At The Center
It really is extremely important what is at the center. Think about it. What is your life centered around? Your family? Your job? Your country? Your religion? Art? Science? Sex? Music? Sports? Money? God?
There’s only one thing your life is truly centered on and that is the planet. Literally, your life is centered on planet Earth. Planet Earth is the only thing which is At The Center of ALL of our lives. It holds us all together, and connects us all. The needs of the living Earth unite us all, independent of our race, politics or religion.
The living Earth is the source of our food and water and the air we breathe, and all of the materials we use to build and maintain our human society. The living Earth is filled with natural resources and any material wealth you may have accumulated comes from exploiting these Earthly resources. The Earth is clearly the center of our lives and makes possible our lives.
This was obvious for thousands of years until Nicolaus Copernicus came along (1543) and pointed out the the Sun is actually the center of the solar system. The Moon orbits the Earth but all the planets, including the Earth, orbit the Sun. In 1584 Giordano Bruno published Of Infinity, The Universe & The World, advocating a Copernican, but also monadic view of the cosmos, suggesting that all stars have planetary systems.
The telescope was invented in 1608, opening up and greatly expanding the heavens above, and it wasn’t long until most educated people believed that planet Earth was just some insignificant little planet in a galaxy of stars beyond imagination in a universe filled with an infinite number of galaxies beyond imagination. In 1634 the first science fiction novel was published by none other than Johannes Kepler, who discovered the three laws of planetary motion, and wrote a book describing a flight to the Moon. Our perspective was no longer fixed on the surface of the Earth.
And suddenly the Earth is not all that impressive. In 1687 Isaac Newton published Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which introduced mathematical laws describing how all bodies great and small move according to predictable forces, giving rise to the theory of a clockwork solar system and a clockwork universe. Newton proved that the Sun, not the Earth, is the gravitational center of the solar system. And his concepts of absolute space with no real center and mathematical (mechanical) time with no relation to anything external left us all with a sense of impoverishment, with no real connection to anything anymore.
Everyone has heard of Newton but not everyone has heard of Gottfried Leibniz, a Natural Philosopher like Newton, who invented calculus around the same time as Newton. Leibniz didn’t agree with Newton’s concept of absolute space; he believed that space was relational. He believed that space existed only in relation to objects contained in the space, and certainly one of the most important objects contained in space is the Earth, which supports our very existence. Like Bruno, Leibniz was convinced that the universe and everything in it had a monadic structure of centered objects, in complex relation to each other.
Newton’s absolute space and mathematical time are useful abstractions, but they are dangerous when taken as truth. The real truth is relational space and natural, biological time. The real truth is that planet Earth is alive, and it is also the center of space as we know it and the center of time as we know it. Sure, maybe a few astronauts will blast off to the Moon or Mars or some other planet in some other galaxy some distant day in the abstract future, but in the mean time, it’s way past time to bring our collective focus and attention and awareness back on to planet Earth.
Newton’s concept of mathematical time has been useful for us to understand (by contrast) the variable nature of natural, biological time, but now that we’ve got it all figured out and provided everyone on the planet with their own mechanical clocks, let’s take a long look at the living Earth and consider what it needs from us.
Not just the Earth, but the entire solar system is alive, a cosmic-scale, photosynthetic organism called MetaGaia. Planet Earth has a photosynthetic physiology that is predominantly plant based, and one of the discoveries we have recently made is that we can actually destroy the biosphere. We can experience the abundance of the Earth, or we can burn it down, poison it, blow it up with nuclear weapons, twist it and distort it with genetic engineering; our ability to disrupt and potentially destroy the biosphere has never been clearer.
Earth’s planetary biosphere is a biological system and biological systems can be disrupted to death. We don’t want that to happen, so we need to Restore the Biosphere, set up and follow voluntarily a set of rules which insure the recovery and ongoing health of the planetary biosphere. We’ve never been in this position before. We’ve never had a scientific understanding of the planetary biosphere. It really is A New Paradigm of Time. The MONAD Calendar-Clock app restores the Earth, the Earth’s biorhythms and biosphere, back to the center of our collective attention and awareness.
The introduction of a new paradigm doesn’t bring all the answers. There is a lot left to figure out about the planetary biosphere, and how planetary magnetosphere and the heliosphere are involved, and so much more to discover. Just keep one thing in mind and everything will work out:
