CHAPTER SEVEN
At the Gates of the New Age - 6

1990 to 2062:
In view of the crucial all-human choice implied in this last question mark, it would be futile to try to foresee what this last 72-year phase of the Piscean Age will witness on this earth. The possibility of important telluric changes, perhaps of a sudden alteration of the polar axis or of the rise of at least a portion of a new continent is certainly not to be dismissed too lightly — nor the possibility of contact with the "humanity" of another planet or solar system, a contact which could give a tremendous shock to the collective mind of earthly mankind. Yet it seems to be in the nature of our human race to seek external solutions to its ever-recurring problems, or some external answer to its never-ending questions.
      I do believe in the intervention of the Greater Whole at crucial periods in the life-span of the smaller wholes which participate in Its vaster being — and this possibility of intervention is no more startling than the immediate rushing of antibodies and white blood cells to any injured part of a man's body. Without having to subscribe blindly to the transcendental belief in a "Mystical Body of Christ" in which we live, move and have our being as individual human organisms, I see no reason to doubt the fact that the earth is a thoroughly "organized system of activities" — even if we refuse to call it a "living organism" — and that this planetary system (and the still vaster solar system of which it is but a part) has the power to readjust fundamental states of disequilibrium and perverted activities which endanger the dynamic balance of the whole system. We can speak of a transcendent God, but we probably do not need to speculate that far, for the cosmic reality of an organized solar system (or even of a planet) provides us with at least most of the answers we need to account for extraordinary "interventions" in the affairs of mankind.
      The only thing which makes such a type of thought unpalatable to our modern "scientific" mentality is its blind faith in so-called natural laws which represent at best but a narrow view of the ordinary behavior of the powers operating in the solar system and the cosmos. A reaction of the planet as a whole to the explosion of hydrogen bombs is, in principle, as explainable as the reaction of the stock market in New York to the start or the end of a war in Asia. Life can protect itself, and I have already shown (in the Prologue) how, with our narrow historical perspective and our very vague and sketchy geological understanding of the past of our globe (not to mention our totally speculative grasp of how the solar system was formed), we have absolutely no way of really knowing whether or not planets and solar systems are manifestations of a cosmic form of "life." There is really no more dogmatic statement than the assertion that our so-called "laws of nature" operate always and in any section of space as we think they do according to our earth-conditioned knowledge, limited as the latter is to an infinitesimally small moment of the existence of the cosmos.
      This modern dogmatism becomes even more unjustifiable since we have built computers that "think" — or at least that can react to abnormal situations and thereby preserve their integrity. At least we could think of the solar system as a gigantic computer able to re-adjust its basic harmonic patterns of existence when menaced by some destructive, centrifugal (and we might say "cancerous") development on the life-processes of one of its planets! By saying this, I do not belittle the validity of a belief in God or in god-like Agencies and superhuman Minds constituting the structuring and guiding aspect of planetary, or cosmic Wholes. A "cold" cosmic Power of Harmony able to readjust everywhere self-defeating states of acute disequilibrium may not be satisfying to the human mind which needs to feel "warmed" by emotions of love; but at least such a cold Power is thinkable and indeed should seem to any broad and non-dogmatic human intelligence perfectly understandable and "logical." Again, I repeat, Life everywhere is able to protect itself in one way or another. Why should it not do so at the planetary or cosmic level? Because we do not know exactly how it could do it at such levels certainly should not stop us from accepting the extreme probability of such a hypothesis.