THE MIRROR, THE FLAME, THE SEED & THE BRAIN Pivotal Technologies; Sociogenesis and the SEASIP Cycle of consciousness evolution; Quantum theory and multiple universes; and how our own man-made mind works. By H.J. McGraw © Copyright 2010 H.J. McGraw, All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION ‘History is a race between discovery and catastrophe.’ “What we see, or seem, is but a dream within a dream.” Philosophy, say many philosophers, is the process of avoiding conclusions by concentrating on formulating better questions. It’s a ‘game’ with no endgame. That notion was the motivation for considering a gimmick for formatting this essay, namely: run the first half of the text only on right-hand pages, then turn the work upside-down and print the second half on the back of those pages, so that the text ‘ends’ where it begins. The book would thus have two nearly identical front covers. You get the picture; a closed loop. But there is an easier way to get the same idea across without making any reader commuting to or from work look cuckoo to nearby passengers for apparently reading a book upside-down. You are asked to go immediately to the end of this essay, and read the first postscript, which will then turn you around, and send you back to this non-beginning which begins with the prologue below. It will echo a trickier effect: that of printing the entire manuscript in a totally reverse type that could only be read (without great effort) by holding it up to The Mirror in order to re-reverse the image. Please proceed, and then please return. PROLOGUE Being is believing. Humanity is a huge single-celled organism with six billion disparate minds. This condition is the result of the migration of the Survival Instinct from the biological plane, where it favored immediate individual well-being, to the higher, wider level of consciousness where collective survival and success would always be an elective choice for action, an alternate response to the impulse for instant gratification, or the reflex reaction to fear and anxiety, or a decision to ignore the demands of vanity and ego. Altruism was born. Biological evolution thus transformed itself into Selective Metamorphosis. (And that transformation occurred many millennia before Darwin ‘discovered’ evolution, just as evolutionism was considered at least a couple of millennia before Darwin!) Such seeming ‘altruism’, however, is more accurately viewed as ‘enlightened self-interest’, for the simple reason that it is impossible for a ‘self’ to act outside of itself. It may include others, but it cannot exclude ‘its-elf’. The completely selfless act is thus a rhetorical

trick. Even heroic self-sacrifice has unintended consequence. (Suicidal self-sacrifice is simply delusional.) So the underlying question is: how could the first appearance of self-awareness into a monistic ‘perfect’ world, which then turned into a fragmented circus of billions of minds in one genetically cloned body --- how could that possibly be interpreted as a strategy of advancement for the Natural Order? (Unless independent consciousness was an error, an abhorrence that nature wanted to correct by expanding then imploding the host population?) Could it be for the same natural reason that it took biological expansion (evolution) so many millions of years and trillions of chance mutations to finally achieve an organic specimen worthy of self-awareness, one that would perfectly fit the ‘perfect world’ already incarnate? Was it, and is it, a matter of “critical mass”? , which in the present case means the proliferation of so many minds and opinions that the collective consciousness falls into total chaos and the throes of imminent extinction, leaving us with no alternative but to regress and reiterate ‘natural selection’ on a conscious level, which then forces us to accept and internalize simultaneously the only logical escape left for our species? Ya gotta do what ya gotta do! And what in God’s name could that possibly be? The dice are so loaded and the deck so stacked against us, and largely by us, that surely the game is all but over, no? Believers can believe anything, but thinkers always come to the end of the line. Could they both be wrong? The worm that spins its cocoon has no say on what it will become, butterfly or moth. Do we? FORETALK Hope is faith. God said, “I first had to create Albert Einstein so that I could then think like him.” So Reality is the result of God deploying an Einstein ‘thought experiment’. And then Einstein thinking like God. Which is why Albert could say, as he really did say, “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe.” Then someone said, “God does play dice with the Universe, but they’re loaded.” And someone else added, “No, the dice aren’t loaded. God just has an infinite number of dice.” God just smiled. And Einstein then stated, as he actually did, “So ...creativity is more important than knowledge.” Which some thought was understated. Enter then one of the 20th Century’s most amazing Inductivists, a man known as ‘the idiot boy’ because he was blind and couldn’t learn. He regained his sight as a young man, fled his home, became a bracero in the California valleys, taught himself to read, and became an accomplished auto-didact. He then wrote “The True Believer”, simply a great accessible book on political philosophy and human nature. The author and longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, told the gathered this: “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

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Another master of the inductive entered the colloquy. The philosopher Henri Bergson added his view: “The Universe is a machine for the making of gods.” God frowned, and said, “I hope you’re spelling “gods” with a small ‘g’. He continued. “What makes your species so slow? Most of you are three, four, five centuries behind. It couldn’t possibly be my mistake, could it? Don’t answer that! “I sent you three emissaries almost a century ago, you know ... Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg. They told you the atom was kaput, that it wasn’t the basis of reality, and that it was probability, what you called ‘quanta, which would be your new penultimate reality. Only a few of you seemed to have even noticed this huge shift in context. “Now I see there’s this new prophet among you, a real renaissance character, goes by David Deutsch --- how did he slip by me? My workload has greatly increased since the Multiverse became ultimate reality. I used to super only the Universe; now I have so many alternate realms to manage I can’t keep up. Deutsch is synthesizing philosophy, physics, quantum mechanics, Darwin’s evolution and electronic computation, into a new Theory of Everything, that, I might opine, is a lot better than the last theory of ‘everything’ which failed to account for ninety-something percent of the ‘dark’ matter/energy that makes up your universe. Oi vey, what chutzpah! “While his book, “The Fabric of Reality” is a good read, he, like all scientists has left himself out of it, in fact, omitted the entire existing human species in his first ‘theory of everything’. “May I remind you, children...you are an integral and essential part of the program. How you see and experience the greater reality --- and then interpret it, because that’s all that you can do (I made sure of that.)--- is your sole means of expanding your cognitive awareness of external reality. It’s the only door you have for getting out of your tiny little egotistical selves. Wake up! “As I just kvetched, I’m too old and too busy now. You’re on notice. It’s entirely your planetary spaceship and your penultimate reality now. I gave you a Garden of Eden which you’ve turned into a Den of Iniquity. You have to take full responsibility. Sink or swim. I probably won’t even notice ... too much on my plate.” Then some clown at the back says, “God, is it true that a trillion years is like a minute to you?” God says, “It’s true.” Guy: “And a billion dollars is like a dime?” God: “Yes, it is.” Guy: “So, God, could I please have just a million dollars?” God: “Sure, just a second.” Next, Marshall McLuhan, the oracle of the electronic age who fully understood how media and technologies are extensions of human faculties; he pops up and paraphrases poet Robert Browning. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor.” (Browning’s line was, “or what’s a heaven for.” ) Marshall chuckled. God looked puzzled. And, ‘poof!’, vanished.

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FOREWORD The foundation of Reality is immaterial --- literally and figuratively. Forewarned is forearmed. What follows is an attempt to explain some things that haven’t happened to us in about twenty-thousand years. At least. We are in an Epochal shift of our conscious view of universal, Ultimate Reality (UL) and our own Penultimate Reality (PR) that exists within the UL like a hologram. And, on a purely physical, geological or cosmic level, we are now completing something that has never been done before: a single, totally dominant species is producing closure on the only planet known to harbor life. That would be Globalization, and the end of the age of space being sold to us by the powers of national security states as the beginning of “The Space Age”. Since we’re about to sail back into uncharted waters, prudence suggests we heed Pascal’s advice: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And Shakespeare’s: “The readiness is all.” So now, forward! Or backward. First, the reader is asked for patience and forbearance. This introduction to an introduction to an introduction, is not just an absurdist conceit; no more so than the notion of a beginning and an end, those inventions of the finite human mind that are predetermined and faulty assumptions. And it’s just as useless to try to start an exposition from the middle. There is no middle either. Increasingly we are beginning to speak of the discovery of new knowledge as being ‘emergent’, arising autonomously from who knows where, as opposed to being causally, sequentially connected to a beginning, a middle and an end. This series of quasi-intros is therefore an attempt to convey the sense and feel of the actual way knowledge is revealed to our individual human minds: from the outside through random entry points, using the three sense systems, mechanical (touch and hearing), chemical (taste and smell) and the electronic eye. Also, up from the body itself, which is composed of the same building blocks (formerly atoms, now quanta!) that our Uni-multiverse itself is made of. This sort of intuitive knowledge is well known in philosophy, and has various handles. But the premise is simply this: how can a self-conscious creature that is made of the very stuff of the reality it occupies not have genuine internal awareness of that reality? One can suppress it, of course, and rely entirely on the reasoning power of the brain. We’re good at that, and even better at using only half our reasoning ability mixed with our irrational side, which we have been doing for the last few self-destructive centuries. In the Western world it has been dogmatically held that intelligence is the ability to make distinctions, to distinguish between things, thoughts or theories. Living in a culture that treats knowledge as being linear, fragmented and specialized is what conditions the brain (even wires it) to think that way, and so logically to see reality that way. But Intuition ‘proves’ it’s definitely not that way. And animal instinct simply denies or ignores it, and so confuses us further. Deduction, or reductionism, is only half our reasoning program. The other half is equally important: Induction. So if deductive intelligence is the ability to make distinctions, then inductive wisdom is the facility to see patterned connections. And we also need Intuition to check the veracity of those connections. (Which may explain in part why in our dumbed-down culture we experience so little wisdom, and make such huge errors.)

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But this is natural. And it’s beginning to shift tectonically, as it does from Epoch to Epoch, our largest duration or context. The inductive mode of knowledge acquisition is returning to preeminence for the first time since the advent of storable grain, for the simple reason that the materialist model of reality conceived back then has been deduced, reduced and subsumed, primarily by science, specifically physics, to almost the irreducible. And the materialist model, like Fibber McGee’s closet, has no more space to store an ocean of new data and inductive observations that threaten to inundate us. Expansive remodeling of the universal psyche has become a necessity. And that means the devaluation of everything we thought we knew about the natural order and our role in it. Simultaneously, as in chrysalis and viral mutation, we will recycle a lot of those deconstructed fragments to construct a new model of reality. Take the clay off the wheel, toss it back in the pot. We’ve hit The Mirror. It’s palindrome time. As we enter the Psychological segue between Epochs, a transition of unimaginable physical danger, the materialist Economic Epoch is approaching closure. This next stage of human evolution will test not only our will and imagination, but the limits of our protean potential, as well. The old definition of human nature, ‘what’ we are, and not ‘who’ we are, will undergo a radical transformation. We either move on or move out. Extinctions are as common in natural history as are new emergent species. But the latter arrive in a whimper, while the former go out with a bang. Like the impenetrable monoliths in “200l: A Space Odyssey”, reality is for the moment portrayed here as a “black box” with several dark windows. In this ‘thought experiment’, we can see only five of the six sides of this opaque cube. So the unseen side may be open, not closed, making it therefore a complete mystery. The five visible sides of our black box represent the five perennial mysteries of existence (Treated here in a Preface and four Previews): 1. Being or existence itself (Why something, not nothing?) 2. Matter 3. Life/Evolution 4. Consciousness, and 5. Sociogenesis. We know almost nothing about No. 5. Peering into the dark windows on each side, all we can see are a series of spiral stairways of different sizes and shapes. They appear to be in motion. This suggests that the deepest mystery of reality is process and not substance. Could it be that the sixth side of the black box is the mystery we are being called upon to complete? Are we free to do that? Or not free not to do it? Are we just pawns of nature as science suggests? (Or just pawns of Science?) Will the belief system that is science lead us into the same dead end as all other belief systems have done? And what will follow? Is it possible to simply believe without believing in something? What does all that mean --- and is it even rational or useful to seek the answers? While the answers to questions like these are rarely what we hope for, they do provide a sense of a larger reality that prepares the mind for Pascal’s chance and change. PREFACE: It’s not what you know. It’s what you know that you don’t know. The first cognitive limitation in human reasoning that must be faced is that we had, and have, only two ways of thinking about reality. We collect and assemble facts and data, a process we call synthesis; then we create a model from that, and then we deconstruct, or

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analyze, the model we made from that assemblage. Human thought has from the start been a carousel of cogitation, going around and around in circles, an over-heard, overlapping conversation between our two cranial hemispheres and their slightly different ‘take’ on experience --- which gives us a possible third imaginary version. So, when we are attempting to deal with any new larger reality, like the Quantum ‘multiverse’, the notion of linear, fragmentary and specialized knowledge is an illusion --- maybe a physically useful one, but a cognitive illusion nonetheless. And as simple as it sounds, ‘circular reasoning’ is the way we go about expanding our physical evolution and cultural habitat. The key is that the circle is never closed, so it’s a cycle, and the cycles go 360 degrees returning to almost exactly where they started, creating deja-vu. But this cycle is a rising, expanding spiral, so repetition is never duplicated. Form is always the same, content is always larger. That other French reference, a mate to deja-vu, is “the more things change the more they remain the same”. Both can be explained as psychological illusions produced by the close vertical proximity of phases or forms in a spiraling cycle while they are also at the maximum horizontal distance in the 360-degree circle. Things can often seem the same, but they never are. They are always, always different. Knowledge, therefore, is at all times confined, but never limited. Repeat: human knowledge is always constrained and contained, incrementally cumulative, but never conclusive, closed or final. (Making theoreticians crazy, if they’re not already.) The tactic of scientific objectification, or going out-of-body, in order to analyze one aspect of reality has both predictive power and absolute limitations. We cannot but continue to be Subjects in the Natural Order; there is no other choice. (Okay, suicide. Maybe.) Science’s idea of a “Theory of Everything” is totally absurd, pure hubris or flagrant rhetoric. If that choice of words is meant to suggest only that we are required to always integrate all new knowledge into any comprehensive models of reality that we construct, that’s fine. But let’s get rid of that used-car salesman pitch. The risk to science is not intellectual failure, it is in becoming too authoritarian and inhuman. There are no shortcuts in the cognitive spiral, no jumping the cyclical track. While this provides us with some predictive insights, meaning that we can project a new Context, it tells us almost nothing about Content, other than a starting point--- Now!---and the next logical sub-contexts that by sequential necessity must follow in the cycle. Our ability to know what we are going to know next is very limited because predicting specific, finite, impulsive human behavior is impossible. Ironically, this means general, longer-range predictions are easier to make and more reliable than specific short-range predictions that involve trillions of individual acts. As an understanding of the basic principles and limits of human thought and behavior, Sociogenesis, is a far more reliable predictor than large scale statistical analysis of current data. So the formula is this: If we do survive, still within the context of our evolution from being chimps in trees, then a logical naturalistic sequence is what must follow. But that can’t tell us whether or not we will survive, being as immediately unpredictable and suicidal as we are, as well as being subject to the vagaries of random astronomical, meteorological, geological and biological events. Nor can we see in any detail relevant to short-lived humanity how, or for how long, this will play out. But so long as we remain addicted to physical progress and short-term predictions (weeks, months and maybe years), we will never experience the reality of the programmed

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evolution that is built into, and seemingly predetermined by, the Natural Order. We will never enjoy the reduction in anxiety and angst that the sages did in accepting and integrating the wonders of the Great Chain of Being. All there is is Is. Existence is devoid of dimension, evades description, and should not be named. It suggests only infinite possibility. And such possibility presents itself only sequentially, piece by piece. Existence precedes and supercedes all else. Now is always everywhere, and everywhere is always now. And it’s always been that way. The pure diamond amber of unending reality is so much more magical and miraculous than the surreality created by those gods that man himself initially created, that “getting it” now reduces all such theological speculation to that of a parlor trick. Believers in a Prime Mover can, axiomatically, only conjure a creator no more complex than their own limited imagination. No wonder they so often rail against God --- (s)he’s always their own invention. (A single God of Gender is the most grotesque misanthropic idea ever.) If your threshold of tolerance for the majestic complexity of reality catapults you back into the atavistic, theological and mystical anxieties concerning first cause and Prime Movers, well, snap out of if! You and we are lone adventurers in our provisional time/space continuum. “It is what it is.” And you can only get a sense of that by contemplation and meditation, not through rote, ritual, medication or formal education. Goethe said ‘action is easy, thinking is hard’. Thinking, in fact, is not hard, but it’s damned long. Intuition is slow to convince reason. And Socrates’ reference to “the unexamined life” did not suggest that a couple of years with a shrink would do the trick. Direct, regular engagement with the mystery of reality is itself reality, is life, is a true education and the authentic expansion of awareness. It’s not taught, and it can’t be learned. It’s all about discovery. (The opening quote is a slight but critical modification of an H.G.Wells quote saying “history is a race between education and disaster”. It’s not. It’s a race between new discovery redeeming old learning and knowledge , thus staving off catastrophe. Education, by definition, is cultural programming. Go back to the early Eric Hoffer quote.) The mind of the individual is accessible only to the individual. Personal intuition makes it opaque from without. Collective consciousness, however, is an open book of shaky information, conjectures, dead hypotheses, shibboleths and lies. There is no intuition in the collective mind, making it a rudderless ship always subject to running aground, which is prevented only by a thin film of legal reasoning that just barely keeps us afloat. Intuition wicks and seeps into society from those rare individuals who can use intuitive knowledge to confirm the sensory intelligence with which it resonates, producing insights that occasionally form a harmonic that others can hear; and that can then lead to a corrective reorganization of human social models and structures. Society can’t exist without individuals. And vice versa. We’re lucky that our Materialist (Economic) Epoch is about to close. It has self-destruction and our extinction written all over it! But for billions of souls, the new chaotic transition will appear to be the promised Apocalypse. The idea itself is engraved in a variety of Revelations going back beyond the Mayan. Under sufficient pressure and doubt it will reboot even in the minds of atheists. Because the next duration, the Artistic Epoch, is still not

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imagined, not visible, and it cannot yet provide alleviation from anxiety and the dark apprehension about the approaching tumultuous future. The real danger therefore comes from those who can only fathom an Armageddon, so they might themselves rationalize bringing it upon us; the old self-fulfilling prophecy. While most humans will probably survive, since the destruction will not be supernaturally driven, it already has the nuclear potential to be catastrophic beyond imagination. At this moment there is not a single piece of empirical evidence that might indicate that our species can survive without first undergoing a horrendous transition, a psychic trauma, and a population implosion. So, metaphorically speaking, God Help Us! To conclude this small reflection on Existence, however, we would be remiss not to remind ourselves that the deepest of mysteries is also the ultimate of realities. The Great Chain of Being is unbroken and inexorable. It is the only thing, other than our own existence, we can be Certain of; it is the only thing we really know for sure. It is the sole, eternal continuity. We’re always filled with certitude, and mistake it for certainty, but it isn’t so. As the wit said about Hollywood, “Nobody knows nothin’.” Western education is almost entirely about supporting and fueling the existing system. Which means you are unlikely to find a chair in philosophy at any university that is occupied by a don who responds to every student rationalization supporting the efficacy of our culture with just one word: “Bullshit!” Nobody, including Socrates, ever got paid for telling people that all the stuff they think they know is just wrong. Yet, we should not be surprised to wake up ‘tomorrow’ and find ourselves ‘made over’ as creatures whose balance of ego competitiveness versus social cooperativeness has been reversed. The flags of Global Patriotism then fly. “One planet, one people, one purpose!” is the cry. Label such a transformation as you wish: the sudden epiphany of the great sleeping masses as to what constitutes genuine survival behavior; a flash flood of cosmic radiation elevating Darwinism out of the flesh and into the mind; or, a program built into The Natural Order, welling up into consciousness. “Man is a rope.”, said Nietzsche. We are the only connection between our past and future. That this does not lead to Utopia we are now fairly sure, indicating that it is almost as likely that it will not lead to a Dystopia. It just leads to more. In the opening sentence of his awesome philosophical opus, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “The world is all that is the case.” Amen. The past and future are in the present. All there is is Is. PREVIEW ONE: MATTER: The snake of physics has swallowed itself. It’s the 2lst Century, and Matter doesn’t matter anymore. An expanded awareness of Existence shifts the paradigm of Matter, making it just another transitional platonic form. As suggested earlier, we are leaving the Materialist Epoch during which we believed that the ground of reality was matter. But when we got to the bottom of that question --- about a

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century ago ! --- we discovered quanta, that bizarre non-material phenomena that undermines and underlies matter entirely, or as the philosophers of science say, ‘quantum theory subsumed classical physics.’ No one yet understands Quantum Theory (oddly, it still only works in practice), but the various supporting mechanics of it prove it to be at least as ‘true’ as thermodynamics and particle physics, and more reliable since it is only concerned with probability, and not human certainty (which, ironically, we have now been forced to admit, has never existed to begin with). In the larger context of Quantum Theory, the new realm which contains our small Universe, there is no space, no time, no gravity --- so about our local physical universe, nothing we believed before is now true. The irony, of course, is now that matter no longer has a prime epistemological position in terms of Meaning, it has become even more critical in Importance. Just as Newton’s laws of motion got us to the moon, but only after they had been obsoleted by Einstein et al, traditional physics will continue to be useful even though only provisional. Our planetary survival depends increasingly on our ability to manipulate matter more effectively and efficiently than ever before. But that’s not science, it is engineering and technology. We have already become Homo ‘technologicus’. (“Sapiens” was a bad idea to begin with. We are not very ‘smart’.) We don’t understand the connection between Existence and Matter, nor for that matter do we understand the connection between Matter and Life, or between Life and Self-consciousness. Having given up on God The Father, the authorities of intelligence now cling desperately to the Big Bang and Uncle Darwin for false comfort and intellectual hegemony, blinding us to the real residence or locus of matter and life, namely human Consciousness. Meaning cannot be found in the Hadron Collider, neurology or genetic totalitarianism. Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, et al, could not have been more explicit about the primacy of matter: it ain’t. In Heisenberg’s words, the endless quest to get to the bottom of the atom, was in their view “useless and meaningless.” (And very expensive.) Even the hardest science doesn’t prove, it only disproves. We live in a quantum multiverse of probability. Move on! Science is fond of using euphemisms such as “causally decoupled” to gloss over their ignorance of those connections. Most everyone, as Monists to some degree, assumes that at a remote level all things are connected. And even if they’re not, we have to make that initial assumption in order to think that we can even begin to make any cognitive progress. Belief in an endlessly open reality completely preempts any temptation to parse or understand it. All thought is thus based on our finite assumption of causality. All is One. Fine. But we can also believe that our universe is populated with other intelligent (?) beings. (Show us their money!) Assumptions are the basis of all belief systems; all of them have been wrong. Awareness expands regardless. It’s an undeniable irony. It’s The Mirror, the eternal palindrome. How inert matter, decaying stuff, gives rise to an inscrutable, self-ordering system of organic dynamism, us, is way beyond human understanding, at least as far as we can imagine. Anyone implying or suggesting that they can, and eventually will be able to, comprehend those connections is pawning off an anthrax-dusted derivative on you. Do not open that envelope! PREVIEW TWO: LIFE & EVOLUTION

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“Remember to honor the self that is dying as well as the self being born.” Okay, open the envelope, please! It will only kill Darwin, who is already dead. Physical, or animal, evolution is simply biological expansion on a craps table. That’s the whole story. “Natural Selection” is a tautology, a palindrome posing as a Theory, attempting to inject some kind of order into a totally random or chance process, as-far-as-we-know (A.F.A.W.K., an acronym that needs far more use because we know so very little.). But theories have never worked in biology. All of them (yes, all!) have failed completely for the simple reason that they cannot predict what’s going to happen. And they do not explain life, they merely describe it by reverse engineering, then trick their inventors into believing that such a description is an explanation. It ain’t. Many evolutionary biologists will admit that if we rewound the evolutionary clock on our planet to the beginning, the chance that things would end up as we now see them, or that we would even be here, might be one in a billion trillion. Any guess that says there are other intelligent beings in our universe is just a guess, no matter who makes it. Theories are valid only in Physics and closely related disciplines because they unerringly predict and precisely explain an orderly decay within the limited laws of thermodynamics. Think of it this way: Because we humans are dynamic organic systems, there is a real separation between us and the mechanical, clockwork universe of entropy. This distancing establishes for us a natural objectivity. We know a lot about the early stage, the behavior and fate of our material universe. We know it’s destined to run down and go into the tank. So now we can project the rate and manner it will do so. Excellent theories then provide us with the means to calculate the orderly decay toward total disorder, or death. Knowing precisely how the world of matter is going to die allows us, paradoxically, to invent ways of keeping our life on it alive until then, a few billion years down the road. (The greater probability is that our descendants will escape both Life and Matter long before then. More later.) And what do we know about the origins of LIFE? Nada, almost. We know it comes out from or through matter, and uses matter as building blocks. We know that once started, random mutation produces expansion both in terms of numbers and variations. And that those in turn influence the survival of the ensuing living things and variations. And on and on, with each roll of the mutating dice, and the changing mutated ecology and habitat. Now all of that is further complicated by the fact that we ourselves are both Agents of Order as well as Ordering Agents. We are both Caused and Causal. This means we are inherently predisposed to favoring order --- everywhere. We can’t keep ourselves from projecting order onto and into chaos, or onto a Creator, with Cause as the reason. We existing humans have four primary traits: 1. Inertia 2. Hope 3. Anthropomorphism 4. Anthropocentrism It is the last two, amplified by the first, that lead us into so many mistakes and regressions. There is no natural “selection”. The first organisms to make selections, as that word is specifically defined, are those capable of making choices after conscious reflection. That be us. So by projecting our assumed selves onto the entire life process, either we are revealing our disbelief in free will and conscious choice, or we are taking ourselves off the hook of cosmic opportunity and responsibility. (Of course, those scientists whose authority and

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careers depend on “finding order” where it doesn’t exist or can’t be found, abet us in our miscalculation.) Make no mistake, science is a better belief system than Religion. The latter offers only prophecy and promise, while good science provides products and prediction. And democratic science, unlike totalitarian religion, is always open to anyone who tries to add, detract or disavow it. (Religion was the caterpillar that became the Science butterfly which has now flown away into cognitive irrelevance.....and greater practical importance.) Modern science, though, has many trappings of traditional religion, from its inception in the sacristy of the church, to its inclination to be dogmatic about its most recent theories or findings, to its canonization of saints like Newton, Einstein, and presently, the endless sanctification of the Holy Darwin. It may sound strange to say that science is a natural continuation and extension of religion, yet together they form the spiritual and intellectual architecture, the cognitive technologies supporting the Epoch of the Seed, the materialist timescape. As many other scientists have said, Evolution is not a Theory. It is a FACT! And Darwin, speaking for a whole line of earlier investigators, was elected to make the closing argument for it. But his subsequent elevation in the 20th Century has heavy political, ideological, economic and philosophical implications in our cognitive world, the principal one being authority-mongering, based on the underlying inability of the materialistically-minded to accept a reality that has neither beginning nor end, which is a form of denial, most ironically, of the platform or premise for the awareness of anything at all. In effect, all that we commonly refer to as ‘knowledge’, therefore, is based on a profound philosophical denial of the primacy of existence. This is Cosmic Comedy. What can we take away from all this? Well, first, that Life is not nearly as meaningful as we’ve been conditioned to believe, principally by the authorities of powerful nation-states who historically have coveted for themselves the right to mass murder. And what kind of cockamamie explanation can anyone conceive of in defense of a world population of seven, going to nine, billion people on one little shrinking planet? Not to see this as the closest thing to an absolute disaster, life killing itself by defending its license to mindlessly reproduce, has got to be the greatest self-deception in our species’ existence. (Who in hell decided that Thomas Malthus was wrong?) Life isn’t precious; it’s perilous, precipitate and pernicious. Blame God, blame Darwin, blame voodoo. Just don’t blame us. Life, like matter, now takes on new Importance as it loses Meaning. It is important because it is the platform, the catalyst, for Self-awareness. Natural selection, like all the other dead Theories in the history of biology, makes great sense and logic --- not in science, but in sociogenic development. All theories in biology are ‘misplaced intuitions’, anthropomorphic projections, that become revelatory only when transferred onto and back into sociogenesis. See Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, and Lamarck’s acquired characteristics theory --- two classic mis-readings of The Mirror. Evolution takes place in the consciousness of individuals and societies of “Homo mensural” (the ‘Measurers’). What happens in all other life forms is chance biological expansion and variation, and survival or extinction. Or, from an even more disinterested perspective, the most brutally vicious competition imaginable; that is, other than gangster capitalism. That great old illustration of dogs sitting around a table playing poker is a perfect representation of all other organic life forms, Wall St. included. This, by the way, does not elevate humanity. It simply puts more heat on us.

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PREVIEW THREE: AUTONOMOUS SELF-AWARENESS Eden simply means we came out of the closet. The modern addiction of trying to pseudo-scientifically demonstrate how other animals are like us, or we are like them, needs to go to rehab. If it were only about organic and physiological issues that would be fine. We can learn valuable anatomical and medical knowledge from reverse engineering. But let’s make it clear --- Homo spiritus is the sole species that evolved to independently develop self-awareness. This is not a hypothesis or a theory. It’s another blatant, obvious FACT! That some animals can be conditioned to emulate self-recognition only indicates how natural and logical that evolutionary process is, and has been! If we hadn’t come along, maybe other primates, whales, porpoises or parrots might have eventually assumed the mantle. But the profound fact remains, we are the only animals ever to realize self-awareness on our own ---after millions of years of biological expansion. We ‘invented’ it! To ignore that mega-physical truth is insane, or worse --- cowardly. For evolutionary theorists in any discipline to project self-aware intelligence onto other species is simple hegemony, the expansion of their own authority into cognitive territory already occupied by native intelligence. Good old American Manifest Destiny. Self-induced self-awareness (and consequent assumption) is the prerequisite for thinking itself. A complex animal brain may be able to perform feats of imitation and elaborate rote behavioral patterns, often better than we can!, but that is NOT thinking. It just isn’t. It’s just amazing neurological dexterity, undisturbed and uninterrupted by human ego and faulty emotional reasoning. It’s a hard-wired extension of instinct, not an indication of fluid thought. If all those neo-Darwinist researchers would spend half as much time contrasting how animals are different from us, and we different from them, we’d all see a different reality. But they’re stuck on their shallow, self-serving agenda, which in turn helps us quell our existential anxiety by reducing us, in public but not in private, to being simple, lonely, irresponsible animals. It’s the perfect recipe for prolonged self-indulgence. And self-extinction. If we are ever to become adults, we have to quit cold-turkey this habit of desperately searching the planet and the universe for companionship, for anything, even a pet, to keep us from the anxiety of cosmic existential loneliness, just as we must also resist the urge to dump the responsibility for existence onto some other invented conscious creatures. We’re isolated and marooned, lost in the stars ---but in a playground of infinite, majestic beauty and complexity. Snap into it! What we need now is each other. Our species used to be more intimate and cooperative back thousands of years ago in the hunter/gatherer epoch than we are today. We’re right on the edge of throwing nuclear bombs around. We’ve reincarnated Hell. Can we find a way out? There are many books about Consciousness now available, including too many from a neo-Darwinist perspective, that hold to the idea that the meaty brain is the mind --- it’s all about electro-chemical neural circuitry that evolved naturally. Others employ a newer idiom to rehash the old Mind/Body conflict. A few even go the other way and view independent Mind as the purpose of existence. Whatever.

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The concept for this essay, however, is simply that the evolution from simple (and totally mysterious) ordinary animal awareness to the kind of institutionalized self-awareness of our species, represents a total break with biological expansion, misnamed ‘evolution’. And, that the Mind is an autonomous phenomenon whose ultimate purpose, while yet unknown, is as much a part of the Natural Order as Matter and Life. Self-awareness is not the sin it was made out to be in the Eden myth, or the accident of Darwinism, or something to be discovered inside brain cells (like taking apart a TV set to search for the picture inside), or some other freak aberration. Mind is autonomous. It is meant to be. Or it wouldn’t be. Looking for the mind in the brain is cuckoo. It is rational and reasonable, our most practical tools, to think that matter is the ground for life, and life the foundation for complex brains, and that brains are the platform for minds. (And also that independent minds are required to acknowledge Existence.) Now we’re trying to figure out, using those minds, what else those minds might be for. It’s a great challenge and an exciting adventure. And the philosophical fact that it is an unending process takes some of the sting out of death. Death isn’t so terrible. It is non-existence that is so insanely horrific. We’ll go deeper into this later. But now it is time to shift to the core, essential subject of this inquiry: Sociogenesis. Sociogenesis is not about external reality. It’s about internal reality. It’s the ongoing saga of the natural, logical evolution of our thinking process, both collective and individual and how they are directly related. It is the reason for our economic, social and political failures and successes. PREVIEW FOUR: SOCIOGENESIS We’re all inmates. And there is no warden. The term may be a neologism, but the concept is as old as the hills. Sociogenesis is the surface pattern of the cycles of human thought as they emerge from the subconscious, rise to the amorphous spiritual, then evolve to the symbolic artistic, and finally crystallize in explicit intellectual articulation. The two programs, individual and collective, are as tightly connected as gears in a clock, thus favoring the view of reality as being more mechanical than organic. We alternate between those models from time to time, emphasizing either Induction, organic, or Deduction, mechanical. Each new duration, from the largest to the smallest (Epoch, Era, Age, Period or Time), opens with Induction, or a collection of observations, new knowledge which is synthesized into a model, which is then followed by Deduction, a reductive analysis of the model constructed from that initial induction period. We do not build our social models based on reality, but ONLY ON WHAT WE GUESS REALITY TO BE. Which, of course, is always incorrect --- and progressive. Consider the probability of any of us ‘guessing’ correctly what reality is? That would be the same as the odds --- a billion trillion to one --- against our just being here! It should surprise no one that all social organizations are created by the individuals therein. Where else could they originate --- from gremlins? And it’s as obvious as rain that all individuals are first created by the social values, mores, thinking and ideas they were born into. It takes decades to get out from under that pile of bullroar. Thus, the paradox: we are not ourselves, individually, yet we are self-invented, collectively.

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Those renegade individuals who then transcend their own cultural context are the visionaries who do eventually become themselves, and eventually reveal societies in decay or emergence. Even with that, however, few human beings have ever cast a shadow over any major social duration longer than several lifetimes, or an Era. And no single human has ever influenced that long evolutionary, anthropological period we here call an Epoch. By definition, an Epoch can only incarnate from the collective subconscious, as with the Material (Economic) Epoch, whose demise the world, hopefully, is now just beginning to witness. Nor should anyone be shocked that we causal agents are the cause of our societies, or that all societies should first conceal, then later reveal on close scrutiny, an ordered structure that reflects, actually mirrors, our ordering, individual, causal minds. Social evolution is a rising, expanding cycle, a spiral ever repeating the pattern of itself, each time with new intelligence and knowledge. We still can’t see what we’ve done until it’s done. Then it somehow seems we knew it all the time. G. Vico, the Italian philosopher, who was three centuries ahead of his time (Imagine how lonely he was!), urged us way back then to examine what we did, and do, in the context of what we are capable of thinking. The world that we create, he insisted, reflected the world in our limited heads. Back when ‘science’ literally meant knowledge in general , he wrote “Scienza Nouva” (New Knowledge), outlining a four-part cycle of history: Theocratic, Autocratic, Democratic (gods, heroes, mankind) and Chaos, and then repeated in the next larger circle in the spiral. He saw it in an historical context, but not an anthropological one, or the even larger dimensions of consciousness evolution. By necessity, Vico’s vision was predicated on only the knowledge existing in the pre-Darwin, earth-centered universe of the l6th-17th Century. The role of religion was therefore over-emphasized. He could not have known of the next larger anthropological context, that the humanity living between the second or Spiritual Epoch that began with Domestication of Fire, and the third, that of The Seed, or storable grain, having no need to invent a connection with a creator, therefore had no need yet of Religion. That need arose with the materialist-Economic-Seed Epoch, which naturally detached humanity from its earlier direct spiritual realization of existence, thus creating a longing to reconnect. (Imagine how lonely they were!) After Hegel and Marx and many earlier proponents, the cyclical theories of history died off, and man’s destiny was sadly deemed to be found only in biology and genetics. But now all that is over as well. We live in a Multiverse or Megaverse (etc.), and our new penultimate reality (PR) is the expanded context of our existence. No more certainties; all the rules are changed. Now it’s only about Probabilities. And that’s for sure. The irony, of course, is that’s the way it’s always been. Newton was right only until he wasn’t. Then he was retroactively never right at all! All knowledge that is preempted by new knowledge means it was never correct from the get-go. Peering through a telescope or microscope at the realms of Matter & Causation is tantamount to studying a receding past, a past that is accelerating and moving away from us; going in the wrong direction to be cognitively useful! All our certainties, all our beliefs, going back to the beginning, have been nothing but an illusion or delusion; important and useful at the time, back then --- but also from that moment, totally incorrect. Poe wasn’t so nutty. He wrote: “All that we see, or seem, is but a dream within a dream.” But that’s what human discovery is always about. Our story is written by us with a pencil; one that has an eraser on the other end.

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Now the cyclical pattern formed by that pencil, collectively and individually, from the start of the third Epoch (Economic/agrarian) some 20-30 thousand years ago (No one knows! All we endlessly keep finding is earlier evidence) reveals a clear, logical expansion of a psychic/spiritual idea, that of man’s relationship to a prime creative force, the Ultimate Ordering Agency. Despite the fact that religion is now patently on the wane, and agnostics and atheists are on the rise, the old encompassing context (third Epoch) insures that this cosmic cycle, with four increasingly shorter Epochs still to come, will play itself out for centuries or a millennia or two, in a glacially deterministic way. This is not a prediction, but simply a de facto projection of forces surfacing too slowly for the collective consciousness to detect, integrate and counter. Freedom is riddled with determinism. After that, not a clue, because Consciousness by then may have transcended biology, or for that matter, even matter itself. If you find such speculation as this last projection to be specious, you are deficient in your awe of existing reality, and not as daring as many physicists and cosmologists who have already projected a post-biological reality that is not based on superstition or hunch, but on informed, but not necessarily correct, reason. We cannot be concerned, however, with what is Possible (anything!) or what is Certain (nothing!) in this overwhelming reality. Quanta has pushed us into the realm of The Probable. It’s already taken a century for the few to acknowledge it. Meanwhile the vast majority are still adjusting to, and lusting for, the fading, causal Materialist Epoch. Which brings up a serious matter, one overlooked for millennia: the importance of the role played by the gullible, the ignorant and the credulous. Most thinkers dismiss denial, stupidity, hatred, revenge and violence as some sort of evil or cosmic aberration. Why not consider it part of the natural order; the down-side of inertia, the immovable object pitted against the irresistible force of progress. It’s just natural decay. Where would we be without it? In a never-ending avalanche of social chaos. One that must come crashing to an end in fairly short order. What would biological life itself look like if it were not for its millions of enemies, inhibitors and impediments? Answer: a fifty-foot deep blob of uniform protoplasm covering the entire planet. Even the complex immune system of modern man is attributed to millions of years of doing battle with mutating microbes that are now actually entombed in our double helix, long skeletal strands which researchers for years thought were just our own mysterious “junk” genes. We are, in fact, walking cemeteries of our genetic evolution. “The past,” said Faulkner, “is never over. It’s not even past.” Surely not in our genes, nor in our sociogenesis. The Present is simply the leading edge of our Past, pushing us into the never quite arriving Future. The present never really exists because it goes by and is gone even before the brain can process the letter ‘n’, as in ‘now’. (Axiom: either it’s always Now, or it’s never Now.) Why would anyone think that the man-made world before us is anything but a creation of our own minds, crazy and sane? Even the human brain itself is a creation of our minds. If science is still your authority-god then you should believe the neurologists who now concede that the ‘hard wiring’ of the brain is shaped significantly by external input, as well as the thinking of the mind itself. Our thoughts actually rewire our brains! You are what you think! The world is what we’ve been consciously thinking. So the question is: what have we been thinking---sub-rosa? Surely, the most imminent mystery before us is the total record of our own actions. The pattern of our universal behavior is a far more revealing record of our underlying thought processes than either our expressed intentions or beliefs, or our provincial historical interpretations of local conflicts. Those are rationalizations at best, and mainly delusional and egotistically motivated.

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As Vico said, all the rest of reality is God’s doing, or, as we might now say, the program of the natural order, or better yet, the endless mystery in the Chain of Being. There are three roadblocks that now prevent us from beginning to solve our own human mystery. First, we don’t want to know, because it might force us to admit we’ve always been incorrect (which is true), which could cause a cataclysmic species depression. In the face of other humungous global problems this would result in a complete loss of hope. Second, we moderns are so conditioned to requiring tangible, measurable evidence, the type science seeks, that any proposition that isn’t first presented as having a factual material basis cannot be considered as real. Which feedbacks nicely into, and reinforces the first denial. Third, physics and biology relentlessly reinforce the second by insisting that the answers to the big questions ---Where are we? And, What are we? --- are to be found only in sub-atomic particles and DNA, two ideas that have already been proven to be indisputably false! And that spells, I-n-e-r-t-i-a! We live today in the context of an exponentially ‘larger’ quantum multiverse in which matter and ‘evolution’ cannot possibly be seminal or fundamental issues. Those ideas have long since been subsumed! The snake of infinity has already swallowed that part of its body. And yet, just a moment’s reflection about our origins and development will produce a startlingly simple truth: there can be only one narrative behind our emergence on this planet. And it cannot be a novel or any other work of fiction. Reality is no metaphor, analogy, myth or fable. It is unequivocally, unalterably and singularly real! Scores of societies have historically produced equally as many creationist myths. All wrong! Yet that didn’t stop us from adopting a new belief system, science, in the faith that we could find the single, inevitable narrative and an answer to our condition ---until some better explanation comes along, always their caveat. By integrating quantum reality into our thinking we are taking a gigantic step forward, distancing ourselves from older thinking, and broadening the context of our existence, as well as shrinking our global history into a more manageable mystery. It allows us to more clearly separate the even more mysterious, Ultimate Reality(UR) from our tiny little PR, which itself becomes relatively much larger than any of the realities we used to believe we inhabited. In absolute terms, of course, the relationship between UR and PR remains fixed. It is only consciousness (only!?) that has expanded. It’s that old deja-vu again, the sense of repetition inherent in the reiteration of cyclical development. The belief that there is a pattern or order to the process by which we have created this human world arises from a deep subconscious intuition that, being what we are -- agents of order and ordering agents -- it is logically impossible for us to have done it any other way! Sometimes a tautological answer is the only way to dismiss a lot of extraneous horseshit. A cul-de-sac is a mirror, signifying only this: such an inquiry ends here! Time to move on. When a human infant soul lands on the planet the first thing it does is, a.) Feel, even before it’s born. Then, b.) It acts reflexively in response to the feeling. Next, c.) It Thinks about what transpired. Then, d.) It judges the choice it made against other possible options. (Because it did all that without words doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.) FEELING, ACTING, THINKING and JUDGING are the four cosmic activities directly engaged in by all captive conscious agents. In infants up to pre-adolescence, that is the set sequence. Then that program is reiterated in the context of a new Artistic - Economic- Spiritual environment, ‘the world’, as opposed to

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the narrow primal environment it had initially adjusted to. It utilizes those same four operations in order to conform to, and try to influence, that new adult world. No single operation occurs in isolation, but only one at any time is dominant in the context of the others. (And all socialization sacrifices Feeling to some degree in the service of collective Action (social and economic), Such conformity desensitizes and blunts intuition, leading to greater conformity. The pattern in individual evolution is the sequence by which those operations play a dominant role. (The mystery of how an infant learns language indicates that thinking and judging start so early in life, so deeply in the dim recesses of awareness, that there is no way to trace it; certainly not with a brain scan.) The pattern of development of all collectives --- societies, empires, cultures and civilizations--- is exactly the same as that for individuals. Only in reverse! It’s The Mirror-effect, the seminal technology. It is reflection and reversal. Every new social organization is a re-organization, a Phoenix arising out of the detritus of a decayed social order, whose creationist myth and resultant value system deteriorated and failed under the pressure of new experience, new knowledge and the kind of human corruption that invariably follows as a reaction to natural social decay. (Sound familiar?) The irony here is that the reflexive intention of human corruption is implemented on one level as a way to preserve and extend those old values and beliefs, while on another level such corruption actually accelerates and amplifies the natural decay of the system! (But it could be that the natural order has it designed this way so that the pain of transition not be prolonged. Or we’d kill ourselves first. Also, if you want to turn a lion into a lamb, or vice versa, better work fast before the anesthetic wears off! Grrr!) The Mirror is our seminal technology, literally. The prerequisite of Self-consciousness is reflection, a reversal in thought, and the hologram suspended between our two cerebral hemispheres. It is the myth of Narcissus rationally incarnated. This is not metaphysics. It is mega-physics. This is reality. The Mirror, in fact, is the metaphor that comes closest to symbolizing Existence itself: just endless possibility. A society or civilization is nothing more than a collection of people. It is something slightly different, but it cannot be more, because it is composed exclusively of humans. It is a system of organization that, to reiterate, reflects the exact reversal of individual evolution: (p) p.i.s.a.e.s. It begins where individual evolution ends, with Spiritual conjecture. Then it goes through logically interrelated phases: Economic, Artistic, Social, Intellectual and Political, then the (Psychological) transition to a renewed Spiritual collective awareness. It is a clear pattern and order. It is the reverse of individual maturation (Feeling, Action, Thought, and Judgment; then repeated as Intention, Purpose and Will.) Thus the acronym for the collective order of consciousness evolution: (P) S.E.A.S.I.P (P), and repeated. What transforms this social circle into a cycle is the emergence of a new transforming Technology: The Mirror (self-awareness) is seminal, followed by the pivotal technologies: The Flame (fire), The Seed (agriculture), and now The Brain (quantum computation), the first step in the human phase-shift from the biological to the electronic. Each new pivotal Technology takes us to an exponentially expanded sense of reality, requiring a new mode of thought: Inductive to Deductive to Inductive to Deductive etc. Each pivotal tool changes the way we experience Ultimate Reality: starting with our being (P)Under Nature, that tortuously long dawning of consciousness in an alien world; then (Spiritual) back In Nature, the quelling of anxiety brought about by our domestication of fire and natural supremacy; then (E) Over Nature (our Edenist illusion of private property in this Economic Epoch); then (A) back Into Nature, (our next Artistic Epoch).

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(NOTE: Because the word ‘nature’ is so tainted, so limited by its association with just life forms, and the traditional usage of ‘Mother Nature’ and ‘Father God’, the preferred term for the whole of reality is ‘the natural order’, and for epistemological organization we divide that into Ultimate Reality; and humanity’s limited understanding of that, or, Penultimate Reality. UR ad PR. The former doesn’t change; the latter keeps growing.) (While we’re at it, a reminder that the term ‘spiritual’ almost always refers to the idea of non-material forms, and not to a religious or mystical association.) All technologies, ala Marshall McLuhan, are extensions of the human body, which is a neat space-manipulating machine to begin with, given the burden of gravity. And those recent inventions of the past few millennia that modern man thinks are so important? Well, they’re just not. The alphabet, written language, printing press, light bulb, electricity, internal combustion, telephone, radio, TV, flight, space travel, nuclear power, etc., etc. --- all belong to the material Epoch, The Seed. All belong in and to the ‘space age’ of Homo mensural, the measuring man. They are very significant in an historical context, but being totally contained in this one mega-anthropological epoch they are cognitively irrelevant in the larger evolving context. All those miraculous inventions are but extensions that amplify and reinforce the original idea that arose with The Seed, storable grain, the materialist epoch --- that is: Realty is Reality; ground is the ground of existence. So they all are secondary technologies because, while they are greatly expansive of our physical habitat and life ‘style’, they are not cognitively pivotal, and so not transformative of deep human consciousness. The most recent technologies, in fact, can also be read as addictive distractions, forms of anesthesia, lulling us to sleep while a new pivotal technology creeps up and into us, a transformative metamorphosis occurring below Huxley’s threshold of awareness. It is not until we reached Computation, not until we actually began to extend our brain into an electro-mechanical ‘brain’, one so much faster and unerring than our meatheads, that some began to understand that matter was not the matter. It was, and is, quanta. And despite the fact that no one really understands what that is --- even Einstein, a co-discoverer, hated it ---just its minimalist meaning is conclusive proof that the Economic (materialist) Epoch has reached completion, or closure. Whatever our new total enveloping agency is, it certainly is not based on atoms and particles. We’re still only in stage one of this overall process. All the popular electronic gadgets based on fifth or sixth generation solid state microcircuits are just the start; they’re toys used for games, gossip and sex. They make people feel like they’re in the Space Age while covertly immunizing them from the paranoia concerning computers, thus preparing us all by mesmerization to tolerate the Computer Age ---the Artistic Epoch. We can hide from one another still, but we will eventually be cajoled into willingly revealing our secrets to the computer. Individualism and autonomy will not disappear, just morph and maybe even intensify. We are already well into the irreversible process of transforming ourselves from a gigantic anthill into single organism with fewer and fewer heads. If you follow this you can see that we’re at the end of “The Space Age”, not the beginning. Space became a dominant abstract concept, a virtual reality, with the ‘invention’ of The Seed. In the two epochs before farming, real space was such a complete, totally embracing reality that it could not have been conceived of in the abstract as a separate idea or an autonomous entity. Meaning, it could not be ‘thought’ of at all.

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We physically evolved here as spacemen. Think about it, could anyone design a better machine for space manipulation and control than the human body?: excellent 3-D vision, stereo hearing, two long appendages with very dexterous digital fingers, erect posture enhancing perspective, all on two, long mobile fast legs --- and a good set of teeth that could eat most anything. Only Rube Goldberg could build a better robot. Not! Space arose to consciousness first with the idea of ‘place’. As nomadic hunter/gatherers migrating out from the eternal summer of Africa we had to develop ‘food trails’ to be at the right place at the prime time to gather and hunt. Our calendar and therefore our agendas were pictures of places in memory that could be recalled even when they were on the opposite side of the schedule. Place is the original abstraction of Space. What followed were territorial rights, then fixed plots of agricultural land ---in short, Private Property, that maniacal idea, like religion, that has resulted in the murder of hundreds of millions of trespassers for thousands of years, turning farmlands into bloody cemeteries. But now, Globalization ends all that because it freezes into a gridlock all the spaces on the planet. There is no space left between the places. No frontiers. We’ve run out of jigsaw pieces; they’re all locked in place. When everybody owns everything, then nobody owns anything. The race for more arises from the sense that you don’t even own what you own; filling a tank with a hole in the bottom. Monopoly money, junk mortgages. All the trillions in 3-card Monty derivatives. Back to early hunter/gatherer days ---in cars. At this point the idea of space can only be extended into outer ‘space’. We are thus lured into the belief that escaping our impoverished imaginations means dressing up like idiots, climbing into huge tin cans, setting off several tons of high explosive, and blasting ourselves to some alien, barren body that likely will make the Gobi desert feel like Eden. The transport of l70-pound bodies across multi-light year space is just propaganda that the U.S and USSR started in their Cold War. Rockets were developed to deliver bombs; space ships to deliver false promises. Those mutual enemies had to offer a token of promise to a world they were holding hostage under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Let’s at least give them credit for not knowing what they were doing. Space travel never made any sense cosmologically, physically or philosophically. Have you forgotten?, a light year is travel at l86,000 miles per SECOND for a YEAR. Today’s trip to Mars takes eight months. Are you getting 30 miles on a gallon of gas? We’ll soon have trouble getting past the satellite rubble we’ve already put into those superhighway orbits right over our own heads; we’re locking ourselves in. And then we would still have to sneak past a galactic bombardment of space rocks in the Khyber Belt just to get out of the solar system. It’s all just science friction. Also, astronomers tell us that all stars and galaxies are moving away from all others at increasing speed, and at some point when we look up into the darkest night sky we will see--- nothing! Eventually everything will be so far away from everything else that nothing will be visible even with the ‘latest’ technologies. To boot, quantum theory makes physical space non-existent on the macro level, making it surreal on our human level. Now, with no real space left here, the concept of space has been reduced to a double abstraction. This leaves the nation-state with only one good purpose: to smooth the transition to a time when “all politics are global”. (But since most politicians are public neurotics, pathological power-mongers, don’t expect that to happen very soon. Sociogenesis is usually almost geologically slow. Inertia.) What’s amazing about all this is how much influence one small institution, like NASA, can have over an entire population. Another older example is Detroit. Remember? After WWII, G.M., Ford and Chrysler decided that American lifestyle and infrastructure should be

