Why is enlightenment important for our survival? In this article written by John Stewart for Spanda Journal, he says that enlightenment awakens essential capacities which are necessary for the survival of humanity into the future. Stewart focuses on two of these capacities: self evolution and meta-systemic wisdom.
Through self-evolution, Stewart maintains, individuals and organizations gain the capacity to go beyond their biological and cultural programming. They gain the freedom to align their rewards system based on current and future needs. Stewart also suggests that when organizations are self-evolved, the interest of their members are often aligned with the interests of the whole society.
Meanwhile, Stewart suggests that meta-systemic wisdom is the antidote to the mechanistic and reductionist thinking prevalent in our time. If enough of us develop this capacity, it will enable us to expand our scale beyond our solar system, to remodel our physical environments, to affect physical events, and to communicate with other living processes. Meta-systemic wisdom will allow us to act, adapt, and relate as a coherent whole, in order to direct a development that does not undermine the millions of years of natural evolution.
Implications for AI
It is important to note that the enlightenment Stewart refers to in this article is not the “classical” enlightenment referred to by many spiritual traditions. It is a version of self-mastery developed primarily to intervene in human affairs. Stewart says that in order to transform classical enlightenment, we must let go of the supernatural, non-scientific, and mystical content. Fortunately for us, there are already enough researches available on the emergence of the second, more spiritual, scientific revolution. A post-materialist world has arrived.
In order to create an enlightened global society, what we need now is to have sufficient numbers of individuals who have realized their power to re-organize their society of mind, and shape the future of evolution. This, essentially, is the purpose of this website. By compiling the work of various post-materialist scientists and academics, we hope to strengthen your resolve (and knowledge) that a new world is being birthed, and our science is changing.
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