The concept of the Noosphere defined by Russian visionary scientist V I Vernadsky has become part of the contemporary scientific and philosophical dictionary and some cyberneticians and futurists predict that geopolitics and geo-economics will be subsumed or replaced in the coming decades by noopolitics and nooeconomics as we gradually, but rapidly, rise above the planetary level to reach a cosmic stage in our evolution.

Article 28 in Chapter 2 of the Noospherical Ethical Constitution for Mankind refers to “information artifacts of the contacts with Extraterrestrial Civilisations” and such learning tools are an indispensable part of achieving the Great Synthesis resulting in the New Knowledge that Dr. Liubov Gordina alludes to, in line with Academician Vlail Kaznacheyev’s affirmation of civilization’s intrinsic connection with the Cosmic Intellect or Consciousness.

Mankind so far remains under the authority of what we may call an intellectually pre-Copernican cosmological order, which still sees the Earth and its dominant human species as unique or at least very rare exceptions in the Universe endowed with the extraordinary, quasi-supernatural ability to think about the outer and inner reality, and develop theories to explain it. In the words of pioneering computer scientist Jan Amkreutz: “Humans…were the first species to cut the chain between a thought and the biological machine that created the thought… Humans have cut the umbilical cord that connects thought to the automatic execution of that thought” (“Being Digital or why the Future needs us,” World Affairs, Vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 2010).

Even such forward looking and seemingly unprejudiced scientific studies as the Millennium Project of the Foundation for the Future (FFF), in its Humanity 3000 Seminar Reports of 1999-2000, refuse to seriously take into account the evidence that we are one planet revolving around one of many trillion Sun-like stars in a seemingly unbounded universe that has existed for about sixteen billion years, while our species appears to have come into being only a few hundred thousand years ago at most. Their conclusions attribute relatively low importance and probability rankings to the prospects of extra-terrestrial contact and (3,825 and 2.359 respectively for a composite Index of 25,702, near the bottom of their scale of priorities for future mankind).

They venture to predict that the quest for Extra-terrestrial life will turn out to be disappointing, as nothing of interest will be found even in the next thousand years, in spite of Frank Drake’s probability estimates. Is this fear of the Unknown or old-fashioned human hubris?

It requires a theologically faith-based ‘dispensationalist’ view, rather than a dispassionate assessment, to assume that we are the only or even the most advanced lifeform or civilization in this unimaginably vast and diverse cosmos. Yet, our supposedly unprejudiced and rational scientists tend to affirm even today that we may be the only species gifted with advanced intelligent life, or at least the most highly evolved in an otherwise desertic interstellar expanse.

The alternative, truly post-Copernican vision, held four centuries ago by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and other pioneers of cosmology, is that we are one of innumerable more or less evolved species along a genetic equivalent of Jacob’s ladder in which we stand at an indeterminate rank. The Universe then does not need us to be beheld and understood, but rather, it constantly and pervasively produces lifeforms like and unlike ours, just as a tree produces flowers and fruits or like nebulae breed stars.

We are mental and biological expressions of the Cosmic Mind, just as matter is a hypostasis or a prosopon of Energy, and our perception of the outer and inner realities is an interface with their otherwise undefinable essence. It can be said that the Cosmos grasps and invents itself - it is a recreation, in both senses of the verb - through all its creatures, which together create and maintain it through their existence and reproduction. The whole and the parts are inseparably interdependent.

Exopolitics, as defined by its founders and pioneers - Alfred Lambremont Webre from Canada, Dr. Michael Salla from Australia, Paola Leopizzi Harris from Italy and the USA, Steve Bassett from the USA - (www.exopolitics-institute.com) is the science that charts the map and studies the laws of the Cosmic City that extends beyond the Solar System to the Galaxy and to the universe or multiverse beyond. As such, it is a part of Noopolitics since all life is a part of the Nous.

It should not come as surprise that such a cosmos-centric and bio-centric horizon is unattractive to our ego-focused conscious awareness and that the “powers that be” which control the Zeitgeist are steadfastly refusing to contemplate it and strive to hide it from those they rule. Hence, the very ancient traditions, supported on an almost daily basis by solid and unambiguous observations, recording that there are many other inhabitants in this universe and that some are around us or even among us, have been practically outlawed by the scientific, religious and political establishment and have so far remained on the periphery of publicly acknowledged reality.

