If this book's introduction sought to convince you to accompany me on a trek to a distant (and yet not-so-distant) destination, then my task now is to provide you with an intellectual map showing our route, and to acquaint you with the basic analytical engine that will propel us along that route. The engine is a mental model of a naturally recurring cycle that has driven the complexity of life on Earth. It is a process composed of two reciprocal movements. The first entails an expansion, initially involving predation, but giving way to mutualism as resource scarcity deepens. The second entails a centralization: a reorganization of information-processing functions to coordinate the new mutualistic relationship.

This chapter seeks to articulate the phases of this cycle, and to introduce the four scalar levels of life's organization (what I call four “worlds”) whose emergence I explain by way of that cycle. I will make an elision between this process of self-organization and what we commonly call “progress,” and explain why the emergence of a conscious planetary entity—a new, fifth world—is a logical next step. These are abstract concepts, however. Humans have always understood abstract concepts most fundamentally through myth. So let me introduce you to a mythology involving a people inhabiting a fourth world and anticipating their accession to a fifth.