The Mirror, The Flame, The Seed and The Brain; by H.J. McGraw

8/9/2019 The Mirror, The Flame, The Seed and The Brain; by H.J. McGraw

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THE MIRROR, THE FLAME, THE SEED & THE BRAIN

Pivotal Technologies; Sociogenesis and the SEASIP Cycleof consciousness evolution; Quantum theory and multipleuniverses; 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. Its 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 itbegins. The book would thus have two nearly identical front covers. You get the picture; aclosed loop. But there is an easier way to get the same idea across without making anyreader commuting to or from work look cuckoo to nearby passengers for apparently reading abook 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 withthe prologue below. It will echo a trickier effect: that of printing the entire manuscript in atotally reverse type that could only be read (without great effort) by holding it up to TheMirror 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 ofconsciousness 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 tofear 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 thattransformation occurred many millennia before Darwin discovered evolution, just asevolutionism 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 mayinclude others, but it cannot exclude its-elf. The completely selfless act is thus a rhetorical


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trick. Even heroic self-sacrifice has unintended consequence. (Suicidal self-sacrifice issimply delusional.)

So the underlying question is: how could the first appearance of self-awareness into amonistic perfect world, which then turned into a fragmented circus of billions of minds inone genetically cloned body --- how could that possibly be interpreted as a strategy ofadvancement for the Natural Order? (Unless independent consciousness was an error, anabhorrence 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) somany millions of years and trillions of chance mutations to finally achieve an organicspecimen worthy of self-awareness, one that would perfectly fit the perfect world alreadyincarnate?

Was it, and is it, a matter of critical mass? , which in the present case means theproliferation of so many minds and opinions that the collective consciousness falls into totalchaos and the throes of imminent extinction, leaving us with no alternative but to regress andreiterate natural selection on a conscious level, which then forces us to accept andinternalize simultaneously the only logical escape left for our species? Ya gotta do what yagotta do!

And what in Gods name could that possibly be? The dice are so loaded and the deck sostacked 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. Couldthey 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 doesnt play dice with the

Universe.Then someone said, God does play dice with the Universe, but theyre loaded. And

someone else added, No, the dice arent 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 thanknowledge. Which some thought was understated.

Enter then one of the 20th

Centurys most amazing Inductivists, a man known as theidiot boy because he was blind and couldnt learn. He regained his sight as a young man,fled his home, became a bracero in the California valleys, taught himself to read, and becamean accomplished auto-didact. He then wrote The True Believer, simply a great accessiblebook 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 witha world that no longer exists.

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Another master of the inductive entered the colloquy. The philosopher Henri Bergsonadded his view: The Universe is a machine for the making of gods.

God frowned, and said, I hope youre spelling gods with a small g.He continued. What makes your species so slow? Most of you are three, four, five

centuries behind. It couldnt possibly be my mistake, could it? Dont 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 wasnt the basis of reality, and that itwas 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 theres this new prophet among you, a real renaissance character, goes byDavid Deutsch --- how did he slip by me? My workload has greatly increased since theMultiverse became ultimate reality. I used to super only the Universe; now I have so manyalternate realms to manage I cant keep up. Deutsch is synthesizing philosophy, physics,quantum mechanics, Darwins evolution and electronic computation, into a new Theory ofEverything, that, I might opine, is a lot better than the last theory of everything which failedto account for ninety-something percent of the dark matter/energy that makes up youruniverse. Oi vey, what chutzpah!

While his book, The Fabric of Reality is a good read, he, like all scientists has lefthimself out of it, in fact, omitted the entire existing human species in his first theory ofeverything.

May I remind you, children...you are an integral and essential part of the program. Howyou see and experience the greater reality --- and then interpret it, because thats all that youcan do (I made sure of that.)--- is your sole means of expanding your cognitive awareness ofexternal reality. Its the only door you have for getting out of your tiny little egotisticalselves. Wake up!

As I just kvetched, Im too old and too busy now. Youre on notice. Its entirely yourplanetary spaceship and your penultimate reality now. I gave you a Garden of Eden whichyouve turned into a Den of Iniquity. You have to take full responsibility.

Sink or swim. I probably wont 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 toyou? God says, Its 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 howmedia and technologies are extensions of human faculties; he pops up and paraphrases poetRobert Browning.

A mans reach should exceed his grasp, or whats a metaphor. (Brownings line was,

or whats 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 thathavent happened to us in about twenty-thousand years. At least. We are in an Epochal shiftof 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 somethingthat has never been done before: a single, totally dominant species is producing closure onthe only planet known to harbor life. That would be Globalization, and the end of the age ofspace being sold to us by the powers of national security states as the beginning of TheSpace Age.

Since were about to sail back into uncharted waters, prudence suggests we heed Pascalsadvice: Chance favors the prepared mind. And Shakespeares: The readiness is all.

So now, forward! Or backward.

First, the reader is asked for patience and forbearance. This introduction to anintroduction to an introduction, is not just an absurdist conceit; no more so than the notion ofa beginning and an end, those inventions of the finite human mind that are predetermined andfaulty assumptions.

And its just as useless to try to start an exposition from the middle. There is no middleeither. Increasingly we are beginning to speak of the discovery of new knowledge as beingemergent, 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 actualway knowledge is revealed to our individual human minds: from the outside through randomentry points, using the three sense systems, mechanical (touch and hearing), chemical (tasteand 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 madeof. 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 verystuff of the reality it occupies not have genuine internal awareness of that reality? One cansuppress it, of course, and rely entirely on the reasoning power of the brain. Were good atthat, 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 makedistinctions, to distinguish between things, thoughts or theories. Living in a culture thattreats 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 Intuitionproves its definitely not that way. And animal instinct simply denies or ignores it, and soconfuses us further.

Deduction, or reductionism, is only half our reasoning program. The other half is equallyimportant: Induction. So if deductive intelligence is the ability to make distinctions, theninductive wisdom is the facility to see patterned connections. And we also need Intuition tocheck 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 its beginning to shift tectonically, as it does from Epoch toEpoch, our largest duration or context. The inductive mode of knowledge acquisition isreturning to preeminence for the first time since the advent of storable grain, for the simplereason that the materialist model of reality conceived back then has been deduced, reducedand subsumed, primarily by science, specifically physics, to almost the irreducible. And thematerialist model, like Fibber McGees closet, has no more space to store an ocean of newdata and inductive observations that threaten to inundate us.

Expansive remodeling of the universal psyche has become a necessity. And that meansthe 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 thosedeconstructed fragments to construct a new model of reality. Take the clay off the wheel, tossit back in the pot. Weve hit The Mirror. Its palindrome time.

As we enter the Psychological segue between Epochs, a transition of unimaginablephysical danger, the materialist Economic Epoch is approaching closure. This next stage ofhuman evolution will test not only our will and imagination, but the limits of our proteanpotential, 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 latterarrive in a whimper, while the former go out with a bang.

Like the impenetrable monoliths in 200l: A Space Odyssey, reality is for the momentportrayed here as a black box with several dark windows. In this thought experiment, wecan see only five of the six sides of this opaque cube. So the unseen side may be open, notclosed, 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/Evolution4. 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 thedeepest mystery of reality is process and not substance. Could it be that the sixth side of theblack box is the mystery we are being called upon to complete? Are we free to do that? Ornot free not to do it? Are we just pawns of nature as science suggests? (Or just pawns ofScience?) Will the belief system that is science lead us into the same dead end as all otherbelief systems have done? And what will follow? Is it possible to simply believe withoutbelieving 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 Pascals chance and change.

PREFACE:

Its not what you know. Its what you know that you dont know.

The first cognitive limitation in human reasoning that must be faced is that we had, andhave, only two ways of thinking about reality. We collect and assemble facts and data, aprocess 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 acarousel of cogitation, going around and around in circles, an over-heard, overlappingconversation between our two cranial hemispheres and their slightly different take onexperience --- which gives us a possible third imaginary version.

So, when we are attempting to deal with any new larger reality, like the Quantummultiverse, 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 itsounds, circular reasoning is the way we go about expanding our physical evolution andcultural habitat.

The key is that the circle is never closed, so its a cycle, and the cycles go 360 degreesreturning 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 isalways larger. That other French reference, a mate to deja-vu, is the more things changethe more they remain the same. Both can be explained as psychological illusions producedby the close vertical proximity of phases or forms in a spiraling cycle while they are also atthe 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 theyre notalready.)

The tactic of scientific objectification, or going out-of-body, in order to analyze one aspectof reality has both predictive power and absolute limitations. We cannot but continue to beSubjects in the Natural Order; there is no other choice. (Okay, suicide. Maybe.)

Sciences idea of a Theory of Everything is totally absurd, pure hubris or flagrantrhetoric. If that choice of words is meant to suggest only that we are required to alwaysintegrate all new knowledge into any comprehensive models of reality that we construct,thats fine. But lets get rid of that used-car salesman pitch. The risk to science is notintellectual failure, it is in becoming too authoritarian and inhuman.

There are no shortcuts in the cognitive spiral, no jumping the cyclical track. While thisprovides us with some predictive insights, meaning that we can project a new Context, it tellsus almost nothing about Content, other than a starting point--- Now!---and the next logicalsub-contexts that by sequential necessity must follow in the cycle. Our ability to know whatwe are going to know next is very limited because predicting specific, finite, impulsivehuman behavior is impossible.

Ironically, this means general, longer-range predictions are easier to make and morereliable than specific short-range predictions that involve trillions of individual acts. As anunderstanding 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 frombeing chimps in trees, then a logical naturalistic sequence is what must follow. But thatcant tell us whether or not we will survive, being as immediately unpredictable and suicidalas 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-livedhumanity 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 willnever enjoy the reduction in anxiety and angst that the sages did in accepting and integratingthe 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, pieceby piece.

Existence precedes and supercedes all else. Now is always everywhere, and everywhereis always now. And its always been that way.

The pure diamond amber of unending reality is so much more magical and miraculousthan the surreality created by those gods that man himself initially created, that getting itnow reduces all such theological speculation to that of a parlor trick. Believers in a PrimeMover can, axiomatically, only conjure a creator no more complex than their own limitedimagination. No wonder they so often rail against God --- (s)hes always their owninvention. (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 PrimeMovers, well, snap out of if! You and we are lone adventurers in our provisional time/spacecontinuum. It is what it is. And you can only get a sense of that by contemplation andmeditation, not through rote, ritual, medication or formal education.

Goethe said action is easy, thinking is hard. Thinking, in fact, is not hard, but itsdamned long. Intuition is slow to convince reason. And Socrates reference to theunexamined 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 trueeducation and the authentic expansion of awareness. Its not taught, and it cant be learned.Its all about discovery. (The opening quote is a slight but critical modification of anH.G.Wells quote saying history is a race between education and disaster. Its not.

Its a race between new discovery redeeming old learning and knowledge , thus staving offcatastrophe. Education, by definition, is cultural programming. Go back to the early EricHoffer quote.)

The mind of the individual is accessible only to the individual. Personal intuition makes itopaque from without. Collective consciousness, however, is an open book of shakyinformation, conjectures, dead hypotheses, shibboleths and lies. There is no intuition in thecollective mind, making it a rudderless ship always subject to running aground, which isprevented 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 intuitiveknowledge to confirm the sensory intelligence with which it resonates, producing insightsthat occasionally form a harmonic that others can hear; and that can then lead to a corrective

reorganization of human social models and structures. Society cant exist without individuals.And vice versa.

