Fermi’s Paradox – Section #3

Table of Contents

BEGINNINGS (cont.)

  1. Gradualism

Human intelligence, now augmented by computerized systems, has accelerated reaction times to speeds which are, perhaps, unsustainable. Machine intelligence and data networks have ‘infected’ human thought, influencing the pace of decision-making across all domains of human behavior, from military early warning systems to financial trading platforms, requiring leaders to respond to data at a speed which removes deliberation. A decrease in speed is, perhaps, the beginning of a new balance.

In both the human and larger Gaian worlds, the speed and quantity of incoming information have exceeded the capacity of organisms to absorb, process and respond to the data. By decreasing the speed by which information is extracted from the environment, more well-informed decisions may be made. In the competition for access to faster and larger data streams, the pace of civilization – and of history itself – accelerates. At a certain point, humans lose control over a data loop which feeds on its own speed. The probability that an individual or a machine will act on false incoming data or react too quickly to incoming information increases. This stimulus-response cycle may lead to a catastrophic decision either through human or AI error. Gradualism slows the pace of incoming data, decreases information flow, and lessens the probability of catastrophic error.

  1. Unity

Speed of data transmission, the overabundance of data and the concentrating and factionalizing effects of social media are three factors that amplify the reactions of the more primitive human brain functions and reinforce a sense of tribalism. This leads to conflict, whether as revolution, as hybrid conflict, or as outright war within or between nations.

Wars, too, can restore balances, yet the consequences of war are vastly destructive to both humans and the larger biome. Humans see evolution as war, as an eternal competition between forms. Yet that is the parochial perspective of evolution from the individual organism and its smaller social groups which engage with one another, sometimes in death competitions. These competitions must be eliminated if humanity is to survive, or the war of all against all contemplated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century may lead to the extinction of our species. And yet internecine conflict within even tightly-woven societies appears to be increasing.

Although they have the cortical capacity for it, humans lack a true species awareness. The base brain mechanisms are programmed to foster the survival of the organism with which it is associated. The limbic system is concerned with social interactions and the survival of the small group. The cortical laminae begin to be aware of a more unified awareness, including a consciousness of the species and of the ecology in which the species finds itself. We have become aware of the planet as a whole, and of the planet as a superorganism.  This awareness must be encouraged and fostered. A true species mind leads to cooperation, which leads to the absence of conflict. This creates the initial conditions by which planetary balance can be restored.

  1. Redirection of the Competitive Instinct

At larger scales covering the greatest species diversity, across greater geographic expanses and over longer periods of time, evolution can be seen as the movement toward balance. Balance cannot thrive amidst competition, which is a zero-sum game meant to maintain imbalance in the sense that an organism and its group seek to eliminate competitors and benefit themselves at the expense of other individuals, groups and species.

Evolution utilizes natural selection – which is competitive by nature – at the level of organisms and species. Yet when viewed across a larger scope, these competitive dramas work toward a greater balance. With the introduction of Biological Intelligence, human interspecific and intraspecific competition became counterproductive in this trend toward balance. Intellectual powers provided the wielders of such capacities a competitive advantage so great that they outcompeted most other species and took control of the environment itself. These powers allowed the accumulation of wealth, energy and other stores that impeded the greater balance sought through evolutionary mechanisms. Thus, competition, as promoted by primitive and midbrain functions, can works against species, including humans, when those more primitive processes harness the intellect to gain a selective edge.

In competitions, the winner who takes all (or at least more) may change, yet the imbalance of winners and losers remains. On the scale of the human animal, its social group and its species, competitive drives seek to maintain imbalances in favor of that organism, social group or species. These result in competitions for territory, mates, accumulations of food and water, supplies of energy, and other resources. Imbalances result.

Human attempts at equality seek a redistribution of power, of wealth, and of materio-energetic spoils within the species homo sapiens itself. This often takes little account of other species or the planet as a whole. Thus, the environmental degradation wrought by redistributive political and economic systems (socialist) may be as great as that inflicted by less equably-oriented systems (capitalist). There is no evidence that the Soviet industrial economy was less damaging to the natural world than American industrial processes despite each system having roughly equal populations and both possessing large landmasses. Regardless of the economic system employed, the primary imbalances created by civilizations utilize similar industrial processes and are thus left unaddressed.

Today, equality is seen as raising the living standards of developing world populations up to the lifestyles enjoyed by developed world economies. Yet this takes no account of the per capita ecological footprint that raising these living standards would mean for the total biome. 80% of world population is ‘developing.’ We conclude that imposing this solution is impossible, and that it would most likely result in the crash of human populations globally due to environmental impacts. In fact, we believe that the current international movement toward total war between the great powers is a manifestation of this unsustainability. The wars being fought are in actuality resource wars between the haves and the have nots. The devolution of previous civilizations was often marked by ecological problems, resource scarcity and subsequent widescale violence over the spoils, either war within the decaying civilization or between that civilization and outsiders. Today, civilization has spread across the entire planet, and its collapse is affecting humanity as a whole. Smaller trends affecting islands like St. Matthews or Rapa Nui have expanded to the world biome. Although we do not endorse the idea that the developed world should continue to consume resources at current rates at the expense of poorer nations, we also see the Malthusian impossibility of allowing the entire world population to use resources at this quantity and pace.

It is fair to adjudge human civilization as of this writing as monolithic, since it utilizes world-girdling supply chains, transportation networks, and information webs. An industry may be located in one place or one country, but it is internationalized in the sense that it most likely uses parts and machines manufactured in other regions. Trade, too, is highly internationalized. And the burning of fossil fuels in one national affects the atmosphere in other parts of the world. Gone are the days when the ecological damage wrought by one society – the Easter Islanders, for example – left other cultures unaffected. We therefore refer to a single civilization affecting all humans and their entire planet.

Yet what builds and drives this worldwide civilization is a very narrow self-interest. It is built upon intra-specific competitions between human groups. Economic, political and social inequities are redistributed through war and revolution to someone else; to a new class or group, without decreasing the net effects that civilization has on the environment. This self-interest keeps the competition, and hence the imbalanced use of resources, alive, regardless of the politico-economic system chosen. Self-interest is natural selection in action. The struggle for domination persists, leading to yet more competition, and to oppression, nationalism and war. Before the advent of Biological Intelligence, the Gaian system had a way of keeping any one species in check. Yet these checks and balances have been upset by BI and the all-consuming civilization which it has engineered.

It is civilization itself that acts invasively upon the biosphere as a whole, not any particular kind of civilization or political-economic system. Not until humans develop a true species mind, and even more, a Gaian consciousness which sees from the perspective of the world system, will true balance within the Terran world become possible. True balance requires that humans act on behalf of the world biome. It has no one else to act for it. Authentic balance requires that humanity act as one, seeing itself as an agent of the redistributive tendency of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This, and only this, will bring true equality.

  1. Creative Destruction

One of the answers to Fermi’s Paradox holds that living planets destroy civilizations because such artificial environments end up exceeding the carrying capacity of those planets to sustain. The intelligent species is regarded, not on a conscious level by the planet, but on an immunological level, as an infectious or cancerous agent which threatens the survival of the planetary biosphere as a whole. The restraining mechanisms which seem to humans as banes, because they cull human populations, are in reality agents of balance. Disease and famine – and secondarily through human action – war, economic calamity and social ills, serve as governors of the supersystem of Gaia, so that some semblance of balance is restored. These cullers foster instability in order to reacquire an even greater, planet-wide order.

Humans, preoccupied with the survival and expansion of their own species, see such agents as evil. Yet they are merely redistributive and serve in some ways to restore overall balance. They act as re-processors which regenerate the worldwide biome. It is a parochial human view to regard these agents of entropy as ultimate evils. These population governors may be seen as threats to human survival and thriving, but they are ultimately catalysts which seek a return to balance. They are processors of stale matrices of energy, arrays which have outlived their usefulness. These recyclers serve to break down overly complex, archaic systems, whether those systems are biomes, or whether they are empires or technologies. The recycling agents make no distinction between an ecology and a technology, for they are impersonal forces. ‘Primitive’ mythologies and religions often recognize this biological indifference. In human economies, the creative destruction of wealth eventually breaks down all inefficient capitalistic or socialist systems or enterprises, stale accumulations of wealth, and bureaucracies. Yet this is merely an extension of biological processes which have often done the same thing to species and biomes in decline.

In myth, scholar Joseph Campbell tells us, the stale energy of a long-serving king or queen -representative of an old and failing reign – is often opposed, challenged and eventually deposed by a youthful and energetic hero so that the energy bound up in such stale bonds is available to a new social order. In The Fourth Turning, historian William Strauss and demographer Neil Howe opine that the same stale energy of an older regime, represented by an older generation and the power structure which it defends, is defied by a younger generation which challenges the conformist values of the generation which established those values. The same is true of species, which have a lifespan, and of whole ecologies. Their slates are eventually wiped clean when the energy of the old order has grown flat and its structure too cumbersome to maintain. Its complex organization is broken and the increasing expenditures of energy which had maintained it is freed in order to form new species and fresh ecologies.

