Consciousness Is Our Oxygen Challenge

The challenge to life presented by the development of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, as a metaphor for the challenge presented to us humans by the development of consciousness.

First, the poetic approach:

Power
JohnAbbe

And then, gradually,
a planetary disaster occurred

The composition of the atmosphere was changed, radically,
by their own actions

Countless billions died

Of those who survived,
a few channelled the new abundance of fuel in the atmosphere: oxygen

They thrived,
and built larger than their ancestors.

   (who continued on in their own way,
   and are the aliens with us today)

Some hundreds of millions of years ago, some single-celled life forms (the ancestors of plants) started cranking out oxygen, enough to over time change the composition of the atmosphere. Oxygen is a chemically powerful substance, and it was poison to many life forms. Many died off. Other forms of life (the ancestors of animals) harnessed the power of oxygen, successfully meeting its challenge.

Some tens-hundreds of thousands of years ago, human beings started to think in a new and different way from other animals, enough to change our own physical and social/spiritual context. Our intelligence, or consciousness, or sapience or soul or whatever, is analogous to oxygen: it is powerful, and can be poisonous or creative depending on what we do with it.

Making creativity rather than poison out of our individual and social consciousnesses is our challenge. To the extent we succeed, we will last longer as a species and enjoy ourselves more, and more fairly. Many believe that we will even transcend in some way (TheNextSingularity).

The consciousness/oxygen metaphor came to me in 2000. I became aware of the importance of attention to personal/interpersonal dynamics through experience in a community in the mid-1980s, in which i took some risks to reach out. Practices (see ProcessArts) came to the fore through these experiences 1990-1992:

seeing unhappy dynamics at what i knew was a relatively good-atmosphere non-profit
waking up in the first U.S.-Iraq Gulf War to the world's issues and U.S. involvement
seeing (verbal/psychic) violence within the 'peace' movement, and in it's messages
seeing unacknowledged undemocratic dynamics at a non-profit about developing democratic arts

Since then, my life has been about responding to this challenge in MyPractices, helping others, and seeking community in our collective effort. --JohnAbbe

This doesn't seem quite right, but it's a start:

And then one day,
we began looking up at the stars in a new way

"We could go there" we heard, we said

For the next tens of thousands of years,
in our confusion we argued,

"Is that voice God or the Devil?"

Eventually,
enough of us realized that the answer was yes.

Okay, that's so vague at the end, let's continue the vagueness for a moment with the BlogStickers approach:

There. Now i can say that the point to me is that the mass suffering humans are undergoing is a natural process (see DominationIsaSabertooth). It has happened before to others, and a systemic correction is underway and we will survive or not depending on what we do with our consciousness. The voices we hear in our heads are AssumptionsOfPowerWithCulture and the out-of-sync assumptions of domination culture all mixed up, and one untangles them and lives the best one can meanwhile. --JohnAbbe

Cool:

"In its beginnings, and in its early development, the human was so frail, so unimpressive, a creature hardly worth the attention of the other animals in the forest. But these early humans were on a path that would in time explode with unexpectedly significant new power, a power of consciousness whereby Earth, and the universe as a whole, turned back and reflected on itself. Earth's community of life would never be the same, for here was a development with such consequences that it can only be compared to the emergence of oxygen within Earth's early communities of life, a development that carried both the destructive and the creative significance of that earlier event." --Brian Swimme, in The Universe Story, page 143

"Our" consciousness is the human NooSphere; what happens to it when we meet OtherConsciousness?

A few references for the oxygen part: