Most of human history has been spent in this era of primitive cultures. Semi-isolated human tribes in various environments around the world have formed the myriad of human cultures which can be expected of requisite variety. When a living system succeeds in a variation which is novel, numerous styles are experimented with. Since humans are a single species, the variance comes from our hyper-complex mind. The plethora of primitive human cultures exemplifies requisite variety in our species. Although it is difficult to generalize about so many differing cultures, there are some recurring themes.

Sociality dominated the Society megaparadigm. Politics and Economics were egalitarian in nature and based on familial and social organization. Life was determined by the environment, everything from quite burdensome to quite pleasant. Their whole world was limited to the boundaries of their tribe and this limited scope was reflected in their living narrative. Most of the tribal names of primitive cultures are translated best as "the people" or "humans." Their name does not separate them from their human neighbors like the nation-state mentality of today, it separated them from other species. It also shows how they view their place within nature, as they are not detached from nature, but see themselves as a part of it, which is also reflected in their elaborate myths.

The myths are non-rational and non-logical living narratives, where the first two people can meet other people and no one seems to notice any inconsistencies. Each myth puts that particular tribe in the best lands, at the center of the world, and important to the story of creation. Each of the tribal members becomes one of the characters in an ever-unfolding drama of tragedy and triumphs. Most importantly, the myths carry the experience of a culture, as memes. The tribal morality, goals, family and social organization, scope, and knowledge are found in these dramatic orations.

The Knowledge megaparadigm of primitive cultures is dominated by Gnosis. Since they are dependent on their environment for survival, it seems obvious that they would be attuned to the workings of nature. When they speak of nature spirits and life-force, they are speaking from experience. Magick is the way in which to enlist the workings of nature for various goals by External Gnosis, while Internal Gnosis is exemplified by the Vision Quest.

The Vision Quest is used by the individual to get in touch with the spiritual and unconscious realms. The individual starts with a question which will focus their attention through an ordeal which can be brought about by endurance, starvation, or hallucinatory drugs. The peyote ceremony of North America and the whirling dervishes of Arabia are contemporary examples of the Vision Quest.

Magick is a collection of spells, which are a mechanical means to gather bio-energy for a desired effect. Spells are tried and perfected methods of this nature influencing. The words and gestures are not to be taken literally, they are being used to shape the energy of the participants to the desired goal, such as healing or weather summoning. The bio-energy cascades through the spirit realm with the attached request, which is then, hopefully, brought to fruition in the material realm. An alternative to the spell is the enlistment of nature spirits to help do the work, or another short cut is to get the subject to do the actual work themselves.

Nature spirits are described by many cultures as angels, devas, demons, faeries, djinn, etc. Ghosts and ancestors would also fall into this category. Nature spirits may be ghosts of long dead species. They are a part of the capricious spiritual realm of the biosphere. Reincarnation states that all beings and spirit beings, from the rocks to the gods, are in a process of self-awareness, just at different levels. As a part of nature, humans can receive assistance from nature spirits as their existence is dependent on the material world, and vice-versa.

Witchdoctors are apparently able to fool the subject into believing they have been cured, when in fact they have cured themselves. This faith healing is just one of the psychic abilities of the human mind. The list of our potential psychic abilities would be lengthy, everything from aura reading and astral travel, to genuine healing and telekinesis. The human mind has many wondrous abilities which must be trained for and practiced.

Gnosis would have problems later because the knowledge is passed on through myths. When later generations would throw out the myths as illogical and unscientific, they also threw out the knowledge gained by that system of thought. Gnosis is illogical and unscientific, but so is the world we live in. The evidence does not always fit the logical, scientific world modernity has constructed. Primitive cultures understand this fuzziness, because they live in an irrational, mythical world, which they have constructed out of their experiences living so close to nature.

The Age of Wonder

Their technology allowed humans to thrive across the entire planets surface, but the most important technological advance in human history was the domestication of grasses. The river valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow rivers were the birth places of first human civilizations, but others have sprung up all over the world. The development of agriculture caused the first ultraparadigm shift as the primitive cultures in these areas gave way to primitive civilizations. This shift separated humans from nature and sent us on a new path.

With the advent of civilization, the Society megaparadigm changed due to the energy derived from the population explosion, which was brought about by agriculture. Knowledge changed due to the time some humans now had for contemplation instead of food production, such as engineering and tool improvement. Different social systems were developed by different civilized cultures to accommodate their new found wealth, but each civilization evolved along the lines already in place during that particular cultures infancy.