The Paradox of Intelligence

The ultimate anthropocentric feat which intellect demonstrates is that, once it fully evolves, it comes to see itself as self-evolved. It confuses itself with the totality of the organism. It concludes that it is the ultimate power in the mind, a peerless competitor produced by evolution, but which now self-evolves, directing its own path. In its most extreme form, this idea of itself clarifies into the proposition that human intelligence is all there is, amidst a sea of relative mindlessness.

In this state of self-centrism, intelligence is seen as almost all of what it means to be human. The whole of human identity is conflated with intellect. As a corollary of this identity confusion, humans come to believe that intellect is capable of solving human problems and even of unraveling the ultimate secrets of the cosmos, and of all the universes which may extend beyond their own. The intellect searches for the universe’s single mystery, the principal from which all other principals are derived. It seeks out a deducible, irreducible natural law because the intellect is a reductionist tool. It is an analytic lens which seeks through the power of further observation the fragmentation of reality into smaller and smaller parts -tinier aspects of time and atomization of matter and spectra of energy – until a grand understanding of the all is attained. The intellect seeks to deduce a principle which unifies the whole by breaking that whole down into finer and finer parts. This quest for unity and wholeness through the fragmentation of analysis is part of the paradoxical nature of the intellect’s search. Through its very method of searching for a unifying principle, it makes it less likely that an answer will be found.

The Science of Myth, and Science as Myth

The search for the ultimate, underivable principle is much like the search for the ultimate, indivisible particle. This particle has not been found, and there are those who theorize that such a particle will never be found. Beyond science, analogues for this quest can be found in the quest for the Holy Grail, the Fountain of Youth, or more germanely, given its pseudo-scientific origins, in the alchemist’s endeavor to turn ordinary elements into gold. The pursuit of the God particle or of an ultimate unifying physical principle is the pursuit of a myth, without the scientific seekers’ knowing that the search is a mythological one.

The alchemist’s search for the process by which other elements could be turned to gold was in reality a psycho-mythological journey. Those, like Jung, who saw this pursuit in psychological terms were not deceived. Those who interpreted the alchemical myth in literal terms never achieved their aim.

Ultimately, we hold that scientific principles, which are always changing over time, represent mythological truths which humanity is not yet ready to receive symbolically. And so, the interpretation of them, left to scientists, is still quite literal. Old religious truths were and still often are interpreted literally, and when doing so, the ultimate mythological and psychological truths behind the religious imagery remain obscure.

Freud taught that dreams have latent and manifest content. Every individual human personality, in its interpretations of dreams, has a tendency toward either concrete or abstract pattern-finding; sometimes both. Those with a tendency toward concrete constructions see dreams for what they are apparently. Those with a tendency toward seeing hidden meaning tend toward the interpretation of a dream’s latent meaning.

We state simply that the cosmos itself is liable to both face-value and latent interpretation. The proponents of the scientific method tend to take the physical world for its manifest content. They interpret material objects and energetic forces literally. Through the use of intelligence, they seek the overt manipulation of matter and energy. They see patent content.

Those with a tendency toward symbolic interpretation see the physical universe and all of its laws as representations of more abstract principles. They interpret objects and forces as reflections of ideas. They see latent content consistent with the principles of psychology, one of the last evolved of the sciences.

The point of view of the first group – the scientific literalists – are adequately represented in human affairs. Many of the problems of imbalance and ecological degradation described in this book are due largely to this worldview.  It seems overrepresented in modern civilization.

To the second group – the symbolists – physical principles and properties such as entropy, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, the conservation laws, and evolution represent mythological, metaphysical or psychological constructs, in addition to their purely physical, manifest meanings. It is important to note here that science does have a practical aspect. The physical universe does have a manifest content, a patent meaning. Yet we maintain that it also has a deeper, often obscure meaning.

Not every mind is ready or able to accept symbolic interpretations of natural phenomenon. The age is not yet. In earlier times, most humans regarded religious stories as literal truths rather than as myth. The ability of most people during this not far-removed, historical period to see religious truth as mythological truth was compromised by a lack of context.  The science of myth, its systematic study, had not yet developed in the modern world. As latent thinkers regard science as myth on a deeper level, we also regard that myth scientifically. This mythological meaning of scientific principles can be treated systematically and quite logically.

Humanity is only ready for the truth for which it is ready. And it is only ready for that truth for which it has context. Theories such as relativity, quantum mechanics and evolution could not have been introduced into medieval Christian Europe, for the learned of that age were not prepared contextually for these revolutionary scientific truths. We hold that science has a double-meaning, as do dreams. Yet many, if not most, in the current day lack the context to interpret science as myth.

The problem is not the use of logic. It is, rather, its indiscriminate misuse and application in all fields of human endeavor, to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. Not all problems are amenable to logical interpretation and treatment. Addiction is an example of an intractable problem where logical, scientific solutions may be inferior to other solutions. The application of control strategies and those involving assertion of human will are often counterproductive for both substance and process addictions. We encourage a cross-fertilization of knowledge across disciplines. This requires the application of scientific principles to affairs beyond their original, mathematical, scientific and philosophical purviews. It also requires the application of metaphysical, spiritual and artistic knowledge to domains previously under the exclusive purview of science.

The latent meaning behind and beyond the apparency of religious stories was hidden behind their manifest content and literal interpretations of such content. In the same way, science has become the religion of its age, and its priests in particular – its scientists – hold close to literal, orthodox interpretations of its hypotheses, theories and laws. While these concrete interpretations have their proper domain and have borne much fruit, the potential for their application across domains is apparent. For example, it does not require a great leap in imagination to see the potential philosophical, metaphysical and psychological implications for such hypotheses as the uncertainty principle, or the many minds or many worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics.

The Psychological Implications of Mere Observation

Physics shows that the act of observing any system – whether it is a process or an object – collapses the wave function of material reality and ushers what is observed from a probability to an actuality. This is not usually fully appreciated from a philosophical or metaphysical perspective, but only from a physical one. Scientific purists most often insist that the act of observation is exclusively a physical act. This is in keeping with the intellect’s insistence on bifurcation, in which spheres of knowledge are often atomized and fragmented. It is sometimes assumed that, in order to remain true to and pure within themselves, certain disciplines should not ‘communicate’ with one another. This holds especially for the tainting of physics by nonscientific disciplines and by other fields of study within science. Spirituality must remain spirituality, and science must remain science.

Quantum mechanics, of which there is more than one interpretation, is regarded by the scientific mind as pure physics. Separate disciplines (and quantum mechanics is good example) seek through observation and measurement to reduce the universe into smaller fields of knowledge. Due to this specialization of knowledge derived from the analytical practice of categorization, specialists sometimes resist cross-categorization and cross-fertilization of separate disciplines. The scientific method and the body of knowledge it yields must follow carefully constructed lines of thought. Scientists seek natural criteria by which to classify their observations and the matrices through which these observations must be sluiced. Yet a look back into the history of science shows that its observations and the rubrics under which its factual findings are organized often turn out to be purely artificial. The disciplined scientific mind lacks unity of knowledge because of these artificial categories. Examples include the classification systems which were applied to the categories of living things prior to the time that the Linnean system was adopted in the classification of organisms. And since the widespread adoption of the Linnean system, evolutionary taxonomy, cladistics, and molecular phylogeny are gradually replacing traditional Linnean taxonomy. Science is provisional. The atom was once considered by many of the ancient Greek atomists to be the indivisible particle, and some thought that the atom was uniform for all elements of matter.

Since the conclusions of science are provisional, it is to be expected that well-accepted theories are subject to indefinite revision. Yet then, they should not be presented as unrevisable truth, and the search for an ultimate law or a penultimate particle should be regarded as an indefinite search rather than as an achievable goal. It should be seen as a mythological search at root. Like alchemy, like the expeditions for El Dorado, like the search for the Holy Grail, it should be seen as a symbolic quest. For when it is taken literally, this search will most likely lead to yet further mysteries.

The problem with the provisional nature of science and its methods of categorization is not to be found in the scientific method or in science itself. It is to be found in scientists. Those who come to scientific conclusions often stake their reputations, their livelihoods and the funding for their research on the verity of their findings, and they will defend them. This leads to a scientific establishment, and to establishment thinking.

Revolutionary new theories are seldom received without skepticism or outright hostility. As an example, the Copernican view that the earth was not the center of the cosmos was met with persecution of those who espoused it. More generally, the view that ‘man’ was the center and the measure of all things was a stubborn idea, a holdover from religion which led to the hostile reception of the ideas of Galileo and even of Darwin in some quarters.  In the realm of religious beliefs, these partitioned schools of thought have often yielded ignorance and persecution rather than knowledge. The astronomer and polymath, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake in 1600 for, among other things, espousing the notion that the earth was not the center of the cosmos. Today, the predominant scientific worldview has led to the exclusion of nonscientific ideas from the realm of serious inquiry.

The search for a Grand Unified Theory seeks the elegance and simplicity of a theory of everything, yet it seeks it in a straightjacketed category; that of pure physics. Something so comprehensive as an all-encompassing universal law which holds the origins and behaviors of all things within its grasp cannot find such a principle through the inquiry of only a single discipline. It must, rather, encompass the knowledge which is available to humanity through all legitimate disciplines.

How could a theory of everything be based upon inquiry only through a single branch of science? Wouldn’t it be more logical to bring to bear the disciplines, theories and hypotheses of other branches of science, and even other branches of knowledge outside of science? Does it not seem more rational, for example, to apply the principles of evolution to the development of particles throughout time since the inception of the cosmos? Or to apply the conclusions drawn from psychology to the physical observations made by any one observer of a quantum system, or any other system? Why is it illogical to assume that the principles of psychology would not also apply to the quantum observations made by an intelligent observer? Why should not these same psychological principles not be applied to theories of cosmology and cosmogeny? Since the evolution of the universe is confirmed by the existence of observers, and observers are subject to psychological ‘laws’, the principles of psychology are at least indirectly related to what is observed. Why are physical laws considered the elemental bases of all things, rather than the laws of consciousness? Simply because humans became conscious of psychological principles and formulated them later in the history of science does not mean that psychological tendencies or properties are less elemental to reality than physical principles and properties.

In the past, humanity sought its universal explanations of all phenomena through magical and religious lexicon. This produced results which are regarded today as historically myopic, often as cultural artifact to be catalogued by anthropologists. Yet myopia still afflicts the worldview of humanity.

In physics, the uncertainty principle prevents observers from accurately tracking both the location and momentum of a subatomic particle (momentum is its mass times its velocity) at the same time. This is not due to any imperfection in the measuring device, but rather appears to be a property inherent in the quantum world. In a theory of consilience, the uncertainty principle could be applied to the fields of cognitive psychology and metaphysics. Principles of particle physics, such as the uncertainty principle, may in turn describe what is observed and how an observation is made from a psychological perspective. In a probabilistic sense, the parameters of the quantum world may influence the conclusions drawn by the observer, psychologically. Yet perhaps the observer influences what is observed, and this influence may possibly be described through the psychological defense mechanism of projection. In this way, the observed and the observer influence each other in bilateral fashion. A reciprocity exists between the observed and the observer which can be explained as much by physics as by psychology.

Disciplines can affect one another in a bidirectional or multidirectional, back-and-forth flow. Principles of psychology may, in turn, help explain observations made in quantum mechanics, such as the nebulous nature of measurements made of the quantum world. Psychological factors may influence what is seen in the quantum world. The many minds-many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, as an alternative to the standard, Copenhagen interpretation, holds that a connection is formed between the observer of a quantum system, and what is observed.

According to this interpretation, since the brain of an observer is composed of quantum systems, all physical states of the brain are quantum states. This means that the mental states of the observer are similarly quantum in nature and governed by quantum principles. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, from which the many minds hypothesis arises, holds that the measurement inherent in any observation splits the universe into two states. This division occurs for every observation, resulting in many different universes, or dimensions, being created by any observer over time. The resulting ‘worlds’ represent the complete history of observations occurring up through the time that a measurement is made in the present moment. This eternal splitting results in uncountable dimensions being created through the observer’s very act of observing. Every one of these realities represents a separate, split-off state of the wave function.  None of the observers who may have made alternate observations can communicate with any of the other observers in their separate universes. Contrary to the standard, Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the wavefunction does not collapse from a probability to a single, determined state. Instead, an observer finds herself in the observed reality which she has chosen to observe in the previous moment. Every life is the sum total of every decision made by the pilot of that life up to that moment in time. She is not aware of the other possibilities which have split off from herself as the result of past observations, each creating a different reality and even a different observer that is just as real as the self she is aware of in this universe.

The implications of this interpretation are staggering. They involve psychological, philosophical and metaphysical consequences which are enough to drive mad any individual who truly contemplates them. It means that there are infinite divisions and splits going on for each mind in each moment. The result of such a split mind is endless fragmentation.

Thus, what is observed, and the reality which an observer experiences, depends upon her state of mind. By their very nature, descriptions of state of mind lend themselves to psychology. State of mind depends upon the choice of what to observe and even of how to observe. These choices are obviously associated with psychological factors. Yet the hardline rules placed around the physical sciences exclude this fact from consideration. They prevent humans from seeing the cosmos through anything but one lens at any one time. This is the limit imposed by the uncertainty principle when it looks upon observation as a purely physical act, devoid of its psychological underpinnings.

These standard underpinnings would have the macroworld determined completely by the microworld of quantum probability, while insisting that the macroworld does not influence the microworld. The direction of causation in physics is unilateral rather than bilateral, despite the claims of some to the contrary.

On a psychological level, the collapse of the wave function and the concomitant movement of potentiality into actuality, is heavily influenced by conditioning. Choice is influenced by conditioning. We have said that the brain has more connections within itself than it has sensory inputs with the external environment. This means that the inner model of reality constructed by the brain is in a sense more ‘real’ and more important to the brain than reality itself. This inner mental model is heavily influenced by memory and past associations. Predictions about the future are based upon past outcomes, as remembered by the brain and recorded in its inner model. Since the process involves remembering things past, it is simply conditioning.

When a thing is remembered, it is first observed, then catalogued and then stored in memory. It moves from a potentiality to an actuality. It becomes quantified in the spacetime continuum, which another way of stating that it is measured. Actuality is expressed as finite quantity, and as a determined state.

Yet potential is unconditioned and is limitless. If consciousness is unconditioned, its capacity is limitless.

Evolution of Spiritual Understanding

There are still those who, theistically inclined, refuse to believe that evolution is at work as a principle in the world. They believe that a God created the present ecology of fixed organisms in a short period of time not so long ago. In these beliefs, Creationists may fail take into account that even spiritual understanding itself evolves over time.  Some religious systems maintain a fixed thought system which inhibits the evolution of spiritual understanding. Throughout the world during the Axial Age, human religious consciousness underwent a revolution at around the same time.

We maintain that as the principles of evolution apply to biology and even to the inanimate, they also apply to awareness, and to spiritual understanding itself. The spiritual dimension, which we believe to be valid way of knowing the universe, may be changeless, yet our understanding of it changes. Religious movements at the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century have sought to apply scientific principles to spiritual practices. These New Thought or science of mind approaches seek to apply science to spirituality to arrive at spiritual or metaphysical ‘laws’. One may agree or disagree with the correctness of these approaches, but it is their attempt at consilience that is noted here rather than the validity of their content. These movements serve as evidence that even the development of religious understanding is provisional, and never absolute in the relative dimension in which humans find themselves. Although religions may seek to extract absolute and unchanging principles governing reality, any truth derived from and by the mind, whether spiritual or scientific in nature, undergoes revision. As the mind’s understanding changes, so do the laws which it deduces.

In the legal field, laws are subject to constant revisions by legislative bodies. Human interpretations of law change as lawyers, scholars, and courts push the bounds of these principles and apply them to an evolving human society. Common law, stare decisis, and legal precedent derive from this evolution. This is not so different than a scientific method practiced by scientists, or a moral code interpreted by religiously-inclined individuals which is continually revised as human understanding evolves. Truth is not provisional. It is not relative. But human understanding of it is.

It is as constructive for the advancement of spiritual understanding to apply principles of knowledge outside the field of religion as it is for the progression of science to utilize discoveries made outside of the scientific method. Science could make use of insights made in metaphysics, psychology and spirituality. Religious understanding could open itself to metaphysics, psychology and pure science. The advantage that science has is that it openly acknowledges a revisionist process. Yet religious understanding is revised over time as well. Humans have evolved from a belief in magic to a more advanced understanding of the benefits of meditation, for example. They have begun to combine psychological with spiritual practices. When all fields of knowledge are combined, humanity may arrive at solutions to problems that eluded it before. For these separate disciplines offer more than knowledge. They offer new methods of change. It scarcely matters that any field of knowledge changes over time. It does not matter whether it utilizes the rigors of proof, experimental validation or the powers of meditation. Practices are not good or bad. They are neither true nor untrue in an ultimate sense, for humanity subsists in a contingent environment. Evolution teaches us that everything is in a process of becoming. Practices – whether they are psychological, spiritual, metaphysical or scientific – either work, or they do not. This is how any consilient discipline should be judged.

Mindful of Mindlessness

From the perspective of physics, the cosmos is viewed on the macro level as a soup of gross entities and forces. Is then atomized into waves and particles and other values which can be further reduced to spectra and exotic species of sub-particles. An alternative view, string theory, holds that the essence of matter consists of infinitesimal vibrating, torus-like structures. The closer one looks, the more constituent parts that are seen. Sometimes, these quanta are predicted, searched for, and then found, just as certain elements in the periodic table were theorized to exist before they were discovered.

As we have observed, the analytical mind and the instruments it designs with which to observe the subatomic world have fragmenting tendencies. By analyzing and parsing, the analytical mind attempts to comprehend the unity which is the whole, and by so doing, arrive at a single, universal first principle which explains the behavior of matter and energy on a subatomic scale.

It is our premise that by breaking down into parts, one cannot understand the whole. By fragmenting into particles which are further divisible, the intellect cannot arrive at an indivisible particle which serves as the fundamental constituent of all matter and by which everything can be explained. There is a problem of quantity caused by infinite divisibility. In theory, any object can be divided into an infinite number of parts, given a tool capable of smaller and smaller bisections. We understand that physics seeks and finds smaller particles. The problem may be one of infinite divisibility. Particle collisions do not result in smaller pieces of the original particles. Since matter is a kind of energy, what results from these particle interactions are particles created from the energy which results from the collision. From these collisions, we find that matter is mutable into other forms of matter. Below the level of the atom, given sufficient energies, any particle is, theoretically at least, capable of being transmuted into any other particle through the collision process.

And there is a related problem. The assumption is that the principles of physics, which describe entities and processes which are inanimate and mindless by their nature, governed by randomness and shaped by probability, form the base of a pyramid of physical laws which, at root, govern all other processes at work in the universe. These random and probabilistic operations are assumed to dictate, at root, the emergence and evolution of organisms and their increasingly complex brains, behaviors, interactions, and ecological systems. The assumption made is that the universe can be reduced to mindless bits, interactions and laws. The contradiction in this assumption is that the materialist intellect seeks to understand what must be ultimately incomprehensible because it is mindless.

According to the intellect, the cosmos originated from random, mindless interactions, within probabilistic parameters. How, then, can a rational mind understand it? If the universe wasn’t created with rationality, then it must ultimately make no sense. It cannot be apprehended rationally. In a universe that arose from mindless, random mechanics, it would be too improbable that the random universe humans inhabit happens to be amenable to logical understanding, with particles obeying consistent laws.

The weak version of the anthropic principle holds that the randomly-generated cosmos humans coincidentally evolved in possesses the constants that it does and obeys the laws that it does because otherwise, we would not be here to see it. Yet this does not address how a random event generator like the universe could be subject to rational understanding. If it arose randomly from nonconscious processes, then no conclusion drawn by philosophy, logic, mathematics or science could be relied upon. Science itself would neither be a valid discipline nor would it be able to provide a truly reliable measure. No experiment could purport to measure what it purports to measure.

No proof could validate itself. No form of mathematics would be internally verifiable. And this is indeed the conclusion reached by information theory as well as mathematics. For this additional reason, science cannot stand on its own, and neither can any of the other disciplines which base themselves exclusively on rational methods. Science arose originally from philosophical disciplines, as did logic. Mathematics came from logic. If physics is correct in its assumptions about the randomness of many physical processes, then any physics which describes randomness or which explains itself as arising from randomness is itself nonfalsifiable.

There is a second contradiction: If the brain itself is ultimately governed by and subject to this mindless randomness, how, then, is the intellect able to make sense of this randomness which surrounds it? If it is governed by mindless and random processes, how can it make rational sense of a cosmos which gave rise to it, which is similarly governed by mindlessness and randomness?  One would have to assume that the mind can never trust the conclusions which it derives, since it is essentially a chaotic assemblage of random interactions.

The anthropic assumption is that the universe must be amenable to scientific understanding because humans find it so. Humans have minds which have devised mathematical principles and scientific methods. They think and reason mathematically and scientifically. Because they have this in-built propensity to do so, they assume that the universe must behave mathematically, must be amenable to rational apprehension, and must be capable of validation through experiment. This is a rather myopic, human-centered view of the world. It has been reasoned by philosophers that the a priori tendency of humans to think and reason mathematically and logically must mean that reality is amenable to mathematical and rational understanding. Yet this is a bootstrap argument. If the reality we find ourselves in arose by chance, we cannot assume that is amenable to any logical interpretation which is nonrandom and systemized.

Some cosmologists believe that the universe humans find themselves in is one of many. Statistically, if there is a megaverse consisting of multiple dimensions, they believe that humans just happen to find themselves in a Goldilocks universe with a cosmological constant that is just right, so that this humanly-inhabited universe is, though randomly inspired, also orderly and amenable to rational understanding. Yet upon what logic is this proposition based? What if the universe humanity finds itself in is essentially unknowable and illogical? It could be that we have dreamt ourselves an order from the chaos.

Statistically, whether there is only one universe or whether there are many universes, the odds are great that the cosmological constants shouldn’t be at their present values, ideal for the formation of life. Humans should find themselves in a universe which is chaotic and not governed by any order. Indeed, the beginnings of the universe we live in were quite chaotic. But then, how did humans even come to be in such a universe? How did a creature emerge which could fathom the universe? How did an organism evolve which could contemplate nonrandomness ever arise from a random system? The statistical odds against this are so enormous as to defy the probabilities of ever arising.

What if the intellect can neither fathom nor reduce the universe to constituent parts amenable to human understanding? The intellect assumes that because it is itself logical, then objects in its environment must also obey the laws of logic and be subject to human understanding. Upon what logic is this assumption based?

It is more logical to apply the principles of psychology and come to see that the theories of cosmologists and physicists are the products of a pattern-seeking mind. Apophenia is the tendency toward abnormal meaningfulness, and the pattern-seeking mind will tend to find patterns where none exist, or where there are gaps in the images or data which is being studied. The visual cortex is particularly adept at filling in gaps, and the intellect can also do so with alacrity. In the nascent periodic table of elements, predictions were made about as yet undiscovered elements. In particle physics, predictions are regularly made about the discovery of particles. These predictions are often later validated by subsequent discoveries. We hold that these prognostications may comport more with an abstract diagram of existence created by the mind’s working model of reality more than they explain reality itself.

The assumptions of the intellect have placed humanity in a paradox: the mind which seeks to understand the universe emerged randomly and probabilistically from the same random forces which it seeks to understand. If the brain arose by chance through the random processes of mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow, as did every other biological development favored by natural selection prior to the human brain’s cortical development, then the brain cannot escape its randomness. It cannot escape the randomness of its thought processes, nor can it escape the inexorability that the cosmos, which it seeks to order through its understanding, makes no ultimate sense. Or, something else is at work.

There is an alternative explanation: Although humans cannot reliably conclude whether or not the dimension which gave rise to them has an ultimate purpose, it does seem to the intellect that this dimension adheres to orderly processes. If this dimension is amenable to rational understanding, it may be because the dimension is rational itself. If the dimension humans find themselves in operates according to rational means, it may have had rational beginnings. And that which is rational is conscious. And that which is rational and conscious may have an ultimate objective. This speaks to awareness. Yet the physics which is assumed to be the underlayment of all things denies that a conscious process could have given rise to the cosmos.  Any view consistent with consciousness giving rise to material order is considered antiquated and religious. These views are marginalized as obsolete arguments which predated Darwin’s mid-19th century theory.

We do not espouse Creationism, Intelligent Design, or traditional religious cosmogonies. We focus our attention on the fact of consciousness and hold that it is more logical to assume that consciousness was present at the inception of the universe than that it was not. We declare it more probable that consciousness gave rise to the evolved human brain than that it evolved randomly from nonconscious forces.

The science-minded materialists are in a philosophical dilemma: the universe obeys consistent, decipherable laws, but it arose from randomness and the intellect which beholds it arose randomly and is subject to this same randomness. The reductionists can avoid philosophy by saying that they merely make a scientific argument about origins, and by refusing to engage in metaphysical or philosophical speculations. If science is that self-contained, then it is best relegated to those technological realms in which its applied value has been proved. Those who espouse a materialist science as the theory for everything should also avoid the super-scientific assumption that the universe is mindless and random in its origins, for they have no more proof of this than those who believe in a God have of their God. Like the rest of humanity, astrophysicists can only assume initial boundary conditions, and assumptions are beliefs, not proofs.

The intellect’s exclusive trust in its own preeminence and in the science it has developed cannot account for the uncertainty inherent in every observation. A fundamental ignorance, born of uncertainty, rests at the heart of every assumption that forms the unseen basis of every logical conclusion. The roots of this uncertainty follow from this premise: that which is random cannot be understood non-randomly.

The intellect views itself as a self-emergent property which has the capacity to study the universe objectively and to come to firm, verifiable conclusions. It assumes, without a confirmable logical foundation, that it can unravel logical secrets of the cosmos. This premise is nonfalisifable because the cosmogeny it has developed also assumes that the cosmos arose by chance, without a logical basis. The intellect assumes that the universe is not inherently logical, since it came to be through accident. Yet the intellect also assumes that this random, nonlogical cosmos is essentially knowable through the faculty of logic.

At root, these assumptions are flawed, as they are based on a contradiction. The assumption is that the universe gave rise to a logical mind from inherently illogical processes. If the cosmos arose from a mindless, chance happening, it cannot be systematized. If the intellect arose from and is, at the ultimate level, governed by random processes, can anything it conclude about itself be accurately measured or reliably proved?

The intellect may simply be imposing its own, a priori structure and understanding upon the universe. It may see patterns where none exist because it is programmed to find pattern, to see meaning. This patternicity is recognized in cognitive psychology. It is one of the Gestalt principles of human perception, as explained in the law of closure. According to this principle, the mind can perceive a whole despite the absence of one or more of the parts from that whole. Yet when the human mind finds meaning in certain experiences which are not judged to be logically falsifiable, this same pattern-finding tendency is judged to be a tendency to find meaning where none really exists. The mind suffering from this propensity toward abnormal meaningfulness is diagnosed as pathological and irrational.

The proponents of a reductionist philosophy exempt their own pattern-seeking and pattern-finding from this tendency toward abnormal meaningfulness. The cosmos may be a random mosaic upon which humans impose subjective meaning, yet scientific observations are considered exceptions to this subjectivity. The results of experiments, unique along the constellation of all human observations, are alone objective and thus amenable to logical interpretation. We find this conclusion curious.

In some dream theories, dreams themselves are considered to occur all at once, with no logically-apprehensible time order to the events which seem to occur within them. According to these theories, it is only in the recollection of the dream that a time sequence is imposed to logically reconstruct the dream in a way that makes sense to the dreamer’s waking mind. The larger physical dimension which humans inhabit may be similarly illogical, with the mind attempting to make sense of an entirely random and meaningless series of processes. If this is so, then all humans suffer from the tendency toward abnormal meaningfulness, including those adhering to rational disciplines which attempt to impose a logical sequence upon phenomena that cannot be understood logically any more than random splotches of paint on a canvass can be so understood.

This inkblot universe we inhabit may be similar to a vast Rorschach test, where the observing mind projects its meaning onto random images which have no inherent meaning in themselves. The chaos preceding the creation of the world which some mythologies describe has been referred to as a raw, inchoate state by Jungian psychology from which the human ego arises and through which it forms its images of the world. The creation of the world may simply be the mind’s attempt to impose meaning upon the random chaos which preceded it and which may surround it. This uroboros may act as a raw substrate from which the world is generated. Yet it has no meaning in and of itself. It has the meaning humans ascribe to it. Why should scientific understanding be exempt from this tendency to seek patterns where none may exist?

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias expresses the human psychological tendency to see evidence in their environment which confirms preexisting belief. Those who adhere to a reductionist worldview conclude that what they see and deduce has meaning, while they claim that the patterns seen or deduced by others who use nonscientific understanding do not possess any meaning or logic, but are rather the victims of superstition, antiquated religiosity, myth in its pejorative sense, or cognitive bias.

Apophenia, that tendency toward abnormal meaningfulness, is only seen by those who see the universe as having materialistic causes as applying to the unscientific ways of knowing which lie outside the intellect’s purely rational sphere. This tendency toward abnormal meaningfulness is pathologized as a disordered psychological trait. Yet what is abnormal meaningfulness? Is it to have one’s own, peculiar, unscientific observations confined to what physicist, Fred Allan Wolf, described as the imaginal realm? Why should it not be equally applied to physicists seeing gluons, Higgs bosons or gravitons? Why should the tendency toward abnormal meaningfulness only be thought to exist in the minds of those spotting UAP’s or seeing Marian visions? Why should abnormal pattern-finding be seen as a trait of psychosis, as a criterion for delusions, for paranoia, for conspiracy theories, or religious fixations?

The brain is sometimes characterized by cognitive psychologists as an inference-generating organ. It is condemned to find patterns, to make up meaning, and the logical flow of forces and particles throughout the cosmos may simply be a mass projection of the brain upon a truly random series of phenomenon. According to the hypothesis of predictive coding, perception is governed by the brain. We have noted that there are many more connections between neurons within the brain than there are connections which relay sensory information from the environment into the brain. From this, it can be deduced that the brain fills in details from missing parts of its ‘picture’ of the external world. Thus, perception is an internal process which relies as much if not more upon the brain’s inner working models of the world as it does upon what is actually happening ‘out there.’ Perception is as much interpretation as it is sensing the outer world.

If there is a missing piece of the picture, the brain relies upon its working model of its environment to fill in the gaps. It utilizes past examples recorded upon this model from memory to supply the missing perceptual data. This use of the past is a source of confirmation bias. It results in much prejudice within the human world. Humans see one instance of misconduct committed by a member of an outgroup, and they generalize this behavior to other members of the same group. The brain predicts based upon its models. It prejudges. This results in racism, classism, sexism, and the many pernicious views and behaviors out of which humans react. It is the cause of much of the balkanization of humanity we have been describing. The brain’s inner models can be corrected by outside stimuli which are novel, but the mind must be open to this novelty. When the input from the environment clashes with the model, the mind has a choice: it can revise the inner working model of its environment, or it can change the information.

Research shows that an incorrectly-remembered event hardens into belief in the same way that a correctly-recalled event does. Memory signaling within the brain operates identically whether an event actually did occur in the way remembered, or whether it did not. Information which contradicts the brain’s inner model of reality will either cause the brain to adjust its predictions about how the world works, or it will cause the information to be rejected or adjusted to fit belief. More often than not, contrary information reinforces preexisting beliefs. This theory of cognitive dissonance is well-established in the literature.

At times, those studying the universe may neglect to account for their psychological tendencies, as observers subject to confirmation bias and to cognitive dissonance. The quantum and relativistic patterns in the universe described by physics may be mere implicits projected from the observer onto her external environment. Projective identification, one of the ego defense mechanisms, may apply as well to the observations of physicists. If so, then psychological principles may be first principles, and physical principles would be second order principles.

A literal interpretation of science, of the physical world, has physics as the builder of all that is seen, and this interpretation would have physical processes be this architect through random, albeit probabilistic processes. A symbolic interpretation, which is consistent with the Jungian worldview, would have psychological principles as primary. Through this psychological lens, the intellect can understand the universe because this cosmos is a projection of patterns implicit first in the mind.

We have stated that science has a symbolic, mythological aspect in addition to its pure and applied physical aspects.  This means that if psychological principles are of the first order, then the physical universe, like the dreams of sleep, has both manifest and latent levels of interpretation.

Physicists have concluded that the underlying substrate of the cosmos is driven by probabilistically-governed randomness, by physical particles in either a wave configuration or a particle aspect. These behave randomly within the parameters of quantum probability. Yet perhaps the bases of the cosmic substrate are psychological principles, so that mechanisms such as projective identification operate implicitly, extending from the mind of the observer into the external world. Rather than being organized from the bottom up, with the particle and its quantum behaviors as the mindless, deterministic influences serving as the basis for everything from quarks to consciousness, perhaps the universe flows from the top down. In this instance, randomness would still exist ‘out there’, but it would be ordered by the pattern-seeking functions of the intellect. Probability would emanate from the observer, and not from particles, fields or interactions themselves. The act of observation would impose the probabilities, which enforce the limits around which randomness could operate. The natural laws would emanate from consciousness and conscious observation, rather than arising from randomness.

If psychological projection came first, randomness would have its place in the cosmos, but it would be subordinate to the act of observation. The uroboric energy from which the perceived world is made is conceived of mythologically as chaos, and mathematically as randomness.  The cosmos would have the meaning and order which the observing mind projected upon it. The universe would be shaped by a bilateral flow between object and observer, in which randomness emanates from the chaotic flux of potentiality inherent in materio-energetic particles and waves, while the observing mind provided the patterns based upon the probabilities the observer imposed through its act of observation. These probabilities would be based upon conditioning, which is what the mind expects to see, as derived from its memory of past events. These memories would contribute to the inner working model of the external world which the mind had constructed. This mind would see what it expected, and what it expects it both invites and seeks. This is the circular nature of its conditioning. The mind seeks confirmation of that which it already thinks it knows, reinforcing preexisting belief. And what it believes it knows, it believes it knows based upon its desire of what it prefers to see. Although the process is circular, it begins with the observer’s choice of what to observe, and of how to perceive what it observes.

In some Eastern systems of thought, it is theorized that neither matter nor mind preceded the other. Rather, each was created through a mutual co-arising. It may be that consciousness and the raw, uroboric substrate of chaotic energy co-occurred at the same time when the cosmos was conceived at the instant of the Big Bang. We believe that this is possible, and even probable. If this randomness and the mind which shapes it into discrete entities and forces co-arose simultaneously, it is still true that consciousness existed at the moment the universe was born.

We conclude that the physical substrate is not patterned by randomness or by randomness tamed by probability. It is patterned by the mind which sees patterns because it expects to see patterns, and the patterns it expects are the ones that it wants to see. The raw substrate from which creation emerges is chaotic, as described in many creation myths. The order is imposed through the act of observing, which is synonymous with creating. Under this scheme, humans would be creators of the cosmos. The universe would not be the creation of a God or a demiurge. Humans impose order and pattern by seeing it, and come to see it through an expectation of its apparency. The universe humans see is at root psychological in nature, and not a spontaneous emergence from mindless physical processes as scientific narrative now seeks to explain it.