However, this is changing now under the irresistible pressure of evidence and in the last very few years and months, possibly because of the all encompassing crisis that has engulfed global society, several irrecusable conclusions and public official statements are paving the way for the Noospheric epiphany. Exopolitics helps reveal the complexity of the universe and its biological and noetic profusion as well as its Order hidden within Chaos. We are not the first, we are not the last, we are not the highest but neither are we the smallest. As all parcels of Infinity, we encompass all Infinity. Like countless other beings, we are permanently in transition on an endless course towards an undefined goal that we may call the Omega Point, Tao, Shunya, Parabrahman, Al Azal, Ain Soph or simply the shoreless Ocean of Light that embraces all.

Here are some of the recent or current developments and disclosures which, coming in a very long succession of events that have been mostly hidden or officially denied, show us that the new era is dawning. An era in which an unlimited potential for learning and progressing beyond our farthest hopes can be realized, not solely on our own, but as Costa Andrade wrote “by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Since the last world war, a considerable amount of data has been collected which, taken together, provide the elements of a new, no longer geo- or anthropocentric worldview.

Many artificial and intelligently operated objects in space, designated in technical military jargon as UCT (uncoordinated targets), have been detected in the last half century by telescopes, radio-telescopes and exploratory satellites. Space is indeed inhabited by craft of unknown origin.

The initial reaction of governments exposed to the evidence of interventions by unknown intelligent powers was predictably dictated by bewilderment, disbelief and confusion. Between 1946 - when the War’s end gave an opportunity to civilian and military decision makers to study the facts - and 1960, a policy of official denial coupled with covert high priority research and analysis was decided on by the US Government and a few other states.

In America in particular, a strategy of systematic dismissal through derision and ridicule was crafted by concerned Military and Intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, as part of the Mockingbird program devised by Frank Wisner Sr. in order to manipulate Media and the contents of news through such psy-ops as the so-called Aviary. Denial and “debunking” were recommended in the Durant Report of the CIA-sponsored Robertson panel on the UFO issue in 1953. However, there are reports that a policy of secrecy with regard to UFO sightings was adopted by the US and Canadian governments as far back as 1936. Much of the evidence for the cover up was painstakingly assembled by Dr. Steven Greer in his book Disclosure – Military and Government Witnesses reveal the Greatest Secret in Modern History (Crossing Point, 2001 and www.disclosureproject.com).

This Research and Analysis led to R&D of technologies retrieved from or inspired by the alien vehicles and their occupants. That process, hidden under multiple layers of secrecy and deception, within the compartmentalized classification of SAPs (Special Access Projects) and CAPS (Classified Access Projects), otherwise colloquially known as “Black Programmes”, has now been partly revealed by a few high ranking military and Intelligence officers, often in the course of well publicized events such as the Disclosure Conference held at the National Press Club in Washington DC on November12, 2007 under the chairmanship of ex-Arizona Governor Fife Symington who was a personal witness to the awesome “Phoenix lights” sightings in 1997.

A scientific study commissioned by National Geographic TV calculated that the lift required to keep the massive (1500 ft. wide) craft sighted over Phoenix by hundreds of witnesses that year, was of the order of 30 million pounds, so that in the very words used in LIFE Magazine back in 1952, “no known or foreseeable human engineered lift producing system could account for (that) performance” (quoted by Larry Lowe, who made the documentary for National Geographic).

Then came the release to the public in France of the 1999 Cometa Report of the State-affiliated GEPAN (www.cnes-geipan.fr), followed by the May 31, 2010 Sigma/3AF Progress Report from the French Association of Aeronautics (AAAF), which both concluded that an extra-planetary origin was the most probable or even the only satisfactory explanation to account for UFOs and related phenomena. It is to be noted that out of the 1600 cases registered by the GEIPAN since 1954, about 25%, or 400 odd cases, are of Type D, i.e. solid, confirmed and unexplained.

The UK Ministry of Defence release of 7200 hitherto classified or restricted files, going back to 1967 only, which began in 2008, is to continue until 2012. In the latter case, each successive release has been abundantly commented on by the BBC, and Brazil in August 2010 repealed State Security Institutional Act 5 which forbade all Media from reporting UFO sightings and encounters without the prior approval of the Air Force.

