The COSMOGONICON On-Line

  • Cover

  •      Letter to
         the Reader


  • Chapter 1

  •      Prelude


  • Chapter 2

  •      The Evolution of
         Reality


  • Chapter 3

  •      Reality Collation


  • Chapter 4

  •      Interlude


  • Chapter 5

  •      Reality Collation
         (cont.)


  • Chapter 6

  •      Implementing a
         New Reality


  • Chapter 7

  •      Conclude


  • Glossary


  • Home

  • Chapter 5


    REALITY COLLATION (continued)



    Religion (continued)

    It would seem that we had too many living narratives to choose from in modernity, and then none in postmodernity, but the evidence used to discredit the existing living narratives has become the living narrative in proxy. Modern Science has been extremely thorough with all of the incredible data gathered over the last 500 years, and any interpretation of it becomes a living narrative, or a scientism. They are not just another version of truth, because they are not presented as the Truth. They are stories which tie together clues found in available knowledge, and they are subject to change.

    Ecological Scientism was the living narrative just offered. It does not come from any tradition, revelation, or pure reasoning. It is based on centuries of humans trying to figure out their world by exploring and investigating it. It is not faith, it is hypothesis; it is not belief, it is evidence; it is not dogma, it is obvious. Eventually, the scientific evidence will become part of the global ultra-paradigm. We should be celebrating these discoveries, not hiding from them.

    Along with the living narrative, Religion is also comprised of rituals and ceremonies. Kung fu-tsu maintained that they are of extreme importance. Humans are social primates and need to commune with others in their community. Rituals and ceremonies bond the community, as well as heal it when catastrophe occurs. Secular Gnosticism, the Religion greater meme offered here, combines the neutral rituals and ceremonies of secularism with the gnosis of various cultures, as well as including Ecological Scientism, as we now seem to have a living narrative capable of uniting the entire species and all terrestrial life into a single community.

    The basic communities will be organized into nodes, which are the equivalent to a community, diocese, or neighborhood. They are named purposely to give them a sense of spiritual connection to the greater whole. This connection is to be maintained through the Celebrations of Life and the Calendar Festivals. Each node is free to develop its own style and to utilize the talents of the nodal community to its fullest. They are expected to evolve differently with all of the diversity of requisite variety.

    The Celebrations of Life are based on the Stages of Life common to all cultures. They are very important to the individual because of their changing role in the society. They should be celebrated by the family and the whole community. Birth is an introduction of the newest member of the community to the community. Scholarship introduces the young scholars to the vast array of human knowledge. Coming of Age introduces the adolescent to sexual responsibilities. Graduation grants the individual full membership in the world community. Marriage seals the bond between two people and their families. Pregnancy is a special time for new parents, who will need the wisdom of the community. After a long life, Renunciation allows the individual to separate from the world and meditate. And, a funeral is the way in which humans deal with the death of one of their own. Secondary celebrations are more personal like birthdays and anniversaries.

    The Festival Events are based on a new calendar, which is needed because of the plethora of calendars in use. The new calendar is based on the anticipation of Unification Day, which is the day the whole species will be united. All of the years before Unification Day will be known as BU (Before Unification) and the era of the Confederation of Terra will be known as AU (After Unification). The first day of the new calendar will be the first day of the Confederation, so choose it wisely.

    The nodes will gather together for weekly festivals. Humans seem to enjoy the weekly gatherings of the community for camaraderie and celebrating being alive. They should be fun, entertaining, and inspirational. The nodes should include all of their talents, such as music, theatre, arts, cooking, debate, games, and magick. The weekly festivals should be held at the nodes nexus. The nexus is a place where the community gathers for the festivals and celebrations. They are sacred space where the bio-energy is just right: temples, gardens, groves, etc. The weekly festivals should be held on the sabbath day of their host nation, not to offend anyone, and the first day of the week after Unification.

    The freeday is a product of the Western culture. It is an extension of the value placed on the individual. The modern idea of creating a day of rest away from religion and work just for individual enjoyments is a spectacular development in human maturation. Family and individuals should balance this time spent together and independently on the freeday and every day. The freeday should be the last day of the week after Unification.

    The cantons festivals are based on the celestial events of the equinoxes, solstices, and the middle days between them. These eight days are easy to celebrate because they are global and about 1.5 months apart. Like the weekly nodal festivals, they are to be wonderful celebrations of being alive. They should be held at the cantons nexus. There are many themes to choose from: "Harvest," "Lights," "Carnival," "Ancestor Memorial," and a myriad of other reasons to commune.