Were 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 chaotictransition will appear to be the promised Apocalypse. The idea itself is engraved in a varietyof Revelations going back beyond the Mayan. Under sufficient pressure and doubt it willreboot 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 darkapprehension about the approaching tumultuous future.

The real danger therefore comes from those who can only fathom an Armageddon, so theymight themselves rationalize bringing it upon us; the old self-fulfilling prophecy.

While most humans will probably survive, since the destruction will not be supernaturallydriven, it already has the nuclear potential to be catastrophic beyond imagination. At thismoment there is not a single piece of empirical evidence that might indicate that our speciescan survive without first undergoing a horrendous transition, a psychic trauma, and apopulation implosion. So, metaphorically speaking, God Help Us!

To conclude this small reflection on Existence, however, we would be remiss not toremind ourselves that the deepest of mysteries is also the ultimate of realities. The GreatChain of Being is unbroken and inexorable. It is the only thing, other than our ownexistence, we can be Certain of; it is the only thing we really know for sure. It is the sole,eternal continuity. Were always filled with certitude, and mistake it for certainty, but it isntso. 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 occupiedby a don who responds to every student rationalization supporting the efficacy of our culturewith just one word: Bullshit! Nobody, including Socrates, ever got paid for telling peoplethat 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 ascreatures whose balance of ego competitiveness versus social cooperativeness has beenreversed. The flags of Global Patriotism then fly. One planet, one people, one purpose! isthe cry. Label such a transformation as you wish: the sudden epiphanyof the great sleeping masses as to what constitutes genuine survival behavior; a flash floodof cosmic radiation elevating Darwinism out of the flesh and into the mind; or, a programbuilt 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 aslikely 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 allthat 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.

Its the 2lst Century, and Matter doesnt matter anymore. An expanded awareness ofExistence 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 thatthe 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 underminesand underlies matter entirely, or as the philosophers of science say, quantum theorysubsumed classical physics.

No one yet understands Quantum Theory (oddly, it still only works in practice), but thevarious supporting mechanics of it prove it to be at least as true as thermodynamics andparticle physics, and more reliable since it is only concerned with probability, and not humancertainty (which, ironically, we have now been forced to admit, has never existed to beginwith).

In the larger context of Quantum Theory, the new realm which contains our smallUniverse, 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 longerhas a prime epistemological position in terms of Meaning, it has become even more critical inImportance. Just as Newtons laws of motion got us to the moon, but only after they hadbeen obsoleted by Einstein et al, traditional physics will continue to be useful even thoughonly provisional. Our planetary survival depends increasingly on our ability to manipulatematter more effectively and efficiently than ever before. But thats not science, it isengineering and technology. We have already become Homo technologicus. (Sapiens

was a bad idea to begin with. We are not very smart.)We dont 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 clingdesperately 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 ofmatter: it aint.

In Heisenbergs words, the endless quest to get to the bottom of the atom, was in theirview useless and meaningless. (And very expensive.) Even the hardest science doesntprove, 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 theirignorance of those connections. Most everyone, as Monists to some degree, assumes that at aremote level all things are connected. And even if theyre not, we have to make that initialassumption in order to think that we can even begin to make any cognitive progress. Beliefin an endlessly open reality completely preempts any temptation to parse or understand it. Allthought is thus based on our finite assumption of causality.

All is One. Fine. But we can also believe that our universe is populated with otherintelligent (?) beings. (Show us their money!) Assumptions are the basis of all beliefsystems; all of them have been wrong. Awareness expands regardless. Its an undeniableirony. Its The Mirror, the eternal palindrome.

How inert matter, decaying stuff, gives rise to an inscrutable, self-ordering system oforganic dynamism, us, is way beyond human understanding, at least as far as we canimagine. 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 notopen 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. Thats the

whole story. Natural Selection is a tautology, a palindrome posing as a Theory, attemptingto 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 completelyfor the simple reason that they cannot predict whats going to happen. And they do notexplain life, they merely describe it by reverse engineering, then trick their inventors intobelieving that such a description is an explanation. It aint.

Many evolutionary biologists will admit that if we rewound the evolutionary clock on ourplanet to the beginning, the chance that things would end up as we now see them, or that wewould even be here, might be one in a billion trillion. Any guess that says there are otherintelligent 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 unerringlypredict 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 realseparation between us and the mechanical, clockwork universe of entropy. This distancingestablishes for us a natural objectivity. We know a lot about the early stage, the behavior andfate of our material universe. We know its destined to run down and go into the tank. Sonow we can project the rate and manner it will do so. Excellent theories then provide us withthe means to calculate the orderly decay toward total disorder, or death. Knowing preciselyhow the world of matter is going to die allows us, paradoxically, to invent ways of keepingour life on it alive until then, a few billion years down the road. (The greater probability isthat 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 andvariations. And that those in turn influence the survival of the ensuing living things andvariations. And on and on, with each roll of the mutating dice, and the changing mutatedecology and habitat.

Now all of that is further complicated by the fact that we ourselves are both Agents ofOrder as well as Ordering Agents. We are both Caused and Causal. This means we areinherently predisposed to favoring order --- everywhere. We cant keep ourselves fromprojecting 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 isspecifically defined, are those capable of making choices after conscious reflection. That beus. So by projecting our assumed selves onto the entire life process, either we are revealingour disbelief in free will and conscious choice, or we are taking ourselves off the hook ofcosmic opportunity and responsibility. (Of course, those scientists whose authority and

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careers depend on finding order where it doesnt exist or cant be found, abet us in ourmiscalculation.)

Make no mistake, science is a better belief system than Religion. The latter offers onlyprophecy and promise, while good science provides products and prediction. Anddemocratic 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 whichhas now flown away into cognitive irrelevance.....and greater practical importance.)

Modern science, though, has many trappings of traditional religion, from its inception inthe sacristy of the church, to its inclination to be dogmatic about its most recent theories orfindings, to its canonization of saints like Newton, Einstein, and presently, the endlesssanctification of the Holy Darwin. It may sound strange to say that science is a naturalcontinuation and extension of religion, yet together they form the spiritual and intellectualarchitecture, the cognitive technologies supporting the Epoch of the Seed, the materialisttimescape.

As many other scientists have said, Evolution is not a Theory. It is a FACT! AndDarwin, speaking for a whole line of earlier investigators, was elected to make the closingargument for it. But his subsequent elevation in the 20th Century has heavy political,

ideological, economic and philosophical implications in our cognitive world, the principalone 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, mostironically, of the platform or premise for the awareness of anything at all. In effect, all thatwe commonly refer to as knowledge, therefore, is based on a profound philosophical denialof the primacy of existence. This is Cosmic Comedy.

What can we take away from all this? Well, first, that Life is not nearly as meaningfulas weve been conditioned to believe, principally by the authorities of powerful nation-stateswho historically have coveted for themselves the right to mass murder. And what kind ofcockamamie 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 closestthing 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 helldecided that Thomas Malthus was wrong?) Life isnt precious; its perilous, precipitate andpernicious. Blame God, blame Darwin, blame voodoo. Just dont blame us.

Life, like matter, now takes on new Importance as it loses Meaning. It is importantbecause it is the platform, the catalyst, for Self-awareness. Natural selection, like all theother 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 backinto sociogenesis. See Haeckels recapitulation theory, and Lamarcks acquiredcharacteristics 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 biologicalexpansion and variation, and survival or extinction. Or, from an even more disinterestedperspective, the most brutally vicious competition imaginable; that is, other than gangstercapitalism.

That great old illustration of dogs sitting around a table playing poker is a perfectrepresentation 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 animalsare like us, or we are like them, needs to go to rehab. If it were only about organic andphysiological issues that would be fine. We can learn valuable anatomical and medicalknowledge from reverse engineering. But lets make it clear --- Homo spiritus is the solespecies that evolved to independently develop self-awareness. This is not a hypothesis or atheory. Its another blatant, obvious FACT!

That some animals can be conditioned to emulate self-recognition only indicates hownatural and logical that evolutionary process is, and has been! If we hadnt come along,maybe other primates, whales, porpoises or parrots might have eventually assumed themantle. But the profound fact remains, we are the only animals ever to realize self-awarenesson our own ---after millions of years of biological expansion. We invented it! To ignorethat mega-physical truth is insane, or worse --- cowardly.

For evolutionary theorists in any discipline to project self-aware intelligence onto otherspecies is simple hegemony, the expansion of their own authority into cognitive territoryalready occupied by native intelligence. Good old American Manifest Destiny.

Self-induced self-awareness (and consequent assumption) is the prerequisite for thinkingitself. A complex animal brain may be able to perform feats of imitation and elaborate rotebehavioral patterns, often better than we can!, but that is NOT thinking. It just isnt. Its justamazing neurological dexterity, undisturbed and uninterrupted by human ego and faultyemotional reasoning. Its a hard-wired extension of instinct, not an indication of fluidthought.

If all those neo-Darwinist researchers would spend half as much time contrasting howanimals are different from us, and we different from them, wed all see a different reality. But

theyre stuck on their shallow, self-serving agenda, which in turn helps us quell ourexistential anxiety by reducing us, in public but not in private, to being simple, lonely,irresponsible animals. Its 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 desperatelysearching the planet and the universe for companionship, for anything, even a pet, to keep usfrom the anxiety of cosmic existential loneliness, just as we must also resist the urge to dumpthe responsibility for existence onto some other invented conscious creatures.

Were isolated and marooned, lost in the stars ---but in a playground of infinite, majesticbeauty 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. Were right onthe edge of throwing nuclear bombs around. Weve reincarnated Hell. Can we find a wayout?

There are many books about Consciousness now available, including too many from aneo-Darwinist perspective, that hold to the idea that the meaty brain is the mind --- its allabout electro-chemical neural circuitry that evolved naturally. Others employ a newer idiomto rehash the old Mind/Body conflict. A few even go the other way and view independentMind as the purpose of existence. Whatever.

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The concept for this essay, however, is simply that the evolution from simple (and totallymysterious) ordinary animal awareness to the kind of institutionalized self-awareness of ourspecies, represents a total break with biological expansion, misnamed evolution. And, thatthe Mind is an autonomous phenomenon whose ultimate purpose, while yet unknown, is asmuch a part of the Natural Order as Matter and Life. Self-awareness is not the sin it wasmade out to be in the Eden myth, or the accident of Darwinism, or something to bediscovered inside brain cells (like taking apart a TV set to search for the picture inside), orsome other freak aberration. Mind is autonomous. It is meant to be. Or it wouldnt 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 groundfor 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 were tryingto figure out, using those minds, what else those minds might be for. Its a great challengeand an exciting adventure. And the philosophical fact that it is an unending process takessome of the sting out of death. Death isnt so terrible. It is non-existence that is so insanelyhorrific. Well 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. Its about internal reality. Its the ongoingsaga of the natural, logical evolution of our thinking process, both collective and individualand how they are directly related. It is the reason for our economic, social and politicalfailures and successes.

PREVIEW FOUR: SOCIOGENESIS

Were all inmates. And there is no warden.

The term may be a neologism, but the concept is as old as the hills. Sociogenesis is thesurface pattern of the cycles of human thought as they emerge from the subconscious, rise tothe amorphous spiritual, then evolve to the symbolic artistic, and finally crystallize in explicitintellectual 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 alternatebetween those models from time to time, emphasizing either Induction, organic, orDeduction, 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 knowledgewhich is synthesized into a model, which is then followed by Deduction, a reductive analysisof the model constructed from that initial induction period.