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centered around the auto. So they bought and bludgeoned Congress and the Eisenhower administration into building roads and an Interstate highway system to handle the millions of cars they were about to dump on us. The option to that, a transportation network similar to that of Western Europe, with an extensive network of public rail, air, local bus and subways, could have been built instead. But Detroit got to dictate what kind of society we would be for most of the next century ---hamsters on 4-wheel treadmills thinking of themselves as kings in their own royal carriages--- making us dependent on foreign oil, fostering urban sprawls, and polluting our air, etc. All the result of a ruinously expensive Free Market!---an economic metastasis, capitalism run amok. And just look at Detroit today. Equally revealing, all this social engineering, these promises of futuristic glory and progress being made by corporate conglomerates, big science and technology, and grunting politicians, all in their own self-interest, appeal to the same human inertia referred to earlier: unlimited progress without real change; an impossible paradox. “Yes, you can have your cake and eat it. If you’ll just take orders from us experts.” To see the future as only an extension of the present is both the cause and effect of human inertia. It is stupidity, the definition of which is willful ignorance. The instincts of the many, their need for more and more, will only recede when all those left in the world have the necessities. Only then can the collective consciousness come to the realization that there are alternate paths into reality other than exponential, unending increases in consumption, multiplied by near-geometric increases in population. It is the first big lesson to be learned from Globalization. This finite planet has reached closure --- is permanently, forever CLOSED! The second lesson will be the realization that electronic computation (quantum level) will be the extension of that part of the human brain, the autonomic nervous system, that will free us from the frustration and guilt of our being incapable of piloting and stewarding Space Ship Earth. We are not adults, or evolved enough to be in command. Near-future computers, multi-redundant, will be as capable of assuming the world’s functions as our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems play in the pre-programmed management of our individual biological systems (just imagine us without them!), first for the whole earth --- and then our solar system, etc. The monitoring and maintenance of our planet is no big problem IF we can extricate human ego, emotion and animal instinct from the program. This is where all the inertia is. Our intentions are good, almost always, even if only because they make us feel good. But then any reasonable plan we create has its implementation preempted by those same three sources of human irrationality, wasting all our good intentions --- and valuable survival time. Swift, unerring judgment on complex physical global matters is becoming increasingly critical. And deep down we know collectively we’re incapable of filling that need. (Almost no one wants war, either. Yet we can’t stop killing each other.) Unlike us, computers have no natural bias, no self-interest. They perform only the functions they are programmed to perform, at increasingly high speed and accuracy. We are nowhere near able to program machines to ‘think’ as intuitively and creatively as we do, if for no other reason than that we ourselves have as yet no idea how we do it! That’s what this investigation is largely about. The paranoid reaction that Big Brother lurks in The Machine is utter nonsense, mystical horse-puckie. When did you start believing that a slave could create its own master? (Oh yeah, God!) But if we ever become slaves to computers, it’ll be because, as with money, sex, drugs, celebrity and crap computer gadgets, we will have willed to succumb, or willed to not prevent it; the coward’s form of suicide.

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The computer’s great power (our invention), complimenting our own brain power, is that it has no ego. It is not self-aware. That’s why it is the really long-range answer to becoming the central control processor and bio-electro-mechanical regulator of our weather, climate, resource supply, economy, energy, food, water and global habitat --- in the same way that our autonomic system automatically controls our own insanely complex bio-system. ( Remember when you go to sleep tonight, there is a little man in your brain who stays awake making sure your heart keeps pumping and you keep breathing. He also, lucky for us, has no ego.) Jesus Christ!, of course computers should ‘run’ the world! Or are we so thunderously stupid, blind and insensitive that we can’t see how moronically inept our species has been in failing to recognize it, even just as an issue? And we can’t rely on science alone either. Remember, some of these guys were at Alamogordo the day we tested the first atom bomb, wondering if that chain reaction would set fire to the planet’s entire atmosphere! Now there’s a case of supreme objectivity for you. “Operation a success; patient died.”... along with all the world’s innocent observers! Or, more recently, a bunch of unemployed physicists/mathematicians, from the holy halls of MIT/Cal Tech/etc., lured onto Wall Street, where they were nicknamed ‘quants’, short for ‘quantitative analysts’, to use sophisticated algorithms to derive monopoly money and fleece the entire planet; according to TV’s “Frontline” to the tune of more than $500 TRILLION –that’s trillion, as in a thousand BILLION, probably more than the total cost of all the wars fought in human history, with enough left over to get a Starbuck’s Latte Grande. You want some numbers? A million seconds is 11-plus days; a billion about 33 years; a trillion seconds is 33,000 years. Going back, just a tiny little trillion seconds takes us to a time when only hunter/gatherers roamed the planet. And the dollar value of all the derivative contracts now out, if turned into seconds on a geologic clock, would find our ancestors swinging in trees, If you thought there was a huge downside risk to science (don’t forget the H-Bomb), wait until you realize what mathematicians and economists have already done to us: they have literally invented a “Fail-Safe” reality which we are now forced to accept. This is a numerical system extended beyond human comprehension, including their own, but one in which they have deep faith, not in the numbers, but in the process itself, which, axiomatically anoints them as the world’s leading authority on EVERYTHING. It wasn’t enough that they had created institutions “too big to fail”, meaning too big to be ‘allowed to fail’ for those in control of most of the wealth. They had to raise the ante to a mathematical system that in itself was inherently fail-proof....because no one could possibly understand it. It’s a leap of faith that once initiated cannot be reversed. Strangely enough it is now only ‘the meek’, whose intuitive strength is not paralyzed by knowledge, that can save us. Only they can sense that in putting lipstick on the Pig of Infinity and Eternity does not alter its piggishness. But it’ll be a long transition. The simple fact that not one of us, or even ten million of us, can change the world --- (and please don’t fall for that Orwellian propagandistic bullshit, like “Your vote counts!” “You can make a difference!” “Dream your way out of the ghetto.” “Be all you can be! (In the Army?!)) ---the simple truth of one’s total irrelevance should not prevent anyone from the life-long inquiry into how it is that collectively, all of us have decided together on the kind of world we now inhabit. It’s no dark mystery. It’s actually easy to understand, but bloody hard to take. The simple banality of it all is almost unbearable. In the West, we all inhabit the same context. We restlessly squirm in a Political Time, in a Political Period, in a Political Age at the end of the Political Era, cycles within the fading

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ring-cycle of our gasping Economic Epoch. We’re in a hyperactive century of an overactive Era; one that is now only about money that is rapidly degrading. Abandon the dollar, liquidate your gold. Save your stuff for bartering. In these dwindling contexts within contexts, as some await anxiously and unknowingly an approaching, totally-enveloping new paradigm, there is but one way for anyone to duck the confusion, chaos, stupidity and violence of this unprecedented species transition, other than denial and a wasted life: jump out and dive IN! The mind is an unexplored dimensionless universe, a parallel realm to reality, the sole refuge from the cataclysmic spiritual vulgarity and brutal chaos of the present collaboration of scardycats, power freaks and fear-mongers. There are no answers OUT there, only the two forces of inertia being wielded by 6.8 thousand, million blind souls. Participation in either form of inertia only leads to cooptation. On this public level, one can now only unintentionally foster wrong answers, wrong questions or both. Fifty years ago Tim Leary urged that generation to “...drop out.” Now, it’s “Disengage!” Detach from the narcosis of political spectatorship. Just think, all the energy you spend that is not directed toward your own deeper self-awareness is automatically drained into amplifying and complicating the very problems you despise. You may think you’re free, but why are you wearing a harness? Who and what do you think is fueling all the capitalist gangsters and crazy politicians in the world? We can change the world by not trying to change the world. But we ourselves can change by trying to find answers to the two most enduring personal questions: Where am I? And, What am I? And that’s what this sociogenesis is all about. We can’t know Where we’re going until we know Where we are, and we can’t know that until we know Where we came from. Only then can we know What we are. Only then can we open a genuinely new chapter on our journey. Be ones-elf. And start all over again. METAMORPHOSIS.....OR METASTASIS? Gregor Samsa woke in the morning to find himself transformed into a beetle. Ever since Galileo we’ve had a pretty fair idea of our location, where we are. The telescope/microscope and their improvements gave us an increasingly detailed description of our place in the universe. Then Hubble and other astronomers gave us a beginning with the Big Bang. When someone asked the eminent Stephen Hawking what came before the Big Bang, he whispered with a wry smile, “God?” What went unnoticed, however, was that Quantum Theory had already been verified by its mechanics, and though not understood, even by the equally eminent Richard Feynman, what it said in a booming voice from Heaven, in a plagiarism of Gertrude Stein: “There is no There there!” And that’s only because there is no Here here. So the question ‘where?’ is nowhere, man. All of reality, the whole shebang along with the Big Bang is simply a whole-a-gram, suspended in a...well, sort of void, or more like an infinite energy field of coded intelligence in which everything, to Einstein’s dismay, is happening all at once, or everything is just Is. That lovely quantum term, ‘simultaneity’. (While the mind is tempted here to reiterate theism --- ‘we are but atoms in the mind of God’--- we should remind ourselves that regression has as many paths going backward as we have to go forward; a mental colonic is the prescription in such cases.)

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So, we still don’t know where we are, but at least we know where we aren’t. And if it’s any consolation, we can always think of ourselves as being ‘here’. The only place there is. Wittgenstein might just as easily have said, “Here is all that is the case.” Or, here is now is here. Or now is always everywhere. And everywhere is always now. And so it has always been. A newborn is incapable of asking the question, “Where am I?” But can anyone doubt that this issue, along with feeling good or calm, is principally what is on its mind? It’s entire chance of survival is predicated on it being able to identify its context and its location within that context. At the other end of the spectrum can any soon-to-die not ask the question, What am I? Where and what are we? is the two-fold question that frames human existence . The first part now seems resolved, or more precisely, dissolved. How about the second? Do we have a final or even a satisfactory answer? And where should we look for one? If you had to select one century which most accurately defines Homo sapiens, and reflects what we humans really are, the 20th Century might be the last place you’d want to look. Unless, that is, you can be satisfied with the obvious answer: we are mad monomaniacal murderous monsters, and we should pray for a new God to exterminate us in order to save what is beautiful on this planet; speaking objectively, of course. (Or did you think all those bad people were just Germans, Japs, Russians, etc.?) But pseudo-science, scientism and neo-Darwinists pretty much leave us with that definition, if not that judgment. We done been defined. In just l50 years we’ve been able to determine our full nature. Boy, are we smart. Even when we discover how clever and intelligent some ancients were, almost the first thing we do is congratulate ourselves for being so smart that we could discover how smart those dummies actually were. The overall pattern suggests we’re headed toward freedom; thankfully we’re not there yet. Or, game over. Poof! That’s the real issue here. Does the natural order have a preset blueprint for what is going to happen to us? Will natural selection emerge fully enough into consciousness for us to willfully turn ourselves around? In order to answer that we must confront a big Catch 22 in the problem: We can’t see the future unless we can see the present. We can’t see the present until we can see the future. And we can’t envision either until we fill in our past. This is a psychological conundrum that demands we unravel it like a woven rope, using both ‘hands’. It is only in having some sense of a future, some intuition based on the infuriating permanence of existence that will allow us to see how profoundly dire our present condition is; and it is only that analysis which can reveal a dramatic but naturally plausible program that can deliver us into a new context, a new Epoch in which we will be as unlike from our present selves as the early hunter/gatherers were from their ancestors swinging in trees. This will not be a redemption, or a deliverance. Just a new more interesting world. Why should we not have as far to go as we have already come? But we have to choose it! We can’t count on the natural order to have it already predetermined, even though once you see how it can happen, only then does that deja-vu sense of a brooding determinism creep back in. If enough of humanity slides back into that comfortable cowardice, which can happen any time in the future, all bets are off. And it is that same anxiety that prevents us from looking into the dark present. Just the list of unattended threats that face our world (Not the goddamn Planet, please! When we’re done the planet will just spit us out, and go on merrily.) are grossly embarrassing:

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population, globalization, climate change, resource depletion, pollution, nuclear doomsday--- and just how long would you like this litany to be? (The most powerful country in the world couldn’t even deal with Katrina!) And, to boot, we can’t digest the present and see the future until we include a full review of our total past, and find a pattern of behavior that suggests we may be as protean, as flexible, and as transformative as those oceanic encephala pods that can morph before one’s very eyes into what ever they happen to settle on. Endlessly repeated triangulation of past/present/future using our mental sextant is our sole means of psychic navigation. And, we do it by intuition, and only then process it with our reasoning brains. So all this suggests that on one level we know there is almost nothing we can do, individually or collectively, about any of these looming global crises. The coordination required is far, far beyond the religious, political, racial, ethnic and class conflicts built into our history to date. So, on another level, personal repression, denial and willed ignorance seem the only rational way out. Live for the moment! Why not? What is so interesting about this reaction is the complicated psychological regression involved in the effort to quell anxiety: the retreat into religious superstitions, the arbitrary choices of what parts of the science menu we adopt and what we deny, and the convolutions of reason and logic that we weave to escape our angst (The Great Dumbing-Down). While each of us may identify with at least parts of this, what seems to evade our questioning completely is a factor underlying all of it: that it is our general appraisal of the definition of our human nature made in the 20th century, based largely on that period’s scientific ‘knowledge’. It may just be that it is exactly that opinion which has frozen our view about the key issue --- what we are, the nature of the beast. We’ve been wrong before. In fact, we’ve always been wrong before. “Always in error, never in doubt.” Now doubt is back, with a vengeance. But there is yet another take, a third level, that is a rising premonition based on an intuition that we will get through, not by dealing with these problems, but somehow by not dealing with them. By simply walking away from them, rather than cooptatively interacting with them, which, as already argued, only seems to amplify and deepen their threats. That logical tsunami of disengagement could sweep the globe, just as it has before, like about 20,000 years ago. And there’s a name for that: it is a species-wide spiritual transformation, a leap of ‘faith’ that follows a psychological transition in which old values and rules decay, are dissolved and reconstituted into a new, larger, more complex sense of our human nature. It’s a metamorphosis, a chrysalis, a common occurrence in natural evolution. And yes, it has happened before, twice in fact, if you don’t count the initial and seminal technology of The Mirror, self-awareness. First, with our domestication of fire, and again with our domestication of plants. Nothing mystical or magical, just a slow realization that the reality we had been living in for hundreds of thousand of years was far more complex than we had believed. Reality shrinks and gets smaller and expands and gets larger at the same time. Eventually that stretch becomes untenable, and we are forced to a consensus on a larger context. We always need a bigger box to put all our shit in. But now, that kind of transition will not take hundreds of thousands, or even just thousands of years, which way back then made it all relatively painless since the impacts of those first two pivotal technologies were so spread out in time, hundreds of generations, that

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those phase shifts couldn’t even have been detected by individuals living then. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but time now moves far faster than it used to. The next profound transformation will occur in a matter of centuries, not millennia or exponentially larger durations. Some individuals, like artists, are more likely than others to catch on to what is going on; scientists are most hip because they don’t have to deal with the intense psychological dislocation that will occur as a result of their projections. They’ve already displaced themselves, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt said, to another place, Planetary Objectivity. Just think of the things we could swiftly accomplish if our subjective selves didn’t keep getting in the way. But even scientists are subjects, so science is also restrained and contained by sociogenesis. (The continued use of the word ‘faith’ is simply a convenience of past familiarity. The new term, ‘intuition’, replaces faith. The difference is that Intuition is an identifiable vehicle for the deliverance of unexpected knowledge: it comes up through our physical being, rather than mystically, like old faith, down from heaven or the stars.) The sociogenic process is very slow, as mentioned, because at every turn intuition is confronted by inertia, the resistance built into us by instinct, ego and emotion. It is a recapitulation of what goes on in biological expansion (formerly, evolution): the force of consciousness is constantly confronted and under attack by external alien agents which, quite paradoxically, creates collectively the very process by which we have been bodily delivered to this point in the universal Timescape. So, for our past experience the word ‘faith’ is still appropriate, even though it has always meant Intuition. (If you’ve ever had the good fortune to sit in a large, group meditation in which, for a few moments at least, most people seem to have been relatively successful in detaching themselves from their egos, you will have experienced the entry of an enormous amorphous force, an encompassing presence, if you will, that feels like pure power. It has no implications other than its own existence. But it is not unreasonable to think that in a slightly different set and setting such an experience could be felt as spiritually elevating or ominously evil. That’s the potential power of a neutral Intuition that we have yet to explore.) (Your pardon is requested here for this third footnote, a second one to the poorly-disguised first footnote, but what they add up to is a deconstruction of the ever-popular philosophical idea of dualism: the notion that reality is composed of a system of dualities, opposite forces, like good and evil, yin and yang. Nope. It’s all in our heads. In fact, a duality might be seen as just a psychological trick we play on ourselves to save us from arriving at a single, inevitable conclusion: a dead end; a cul-de-sac. There’s no where to go from Is. But that’s okay, because it’s much bigger than we thought.) One way to look at sociogenic regression (although it’s difficult to see how the Eden metaphor can be improved upon) is to think of humanity crowded into a large room that they entered long ago through a Golden Door. But now the atmosphere has become oppressive and threatening. The crowd surges back in retreat against what it thought was the Golden Door. It won’t open. Panic and disaster ensue. Then it is noticed that a few daredevils have made their way across the room and are beginning to disappear into a rat hole. As the mob senses the possibility of deliverance, the rat hole takes on the appearance of a Golden Door. And, voila, humanity enters a new context. Not a better one, since there is no such thing. Just a larger, more interesting one with a different set of challenges and problems. Wittgenstein once suggested that a serious philosophical work could be written using just jokes. Here are just two (and let’s hope they’re funny) that completely frame our human

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cognitive context; how we see, experience and come to know the world --- at least in this ebbing phase of our consciousness evolution: Joke One: Town drunk is found searching around under a street light in the middle of the night by his neighbor who asks: “What are you looking for, Ed?” Ed: “My keys.” Neighbor: “Is this where you lost them? Ed: “Don know, but its da only place I can see. (Budabumpbump!) Joke Two: Guy gets drafted into the Army. At the reception center he begins picking up scraps of paper, examining them, then exclaiming just audibly: “That’s not it!” He soon starts going through waste baskets and trash cans, searching anything that might have words printed on it. “That’s not it. That’s not it.” The habit grows into an obsession. He’s examined by Army psychiatrists, found unfit, and handed a Section Eight discharge. He unfolds it, looks, then exclaims: “That’s it!!” And the moral of the stories: we are always limited to looking only where we can, and incorporating only what is psychically useful and practical. But the process is ever progressive, expansive and illuminating. And, “That’s it.” Little wonder, that in times like we are now in, it is most difficult to discern whether it is a chrysalis or a malignant metastasis. We only have history to directly refer to, and in that context it is all over but the whimpering. You may be tired of hearing it, but just once more: there is no evidence whatsoever in this Economic Epoch, the full anthropological duration, that suggests anything other than we are lemmings spinning off a cliff. Their reasoning is wrong, but religious fundamentalists got the right answer: Apocalypse Now! Intuitive communiqués are always right; reasoned interpretations are usually wrong because they are confined by the language/knowledge of the moment. But we can refer to, and infer from, our wider anthropological record, and now see a bit more hope. A brief meditation on how well we made the change from roaming nomadics to sedentary farmers and city-builders surely indicates a profound transmutational capability. A giant mental transformation had to occur in order for us to accomplish that. And just because such an intellectual reversal took place simultaneously with the physical transition itself, that does not mean we changed our thinking only well after we changed our habits. It’s another closed loop, with the first weak signals from intuition precipitating action from a subconscious level, which is then rationalized and reaffirmed by intuition with a stronger signal that then stimulates an articulated rationale. Once again, intuition is slow. We do things before we understand them. Collectively we’re like infants, engaging in elaborate actions long before we can verbalize them. It just shows how physically authorative and intellectually commanding non-verbal body knowledge can be for an individual. And once you get enough individuals moving in the same direction --- watch out! Looks like Evolution. But today we’re so completely conditioned by modern materialism that we can only ask for more. (Lickspittle pols are still promising voters a ticket to ‘the American Dream.’ Yaargh!) The magic of reality has escaped us. We’ve locked ourselves in that room behind the golden door. The rat hole across the room is not yet visible. We’re spiritually suffocating. As Beckett wrote: “I can’t go on! I can’t go on!... I will go on.” An implacable resignation reduces the great masses into either cannon fodder or mattress stuffing. The world is inundated in facts, information and opinion; wailing voices in Dante’s

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Inferno. The chaos is forcing the intelligentsia to turn from real thought to spurious, specious speculation, or rationalization and relentless daily reductionism. Can we really blame anyone for choosing to leap into denial in response to all this? IN THE CONTEXT OF ALL CONTEXTS Giving-in is the opposite of giving-up. The reference is to a notable essay by George Trow in the New Yorker thirty years ago: “In the Context of No Context”, a lament about the trance that television was creating in the Western mind, a displacement of reality and our connection to it, or disconnection from it. We can still appreciate that writing for what it was then, but it is now irrelevant. There cannot be a ‘context of no context’. Context is everything. When we are between contexts it is only an illusion that they have disappeared. There’s always a bigger one coming; existence always precedes and follows essence .... and everything else. Context is another man-made concept, a hypothetical arena of awareness, which can be visualized as a sphere of influence which exists in reality because we put it there. But context has its own rules, despite us. Let’s look at some very simple examples: The context of weather is season, the context of season is climate, the context of climate is geography, etc., etc. Or, an hour is contained in a day, a day in a week, week in a month, month in a year, year in a ....astronomical calendar? Which reveals how natural are some contexts, and how arbitrarily man-made are some others. But there is always one constant: CONTEXT RULES! The content of all lesser contexts must obey, or at least not defy, the laws that frame its larger context. Smaller contexts existing within larger ones, like a series of spheres, or gears, within spheres, must all mesh with the laws of the next larger embracing context. Therefore the largest context rules all the contexts that it contains. Now this reductionist abstraction may draw a big ‘duh!’, but most of us repeatedly ignore its implications. Probably the greatest misunderstanding between any two people, or any two groups of people, occurs because neither side is aware that the very words they are using, whose definitions they both understand, may have differing connotations as a result of coming from totally different, or even overlapping, contexts. An extreme example of this is Wittgenstein’s observation: “If a lion could speak we still couldn’t understand it.” Even a simple person-to-person dialogue could be constructed that would allow a reader to conclude that it’s meaning was at either end of two diametrically opposed propositions. Still too abstract? Okay. Consider that the evolution of our consciousness has developed in steps, or contexts, concerning what constitutes reality. In the beginning, we knew nothing. Now we know a lot. We even know how little we knew way back when. And we even suspect that we know less proportionately now than our ancestors thought they knew then. What the hell? You can see where this is going: everything we thought we knew is incorrect. As ‘right’ as he was at the time, Newton was finally always ‘wrong’. Meanwhile, the more we know what we think we knew, and know we don’t know now, the stronger becomes our conviction that it is all of a piece. Regardless of its complexity there is only one narrative, one story about us--- no deceptions, tricks or contradictions. One species with one narrative. We are free to disbelieve this only at our own mortal risk.

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We are, cognitively speaking, flying by the seat of our pants. So what? It’s what we got, and it’s better than nothing. And if you don’t believe that almost any entry into existence is better than nothing, then you’re totally nuts. One starts to get light-headed here. But it all leads up to an understanding of why and how our own sociogenesis, the pattern of how we have attempted to consciously process reality, is the unavoidable secret to our survival and progress. It ain’t material! We’re at the end of that trail ...or trial. Everything doesn’t change. A whopping contradiction. It may seem to, as the French say, yet it always seems to stay the same. What the hell? Here’s the key: A new larger context does not change the FACTS. It does not change the reality of the surface flow of events that occurred in any other prior context. But it now changes the relationship of the Facts to one another! And probably more importantly, the expansion of reality reveals new unsuspected connections and relationships between facts, which necessarily changes their connotation, and thus the meaning, of reality itself. To any sentient creature that surely must feel like everything has changed; that which was, really wasn’t, and isn’t... so that logically we’ve always been wrong. Thus, as Beckett suggests... ‘we can’t go on!’ (“Oh, what’s the use?!” Answer: there is no ’use’. It’s only Materialism that demands we be implacably practical. The town drunk has a better read. One of God’s little tricks...so to speak, that is.) Now all this is driving at one proposition: that the dominant belief system of our Economic Epoch, preceded by our psychic transition from the simple acceptance of an absolutely mysterious, impenetrable reality, first evolved from religious invention as a substitute for the all-encompassing earlier spirituality, and only then into the deductive reasoning of Science. In effect, while trying to maintain a tie to an anxiety-free innocence, we were sliding down a slope into the matter of materialism. And, as we simultaneously constructed that as the model of all reality, we also invented a technique for analyzing that model in order to prove it, making it able to predict our fate as the inhabitants of that ‘reality’. And now that science has deconstructed that materialist model of reality down to a vanishing point (quanta) we are left with no connection to, or sense of, the profound mystery of existence. This can’t go on. And if it can’t, we can’t. It’s really that simple. So the psychological transition between this and the next epoch, between all epochs, is always a coalescence of the collective universal mind to move in a given direction in order to find agreement as to what reality is, or, at least, what it’s not. On a subconscious level we begin to renunciate our ‘wrong’ beliefs (deprogramming) which reopens our minds, and allows our intuition to come forth and rejoin with our perennial, enduring curiosity, memory and imagination about ultimate reality. Inductive reprogramming. Eden reiterated. It’s a psychological thing that feels like a mystical, religious thing. But on closer examination it really reflects a natural cognitive principle: the easiest decisions to make, regardless of consequence, are the ones where there is no alternative. Although we may entertain imaginary options in order to preserve our sense of free will. It’s just a brutal survival thing. The great pivotal technologies are not consciously chosen by humans. They just happen, like in Darwin’s natural selection. No individual ever considered whether or not to adopt fire, or plant seeds. And now no one is consciously deciding to adopt computers as our new metaphor. (Or metaphive) Collectively, however, it’s a stampede. Free will might exist somewhere, but not on this planet. We’re still automatons. We dumbly proliferate like plankton, as if the act of reproduction could give us the certitude, or

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faith that we could not find by and for ourselves. Intuition shouts: “You are still only destined to be free!” This is not a judgment or an opinion, but a disinterested comment on our anthropological history. From the singularity of self-awareness, we have been making decisions we didn’t know we were making. Or, as Yogi said, “ When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” And we did. Repeatedly. Yet major ‘paradigm shifts’(another 4-bit buzz word), be they in science or sociogenesis, do not happen by accident. We would have become extinct long ago if chance were the main operative in our reality. The Catch-22 earlier mentioned is itself a preordained tactic of consciousness. The most dire extinction threats cannot be detected unless accompanied by comparable survival ideas. After literally millions of years of programming ourselves with nomadic hunter/gatherer strategies, how else could our ancestors have had the idea for, and made the transition to, agrarian settlements, villages, towns and then exotic cities? The first in situ farm groups were extreme radicals, defying millions of years of tradition. And they had to continue in the face of brutal resistance by all the roaming bands of hunter/gatherers who no doubt raided those small enclaves repeatedly for at least hundreds of thousands of years. (The survival instincts of the nomadics versus the utopian dreams of the farmers.) What deep intuitive calling, what profound subconscious pull, kept the agrarian idea alive and on track despite unrelenting rejection and defeat? And what could have swayed those remaining hunter/gatherers to forsake their own Eden, the easiest pickings ever, and slowly adapt to becoming farmers, too? Darwinian Evolution can provide no clue to this progression. Adherents just argue for the sake of authoritative hegemony. The reductivist’s argument is that such a long, slow, incremental transition must be a function of ‘evolution’. It just happened naturally. But what does that explain? It’s just another tautology: we got here by getting here in tiny, tiny steps? Horse-puckie. Another ‘evolution theory’ recently applied to Darwinism, as a corrective to the above problem and its failure to explain, is called “punctuated equilibrium”. In short it means things drag on and on, and every so often the status is punctuated by a burst of dramatic change. This is another biological theory, a misplaced intuition, that is best applied to sociogenesis and consciousness evolution. And the punctuation part is always a Pivotal Technology, radicalizing human habitat, habit and thought. (The swiftness of change is always relative to the duration of the context. A millennium can be like a geologic day or a journalistic eternity.) In a reality of Perfect Chaos the probability of the appearance of pattern (i.e., order, or the dreaded ‘intelligent design’) is 100%. If it weren’t, then chaos would always be predictably unpredictable, and not chaotic. We happen to be creatures that by chance came to inhabit the patterned and orderly part of that multiverse. The clues to it are buried inside us. Call it intuition. Deductive reasoning simply dries up when any model of reality has been analyzed to its vanishing point. (We ‘disappear’ with it. Chrysalis.) That’s when inductive reasoning moves in to re-aggregate and remodel reality, and so save us ---for another round. Theoretically, one can Halve-the-Whole forever. No matter how many times you split something in half, you will still have a half to then halve again. But it doesn’t work for long in reality, for hugely obvious reasons. As well, at some point in the narrowing stream of deductions, the mind begins to doubt the process itself, allowing all those extraneous facts and globs of new information, never part of the old model itself, to gather into a force that floods the mind. Then we begin to perceive new connections and associations in reality.

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(Techies call this ‘system dynamics’; and most recently academic neologists have come up with the four-bit term, ‘interdisciplinarity’. But philosophers have always just called it Induction, hard evidence of the endlessness of existence. We forget the Golden Door and run for the rat hole, for we sense a larger reality beyond it. But it don’t come easy. Programming the human computer is a helluva lot easier than deprogramming it. It’s a very sticky mess in there. Beliefs die hard, usually taking millions of us with them. All this helps to explain the old axiom of self-loathing, repeatedly expressed in religious terms: Armageddon and Apocalypse. We have this built-in inclination to take things to the cratering point, to the edge of destruction, before we can see a way out. Blame it on our inertia, and our pathetic hope to get the benefits of a benevolent creator, the select predictions of science, and the promise of an eternal existence. And all for free, of course. One last point to be made about context and content is the matter of perspective. “It depends on how you look at it.”, goes the old saw. And from what point, when, why and who you are . With so many cognitive caveats and restrictions, it’s a wonder we know anything about anything. And maybe we don’t. But maybe we don’t need to. The Cognitive Ladder, starting at the bottom rung of Fact, just simple crude fact, rises to the next step: Information, collections of related facts. Then up one more rung to Knowledge, the comprehension of information categories. Higher next to Understanding of the many connections; then up to the Meaning we seek to move on, and finally, perhaps, to Wisdom. (Although wasn’t Wisdom outlawed in the 20th Century?) That leaves almost all of us with the ultimate cognitive goal of finding Meaning. So maybe the ladder can be climbed a couple of rungs at a time. The sole objective is to get to the top in any manner. Is it possible that the entire catalogue of rational strategies (memory, perception, reason, logic, etc.), those conscious mind-based maneuvers, can be preempted by Intuition? Without language to get in the way and confuse us, can meaning be found intuitively? Is this the ancient notion of infused knowledge? Or the current idea of Buddhist enlightenment? While wisdom and enlightenment may be too ambitious for almost all of us, those mental states requiring so many years of dedication as well as the support of others (since we all have to go to work for most of our lives), meaning at least lies within our ordinary mortal reach. But in the final full bloom of Materialism with its inevitable by-product, unchecked material desire, it is not simply the acquisition of knowledge that drives global culture, it is its exploitation. And that requires the mining of endless streams of Fact to be manufactured into voluminous amounts of Information as a prerequisite for fueling the frenzied global competition for material success. Matter into manna. And the strategy for facilitating that system of exploitation is the linear, fragmented and specialized treatment of epistemology; going down the cognitive ladder rather than up; it’s material pragmatism vs. psychic awareness. And modern media, the leader of the touted ‘Information Age’, will be glad to accommodate your desire, thank you. All media, whether it be in democratic or totalitarian states, is principally engaged in selling its own favored propaganda. Almost a century after hard science has deconstructed the universe of matter, literally down to the vanishing point, the big mass of souls is just now catching the fire of desire ---where’s mine!? (And who can blame them?) And much of science is glad to add fuel to that flame. (The objective search for pure knowledge ended long ago with the realization that there was no such thing. And in a larger

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anthropological context, the science impulse has always been driven primarily by prediction, because only prediction helps to satisfy man’s deepest need for control, which is the basic antidote to existential anxiety. In that context, knowledge becomes just piety, pretense or profit.) It seems almost ludicrous to suggest in this modern age that not only is knowledge, as just one step in the cognitive ladder, something not to be exploited, but it shouldn’t even be acquired! Isn’t it just a plateau in the ascending awareness process, something to be transcended? And in an overcrowded world with rapidly depleting natural resources, including air and water, the manic march of billions struggling to exploit matter through knowledge sounds a bit apocalyptic, no? Of course, we have to live. But at the same evolutionary stage as dinosaurs? Anyway, from this simple sketch, it is easy to see how material progress inhibits psychic awareness and vice versa. But a whole world in pursuit of the material can only result in flooding the cognitive realm with fact and information, which is then dammed by the reverse use of knowledge, and ends up with billions of humans drowning in the Styx. We call it ‘dumbing down’. The mob is regressing, crushing and banging at the Golden Door. But it brings to the forefront again the simple issue: What are we here for? Are we all here for the same reason? Or are we all here just to get rich? (If capitalism was the catalyst that made democracy possible, and democracy then spread to make the world safe for capitalism, what is the ultimate role of capitalism? Can’t it be only to exploit cheap labor to extinction, and flood all markets with goods and services to saturation? And hasn’t the U.S. already passed that point, at least for a ravenous minority who can’t seem to be sated?) Let’s look at two good answers from our cognitive modes for synthesizing and analyzing: the Artistic and the Intellectual. First, here’s what Alvin Kernan has to say about Meaning in his book, “The Death of Literature”, a work that anticipates how an emerging Artistic Epoch might change even the meaning we have about art itself: “...meaning, not raw facts, is what humanity seeks, as society is a collection of kits or codes for processing raw facts into meaning. Take a variety of things and put them in some kind of relationship, a simple sequence, a taxonomy, a hierarchy, or a cause-and- effect pattern, say, and they make sense, apparently for no better reason than the tautological one that order and relationship are felt by humans to be meaningful.” A couple of quibbles. “Raw facts” are first processed into Information, and that into Knowledge, then to Understanding, and only then can we extract Meaning. Also, “...for no better reason than the tautological one.” There is no better ‘natural’ reason!, simply because we are causal agents living in a causal segment of the Multiverse. If by ‘tautological” we infer the most fundamental feed-back loop that connects us to that first preconscious ‘sense’ we have of reality while still in the womb, the motion, the force, the gravity that is ‘felt’, then the tautology is not redundant. Such a loop means we have come to a provisional boundary of human reason, clearly indicating and telling us to move on, and look elsewhere. But Kernan is on the money in implying that we can’t go beyond Meaning until we’ve first gone through all that. Next, David Deutsch, speaking from the Intellectual side of things, or, the algorithmic analysis of the symbolism of Art --what we call Science.

