Is the Noosphere waking up? M-class solar flare, 9th March

 The Silver Surfer will have been proved right

I've heard of Vladimir Vernadsky's 'noosphere' before, but never  quite understood it. In the wake of Yuri Gargarin's first journey into space, shouting 'Poyehali!' let's go! - after Chuck Yeager skimmed its edge in the X-1, the ideas of Russian Cosmism have come to  my attention. Cosmism is beginning to make sense, as I am increasingly aware that 'mind stuff' (1) is  not 'brain stuff'. We are mind stuff, we observe matter - the paradox of Ouroubouros a clear metaphor for this philosophical conundrum. 

The Cosmicists idea of a living sun, evidenced by extremely  complex coronal activity, would make sense intuitively. We would all be living within the sun's noosphere. Think of all the solar religions of human history . Perhaps they were onto something after all. 

Science Fiction has already explored this possibility, of course. Stanislaw Lem in Solaris and Frank Herbert in the Dosadai Experiment and Whipping Star. I am a great fan of Science Fiction authors - the canaries  in our coal mine, as Kurt Vonnegut liked to call them.

Nevertheless, however interesting  these ideas may be, they are surely half baked. Moreover, they are the stomping ground of an awful lot of creepy proto fascist New Age types like David Ike, eugenicists and elitists all, at heart. Whatever insights there may be here are based on intuition and feeling and so we contemplate them, we can entertain thoughts  without inviting them home to stay. If thoughts and ideas overstay their welcome they then become our constant companions - beliefs.

Ask the SF writer who wrote about living suns  if s/he actually believes in living suns and s/he will  use Robert Anton Wilson's 'Maybe logic' - RAW was the co-author of Illuminatus with Robert Shea. An SF writer can entertain a possibility. S/he will ride the thought, the thought won't ride hir.

Of course, Soviet science fiction was rich too, exemplified by the the Strugatsky Brothers. Ultimately, it was just as dystopian as American and British science fiction. Certainly the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem contemplated the possibility of living planets to the nth power. Solaris was a living and loving mind. Surely, Stanislaw Lem entertained the ideas of Tsiolkovsky and Vernadsky. Just think of the beauty of it. Our sun as a kind of Solaris. Solaris, the film that moved me to my core. Lem's US counterpart was a little more conservative -  his Gods, like the A.I. Minds housed in Culture ships in Ian Bank's novels, were more distant.    

And now the film, The Fountain, also makes sense to me. The idea of death as a form of interstellar travel. The deep narrow channels in the pyramid of Giza pointing at doggone Sirius. Mantak Chia's starry meditation exercises. The experiments of the nutty scientists in Russia into the noosphere, seeing them on BBC 4 this evening and meeting them in Kiev when I taught at the Ukrainian University of Lingistics; usually physicists. My obsession  with the Andromeda Milky Way collision. Sitting on top  of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan making promises that I actually I kept.

Perhaps, indeed, a sun wakes up to consciousness from dreaming, in the same way that  it is set  alight when it gathers enough mass. And if our sun is waking up. And if it is waking up now then another science fiction writer will have been right too. C.S. Lewis. For him the planets and the sun were alive. And Doris Lessing will also have been proved to be prescient,  in  Shikasta her idea that malign forces were sucking at the energy and goodness of the Earth, the elan vitae of the Earth. She visualised huge tornadoes of light siphoned off, cheapening and shrinking -diminishing the globe. Indeed, even the Silver Surfer will have made his point.

And of course the  mystical followers of Hermes Thrice Great, Manly P. Hall, and the Kabbalists like William G. Gray my friend Jacobus Swart  and Alan Moore. They  will have their day in this living sunlight. And come to think of it, when I was very little and when I was most alive didn't the very sunlight caress me to my core? Didn't I  feel the warm fingers of the sun clasp me? Have you had this feeling?

The timing of this awakening to these things shocks me. Does it  mean anything? Does it mean nothing. I was with a follower of Hermes Trimagestus and he told me of a dream. He was deeply insulting. I dreamed of him in a gathering of the great, he said. He was one of them. Imagine that, he, of all people. But these are metaphors, iconic languages of the unconscience, the language Werner Herzog believed we desperately needed to plumb.  'The poet must not avert his eyes", he says in this interview with Mark Kermode. 

Herzog's middle path is preferable, not the left hand path of Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty or the right hand path of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series or Olaf Stapledon's dark and convincing abyss.

(1) Mind Stuff of William Kingdon Clifford

"Briefly put, the conception is that mind is the one ultimate reality; not mind as we know it in the complex forms of conscious feeling and thought, but the simpler elements out of which thought and feeling are built up. The hypothetical ultimate element of mind, or atom of mind-stuff, precisely corresponds to the hypothetical atom of matter, being the ultimate fact of which the material atom is the phenomenon. Matter and the sensible universe are the relations between particular organisms, that is, mind organized into consciousness, and the rest of the world. This leads to results which would in a loose and popular sense be called materialist. But the theory must, as a metaphysical theory, be reckoned on the idealist side. To speak technically, it is an idealist monism."