As science and technology have advanced, each generation continues to accelerate the rate at which the modern world is being reinvented. This quest for knowledge, often fostered by the best ideas from young minds, feeds the numerous industries created to develop our consumer culture. Environmental damage from tailoring the natural environment to suit new consumer fashions continues with the expansion of agriculture's attempts to feed the growing global population. Alongside the continuing destruction of the environment, global warming has the potential to derail the runaway train of intelligent design.
Considering these looming disasters, it is clear our collective intelligence needs to focus on priorities other than economic growth. Clues to understand current agendas better arise from exploring the legacies past cultures contributed to human intelligence. History and archaeology tell us when new ideas first led to the spread of cultural advances. Like threads, they have been spun and woven into the tapestries of our consciousness, redefining what it can mean to be human. The book A History of Our Emerging Consciousness traces how this result enriched the lives of our ancestors. Looking at the continuum of progress made during past millennia, its physical, emotional, mental and spiritual stages introduce us to a process in which we are all participants.
The times when these new ideas were introduced are seen to relate to a natural cycle. The early use of the scientific symbols describing this cycle introduced an accurate annual calendar. This clock was invented by projecting onto our annual cycle of starry patterns many of the qualities that describe the cycle of the seasons. A calendar became available to all farmers. Our emerging consciousness is discovered to follow these same symbols. This is shown by their correlation with the survival strategies that have come down to us through the ages. Some still serve us well while others have inextricably led to the many global crises facing us and future generations.
The idea of 'as above so below' introduces the principle of correspondence, often identified as the law of correspondences. One of the countless natural examples of this is the correspondence between the structure of our solar system and the atomic structure of atoms. This principle ushers in the idea that the Universe emanates from one source with common laws and characteristics. These may apply to each aspect of creation manifesting in its appropriate plane of expression.
Mythology, archaeology and history reveal how human developments mirror this correspondence. This book first considers the growth of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions of intelligence since the last Ice Age. It describes how other qualities of consciousness emerged alongside these four phases of growing intelligence. From these a model describing our emerging consciousness during the last 10,000 years is developed. To test its validity a more extensive study of the emergence of all other qualities of consciousness is successfully undertaken.
Palaeontologists argue that the most distant period in the past from which we can begin this test is the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution, c 38,000 BC. It was around this time that it is believed the human imagination was first expressed. The path our species has followed since this birth is traced. It describes the backdrop of the many ages during which a process has been endlessly inspiring and informing the self-awareness, imagination and endeavour upon which we all depend. A greater awareness of this process may influence the way we view the challenges facing the modern world
