This book was not written for a mass audience, but rather for a vanguard that will serve as a "saving remnant" of our species. These people quite uneasily know who they are. They are successful in their society, but not just in the usual sense. They have mastered the skills requisite for successful-survival, irrespective of the occupational or career path they have taken, so they know they can land on their feet regardless of the circumstances they encounter. However, they have gone a step further. Not only do they consider themselves successful, but they have also discovered and become well-aware of the limits and illusoriness of this success. Their success did not lead to the promised and anticipated fulfillment. Even when they paused to reflect on this but then redoubled their efforts on the assumption that the shortcoming in their success was purely quantitative; the hoped-for fulfillment still remained elusive.
Returning to the embrace of their familiar belief-system, religion, or a variant thereof, joining groups and seminars, seeking and following gurus, dropping out or retreating, or getting involved in psychological or spiritual self-help courses and books, although promising and even temporarily satisfying, also failed to fulfill them. Many might have settled for these limited measures on the assumption that they were just expecting too much out of this life, a viewpoint amply reinforced by all too many individuals and institutions of our society.
These few, this vanguard or saving remnant, will not settle for the meager existence that passes for a life for so many. Instead, they will trust their own impetus to fulfillment: the still, small voice within. Further, they will not abandon, in an emotional thrall or a leap of faith, their reflective intellect, a crowning achievement of Homo sapiens. But unlike so many intellectuals, they are willing to acknowledge the limits of earthbound human intellect and logic in a generative Cosmos that requires a willingness to go beyond the human mind as presently constituted while also subsuming it. Thus, they can become aware of, and will need to participate in, an evolving, emergent human consciousness. And they will refuse to be left behind for the reward of a few more socio-economic trinkets or even for some possible transitory psychological highs of their present consciousness.
Although human consciousness seems to have evolved gradually and with continuity, it is at least equally plausible that it also evolved by leaps or discontinuities that we call mutations. We shall soon see that such a discontinuity or mutation has recently (in human evolutionary terms) become available as a conscious life choice for those who have the strength and confidence to claim and enter into it. This book was written for those intrepid explorers who are ready and willing to embark on such an adventure of consciousness and, as we shall see, concomitant action as well.
|