We do not build our social models based on reality, but ONLY ON WHAT WE GUESSREALITY TO BE. Which, of course, is always incorrect --- and progressive. Consider theprobability of any of us guessing correctly what reality is? That would be the same as theodds --- a billion trillion to one --- against our just being here!

It should surprise no one that all social organizations are created by the individualstherein. Where else could they originate --- from gremlins? And its as obvious as rain thatall individuals are first created by the social values, mores, thinking and ideas they were borninto. It takes decades to get out from under that pile of bullroar. Thus, the paradox: we arenot ourselves, individually, yet we are self-invented, collectively.

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Those renegade individuals who then transcend their own cultural context are thevisionaries who do eventually become themselves, and eventually reveal societies in decay oremergence. Even with that, however, few human beings have ever cast a shadow over anymajor social duration longer than several lifetimes, or an Era. And no single human has everinfluenced that long evolutionary, anthropological period we here call an Epoch. Bydefinition, an Epoch can only incarnate from the collective subconscious, as with theMaterial (Economic) Epoch, whose demise the world, hopefully, is now just beginning towitness.

Nor should anyone be shocked that we causal agents are the cause of our societies, or thatall societies should first conceal, then later reveal on close scrutiny, an ordered structure thatreflects, 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 intelligenceand knowledge. We still cant see what weve done until its done. Then it somehow seemswe knew it all the time.

G. Vico, the Italian philosopher, who was three centuries ahead of his time (Imagine howlonely 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 inour limited heads. Back when science literally meant knowledge in general , he wroteScienza Nouva (New Knowledge), outlining a four-part cycle of history: Theocratic,Autocratic, Democratic (gods, heroes, mankind) and Chaos, and then repeated in the nextlarger 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, Vicos 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 thereforeover-emphasized. He could not have known of the next larger anthropological context, thatthe humanity living between the second or Spiritual Epoch that began with Domestication ofFire, and the third, that of The Seed, or storable grain, having no need to invent a connectionwith 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 spiritualrealization of existence, thus creating a longing to reconnect. (Imagine how lonely theywere!)

After Hegel and Marx and many earlier proponents, the cyclical theories of history diedoff, and mans destiny was sadly deemed to be found only in biology and genetics. But nowall that is over as well. We live in a Multiverse or Megaverse (etc.), and our new penultimatereality (PR) is the expanded context of our existence. No more certainties; all the rules arechanged. Now its only about Probabilities. And thats for sure.

The irony, of course, is thats the way its always been. Newton was right only until hewasnt. Then he was retroactively never right at all! All knowledge that is preempted bynew 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, apast that is accelerating and moving away from us; going in the wrong direction to becognitively useful!

All our certainties, all our beliefs, going back to the beginning, have been nothing but anillusion or delusion; important and useful at the time, back then --- but also from thatmoment, totally incorrect. Poe wasnt so nutty. He wrote: All that we see, or seem, is but adream within a dream.

But thats what human discovery is always about. Our story is written by us with apencil; 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 thestart 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 apsychic/spiritual idea, that of mans relationship to a prime creative force, the UltimateOrdering Agency. Despite the fact that religion is now patently on the wane, and agnosticsand atheists are on the rise, the old encompassing context (third Epoch) insures that thiscosmic cycle, with four increasingly shorter Epochs still to come, will play itself out forcenturies or a millennia or two, in a glacially deterministic way. This is not a prediction, butsimply a de facto projection of forces surfacing too slowly for the collective consciousness todetect, integrate and counter. Freedom is riddled with determinism.

After that, not a clue, because Consciousness by then may have transcended biology, orfor that matter, even matter itself. If you find such speculation as this last projection to bespecious, you are deficient in your awe of existing reality, and not as daring as manyphysicists and cosmologists who have already projected a post-biological reality that is notbased 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. Its already taken a century for the few to acknowledge it. Meanwhile the vastmajority 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 therole played by the gullible, the ignorant and the credulous.

Most thinkers dismiss denial, stupidity, hatred, revenge and violence as some sort of evilor 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. Its just natural decay.Where would we be without it? In a never-ending avalanche of social chaos. One that mustcome 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 millionsof years of doing battle with mutating microbes that are now actually entombed in our doublehelix, long skeletal strands which researchers for years thought were just our own mysteriousjunk genes. We are, in fact, walking cemeteries of our genetic evolution. The past, saidFaulkner, is never over. Its 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 arrivingFuture. The present never really exists because it goes by and is gone even before the braincan process the letter n, as in now. (Axiom: either its always Now, or its never Now.)

Why would anyone think that the man-made world before us is anything but a creation ofour own minds, crazy and sane? Even the human brain itself is a creation of our minds. Ifscience 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 thethinking of the mind itself. Our thoughts actually rewire our brains! You are what you think!The world is what weve been consciously thinking. So the question is: what have we beenthinking---sub-rosa?

Surely, the most imminent mystery before us is the total record of our own actions. Thepattern of our universal behavior is a far more revealing record of our underlying thoughtprocesses than either our expressed intentions or beliefs, or our provincial historicalinterpretations of local conflicts. Those are rationalizations at best, and mainly delusionaland egotistically motivated.

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As Vico said, all the rest of reality is Gods doing, or, as we might now say, the programof 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 humanmystery.

First, we dont want to know, because it might force us to admit weve always beenincorrect (which is true), which could cause a cataclysmic species depression. In the face ofother humungous global problems this would result in a complete loss of hope.

