— Christopher Fry in his play “A Sleep of Prisoners” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951) written at the invitation of the Religious Drama Society for the Festival of Britain (1950). Cited by Peter Russell in the conclusion of the film “The Global Brain” (Los Angeles, California: Penny Price Productions, 1983) at 33:07. The film is an adaptation of an audio-visual presentation Russell directed at the International Psychosynthesis Conference (Toronto, Canada: July 1, 1983). In turn, the presentation is an adaptation of his text, _The Global Brain: Speculations on the Evolutionary Leap to Planetary Consciousness_, ISBN: 0874772486, (Los Angeles, California: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1983). Originally published as _The Awakening Earth: The Global Brain_, ISBN: 1850631018, (London: Arkana, 1982).

The revolutionary struggle is the very antithesis of the parliamentary struggle. In Germany, for four decades we had nothing but parliamentary “victories.” We practically walked from victory to victory. And when faced with the great historical test of August 4, 1914, the result was the devastating political and moral defeat, an outrageous debacle and rot without parallel. To date, revolutions have given us nothing but defeats. Yet these unavoidable defeats pile up guarantee upon guarantee of the future final victory.

There is but one condition. The question of why each defeat occurred must be answered. Did it occur because the forward-storming combative energy of the masses collided with the barrier of unripe historical conditions, or was it that indecision, vacillation, and internal frailty crippled the revolutionary impulse itself?

Classic examples of both cases are the February revolution in France on the one hand and the March revolution in Germany on the other. The courage of the Parisian proletariat in the year 1848 has become a fountain of energy for the class struggle of the entire international proletariat. The deplorable events of the German March revolution of the same year have weighed down the whole development of modern Germany like a ball and chain. In the particular history of official German Social Democracy, they have reverberated right up into the most recent developments in the German revolution and on into the dramatic crisis we have just experienced.

How does the defeat of “Spartacus week” appear in the light of the above historical question? Was it a case of raging, uncontrollable revolutionary energy colliding with an insufficiently ripe situation, or was it a case of weak and indecisive action?

Both! The crisis had a dual nature. The contradiction between the powerful, decisive, aggressive offensive of the Berlin masses on the one hand and the indecisive, half-hearted vacillation of the Berlin leadership on the other is the mark of this latest episode. The leadership failed. But a new leadership can and must be created by the masses and from the masses. The masses are the crucial factor. They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the challenge, and out of this “defeat” they have forged a link in the chain of historic defeats, which is the pride and strength of international socialism. That is why future victories will spring from this “defeat.”

“Order prevails in Berlin!” You foolish lackeys! Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing:

I was, I am, I shall be!
— Rosa Luxemburg in her essay “Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin” (“Order Prevails in Berlin”) written in the midst of a successful counterrevolution (Berlin: January 14, 1919). It was published the same day in Die Rote Fahne (“The Red Flag”), the paper Luxemburg co-founded (November 9, 1918) with Karl Liebknecht, the more radical son of the founder of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD). The paper was originally an organ of the Spartakusbund (“Spartacus League”), co-founded by Luxemburg and Liebknecht in rejection of the SPD members who voted in the Reichstag to embrace Germany’s imperial war in 1914. Shortly thereafter (City Council reception hall, Berlin: December 30, 1918 – January 1, 1919) the Spartacus League became the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (“Communist Party of Germany”, KPD) at a conference which Liebknecht opened (“The crisis of the USPD”) and Luxemburg engaged (“Our Program and the Political Situation”). In January, a small group of workers seized control of several streets in the newspaper quarter, precipitating embrace by the KPD and a general strike in which half a million workers occupied parts of Berlin. The strike was suppressed by hired Freikorps (“Free Corps”), paramilitaries freshly armed with defeat from WWI, who captured and murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht the next day (Berlin: January 15, 1919).

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"Die Revolution sagt ich bin, ich war, ich werde sein."
@anonymouSabu on Twitter (March 5, 2012 @ 5:57pm)

“Die Revolution sagt ich bin, ich war, ich werde sein.”
(“The Revolution says I am, I was, I shall be.”)
— (allegedly) Hector “Sabu” Monsegur in the last tweet on @anonymouSabu‘s account, (March 5, 2012 5:57pm CST). The next day, the FBI announced his capture along with five other Anons whom he is alleged to have directly implicated.

I AM, HOWEVER, ENCOURAGED BY A keen sense OF WORLD LITERATURE as the one great heart that beats for the cares and misfortunes of our world, even though each corner sees and experiences them in a different way.