The Sociality which dominated the primitive cultures gave way as the other greater paradigms gained strength. Some interesting changes did occur within Sociality though. The most important was the advent of writing, which co-evolved with Economics as a way to keep track of wealth and transactions. Like anything new, writing became as varied as the cultures which developed it. Writing also sparked the formation of laws, or a written code of conduct which all are expected to obey under threat of punishment. They are a morality enforced by the warlords to override the various moralities of the different cultures, to govern commerce, and to dictate a Sociality more to the liking of those in power.

Economics was new to civilization. In their primitive cultures, the food was distributed more or less equally among those in the tribe. Now there was surplus food of gargantuan proportions which had to be dealt with. The agents of Economics, the merchants, would be competing for the crumbs, while warlords and priests would be competing for control of the economy over the next 5000 years. Ancient Egypt is an example of religious domination, while Babylon and the Aztecs are examples of political domination of Economics, as well as the whole Society megaparadigm.

The power derived from controlling the wealth of the civilization usually came under the influence of the man with the best army. The warlords are a product of this era in our history. The tribal rivalries which would sometimes cause bloodshed evolved into the institution of war in primitive civilizations. War evolved into a vicious and hierarchical system of cultural extinctions, as all future realities would be imposed by force. From petty wars to empire building, the warlords left no time for peace. They would use their wealth to gain more land to gain more wealth to gain more land, etc. The price of success or failure was still senseless death. War became glorious as this major meme seeped into Sociality and Religion.

As Politics has warlords as its agents and Economics has the merchants, Religion has priests. The priestcraft became institutionalized in this era, as an evolution of the shaman. They made themselves indispensable by controlling the rituals, ceremonies, and even the living narratives which give the society its meaning. They had enough power from this to compete with the warlords for control of the economy and the society. In most cases, the priests and warlords conspired to share the bounty of civilization.

The technologies of agriculture and architecture dominated the Knowledge megaparadigm of this era, while Gnosis was yoked together with Religion by the priests to maintain their position. Magick was turned into rituals and ceremonies which confounded the believers and did nothing for them. The spirits became anthropomorphic gods which needed to be bribed with prayers and blood sacrifices, and of course, the priests knew exactly what the gods wanted for their favors. Internal Gnosis was turned into the oracle, as the priests became the intermediaries between the people and the spirits. The actual gnosis was soon lost in all of the human self-aggrandizement, and from the growing separation from nature.

Even with these disadvantages, Internal Gnosis reached its peak near the end of this period in India. The monks (or yogis) there took their quest to the ultimate level. Through great effort, the Upanishadic monks attained the highest level of consciousness, a level where they claim that All is One. They also created a path for others to follow, Raja Yoga. The initiates of this empirical gnosis must first learn to control their behavior and their habits; then they must learn to control their breathing and stillness so they will not interfere with further progressions. Next, they must learn to control their thoughts and their concentration. In the final stage, Samadhi, the at-one-ment is described as infinite awareness, infinite being, and infinite joy. This gnosis is buried within the mythic mentality which fostered it, but it is still quite valuable if one is to fully understand human knowledge.

In Iran, much earlier than the Upanishads, another form of Internal Gnosis was being experienced by a priest of the Aryan invaders of South Asia. Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) experienced a spontaneous gnosis. What the yogis experience through years of meditation, some humans seem to experience during a Vision Quest. Spontaneous gnosis has been experienced by many humans throughout history. Usually, the experience seems to confirm what the individual already believes to be reality, but sometimes, like in the case of Zarathustra, the experience synthesizes a dilemma into something new.

Zarathustra was having problems with the gods he was serving. They were gods of destruction worshipped by the Aryans who were conquering all of the Eastern Hemispheres civilizations with their chariots. Zarathustra saw no good in these gods, so he left his people to wander in the desert with his dilemma. While crossing a river (and probably on psychedelic mushrooms), he had a vision of the one true God, Ahura Mazda. This was the start of Zoroastrianism, the first evangelical, monotheistic religion. Zarathustra succeeded in converting an Iranian warrior tribe himself. Eventually, the entire Persian Empire had Zoroastrianism as their greater meme for Religion.

The Iranians would remain warlike and the end of this era would see the rise of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire, which would become the first multi-cultural culture after conquering Babylon and Egypt, but the Greeks, also Aryan, who dominated Mediterranean commerce, continually repelled the Persians. Also, at the center of trade between Asia and Africa was Israel (later Judea), whose culture has its own version of monotheism. The Jews seem to have gone from a displaced warrior tribe to a wealthy trade kingdom to decadence to conquered people. Yet, they have survived as a culture due to their fanatical devotion to their one true God, Yahweh, to their written living narrative, the Tanakh, and to their resilient culture.