Second, we moderns are so conditioned to requiring tangible, measurable evidence, thetype science seeks, that any proposition that isnt first presented as having a factual materialbasis cannot be considered as real. Which feedbacks nicely into, and reinforces the firstdenial.

Third, physics and biology relentlessly reinforce the second by insisting that the answersto 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 havelong since been subsumed! The snake of infinity has already swallowed that part of its body.

And yet, just a moments reflection about our origins and development will producea startlingly simple truth: there can be only one narrative behind our emergence on thisplanet. 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. Allwrong! Yet that didnt stop us from adopting a new belief system, science, in the faith thatwe could find the single, inevitable narrative and an answer to our condition ---until somebetter 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 clearlyseparate the even more mysterious, Ultimate Reality(UR) from our tiny little PR, which itselfbecomes 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 isonly consciousness (only!?) that has expanded. Its that old deja-vu again, the sense ofrepetition inherent in the reiteration of cyclical development.

The belief that there is a pattern or order to the process by which we have created thishuman world arises from a deep subconscious intuition that, being what we are -- agents oforder 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. Acul-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, evenbefore its born. Then, b.) It acts reflexively in response to the feeling. Next, c.) ItThinks about what transpired. Then, d.) It judges the choice it made against other possibleoptions. (Because it did all that without words doesnt mean it didnt happen.)

FEELING, ACTING, THINKING and JUDGING are the four cosmic activities directlyengaged in by all captive conscious agents.

In infants up to pre-adolescence, that is the set sequence. Then that program is reiteratedin 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 fouroperations in order to conform to, and try to influence, that new adult world. No singleoperation occurs in isolation, but only one at any time is dominant in the context of theothers. (And all socialization sacrifices Feeling to some degree in the service of collectiveAction (social and economic), Such conformity desensitizes and blunts intuition, leading togreater conformity.

The pattern in individual evolution is the sequence by which those operations play adominant role. (The mystery of how an infant learns language indicates that thinking andjudging start so early in life, so deeply in the dim recesses of awareness, that there is no wayto trace it; certainly not with a brain scan.)

The pattern of development of all collectives --- societies, empires, cultures andcivilizations--- is exactly the same as that for individuals. Only in reverse! Its 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 ofa decayed social order, whose creationist myth and resultant value system deterioratedand failed under the pressure of new experience, new knowledge and the kind of humancorruption 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 onelevel as a way to preserve and extend those old values and beliefs, while on another levelsuch corruption actually accelerates and amplifies the natural decay of the system! (But itcould be that the natural order has it designed this way so that the pain of transition not beprolonged. Or wed kill ourselves first. Also, if you want to turn a lion into a lamb, or viceversa, better work fast before the anesthetic wears off! Grrr!)

The Mirror is our seminal technology, literally. The prerequisite of Self-consciousnessis reflection, a reversal in thought, and the hologram suspended between our two cerebralhemispheres. It is the myth of Narcissus rationally incarnated. This is not metaphysics. It ismega-physics. This is reality. The Mirror, in fact, is the metaphor that comes closest tosymbolizing Existence itself: just endless possibility.

A society or civilization is nothing more than a collection of people. It is somethingslightly different, but it cannot be more, because it is composed exclusively of humans. It isa 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 itgoes through logically interrelated phases: Economic, Artistic, Social, Intellectual andPolitical, then the (Psychological) transition to a renewed Spiritual collective awareness. It isa 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 thecollective 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 transformingTechnology: The Mirror (self-awareness) is seminal, followed by the pivotal technologies:

The Flame (fire), The Seed (agriculture), and now The Brain (quantum computation), the firststep 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. Eachpivotal 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 fireand natural supremacy; then (E) Over Nature (our Edenist illusion of private property in thisEconomic 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 termfor the whole of reality is the natural order, and for epistemological organization we dividethat into Ultimate Reality; and humanitys limited understanding of that, or, PenultimateReality. UR ad PR. The former doesnt change; the latter keeps growing.) (While were atit, 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 aneat space-manipulating machine to begin with, given the burden of gravity. And thoserecent inventions of the past few millennia that modern man thinks are so important? Well,theyre just not.

The alphabet, written language, printing press, light bulb, electricity, internalcombustion, telephone, radio, TV, flight, space travel, nuclear power, etc., etc. --- all belongto the material Epoch, The Seed. All belong in and to the space age of Homo mensural, themeasuring 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 evolvingcontext.

All those miraculous inventions are but extensions that amplify and reinforce the originalidea that arose with The Seed, storable grain, the materialist epoch --- that is: Realty isReality; 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 notcognitively pivotal, and so not transformative of deep human consciousness. The most recenttechnologies, in fact, can also be read as addictive distractions, forms of anesthesia, lulling usto sleep while a new pivotal technology creeps up and into us, a transformativemetamorphosis occurring below Huxleys threshold of awareness.

It is not until we reached Computation, not until we actually began to extend our braininto 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 despitethe 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 hasreached completion, or closure. Whatever our new total enveloping agency is, it certainly isnot based on atoms and particles.

Were still only in stage one of this overall process. All the popular electronic gadgetsbased on fifth or sixth generation solid state microcircuits are just the start; theyre toys usedfor games, gossip and sex. They make people feel like theyre in the Space Age whilecovertly immunizing them from the paranoia concerning computers, thus preparing us all bymesmerization to tolerate the Computer Age ---the Artistic Epoch. We can hide from oneanother 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 evenintensify. We are already well into the irreversible process of transforming ourselves from agigantic anthill into single organism with fewer and fewer heads.

If you follow this you can see that were at the end of The Space Age, not thebeginning. Space became a dominant abstract concept, a virtual reality, with the inventionof The Seed. In the two epochs before farming, real space was such a complete, totallyembracing reality that it could not have been conceived of in the abstract as a separate idea oran 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 bettermachine for space manipulation and control than the human body?: excellent 3-D vision,stereo hearing, two long appendages with very dexterous digital fingers, erect postureenhancing perspective, all on two, long mobile fast legs --- and a good set of teeth that couldeat most anything. Only Rube Goldberg could build a better robot. Not!

