Imploding into homeostasis

Four decades ago, Marshall McLuhan imagined the implosion from electric technologies would extend our nervous systems worldwide. We know more now about how our bodies regulate all it's internal functions and how planet earth does the same with the biosphere. We also have the Internet and cell phone grid giving us a "nervous system" that encompasses the entire globe. Rather than extending our nervous system, I find it's more apropos to consider extending our internal, self-regulating abilities.

Our bodies maintain an amazing complexity of balancing acts. We continually demonstrate a dynamism of self regulation that boggles the conscious mind. There's no way our thinking could manage all the internal functions which are kept in harmony, mutual accommodation, collaborative interactions and compatible levels of activity.

The way we humans live on this planet demonstrates almost none of this self regulation. We are given to excess, ruin and devastation. We appear to be exploitative, parasitic and cancerous -- from the perspective of other species and whole systems. We don't have the sense to integrate, balance and cooperate with the vast web of interdependencies in the natural world. We've been cast out of the garden for our insolence, incompatibility and inconsiderate attitudes.

It now appears to me that the Internet is a training ground for us humans to live as one with all natural systems. We are cultivating the consciousness to conduct ourselves in the totally interconnected dynamism of the biosphere. We are seeing how to lose our sense of isolation, disconnection and arrogance over other portions of the web of life.

When we extend our body's natural ability to maintain homeostasis, the planet will be transformed. Humans will join in all the ecologies that maintain the robust, thriving diversity on earth. We will process enough consciousness of the whole to contribute without excess, ruin and devastation. We will have the sense to fit in, accommodate others, balance responsively and self-regulate compatibly.

When this occurs, The Internet will appear as a perfect developmental stage. We will look back on all that online connectivity as "where we learned to give up the heroics and join the biosphere". We'll realize how blessed we were to get familiarized and practiced in a playground based upon infinite interdependence. We'll consider the Internet to have effectively modeled a significant portion of the functionality of the biosphere. We will be grateful that cyberspace gave a way to return to the garden we were expelled from when we got too smart to live in homeostasis with all living things.