A universe which, under the influence of an ever more advanced organic arrangement, concentrates and reflects psychologically upon itself.
The human ‘species’ has succeeded in covering the earth: and not only spatially—on this surface that is now completely encircled mankind has completed the construction of a close network of planetary links, so successfully that a special envelope now stretches over the old biosphere. Every day this new integument grows in strength; it can be clearly recognized and distinguished in every quarter; it is provided with its own system of internal connexions and communications.
Practically all of us, again under the influence of ‘anatomical’ preconceptions, live with the impression (and some scientists even develop, as a principle, the conviction) that the human individual is not organically affected by the multiple links that act upon him from all sides to associate him ‘symbiotically’ with his fellows. For more than twenty thousand years, we now know, there has been no appreciable change in the shape of his cranium; his elementary instincts have remained the same. Is not this a conclusive proof that civilization and culture produce in us no more than temporary and superficial modifications, from which primitive man would emerge unchanged if, by chance, the forces of collectivity were to slacken their grip on him?
It is no longer the simple isolated reflection of an individual upon himself, but the conjugate and combined reflection of innumerable elements, adjusting and mutually reinforcing their activities, and so gradually forming one vast mirror—a mirror in which the universe might one day reflect itself and so fall into shape.
A world that is in equilibrium upon instability, because it is in movement: and a world whose dynamic consistence is increasing in exact proportion with the complexity of its arrangements, because it is converging upon itself in as many sidereal points as there ever have been, as there are now, and as there ever will be, thinking planets.
Under the combined force of the multiplication (in numbers) and expansion (in radius of influence) of human individuals on the surface of the globe, the noösphere has for the last century shown signs of a sudden organic compression upon itself and compenetration. This is without any doubt the most massive and the most central of the events the earth has experienced in our day.
Now that life has placed us in this critical situation, how are we going to react to the test?
That is why we are so often horrified, or terrified, by the modern world: a machine for destroying the individual or mechanizing him.
If it is really true that an ultra-human can be distinguished ahead of us, to be attained by ultra-evolution, it is equally true that this ultra-evolution, operating henceforth in a reflective medium, can only be (at least in its most seminal and central axis) an auto- or self-evolution: in other words, it must be a consciously and passionately willed deliberate act.
Surely the most urgent task confronting the genius of man at this moment is to conceive and undertake the construction of another ‘Palomar’—but this one would be designed to bring out not an expansion of the universe in space but a psychogenic concentration of the universe upon itself.
It is a matter of bringing together a large enough number of minds that are sufficiently open and in tune with influences of the cosmic order to perceive, record and amplify a movement of the noösphere in relation to itself.
May there not really be a way, for a scientifically alert observer, of detecting around us the signs of an ultra-evolution (we might say ‘a wind of reflection’) in a whole series of psychic phenomena, still incompletely identified and yet patient of statistical study? For example, the general rise, at this very moment, in the most advanced areas of human thought, of a certain distress—or, on the contrary, of a certain excited anticipation—both specifically connected with the gradual awakening in us of the consciousness that the universe is not only in movement but is carrying us with it?
A new way of seeing, combined with a new way of acting—that is what we need.
The animal, it would seem, only knows: while man ‘knows that he knows.’ It is a case, as it has sometimes been described, of ‘consciousness squared.’
A state, let me add, that is totalized but not totalitarian.