The new regulation adopted by the Brazilian Air Force and signed by its Commander, Lt. General Juniti Saito in August 2010, following various public statements, and the May 20, 2005 release of hitherto secret reports by the Air Defence Headquarters, instead instructs all pilots to report any anomalous observation or experience. Several other governments are showing increasing willingness to admit that the Alien presence can no longer be denied in principle. The Chinese Media for example have reflected a number of spectacular mass UFO sightings in the summer of 2010 and the comments they drew in scientific institutions. An assessment of the astronomer from the Red Mountain Observatory, Prof. Wang Si Chao, who stated that the objects observed in those days were intelligently guided, extraterrestrial or at least non-human, was carried by the People’s Daily.

Meanwhile, the frequent and striking “crop circles” that appear in England and other countries through a mysterious process, seemingly involving the emission of microwaves from an unknown and invisible source, to produce instantly very complex, geometrically sophisticated and symbolically pregnant designs, is taken by most serious students of this subject as another trace of “Alien” activity, with the apparent intent of arousing wonder and expectations among people.

Some political leaders and other eminent personalities fought long and hard to shed some light on the UFO enigma, and through the efforts of Sir Eric Gairy, then Prime Minister of Grenada, a decision was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1978 (No. 22/426) to encourage governments all over the world to share any and all information collected on the subject and to support the creation of an international research Institution.

However, it is widely believed that from its seat in the Security Council, the USA blocked all action on this resolution and, coincidentally or not, Sir Eric Gairy was overthrown by Maurice Bishop in a US-supported coup while he was at the UN Headquarters in New York meeting with the Secretary General over his initiative.

In the USA itself, a slow but intense process of public education is being carried out, mostly by the mass media, in the genre of science fiction, while a few high profile initiatives have been undertaken. Among them is so-called Plan C, a draft White Paper for Disclosure devised by Dr. Scott Jones, a veteran investigator of para-normal phenomena, who was scientific adviser to the late Senator Claiborne Pell from Rhodes Island, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1987 to 1994 and himself keenly involved in gathering UFO related information.

Inventor and industrialist Robert Bigelow, Founder and Chairman of Bigelow Aerospace (Nevada, USA), who is building a private commercial space station, championed UFO research for several years through his Institute of Discovery Science and talked about his investigations to reporter Kenneth Chang in an article published in the International Herald Tribune (June 9, 2010). Another endeavour in the same field remains known as the Rockefeller Initiative undertaken by Laurance Rockefeller in 1997 to convince his friends, President and Mrs. Bill Clinton, to launch a public study of the UFO mystery and open up the classified archives on the subject. Bill Clinton however is reported to have told the late Larry Rockefeller that there was too big a political and personal risk in such an attempt.

John Podesta, President Clinton’s chief of Staff and subsequently the head of the transition team for Barack Obama, participated in the Press Conference on Disclosure at the NPC and expressed on record in later occasions his support for an investigation or at least for the US Government to open its files on the issue of UFOs. In the last few years, a series of factually supported documentaries, such as those directed by James Fox and abundantly publicized on American popular TV talk shows such as Larry King Live, have rendered the official policy of silence and denial increasingly untenable.

There is evidence that the US and NATO military and civilian power structures are deeply divided, especially since very large crafts were not only observed but also tracked on Air Defense Radars and pursued by fighter jets even in the restricted airspace above Stephensville in Texas, near the Crawford ranch of then-President George W Bush, in the summer of 2008.

As late as in September of this year, President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Kalmykia in the Russian Federation, who claims to have been abducted aboard an Alien spacecraft from his Moscow home on April 1997, called for the creation of an Institute of Research on UFOs and allied phenomena soon after Italian Member of the European Parliament Mario Borghezio sponsored a resolution to ask that member-states reveal what they know and set up a public Inquiry Commission.

Not too much has filtered out of what the US and other Governments have discovered in the course of decades of investigation of the phenomenon. More than thirty years ago, noted scientist and “UFO” researcher Jacques Vallee and some of his colleagues voiced doubts about the extent of information really held by official or secret agencies in a realm which proved stubbornly unfathomable in the light of (then) current scientific knowledge and which still seems to elude the grasp of human rationality.

If we rely on what transpired from various reports leaked out but so far never confirmed, we may conclude that several “alien” races, some very similar to if not identical with “homo sapiens” and others rather different from it, operate in various dimensions, move in and out of “our” space-time and demonstrate mastery of technologies connected with gravitation, electromagnetism and properties of Quantum physics. Some of those beings are semi or wholly “artificial”, neuro-digital, cyber-mechanical or bio-engineered. Some evince a collective mind as if they were all wirelessly hooked on to a common superbrain (or supercomputer) which controls both them and their vessels.