In earlier times, the concept of spontaneous generation was used to explain the origin of organisms in ponds such as pupae, which were thought to have arisen when hair from a horse’s tail fell into the water. More accurate measuring devices as well as theories were necessary to conclude that no organic organism can arise spontaneously without prior cause. In a similar way, the complex patterns seen in nature, up to and including consciousness itself, cannot have arisen spontaneously from mindless cause. Rather, the act of observation collaborates with raw, inanimate physical matter-energy to co-create the universe. Creation is the result of the collaboration of conscious observation and pattern seeking, cooperating with the raw, random substrate.

This, of course, begs the question of how such an ordered pattern of seeing could arise from mindless and raw matter-energy. We say that they co-arise.

Particles consist of other particles, and may be defined by and through each other. They serve as overarching, composite structures, but may also be components of other particles. They may also be exchanged between other particles. Particles create other particles, which in turn generate the creating particle. It is an idea of Buddhism that there is a mutual co-arising between all created things, and these connections between physics and Eastern ideas were explored in-depth in Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics.

Theoretically, this transmutability is a feature of S-Matrix theory and the related bootstrap hypothesis, which hold particles to be intermediate states which express interactions (forces) in temporary ways. These ideas view particles as processes rather than entities. In the argument between Einstein, who concluded in the reality of discrete objects separated from one another in spacetime, and quantum theorist Niels Bohr, who theorized that once connected, even particles separated by remote distances still retained their nexus as a unified whole, S-Matrix Theory and the bootstrap hypothesis come firmly down on the side of Bohr’s nonlocal causation and quantum entanglement. More recent observations confirm the reality of quantum entanglement.

In S-Matrix theory, matter has no ultimate, fundamental particle, or even an irreducible theory of everything. All entities, fields and interactions are mutually defined by and through each other. Although S-Matrix Theory and the bootstrap hypothesis have been assailed and somewhat discredited by the Standard Model of particle physics, we find a good deal of elegance in them, and much in them which lends them credence as accurate descriptions of metaphysical reality. In the history of science, old theories and hypotheses are sometimes rejected, only to be exhumed, dusted off and rehabilitated. Even if S-Matrix Theory and the bootstrap argument ultimately do fail to describe particle physics, they yet have metaphysical applications.

Intention

A universe which is patterned follows predictable laws which bear the hallmarks of reliability. The patterns repeat. Laws which explain these patterns are predictable and repeatable. They are amenable to logic. It is more likely than not that a cosmos which is logical has, as one of its fundamental traits, consciousness. A variation of the anthropic principle holds that such a cosmos must give rise to conscious observers.

That which is conscious is intentional. It is not likely that such a universe follows the laws of logic by chance. A cosmos amenable to logical interpretation due to the logical behaviors, patterns and laws which are inherent in the materio-energetic structures of the universe is unlikely to have arisen exclusively through random causation, though randomness, as we have stated, was most likely present as raw, uroboric energy in the beginning. It is highly improbable that this scenario would have arisen purely at random. Of all the possible configurations into which it could have arisen, it defies logic to conclude that a cosmos of deducible patterns would have evolved randomly. The odds are too much against it. The universe produced highly complex organisms which develop according to evolutionary principles. It evolved creatures and biomes capable of self-regulation. It gave rise to the human brain, which has yielded enormous technological complexity, including AI systems. These developments are highly improbable if randomness is the sole generator of both the nonliving physical structures in the universe as well as the enormously complex human beings which now adapt their environments to suit themselves. To say, as some will respond, that a randomness can give rise to consciousness – that we live in such a patterned universe that is amenable to logical interpretation because, by chance, that is the one we happen to find ourselves in – does not really answer the question of how randomness could be the exclusive agency of consciousness. It falls back upon a bootstrap argument of circular reasoning.

This is especially so since the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is considered by physicists to be a first principle that is irreducible to yet more basic laws, holds that the universe will devolve back into chaos. Based upon the existence of entropy and the tendency toward devolution, it is more probable that any system, including the universe, would assume the configuration of its least organized energetic state, would continue to assume it as a steady state, and would not give rise to complex, self-reproducing structures capable of self-regulation and self-awareness. In other words, systems capable of complexity, self-reproduction, self-regulation and self-awareness are highly unlikely to have arisen randomly from a state which tends toward entropy. BI and AI are unlikely to have accidental causes.

We must ask how the cosmos could have given rise to an organism which wonders how the cosmos could have given rise to that organism. We believe it more likely than not that it can ponder this question because the origins of the universe were marked by conscious organizing forces.

Thus, the universe probably had, as one of its basic principles and causes, a psychological origin as opposed to a purely random one. The random generators assumed by physicists to have given rise to complexity and self-awareness are more likely coexistent generators. As the prima materia through which conscious observers construct the universe, this random substrate may be likened to the unassembled ‘alphabet’ of code, the raw constituents of programming like the four base pairs of DNA code before it is put together. These basic structures are built by the observer into repeating, self-same iterations through her act of observation, accumulating to complexity through fractal methods that result in patterns. The first principles leading to the universe’s creation and evolvement are likely to be psychological in nature, utilizing this raw substrate of matter-energy and the repeatable interactions by which these building blocks are assembled. The laws of physics are involved, yet so are the ‘laws’ of psychology.

If first principles are psychological in nature, then even if they co-occurred at the beginnings of the universe, physical principles governed by randomness and probability would be intermediate, mediating causes, and not first principles. These laws would be set in motion by the intention of the observer in every act of observation. For instance, wet clay on the potter’s wheel behaves according to the principles of physics, yet the shape which the pottery takes is determined by the potter. The mind which seeks to understand the universe then could not have arisen from the laws of chance and probability. The intellect would see patterns because it itself is patterned. We hold that the pattern exists as an a priori tendency in the mind of the observer, and that it is then projected onto the substrate of randomness found external to the observer.

Patternicity, the tendency of the mind to discover patterns in nature and in randomness in general, is the cognitive tendency, described by reductive science, to explain the human bias toward meaningfulness. It may answer why humans tend toward a belief in God and supernatural explanations for phenomenon in general. It may explain the belief in magic and even help to explain in part psychological disorders which have delusions as their manifestations. It may illuminate why humans have a propensity to experiences in the imaginal realm, phenomenon such as extraterrestrial encounters, Marian visions, ghosts and hauntings. We do not mean to pathologize any of these human traits. We simply seek to unite them under the constellation of a pattern-seeking predisposition common to humans.

The materialist approach to psychology and cognition assumes that a priori structures within the brain seek out nonexistent patterns in randomness and nature. These theories may agree that this inclination toward meaningfulness may be of a religious or magical nature, and that it may also exist wherever delusional belief systems or other symptoms of mental illness, such as hallucinations, are diagnosed. Yet most materialists would probably deny that this tendency toward pattern-finding projects other kinds of order onto the physical world, patterns involving mathematical formulas and scientific laws. In other words, they would deny that they project their own tendencies toward rational explanations onto the universe, instead holding that it is in the nature of physical reality to be inherently amenable to rational understanding.

Yet mathematics does not exist in nature. It is a lexicon which exists in the mind. It is the mind which invents language, which is always symbolic. We see mathematical patterns in nature because our minds operate mathematically. Patternicity cannot give preference to one set of patterns (science and mathematics) over others (religious or magical belief) and still be valid as a concept. The tendency toward meaningfulness projected outward onto the environment either is exists or it doesn’t. It either has general applicability as a psychological principle, or it doesn’t. If we can pick and choose between ‘valid’ patterns actually found in the external world and ‘invalid’ ones projected by the mind, then where is the line drawn between genuine and invented patterns? What are the criteria for distinguishing normal from abnormal meaningfulness? Why should the universe be amenable to mathematical interpretation, but not spiritual understanding? In other words, why should it possess a logical order, but not a spiritual or metaphysical one?

It is possible that everything external to the mind is indeed random and chaotic. But then, the very complexity within the human brain which seeks out and projects pattern and structure onto the randomness in its external environment had to be created by something. We conclude that it is not very logical or very likely that the process which created this ordered complexity within the brain was itself illogical, chaotic or random. The odds against this are staggering and concluding that randomness gave rise to a nonrandom observer and otherwise we wouldn’t be around to see it may be self-evident, but it offers no counter to our argument.

The patterns found within the mind must exist, or the mind would be unable to project patterns onto its external environment. The likelihood of the projective agency within the mind being randomness itself, or being created by randomness, is so highly improbable that it is unlikely to have arisen anywhere in the history of the universe, even this universe in which humans find themselves, which has a cosmological constant that is just right for the stability of matter to exist in its current forms. In other words, if the brain acts at random, then nothing it perceives in its outer world should make any sense. And if the materialists are correct that the universe arose at random, then the mathematical and logical properties which the universe seems to possess are no truer than any delusion entertained by a mentally ill individual. Then any conclusions about anything are meaningless, since everything is essentially indecipherable chaos. The mind is mad. The world is anarchy.

