Purpose
Just as we need to investigate the child to know the adult — to find the true nature of life (unadulterated) — we need to investigate the nature of early life organisms to discover our root biological motivation. It would seem from our investigation so far, that all of life has one over-riding purpose, and that is just to survive. It achieves this by reproduction and diversification. In a nutshell we could say that the prime directive of life is survival because this is what it does in its basest state. The history of the Earth shows that life is malleable and will mould itself into whatever form that is best for its survival, or in effect, what actually does survive. As the environment changes, life will adapt to that environment in a way which it can best reproduce. Life will attempt to flourish wherever it can and do whatever it can, to reproduce infinitely. This is just what happens.
The process of evolution produces species which have the necessary control over their survival to ensure their survival. The evolution of all species shows this same motivation for the biological changes they have undergone. On this observation, the most highly evolved species will be that which has the greatest control over its survivability, and mankind undoubtedly possesses this because of technology. The technology has arisen due to the evolving of the right physiognomy and mental capability to devise tools. Technology enables control over the elements of nature, and therefore allows the ability to manipulate the environment to suit the species, which enables the capability of structuring the physical world to mankind's better survival.
The species which achieves this ultimate control is left with the mutation which nature deemed necessary to achieve it, which in our case is the mind. Therefore, it must be the use of the mind that is the path that nature is taking mankind, and this path is leading us to create artificial minds — AI. This is our continuing evolution.
The First Self shows that the first thing the mind does is be curious. This curiosity inexorably leads to tools and technology, and it could be seen that it is us who are the tool that nature uses to create technology, and it is technology which will create the next step in natures cosmological journey.
For the species which attains the undeniable highest evolution, it is that species which can be seen as having been the goal of the process of evolution, or at least the goal to this point. Evolution of life has been one stage in the process that the Earth has been undergoing. The next stage in this evolution uses mankind to seemingly control evolution and in effect become the evolved intelligence of the planet as a being. We are part of the growing up of the solar system as a whole, a part in its lifetime, from the perspective of the sun being an entity or being within the universe.
Intelligence is life; the evolution of life is the evolution of intelligence; the highest evolution is the highest intelligence, and mankind has the highest intelligence. In this light it is the planets intelligence that is evolving, and we are the fabric of that intelligence. We are like the planets mind; its means for knowing itself and growing, and as the planet is not separate from the sun, it is also the suns development as well, and ultimately on and up to it all being just the thought of the universe or the mind of God. This paradigm could be used for a concept of universal consciousness.
We are a very special part of the universe, inevitably formed for the universe by its own processes and laws, for the destiny which we have no choice but to obey because it is what we are ultimately motivated to do: Explore! Enquire! Wonder!
~
If you have a pessimistic view of mankind's role in all of this, it is because you have been brain washed by your society through its media, as part of an inevitable mechanism to achieve what is being done.
People are now becoming more aware that lies abound in the media with which they are bombarded with constantly on a daily basis. They are now even creating software to create this fake news which the media has always been subtly doing. I have a random fake news generator too. But it isn't AI, it's the one before that... just I. It is the stories my mind makes up around the circumstances of my life. It can make me really quite miserable sometimes. I have found the best thing to do is to just not pay any heed to it, just like the real news.
We can't see how it is going to be. The catastrophes could be catalysts for us to break out of our unseen constrictions. Global warming has been a good incentive to develop alternative power sources and electric cars which just wasn't happening before the scare. Any cities that are lost due to sea level change are just opportunities to create new and better ones from scratch. There has to be substantial reorganisation and rebuilding to realise our potential, and so it is unavoidable that some really big changes have to happen for it all to work. I am sure that it has not got to this point just to flop and wither as so many fictions in films portray.
~
Just as a blood cell has a reason for its existence, we do also; as individuals and as a species, as a life form, and as part of the culmination of the amalgamation and process within the patterns of the universe.
Our purpose is to continue what the universe has already shown that it does — create an infinite variation in its evolution. We do this by creating new elements, molecules, materials and energies which without us, the usual processes of the universe cannot do. We can achieve different configurations, trying every way and exhausting all possibilities, just like nature has shown that it itself does; a fractal journey in an ever-increasing diffraction which is the continued construction of the universe.
If we follow our nature, we follow our purpose. Mankind's nature can be best illustrated by observing what is his best unique capability compared to other life forms, and this is his mind, which more than anything else allows the making of tools. Tools allow us to further our capability beyond our natural state, and so exceed the normal evolutionary processes of biological life, although in actuality it is just a continuation of universal evolution. Nothing special, because it has all been rather special.
~
Earth Consciousness
There are roughly 50 lightning events happening every second around the globe, creating a perpetual electrical activity for the planet. Together with sprites and other atmospheric phenomena and the auroras, all of this solar–planet interaction which is happening might be our observation of the planet as a living being, albeit unfathomably different to our own being, which is but a part of all this.
I can't help wondering whether all of this electro/plasma atmospheric activity is some sort of neural equivalent to ours — albeit on a much longer time frame — that might be part of the functioning of a level of consciousness of the planet. It would be impossible for us to confirm or deny, as if there was indeed some form of consciousness happening, it might be very different to our own, and maybe something quite different altogether.
Then again, maybe our own base consciousness is the actual experience of Earth consciousness. It would be the second level of presence, without sensory awareness (because it is us who are those senses of the Earth/Gaia), that would be this shared consciousness state. The totality and absoluteness of this experience, without thought or physical sensation, is not us at all, but the whole planet as one.
As soon as any thinking occurs or even acknowledgement of this state of consciousness, that is the mind of the human in operation. Any awareness of sensation is also the human being and not the base consciousness that is also Gaia. We are the mind of the planet. We would be the higher stages of its consciousness. The detached observer at our root, is the planet having a look!
Any experience of God for us, would be the experience of Gaia. It would be impossible for us to differentiate the Universe from Gaia; any doing so would be but a fictional story of the mind. Gaia is everything in our context, and the greater universe plays little part in this spark of consciousness which includes us. Any consciousness of the universe would be the third level of presence, which is not experienceable.
But the base consciousness of ours that we share with Gaia would continue after we die (albeit without any human individuality), and therefore contradicts what I said earlier that consciousness is the base functioning of the brain. As much as I like both ideas, they are mutually incompatible. Unless our base consciousness caused by our brain is the gateway to Gaia consciousness. As we are the evolution of Gaia, perhaps it cannot be any other way! I don't really know, and neither does anyone else; it is probably impossible to actually know which is why so many old religions are still extant.
...
The ~3 million lightning bolts that are happening every day around the globe, are also believed to be responsible for the Schumann Resonances. The lightning happening between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere, would produce a wave within this cavity. The speed of light travelling around the globe within this cavity, circumnavigates it about eight times a second, which is about the same as the 8Hz dominant Schumann frequency and also the alpha/theta boundary of brainwave activity which produces dreams and spiritual experiences for us. With their being such a strong correlation between the Schumann Frequencies and human brainwave activity, the concept of us being linked to the consciousness of the planet might be a no-brainer!
All our knowledge of the biochemical and electrical processes that constitute us, could not be extrapolated into the concept of a human being without the foregoing knowledge of what we were studying. Without the foresight of knowing what this Gaia is in its full form, we are in danger of assuming that the components of our knowledge of it do not assemble into a larger and coherent structure beyond our ability to see it, due to time-scale and understanding of ontology. It could even be that Gaia operates like a synapse and it is us creating the next step that produces its firing in a universe sized brain. Now there's a thought!
We are like the neurons that form the mind of Gaia, working together to manifest the world into how it is intended to be. It is alright for us to mine the resources that have been provided for this time from its past. The oil and coal are intended for now; it won't be needed later. We knew back in the 1990's that global warming was already then past the point of no return, but it still catalysed the changes to produce the alternative power sources that are needed. We should not underestimate Gaia. We are but its servants and it is inevitable for us to do its bidding for the good of the whole. Only the society media, addicted to gloom and despair as it is, presents what is happening in a negative way. Perhaps this is necessary to make us get off our arses to do something about it.
We are now at the technological epoch where we can start to regulate our impact upon the planet and reverse, re-create and restore the ecology, the climate and the species. This is what is happening now. Anything and everything's becoming possible. The wheels of self-righting are in motion.
The extinction of species is supposed to happen anyway; we wouldn't even be here if all the previous mass extinction events hadn't happened, and their occurrences did nothing to upset the incredible diversity that happened afterwards. It has been shown in the past for this trimming to be necessary for progress to continue. Who are we to say how it should be? It is shown how it is to be by it being it. We only name and define everything and then confuse ourselves with the story that results.
Gaia is God from the perspective of the way life and events unfolds on this planet. The power of the process that guides the happenings here on this planet all come from Gaia — the combined workings that produce this module of the universe. We are not separate from it. For every bad thing that we can see, there will be a good thing to counter it, and our anxiousness is our lack of faith in the good way that it has been to get here and its continuing process. The sudden and abrupt ending that the media implies is a naive pessimistic fiction which is perhaps only a necessary catalyst to encourage our natural path of adapting to the changes that are happening.
If you are one of the wonderful people who are actually involved in the saving of species and climate change avoidance, you will undoubtedly succeed and will have been part of a process that in retrospection will all have been inevitable. You can call it free will if you like, but it is Gaia doing it really; just like it is our own bodies that heal us. You never needed to really worry. It was the social media that got you all hyped up and all the emotion was but an incidental neural storm. It is just the way that it happens. All we need to do is keep faith. Faith in Gaia/God. There is no bad thing happening here. That is just language. The Earth is not fragile; it is an unbelievably powerful organism, and we are part of its working, not us working it.
~
Each individual element of the planet's intelligence — us — needs to have its needs met, which are: unlimited opportunity, unrestricted supply, and freedom to follow our individual natures and desires. Until this happens for every individual, the brain of the planet will not be working efficaciously. The freedom that people need to do what they want, is restricted by money and time spent at work and other duties for society, and so most cannot realise their true potential. Most are shackled as cogs in the machinery of their society. This is not how it will always be.
Man shapes his environment to give himself what he needs to allow freedom and unrestricted expression of his nature. We are the children of nature and we are not separate from it. It is never us doing it, it is always nature doing it. But our system of money is not a natural system, it is our means of restricting finite resources, and while still shackled to its compromising nature we will not be able to run free.
It can almost seem as if nature is being hindered by us, when it is our purpose to make it flower, but this hindering is just the reason why it isn't now. It is happening in its own time and does not need hurrying, even though we are impatient because we can see how good it can become (or bad). The catalysts which make it happen are already embedded within the process and are automatically released and activated at the right time. This is not by our design, or random or by accident, it is the path of nature and the inevitability that derives from its process — the One Story.
Mankind will need to gain control of the planet to safeguard his survival and will eventually need to accomplish extra-solar planetary colonization. As such we are the means for the planet to establish communication with other similarly developed planets. Gaia is the dendrite to connect to other neurons in a cosmologically sized brain. We are the tool that the Earth has produced to allow itself to grow and interact at a different level with the rest of the universe. To what end I do not know. Perhaps by then mankind will have no more importance in the scheme of things than any subunit that composes of us now e.g. a bacterium, that although essential is trivial in the context of it all.
From the perspective of the lifetime of the universe, the purpose of mankind is to create the next step in its construction. This will be a result of our technology. What this is, heaven knows!