TERRA CITY - THE WAY

5. THE WAY

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A New Attitude

If we agree that our attitude is crucial to our decisions and actions, to the way we live our lives as individuals and as members of the society, and if we also agree that the time has come for the long process of change from the hunter and hunted attitude to a truly human attitude to be finalized, then the only thing remaining is to start the search for a proper way, or ways, to complete this process. If we bear in mind the profundity of this endeavor, then the best point to start looking for a way to change our attitude in life is by reconsidering our attitude towards life itself.

Theoretically speaking, everyone is entitled to live their life as they please. And everyone struggles to do more or less what they consider to be important in their life. Some try to become rich and famous, others strive to be abundant and fulfilled, others would settle for getting by, while still others fight for survival most of their lives without much success or end up just giving it up all together. No one should be judged too toughly, for it is not that easy to make it in life, and it is even more difficult to make the best of it. Often, even the ones who seem to have succeeded in certain aspects of life discover that they have more or less failed in other aspects. It would be enough to think, for instance, of how many sons and daughters of rich and famous people chose a wrong way in their lives, mostly because of lack of attention and improper guidance from their overwhelmingly busy parents.

Regardless of our choice and the degree of success our lives, sooner or later we all come to a point when we ask ourselves a few… odd questions, such as: What is life all about? What is its sense and meaning? What is the very reason of our existence? The best answer to these questions that I ever heard was given almost a century ago by Anatole France, the 1921 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His revelation is short and astonishing: ‘The main purpose of life is the evolution.’

Ever since I read this, I could not get it out of my mind and I could never think and act the same as before. The main purpose of life is the evolution! In other words, everything each one of us says and does during our lifetime has a little tiny impact on the evolution of the human civilization as a whole. It sounds a bit surprising, doesn’t it? We all agree that personalities such as Guttenberg, Newton, Edison, Pasteur, Einstein and many others of their rank impacted indeed the evolution of life on Earth, but to say that the same thing applies to a certain degree to each one of us does not seem so obvious. On second thought, if we consider the sum of the infinite interconnections and interrelations between us all within our families, on the street, at work, within our city and our country, in the everyday life and during the major events, we may see that their cumulative effect may have indeed such a result, and then we start to understand how this might be possible.

We can look at the evolution of human civilization either in its entirety or separately on various planes: economic, political, social, cultural, educational… Like any other evolution, this is not a linear process, for things do not evolve straight from one point to another. Very simplistically speaking, if we try to envision a graph of the overall evolution of human civilization, we can distinguish three kinds of curve:

1 - periods of quantitative accumulation,

2 - qualitative step-ups,

3 - temporary setbacks.

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The next step in our evolution

About 40 years ago, a member of the Romanian Academy of Science published a surprising theory about the nature of substance. In essence, he came to the conclusion that particular changes in the structure of substance, and nothing else, are responsible for the generation of the different forms of matter, as we know them:

- “dead” matter, such as wood, paper, iron or plastic,

- living matter, as in any live organism,

- intelligent matter, respectively the gray matter of the brain.

His theory was based on pure analysis without having proper instruments to prove it. About 25 years later, a group of French researchers, using a very powerful microscope, discovered the exact structural formations indicated by the scientist thus validating his theory. What was most intriguing was that the scientist indicated that these forms of matter – “dead”, living and intelligent – are only the first three in a total series of seven (7) possible levels in the evolution of substance. And he also indicated that the very next level will be the group intelligence. […]