paragraph 9

I realise that I owe my friends lots of apologies: I can't help myself, and seldom have the head/social space to apologise for discourtesy and downright rudeness. I suppose that, if my position weren't both fragile and extreme, it could be possible to be considerate always. Sorry. Also I'm not sure how much I go over and over the same ground. Recently, coming across stuff I wrote years ago, it seemed so to me. I hope there is a spiral effect.

I find it a great wonder that a fertile planet like ours should exist at all in the cosmos of the physicists: its very existence could be enough for us to rejoice. Even as we despoil it, we discover more about it: discovering and disrupting have long gone hand in hand. It is surely time now for this pattern to change.
An even greater wonder in the physicists’ cosmos is the existence of loving intelligence (or intelligent love - I emphasise understanding as well as deep affection -): again the very existence of such a thing (even if only here and there, in some of us some of the time) gives reason for hope and joy.

It is possible, and for 28 years I have steadfastly believed it (another remarkable thing?), that this phenomenon of Intelligent love will suddenly, and soon, overcome our entire species - and we shall no longer care about ourselves, human life, our culture as we know it, even our relatives and friends and fellows the way we do now (bordering at least on self-idolatry), but will find we co-operate selflessly for the nurture of intelligent love on the fertile planet which is at least its local home.
Then we might, for instance, seek to live less long and in less numbers -- for the sake of the wonders we are
caught up in: servants not masters; humble not proud, etc. It may be that then we shall be convinced that an "extra-cosmic" Intelligent Love exists to which the intelligent love in us responds, as the mystics more or less everywhere relate.

But I doubt very much whether this belief, or any other can profitably be maintained before the transcendence I (have experienced and) imagine. That transcendence is reported by mystics, and experienced by me as requiring the loss of attachment to all previous values: a state of total despair, accepted as the end-state of human vanity. In experiencing both the criminal follies of our leaders and news-makers today and the bewildered confusion of my family and friends (and myself in so far as one of them), I register hope that such defeat and despair is near at hand. Then the function of my (unanticipated but accepted) pilot role of the past 28 years may become clearer to others than so far to me: the sketching out of an ideology that can help the species unite and enter its mature "imago" stage.