There is great concern today among thoughtful people about the condition of our planet and its possible future. Wars are raging around the globe, and concern for the climate crisis has receded into the background while nearly all nations focus on increasing their GDPs through trade, production, and consumption. But the perpetual growth of global GDP means burning more fossil fuel, extracting more natural resources, and giving less thought to an entirely new world system that might be predicated on authentic sustainability rather than endless growth.

In short, the condition of our world leads many thoughtful people to a feeling of hopelessness and despair. We are facing the possibility of human self-extinction. Like the ancient Greek Hedonist philosophers, such people are often led toward a life of sensuousness and pleasure because thinking about the world and its future has become too painful. Due to the lawless and fragmented condition of the ancient world, these ancient Greeks used hedonism to achieve a certain non-attachment (ataraxia), cultivating inner peace.

Today in the West, millions of people are turning to meditation of one form or another, largely derived from Hinduism and Buddhism. This movement is led by well-known figures, past and present, such as D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, David Loy, and Ervin Laszlo. The movement validly explores the wonderful possibilities of meditation and spiritual practice. Yet, in terms of political and social action for a transformed world, it often serves as a form of escapism. The assumption is that the world will only become a decent place for humans and other life forms when the majority of people have moved to a higher level of spiritual discernment.

This movement broadly includes a worldview known as Integral Spirituality and a related view called Spiral Dynamics, both of which understand human history as the evolution of ever more holistic stages of consciousness. However, beyond meditation, the cultivation of mindfulness, and growing self-awareness of the stages of spiritual development themselves, these orientations remain rather passive. Ken Wilber, for example, who compares many models of spiritual, emotional, and cognitive stages of development in Integral Spirituality (2007), provides little in the way of a rationale for these stages or a plan of action by which we can accelerate growth toward the higher stages of development—stages that are more holistic and presumably will save us from our trajectory toward extinction.

There is truth in these approaches, of course, but their assumptions leave out an entire dimension of our human situation where a much more affirmative and immediate hope exists. This is an aspect of our existential condition that we urgently need to activate within today’s endangered world. Unlike the world of the ancient Greek Hedonists, today’s fragmented and lawless world may lead to the extinction of our entire species. We need all the hope—and corresponding future-oriented action—that we can get. To define this largely unrecognized dimension of our humanity, let us look at its emergence with respect to the evolution of science and culture since the Renaissance.

Prior to the 17th century, Western religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—tended to embrace the dominant worldview that the Cosmos was created only a few thousand years ago by a transcendent God who placed human beings at the center of creation both spiritually and physically. Spiritually, we were made in the image of God within a divine drama involving human sin and redemption; physically, the entire Cosmos of Sun, moon, and stars revolved around an Earth placed at the Universe’s center.

It is no wonder that the Catholic Church sought to suppress Copernicus’s 16th-century work, which identified the Earth as a mere planet revolving around the Sun as the true center of creation, given the staggering spiritual implications. If the Earth were merely a contingent body hurtling through space thousands of miles from the true center, what did that imply for the spiritual truth that all creation was a divine drama centered on human sin and redemption? This marked the beginning of the end of humans believing they were the exclusive center of creation. Copernicus’s thesis was soon confirmed by Galileo, Kepler, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton, and others. From the late 16th through the 17th century, the worldview of Western humanity underwent an unimaginable psychic shock: from being the center of creation, we suddenly found ourselves tiny, insignificant, and perhaps entirely contingent within a Cosmos whose dimensions expanded dramatically with every larger and more powerful telescope invented.

The work of these early-modern scientists and philosophers resulted in a radically dualistic worldview between body and mind, along the lines Descartes developed in his Meditations (1641). The physical world now appeared as “dead matter”—atomistic, mechanistic, and deterministic, unlike the human mind, which possessed feelings, thoughts, and the capacity for free choice. By the 18th-century Enlightenment, many thoughtful people had become Deists, believing God had created the Universe as a gigantic clockwork machine set running long ago, without subsequent divine interference. Many of the founders of the United States, such as Thomas Jefferson, were Deists in this sense.

During this early-modern period, the two giant organizational systems that dominate our world today were established and empowered: capitalism and its interrelated system of militarized sovereign nation-states. Scholars often date the nation-state system to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, while capitalism evolved from the 17th-century system of maritime trade, gold reserves, and insurance. However, by the dawn of the 20th century, this early-modern worldview began to be overthrown by scientists such as Albert Einstein and Ernst Mach, and philosophers such as A.N. Whitehead, Jan Smuts, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. These two giant organizational systems remain with us, but the worldview within which they arose has been transformed.