Some high-level military officers involved in monitoring the research, such as Admiral George W Hoover, (a pioneer of space flight and godfather along with Wernher von Braun of the Orbiter Program prior to becoming head of Naval Intelligence) and Colonel Philip Corso who sat on the National Security Council, attribute an exo-chronic origin to at least some of the “visitors”, meaning that they come from another space-time continuum, specifically from “our” future, as if they had been sent on a reverse drive to observe and perhaps shape events in view of a desired or programmed result. In that recursive, teleological reality, what shall be determines what was and is, by steering it forward along preferred pathways within a cobweb-like maze of possible routes.

Such a vision sheds new light on the Samskrit depiction of the supreme monarch as the Ruler of Time, and explains why according to Hindu cosmology Time is created or rather arises before Space, which is a consequent extension of it.

The likely process at work behind the UFO phenomenon may be analytically split up as a complex long-term operation involving the following interventions which, for mnemotechnical convenience, I will call the ten I’s:

-        Initiation: by triggering transcendent mental and physical visions and experiences, with “out of body” components, which suggest the existence of a higher, super-natural and mysterious reality.

-        Inspiration: by transmitting messages, in a literal or symbolic format (such as telepathic or vocal statements, “crop circles” or signs in the skies et al.)

-        Information: by passing on spiritual, scientific and technological data and tools in a variety of ways, when abducting human beings for example, or communicating with selected or random individuals, such as all those contacted by the enigmatic “Ummites” in Europe during the nineteen sixties, or the equally numerous members of the Italian Amicizia study group in the seventies and eighties, as recorded in books written by some of the witnesses.

-        Inception: as defined in Christopher Nolan’s film of the same name; by “injecting” ideas and concepts in people’s minds, possibly through the medium of dreams and by means of:

-        Implantation of various microscopic devices which have now been detected and identified in a large number of human beings.

-        Infiltration of “ET” individuals, biological machines and cells in the midst of society, also with the help of:

-        Insemination of human beings with Alien genes (possibly to trigger into action the so-called “junk DNA) in order to create hybrid beings with added capacities and functions.

-        Invasion: a peaceful, orderly and gradual “merger” of the human and ET species on this planet and in outer space for wide-ranging cooperation. As part of this process some UFOs survey and monitor, at least since World War II, important strategic facilities and installations all over the world, in particular atomic research centres and power plants, space flight launching areas and artificial satellites, ICBM silos, Air Force and nuclear submarine bases, aircraft carriers groups and the like.

-        Immanence will be the result of the deep interpenetration between the ET and us in the sense that, as is already happening since the last few decades, many technological breakthroughs and heuristic transformations brought about by an “Alien” influence are being carried out as being wholly domestic and indigenous to our species. 

Hence a minimal, though substantial degree of “alienation” has been caused by the current epistemic and technogenic revolution, because it is not seen as the result of an outside involvement by a vastly higher and mightier entity, so that we are going through, seemingly on our own, with the radical process of Invention and closing the circle by launching our own invasion of both the outer (macroscopic) and inner (microscopic) dimensions of the space-time continuum.

The result being sought from above is the “fusion without (or with minimal) confusion” described by Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus in the 16th century.

Thus “they” are influencing us at various levels (many of them, subconscious or wholly imperceptible) to arouse certain latent mental faculties, challenge our perceptions and beliefs, induce us to modify our worldview and develop a number of technologies enabling us to meet them half-way. As some humans become more like them, the connection or merger can take place without major trauma as it becomes an immanent process.

We can briefly mention some of the epistemic and technological discoveries which represent benchmarks in the process of transformation into the meta-human condition that is embedded in our genetic programming, just as the fully grown individual is implicit in the embryo so that in that light every present contains both its past and its future. The future is the explication of what has been and of what this past is becoming.

Here are those we selected, in no particular order:

1] The coming Singularity Point as defined by Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans transcend Biology, 2005) obtains when the speed of computer will surpass the human brain’s ability, which should be reached in 2048, coincidentally the year when China is supposed to become the world’s largest economy and India the third, though the PRC may  equal the US in terms of GDP by 2029 when Kurzweil predicts our intelligent machines will first pass the Turing Test. At that point the conditions will be met for the full fledged convergence between biological and technogenic organisms.

