It took thousands of years for humanity to become fully self-conscious and yet, with all the good traits that came along with it, humankind was not able to get rid of all the primeval tendencies of the simple conscious animalistic characteristics like envy, rage, jealousy, desire. These traits still hide and wait in the shadows of our minds for an opportunity and can lurk at any moment to wreak havoc.
For example, how many times have we read about peace-loving individuals, from respectable well to do family, who have never harmed a fly in their entire life to all of a sudden, over a trivial argument, savagely stab someone to death!
This can happen any time as we still have, under the self-conscious layer, the ghost of the animalistic traits that belongs to the animal kingdom. These uncontrollable urges brought about the institutionalization of law to deal with and suppress such tendencies from getting beyond control since time immemorial.
Desire for wealth throughout mankind’s history has been the prime motive for all the crimes and discords in society. Without the need for wealth, there would be lesser need for desire. Desire for a better life, desire for a better house, car, easy life, and so on, are all based on desire.
The first thing, therefore, is to get rid of desire and be content with what we have. Wealth is like a load that we accumulate throughout our working life, and the more we have the more we want to put aside for those layback, lifestyle days we want to enjoy at some time in retirement which never seems to come. A boat loaded to the brim with gold is certain not to make the journey!
The transition between self-consciousness and cosmic consciousness is not bound to happen universally soon. I will take a long time. However, it is bound to become more and more common in humans, without the slightest doubt. There has been an upsurge in interest amongst the younger generation in YouTube® and elsewhere, on matters relating to metaphysics and spirituality, and more and more are interested in knowing the truth
Despite the fact that the whole world’s economy is based on desire, it is fair to assume that this is one characteristic of the human that will be the hardest to get rid of. The longer it stays the main drive of our civilization, the longer it would delay the universalization of enlightenment.
Today, enlightenment has been achieved by an insignificant number of people. This number has to grow in order to justify human mental evolution. As more people become enlightened, more would follow, and the spiritual movement would propagate until it becomes universal.
Same as with self-consciousness, which took millions of years to develop and become universal, one should not expect the whole of humanity to become enlightened in a few hundred years. However, there is still hope that it would propagate exponentially once it gets momentum. There are still places in the world which have not been truly explored, with inhabitants still living in a semi-barbarous state. It would obviously take more time for them to join the enlightened.
Therefore, it is a fair speculation to assume that it would take many thousands of years for enlightened humanity to flourish as a global civilization, the like that we are today as self-conscious people.
However, a few thousand years is a long time. And at the rate technology is advancing today, humanity might not even call themselves as Earthen in the next 100 years. With the colonization of Mars and further cosmic exploration, humanity will be too busy, with spiritual advancement not progressing as expected. But far into the future, an enlightened civilization might develop in colonized planets and start a new era of peace and propagate the teachings of enlightenment to a yet to be discovered human civilization in the vast cosmos.