This Magic Sea

This image of the Full Earth was taken half way to the moon by the Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans. Three men were in the spacecraft and only one man used the camera for this image. But the photo was, in a larger sense, taken, printed and distributed by the collective scientific and technical effort of millions of human beings. In one way or another, in the interconnections of nature, wealth, politics, and knowledge, every person and every creature of Earth participated in capturing the image. It is a self-portrait of a living planet. This is an image of a human egg. It is a tiny sphere, only 0.1-mm in diameter. Loosed from its walls in the ovary, the egg floats in a fluid almost identical to sea water. The two spheres have many similarities. 1. Both are small on their own scales, and yet filled with awesome potential. 2. Both spheres are alive. 3. Both are involved with the process of becoming....

Life's destination is a vanishing horizon, retreating before the advancing thread of awareness as it learns new ways to gather, process and respond to information. Individual beings - on the scale of a cell, a multicellular creature, a species, or an ecosystem - are embedded within a vast network of intercommunications . Each being is a  thread of awareness , receiving signals from the world around it, unaware of the network of intercommunications within itself gathering and processing the signals to create its awareness. Each being perceives itself as the focus of these forces, and perceives other beings as individual entities separate and apart from its own focus. Yet all entities exist together as one integrated network of intercommunications.  The network of intercommunications,  creating the thread of awareness of all beings, determines their relationships and their future evolution and is beyond the horizon of any one being's perceptions. But not beyond our coll...