Starting in Sumeria, Egypt, India, and China, and later Iran, Greece, Basque, Mexico, Canaan, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Inca, Kogi, Khmer, the Mississippi region, and Polynesia, primitive civilizations come in many forms, and some of the most wondrous human achievements were built in this age. Primitive civilization ultraparadigms have many similar themes, but they are radically different from their earlier primitive culture ultraparadigms. Three primitive civilizations, China, India, and Greece, experienced the next ultraparadigm shift at roughly the same time.

The Age of Order

The next catastrophe also began within the megaparadigm of Knowledge. It was the institutionalization of Philosophy. Humans have always been rational and logical, but until the advent of the Philosophy greater paradigm, they had never applied it to themselves. Inexplicably, reason and logic bloomed around 500 BCE. Independent of each other, humans in China, India, and Greece started to examine the reality of the primitive civilizations and found them lacking any rationality. Confucius, Buddha, and the Greek Philosophers each used the reason and logic for different goals, but they all came up with the Doctrine of the Mean, or health and healthy behavior through moderation. There are other similarities, but none as vociferous.

In China, Kung fu-tsu (or Confucius) used reason and logic to help repair the unraveling culture in China, which was starting to sink into the Period of Warring States, one of the worst eras in human history. In his time, Chinas culture was only beginning to fray. Deliberately, Kung fu-tsu created a new culture out of Chinas mythical past put together with the new logic and reason. The new reality was based on the noble goal of educating an entire culture of chun-tsus (or gentlemen scholars) and to build a society which rewards them. The Chinese used Confucianism to rebuild their civilization after 200 years of warfare. Later, the Confucian high culture would even convert the occupying Mongols. It still survives in China and some of its satellite states.

Siddharta Gautama was a prince who left a life of luxury to search for the Truth. First, he became an ascetic and later tried Raja Yoga, but they did not work for him. He finally reasoned through the mythic gnosis of the Upanishads and attained Nirvana on his own. When asked if he was a god, he humbly stated that he was simply awake. Buddha (or the Awakened One) came up with his own path of philosophical gnosis called the Eightfold Path and went about India telling everyone of his findings. Buddhist missionaries soon spread throughout the Eastern Hemisphere, but found success only in East Asia.

In India, the Buddhists were disrupting the accepted reality and this was not taken lightly by the warlords and priests who ruled through the caste system. After a long struggle, Buddhism was finally pushed out of India by the introduction of the Krishna and Rama myths which supported the traditional Indian memes, thus India has remained in the primitive civilization stage. Buddhism became one of Indias greatest exports though as it has survived in many forms in many cultures, from the Zen of Japan, to the mountains of Tibet, and in the mystical movements within the Western religions.

In Greece, an entire sub-culture evolved around the love of wisdom (or Philosophy). The most prominent members were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They reasoned through reason and formed the core of Classical Philosophy, the greater meme which has dominated Philosophy in the West ever since. They questioned reality and then questioned the questioning. Their logic and reason became an academic discipline, which soon branched out into art, politics, mathematics, geometry, and much later, into Science. With a new found optimism, the Greeks flirted with democracy, expanded markets, wrestled with religion, and boldly attempted to conquer the world under Alexander, bringing their new rationality with them.

Philosophy brought a dilemma to the primitive civilization ultraparadigms, when the philosophers discovered that the myths were not logical or rational. Socrates was put to death for questioning the accepted reality. Theology was invented to deal with this dilemma by imposing logic and reason on the myths, but there are still those who can find holes in the logic caused by trying impose order on chaos. Only certain myths would survive the imposition of logic, and the polytheistic Greek religion would not. The Greeks had always admired the logic and rationality of monotheism, but would not accept the Zoroastrianism of their Iranian rivals. Judaism offered hope, but it is an inherited religion. Also, circumcision and the dietary laws were not to the liking of the Greeks. When the most amazing event took place, the son of a Jewish carpenter with a religious dilemma had a spontaneous gnosis which would change world history.

