=1 "The superbrain"
The superbrain by Benedictus Montecrossa
The first of the great syntheses on our planet took place 2,000 million years ago in the Precambrian age when a living cell united with another living cell to form the first multicellular being.
The second great synthesis took place in the Devonian age more than 1,000 million years later when multicellular insects cooperated to form insect states like those of the termites, the ants, the bees and the wasps.
The first synthesis was physical: cell was added to cell to form a single psychical body, in which each individual cell became highly specialised in its particular activity in that body.
The second synthesis was not somatic; each ant, each bee preserved its own independent physical body. The union was hormonal and effected by hormonal-chemical exchanges between the independent bodies so that they came to constitute a single vital being. What the individual lost was its vital independence, for each one now played a vitally specialised role: the egg producer, the water carrier, the soldier, the worker, the queen and the drone. Each had to play its specific role so that the hive could live and continously renew itself.
The third great synthesis is taking place in our time, and in it we are all participating. It is the synthesis of living mind, in which all the individual minds of man lose their capacity to function separately and alone. No human child could become a human being, a partaker in human culture, if it were left entirely to itself.
The communality of mind we call culture, and until our time cultures were still to be found in the plural. There were many on earth. But what we are now witnessing is the birth of a common culture for the whole of mankind. There is no longer an Arab chemistry or an Indian psychology or a Chinese astronomy. There is only one body of science from Tokyo to Cape Town, from Los Angeles to Moscow. And thousands of biologically independent individual scientists are forming together that great invisible body, the scientific community, which to their mind is as real as the anthill is to the ant.
This third great synthesis is still in the making. It is not yet accomplished; is has not reached adulthood. It is flexing its invisible muscles and slowly building its nervous body of electronic communication, its memory archives of electronic tapes, and it has started to create its own language, of which we know only the first stammerings, such as
- e = mc2
- or Zn + O = ZnO
- or AV¬A.
Like the preceding syntheses, it may take millions of years to reach its full potentialities, but the chances are that it will need thousands only, because this synthesis has become a conscious process and therefore does not need a long biological evolution to be realised. Its future instrumentation: electronics, its future energy source: hydrogen fusion, are already visible from where we are. Just as the multicellular being acts in relation to its environment as a single cell, and as a swarm with its hundreds of bees can defend its hive like a single angry being, this future mind-being of mankind will act and develop like a single supermind in spite of its thousands and thousands of biologically independent brains.
It is this superbrain which will give to each individual mind its guiding lines, its framework; it will constitute its playground, and, finally, permit every one its highest possible individual fulfilment.
Each of these great syntheses has been a step not only toward a more complete organisation, a higher efficiency of the whole, but also paradoxically toward a greater freedom for every individual in an ever-widening inner space.
In a primitive culture none of our great poets or musicians or scientists could have functioned as independently, as individually, as in a cultural environment where they can stand on the shoulders of the giant pyramid of their predecessors which the superbrain of mankind preserves for them through the ages.
Anatomically the brain of a Sebastian Bach, a Pablo Picasso, a Cantor or an Albert Einstein has already been with us for forty thousand years. But the cultural body was not there to permit its full bloom in its particular individuality. What real individuality is we may know only after another ten thousand years, when the electronic library of a planetary culture can spread before each baby born the vast gamut of its possibilities of fulfilment.
Now our children are still little beggars, searching hopefully in those dustbins of culture we call schools. But before very long failthful and skilled electronic teachers will present each child with the riches of his very own individual cultural kingdom. It is on the summits of this third great synthesis of life that man will really become homo sapiens. Then he will stand on the solid foundations of a cultural past, surrounded by the electronically accumulated and organised knowledge of the billions of men who have lived on earth before him. Thus he will be able to choose freely his very own cultural contribution to that great invisible hive: the superbrain of humanity.
Only then will each man attain to his luminous indiviudal summit, his own divinity of knowledge, bliss, love and consciousness, because each man will not only be aware of his own little biological body, but will be able to see with the awareness of the whole, to act with the knowledge of the whole, and to enjoy the bliss of the whole. It is in this single whole that each will find his soul and his immortality as well as a physical cradle for birth after birth after birth.
Life’s longing for the shining heights of being will have taken a new step forward, and when man then looks back towards his beginning as a unicellular being in some forgotten sea he may well feel that the most difficult part of his advance towards omnipotence and omniscience is already behind him.
He will have taken the greatest hurdle in the course of his evolution towards perfection, the hurdle of the ego, the ahamkara, the feeling of being a separate isolated being in a hostile universe, and will have gained the new security of being a perennial element in the conscious superorganism of planetary man.