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A phrase here catches me: to be totally enlightened and aware of the Earth and our true place, we can see, understand... feel that we are among the stars! I do not mean this as a figure of speech.
Imagine a dot on a globe, showing your location in a continent, nation, state, county ( you can look down and see tees now), city, block, house. Now reverse; go back up to the globe, as you'd see on a weather report (without the overlaid borders); and continue on out. There, see it? That's your context! That's where we are --stuck to the side of this planet, like refrigerator magnets on a living fridge!
Human culture has been like a boat on a beautiful river, in dense fog, and we didn't know where or if there was a big waterfall ahead! ...or even if we'd gone over a few before our species "grew up".
Science has changed all that, tho there are a few "waterfalls" we don't know enough --if anything-- about yet.
Mostly because of computers, but also because of our newly-won right of dissent, it is my belief that our time will eventually become known as the dawn of recorded history, because we've only begun to record much honest data. If I'm off on that prediction, I think I'm probably too conservative; we may not yet have achieved that "dawn" state.
It appears to me now that I started to study the future for a reason that fits well into the study of the philosophy of Gaia, which is: to learn where we are, past just our relationships with other people. It's the foundation of what any philosophy tries to give you, as well as a more thorough knowledge of who we are.
But first --where.
One method of feeling out where we are is to bracket our existence in time and space (location). Since the Ptolemaic era, at least, our species has struggled to learn and to disseminate the knowledge of our location relative to the landmarks of our globe, and relative to its size. Lately, we've tried to realize our location relative to the rest of our galaxy, etcetera. We are not finished yet. There are factions of people that have fought --and still fight-- against knowledge and awareness.
As to our species location in "time", we have struggled against these factions for only a hundred or two hundred years; since our first hints that the Earth is vastly older than the biblical scholar said. We can check that written history, but it tells us more about their psychology than our history.
However, studying the history of false notions does not inform us of the truth. (Okay, it helps us avoid repeating some mistakes.)
Finding our place is what Gaia helps us do. I think I can say that it is the only spiritual philosophy that does.
Where are you? Where are you?
An hour's look thru very old family photos can really put you in your chronological place. Especially pictures of obvious relatives... whose names and lives you know not of.
It was mere happenstance that the first pictures were in monochrome. Those who grew up with mono movies might've gotten the feeling that the past was that way. Actually, the 1930s were in color, the same as any past time. Or now.
The world evolved --and was lived-- an instant at a time. Divide four Billion years by an average human lifetime of 30 years. That's a lot of grammas and grampas.
You can travel to the country of your great-grandparents, and that can be interesting. You can find the culture that influenced you somewhat, thru the generations. But you can go back further than that without taking a step physically. You can find what influenced every step you've ever made, find where you really belong, and, like the lost orphan, who your real "mother" is: nature itself.
Mother Nature is such a great term; so much more appropriate than we would have thought.
In the more distant past, matter and energies that impacted the planet had a slight and continuous effect on it; and at rare but significant times, the effect has been disastrous. (That's a word that is almost appropriate, because disaster means "bad star", and several times, a careening small body --not star-- impacted the earth and changed it drastically. Ask any dinosaur.)
The past is only one side of the bracket. And if the past is a generalized deduction, the future is only a guess.
I would like us all to be able to envision the universe from outside our ego. From --so to speak-- a flying time machine that confers amnesia; a window onto the past and future, and in all places in the universe.
The most significant of the insights from the "future bracket" (besides our own deaths) is that the world did not lead up to, and end its work with, the human species! Evolution was not an intelligence that had the human species, and you in particular, in mind as the ultimate, perfect goal. That's teleology; verboten in scientific circles, and ridiculous besides. Our human hand did not evolve to fit the hammer-handle that someone would someday invent for it. The idea of that handle's shape did not hang in the ether waiting for our hand to fit it!
Evolution has not reached its goal... because there isn't one. There is only... change. Although... you might call "change to keep refitting the organism into the changing balances of nature" a (moving) goal, if you insist. Among animals, we are between the sloth and the shrew. (Mark Twain said we were between the angels and the French!)
* We also have a place in the speed of things. Among inanimate things, we are somewhere between the speed of light and the speed of glass. Glass, you see, is technically a liquid that flows very, very slowly. It would eventually form a puddle beneath every window-frame. (Except that the frame would long ago have rotted away, on its own scale of speed. In fact, it would take billions of years, so go ahead, you can buy that window.)
Are we individual and independent, or are we dependent on a culture? We can compare humans and their society to particle and molecular chemistry and physics; the ultimate independent particle being the neutrino. It has a hi-speed life, but rarely interacts with anything. Whereas molecules may be very active --as an acid-- but very quickly break down into something very stable... which may never change again. A hell on both extremes. Complete lack of change is a good definition of death or, at least, non-life.