Space arose to consciousness first with the idea of place. As nomadic hunter/gatherersmigrating out from the eternal summer of Africa we had to develop food trails to be at theright place at the prime time to gather and hunt. Our calendar and therefore our agendas werepictures of places in memory that could be recalled even when they were on the opposite sideof the schedule. Place is the original abstraction of Space. What followed were territorialrights, 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 forthousands of years, turning farmlands into bloody cemeteries.

But now, Globalization ends all that because it freezes into a gridlock all the spaces onthe planet. There is no space left between the places. No frontiers. Weve run out of jigsawpieces; theyre all locked in place. When everybody owns everything, then nobody ownsanything. The race for more arises from the sense that you dont even own what you own;

filling a tank with a hole in the bottom. Monopoly money, junk mortgages. All the trillionsin 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 luredinto 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 ourselvesto 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 thatthe 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 promiseto a world they were holding hostage under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Lets at leastgive 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. Todays tripto Mars takes eight months. Are you getting 30 miles on a gallon of gas?

Well soon have trouble getting past the satellite rubble weve already put into thosesuperhighway orbits right over our own heads; were locking ourselves in. And then wewould still have to sneak past a galactic bombardment of space rocks in the Khyber Belt justto get out of the solar system. Its all just science friction.

Also, astronomers tell us that all stars and galaxies are moving away from all others atincreasing 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 bevisible 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 beenreduced to a double abstraction. This leaves the nation-state with only one good purpose: tosmooth the transition to a time when all politics are global. (But since most politicians arepublic neurotics, pathological power-mongers, dont expect that to happen very soon.Sociogenesis is usually almost geologically slow. Inertia.)

Whats 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? AfterWWII, 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 Eisenhoweradministration into building roads and an Interstate highway system to handle the millions ofcars they were about to dump on us. The option to that, a transportation network similar tothat 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 royalcarriages--- making us dependent on foreign oil, fostering urban sprawls, and polluting ourair, 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 andprogress being made by corporate conglomerates, big science and technology, and gruntingpoliticians, 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 yourcake and eat it. If youll just take orders from us experts.

To see the future as only an extension of the present is both the cause and effect of humaninertia. 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 thoseleft in the world have the necessities. Only then can the collective consciousness come to therealization that there are alternate paths into reality other than exponential, unendingincreases in consumption, multiplied by near-geometric increases in population. It is the firstbig lesson to be learned from Globalization. This finite planet has reached closure --- ispermanently, forever CLOSED!

The second lesson will be the realization that electronic computation (quantum level) willbe the extension of that part of the human brain, the autonomic nervous system, that will freeus from the frustration and guilt of our being incapable of piloting and stewarding Space ShipEarth. We are not adults, or evolved enough to be in command.

Near-future computers, multi-redundant, will be as capable of assuming the worldsfunctions as our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems play in the pre-

programmed management of our individual biological systems (just imagine us withoutthem!), 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 extricatehuman 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. Butthen any reasonable plan we create has its implementation preempted by those same threesources of human irrationality, wasting all our good intentions --- and valuable survival time.

Swift, unerring judgment on complex physical global matters is becoming increasinglycritical. And deep down we know collectively were incapable of filling that need. (Almostno one wants war, either. Yet we cant 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 arenowhere near able to program machines to think as intuitively and creatively as we do, iffor no other reason than that we ourselves have as yet no idea how we do it! Thats what thisinvestigation is largely about.

The paranoid reaction that Big Brother lurks in The Machine is utter nonsense, mysticalhorse-puckie. When did you start believing that a slave could create its own master? (Ohyeah, God!) But if we ever become slaves to computers, itll be because, as with money, sex,drugs, celebrity and crap computer gadgets, we will have willed to succumb, or willed to notprevent it; the cowards form of suicide.

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The computers great power (our invention), complimenting our own brain power, is thatit has no ego. It is not self-aware. Thats why it is the really long-range answer to becomingthe 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 ourautonomic system automatically controls our own insanely complex bio-system. ( Rememberwhen you go to sleep tonight, there is a little man in your brain who stays awake making sureyour 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 thunderouslystupid, blind and insensitive that we cant see how moronically inept our species has been infailing to recognize it, even just as an issue?

And we cant rely on science alone either. Remember, some of these guys were atAlamogordo the day we tested the first atom bomb, wondering if that chain reaction wouldset fire to the planets entire atmosphere! Now theres a case of supreme objectivity for you.Operation a success; patient died.... along with all the worlds innocent observers!

Or, more recently, a bunch of unemployed physicists/mathematicians, from the holy hallsof 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 fleecethe entire planet; according to TVs Frontline to the tune of more than $500 TRILLION thats trillion, as in a thousand BILLION, probably more than the total cost of all the warsfought in human history, with enough left over to get a Starbucks Latte Grande.

You want some numbers? A million seconds is 11-plus days; a billion about 33 years; atrillion seconds is 33,000 years. Going back, just a tiny little trillion seconds takes us to atime when only hunter/gatherers roamed the planet. And the dollar value of all the derivativecontracts now out, if turned into seconds on a geologic clock, would find our ancestorsswinging in trees,

If you thought there was a huge downside risk to science (dont forget the H-Bomb), waituntil you realize what mathematicians and economists have already done to us: they haveliterally 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 theyhave deep faith, not in the numbers, but in the process itself, which, axiomatically anointsthem as the worlds leading authority on EVERYTHING.