    Unification Day is to be celebrated at the regional level. The theme should be unification. It should last for at least a week and have a fair-like atmosphere. It will be held on the host nations New Years Day in anticipation of the unification of the world and the Confederation of Terra. It will be New Years Day with the new calendar.

    The whole world will come together every four years for Leap Years Day. There should be two weeks of celebration on a global scale centered at Nexus Prime in the worlds capitol. It should combine the Mardi Gras, the Worlds Fair, and the Olympiad. Everyone should make the pilgrimage to this world-wide festival at least once in their lives.

    The priest caste has been replaced by an entire religion of priests. Each member of the community is an independent "priest" of Secular Gnosticism, although there are four types of priests, based on the four Yogas of Hinduism. Their Western names are Ministers, Magicians, Mystics, and Monks. Each performs a different function within the society, but all are of equal value. The individual shows tendencies for all four of them, but one does dominate.

    The Minister is based on karma yoga, or the way of deeds. They are all who perform services for others in their daily lives. Physicians, farmers, bureaucrats, waiters, street sweepers, shop keepers, artists, reporters, and lawyers would be Ministers. Everyone is a Minister. The Magician is based on bhakti yoga, or the way of ritual. They are the leaders of the Celebrations and the Festivals. Magicians are practitioners of the External Gnosis of Magick, as well as theatre, music, and counciling. Mystics are based on jnana yoga, or the way of knowledge. They are the scientists, philosophers, gnostics, and technologists. The Monk is based on raja yoga, or the way of direct experience. They are those rare individuals who have renounced this world in order to go inside. Monks are the masters of Internal Gnosis.

    Change seems to occur in Society due to changes in Knowledge. Homo sapiens became the first dominant species due to our tool mastery in our infancy stage of primitive cultures. Our toddler primitive civilizations came about due to agriculture. Civilized societies came with philosophical reason and logic in our childhood. Our modern youth, which was sparked by scientific exploration and investigation, finally gave way to our adolescent postmodern identity crisis, which was brought about after there was enough accumulated data to get a clear picture of the material world, and it was not what we expected. The Knowledge megameme offered here is Homo Maturus, because the next stage for humanity is to mature by becoming responsible for ourselves, as well as for the health of the entire biosphere. The change in Knowledge this time comes from the convergence of all four branches, especially the reinstatement of Gnosis.

    Gnosis

    Gnosis has been suppressed due to its proximity to Religion, but how can one have Knowledge without including the prophets, yogis, shamans, psychics, and other gnostics which this world has produced? Including the greater paradigm of Gnosis in the megaparadigm of Knowledge validates a plethora of data which has been ignored by Modern Science. It has been labeled as ignorance and superstition, but Science is reluctantly starting to recognize Gnosis. Psychology, Gaia, complexity, relativity, animal consciousness, and the legitimation of esoteric knowledge have allowed Gnosis, with the aid of constructivism, to throw off its yoke to Religion and stand independently.

    The bio-energy of life permeates the entire layer of convergence on a transsensual level. Our senses evolved out of necessity for survival. It is unnecessary to be able to perceive the bio-energy. Therefore, the only way to detect it is to collect evidence of its workings. There is a similarity between a living organism and the Gaia entity. The entire biosphere has a metabolism which circulates nitrogen, oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide, ozone, salt, iodine, sulfur, weather, currents, and even the continents, themselves, around the entire planet through a hyper-complex system of living agents, like any body-colony, and through sheer will. Most living organisms do not have a brain to house the mass consciousness, which is a Vertebrate trait. Yet, these organisms react as a singularity, or self-aware, which is the difference between alive and not. The entire planet shows evidence of being a mass organism with a will of its own, from its conquest of earth to its reactions to catastrophes. There is enough evidence to show that something is going on beyond our senses and beyond our control.

    The Gaia entity is the sum total of all life on this planet, and it permeates the earth, air, water, and fire, as it has the entire planet surface as its body. Other living planets would have their own Gaia entities. The Hindu term for this entity is the impersonal Brahman. Atman equals Brahman. The atman is the sum total of the human body-colony, a whole made of many, which is, in turn, a part of another whole, Brahman. Through Internal Gnosis, the Indian yogis are able to join this massive singularity of bio-energy, which has been described as infinite awareness, infinite being, and infinite joy. They mistook this energy for the Truth. Instead, it is a terrestrial phenomenon of life. Brahman is the sum total of all life, the Terran Gaia entity. The workings of the Gaia entity has also been observed as the Tao te Ching, or the Way of Life.

