There is, they say, a band of thought encircling the planet. Not just the bits and data of internet cloud stringing every house and town from Russia to California, from Manilla to Iceland.
Rather a realm of thought, conscious or unconscious, emanating from the evolutionary impacted emergence of human ratiocination translating consciousness into mental deliberation, theorizing, and opinionating judgment.
(cf. The Third Story of the Universe | Brian Swimme | TEDxBerkeley, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLJ-MSUQsh0. Time 15:11)
For better or worse, a new phylum of evolutionary appearance that becomes an active player in the specific cosmic neighborhood of planet earth and its extensions.
In the theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky's noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements. It is also currently being researched as part of the Global Consciousness Project.[19]
Teilhard perceived a directionality in evolution along an axis of increasing Complexity/Consciousness. For Teilhard, the noosphere is the sphere of thought encircling the earth that has emerged through evolution as a consequence of this growth in complexity/consciousness. The noosphere is therefore as much part of nature as the barysphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. As a result, Teilhard sees the "social phenomenon [as] the culmination of and not the attenuation of the biological phenomenon."[20] These social phenomena are part of the noosphere and include, for example, legal, educational, religious, research, industrial and technological systems. In this sense, the noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere thus grows in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. Teilhard argued the noosphere evolves towards ever greater personalisation, individuation and unification of its elements. He saw the Christian notion of love as being the principal driver of "noogenesis", the evolution of mind. Evolution would culminate in the Omega Point—an apex of thought/consciousness—which he identified with the eschatological return of Christ.
(--Noösphere, Wikipedia)
I'm not sure we've ever come close to understanding the story, the mythology and imaginative urge, of Christ-reality.
Is Mary the earth?
Is Christ the cosmos?
Is Jesus humanity?
...
Elsewhere --In her Monday poem email Doris sends William Carlos Williams:
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams
…. …. …
I respond:
plum, tuckered, out
no, not forgiveness,
i cannot abide your cheek —
leave here, don’t come back
-wfh
I don't want to be harsh to the poet thief, after all, he seems contrite with a dubious delight in his caper. And maybe my haiku response will soften and relent and simply savor the good doctor's playful confession.
Human thought, in all its myriad shapes and stretching extension, leaves us no longer at the mercy of elemental materiality and biologic viability. We become what we think. The earth becomes what we think of it and what we think for it.
This is not merely an anthropocentric or anthropomorphic conceit. It is raw and serious impactful reality.
What question, what koan, is being presented to us for our practice as novices in this interstellar zendo we call "my life," "our life," "life-itself?"
The state department of transportation dumptrucks, layers, steamrollers, and men with shovels and rakes have moved past our roadside gate after asphalting the other lane of Barnestown Road.
This feast of Mary's Assumption.
This liturgy of Monday morning.