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THE REVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES Permission is granted to print and distribute or sell any number of
copies on condition that every copy is accurate and complete and displays this website
address: TheNextCivilization.com
Summary The Revolution of the Species, a condensed and modified version of The Adventure, is designed to serve as "A Guidebook for Immigrants to the Next Civilization." After summarizing the scientific paradigm that solves the puzzle of coincidences, the guide exposes the common error of all the world religions that have failed to end the insanity of war. What is the common error? Teaching the child to hold in awe some god or nature or nation or nirvana or other Big Other as greater than his or her own self. War is so ghastly, so cruel, and so insane, that every religion – including the religion hidden in science – that has failed to end war must be abandoned. To cling to any of the world’s major religions is to condemn humanity to continuing the insanity of war. Because these failed faiths are held sacred, sacrilege is necessary. To mock the sacred, provocative poems and bumper stickers from Park Teter’s other works are inserted in the text of The Revolution of the Species. Once freed of sacred beliefs, humanity can replace war with an awakening to the total, absolute, infinite, irreducible, inalienable, unconditional, intrinsic, unique, and glorious worth of every mortal individual.
Excerpt Future history, like past history, will be full of shifting alliances and the rise and fall of empires. Therefore, future history can produce another global Cold War. The next global cold war could lead to a global nuclear war. Therefore, the nuclear extermination of the human race remains a possibility. That possibility is, in itself, the greatest change in all human history. All the political, economic, scientific, and religious revolutions of human history are smaller changes than the new possibility that humanity will end humanity. The size of the danger is equaled by the size of the opportunity. The danger is total. The opportunity is total. Imagine a world in which all humanity has been exterminated. Now imagine a change equally total… but opposite. What creative change could be as total as the total end of humanity? Humanity’s awakening, at last, to the adventure for which we exist. Imagine a civilization that unleashes creative powers equal to the destructive power of a nuclear annihilation. How can we create that civilization? Only with a consciousness that is, like the possibility of the end of humanity, absolutely new. The task is large, but it will be accomplished by something we have been taught is small – the human individual. Can individuals create a new civilization? We have a clear and compelling precedent that demonstrates that individuals deciding to change their own lives can change world history. Most of the 800 million now living in North and South America are descended from individuals who decided to leave their homes in other continents and cross oceans to a "New World." In the same way, individuals today can decide to immigrate to a "New World." But that migration will be an inner migration to a new inner world. Leaving one's inner home will be harder than leaving a physical home, and the inner ocean that must be crossed will be more vast than the Atlantic or Pacific. But those individual inner migrations will change human history more profoundly than all the migrations of individuals to the Americas. In important ways, the inner migrations will not resemble the migrations from Europe to the Americas. Instead of repressing natives, inner migrants will rediscover their own native selves. Instead of enslaving Africans, inner migrants will free themselves.
The inner migration that will create The Next Civilization is this: recognition by ‘ordinary’ individuals of how extraordinary they truly are.
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