In past times, also, besides age-old national literatures there existed a concept of world literature as the link between the summits of national literatures and as the aggregate of reciprocal literary influences. But there was a time lag: readers and writers came to know foreign writers only belatedly, sometimes centuries later, so that mutual influences were delayed and the network of national literary high points was visible not to contemporaries but to later generations.

Today, between writers of one country and the readers and writers of another, there is an almost instantaneous reciprocity, as I myself know. My books, unpublished, alas, in my own country, despite hasty and often bad translations have quickly found a responsive world readership. Critical analysis of them has been undertaken by such leading Western writers as Heinrich Boll. During all these recent years, when both my work and my freedom did not collapse, when against the laws of gravity they held on seemingly in thin air, seemingly ON NOTHING, on the invisible, mute surface tension of sympathetic people, with warm gratitude I learned, to my complete surprise, of the support of the world’s writing fraternity. On my fiftieth birthday I was astounded to receive greetings from well-known European writers. No pressure put on me now passed unnoticed. During the dangerous weeks when I was being expelled from the Writers’ Union, THE PROTECTIVE WALL put forward by prominent writers of the world saved me from worse persecution, and Norwegian writers and artists hospitably prepared shelter for me in the event that I was exiled from my country, Finally, my being nominated for a Nobel Prize was originated not in the land where I live and write but by Francois Mauriac and his colleagues. Afterward, national writers’ organizations expressed unanimous support for me.

As I have understood it and experienced it myself, world literature is no longer an abstraction or a generalized concept invented by literary critics, but a common body and common spirit, a living, heartfelt unity reflecting the growing spiritual unity of mankind. State borders still turn crimson, heated red-hot by electric fences and machine-gun fire; some ministries of internal affairs still suppose that literature is “an internal affair” of the countries under their jurisdiction; and newspaper headlines still herald, “They have no right to interfere in our internal affairs!” Meanwhile, no such thing as INTERNAL AFFAIRS remains on our crowded Earth. Mankind’s salvation lies exclusively in everyone’s making everything his business, in the people of the East being anything but indifferent to what is thought in the West, and in the people of the West being anything but indifferent to what happens in the East. Literature, one of the most sensitive and responsive tools of human , existence, has been the first to pick up, adopt, and assimilate this sense of the growing unity of mankind. , I therefore confidently turn to the world literature of the present, to hundreds of friends whom I have not met face to face and perhaps never will see.

My friends! Let us try to be helpful, if we are worth anything. In our own countries, torn by differences among parties, movements, castes, and groups, who for ages past has been not the dividing but the uniting force? This, essentially, is the position of writers, spokesmen of a national language, of the chief tie binding the nation, the very soil which the people inhabit, and, in fortunate circumstances, the nation’s spirit too.

I think that world literature has the power in these frightening times to help mankind see itself accurately despite what is advocated by partisans and by parties. It has the power to transmit the condensed experience of one region to another, so that different scales of values are combined, and so that one people accurately and concisely knows the true history of another with a power of recognition and acute awareness as if it had lived through that history itself–and could thus be spared repeating old mistakes. At the same time, perhaps we ourselves may succeed in developing our own WORLD-WIDE VIEW, like any man, with the center of the eye seeing what is nearby but the periphery of vision taking in what is happening in the rest of the world. We will make correlations and maintain world-wide standards.

Who, if not writers, are to condemn their own unsuccessful governments (in some states this is the easiest way to make a living; everyone who is not too lazy does it) as well as society itself, whether for its cowardly humiliation or for its self-satisfied weakness, or the lightheaded escapades of the young, or the youthful pirates brandishing knives?

We will be told: What can literature do against the pitiless onslaught of naked violence? Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with LYING. Between them there is the closest, the most profound and natural bond: nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence. Whoever has once announced violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose lying as his PRINCIPLE. At birth, violence behaves openly and even proudly. But as soon as it becomes stronger and firmly established, it senses the thinning of the air around it and cannot go on without befogging itself in lies, coating itself with lying’s sugary oratory. It does not always or necessarily go straight for the gullet; usually it demands of its victims only allegiance to the lie, only complicity in the lie.

The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can VANQUISH LIES! In the struggle against lies, art has always won and always will. Conspicuously, incontestably for everyone. Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.

Once lies have been dispelled, the repulsive nakedness of violence will be exposed–and hollow violence will collapse.

