Increasingly, I find myself musing on the future of the human family. The challenge is twofold, looming climate catastrophe and the growing risk of nuclear war. I believe that we need to wake up as a species, confront the looming dangers and jointly strive to evolve a new common consciousness. Imagine you are walking along, and you notice a child has broken free from its mother and runs on to the road full of speeding cars. You see this and realize the mother is unaware of what’s happening. Instinctively, you run onto the road and save the child. You don’t need to be a philosopher to decide to save the child; it’s the response of any normal human being. It is a matter of common human consciousness. I believe we need to evolve an expanded common sense—deeper, wider, more dramatic than usual. What’s at stake now is saving the whole of life on earth. That may be possible, if we learn to deploy the paranormal potentials that humans possess.
Consider a certain strain of Russian philosophy and the evolutionary task we are talking about. For this I rely on a remarkable book by George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists (2012). The subtitle of this book illustrates how remote this is from Soviet communism: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his Followers. The Cosmist school of thought, which can be traced back to the early twentieth century, has scarcely been noticed, a vision linked to Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903)—a vision that draws on magical and mystical data. The result would give rise to a scientific revolution that overthrows materialism. The metaphysical conclusion: mind is the root and essence of our humanity. This is an outlook totally at odds with the materialist ethos of the powers that be.
The Cosmist believes the universe, our planet, is evolving toward a divine wholeness and perfection. This signifies an invitation to take the next step toward self-realization. The thinking here is vast. The Russian Cosmist believes that we are capable of active, self-directed evolution; and thinks in terms of global spiritual transformation. Young calls attention to this Cosmist emphasis, which is “to turn elements of traditional occult wisdom into new directions in philosophy, theology, literature, art and science. . . a process in which thaumaturgy finds academic legitimacy, and academic knowledge becomes thaumaturgical.” (p.9). Here I should mention an item central to Fedorov’s vision, the idea of the resurrection of the dead.
Around the same time in England, F. Myers and the founders of psychical research were studying mediumship and apparitions of the dead and making the case for postmortem survival of consciousness. Fedorov was viscerally horrified by the materialist assumption that the soul and consciousness of a person are annihilated by physical death. But if the psychical researchers made their case, the project of restoring to life all the dead bodies of human history would be superfluous. All the dead souls simply disengage from their dead bodies and enter an extraphysical environment, a kind of lucid dreamworld, freed from the constraints of physical reality. People who have near-death experiences call this heaven. Fedorov wanted to resuscitate the dead so we could resuscitate the love in our lives. What would Fedorov say if he was privy to the mysteries of the near-death experience? It would be a response of metaphysical joy and elation. The afterlife would point to a new communism of consciousness. It would open us up to a new universe of love, wider, deeper than the shrunken, broken universe that is the tragic consequence of materialism.
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