"...clinical neuropsychologist Gabriel G. de la Torre now argues, we're not quite ready to make contact just yet. The problem, he says, is that most of us haven't come to grips with our place in the universe. He calls this the "cosmic consciousness" — a term that Canadian psychologist Richard Bucke defined as "a new evolutionary step beyond self-consciousness." Now while this sounds a bit new-agey, there's some substance to this idea. As Torre writes,
More than one hundred years ago, Bucke went further and described a new concept of cosmic consciousness as a new evolution [sic] step beyond self-consciousness. According to Bucke, by virtue of self-consciousness, man is not only conscious of trees, rocks, bodies of water, and his own limbs and body, but he also becomes conscious of himself as a distinct entity apart from all the rest of the universe. Further, by means of self-consciousness, man becomes capable of treating his own mental states as objects of consciousness. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.
For many of us it's so true. There are still people who believe that Earth is the center of everything and the sun orbits the Earth! We must grow up and attain space awareness or cosmic consciousness, accepting our place in the universe and realizing we are simply part of a biofilm clinging to the third rock from a minor star in an ordinary galaxy, one among possibly trillions. Until then our egos will continue to let us ruin our world and kill off other species because to the way of thinking of the religious we are the important ones created by a deity or deities and what we want is all that matters...after all, according to one of the major religions, we were given dominion over everything on Earth to do with as we please because our planet is unimportant and it's the afterlife that counts. We must one day put away such childish things.
