What's Next
MAYA
Eastern spiritual traditions have always emphasized the illusory nature of the reality of our senses, and how our physical senses keep us locked within Maya, the world of illusion. But little attention is given to the concept of Maya in our modern secular cultures. We tend to reject the truth it contains out of hand, regarding it as some sort of exotic mysticism, when it really just reflects a fact of our human condition.
Our senses can perceive only the local space we inhabit; only that which we can see, hear, smell, touch or taste. If we were hooked up to a sophisticated virtual reality machine and immersed in its cyberspace world for any length of time, our spatial awareness would be circumscribed and bound in this way even to an imaginary cyber reality. Especially if peripheral devices enabled us to 'hear', 'touch' and maybe even 'smell' various aspects of it, that cyberworld would soon come to absorb our sense of where we existed spatially.
The non-local Planetary/Cosmic space we inhabit eludes confirmation from our senses, that's why up till now it didn't factor into our spatial grounding. As a species, our spatial orientation remained bound and circumscribed by our senses until our modern Space Age with its space satellite imagery showed us irrefutable evidence of our Planetary/Cosmic existence. Teilhard de Chardin foresaw this happening. He predicted that our 'instrumentation' would one day advance enough to serve as an extension of our physical senses. And it's our Space Age instrumentation, specifically our satellite imagery; that's now enabling us to expand our sense of where we are up to the next higher order of magnitude of reality - the Planetary/Cosmic dimension of our existence.
An Ant's View of 'The World'
Think of a colony of ants scurrying across a boulder deep in a forest. Imagine you're in that same forest, sitting nearby on the mossy ground watching the ants. You're aware of the smell of nearby pine trees, a gentle cool breeze on your skin, dappled sunlight falling through the leafy heights around you. You watch as the ants scurry over the boulder, totally oblivious to the larger world of the forest around them and pre-occupied with their ant scent trails, their ant specific notions of territoriality; food-gathering, etc. If you continued to watch them for hours on end, after a while your more expanded human spatial awareness would begin to feel uncomfortably telescoped and stiffled. Eventually you'd have to look away to ground yourself once more in your more habitual, more encompassing and inclusive human-scale spatial reality - the reality of the forest.
In a similar way, our myopic and self-absorbed Nation-State based conceptualization of 'The World' is becoming too tight a fit for the next stage of our evolution. It's 'boxing in' and stiffling our expanding human consciousness in an increasingly uncomfortable and unsustainable manner. Our current sense of 'The World' confines and restricts our spatial awareness into its patchwork quilt of Nation States every bit as much as forcing ourselves to fix our attention for a long time on a colony of ants on a forest floor uncomfortably 'boxes in' our spatial awareness from its more habitual and expansive human-scale spatial reality. The difference is one of degree only. Especially now that the seminal image of our Earth as viewed from space is firmly rooted in our collective unconscious.
"Knowledge of the material world need not alienate us from more spiritual thought, it can indeed guide us to such thoughts."
Harold J. Morowitz
Cosmic Joy, Local Pain
Whether we live in a modern industrial city, or a small Third World village, the conceptual frameworks that now predominate in our species obscures awareness of our actual physical proximity to each other at the planetary scale, and the undeniable mutuality of our deepest desires for security, peace, and 'just enough' to meet the basic survival needs of all. These internalized conceptual frameworks almost totally ignore the reality of our planetary dependence... to say nothing of our Cosmic participation. They enmesh us from birth to death into archaic sub-group divisions every bit as much as ants are mindlessly driven by their chemical pheremones to identify only with others of their own colony. And like warring colonies of ants on a forest floor, we'll continue to almost robotically kill each other and die in large numbers until we form the higher order unity at the species level that Planetization makes possible.
"(T)he sense of species which for a time seemed to have vanished from human hearts, dispelled in some sort by the growth of Reflection... is now gradually resuming its place."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin