In the year 1889, Poincaré discovers the homoclinic tangle and realizes that the solar system is not the neat, elliptically revolving system of Kepler, but a chaotic system. It is also the year of the Universal Exhibition in Paris, when, for the first time, a human structure is built that is higher than the Great Pyramid. It is the year when Indonesian gamelan music comes to Paris, and Satie is enthralled and realizes that time is not a mechanical unit measured out by the metronome, but an extensive tonal durée. And in these studies of human phenomenological time, Bergson and Proust are also at work in the excavations of past time and human consciousness. There is not simply one mind at work here on the problems of matter and memory but a larger mind whose phase-space is the city of Paris, and this is precisely what I mean by the emergence of a noetic polity. Poincaré will influence Einstein, and both will influence Picasso, and from Picasso’s retrieval of African masks, a-perspectival space, and Einsteinian relativity, art and science will begin a process of parallel processing that is characteristic of a noetic polity. Small wonder that Walter Benjamin called Paris the capital of the nineteenth century.¹⁵

A noetic polity is a culture in which identity is based upon participation in an ecology of consciousness. In tribal societies, identity is based upon blood – upon a sanguinal identity in which we are known as the children of Abraham. In a kingdom or empire, identity is based upon land and location – a characteristic feature of the Geometrical Mentality. In an industrial nation-state, identity is based upon economic class, language, and parentally derived accent. In a noetic polity, culture is generated by the mutually interacting causal systems of art and science, and a new kind of personal, post-religious spirituality that we see prefigured in the Rosicrucianism of Satie, the theosophy of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and George and William Yeats, and in the scientific cosmic mysticism of Einstein. In this personal and fractal (self-similar) metabolism of unique mind and Universal Mind, identity is based upon the participation through conscious experience more than doctrinal belief. This ecology of consciousness is more like a cloud than a clod, a circulating atmosphere more than a fixed continent.