09/16/97 5:28 PM Some might say that its absurd but I say that there does exist an inner

voice that speaks to me in the form of feelings. I was reading David Spanglers little book: The Call when I felt like playing solitaire. Yes, something as mundane as that. I played for a while and then felt I wanted to do something and this is that something else. There are many mundane things that get done due to the inner feelings that draw us to them. Today I went to the post office and wrote out the bills. Very mundane. I also felt like siting down and writing earlier. I wrote about techno-systems and cultural systems and even gave them both names. Technome is the word I coined for technological systems. Culturons is the word I gave to cultural systems. Culturons include within themselves technomes. Perhaps it would be better to adopt the word Techneme rather than technome. And perhaps Cultureme rather than culturon in the spirit of the words gene and meme. I think I prefer techneme and culturon for these very large and very complex systems. Sure the words electron, proton and neutron were coined for subatomic systems that are relatively simple compared to cultural systems and technological systems. Yet even nuclei, molecules, genes, chromosomes and genomes are relatively simple and small systems compared to a living Gaian planetary systems, a galaxy or a cultural or technological system. A techno-system is a part of a cultural system since it embodies the economic knowledge and behavior or conduct of a human cultural system. We might even be tempted to come up with word that describes the systems on the largest psychic scale. In this context the word psyche is used to denote the entire realm of everything and that means all consciousness in the simultaneous sense of time derived from relativity theory - the coexistence of past future and present awareness. There are already words to denote the whole and they are words which include the Greek word Psyche, the Chinese word Tao and the Buddhist Chinese word Wu Hsin. The word meme has been

coined to denote psychic entities which might also be called psychons, psychomes or psychemes - or shall we say psychic systems since that probably best described what the word is intended to symbolize. In which case it becomes important to have a well defined idea of what a system is. One of the problems with the study and definition of systems, is that in almost all cases (one exception only), a discussions of systems requires the differentiation of the psychic whole into parts. This is what happens when we attempt to use the word systems for anything other than a fully integrated whole. Anything less than a fully integrated psychic system is a bifurcated, separated, objectified, partial, differentiated system in which the patterns of the whole are at least partly obscured. This is the so called Cartesian split in which a part of the whole is set aside to confine consciousness. The new culture that is arising is a culture in which the Cartesian objectivity that has given rise to the fossil fuel based industrial consumer culture; is generally identified as an implicitly assumed idea that is responsible for the entropic tendencies of human conduct in this advanced stage of growth of the industrial culture. We call it reductionist. We cannot abandon some type of objectification if we wish to use words to cultivate a new more harmonious way of viewing reality and of conducting ourselves in our economic behavior. If we are entirely integrative we are forced to either remain silent or at the very least to have a one word vocabulary that represents the whole - a word such as Psyche or Tao. The general trend of scholarship is to move to the contemplation of larger systems as a means to healing the life threatening effects of our industrial culture and economic conduct and consumption patterns. This means a preference for the study of larger systems such as the entire living planet, the eco-system, bioregional eco-systems, biomes, the cosmos. At this point in history, the system which appears to appeal to most, as the appropriate system for study and contemplation is the whole Planetary system, both the inorganic and the organic systems as a whole.

Any study or contemplation of this system will eventually result in the awareness and consideration of the cosmic origin of the materials of the Earth, and the essential nature of the continuing radiation from the sun without which none of the plants and animals that utilize solar derived energy can continue to survive. In this sense the arbitrary placement of a system boundary around the Earth, requires us to exclude the essential cosmic connection of the Earth to its ancient origins as star fragments. However, the contemplation of the Earth as a system, rather than the smaller systems of the ego-system of the individual, of the atoms, of the human species or of cultural and economic systems, is a move in the right direction for healing the wounds that fossil fuel based industrial cultural systems of production and consumption have opened up in the global eco-system - like the sores of the disease small pox on the human body that appear when infected with that disease. So even though the contemplation of Gaia, may not achieve psychic wholeness, it is a move in the right direction from greedy self absorption which is the primary system of contemplation and the one that is most responsible for the appearance of the sores on the Earth that are being attributed to the disease of late industrial culture. Yet, as the spiritual traditions of human cultures reveal to us, the complete integration of consciousness, of the whole, a Unified whole, is the purpose of the Universe. In the process of development of psychic wholeness, the contemplation of Gaia is but a step, Even the contemplation of the whole process of cosmic evolution, is but a step along the way. Only in contemplation of psyche as a whole over all time and space and beyond time and space, do we begin to approach the Unity of all in which there is no splitting up of the one into parts. We owe much to writers such as Theodore Roszak and Thomas Berry for having communicated to us in the forms of printed books a vision of the Earth as a whole system and even of the Universe as a whole system. Contemplation of both the Earth as a whole

evolving system and the Earth as an evolving systems are important in the evolution of psyche to its ultimate state of total and complete integration in a divine and sacred Unity which is the essence of spirituality and mysticism in particular. We might even suggest that the psychic integration of mysticism, involves small scale contemplation beginning with the ego - which in this context means an awareness of the tendency to focus on the individual desires that are associated with material desires and needs. From there it might be appropriate to recommend contemplation of larger systems such as the immediate family, community, ancestors, nation, bioregion, global ecosystem. All of these are systems. It is the nature of psyche that the psychological ego self associated with the human physical body is one of the most stable of psychological systems. It is also the nature of psyche to evolve toward wholeness which is far more stable that any other psychic systems although there are other relatively stable systems including the whole Earth, the Cosmos, the family, the nation, the bio-region as previously discussed.