
being a “me.” Of co-existing with that newly awakened desire
in our personal psychologies to win it all, every time, all the time.
To always be among the “haves,” no matter what the cost to the
“have nots,” to ourselves, to our surroundings, to the hopes and
dreams of a planet-full of people—and to the future. This is, even yet,
the challenge facing the shark mind.
(3)
Emboldened by our success at creating new technologies,
some of our personal psychologies—especially during
the century just ended—dared to make this audacious claim:
What We, the People, seek most, we already have!
All each of us need do is open ourselves to a natural,
preexisting harmonic of abundance and learn
how to receive its bounty, in peace and love.
Such a schemata has the resounding “ring of rightness,”
but there is a problem. Such a view leaves the We, the People,
and all other “vessels of life” vulnerable to malevolent
forces of extreme self-interest and corruption, of denial
and destruction. Where does the wherewithal to resist and turn
back such evil originate? This is, even yet, the
challenge facing the not-quite-flying fish mind.
(4)
And now, as the Twenty-First Century unfolds, the most agile
and committed of the pragmatists in our midst have begun
in earnest to explore this hypothesis: No matter what it is
on the planet, if it is broken and needs to be fixed or if it
doesn’t exist and needs to be created, you and I should have
no qualms about doing whatever it takes to fix it or create
it together. If it makes sense, if it can be made to work, if it
makes for a better world. Recruiting the aid and involvement
of other beneficiaries of the forces of syntropy, seeking to resist
or co-exist with the forces of entropy, we should pursue
outcomes simply because they are right and just and needed,
without surcease and without second-guessing. And
we should expect that we will win often enough,
and that through our own attitudes and wiles, our own strategies
and audacities, we can create a sustainable ambiance
of betterment—of abundance—across the board. This is,
even yet, the challenge facing the dolphin mind.
All this matters because it is a counterforce to the dread entropy, a universal “spreading miasma of disorder” in which most of the ingredients resulting from the Big Bang continue to grow more and more disorganized.
Due to entropy, this little spot in infinity we call the universe can be expected at some point to undertake one final “tick-tock” and either collapse inwardly on itself or else expand into the vastness of the great emptiness and, like an old soldiers, just fade away. The idea of such an end to something that we humans have put so much thought-power and muscle power into investigating and developing would be thoroughly off-putting were it not for syntropy—for the phenomenon of life itself. And, of course, for what the human brain/mind has managed to do with time, space and complexity. To this point at least, we are syntropy’s greatest achievement.
Precisely because life runs up and not down, syntropy is a cosmic kitchen, not a cosmic wrecking yard. It is syntropy and what has happened in the universe since life began that holds the key to understanding why the dolphin mind and all the other varieties of mind exist. And why users of the dolphin mind are being called on to help lead carp, shark and not-quite-flying fish minds out of an increasingly tangled, complex post-modern wilderness of insufficiency, inequality, ineptitude and “ingenerosity”—greed. Can we succeed at this? Who knows. Must we try? We must. We’ve come too far on pluck and luck and applying our expanding capacities for figuring things out to mishandle the great human experiment with syntropy now.