Astronomers measure time --the speed of change --in, well, astronomically vast sweeps. The age of a star is in Billions of years.
To humans, a few hundred years ago, the universe equaled the Earth. They thought that the entire scope of the Earth, or a map, if ever known or drawn, would not get done till far into the distant future. They thought that "things identified as part of the universe" would be quite a list of things like rocks and trees, animals, etc.. Only way at the end of their list might come... "and a few tiny dots in the night sky."
Later, the Solar system was "the universe"... all revolving around the Earth, of course. Originally, they thought the Earth was too vast, too immense for the human mind to comprehend.
By the 19th century, the Earth was no longer the center, no longer the biggest thing; and the Earth was no longer big enough to be considered a major part of the universe. The universe was the Solar System. Then it was the Galaxy, Etc.
Where are we, compared to that?
* * Once upon a time, (twenty or... more... years ago) there was a little boy (that's me), who loved astronomy and other knowledge. On a certain clear night that was moonless but street-lighted, a friend and I found a nearby spot--a neighbor's back yard--that lay fairly dark... for it was the night of the Perseids. That meteor shower was quite an attraction to a boy in a small town that had nothing else happening. (I still say: If it's noon in California, it's about 1955 in South Dakota.)
We lay on our backs and waited and watched. Then it happened. Nobody else could've seen it, even my friend, because it happened only to me. It wasn't the meteors that we saw. No, I wasn't teleported into an alien spaceship, but to me, it felt just as strange.
You see, I had already practiced imagining other points of view, such as seeing thru a dog's eyes, a foot above the ground, as he runs along... feeling four legs workin'. I had a feel for the fact that the world is a big ball. And I knew the layout of the Solar System, and how gravity works, as the planets fall around the sun. I could still point toward the sun at midnight.
Suddenly, without trying, all that came together for me in a scary way, as book-larnin' became knowledge. It was my first peak experience. I seemed to get vertigo. Down was still down, and up was still up, but now I had another up: north. Not the curve over to the Earth's pole, where horizontal pointed at the sun, but straight Celestial north. North that stays north!
I knew --I felt-- where I was. A mysterious force held me down. It's a force that scientists still know nothing about, but that we call gravity. I lay there like a fly on the wall, gravity-pasted onto the side of a tiny planet that was falling thru space; a planet which was itself held by gravity to the star I knew was behind me.
I could see stars and space. I saw them as I never had before --or to be honest-- since. The "sky" was no longer a flat black bowl with pinholes for stars. I saw... distance. I saw that the stars were at different distances. I looked across at them, rather than up. I lay on my back, but felt the stars behind me, behind the planet, and, farther, behind the glare of the star we call Sol.
There was... insignificance. I saw an awesome beauty, on the largest scale I've ever felt. For that little while, I saw... really saw... something of what the universe is. That little moment changed my life.
I can't give you that. I can't purposefully recreate much of that experience for myself. Some, tho. But I can tell you that you may have such a thing happen; perhaps as you walk past an ordinary tree, for example. Or see a spiderweb.
But --darn it-- it won't happen if the experience itself is your goal. What a double-bind! ...more of that elsewhere.
* But we now have a greater "where" for us to find ourselves within. It's a new and marvelous discovery by scientists. They did not invent it, and it's not just "an idea".
It's the intricate interworkings of the Gaian "mechanism". We are but one gear in it. But I want not to overwork the "meshing gears" metaphor--or any other. Nature is also a balancing act; one species playing against others near its ecological niche (various antelope)... and fighting its way between the things it wants to eat and the things that want to eat it--as the Gazelle is between the grass and the Cheetah. This is dynamic; things change. The slowest and least alert get eaten... or fail to eat.
We have a niche too, and it's changed a lot in the last couple hundred years, unfortunately.
I can give you this: that what you will find in Gaia is worth vastly more than the effort you will put into it. We may call it simply knowledge--textbook learning--but you can then apply that knowledge to a visceral understanding! Never forget that an Understanding of something is worth ten times the mere knowledge of it. An understanding that can see and feel a thing without words and text; without terms of identification and related mental pictures.
Words are useful only to point at something; they're just a pointer, not the thing itself. They do not confer any understanding, not directly. Forget words whenever you can.
I use words here to point, and tell what little can be told. I want to tell you where you are. But all I can do is tell the text, walk the walk, and hope you get enough to see your way thru the cultural smoke, to bypass the way you want things to be, and feel nature as it really is, and know that as it is... is the best way it can be. The best of all possible worlds.
Einstein: "To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties--this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."
How could anyone's image of "heaven" not include forests and all the Gaian systems of Earth, because we are part of that. It would not be an improvement to remove us from everything that we are part of here. In the end, I suspect, if we believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, our image of heaven would wind up as a twin of the Earth as it is!
Gaia is not only where you are, it is who you are. See you in the next chapter.