2] Information technology, IT is now taking over all our technological, economic, logistical and political structures. Close on its heels, AIT, Artificial Intelligence Technology is rapidly rising and leading to ET: Exotechnology, taking us beyond our physiological condition, which in turn holds the key to TT: Transtechnology which our visitors master.

3] The attainment of Alvin Toffler’s next stages in human evolution, from the Information Age we are now in to the Transhumanist and on to the Cognitive Tech Age to which William E Halal adds a further level: the Existential (The Life Cycle of Evolution, in Journal of Future Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, Aug. 2004)).

4] Futurists like Kurzweil and Gregory Stock (Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (New York,1993) write about man merging with his machines by uploading the human “mind” or at least the brain functions and memories onto a computer chip and thereby virtually achieving physical immortality.

5] The Millennium Project predicts that technology and the connected and resulting human evolution will lead to “blurring the border between individual capacities and environmental potential” through the use of Nanotechnology, together with Robotics and Genetic Engineering (NRGE) and the upcoming Picotechnology (the manipulation of atomic nuclei), Femtotech (the mastery of subatomic components) and the assistance of Quantum computers endowed with wormhole-inlaid chips. Digital technology is already opening up the prospects for not just reading but also rewriting some of the neuro-genetic codes, using bytes instead of genes in a virtual reality blueprint of the physical universe which evokes a high-tech hologram of Plato’s world of ideas.

6] Astrophysicist Paul Davies hails a revolution in human awareness as a result of the contemporary and convergent discoveries in inner space (consciousness) and outer space. His book Are we Alone? Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life (1995, Basic Books) inspired the late Laurance Rockefeller to launch his aforementioned initiative.

7] Evidence is rising for the existence of a method to capture or rather coherently integrate EFTV, energy from the sub-atomic “zero point” or the quantic void (described as  a virtual particle flux) which is indeed far from empty. The introduction of a charged mass in mass free space generates an interaction which is recorded as a physical field or force. An E-field is, in Lt. Col. T E Bearden’s words: “A force-free condition in mass-free space” (World Affairs, Vol. 9, no.4, winter 2005)

Research conducted in the erstwhile USSR, the United States and other countries has experimented the use of longitudinal or scalar EM waves in a number of applications, according to discoveries drawing upon the works of Maxwell, Poynting, Faraday and ET Whittaker, made by pioneers such as Nikola Tesla, TT Brown, J Searl, JL Naudin, PK Anastasovsky and TE Bearden (www.cheniere.org). Implications of this property of Nature, flowing out of the Kaluza-Klein Model, would include the possibility of halting or reversing the flow of time and the ageing of living cells (organisms).

8] A global Control System was posited by  Jacques Vallee in his book Le College Invisible (1975), by analogy with the behaviorist “reinforcement program” theory devised by  Prof. BF Skinner (Reinforcement Programs by Ferster and Skinner, Appleton-Century, 1957) through research supported by the US Office of Naval Research (ONR).

Skinner demonstrated that the most effective way to train animals and humans is to selectively and randomly reinforce certain unexplained actions intended to bring about their adaptation to a new reality. The learning conveyed in this apparently unpredictable manner is irreversible as it sinks in the deeper levels of awareness by creating myths which are “truer than the truth”. The Earth and all its inhabitants appear to function under a cybernetic control system which acts through a very large range of seemingly “natural” or intelligently-operated processes that sometimes appear to us as supernatural or “divine” interventions and sometimes may remain cloaked in the guise of geological, meteorological or man-made events.

The Aliens indeed appear to be using this method while remaining mysterious and “meta-logical” in their appearances and interventions. The very power of a mystery, Vallee points out, resides in not being explained or dispelled. He quotes from the famous pioneer of the psychedelic culture, Timothy Leary, who conveyed the following message: “The goal of evolution is to produce nervous systems capable of communicating with and returning into the galactic network where we, your interstellar relatives, are awaiting you”.

He also cites Leary’s colleague, John Lilly in his work Programming and Meta-Programming in the Human Bio-Computer (Crown, 1887). There may be a connection between this broader understanding of the brain’s functions and the enigma posed by the Mexican thousand year old skull studied by Lloyd Pye (www.starchildproject.com) where  hybrid nuclear human-alien DNA has been detected as well as apparently synthetic components in the material of the skull which is part-organic and part-ceramic. Pye is an exponent of the Intervention Theory (“A Brief Introduction to Intervention Theory” in www.lloydpye.org) which posits a seminal ET role in the creation of homo sapiens.

