Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

humanity

When Carl Linnaeus named the human species Homo sapiens ‘wise human’ in the tenth edition of Systema Naturæ in 1758, he did not define the essential characteristics of humankind in contrast to the other biological species. Furthermore, Linnaeus did not explicitly designate a typical specimen of Homo sapiens (other than himself), which is done whenever possible, depositing type species in museums.

Rather, to understand what it means to be human, Linnaeus simply wrote, Homo nosce Te ipsum ‘Human, know thyself.’  He was thus following in the footsteps of seven wise men, who inscribed this maxim on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, Plato tells us: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton) “Know thyself.”  In a similar fashion, when Neo visited the Oracle in the popular allegorical movie The Matrix, hanging on her kitchen wall was a sign saying Temet Nosce, Latin for ‘Know yourself’.

What these directives indicate is that Homo sapiens is essentially a cognitive species, not just a bundle of biochemicals. So it is rather limiting to view humankind biologically. As we see from the schema for the Grand Design of the Universe, human evolution has been primarily mental during the five thousand years of the patriarchal epoch.

It is thus more appropriate to name our species Homo noeticus. However, we have struggled to understand ourselves, having great difficulty in knowing what it truly means to be human. This is why Eckhart Tolle wrote in A New Earth, “We are a species that has lost its way,” ending this inspirational book with these sentences: “A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!” So all is not lost. It is still possible for us humans to find our way Home through self-inquiry.

To give this superintelligent, superconscious species a name, Osho called it simply Homo novus or Zorba the Buddha, representing a new synthesis of East and West, the meeting of all polarities. As he said, “The new man is not an improvement upon the old; he is not a continuous phenomenon, not a refinement. The new man is the declaration of the death of the old, and the birth of an absolutely fresh man—unconditioned, without any nation, without any religion, without any discriminations of men and women, of black and white, of East and West, or North and South.”

However, Homo novus is not actually new. For Osho said in The Book of Secrets, the first of his many books of transcribed series of mystical discourses, anyone can become a Buddha, for you are already a Buddha, only unaware. He knew this because parallel with the emergence of Homo noeticus, mystics through the ages have been aware of a quite different Universe from that which the Western mind has constructed. They have turned inwards as members of what we can call Homo divinus, living in union with the Divine.

Although these terms have not yet been generally accepted, we can say that progressives and spiritual seekers in the second tier of the spectrum of consciousness, have been seeking to unify them in their own beings since the 1960s, acknowledging that Love is the Divine Essence we all share. For instance, the Sufi poet Rumi said, “Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns.”

A fresh understanding of the meaning of humanity is thus emerging, as all the divergent streams of evolution converge in Wholeness, as the union of all opposites, transcending the conflicts and dualities that have afflicted our relationships with each other over the years in Nonduality. In this way, Homo divinus merges with Homo noeticus in what we can call Homo holoensis ‘belonging to the Whole’.

See also: 

Etymology

See human.

Common ancestor(s):