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Deutsch is one of those rare modern renaissance figures who have excelled in several highly specialized disciplines, and attempted (and to a degree succeeded) to integrate physics, biology and computation with a philosophical outlook. His book, “The Fabric of Reality,” is a prime example of the turn of mind taking place in the world of science, from the long-term reductionist to the more inductivist and synthesizing trend that will be the hallmark of the next epoch, the Artistic. (In truth, classic science is no longer.) In his introduction, Deutsch says he remembers being told as a child that in ancient times a learned person could ‘know everything that was then known’. But modern man could not possibly even come close to that. “The latter proposition surprised and disappointed me,” he said. “In fact, I refused to believe it. I did not know how to justify my disbelief ... and I envied the ancient scholars.” (Generally, scientists don’t trust intuition very much.) He then goes on to make a distinction between ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’. In order to know, he says, “one comparatively simple and comprehensible theory can cover an infinity of indigestible facts.” As in our cognitive ladder, understanding is the process of recognizing the relationship between bodies of knowledge. (Interdisciplinarity!) It is the process of understanding process. Being primarily a scientific mind, this is where Deutsch stops climbing the ladder. But what an accomplishment. “Quantum mechanics, Deutsch insists, must be taken not just as a predictive tool, but as an explanation for how the world really works.” (George Johnson, NY Times) But, is how ‘the world works’ the same as how the multiverse works, or how reality works? De facto, no. All of that is still open-ended; even more open-ended than we were ever able to imagine. And it greatly expands our human PR. And that’s hugely mind-boggling. As lovely as is Ludwig’s line, “the world is all that is the case”, it always begs the question, Okay, what is ‘the world’? We don’t have to know -- have knowledge of -- what quantum theory is in order to grasp the profound ‘meaning’ of what just a minimalist understanding of its implications are. By simple deduction, what we now know, understand and extract meaning from, beyond a reasonable doubt, is just this: the universe we have long known since the days of the Big Bang is no longer the largest context of our physical existence. Should you doubt the claim of ‘reasonable doubt’ here, be reminded: quantum electro-dynamics is the most precisely tested theory in all of science! (And this is widely, and often begrudgingly, accepted by all of hard science.) So, even though we don’t know what quantum theory ‘means’ in terms of additional knowledge, we can be certain of what it means in the terms of our traditional understanding and meaning of our old, local universe: IT AIN”T NO MORE !! We have been living in an immensely larger context for almost a century, and only a few even know it. Inertia. So what’s interesting about our future is how this knowledge is going to enter our collective consciousness. Will it osmose, or will it suddenly crater? In either case, we will be a different species when it does occur. It will literally change everything we ever thought about reality. After the initial impact of psychologically making existence seem more dangerous, emptier and lonelier, we will come to understand a greater reality, and feel a greater spiritual security. We will be neither ‘over’ nor ‘under’ nature, but deeply re-embedded ‘in” it. So we will be confident and freer to create new strategies for our continuing survival. The great existential principle, “Existence precedes essence” is a belief, one that is repeatedly verified by empirical evidence. But in our PR, ‘essence often precedes existence’;

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that is, a phase shift in our deepest sense of existence expands our ability to articulate a still deeper sense of what both maxims mean. Here’s how the eminent Princeton physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, after long reflection on quantum theory, somewhat ruefully drew personal and universal meaning from this new revelation. This note appeared in his own private journal: “No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions. How come the universe? Us? Anything? But happily, we are around the answer to these questions. That’s us.” This is as terse and succinct a philosophical/scientific expression of existential acceptance as one will ever see. It describes an arc, a span of intelligence that stretches the distance between Reason and Intuition to a new dimension. Nothing changed. And everything changed. We can go on. THE MIRRORING OF REALITY The looking glass doesn’t lie. It whacks you in the back of the head. There is a logic to conscious awareness that is exponentially larger and more complex than both religion and science combined, because consciousness began long before we ‘invented’ science, religion, agriculture or even fire. That logic lies within the syntax of mental processing that carries us from simple fact, to info, to knowledge, understanding, meaning, wisdom, to.... It was said that David Deutsch stopped on the cognitive ladder at Understanding. Well, almost. In his exponential extension of our evolution from the biological into the quantum multiverse he did insist that the one thing that wouldn’t change, even after we became transcendent, was argument. Debate would go on and on like a cosmological echo... palpable mirror reflections ... as long as autonomous consciousnesses exist. So, clearly, meaning is not the end of the game, but a new beginning. And that lets us look back and reflect on what we’ve been up to for the past seven million years. Missing link? More like a whole chain is missing. We’ve now come to one good answer, or at least, a good partial answer to that old itch: what are we here for? Answer: To discover by reflection. To Mirror Reality! And what’s reality? Whoa, goin’ the wrong way, pardner. That’s what we’re here to find out. Life isn’t just a great leap from premise to a conclusion. It’s a nearly endless heartbreaking, elating, miserable, joyful adventure. ‘I can’t go on. I will go on.” But in the great initial act of this cosmic drama that opens with consciousness emerging on planet earth, in which we were and are both the audience and the actors, our narrative is all about light, mirror, camera and action. Scene three is fading, and scene four, the Artistic Epoch begins. In ‘real’ time, as we’ve come to know it, this entire first act is almost over. The first three scenes (epochs) took at least a couple of million years to play out -- but who was counting? -- and the next four scenes will take just a couple of millennia. (Our Western bias, calling this the Third Millennium, is absurd. Just another side-effect; a hangover of provincial creationist mythology. It’s existentially more like our species’ two-thousandth millennium.) As consciousness gets better at reflecting reality, everything speeds up to that singularity: No-Time. If, as they say in California, sixty is the new forty, as we zip through the Artistic,

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then the next Social and Intellectual Epochs, and reach the final Political Epoch, our last timescape, by then a century will be just one new day. Warp speed is coming, but not in the mode of motion through space, but in the blur of light on a digital clock. By reducing either space or time, both are affected, but time shrinks faster. It should now be apparent that in this schema, the epoch of “The Seed’, the economic or materialist epoch, exists entirely within the context of the two preceding durations, the Spiritual Epoch and the initial Psychological transition of consciousness incarnating into matter and life. That, of course, was the longest duration of all, requiring a few million years for consciousness to adjust to being imprisoned in flesh, with all its attendant crudities. As opposed to the many millennia it took for us to get from Fire to Seed, that makes our entire epoch of material reality a tiny anomaly in a far longer spiritual reality. Metaphorically, maybe even literally (or literarily), it begins with Narcissus looking into a mirrored pool and seeing ...yoiks! not an alien ... but himself. And then falling in love with that image, which is a big part of our Edenesque drama of conflict. The coincidence that Narcissus already had a bicameral brain, a bifurcated, dual meat computer linked together by a coaxial feed-back cable in his head that was capable of generating and storing in memory images of the self --- well, it may not have been a coincidence. But don’t go there! The simple neurological fact is that the brain of homo sap was already flexibly hard-wired to go up the road of self-awareness. And there was no turning back. From the time we left our primate cousins, we had to endure ‘under’ the brutal indifference of nature. Only our ignorance kept us from being literally scared to death. We didn’t know any better. Some tens of thousands of years ago, nobody knows (nobody!), we domesticated Fire and got out from ‘under nature’ by becoming superior alpha dogs over the rest of the fauna on earth. Consciousness found a secure home back ‘in nature’, and came out of hiding. We were aware, and on our way. If we view The Mirror as our seminal technology, then The Flame becomes our first pivotal technology. The torch wrenched us out from the inseparable tapestry of our prior existence, creating an entirely new and additional world. Fire extinguished night. Fire repelled all our natural enemies. Fire expanded ‘leisure’ time, allowing us to think and scheme. Fire lengthened our menu, amplified greatly our energy and nutritional reserves. Fire, being portable, extended our range of exploration and habitat. Fire literally reversed the way we experienced reality. It can’t be overemphasized. Now, a highway begins as a road, and a road starts as a lane, and a lane a path, and a path a trail, and a trail begins with a barely legible line marked by scat. We followed animals who we ate, as they followed the food they ate that we could also eat, and so we learned that their trails always led to safe, supporting ecological habitat. Then we learned to defend and exploit those habitats. Then manipulate and control them. And we became farmers. Realty became Reality. Bingo! Suddenly we’re not ‘in nature’, we’re ‘over nature’ ---masters of the universe -- and as the Eden metaphor suggests, we were not supposed to eat from that tree. Phooey! The Eden myth, really all about consciousness, has plenty to symbolically teach us about great paradigm shifts, the mirror reversals of cognition in sociogenesis. But the stuff about serpents, sin and guilt was just slipped in by shaman politicians. Now the skeptic must ask: just how do we know all this? Well, we don’t. And we won’t. But we can make the best guess, which is all we ever do anyway, through reason. Specifically, we have to resort to logical necessity, the reductionism that is running out of context in materialism is now transferred back into analyzing us as subjects, and our enduring effort to be objective.

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What is the minimal naturalist description of how we physically went from chimp to chump? Not the maximum convolutions of Natural Selection. Those describe our cognitive trail that we are here trying to simplify by linking it to the progression of logical physical technologies that we used to build our models of penultimate reality, that we hope will mirror ultimate reality. Hope. And words. It’s all we got. Our Economic Epoch has served our purpose. Science has provided three great findings: First, that the material realm exists as an autonomous reality. Second, that this independent domain exists only provisionally within the context of a multiverse or megaverse. And finally, most importantly to our cognitive evolution: Science validated Intuition. And vice versa. We just don’t imagine we are here. We are here. “The world is all that is the case.” We are inescapably imbedded in that great phase of it that is an intrinsic constituent of the greater multiverse. What a weird thing to be told: you can’t escape a ‘prison’ you don’t even realize you’re in! If Deutsch is to be taken seriously when he says that quantum mechanics must be taken seriously, not just as a predictive tool, but as a way of explaining how the ‘world’ really works, then ---and this is crucial --- it must also be taken seriously in sociogenesis. If quanta have replaced atoms, and particles and everything else as the fundamental ingredients in reality, it is imperative we include ourselves in the new matrix! With any model of reality we now construct (invent or discover), to somehow exclude ourselves from that formula will be unforgivably, mentally corrupt. We’ve been able to get away with it up to now because we didn’t know any better. But since we’ve passed that age of unreason, it won’t happen. If you accept science, even if you believe only in the hardest sciences that rigorously employ the toughest tests for falsification, then you have no choice but to see and experience yourself, not as an animal, but as a spirit. Still in animal form, but a spirit. (It’s all about a trade-off between animal security and spiritual freedom --- or the evolution of consciousness.) We are all merely, and majestically, composed of Quanta! And we don’t yet have to know what that is ... just that It Is! To get the full psychological effect of this we must regress for a moment. When Copernicus, and then Kepler, proved that the Earth was not the center of anything, it changed nothing. Because it meant only that such had always been the case! It didn’t matter for how many millions of years we had believed otherwise, or how invested some authorities were in their limited forms of knowledge. It meant only that the earth had never, ever been the center of anything. Heliotropism wasn’t a goddamn new hairstyle ---it was, is, and would be, a simple goddamn Fact! When we later discovered that our crummy little star was at the fringe of a third-rate galaxy, that didn’t change heliotropism. And it’s now true for the quantum multiverse. Quantum mechanics is not ‘news’. It’s ‘olds’. Quanta has always been so. And even if that is not infinitely and eternally true, it is true from the beginning of its time up until at least tomorrow. Everything accrues; all that is new is an add-on, and only new to us. Complexity grows and grows. It is revealed to us when we discover greater simplicity. Simplicity is not the opposite of complexity. It is the basis of it. Complication is the opposite of simplicity because it starts from a faulty premise and results in confusion.

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And if that makes anyone feel it’s just too much and should be ignored, that just means they have willfully dropped out of the game by shunning a real part of reality (for which they should be shunned, or at least ignored). So, we remain subjects in a new exponentially expanded domain. And we have a new emperor. Luckily, he, she or it, is as uninterested and disinterested as the last one. This acceptance now requires a new, more inclusive definition of Intuition. There’s never been a really good one; they’ve all been too loosey-goosey. But with quanta we begin to understand why that was so, and now isn’t so. Biology and Darwin had preempted public awareness of physics even before the Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg and Einstein esoteric physics appeared on the scene. And for us, as a life-based form, we had always assumed life to be the only conceivable platform for all feeling, other than religious. So despite that we later learned that molecules and atoms were the foundation of living cells, it never occurred to us that those particles might have been the source of those feelings we called intuition. And if logic had been applied, that idea would also have been dismissed as well on the basis that atoms and elements were part of inert, decaying matter so, de facto, could not be the source of lively intuitive ‘feelings’. But then came quanta. ‘Quanta is us.’ So, even before we could see ourselves as being inseparable from the material, atomistic world, a world we ourselves had declared as ‘real’ by being separate from us, or in the duality of subject/object, we being separate from it, we have been unknowingly plunged into a new monistic reality of quanta that reduces the idea of subject/object separation to just another paired-cognate, that is, two terms required to create a single concept (up/down, good/bad, real/unreal, out/in etc.) Even if we try to pull that same old stunt of leaving ourselves outside of ‘reality’ in order to preserve our fictional ‘objectivity, we will not escape being re-immersed in the unconditionality of existence. And for the first half of the next epoch, we won’t even want to. We will be too busy synthesizing and struggling to build a new model of the multiverse that we can then disassemble and try to understand. No wonder we keep asking, “Where are we?” If we don’t now take quantum mechanics seriously, the answer is: limbo, that free-floating sense of being in ‘the context of no context,’ dumbed all the way down. The approaching Artistic Epoch, like art itself, will be founded primarily on intuition. It’s renaissance time again. Our species returns to being ‘In nature’. By being ‘above’ nature we materialistically progressed, but spiritually regressed, that is lost contact with UR. In our new timescape we will be fully in touch with a greater reality, but hardly out of the woods. Every trail is a trial. Yet each new great pivotal technology is also a new dawn, has the feeling of a gift, another chance. Then in time, it begins to feel inadequate again, so we manically deconstruct that model, and end with not only deductive dust in our hands, but a new insight, a rebirth. The speed of this next transition will be brutal, however, amplifying displacement and disruption. There’s no place for optimism in real evolution. Grab joy when you can, and hold on to hope. ‘And you know it don’t come easy...’ One of the strongest proponents of intuition was Henri Bergson, a philosopher who won a Nobel in literature. One might say that Bergson had a powerful intuition about intuition. His writings underscored the uniqueness of individual experience, suggesting that it was autonomous minds that led the collective consciousness --- the irresistible forces pitted against the world’s masses, the immoveable object. (Which might explain why the natural

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order requires several billion souls, in order to find enough tiny mirrors to generate a critical mass of light sufficient to illumine, motivate and move the dead-weight of the collective consciousness ahead, an inch at time.) He, and we, however, have no idea what the syntax or language of intuition might be, even if we label it ‘quanta’. It’s code. It’s like how animals operate without language: by signing and signaling. The ‘vocabulary’ of many mammals, especially primates, is far more complex than we realize, because it’s so simple. Chimps read lips, and have an extensive lexicon of subtle facial expressions to go along with their ‘dictionaries’ of hand gestures, body language and elaborate (for animals) vocalizations. This capacity for deciphering code that animals acquired during biological expansion (‘evolution’), a direct link to Bergson’s “elan vitale”, the life force and the universe of entropy, may still be with us, a kind of infused knowledge hidden from our awareness by the chaos of pseudo-rationality, the sea of superstitions we flounder in. Is there such a thing as being overeducated? You bet! It simply means knowing too much about too little. Knowing more and more about less and less, until you know almost everything about nothing. (That is, knowing everything about nothing that adds to the collective consciousness.) Could this be the path of intuition? The more familiar we become with it, might we also develop linguistic forms for those once amorphous ‘senses’ that could now be shared and universally understood? Western transcendental meditation! Bergson said, “The Universe is a machine for the making of gods.” Surely, by “gods” he meant ‘spirits’. And that by ‘spirits’, we mean non-material forms of awareness. There’s no end to this business. All there is is Is. And it always was and will be. Or not. REALITY: AN OPEN AND SHUT CASE Beliefs obstruct conscious awareness. Consciousness is a dance between reason and intuition. That dance is how our species endures. If those two didn’t dance we’d be dead. With as much objectivity as you can muster, look back at our simplest conditions and most basic situation. We are composed of three separate people gathered in one dance hall. On our animal side, we have Instinct, Ego and Emotion. On our rational side: Reason, Logic and Memory. Then there is that lone wolf, Intuition. Who’s he gonna dance with? In order to incarnate into reality, intuition has to support reason, logic and memory; and vice versa. It’s the key to our evolutionary survival. It influences, just enough, the balance of power between the dark forces of irrationality and those of light, to account for our sustained presence. In any culture or society in any time, when darkness creeps in and the tensile strength of its cohering fabric begins to fade, fray and rend, it seems like the atavistic forces are winning; Armageddon and doomsday await. But, axiomatically, since we’re still standing, nothing has been lost or won, yet everything has changed. It’s always about chrysalis and metamorphosis. Rome didn’t fall. It consumed itself. The snake swallowed its tail. The reason social units seem to die is due to the inability of the underlying assumptions of their origin to stretch enough to cover all the new knowledge and revelations that have occurred since their inception. Ironically, it is our analytical ability that allows us to turn what had been an opaque belief system into one of transparency.

