From the chapter, 'The Heresy of Humanism', in Beyond the Fall of Night, by Arthur C. Clarke and Gregory Benford:

   "This is your 'higher cause', isn't it? When he asked if you would help defend human destiny?"
   "He was guilty of the heresy of humanism."
   "How can that be heresy?"
   "The narcissistic devotion to things human? 'Man is the measure of all things'? Easily."
   "Well, he has to speak for his own species."
   "His genus, you mean, if you would include yourself...The order of primates. A useful intermediate step. You possess the general property of seeing events in close focus. Your ears hear sounds proportional to the logarithm of the intensity. Otherwise you could not hear a bee hum and still tolerate a handclap next to your ear. Or see both by moonlight and at high noon; your eyesight is the same."
   "Those are damn useful."
   "True, but you also consider time the same way. Your logarithmic perception stresses the present, diminishing the past or the future. What happened at breakfast clamors for attention alongside the origin of the universe."
   "Hell, we have to survive."
   "Yes, and hell is what you would bear if you had continued with your heresy. Your trouble is that contrary to the logarithmic time sense, evolution proceeds exponentially. And the argument of the exponent is the complexity of all life forms."
   "And what's that mean?"
   "One-celled organisms took a billion years to learn the trick of marrying into two or more. From dinosaurs to Ur-humans took only a hundred million. And then intelligent machines -- admittedly a short-lived experiment -- required only a thousand."
   "You don't seem all that advanced beyond us."
   "How would you tell?"

 Clarke and Benford, continuing into an analogy of humans and bacteria, ala Jesus' parable of the leaven in the bread of life, applied to 'liquid bread' (for an enlightening note of levity ;> :

 "If such bacteria could think, what would it make of the frothy spume of beer? As catalysts they were certainly taking part in processes transcending themselves, yielding benefits they could not imagine. If they could somehow know, they might well feel immeasurably exalted.
 But to those who brewed beer's casual delights, the bacteria were unimaginably far beneath the realm of importance, mere dregs of evolution. And whatever dim perceptions the algae could muster would hardly resemble the true nature of the talk and laughter and argument which swirled through the minds that felt the pleasant effects of that beer.
 Her own understandings of what the past struggle had been about --could they be similar? Valid, perhaps, but dwarfed by the unknowable abyss that separated her species from the purposes of entities enormously removed.
 Could that bear somehow on what Seeker meant about logarithmic time and exponential growth? That she could not even imagine such a gulf?"

   'Transpersonal Psychology' is a current term in Earth human psychology that includes the personal dimension yet also recognizes that such study involves a continuum that extends beyond the personal. I coined the term 'Trans-Human Psychology' in recognition that this continuum also extends beyond the human, and that the current stage of Earth human development is one in which the natural progression and discovery is that Earth humanity are multidimensional beings, who are only incidentally and temporarily human in species, just as those native to Earth were only temporarily ape in species. We are all beings primarily of consciousness, and only identified by our physical species in passing. In short, that the current definition of 'human' is in fact mistakenly limited in the scope of its understanding to a particular developmental, evolutionary stage of beings who only temporarily happen to be evolving through the human form.

   As Swami Paramahansa Yogananda said, when asked if human reincarnation was limited to Earth, "No, there are innumerable planets to go to." In other words, the humans on Earth have evolved through many bodily forms on many worlds, and progress thereby through an evolutionary continuum, in which the present human stage is but a brief part.

   The historical records of Earth societal, cosmological and spiritual traditions, erroneously dismissed as 'myth' by an understandably provincial and anthropocentric Earth science, no less repressed than the metanoias of the Ku Klux Klan, are accounts of the development of Earth society in the context of an interplanetary and interdimensional family and neighborhood. These records show that most 'human' beings on earth have come here from other planets for this their 3rd dimensional learning cycle, and relatively few have evolved here from their beginning, just as in any town or country some people will be 'native' and most will have immigrated, and few 'natives' will have heard of or been to these other places which nonetheless exist.

    Expression of such awarenesses to those adhering to 3D Earth consensus perceptuality will often be misdiagnosed as a dissociative psychiatric disorder, rather than the more accurate assessment of the adjustment to and integration of a larger psychological reality.

   I want to emphasize this, and Earth humans' kinship with their neighborhood and extended family on other planets and dimensions, to whom Earth humans are literally related, spiritually and even physically, since other planetary races have been intimately involved with Earth evolution from its beginning.

   As I like to joke, in truth, "We're all related, and we're all from 'somewhere else'!"

    My page's focus is interdimensional life - in short, all life, understood both in its unity and its infinitely diverse and interdimensional aspects - and specifically those who have sometimes been termed 'wanderers', those who have incarnated here on Earth from other planets and dimensions to be of service and learn through balancing compassion and wisdom into unity through that service.

   There is much material and discussion of these topics these days and throughout Earth history, which I include on my site, and I am happy to discuss any of this at anytime.