It is also a first principle of reason that the simplest explanation which fits the facts is most probably the correct explanation. The Law of Parsimony so holds. Ockham’s Razor is not without its critics, yet it has held up over the centuries.

Is it not true that the simplest explanation which fits the facts of the existence of an ordered cosmos and the emergence of the intellect is that both are innately logical? That the human mind can deduce rational law and repeatable operations within the universe because of its own implicit rationality? That the logic and order of the universe is most likely explained by the logic and order of the mind which can deduce the rational order of the universe? We hold that these principles are more likely because they more likely fit the human experience of the phenomenal universe than the rather illogical assumption that random generators evolved nonrandom consciousness. This is the simplest explanation which fits the facts.

In physics, probability sets parameters around the random. We believe that it is more probable than not that the very first principle with which the universe is endowed is awareness, that it existed along with the unconscious substrate at the instant and point of cosmic origin, and through its very acts of observation in each instant, it re-creates this universe. As there are cosmological constants in the universe, so, too, we believe, there are constants of awareness, boundary conditions which are unvarying throughout any conscious system. One of the fundamental constants of awareness is balance.

All systems seek balance; equalizations of pressure temperature, and charge, for instance. Balance is conserved throughout any conscious system. The human personality seeks balance, or psychological disturbance results. Dyadic systems between any two people also seek a balance in their dynamics: there are minimizers and maximizers of problems. Systems theory has been applied to family systems to show that dysfunctional family systems are those which are out of balance. An identified patient within such a system is often simply the individual who expresses the imbalance within the family system by exhibiting pathology. Within any individual and collective conscious system, the psychological literature describes conscious and unconscious forces. Awareness may move back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness. Yet as matter is conserved, as energy is conserved, so, too, we believe, the net amount of awareness can neither be created not destroyed within any system. It may only change ‘form’ from consciousness to unconsciousness, and back again.

We conclude that human consciousness, as expressed in the human ego, has a developmental path which seeks to increase in acuity. It sharpens over time. In the Dream Time described by Austro-Aboriginal peoples, called the Child Land in the Jungian worldview, unconscious uroboric energy dominated, and threatened to overwhelm and reclaim the nascent ego consciousness, which was fragile. The progression of consciousness from this unconscious state to a conscious one can be traced in the individual development of every human being from infancy through adulthood. In this sense, human development is an isomorph of the collective evolution of human consciousness, as first described in myth. Yet over time, the human ego gained in strength, claiming greater proportions of psychic energy from unconscious forces.

In an ultimate sense, since awareness can neither be created not destroyed, it is always total. It is always complete. It is also limitless. Its default state is infinite, yet the individual ego has difficulty in comprehending the concept of infinity since the ego itself is a bounded system, and therefore finite in nature. The conservation laws apply to a human personality since it represents a closed system with limited energy, as described in Freud’s theory of the human personality. The totality of awareness cannot be fully understood by the human personality in its conscious aspect since its understanding is always subject to an innate uncertainty, as we have described. Being a bounded system, its understanding is also bounded and limited, and this incompleteness of understanding is expressed as and in terms of uncertainty. Yet the truth of totality is grasped by myth, by intuition, by metaphysics, by spiritual methods of understanding, and to an extent by certain schools of psychological thought.  

Yet if awareness is always total, how can human understanding fail to attain it? And if awareness is limitless, then how can it be subject to the conservation laws, which apply to closed systems of limited content? Awareness can neither be created nor destroyed because it is always total and always has been. This cannot be grasped by the intellect through logic since awareness is not ultimately quantifiable. It is intuitively knowable, but not mathematically measurable. It cannot be known purely through scientific means because it has psychological origins.

What follows is a short discussion of infinity. We address the question of whether infinity exists. Infinity is an either/or, all or nothing proposition. There are no degrees of infinity, though there, of necessity, degrees of finitude. A thing cannot be more infinite or less so. it is either endless or it isn’t. If anything is infinite, then everything is, in a way, also infinite because it is included within the infinite subset. Everything that must exist within the infinite and must be connected to limitlessness.

The cosmos may in reality be infinite itself. If so, then its physical infinitude may simply reflect the potential of its limitless awareness. In this scenario, the human ego, being a limited system, may forever grow toward this limitless awareness by increasing its boundary, yet never fully attain it. As the human ego gains in strength, it claims greater proportions of psychic energy from unconscious forces, yet since these forces are unlimited, an understanding of the totality of limitless awareness will never be fully attained. Being a bounded system, the human ego can attain greater degrees of consciousness, yet since it exists in degrees, it is in the process of becoming. it exists in a comparative state. It can compare itself to its level of conscious understanding in the past. it can compare itself to the limitlessness which surrounds it.

Humanity’s connection to this infinite envelope is through collective unconscious forces that allow an intuitive, though unconscious, grasp of this totality. This understanding can be accessed through mythological and psychological ways of knowing, yet not through quantifiable means, since to try to quantify the limitless is a contradiction. Quantities imply boundaries, and boundaries imply limits. The human ego has a boundary state, yet that which surrounds it does not. From within any barrier, the concept of infinity cannot be sufficiently understood.

We assume that awareness within each human exists in a closed system, since individual human awareness appears limited. It reflects and is reflected by a cosmos where phenomenon like matter and energy are conserved, and so the total ‘amount’ of awareness as expressed in a discrete packet of energy contained within a material structure like a brain appears to be conserved as well. Yet awareness as a whole, being identified with the infinite, can neither be created nor destroyed. It is all that it ever was or could be. It may merely convert from unconscious to conscious aspects, and back again. Yet it is limitless in extent. The individual ego has difficulty in comprehending this limitlessness, as it does in understanding any infinite system.

Conservation laws apply to closed systems, and closed systems are finite. What the individual mind cannot hope to understand is how a ‘larger’ infinite and open system can also be subject to conservation so that infinite awareness is also conserved. We respond that awareness is conserved because it always was what it ever could be. It is changeless. Since this net ‘amount’ of awareness is conserved and can never change, balance is one of its fundamental characteristics. We say that it is infinite in extent, and therefore in reality, it cannot be measured as any amount. For this reason alone, it is not subject to scientific or mathematical understanding.

It is conserved precisely because it is limitless in extent. More of it cannot be created because it already occupies everything. It cannot be destroyed, for what, then, would take its place? For infinity to be conserved, it simply means that it cannot grow beyond its previous extent because it has no extent. It cannot grow because it is already endless. In this sense, it is balanced. It came from balance and seeks to re-achieve balance. Born from balance, it has an unceasing central tendency to return to it. Humans view this return to balance as death. From another perspective, unlimited awareness can be viewed as its own self-awareness of its changeless, steady state. If awareness can neither be created nor destroyed, but remains constant, then it is, in its totality, balanced. If it is balanced in this respect, it is also changeless.

Awareness and infinity are the same thing. Balance is also in its identity synonymous with awareness and infinity. We have stated that awareness always was what it ever could be. Along its time axis, infinity is expressed as the eternal. Eternity is simply the time aspect of infinity. Awareness can never become more or less of its itself because it is changeless. being changeless, it is also timeless, since time only arises as a function to measure the change in state of any system. Without change, there can be no time, no way to measure time, and no need for time as a function. Space and time, are of course, joined in spacetime as one aspect. Therefore, eternity is infinity of time. If infinity exists, then eternity must be its temporal aspect. If anything is eternal then that thing must also be uncreated, having existed back in time without birth.

Even materialist philosophers must agree that anything created must be originated by something. Yet the human brain can trace its origins only back to a certain point in time. It had an inception date, and therefore it is a bounded system. Time itself began at the moment of universal inception. In cosmogeny, the current era of the universe was ‘hatched’ from this singularity, which set the arrow of time unidirectionally from past to future, at least at the macrocosmic level. This era, in which the metric expansion of space occurs, is referred to by physicists as the dark-energy-dominant era. In this current era, metric spatial expansion is most strongly influenced by vacuum energy. It is defined as that era before the local supercluster of galaxies will set beyond the cosmological horizon by the accelerating expansion of space.

What was before the moment of the Big Bang? The brain was not there to record this, and nothing it has devised so far can penetrate this shadowy barrier to human understanding. The intellect therefore has no knowledge or recollection of what existed before this instant of cosmic creation, since it was not there to consciously observe it. All it can do is generate inferences about cause, as it infers so many other facts which it supposes are true about the dimension in which it finds itself. These proofs and facts are nothing more than assumptions, which are beliefs.