Yeshuah bar Yosif (or Jesus) was a poor carpenters son in the Judea of Roman occupation. Judaism was in a renaissance of its own with the rebuilding of the main temple in Jerusalem. Yeshuah was deeply spiritual and quite intelligent. He may have had some Qabbalic training, plus he knew a great deal about Judaism and Zoroastrianism, which was thriving over in Persia, the rival of Rome. While meditating in the desert with the Essenes (a hermit sect of Judaism), he synthesized Judaism and Zoroastrianism. This synthesis was carried on by others like Paul of Tarsus, who formed the core of Orthodox Christianity.

Finally, here was what the Greeks had been looking for. Christianity is the synthesis of both monotheisms in question, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, without any political baggage from Persia and without the familial and cultural requirements of Judaism which, like Hinduism, demands that one be born into the religion to qualify as a member. The Greeks converted to the evangelical Christianity. Later, the entire Roman Empire was forced to convert, as the logical, rational, and revealed monotheism of Christianity would become a theological triumph as other, less sophisticated religions were swept aside with the aid of a military dictatorship. The influence of Zoroastrian and Judaic ideas through Christianity (and later Islam) are felt throughout the Western cultures.

The most important idea would be individualism, which stems from the Last Judgments of all Western religions. Being responsible only to God for ones actions changes the way one views the world. Individualism gives the ultimate authority of ones own reality to the individual, who suddenly becomes valuable. This radical idea allows evangelical living narrative memes to be introduced into other cultures, which spread out and bring their connected memes with them, like cultural viruses. Unfortunately, some of these memes, once dominant, revert to force and violence when threatened by the old strains, or by new ones, thus betraying the freedom which allowed them to succeed.

The other idea which came from these traditions is the divinely sanctioned separation between humans and nature. During the age of primitive civilizations, humans became separated from nature due to the fact that they no longer relied on nature for their livelihood. This separation is evident in their myths. Eventually, humans were not just separated from nature, but given the right to do with it as they please. Some truly believe that this world is not important, and that it is the next world which is truly real. One can see how the priests, warlords, and later the merchants, would take advantage of this perspective. Also during this era, there would be great devastation of nature, but nothing like what would come later.

Another spontaneous gnosis would also change the world in this era. In Arabia, a caravan master, Muhammad ibn Abdullah, was having difficulty with the dilemma of having too many living narratives to choose from. Arabia was positioned between the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. There was also a large Jewish population, as well as the indigenous pagan Arabs. Traveling extensively, Muhammad was confronted with all of these competing ultraparadigms. In a cave in the desert, the dilemma was synthesized into Islam.

The warrior Arab tribes soon converted to Islam, and then set out to conquer the world in a holy war. They devastated the Byzantine Empire, destroyed the Persian Empire wiping out Zoroastrianism as a world religion, and conquered everything from North Africa to Central Asia. After the bloodshed, the Islamic Empire was one of the high points in human history. Greek philosophy was reborn under Islamic theology by al-Ghazali and Jewish theology by the scholar, Maimonides. Through Islam, Greek and Roman knowledge would eventually find its way back to Europe. Islam is a separate culture, but it shares the same Semite creation myths as the other Western cultures. The Islamic Empire was the only other culture to join Confucian China and Hellenized Europe to the civilized society level, thanks to Philosophy.

The Society megaparadigm went through quite a change in this era. Sociality was dissected by philosophers and then re-arranged by Christianity and Islam. Politically, the warlords became an institution known as kings. Kingdoms warred each other endlessly during this time as well. Economics saw the spread and acceptance of the merchant class, who were able to procure some influence from the warlords and priests, and extend trade from Spain to Japan, until the Mongols came. The Mongols sacked China, India, Persia, and Arabia. Europe was spared by the timely death of a chief warlord. The separate cultures then became isolated and alone.

It would seem that the two spontaneous gnosises had more of an effect on reality than Philosophy, but it is the reverse. These two religions would not have been so successful if Philosophy had not set the stage for their appearance. Humans started to impose rationality on their world just by simply thinking about what they were doing. This pondering weakened the mythical Religion memes, which were then replaced by the more rational monotheisms and supported by theology. But Philosophy asks many questions which have no answers, only one culture would eventually seek the answers. The Greek-influenced Europeans would be the only culture to go from pondering to action. Their ultraparadigm, Modern Society, would inevitably allow them to conquer the entire world.

The Age of Curiosity

The next catastrophe within the Knowledge megaparadigm was the advent of Modern Science. Empirical Science surfaced in every other culture before it was used by the Europeans around 1500 CE. Starting in India under Asoka, a Buddhist, it then moved east to China and west to the Islamic Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and finally to Western Europe. Where-ever the idea of experiment went, it was pursued at first and then persecuted when it started to question the accepted knowledge or, worse, religion. The Protestant Europeans were questioning both when Science came to them. Finally, Science had a place to grow.