That, my friends, is why I think we can help the world in its red-hot hour: not by the nay-saying of having no armaments, not by abandoning oneself to the carefree life, but by going into battle!

In Russian, proverbs about TRUTH are favorites. They persistently express the considerable, bitter, grim experience of the people, often astonishingly:

ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUTWEIGHS THE WORLD.

On such a seemingly fantastic violation of the law of the conservation of mass and energy are based both my own activities and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (also transliterated as “Alexander”) in part 7 (the conclusion) of his Lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1970). Solzhenitsyn did not accept the Nobel Prize until 1974, and had to smuggle the lecture out of Russia in April 1972. Translated from the Russian by F. D. Reeve in _Nobel Lecture_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972). Cited by The Augustine Club (Columbia University, New York: 1999). Cited in part by Jacob Appelbaum [ @ioerror ] in his keynote address “WikiLeaks: We Open Governments” delivered at The Next HOPE Conference (The Pennsylvania Hotel, New York: 2010). Cited by Nigel Parry [ @FlyingMonkeyAir ] in his blog post “Jacob Appelbaum’s keynote speech at 2010 HOPE Conference in New York City”.

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Mr. Jaeckel: Hannah, did you hear that?

Hannah: Listen…
— Charles “Charlie” Chaplin as “A Jewish Barber” and Paulette Goddard as “Hannah” in “The Great Dictator” (California: Charles Chaplin Productions, 1940). Cited as a “Memorable Quote” at IMDB.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
— Charles “Charlie” Chaplin as “A Jewish Barber” in “The Great Dictator” (California: Charles Chaplin Productions, 1940). Cited as a “Memorable Quote” at IMDB. Thank you to Jamie Corson for the lead.

The foundations of our conceptions on the universe, on nature—the unique entity—on everything, of which one heard so much in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, is transforming before our very eyes with an extraordinary speed rare in the history of thought.

We are studying a very small space—but inseparably linked to an immensity of the cosmos—in establishing laws and regularities in the history of the chemical elements of our planet.  Profound analogies—and even more than analogies—exist within.
— Vladimir Vernadsky in his text _La Géochimie_ (“Geochemistry“) (1924). Cited by Paul R. Samson, David Pitt, in _The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global environment, society, and change_, (Psychology Press, 1999), ISBN: 0415166446, ISBN: 9780415166447, p. 26.

“Listen, son. In your mother’s womb you were conceived. From an individual human womb you were born to an individual human life. It was necessary, it was good. But individual human life is not sufficient to itself. It depends upon and is part of all life. So now another umbilical cord must be broken—that which binds you to your mother’s affections, that which binds you to the individual human life she gave you. For twelve years you have belonged to your lesser mother. Now you belong to your greater mother. And you return to her womb to emerge once again, as a man with no mother’s hold upon him, as a man who knows himself not an individual but a unit of his tribe and a part of all life which ever surrounds him.

Lithops, sometimes referenced as 'living stones'
Image credit: Per-Anders Sjöströms kaktussida / cactus page

“Listen, son. You were born into the human-animal life of sense and nerve and will. But it is necessary that each man sometime be born again: into the consciousness of an even greater life.

“You have learned what in your ordinary animal-existence is necessary for your earthly body.

“Now you must have awakened in you the instinctive need for self-perfection in your inmost spiritual being.

“You must be taught the laws of world creation and world maintenance, the laws of all life whatever form it takes: the living stones, the breathing mountains, the tall walking rain, as well as those of bird and fish, beast and man.

“You must learn that each man has the debt of his arising and his individuality of existence to pay; that this debt must be discharged as early and quickly as possible so that you, as I, as all, may assist in turn the most rapid perfecting of other beings—those like ourselves, and those units of life advanced to the degree of self-individuality.

“For only in this way can life progress, can life exist.

“What is more fitting then, son, that to learn this you must return to the womb of the earth which is the mother of all life? That you be reborn from it into the greater spiritual life as you were born into the lesser life of the flesh?

“Peace, my son. And with it understanding. This period of your gestation will be long—twice as long as was the first, for the life it bears will be likewise longer. The lessons will be difficult, but they will be unceasing. Voices will speak them over and over until their meaning flows through your blood, though the words which must never be repeated be unintelligible to those who have no heart to understand.