Of the many developments during the 19th century, two are particularly critical: scientist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, establishing the scientific theory of evolution, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche articulated the philosophical and spiritual implications of the early-modern worldview. Nietzsche called it “nihilism”—the conclusion that human life lacks meaning or purpose, and that any claims to purpose are simply an illusion, for “there is no truth” (es gibt keine Wahrheit).

Many aspects of the early-modern worldview persist. Militarized sovereign nation-states continue to wreak havoc, and capitalism continues to concentrate wealth in fewer hands. Nihilism also pervades modern culture: belief in truth is scorned as mere naivete, while lies and manipulation are deployed within a universal, egoistic battle for private wealth without regard for others or the common good. There appears to be little difference between capitalists who manipulate in service of wealth accumulation and politicians who manipulate in service of personal power. Integral spirituality has little to say regarding a critique or transformation of these systems.

Nevertheless, science has long since transcended this early-modern worldview. Twentieth-century philosophers and scientists have laid the foundations for a transformed cosmology—one that restores great hope and purpose to human life and the Cosmos. Why hasn’t the world followed suit? In my view, the intertwined system of capitalism and militarized sovereign nation-states has infiltrated all dimensions of life on this planet, trapping us within its nihilistic and self-destructive assumptions.

In the new cosmology, everything in the vast Universe is interconnected. The sharp division between mind and matter is gone, and all things are understood to have "internal relations” with one another (rather than merely "external relations”). This means what one country does to another affects everyone, including the aggressor. It means my accumulation of wealth at the expense of others and nature affects me as well. Holism is a key concept of this new paradigm, meaning that sovereign, independent nation-states are an anachronism, just as competition for wealth among independent individuals and corporations is a destructive relic.

The new science of ecology aligns with this cosmology of holism. All things affect all other things as parts of interdependent fields within fields of integration. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order (2002), physicist David Bohm affirms a “matrix that subtends the world,” stating that “relativity and quantum theory imply an undivided wholeness, in which analysis into distinct and well-defined parts is no longer relevant” (183). We are one interdependent species on this planet with one interdependent ecosystem, and it is time we act on these truths. We must unify our planet ecologically, economically, and politically, or we will soon drive ourselves to extinction while ruining our planet as an oasis of life.

In 1926, Jan Smuts published Holism and Evolution, writing: “Darwin has changed our whole human orientation of knowledge and belief…and has probably made a greater difference for human thought and action than any other single thinker…. He has pointed the great way, and on that way we are already traveling beyond his great vision” (1986, 185-86). After Darwin, Einstein gave us the cosmic theory of relativity in 1905, demonstrating the integration of space and time at the cosmic level, and by 1929, Edwin Hubble provided evidence of an expanding universe. Today, many scientists agree that not only does life evolve on Earth, but the entire Universe has been evolving since the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, with the evolution of terrestrial life being a direct consequence of that cosmic evolution.

All things in the Cosmos are holistically intertwined, and the Cosmos is evolving—going somewhere. It has a telos, a purpose, a direction. The hard distinction between mind and matter has been surpassed by thinkers such as Whitehead in Process and Reality (1929), and Christianity was adapted to the new Cosmology by thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1959). Human beings have evolved as self-aware beings whose self-awareness allows them to pursue purposes and perform actions to achieve those ends. Now we see that the Universe itself possesses purpose and has evolved a creature capable of purpose.

Furthermore, the Cosmos manifests “emergent evolution” (since it appears to be moving toward a destination), and the emergence of a creature who can comprehend this telos appears as a consequence of this cosmic aspiration. It seems that the cosmic nisus (purpose or direction) involves human beings. The Cosmos has created what we call “mind” or “reason.” Smuts writes: “Our Reason is in its very essence more than individual; it is expressive of universality; it is part of that Order which regulates the universe, and in a deep sense is a creative factor or co-creator of that Order” (243). Humans have evolved as a key element in the telos of the evolving Universe. Medieval thinkers thought we were at the physical center. Still, now we see that the center is everywhere, having evolved a special focus in rational, purposive beings who can further its holistic aims.

Teilhard de Chardin declares, “Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself” (1959, 221). Our self-aware rationality and purposiveness must be used in service of the cosmic telos directed toward ever-greater holism, integration, harmony, and unity in diversity. As a Christian, Teilhard calls this integrating energy “love.” Indian thinker Sri Aurobindo united the Western concept of evolution with the traditional Indian Yoga of unity in a vision of humanity’s role in the evolving Universe, writing that “the Universe… creates a self-conscious concentration of the All through which it can aspire” (1970, 45). The Cosmos now aspires through us; we bear the immense responsibility of promoting holism across all dimensions. Philosopher Errol E. Harris observed in The Reality of Time, “Thus, our consciousness of ourselves is at the same time the consciousness of the world and the world’s consciousness of itself” (1988, 104). The cosmic evolutionary process has become conscious of itself in us.