For Modern Science to flourish, it needed the logic and rationality of Philosophy to change the Society megaparadigm once again, so on a wave of scientific inquiry, the theological Western European culture was haphazardly reordered into a modern society, with its democracy, liberty, and free markets, as Greek philosophy surfaced again in Europe. This was the Enlightenment, a humanistic ultrameme, which was to replace all traditional realities. It is unlike any previous reality, as science became popular and the merchants began their ascent.

Gradually, the merchant bankers were becoming wealthy and powerful enough to exert some true power within the society, while the European kings saw an end to their power under the new constitutional monarchies, and the priests had lost face because of the way they handled Luther and Galileo. The merchants began to co-evolve with the scientists, thus granting them a certain amount of freedom. With this new found freedom, the Europeans explored and investigated the world, as long as it was profitable.

Modernity spread throughout the competing European nation-states. With the knowledge they gained from science and the accompanying technological advances, they were able to conquer the whole world. Spain, Portugal, France, England, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Russia all lay claim to the world. Such was their might that they only had to fight token wars before it was realized by the indigenous people that resistance was futile. This quick surrender saved the people as well as the natural resources which would soon be exploited. There is not one border in the world which was not created by a European state.

Colonization took place under the political paradigm of imperialism. The colonies had the ultraparadigm of the conqueror imposed on them by military and then economic force. After the bloodshed, the colonys economy was ignored in order to set up one favoring European economic needs. This was accomplished by planting one or two exportable crops at the expense of natural ones. The railroads would then link the plantations and mining sites with the closest port. The indigenous people were of little or no concern. Also, the colonies would be governed exclusively by Europeans. No information was transferred to the indigenous people to help them run their own nation or to use the technology, thus they would stay dependent on the Europeans.

When the colonizing was complete, the European nation-states became the wealthiest nations ever, which caused an increase in the funding of science and technology, creating a self-perpetuating spiral of technological advancement and wealth accumulation. This is known as the Industrial Revolution, which made those merchants involved the wealthiest individuals ever. The merchants were now powerful enough to challenge the warlords and the priests for control of the economy and the society. Eventually, they would seize control of Politics by replacing the king with the democratic republic and gain control of the living narrative by replacing organized religion with the idea of religious freedom.

For the merchants, democratic republics are easier to control than any other form of government. First, the republic takes away the threat of the warlords, who can ruin a nation with useless wars and who are able to impose their will through force. Second, it gives the populace the illusion that they have choices, which makes them less likely to rebel. Third, the representatives are usually from the merchant class, which means they are conveniently able to draft and enforce their own laws. Fourth, these representatives also seem to be easily bought, which gives those with great wealth an avenue to exert their will by influencing several of them at any given time.

All religions have been easily pushed aside by granting the freedom of religion to the individual and the freedom from religion to the nation by separating it from governance. These freedoms evolved out of the long and painful religious wars caused by the Protestant revolt from the Catholic Church. The solution in the American Constitution, and later almost all nation-states, was to let the individual decide which living narrative to live. The irony is that the merchants were able to suppress Western religions with the individualism meme originated by Western religions.

Once the merchants had taken economic control of the Society megaparadigm, much of the populace went from farmers to factory workers. Life was miserable and short for these workers, who were beginning to rebel. Socialism evolved as a way for the workers to take control of industry and gain the benefits of their own labor. There were many rebellions and revolutions. The Russian Empire became the Soviet Union as the Communists actually overthrew their government and set up a nation-state based solely on Economics. For the most part, the workers settled for labor unions and slowly menial labor was exported to the colonies.

The merchants helped create the imperialist system, so when they gained control of Western culture, the wealthiest merchants (or capitalists) placed themselves at the top of the imperialist pyramid, the citizens of the nation-states of Europe came next, and then the others were left to fight each other for position. Those nation-states which fail fall to the bottom. The weak nations support the lavish lifestyles of those higher up. Along with Western Europe, the English-inhabited America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are also a part of the upper tiers. America soon found itself on top of the Europeans, since the United States embodies the Enlightenment. Japan was foresighted enough to see the benefits of exploitation instead of being exploited and joined the Europeans. The Communists of the Soviet Union tried to set up an opposing pyramid with Russia on top, but it failed.

In the Knowledge megaparadigm, Modern Science has given us so much data about our world that it will take us centuries to ponder the implications of the discoveries, such as space, evolution, relativity, quantum, Gaia, and complexity. Some of the greatest advancements in knowledge have also come from Modern Technology, from toilets to refrigerators, from steam engines to jets, from the telegraph to the television, from an automobile to a space station. Technology also aids our scientific investigations and explorations. It makes our lives easier by doing our work for us. The human ability to use and fashion tools has come a long way in a short time. The combination of science and technology coupled with rampant capitalism and nation-state competition, which allowed modernity to conquer the world, has not only given the West the best standard of living in human history, but has also impoverished the rest of the world.

Although Science dominates Knowledge in the modern society, spontaneous gnosis was not silent. Joseph Smith founded the Mormon religion in early America. He synthesized Christianity with the prevailing belief that the Native Americans were the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel and the idea that America was setting up a new Covenant with God. BahaUllah founded the Bahai religion in Iran. He synthesized his Shia Islam with Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and modern Humanism, as well as including Science. For the most part, Gnosis was reduced to mere superstition during this era.

The Age of Chaos

All of the human cultures have had their insulated, semi-isolated evolution stopped, as modernity has brought the species together after so many years of separation. The intentions of the founders of the Enlightenment was that an enlightened, modern world would replace the repressive, ignorant traditional cultures and all would have prosperous lives. Instead, modernity was as coercive and ravenous as it was liberating. Eventually, it was made obsolete by one of its core institutions (the greater meme of Modern Science), and now, in the postmodern era, humanity has been thrown together without an ultraparadigm to connect us all as a species.

The modern Europeans have accomplished many wonderful advances in science and technology, as well as political and religious freedom. But in their conquest of the globe, they committed at least four unforgivable crimes which taints all of their achievements: (1) the hoarding of their knowledge, so as to make all the rest of humanity pay for those wonderful advances, rather than sharing them, and the economic enslavement of their colonies which resulted from this greed to support their elevated position on a skewed economic pyramid; (2) the physical enslavement of the Africans, when the Native Americans would not do; (3) the continuing genocide against the Native Americans; and (4) the continuing environmental destruction on a scale close to an asteroid strike in extinctions, pollution, and habitat destruction.

It is ironic that modernity was undermined by science, since they have been co-evolving for the last 500 years. The postmodern era began around the mid-20th century, as data from the scientific explorations and investigations began to give us a vastly different view of the material world than was ever imagined: astronomy has placed us on a small planet in an immense universe; evolution has discovered humans to be primates and just one of the myriad inhabitants of the complex living system which grows on this small planet; and relativity and quantum physics have found the material world to be pure energy which tends to exist in void. When these findings are compared to our cultural realities, including modernity, and the assumptions which they are built on, they all become socially constructed, varying version of truth.

Humans have been quite successful and have spread out around the planet in a myriad of cultures. In the process of cultural evolution, the European ultrameme Modern Society allowed the Europeans to conquer the world and to force all of humanity together under their reality, then we discovered all realities to be relative and reified, and now we are left alone to fend for ourselves, as individuals and as a species. We can either deny the relativity of our particular cultural reality (as a fundamentalist Christian, Hindu, Modernist, etc.), face the madness of having to create our own reality, or just pretend none of this happened and continue life as usual.

The postmodern era has been dominated by the latter. Postmodern means "after the modern," but modernity has been allowed to continue because there are no alternatives, as the name implies. None of the other existing cultural realities can become the new global reality because they have become just as obsolete as modernity due to scientism and relativism, and because of the rivalry which exists between the various cultures. Also, the new awareness of our reality construction, or dereification, negates any naturally emerging reality from unconsciously succeeding modernity. In other words, we have no alternative but to consciously construct the first global ultraparadigm for the benefit of the entire species, as well as for all life. When successfully implemented, it will mark the end of the postmodern era and the beginning of the next.

None of the realities presented here is better than another, because they are all part of the natural process of human reality evolution, which was an unconscious process until just recently. The difference seems to be one of energy use. The further the realities progress, the more encompassing they become, which increases their scope and complexity, as well as the number of adherents and available resources. The primitive cultures are limited to their community or tribe; primitive civilizations consist of several communities to create a culture; civilized societies are multi-cultural cultures; modern society was the first dominant global culture, but it is the European regional reality imposed on the rest of the world through military and economic force; postmodernity is the first actual global culture, but it is a mess. The next step for human reality evolution is a global civilization, because once the process began, a global reality was inevitable, but it will have to be consciously constructed.