A Tibetan father and son on a pilgrimage around China's Mount Kailas
Photograph by Lynn Johnson
Image credit: National Geographic - Tibetans Evolved to Survive High Life, Study Says

“You will be taught the whole history of our people, of our tribe. How they had their last arising from the deep turquoise lake of life in the center of the world, the blue lake in whose depths gleams a tiny star, our Dawn Lake. How they emerged from a great cave whose lips opened into the world we see, from whose lips dripped water to congeal into perpetual flakes of ice whites as eagle-down. You will understand then, son, why those of our clan are called the Deep Water people; why our kiva, this kiva, is called the Eagle-Down Kiva; the meaning of our masks, our dances, our songs. You will see this cave. You will finally see this lake—our Dawn Lake.

“But behind all this you will learn of previous emergences. Of the significance of the four elements, corresponding to the four worlds from which man has successfully risen. The fire world of rampant primordial forces; the world of air which separated from it; the third world of water which then came forth from the vapourous air; and the present world of earth. From your understanding that the body of man is itself a world derived from these four and hence composed of their elements and corresponding attributes, many things will be plain.

“You will perceive this kinship to all the living creatures of these four kingdoms of fire, air, water, earth. Not only his chieftanship over them, but his responsibility to them. For you will begin to understand that there is another world, a fifth world to which we must all arise, and for the gaining of whose attributes this initiate is a preparation.

“Hence you will be taught, as those Old First Ones were taught, that the pine tree, the corn plant, have a life as we, but that they may be used and that they accede to their sacrifice for the maintenance of all life. You will be taught that the eagle, the trout, the deer, each has a life as we, but that they may be used and that they accede to their sacrifice for the need of progression of all life.

Rain clouds seen from Märket
Photograph by Niklas Sjöblom
Image credit: Flickr

“But through all these truths will run the one great truth: the arising of all individual lives into one great life, and the necessary continuance of this one great life by the continual progression of the individual lives which form it.

“You will learn that this continuous progression seems to extend infinitely into time. But you will learn likewise that time also is an infinity.

“And that is life. Life must be lived, not learned from. And that is why in full consciousness only there is freedom. And that is why you learn awareness. To life life, in full consciousness, in freedom. Unbound by possessiveness, the possessiveness of your mother, the possessiveness for your son.

“Now I can say no more. You will grind your own corn: it makes song come easier. You will make your own moccasins: busy hands free the mind to the spirit.

“Now I, the father, having deposited his seed, withdraw from this womb.

“Now I, the father, say good-bye to his child.

“We will meet again. But as brothers. As men together. As equal parts of one great life. No longer separated. But in that consciousness of our oneness which gives us our only freedom.
— Frank Waters [ foundation ] in _The Man Who Killed The Deer: A Novel of Pueblo Indian Life_, ISBN: 0804001944, (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1970), p. 97-100. First published (1942).

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. So they find their way, their random combinations that are driven by forces we don’t know about. It’s through this recombination that something new may come up, not when we try to push them directly.
— Csíkszentmihályi Mihály (also transliterated as Csikszentmihalyi Mihaly, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) as interviewed by Michael Toms in the New Dimensions newsletter. QOTD for 08.18.2011. Submitted by Kathleen Magone on 08.13.2011.

The study of the biosphere cannot be made only by biologists. To study its components and their interactions, a multidisciplinary approach is needed. However, at Vernadsky’s times nobody even thought of interdisciplinarity. His theory was actually far ahead of the times when it arose. By portraying life as a global phenomenon, in which the sun’s energy was transformed on Earth into a kind of “green fire”—it referred to photosynthesis—he made an anticipation of global ecology; and he made also an anticipation of the concept of “ecosystem” [7, 29].
— Mercè Piqueras [ @lectoracorrent ] in the Introduction to her paper “Meeting the Biospheres: on the translations of Vernadsky’s work” (PDF).  Published in International Microbiology: The official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology, Volume 1, ISSN: 11396709, (Barcelona, Spain: Springer, June 2, 1998), p. 165.

The seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.

This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.
— Jacques Lusseyran in Against the Pollution of the I: Selected writings of Jacques Lusseyran, (New York: Parabola Books, 1999), p. 32-3. Cited by Luke Storms in Parabola Newsletter (06.17.2011).

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...illustrates the dynamical changes of the global magnetic field in the course of a disturbance: a temporary compression of the magnetosphere by enhanced flow of the solar wind is followed by a tailward stretching of the field lines. Eventually, the increase of the tail magnetic field results in a sudden collapse of the nightside field (a substorm) and a gradual recovery of the magnetosphere to its pre-storm configuration.
Image credit: Nikolai Tsyganenko - Modeling the Earth's Magnetosphere Using Spacecraft Magnetometer Data