“The link that binds all these individuals together into one coordinated super-organism is a highly effective system of communication.”—David Attenborough, Life on Earth

  I first read Sir David Attenborough’s Life on Earth some twenty years ago. Since then I’ve perused it over and over. I even have it on audiobook. I used to listen to it while driving a truck through the mountains of British Columbia or on my way down to California. There were a lot of hours to fill on those seemingly endless highways. 

  In the book, taken I gather from the television series of the same name, Attenborough traces the deviously meandering multi-branched exfoliation of Life’s evolution throughout the ages employing modern living examples that serve as relics of begone epochs. 

  The “super-organism” Sir David refers to in the above quote sounds a great deal like cultures and civilizations as understood by say an Oswald Spengler, Will Durant, or Joseph Campbell. Like all living creatures these super-organisms have life spans, they are born, they grow, mature, decline towards senility, and die.  

  But Attenborough is not referring to human civilizations, he is highlighting the phenomenal existence of termite colonies a million or more strong! 

  What an inconceivably vast multifarious miracle Life is! 

  And what of the “highly effective system of communication?” Play with that thought.  A million seemingly individual termites actually comprising a single living reproducing organism! 

  Is that not you and I?!!

  What sort of pre-intellectual, sub-rational “highly effective system of communication” must we have to bind us all into membership and identity in our communities? 

  And what if it fails? What if ‘God,’ ‘Life,’ ‘fate,’ or whatever you want to call it should throw a wrench in the system of communication and like the builders of the human termite Tower of Babel in the Bible the individuals comprising our grouping can no longer understand one another? 

  “God is dead,” proclaimed mad solitary Shaman-Type Friedrich Nietzsche nearly a century and a half ago. What he meant was the “highly effective system of communication” that underpinned his world was crumbling.

  Mad miraculous Life Flows ever on though…

  And whether we believe it or not, hear it yet or not…

  A New Message using the same old almost forgotten highly effective system of communication is on its way….