The entire paradigm undergirding capitalism and militarized sovereign nation-states is antiquated and self-destructive. We have evolved on this planet for a reason. The cosmic evolutionary telos has become self-aware in us, and its purposes are neither individual egoistic self-promotion, nor personal accumulation of wealth, nor nation-states waging war against one another. Many scientists now view the existence of self-aware beings as intrinsic to cosmic development (referred to as the “Anthropic Principle”). We are a “leading shoot” of the cosmic nisus, yet we are failing to integrate this key to our existence into our personal lives, cultures, economics, or politics.

Like Immanuel Kant and others before him, Errol E. Harris advocated for democratic world government. He wrote in support of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth in Earth Federation Now: Tomorrow is Too Late (2014). His awareness of the cosmic telos in us led him to comprehend the severity of our trajectory toward self-extinction. The loss of the human project on Earth would be a disaster of cosmic significance. We will have failed in our divinely given gift of freedom and its holistic task of integration, love, compassion, and justice. Without uniting under the Earth Constitution to end war, prevent nuclear holocaust, and reverse climate collapse, we face a failure of cosmic proportions.

Harris concludes his book with this warning should we fail to unite under democratic world law: “Mankind will indeed face extinction, along with other living creatures. The fruits of culture will be lost forever; the light of knowledge will be extinguished, and the discoveries of science will have been in vain; the illumination of consciousness will vanish from the Earth, abandoning it to oblivion as it becomes a dead planet, like Mars or Venus. Federalists of the Earth unite; you have everything to lose if you fail!” (2014, 128). Like Harris, I sense the demands of the cosmic nisus in us to integrate humanity under the principle of unity in diversity—the primary function of the Earth Constitution.

If the Cosmos has become conscious of itself in us, what are the implications for spirituality and ethics? The movement focused on meditation in pursuit of non-dual unity with the ground of being is insufficient as a foundation for ethical action. Non-dual unity is not identical to the unity in diversity of the cosmic manifestation that we comprehend through this vision. Instead of escaping the phenomenal world as an illusion (samsara or maya), we see that the phenomenal world manifests the reality of a telos moving toward what Teilhard called “Omega” or fulfillment (of which we have only a dim comprehension).

Our inner peace need not come solely through meditation or resignation, but through integration with the self-aware telos that the Cosmos has created within us. The eternal “now” is directly related to the temporal “now” of diversity evolving toward integration and greater unities. In human temporality, we live within a dynamic present in which we remember the past and anticipate the future. We invariably evaluate the past as having been lacking in certain respects, both for humanity and in our personal lives, and we naturally believe things should be better in the future—that I should be a better person, and that humanity should end war and learn to live in peace.

This dynamic of temporal existence—a flawed past contrasted with an expected better future—can be framed as possessing a “utopian horizon.” The Cosmos has gifted human beings with a utopian horizon that inspires us to act in the present in light of the idea that things can and should be better. I developed this idea at length in my book Human Dignity and World Order (2024). As Smuts expresses it: “The holistic nisus which rises like a living fountain from the very depths of the universe is the guarantee that failure does not await us, that the ideals of Well-being, of Truth, Beauty and Goodness are firmly grounded in the nature of things” (345).

The Cosmos calls us to strive for truth, beauty, and goodness, and to promote holism in all our activities and life purposes. Our immediate historical ethical imperative is to ratify the Earth Constitution, which is the only effective way to end war, establish planetary social justice, and address our global climate crisis. The structure of human temporality—living in a dynamic present, critically evaluating our past, and envisioning a future where things can and should be better—is our cosmic gift. It allows us to be active participants in the (r)evolutionary process of establishing greater harmony, justice, peace, and well-being for ourselves and future generations.

Our self-awareness is the voice of the Cosmos within us—the Cosmos becoming aware of itself. Hope is built into the very structure of our being, bringing an immense influx of hope into our lives. The eternal “now” and the temporal “now” have united in an evolutionary telos expressing the essence of our humanity. Here, we discover the moral demand for ratifying the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

References

Sri Aurobindo (1970). The Life Divine. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust Publishers.
David Bohm (2002). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge Publishers.
Constitution for the Federation of Earth, Compact Edition (2016). Glen T. Martin, Intro. Institute for Economic Democracy Press.
Errol E. Harris (1988). The Reality of Time. Humanities Press.
Errol E. Harris (2014). Earth Federation Now: Tomorrow is Too Late—Institute for Economic Democracy Press.
Glen T. Martin (2024). Human Dignity and World Order. Hamilton Books.
Jan Smuts (1986). Holism and Evolution. The Gestalt Journal Press.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959). The Phenomenon of Man. Harper & Row Publishers.