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On Fri, 11 Apr 1997, Osmar Ferreira de Oliveira wrote:

> >Interconnectivity: a medium as its message My own awakening to the deep
> >ecology of Spirit was triggered in the 1960s by media prophet Marshall
> McLuhan's quip, "In the electronic age we wear all mankind as our skin." I
> recognized that the potentials of electronic communication were far more
> than skin deep, and that one day we would think with all of humankind as our
> mind. We would then be thinking the world together. While thinking the world
> together, what would we think about, and what medium would serve as the
> conveyance of our thoughts? McLuhan's most famous statement seemed germane to
> these questions, his proclamation that "the medium is the message." The
> ultimate message of any medium, McLuhan maintained, is not its content;
> rather it is the change in our behavior and lifestyles that is brought about
> by the way the medium works and what it does. The "message" of TV,
> therefore, rather than the content of its programs, is the individual and
> collective changes it introduced into the way that people spent their time
> and money, altered their social activities, and revised their sleeping
> patterns, for instance. In contemplation of this relationship between medium
> and message, I concluded
> that while thinking with all of humankind as our mind, what we would think
> about would be our interconnectivity, and what we would think with would be
> a mass medium that reinforces interconnective behavior.
> >
> >In keeping with this conclusion, from the late '60s through the mid-'70s, I
> >was involved in the founding and development of environmental education in
> our country's school systems. I realized all along, however, that even
> though environmental education was increasing humankind's awareness of
> interconnectivity, the medium of schooling had a countering tendency.
> The uniform thinking that schooling and other one-way mass media enforce is
> counterproductive to the interconnectivity of independent minds.
>
> >It wasn't until 1977, upon discovering Science of Mind, that I found a more
> profound way of thinking about our interconnectivity. And it was yet six
> more years until I discovered a mindful theory of human interconnectivity
> while reading eter Russell's book, The Global Brain. Observing that it takes the
> interconnectivity of 10 billion atoms to make a human cell, and of 10
> billion human cells to make a human brain, Russell hypothesized that as we
> approach having 10 billion such brains on the planet, they will somehow
> interconnect to create a collective human consciousness. Earth's global body
> would thus acquire a global mind. A potential candidate for
> global-brain-like interconnectivity, the Internet, already existed in
> embryonic form when Russell's book was first written. Yet only today, with
> Internet activity increasing more rapidly than has any other technology in
> history, do we at last have a mass medium that
> reinforces the essence of our interconnectivity by empowering--as a
> consequence of linking--independently thoughtful minds.
>
> >Nonlocality is here to stay. The Internet reflects a recently discovered and
> >mysterious quality of the universe, a quality of so-called "nonlocality."
> The term "nonlocal" was initially coined to describe observable and
> measurable interactions that seem to exceed the speed of light. For
> instance, certain influences of subatomic particles on other particles are
> instantaneous,
> occurring in less than the amount of time required for light to travel
> between them--as if the particles were telepathic. And in the cosmos at
> large, galaxies that are many more billions of light years apart than the
> universe is billions of years old respond identically to the same physical
> laws even though no signal could have traveled between them to convey the
> influence of these
> laws.
>
> End of part I
>