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Eventually, we see right through ourselves. In that sense, light always triumphs over darkness. Those who doubt this are surely unsure of their own implacable existence. Now this is as good a place as any to tackle the thorniest, most basic and irresolvable philosophical issue of all time. Duality vs. Monism, Cause vs. Existence, Eternal vs. Temporal, open vs. closed, infinite vs. finite. It has many labels, but they all mean the same, and originate from the seminal question: Is existence limited or unlimited? Just a thirty-second meditation on this issue can make feel you have fallen into a black hole. While there are many philosophical puzzles that seem irresolvable, eventually most are just simply dissolvable; that is, they become irrelevant and just go away. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” This is no rhetorical joke. It may be a cosmic joke, because it’s a slight exaggeration of the kind of questions that mankind has been asking itself since day one. Most of them now seem not just irrelevant, they seem absurd. And they are. But not the old monist/dualist puzzle. It’s a diamond. It can’t be dissolved. You can’t ever call it irrelevant, because it is always crucial. And, here’s the point: it’s also utterly USELESS! Because it’s neither answerable nor dissolvable. It’s an impermeable mystery. Now there are only two strategies for dealing with an unanswerable/nonsolvable question: forget it and move on (dangerous), or put it in its own category, and always keep it in front of you (less dangerous). Don’t turn your back on it! It will kill you. So, whether or not ultimate reality is open or closed, it remains the most important non-answerable question in all epistemology. Unless it is kept in the forefront, like attached to your car’s rear-view mirror, you will find yourself, like Yogi Berra, coming to a fork in the road --- and taking it! That is, your train of thought will take a bend that implies your subconscious mind favors one answer over the other: reality is open -- reality is closed. Because of our current nature, our being caused and causal creatures, we intrinsically will always be tempted to try to answer the question that can’t be answered. It so often feels like that’s the only way to escape existential anxiety, and become free. Of course, the ‘closed’ answer puts you in prison, and the ‘open’ puts you in the infinity of limbo. Same difference. With the computer, however, we can have it both ways. Since we’ve been programmed to always see or search for cause, we can compensate for that by omitting the concept of Cause from our computer programs. (No, they can’t will to think that way!) The more advanced our computers get the better they will become at predicting solely on the basis of probability. And we can always compare our meat computers with our electronic ones. But you better be listening to your intuition when you do. Moral: when you come to a fork in the road, take neither! The road-sign message from Intuition says: you’re on the wrong road! Go back and start over. The dance between reason and intuition gives us an edge. Intuition always reminds us that there’s more. We’re never at the end of the great chain of being. It will also never tell you that reality is eternally open. Nothing can tell you that. In recent times the phrase, ‘counter-intuitive’, has become fashionable. There’s no such thing. It’s an oxymoron. All it means is that the mind is confounded by new knowledge that conflicts with old beliefs, beliefs that we try to defend and preserve by calling them “intuitions”. Intuition never verifies or affirms. Intuition is not rooted in culture or any human conception of time, space or reality. It is our connection to existence itself. It only provides direction. In that context it is always our most reliable guide and warning system. But it is our human proclivity to misinterpret its meaning that misleads us.

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So, reality really is both an open and shut case --- because it’s neither. Therefore, to call oneself a Mysterian is a more positive position to take than ambiguous labels like ‘agnostic’ or ‘atheist’, labels that negatively reinforce a belief in creation. ‘Mysterian’ doesn’t even refer in any way to religion or theological concepts. The term ‘mysterian’ exists only within the context of existence and the context of what the human mind is capable of knowing. Period. And it begs the question: why would anyone want to believe in anything whatsoever, when there is so much to learn? The only thing that believing does, besides briefly anesthetizing angst, is to close off access to intuition. And that then acts as an inhibitor to learning, a tactic which in the longer run produces far more anxiety than any belief or belief system can overcome. (Or, the final antidote. You can club your natural awareness into bloody submission ... like most people do. Denial works, but it produces a shitty life.) FULL CIRCLE: HOME AGAIN Everything is co-incidental, a-causal and interrelated. Except us. So the big sociogenic spiral makes a full circle, and we’re back ...where? Well, we’re certainly not back to where Wheeler suggested, with Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides. That’s relatively just a few days ago. That’s only three Eras back in the six Eras that comprise just this Economic Epoch. The history of Greek culture represents only the Social Era of the Economic Epoch. (Rome’s empire is the Intellectual Era of this epoch; and our Western civilization is the Political finale). What we are about to confront is not simply a new take on Plato, but a completely new realization of reality itself; one that Plato could not possibly have entertained. Anything less is totally unimaginative and a dead end. The new context that our species is about to enter must logically be inclusive of all the others that came before. Reality is evolutionarily cumulative, not reductive. The pivotal technology that is the computer is another iteration of The Mirror, the advent of consciousness itself. The entire process is not unlike the giant mirrors that have to be ground and polished that astronomers need to focus light from places unseen. What is curious here, is that this is not a metaphor of astronomy. Astronomy is the metaphor for the ‘seeing’ we will do with the computer; just as NASA is only the metaphor for the inner ‘space travel’ that we will undertake with quantum theory. Intuition first arrives into consciousness as metaphor, symbol and analogy; reason then translates it into an algorithm, and creativity into a technology. All technologies are McLuhan extensions of the human body. All but the pivotal technologies quickly replace one another because they are simple, linear, specialized extensions of the prior pivotal technology, small steps in a metaphorical chain. Pivotal technologies (fire, seed, computer) are metaphors that must be totally experienced in order to be transcended. Who would have thought that when Lazy Linda, back in the Pleistocene, got so tired of the endless grind of migration needed to find food, that she said, “I’m getting off this conveyor. I’m planting these seeds and waiting right here until they make dinner.” --- well, who could have thought that someday she’d be dining

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on caviar at Windows on the World, top of the World Trade Center, and musing, “Is this all there is?” In short, the Economic Epoch is almost over because it’s exhausted, used up as a tactic and as a metaphor of reality, one that had to be experienced first-hand to be fully understood. But it must now be confined to memory. At least by those who’ve been through it, and now can really comprehend it. Since we cannot recapture the first moment and full meaning of self-awareness by using only the strategies and techniques developed in this Economic Epoch, we must wait until the new Artistic Epoch sufficiently expands human creativity in order to recreate that old singularity. This is where Quantum Theory leads us, not just around the corner and back to the assumptions of Plato and Aristotle. (Being human they too had to make assumptions.) If we have to restart there, and go through all that again, we’ll just end up in the same Hell we are in now. Red rum, red rum! Anyone not able to see how we are maniacally preparing the stage for our own extinction cannot possibly have the imagination to invent and believe in a way around it. This is not an opinion. It is a simple axiom. And the abundance of crappy science fantasy and fiction shows it. Even when given total freedom to invent a new order, a new world, one that demystifies our nature and our role in evolving to this point, the human imagination seems capable of drawing only on tired, cultural shibboleths and dead assumptions in constructing a new narrative. “Beam me some more crap, Scotty.” Also, since sociogenesis is inherently a collecting function, based on a system of amassing incomprehensible amounts of digital data in order to produce a comprehensible analogue understanding, won’t it take the imagination of millions or billions of individuals in order to reach the critical mass needed to generate universal understanding? Or could it be that such a chain reaction has already commenced, but cannot yet be experienced? Another simple axiom. (Deduction is Digital. Induction is Analogue. Analysis and Synthesis. The Draft Dodger and The Drunk. What goes around, comes around again and again. In a different hat.) THE SPIDER, THE SNAIL & THE SNAKE Before the earth was flat, it was round. Here are three majestic natural forms and one process that symbolize the broad sweep of sociogenesis. They are clues to the Great Human Cognitive Easter Egg Hunt. The Spider, the Snail, and the Snake. And the metamorphosis that occurs in chrysalis. Start with the Spider and its great mysterious product, the Web. How on earth could any thinker have convinced himself that Homo habilis was the first tool-maker? The stone-ax, that sacred relic of archeology, is such a crude, rudimentary tool compared to a spider’s hi-tec invention. That web is such an elaborate complex machine of communication and execution that it defies logic. And our ancestors saw and understood this, instinctively and intuitively, literally millions of years before they ‘invented’ a sharpened piece of stone. When did we betray memory and forget this? (Blame God!)

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The first recapitulation of the spider’s web arrived with human language (the only kind). Language is our primal web, a patterned code we invented and evolved for sharing the way we experience an incomprehensible reality, thereby meta-bonding in order to prevent our personal and collective disintegration and extinction. And then came the electronic web, a perfect computer parallel, the Internet! As the spider extends it spatial sphere of influence by weaving silken thread, we humans expand our PR by spinning yarns about UR. We glide out into the future on an expanding, free-floating web, a network of increasingly complex language. Beckett is right: all we have are words. Good enough. Yes, naming things does make them real. At least to us. Then there is the Snail, that expanding coil of chambers that begins at a point, grows larger and larger, suggesting it can go on forever. It reveals the exact same geometry as the expanding rising cycles of our spiraling sociogenesis. In the animal snail, naturally, it all comes to an end. But in the largest reality, the geometry of the snail, the expanding spiral, may be a pre-existing Platonic form that is without limits. Each chamber is a new context, a new model residence in which consciousness resides until it gets too large and must create a larger context. Finally, the snake that swallows its tail and then its entire being. It’s form is the symbol for Infinity, making the snake eternal. At the very point of its disappearance, it reemerges in some other timescape. One door closes, another opens. Chrysalis and metamorphosis, naturally, remain the mysterious transformations by which consciousness creates a larger context of UR, enabling it to then extend and enlarge its PR. It suggests a moral: if your destination in this mysterious journey is to arrive at a conclusion, you have already failed. Die open. EVIDENT, EMMINENT, EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF SOCIOGENESIS (P) p.i.s.a.e.s./S.E.A.S.I.P (P) – the essence that precedes our existence What has been discussed so far is primarily what the consequences are of our use of our limited mental faculties; how we think produces how we act. But the Political Era now coming to a close is so charged with action that it has become our habit to reverse that sequence: we deduce from our actions (history) our motivations. This is fine for any limited duration in question. But it’s just wrong to apply such deductions to our longer duration, our larger contexts. We are not the same people we were during our hunter/gather life. Our minds and our brains do not work the same way. And their minds and brains did not work the same way as those hominids who had not yet domesticated fire. To find the long-term commonality of our species, then, we need to go deeper and longer. And by logical necessity, and the careful use of Occam’s Razor, reconstruct the minimalist, natural explanation for our genesis. The Razor is used to excise the unnecessary. In this case, a lot of biological gibberish

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that tries to account for almost all human actions as arising out of genes and cells. In truth, probably more than half the activity that evolutionary biologists (and the many other new bandwagon Evolutionary disciplines) claim is biologically driven, can be better accounted for by an analysis of how we humans think differently in different sociogenic contexts. What follows is not a law, rule, hypothesis or theory. As with Biological Expansion & Diversity, it is presented as just a simple, not-so-bloody FACT. And it’s based on only what the human mind can do in a given context, and then what it can do it with that in a new wider context. And it’s only because it is so simple that it can lead to such great complexity. There are only two categories of human activity: Physical and Mental. There are only three kinds of activity in each category. In the Physical: Economic, Social and Political. In the Mental: Spiritual, Artistic and Intellectual. And the (Psychological) is the interface where all six interact and argue, individually and collectively. (And in our present case, where all the sex goes on.) All this sounds so profoundly basic, like ‘duh!!’ ---and that’s the point. The reason we don’t really know ‘What’ we are is because we’ve forgotten the basic assumptions concerning our capabilities and limitations arising from our original context. And that led us to making new and more flattering assumptions about our prowess. Wrong. What makes such a simple taxonomy so powerful is just that, its simplicity. That and one even simpler technological device: the mirror, our seminal technology; the simple reversal of a sequence which changes everything while changing nothing. “Madam I’m Adam.” The awareness process has always been a collaboration between the individual mind and the collective mind. It is a closed, feed-back loop, with all individual ‘gears’ moving in one direction, moving any larger social gear in the opposite direction, by reversing the sequence of development. Yea, it sounds like a clock. And it’s a lot like one. We know how infants come into the world, respond and develop. We’ve all watched it in wonder. As previously stated, they first feel, then act, then think, then judge; and repeat on the next social level. It’s first, (Psychological) starting in the womb; Political, for will to act; then Intellectual, process and articulate the result; then Social, position oneself among others; then Artistic, self-expression within the group; Economic, a lifetime of employment; and finally, Spiritual, a wonder of what it all meant. The mix for everyone is different, but the sequence is the same because the human mind is structured to proceed that way. (P) p.i.s.a.e.s. “Because feeling comes first.” said e.e.cummings. And the rest logically follows. And the social structures all flow in the opposite direction. As said earlier, no social unit. can be more than the people who compose it, but it can be different. It can be, and is, just a mirror opposite of individual development, a hand-held looking glass which an individual used to produce an identity. Be it a civilization, a culture, a society or even a state, all arise out of a previous diaspora, a dispersal resulting from a variety of natural or man-made events, including the natural decay occurring in a previous sociogenic cycle when the basic assumptions about reality run out of gas. The rebirth is always identical: it begins with Spiritual reappraisal, the older faith, de facto, having failed. This is followed by the unavoidable Economic need to meet the groups physical requirements. Next, a symbolic Artistic interpretation of the Spiritual vision. Then a Social classification of roles and hierarchies. Fifth: A specific analysis and verbal/written codification of the artistic interpretation of the spiritual insight. And lastly, a full-blown

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acting out on all levels of the explicit values, mores and powers arising from within the groups total overall vision: this is The Political finale. (P)S.E.A.S.I.P. There are no demarcation lines, no ‘tipping points’, in this flowing sequence, and all agencies are always active to some degree. The different phases, however, always emphasize one subject activity, in the order as stated. This is true also in individual development. (reversed) It should also be noted that both the Individual and the Social cycles are woven together by virtue of the fact that each cycle alternates the focus of interest to the benefit of the individual, followed by a concern for the group. The individual accommodates the group, and the group assists the individual. How else could it be? THE ORIGINATING TEMPLATE OF SOCIOGESIS Individual emphasis <<<<: Spiritual ----------Artistic--------------Intellectual (sequence<<<<) \ / \ / \ Group emphasis: \ / \ / \ Both: (PSYCH) (sequence >>>>> ECONOMIC----SOCIAL--------------POLITICAL>>>>> This all feels a bit academic and abstract. So lets look at anthropology and history, and see if we can find any tangible evidence for such patterned forms. Should we begin with the largest context, the one in which consciousness itself emerged in an animal form, and the one that still controls all other contexts? Or should we look at the nearest, narrowest, most immediate Timescape: the Time, in the Period, in the Age, in the Era, in the Third Epoch of human existence? (Note: while the labeling of the durations in this chronological taxonomy is arbitrary, their sequence and specific reference is not. It’s real. Who is to say what an ‘era’ is, or an age, a period, an eon, an epoch? They are all unspecified durations until someone, by usage, decides which is longer or shorter than another. In our case, common sense and prior usage was the guideline; a Period seems longer than a Time, an Age seems shorter than an Era, etc. And the Epoch is the longest only because it is the duration between Pivotal Technologies, the most significant ‘genetic’ markers in sociogenesis.) Since it is tangible evidence we are looking for, that would suggest the smallest example might be the most revealing. Okay? Here goes. At the end of the 20th Century, the United States entered the Political Time, of the Political Period, of the Political Age, of the Political Era, of the Homo sapien Economic Epoch. (We are now so deep in a metamorphosis, a cascading avalanche of psychic change, that it is all but invisible.) We are already entering that Psychological segue between the old materialistic and the new Artistic Epochs. Luckily, we’re so anesthetized by huge practical problems and misdirecting technologies, as well as being in the eye of the simultaneous telescoping of the five Timescapes, that we can neither see nor feel the great morphing. We’re in suspension. (When coming into a major train station there are moments when the tracks coalesce, and the train you’re on is moving parallel to one on either side of you. All three are moving slowly, but at slightly different speeds. For a few disquieting seconds it is impossible to sense whether you’re going forward, backward or you’ve just stopped.) It all seems like some great Dumbing Down. Just as well. Or it would kill us.

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That whole paragraph is just a sketch of the set and setting for what follows: The’60’s in America saw the advent of vehement youthful reaction to the Complacency & Conformity of our postwar culture. It came it two varieties: the college kids who tried to correct and improve the society they were about to enter, and try to succeed in. And a younger age group that just dropped out of the culture entirely. The former, a homogenous educated group, was an historical first. The drop-outs, however, had a lineage, other ancestral groups that tried the same tactic in a different context. Which is what makes their evolution interesting. After WWI the Bohemians said they’d had enough of society. It’s clear that their form was Artistic, a reversion to sustained self-expression. Their main objection, however, was resentment toward the social structure: content Social. A depression and WWII followed, stalling any cult evolution, until peace returned and brought with it the Beatniks, whose form was Intellectual and Content was Political. As in a Greek myth, with Beatniks fading away, a new movement was birthed, literally, from the head of the ‘beat generation’ on upper Grant Avenue, Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. The migration began and settled at the intersection of Haight and Asbury by the Golden Gate panhandle. That drop-out movement progressed and degenerated so quickly, that few noticed its intent and motivation. The first Hippies, smoking grass, were spiritually moved. They sought an entirely new existence, rather than just an alternative to modern American culture and values. Yes, they used psychedelics to enhance their spiritual moods. So, while their form was Psychological, the content of the early movement was Spiritual. Before the Hippies got wasted entirely, another cult fetus began to form in that brain: they called themselves The Diggers. The Diggers naively aimed to begin a new civilization; back to the land of The Seed (Economic) as a means of support for the effort to find a new self-expression of being (Artistic). It was existential and impractical in the larger hostile context (the Political Time in the Political American Period). The Diggers never got off the ground, or, as it were, never got on the ground. This suggests that even on the most micro level the meshed gears of sociogenesis are fixed . Any effort to jump the host context can only result in an automatic clutch kicking in that puts forward movement into neutral. There’s been no sign in forty years suggesting a new spontaneous cult was about to sprout. And yet, there are more reasons than ever in American culture today for such a social event to occur. Had the Diggers been able to emerge, however, their form was already clear by intent; Economic, an agrarian replay of the Epoch of the Seed. The content, Artistic self-expression. In short, the form of the Bohemians became the content of the Diggers. Thus you have the entire sequence, the full cycle: Social, Intellectual, Political, (Psychological), Spiritual, Economic and Artistic. (The Digger movement had to be stillborn: they planned to reinvent the same wheel. Sociogenesis, like biological evolution, cannot go backwards.) This is the sociogenic equivalent of the DNA/RNA of biology, which can also be seen in the context of the full American Period. That will be covered in a bit. But a better view of the cycle right now can be seen in the sweep of what we call Western Civilization, beginning in 1 A.D., the Political Era here referred to as ‘Christian’. In keeping with the taxonomy used by many historians in describing the evolution of the West, the word ‘Age’ becomes the largest subdivision, i.e., “the Age of Reason”, “the Age of Revolution”, etc.