    This transsensual realm is dependent on the material realm, and visa-versa. Through the vanishing knowledge of External Gnosis, the shaman could exert a certain amount of influence by harnessing the bio-energy through magick. These early Magicians also knew much about the capabilities of the human mind. They could also contact the denizens of that realm, the nature spirits, which are some form of non-material life. These nature spirits seem to be dedicated to the support of the material realm. The spirit realm is an alien world to us and most of the knowledge accumulated about it is ineffable, but it still can be found in some cultures, in esoteric writings, and in our myths, as well as in quantum physics, as energy delicately becomes alive. Look for coincidences, for they show us the interconnectedness of both realms. Mature Gnosis will have to relearn what was lost in both Internal and External Gnosis and then take it further.

    Philosophy

    Philosophy entered three societies differently. The logic and reason of Philosophy allowed Kung fu-tsu to order the Society megaparadigm of Chinese culture; it allowed Buddha to order the Internal Gnosis of India; and it allowed the Greek Philosophers to order the thinking process. Once entered into Knowledge, Philosophy becomes the hub, because it allows us to order our minds and our reality for a clear mind to mind conversation. Philosophy is not like Gnosis and Science. The history of Philosophy is not of resolution, but of continuous debate. It is the arena of ideas.

    The postmodern Existentialist Philosophy is a result of having to deal with relative reality and the scientific evidence. Our world is absurd. There is no reason for it to be here, but here we are none-the-less. In a world full of competing realities, each individual must choose their own meaning for their existence. In this way, Existentialism is a secular form of individualism. Consequently, we must also choose what is the meaning of existence as a group. Our postmodern predicament is to decide what it means to be human. We will soon need a consciously constructed, mature reality for the whole species to replace the languid culturally specific realities. This new reality reconstruction will occur in the Philosophy arena.

    The reality we choose will ultimately be decided by the whole species in our hermeneutic circle of reality construction, or the circulation of ultraperspectives and the ultraparadigm, by a species which has just become global, as well as aware of its constructivism, and aware of certain scientific evidence regarding the material world. Once an alternative reality becomes the ultraparadigm for the species, Postmodern Reconstructivism will turn into Mature Philosophy, which will have to deal with the knowledge that the chosen reality is not the Truth, but the best we could do at this stage of our evolution, and have the difficult task of expanding the chosen reality, with the understanding that some day it will be replaced.

    Technology

    Postmodern High Technology has begun to stagger the imagination. There are no limits to the possibilities of future advances. The problem with our technology is that our Society megaparadigm is under the control of Imperialist Capitalism. Like all postmodern culture, technological advances are driven by profit with a total disregard of any other factor. While we ponder the dilemmas of our technology, such as pollution, genetic engineering, and geriatrics, the merchants are making all the actual decisions based on greed as the motive, which is unhealthy, and we consume their products like gluttons in the West or slave to make them elsewhere. The life-enhancing Mature Technology will continue the advancement, but at a slower pace, and it will be motivated by responsibility and posterity, and available to all under Egalitarian Socialism.

    Science

    Modern Science has failed to reach its goal of finding the Truth through investigation and exploration, because it has reached certain limits, since there is no going back before the Big Bang, and we can get no smaller than pure energy, but the data gathered by Modern Science will always be valuable. Only its reign of dominance is over, and a time of a unified Knowledge is about to begin. The task of Mature Science will be to continue the investigation and exploration of the universe, because there is still so much to learn, as we are just now starting to understand our place in the universe, our tiny planet, the complexity of life here, and our amazing species. Unfortunately, Modern Science has given us so much data that it is difficult to put all of the varied disciplines together, so the valuable knowledge floats around in an ocean of trivial information, which seems to be trebled daily.

    Just as before, the Society megaparadigm is changing to be more in tune with Knowledge, which is going through the tricatastrophes of globalization, scientism, and constructivism. Although Modern Science has failed to discover the Truth, it has given us an unexpected living narrative, but scientism contradicts the multitude of contradictory living narratives of the past, which constructivism has shown to be relative and reified. What we have learned from science about ourselves and our world is both awesome and awful, as our delusions are stripped from us, and we are left alone in an absurd universe with no alternative but to bring our reality more in tune with our new knowledge.

    The Humans of Terra, the alternative ultrameme which includes the Confederation of Terra (the Society megameme with Alto-Confucianism, Democratic Anarchy, Egalitarian Socialism, and Secular Gnosticism) and Homo Maturus (the Knowledge megameme with Gnosis reunited with Philosophy, Science, and Technology), is offered here to replace our suspended state of reality in the globalizing and constructivist postmodern era, and allow a new era of cooperation to begin. It will probably not take the world by storm. Even if it was to become the global ultraparadigm, it would not happen over night. The birthing process is long and painful. Confucianism did finally succeed in changing China, but only after the Period of Warring States. The question then becomes how to implement the new ultrameme so it has the best chance of success.


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