It wasnt enough that they had created institutions too big to fail, meaning too big tobe allowed to fail for those in control of most of the wealth. They had to raise the ante to amathematical system that in itself was inherently fail-proof....because no one could possiblyunderstand it. Its a leap of faith that once initiated cannot be reversed.

Strangely enough it is now only the meek, whose intuitive strength is not paralyzed byknowledge, that can save us. Only they can sense that in putting lipstick on the Pig ofInfinity and Eternity does not alter its piggishness. But itll be a long transition.

The simple fact that not one of us, or even ten million of us, can change the world ---(and please dont 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! (Inthe Army?!)) ---the simple truth of ones total irrelevance should not prevent anyone from thelife-long inquiry into how it is that collectively, all of us have decided together on the kind ofworld we now inhabit. Its no dark mystery. Its actually easy to understand, but bloodyhard 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, ina 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. Were in a hyperactive century of an overactiveEra; 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 unknowinglyan approaching, totally-enveloping new paradigm, there is but one way for anyone to duckthe confusion, chaos, stupidity and violence of this unprecedented species transition, otherthan denial and a wasted life: jump out and dive IN! The mind is an unexploreddimensionless universe, a parallel realm to reality, the sole refuge from the cataclysmicspiritual vulgarity and brutal chaos of the present collaboration of scardycats, power freaksand fear-mongers.

There are no answers OUT there, only the two forces of inertia being wielded by 6.8thousand, 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, wrongquestions or both. Fifty years ago Tim Leary urged that generation to ...drop out. Now, itsDisengage! 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 youre free, but why are you wearing a harness? Who and what doyou 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 canchange by trying to find answers to the two most enduring personal questions:

Where am I? And, What am I? And thats what this sociogenesis is all about.We cant know Where were going until we know Where we are, and we cant 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 weve had a pretty fair idea of our location, where we are. Thetelescope/microscope and their improvements gave us an increasingly detailed description ofour place in the universe. Then Hubble and other astronomers gave us a beginning with theBig Bang. When someone asked the eminent Stephen Hawking what came before the BigBang, he whispered with a wry smile, God?

What went unnoticed, however, was that Quantum Theory had already been verified byits 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 noThere there! And thats 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 aninfinite energy field of coded intelligence in which everything, to Einsteins dismay, ishappening 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 haveto go forward; a mental colonic is the prescription in such cases.)

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So, we still dont know where we are, but at least we know where we arent. And if itsany 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 doubtthat this issue, along with feeling good or calm, is principally what is on its mind? Its entirechance of survival is predicated on it being able to identify its context and its location withinthat 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, andreflects what we humans really are, the 20th Century might be the last place youd want tolook. 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 inorder to save what is beautiful on this planet; speaking objectively, of course. (Or did youthink all those bad people were just Germans, Japs, Russians, etc.?)

But pseudo-science, scientism and neo-Darwinists pretty much leave us with thatdefinition, if not that judgment. We done been defined. In just l50 years weve been able todetermine our full nature. Boy, are we smart. Even when we discover how clever andintelligent some ancients were, almost the first thing we do is congratulate ourselves forbeing so smart that we could discover how smart those dummies actually were.

The overall pattern suggests were headed toward freedom; thankfully were not thereyet. Or, game over. Poof!

Thats 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 towillfully turn ourselves around?

In order to answer that we must confront a big Catch 22 in the problem:We cant see the future unless we can see the present. We cant see the present until we

can see the future. And we cant 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 theinfuriating permanence of existence that will allow us to see how profoundly dire our presentcondition is; and it is only that analysis which can reveal a dramatic but naturally plausibleprogram that can deliver us into a new context, a new Epoch in which we will be as unlikefrom 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 cant count on the natural order to have it already

predetermined, even though once you see how it can happen, only then does that deja-vusense of a brooding determinism creep back in. If enough of humanity slides back into thatcomfortable 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! Whenwere 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 worldcouldnt even deal with Katrina!)

And, to boot, we cant digest the present and see the future until we include a full reviewof our total past, and find a pattern of behavior that suggests we may be as protean, asflexible, and as transformative as those oceanic encephala pods that can morph before onesvery eyes into what ever they happen to settle on.

Endlessly repeated triangulation of past/present/future using our mental sextant is our solemeans of psychic navigation. And, we do it by intuition, and only then process it with ourreasoning 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 coordinationrequired is far, far beyond the religious, political, racial, ethnic and class conflicts built intoour history to date. So, on another level, personal repression, denial and willed ignoranceseem 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 arbitrarychoices of what parts of the science menu we adopt and what we deny, and the convolutionsof 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 ourquestioning completely is a factor underlying all of it: that it is our general appraisal of thedefinition of our human nature made in the 20th century, based largely on that periodsscientific knowledge. It may just be that it is exactly that opinion which has frozen ourview about the key issue --- what we are, the nature of the beast.

Weve been wrong before. In fact, weve 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 notdealing with them. By simply walking away from them, rather than cooptatively interactingwith them, which, as already argued, only seems to amplify and deepen their threats. Thatlogical tsunami of disengagement could sweep the globe, just as it has before, like about20,000 years ago.

And theres a name for that: it is a species-wide spiritual transformation, a leap of faiththat follows a psychological transition in which old values and rules decay, are dissolved andreconstituted into a new, larger, more complex sense of our human nature. Its ametamorphosis, a chrysalis, a common occurrence in natural evolution. And yes, it hashappened before, twice in fact, if you dont count the initial and seminal technology of TheMirror, 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 infor hundreds of thousand of years was far more complex than we had believed. Realityshrinks and gets smaller and expands and gets larger at the same time. Eventually that stretchbecomes untenable, and we are forced to a consensus on a larger context. We always need abigger box to put all our shit in.

But now, that kind of transiti

Documents

The Mirror, The Flame, The Seed and The Brain; by H.J. McGraw