esotericvoyage.com

Others have thought about people simultaneously having the same invention or discovery. There have been studies done and papers written about it. Some have pondered the effects a man of ideas has vs. the effects a man of action has on the world. And some have even concluded that when near-simultaneous invention happened, it must have been “an idea whose time is ripe”. And someone else would have made the same discovery… but when a man of action is silenced, the future is changed.

I don’t agree. Ideas change the world. And the most interesting thing to ponder is, where do world changing ideas actually originate?

Of course some people believe the future is already written. See George W. Bush, addressing U.S. troops at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait (Jan. 12, 2008) and Bushisms.

“There’s no doubt in my mind, when history was written, the final page will say: ‘Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world.’

Note: The first news media article changed the quote. On purpose, I think. Bush actually said, “…when history was written…”. I saw actual video of the speech.

And having a US President believing in the rapture and starting a shooting war in Iraq isn’t a good thing. “The rapture is not an exit strategy”.

Newton and Leibniz simultaneously discovered calculus. I would have said that Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray simultaneously discovered the telephone except … (See my entry on The Study of History). And there are many other examples. An interesting philosophical side note is that the American patent system is “the first to discover” not “the first to file” as is most of Europe.

Statistical studies of patent applications show that discovery are are seldom simultaneous or near-simultaneous. I would argue that not all discoveries change the world in the same way. And using statistics as an analysis tool doesn’t really uncover Gaia affecting the consciousness of people. The Universe doesn’t really care if Amazon.com has a patent for one-click shopping or not.

Some ideas are important to the Gaia consciousness while others are not. The ideas that change consciousness and change the world are the areas of evolution where Gaia might work. These ideas help to evolve the Gaia consciousness. (See my entry on Dream Connections for the mechanism on how changing human thoughts changes the Gaia consciousness.)

Some discoveries and inventions that have changed the world are the discovery of fire, splitting the atom, and the Internet. The Internet is analogous to an additional nervous system for the planet, greatly expanding the spreading of news and ideas. And responsible for the creation of this blog.

(Movies are also a tool that spreads new ideas and thoughts to a great many people. See my entry The Last Mimzy is the best Mimzy).