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In this case, we begin with the spread of Christendom, including the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine: The Age of Faith (SPIRITUAL) The underground Church comes to the surface and spreads across Europe. Next, The Age of Toil (ECONOMIC), often called The Dark Ages, or Middle Ages; the Fifth to Fourteenth Century. The Economic Age was all work. The seeds of private property, Mercantilism, City States, Guilds, Capitalism. As it is for most individuals, the longest duration. The Age of the Renaissance (ARTISTIC) The rebirth, re-flowering of the Christian spirit integrating Greco-Roman humanist forms and values. The Age of Reformation (SOCIAL) A restructuring of role and class resulting from prior religious, artistic and economic change. Usually depicted as primarily a church matter, but the secularization effect on the population was clearly a social revolution. The Age of Reason (INTELLECTUAL) the emancipation of thought gave rise to ideas about an objective reality, separate from God’s. Science became codified reasoning. The Age of Democracy (POLITICAL) the recognition of the inalienable, god-given rights of individuals in relationship to the Church and State; and the awesome irony of the final natural decay of all the Eras and Ages during the American Period and Time of the entire materialistic ECONOMIC EPOCH, produced by the wholesale acting-out of the values that evolved and devolved over the preceding 2,000 years, abetted and accelerated by massive unintended individual corruption in the last stages of the avant-garde societies. Cultures begin as enablers of individual exploration and expression, but gradually morph into inherently conservative vehicles midway in their evolution. The emancipator becomes the jailer. We should remind ourselves again of what Alfred North Whitehead said about sweeping culture transformations: Those individual societies that are the first to be visited by such change are, in their states of unpreparedness, humbled and all but destroyed by the impact. Being on the cutting-edge is exciting. And very dangerous. Unfortunately, we don’t get to choose. Which takes us to America and the end of the Western Era and line. (Trust in existence requires us to see every end as a beginning.) It’s been labeled The End of History. But it’s not the end of Anthropology. The old history is popped into a new larger context making it look not at all like history. That’s just another illusion. What a pivotal role America was elected to play. Luck of the draw. America as the POLITICAL PERIOD, in the POLITICAL AGE, and ERA of the ECONOMIC EPOCH! And now, in our POLITICAL TIME of our POLITICAL PERIOD, we are confronted by a huge dramatic final acting-out of what had become a desperate clinging to the notion that matter was all that mattered. Wall Street made a half-a-Quadrillion dollar bet on it. And lost. As did everyone else. It’ll take a century to sop up all that blood. The sociogenesis of American civilization, given the fertile virgin ground it was handed, along with the protection from outside power and influence provided by our natural geographic isolation, should have led to a classic, laboratory model of the SEASIP Cycle. But three powerful forces skewed and retarded our ‘natural’ evolutionary pattern. And all of them fell upon us like a tsunami in our second or ECONOMIC TIME. The first American SPIRITUAL TIME was pretty clean. A small band of Pilgrims (among a horde of Puritans) carrying the seeds of a humanist theism, extolled by the Emersons and Thoreaus, were able to cultivate a climate in which a huge historic document emerged, forever liberating the secular life of mankind from the dictates of religious authority. Freedom FROM religion was born here on Indian ground.

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Our Constitution, which belongs to the world, may be the most revolutionary document in human history. And don’t be deceived by all the scary current fundamentalist regression. History (or anthropology) is against it. It’s fated to fail. Which is not to say that it won’t first create great destruction. The fact remains, however, that the American Experiment will eventually lead to a greater global liberation, even if we’re not here to enjoy it. But now, the bad historical news: our three impediments to smooth transformation. First, we were not ‘handed’ this continent. We invaded and all but exterminated the indigenous population whose home this had been for thousands of years. Interpret this as you wish, but the fact can’t be altered. Second, we raided another continent, Africa, and enslaved a population to complete our ECONOMIC TIME. In effect, we didn’t even experience our own economic evolution. Third, and the topper: While we were still killing red men and beating black ones, the Industrial Revolution descended upon us, and sent us into a compulsive manic frenzy that is only now abating. Or collapsing. Or cascading. The meaning of all this is now evident. We collectively never had an adolescence, no ARTISTIC TIME of national self-expression. No SOCIAL TIME, other than the technical declaration that slavery was legally abolished. And the INTELLECTUAL TIME was all about science and technology, leading directly into this POLITICAL TIME, which can be fairly described as a prison in which hundreds of millions of people are held hostage by national and transnational corporations, banks and investment firms, an enormous military/industrial complex, and platoons of political goons on the state and federal payrolls who are also being bribed by the first three powers to act in their behalf. Is this our national chrysalis? Is this the encapsulating cocoon that will protect us from a crumbling world? Will we emerge as butterflies into a New World Order? Or ....or...does our stunted and stalled sociogenic evolution just underscore the efficacy of the SEASIP cycle by demonstrating the rule that Context Rules, and that Ultimate Context rules Absolutely? Does it not suggest that while social progress can occur at varying rates in different societies and cultures, there is an absolute limit to the amount of differentiation there can be? And doesn’t this indicate that these are rules that we began to follow unknowingly, which then imprinted themselves on our subconscious, completing the feed-back loop, the spine which has held together this First Book of Consciousness and the seven Epochs and many Eras, Ages, Period and Times? Care to take a guess? The main point, however, is that the SEASIP(P) pattern of sociogenesis is evident on all levels of social and individual evolution. The Mirror, the Flame, the Seed and the Brain are the first four of the seven Epochs of the emergence and transformation of consciousness on planet earth. While we are on the threshold of a new Epoch, The Brain (computer), the so-called First World remains inert, clinging to the agricultural or materialist Epoch. Is the pattern apparent there, as well? Sure. The long duration and pre-historic beginnings of the Epoch of The Seed makes it hard to find unbroken threads of tangible evidence. But working in reverse, and beginning with our Western civilization, it seems obvious that we are approaching the close of the Political Era of the materialist Epoch. Which would logically nominate Rome as being the Intellectual Era. And for that a good rational argument can be made. And Greece was the Social Era. Another good argument. And Egypt, the Artistic Era. Again, good fit. Maybe Sumerian civilization as the Economic Era. There’s historical evidence it was the first site of ‘corporate’ farming. The Spiritual Era? ... that seems lost in the mist of pre-history.

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But the pattern is clear. It is our new Penultimate Reality, a chapter in The First Book of Consciousness, just one phase of dimensionless Existence, or Ultimate Reality. We are so conditioned as reductivists, however, that a question sticks in our craw: from whence arises this seemingly deterministic cycle of social and individual evolution? By this time you may anticipate the answer: there is no ‘whence’! It’s just about us being pushed by the past, through the present and into the future. Human evolution is a single narrative relating an unbroken chain of events. It has no beginning and no foreseeable end. (In fact, that which has no beginning, cannot be conceived of as having an end. Also, Infinity makes time redundant, just an abstract tautology that renders the concept of Eternity totally meaningless. ) This observation instantly changes that very definition: Human evolution begins with the story of how we assumed the opposite of no-beginning/no-end, then later simply broke into the unbroken chain of being in order to examine the links from inside. Process, to be understood, requires our minds to break into Reality, like robbers. That’s science. Then we have to steal back out, and cover up our entry to preserve our existential balance, our equal dependence on an unbreakable Reality. That’s philosophy. Therefore, the (P)SEASIP cycle is simply self-imposed. And the simple-to-complex explanation is that it is an ordering formula that allows us to see Process and Reality almost simultaneously. Or just close enough to experience them as being both separate and unified at the same time. The formula incarnates as naturally as Darwinism. It is a result of the initial interaction of a limited set of sensory detectors (mechanical, chemical and electronic) linked to a self-aware brain/mind, that catalogues and stores such ‘experiences’ in orderly programs. These then morph into a platform that powers a secondary level of interaction with a now conceptualized form of external Reality. A continuous feed-back loop is thus established, guided at first by reason and logic, and eventually more directly by the most fundamental component (so far!) of the animal anatomy, Quanta. But we’re not there yet. But, but ... we are at a place where we can comprehend that the great gyre of sociogenesis is just a psychic habit or pattern formed by the subconscious awareness of the elaborate interaction between self, thought, process and reality. And that itself is just another platform from which to launch a deeper, epistemological, inner exploration. Let us allow G. Vico, our earliest accomplished explorer of historical self-awareness, have the first pre-last word. Better yet, here’s what a modern enlightened man, Isaiah Berlin, had to say in an effort to amplify and illuminate Vico’s words for a new historical audience, us: “.... he (Vico) dissolves the concept of a static human nature ---the un-altering kernel ---and replaces it with a pattern of systematic change. Historical insight for him is a form of men’s awareness of themselves as purposive beings whose modes of thought, feeling and action alter in response to new needs and activities, which generate new institutions, entire new civilizations, that (re)incarnate men’s nature. Men are able to understand these civilizations, no matter how remote from their own, in a fashion different from that in which they can know the external world (science), because they are largely man-made.” Clearly, if Vico had been able to acquire the modern idioms of philosophy, technology and science, his writing would have made this essay almost impossible to justify. It would, in fact, have simply made it plagiarism. Language itself is intelligence. It is the silk of the Spider weaving the web of connections across the space-less dimensions of reality. (“Words are all we have,” said Sam.) And the

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web (and ‘The Web’) sends back a message to the coil of the Snake, bringing it back to the place in the cycle where it began, but now subsumed and reborn on a new loftier level. And the reincarnated Snake of consciousness gives rise to a new chamber on the spiraling Snail of sociogenesis, a chrysalis from which emerges a stream of cognitive butterflies, flying out to explore a new reality. (...or what’s a metaphorical metamorphosis for?) In keeping with the principles of philosophy, logic and science, dictating that ideas cannot be proved, only disproved, it now seems safe to declare that the 20th Century, beside being the bloodiest in history, was also that period least likely to provide us with any clear sense of our identity, and more importantly, our very human transformational nature. But, as a species, it was a good time for imprinting the perversities of self-loathing. Is it only as an innocent child that one now contemplating the 20th Century might sincerely wish to become an alien? We can stop looking for ways to humiliate ourselves, however. The soft grayness of the approaching Artistic Epoch is as hopeful as it is anxiety provoking. So all we need do is fully accept the dimensionless indifference of existence, and then observe the awesome humbling power it has over self-awareness. It seems to benignly whisper, “You are lucky to think that you even exist at all.” No accusations, no guilt, recriminations or obligations. After some waves of anxiety induced by the contemplation of non-existence, all that remains in one’s mind is clarity and the freedom to resist. The only implied request to us by Existence is that any conscious being demonstrate publicly a sustained Will to continue on. “I will go on...” And the only private quality needed to do that is Courage. But it’s a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Freedom is the only state of being that an autonomous consciousness can seek in reaction to the inevitable death of both God and the human body. The only alternative is cowardly submission, utter subjugation and the reaction to it: vengeful manipulation and exploitation of others. Our instinctive animal past is not what made us murderers. We are free only to pursue freedom. Freedom is the only vehicle that can deliver us to existential responsibility. That this is progressive seems an undeniable truism. That attempts to escape or evade this truth invariably lead to economic, social and political disaster is amply historically recorded. That the ocean of tolerance that Reality provides us does not suggest an infinite patience for our ill-will and defective judgment is patently clear. That a state of absolute freedom exists can only be conceived of as a possibly meaningless possibility. Our immense journey in pursuit of liberty indicates that such an essence preceded our very existence, possibly making it a fundamental element in Existence itself. And this is our present limitation of thinking and thought. This is our new frontier, our new Penultimate Reality. Restore Eden; and think about it.

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======================================================================= (Now jump over this Postscript, which you supposedly read earlier, to the post-postscript) POSTSCRIPT Philosophy, say many philosophers, is the process of avoiding drawing conclusions about mortality and death by dissolving and eliminating all questions. It’s a ‘game’ with no endgame. (Is there an echo in here?) And this suggests kind of a neat idea: if you approach the final eye of the needle, naked and devoid of all baggage, maybe you’ll be allowed to slip through. But that’s just another first-cause, God-type question, isn’t it? (And that itself is just another question, isn’t it? (And that’s just... (“Okay, shut up!”))). So if questions can’t be used to avoid conclusions, and conclusions (or received assumptions) are useless in formulating questions, what good is thought and thinking? (“Is that another goddamn question?” “Why do you ask?” “Why don’t you stop? “Why should I?” “Okay, Uncle!!) Philosophy is the father of Science. They still share the same objective: reveal what might be, by eliminating what almost definitely isn’t. It’s a process that has the potential for being a life-long pursuit (if you play your cards right). And in this Age/Era / Epoch/ (Psychological) and tumultuous physical transition, the practice of Philosophy leads one to automatically follow four of the new Ten Commandments: l. Do no harm. 2. Stay out of harm’s way. 3. Think. 4. Celebrate. Feel free to write the other six commandments for yourself. The internal sense that one begins to acquire while pursuing the true nature of reality feels very much like freedom. Such a sense, of course, could be attributed to the illusion that detachment from historical shibboleths is itself freedom. So just the simple perspective needed to see things as they are, not as one might wish them to be, is one that might only be obtained at the end of a long and thought-filled life. Yet, even that is no guarantee. (A brash young man is chastised by his boss: “Don’t talk to me that way. I have thirty years experience in this business!” To which the upstart replies: “No, you don’t. You have one-year’s experience thirty times.” In most cases, the lad is right.) It’s not intelligence, or cleverness, or experience that puts one nearer to timeless truths. It is Openness; a relentless willingness to let everything in, and allow everything to fall out. Because there is so much to consider and reconsider, it always takes at least a lifetime. But until there is nothing left to lose, there can exist no opportunity to approach being egoless, and therefore authentically objective. This is why the young are never Wise. But they always carry the potential. STOP HERE, and proceed back to the beginning. .

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======================================================================== POST-POSTSCRIPT (The end of ends) That then is the story of The Storytellers, that strange cut-and-paste cult-species of mythologizers who cobbled together pictures of the external world they believed to be real and true, based not on fact but only on their experience, creating a serial family album whose pages piled up like geologic strata, solidified into an irretrievable data collection whose secrets can now be recovered only by logical necessity, massive induction and computation. Whatever other role causality plays in reality, it is clearly the essence of sociogenesis. Again, we are causal agents. We live in a man-made world made by man-made minds. And both because and despite its great complexity, logic insists there is but one, coherent, single narrative. Our future may be open to interpretation, but our past is not. No wonder we avoid it like the plague. The key to finding page-one of our story is to keep digging until one comes to the Mirror: a cul-de-sac, a coded palindrome, a tautology where the snake consumes itself. Euphemisms like ‘causally decoupled’ just don’t cut it. And once again, the Eden metaphor comes to the rescue: “Madam, I’m Adam”, a nearly perfect palindrome for the way we, and everything else, emerges up into awareness. Recent research into the double-helix, DNA and chromosomes has found encoded palindromes to be deeply puzzling. They are tiny mirrors that say the same thing, backwards and forwards. Just like sociogenesis: Individual conscious evolution is the mirror reverse of collective evolution. It is the template of our sociogenesis. A tautology or cul-de-sac can be seen either as a final conclusion or a new beginning. And what Einstein said about insanity, going round and round, repeating the same action while expecting a different result, is a good description of much neo-Darwinist thinking. Move on! Change is our permanent condition. Don’t waste time in redundancy. We are the protean interface with UR. While we now can conclude that we can conclude nothing about Ultimate Reality, we can take one more pass at trying to define the motivations of thinkers who might best fit the label, Philosopher. This could be a book in itself: “The Psychology of Philosophy” (by Woody Allen, author also of “Problems in Non-existence”). But such a comic monologue is unnecessary in order to understand what else the most humane philosophers might be up to. Sure, some are fixed on mortality and death. Yeah, some are logicians playing Rubik’s Cube in their head in search of the perfect, or near perfect question; a game of one-upsmanship. Scientists and philosophers are both equally human, and prone to hyperbole. But in many of them there is some sense of the Cognitive Voyager, the Explorer of psychic spacelessness, the Cartographer of the frontier where human awareness morphs into the void of existence. And in a few, this motivation stands out as the principal force for their fearless investigations. Such adventures seem not to be chosen. Rather it’s as if the ship itself selects the captain. This is a challenge that is not to be taken by the faint of heart. There is a huge paradox in this agenda. If one is incorrect in the direction taken, and falls off the edge of the world, so be it. Lick the wounds, and come back to port, to common familiar reality. Or just die.

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If, however, the voyager remains on course and sails beyond the world’s present knowledge, leading to the extension of human Penultimate Reality into the absolute indifference of existence, be aware: you have passed the point-of-no-return. Too late. There is no coming back, no returning home. Bye, Mom and Dad. Bye, God. Bye, all. Dare to be. Die open. Bon voyage!