The Earth Will Soon Be Sentient. It has been suggested that the whole Earth is a giant organism rapidly progressing toward sentience, and that humankind is the principal agent of this evolution.
Such a belief requires that we go beyond the role of being stewards and take a more proactive stance as it relates to the Earth’s future. British scientist James Lovelock, after being inspired by images taken from space in the 1960s, proposed his “living” Earth or Gaia hypothesis (named after the Greek goddess of the Earth), which describes the planet’s ecosystems as behaving much like a super-organism in which all the geologic, hydrologic, and biologic cycles self-regulate the conditions on the planet. The entire range of biota, from the smallest to the largest, from the simplest to the most complex—plus the air, the oceans, and the land surface—all appear to be part of a giant system able to regulate: Chapter Three - A Planetary Light Network. Right at the shift of the ages and the turn of the millennium - just as civilization finds itself at a critical crossroads - a global information system has emerged capable of instantaneously connecting all of us.
Simultaneously, humanity finds itself in a rapid spiritual awakening - what has been described as an acceleration, a grand catharsis, a quickening, a christing of consciousness. The Earth has grown a brain, expanded its mind, and is discovering its destiny in a planetary network of light. The combination illuminates the lamp of HOPE. For thirty years, a French Jesuit Priest named Teilhard de Chardin wrote a variety of works which inspired James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis: The global ecosystem as a living superorganism, whose whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. He envisioned a stage of evolution where a complex membrane of information fueled by human consciousness enveloped our planet crystallizing into "a noosphere" (from the Greek noo, for mind). Cosmic consciousness. Cosmic consciousness is a book published by Richard Maurice Bucke in 1901, in which he explores the phenomenon of Cosmic Consciousness, "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man", a consciousness of "the life and order of the universe".
History[edit] In 1901 Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke published Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, in which he explores the phenomenon of Cosmic Consciousness, "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man", a consciousness of "the life and order of the universe".