Afterword [I]:  Terran Humanity at the Brink

The calculus of retortion set forth above is also a calculus of accountability, and a calculus of retorsion:  no action goes unrequited. Every action, every actor, is self-requiting. What we have visited upon others, will be visited upon ourselves.

Is it well then, that The Nonlinearity Barrier still constrains us?  The Nonlinearity Breakthrough can empower us to create a global renaissance of humanity.  It can also enable us to create new and even more terrible weapons; to "create" planetwide destruction, with even greater human self-devastation than ever before.

To attain the former, and preclude the latter, it is not enough to have defeated one Hitler and one Stalin in our outer world during this century.

As the Hydra's headless necks sprouted two new maws for each one that Hercules hewed off, so this world can, and does, sprout new Hitlers, and new Stalins, ad nauseam.

Only to the extent that each living person fights World War II and the Cold War anew, within, and wins, can the world become safe for humanity, and humanity safe for the rest of the universe.  Only to that extent can we confront, and overcome, the hideous and unnamed invisible face and invisible mind of the global "Invisible Hand." This monstrous power can, at will, and with the speed of the electron, throw down whole nations into decades of destitution and desperation, hurling emergent middle classes back into the dark ages of "Third World" deprecation and depredation -- this monster that is the unconscious self-oppression of Terran humanity, mediated through its plutocratic econo-political “elites”.

Each human soul holds divine potential and satanic potential.  Each harbors both the seed of divinity, and the seed of iblis.  We have by now built a world which potentially empowers each individual, vis-a-vis our species, and its future, to unprecedented degree.  The attainment, survival, and ‘self-prosperization’ of humanity all depend upon the degree to which each of us slays -- or, if you prefer, tames -- the monster within each one of us.  For each of you is, as am I, endowed with an inalienable blemish, and burden, of evil -- inalienable in that only you, through the expressed consent of your own self-effort, can enable it to be subdued and, at last, extinguished, before it extinguishes you, and, perhaps, with you, the rest of Terran human kind.

Insufficient inner, individual self-conquest on Earth to date has exacted an unended, refluent reverberation of outer conquest and subjugation.  It has ended every social ‘self-bifurcation’ with the abiding refrain:  "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  Meet self.  For our "bosses" can never be better than we deserve -- never better than a reflexion and a ‘refluxion’ of ourselves, of the content and quality of our own past actions!

There is a ‘quanto-qualitative’ requirement for this revival, and global renaissance, of Terran humanity.  Enough of us must change ourselves.  Enough of us must change ourselves enough, change ourselves enough in terms of the quality of our personal, human ‘‘‘meta-evolution’’’, hence action.  Enough of us must change ourselves enough in time, before the window of opportunity for successful passage of its 'Meta-Darwinian, Genomic/Phenomic Planetary Selection Test' closes forever for planet Earth.

If -- and what an enormous and fragile if it is -- if enough of us relinquish our chronic denial, cease our incessant ‘exo-projection’ of our own monstrous fault as if all of the fault were only in others, and see fit to confront and to accept what is required of us to conquer the Hitler and the Stalin inside each one of us, then we may yet acquit ourselves of our inhumanity. If we are so exonerated, in the years just ahead, by the jury of our own self-requital, then a new and vaster prospect opens before us and our posterity.

If we meet the mark, victorious in battle on the plain kurukshetra, then this terrene seed in which we inhere will become a planet in waiting, at the edge of the galaxy, at the brink of greater reality -- to turn the dust of a trillion worlds into blood and flesh, and to awaken its long-slumbering spirit.

Overcome we the iblis within ourselves, and the cosmos will be our canvas. We ourselves will be our works of art. We ourselves will be our work of art.

Karl Seldon                                              #                                             Sophya St. Germain

                                                      25 November 1999