This theory is well illustrated by a written statement found in one of the many documents that were sent to several researchers in a number of countries in the nineteen sixties and seventies by the Ummites to whom we referred above: “we have no intention of interfering with the social evolution of your planet due to transcendant reasons. A higher morality forbids any paternalistic attitude” and in another passage: “Don’t change your ideas for ours” (quoted in Vallee, Ibid.). There seems to be a will to inform, at least those who are ready to listen or read but not impose that information in order not to create social stress or panic.

9] The aforementioned Millennium Project has pointed out a number of paradigm-changing prospects that are rapidly rising on our social horizon. We will cite them together with other, equally important avenues for transformation:

-        The expansion of the Internet. Vinton Cerf, inventor of TCPIP and Vice-President of Google, is planning an interplanetary Internet to support space exploration and colonization.

-        brain-computer interface and cyber-brain symbiotics, including the technology for brain monitoring (mind reading) being developed by NASA and other public and private organizations on the basis of techniques pioneered by Dr. Igor Smirnov and Dr. Robert Parks in the area of psychotronics.

-        genetic engineering on the basis of decrypting the codes of Electromagnetic Bio-Information in Intercellular Interactions, on the basis of V Kaznacheyev’s research.

-        human-to-human transfer of synapse interconnects and downloads.

-        the creation of quantum chips (no longer operating through photolithography).

-        the ability to connect AI machines with global knowledge networks.

-        the generation of artificial life forms devoid of cytoplasm and biologically based neural patterns.

-        the mapping of synapses and neurons (similar but larger in scope than the Human Genome Project) in order to develop neuro-biology

-        achieving mechano-synthesis for engineering controlled chemical reactions intended to produce desired materials from atoms and sub-atomic particles.

-        building synergy between artificial intelligence, bionics, materials science, nanotechnology, telecommunications and robotics, thereby weaving the “Internet of things” to replace the current audio-visual Internet.

10] In the field of aero and astronautics, a number of experiments have been performed and crafts built in shapes and with properties similar to those reported from some UFOs. One current example is Russia’s Locomoskyner, saucer-shaped, helium propelled and operated by electric motors, which is being built in Ulyanovsk and of which a prototype was presented at Moscow’s MAKS 2009 Air Show as a pioneer for the future generation of aircraft that will take off and land vertically, will not be powered by liquid fuel and will hence no longer require landing strips or runways.

11] An increasing number of leading scientists, such as Michio Kaku of the City University of New York (Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions and the Future of the Cosmos, Random House, 2007) and Elizabeth Sahtouris (Expanding Our Worldview to Other Dimensions, When Cosmic Cultures Meet, 1995) recognize that our universe “has many mansions” as Christ put in the Gospel, in the sense that it comprises many dimensions or planes beyond, within and beneath the slice of reality we perceive through our senses. That emerging “multi-worldview” reflects the implications of Quantum Theory such as Uncertainty, Non-Locality and Quantum Entanglement. It may also help account for the demonstrable influence otherwise imperceptible mind waves have on “material particles” and organs such as genes.

12] Those very scientific breakthroughs which often may be described as (meta)logical intuitions deduced from mathematical equations lead us to break away from conventional logic itself in order to perceive a larger reality which escapes the norms of syllogistic reason and seems as absurd as Taoist aphorisms, Sufi paradoxes or Zen Koan. Thereby we learn that, as Francis Bacon had understood more than three hundred years ago, our knowledge is shaped by our belief structure because we see what we believe despite appearances to the contrary.

Conclusion

We are being co-opted, at various levels of consciousness and activity (scientific and technological, economic, social, religious and political) into a greater community of being and knowledge through a transitional process probably meant to protect us from disintegrating as a civilization or disappearing as a species. It may be the future itself that acts to take us forward if we accept the teleological perspective in which “finality prevails over causality” (Costa de Beauregard and Kervran). The path only has meaning if we know what the goal is and if we have not been there before, we are blind by definition and can only rely on more advanced guides that we trust on the basis of our own reason, memory and vision. So do we achieve a holistic, stereoscopic, non-linear but cyclical and logarithmical vision of history.

We think that we are climbing all on our own whereas we are indeed being drawn upwards. Expansion is the effect of the attraction towards the next stages of being and the higher dimensions.

The author is Convener, Editorial Board, World Affairs Journal; the paper above was presented at the World Forum of Spiritual Civilization at Astana, Republic of Kazakhstan, presided over by President Nazarbaef, on 19 September 2010