We, too, make assumptions, informed guesses about the nature of reality. Our hypothesis that infinity exists, and that awareness is similarly infinite in extent, is based on the fact that some cosmological models, from a scientific standpoint, assume that the universe is infinite or that there are an infinite number of universes. These models therefore believe that infinity exists. To conclude that awareness is similarly limitless is, we admit, more of a creative leap. Yet we hold that the mind could not be cognizant of the concept of infinity unless this limitless awareness existed, and unless the mind were somehow linked to it, or at the least contained within it.

Some facts are beyond dispute. We find ourselves in a universe which has conscious observers, and we assume, by virtue of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that it tends toward balance. This natural tendency toward balance is the trend of evolution, which is influenced by the Second Law in the sense that evolution seeks even distribution of matter-energy-data (data expressed as awareness) throughout the spacetime continuum. Evolution on any level – physical, biological, technological, psychological – is simply the movement toward balance.

The Balance Before Cause

The cosmos is dynamic, and dynamism is change. Change is imbalance, for change is the movement of particles and waves, of matter and energy from one region of greater concentration to another location where it is less concentrated. If all were balanced in the even distribution of matter and energy throughout the cosmos, change from this steady state would be impossible. Therefore, the fact that change occurs is an indication of an imbalanced state. In its current condition, the cosmos expresses this imbalance.

Obviously, human intelligence did not exist to observe the Big Bang or what came before the instant when the universe was born. If the intellect is not cognizant of the moment of the universe’s creation – if human intelligence has no recollection of it – then the intellect cannot propose with any certainty what came before the phenomenological universe, or what it is that ultimately gave rise to the intellect itself. The intellect has a working theory of how it evolved in an intermediate way from the inanimate universe. It has hypotheses and theories which can trace intermediate causes, such as the aggregation of matter and energy and the formation of the four universal interactions; the strong interaction, the weak interaction, gravity and electromagnetism. Yet it can neither propose with any definitiveness what existed the instant before the cosmos came into being, or whether the first principles which governed this ‘pre-birth’ state were logical or chaotic, whether they were governed by pure randomness or by intention. If the state prior to the inception of the universe as humans know it was logical, it may be that the ultimate cause of human intelligence is itself intelligent. There is no way of knowing.

Still, the intellect proposes that it may know. It proposes that the conditions of the state prior to the Big Bang may have been random and mindless, explicable by inflationary theory, which holds that the universe could have expanded from nothing, and that this nothing could have given rise to something. This is unproven and unproveable. Like theological proofs of the existence of God, hypotheses which conjecture what, if anything, existed before the universe began are nonfalsifiable. By the standards of the scientific method, a hypothesis which is not disprovable must be disregarded.

Our hypotheses are also nonfalsisfiable. None of us can do anything but discuss these themes in terms of probabilities. We can make arguments. In this regard, we conclude it to be more likely that order was a fundamental trait of the early universe, of the Big Bang, and even of what preceded the instant of universal inception. We conclude that this order was present at and even before the moment of universal inception because this order is perceived today by the conscious mind. As background radiation signatures can tell us much about the nature of the big bang and the conditions of the early universe, the fact that the early cosmos obeyed certain orderly parameters and that it produced an ordered, rational mind makes it more likely that order governed the process of cosmic birth, and even preceded it.

Gestalt psychology made contributions to cognitive psychology through its study of how the mind perceives in a visual sense. Gestalt psychology utilizes the principle of psychophysical isomorphism, which assumes a correlation between the brain and the mind. Although descriptive rather than explanatory in a rigorous scientific sense, Gestalt psychology has proved foundational for investigations into perception, cognition, problem-solving and even pathology. Gestalt psychology studies how humans and other animals perceive objects in their environment, and how parts of perceived objects are related to their wholes. Gestalt assumes that rather than the sum of the parts being greater than the whole in an arithmetic sense, the whole is actually ‘something different’ than the sum of its parts. This is, we hold, consistent with the properties of emergence in evolution.

Summing is obviously quantitative, while both Gestalt rules of perception as well as emergent evolution study the connection between the parts and the whole. The phenomenon of emergence and Gestalt psychology describe qualitative differences between the level of the elements which compose an entity and the level of the whole of the entity perceived or evolved.  It is a Gestalt principle that like is grouped with like. The law of similarity, a basic Gestalt principle of perception, holds that the mind recognizes that objects with similar physical characteristics, or resemblances, are grouped together by the perceiver as members of the same class. The law of past experience describes the tendency of the mind to group objects which are perceived in close proximity as belonging together. The law of continuity holds that when objects are perceived as aligned, they ‘belong’ together. The law of closure predicts that the perceiver will see objects which are incomplete, such as circles or squares with gaps in their lines, as complete objects.

More comprehensively, the law of good Gestalt concludes that individuals will perceive some aspects in their visual field as belonging together. According to the law of good Gestalt, humans tend to experience their reality as orderly and symmetrical. They have a propensity to perceive simplicity and stability. Through these perceptual rules, humans often exclude complexity and the unfamiliar so they may perceive their experience as being simpler than it really is. In this way, extraneous stimuli are often eliminated from the ‘picture’ which humans make of their world. The inner model the brain constructs of its environment may be simpler than the environment actually presents. In order to make sense of their environment, we use these laws to simplify what they see. This helps the brain create meaning, which requires regularity in the environment. Although we speak of visual laws of perception, Gestalt principles can also be generalized to the other human senses.

These descriptive rules help the perceiving mind to attribute cause and effect. Although they are principles of Gestalt psychology, we hold that they are relevant insofar as the organizing principles perceived in the external world arise first as patterns in the perceiving mind, which then classifies them as causes or effects, depending on their similarities and differences. Causes are antecedent by their very nature. They occur first in time. This makes them similar, and effects are similar in that they occur after perceived causes. These rules of perception do not arise in the environment. They arise in the mind.

Externalities did not cause the brain and mind to perceive cause and effect. Rather, cause is perceived first in mind, which then separates it out from perceived effects. Our hypothesis is that the universe is simply chaotic flux. External, physical cause and effect are unordered data streams with no internal structure. External reality may be regarded as a quantum stream, with no real, discernible boundaries between objects and their surroundings. This reality lacks true boundaries, which may be regarded psychologically as stream of consciousness. We describe particles as intermediate states which manifest interactions (forces) in temporary ways. All material objects are processes rather than discrete entities, and so are events and experiences. Human minds place temporal markers around causes and effects in the same way that they place spatial markers around discrete objects. By assigning beginnings and ends to events and experiences, cause and effect are divided by a mind trying to make sense of chaos. In this sense, reality is created rather than given. it is interpreted rather than provided whole by an objective reality. However cause and effect may be divided by the mind, they are attributed rather than objectively real. They are assigned values as demarcating points, as event markers. Some are classified as causes and others are categorized as effects to order physical events into a timeline so that experience is structured in a linear fashion embedded in the mind’s sense of time.

It is therefore probable that a preexisting awareness perceives and structures cause and effect from a random flow of unconscious, uroboric energy. Yet cause and effect are as much a bedrock of science, of physics, cosmology and evolution, as they are of any other system of knowledge. These rules of perception which order reality into causes and effects reside as preexisting structures within the mind and these structures order the world experienced through the senses. It is worth reiterating that the number of connections between nerve cells within the brain are more numerous than sensory inputs which deliver information from the outside world into the brain. Human interpretations base on inner working models of reality may be the true ordering principle of the cosmos. This remains a probable influence on our understanding of cosmological events, which in reality may subsist in a chaotic stream. In this sense, humans create the observable universe. The intermediate ’causes’ of human intelligence – the evolution from the inanimate to the animate to consciousness – may obscure the fact it is consciousness which orders even the inanimate world.

To conclude that chaos gave rise to the order in the human mind is not likely. It defies logic to conclude that randomness and disorder, on their own and without any catalyst, eventually self-organized into highly complex, conscious structures. A mediating process, a catalyzer, is most likely responsible for creating this order, and that reagent exists within the mind itself. The rules of perception described earlier in this chapter allude to this medium which organizes experience into discrete and probable events. Probability is that psychological variable represented by prior conditioning. What is seen and experienced is what is expected, based upon prior conditioning.

This catalyst had to be present at the inception of the universe, or else it would have arisen randomly from chaos, which is highly unlikely even in a universe where the cosmological constants were just right for the formation of matter. And too many developments would have had to break just right for life to have evolved, and for intelligence to have progressed from the development of nonintelligent reproductive lifeforms.

We conclude that the only assumption upholding this strange belief that consciousness arose randomly is the distinction the mind makes between what is inside itself and what lies outside, as signified by the boundary inherent in discrete objects, which is another delineation made by the mind according to these very same laws of perception. Without this membrane which supposedly encloses the conscious observer within the walls of its own body, separating it from that which is observed external to itself, there is no prohibition against a conscious presence everywhere in the infinitely dense universe at the moment of universal birth. Due to the existence of nonlocal cause, we conclude that the dimension humans inhabit, up to and including the universe itself, lacks an inherent internal structure marked by boundaries or any boundary condition. We hold that there are no discrete objects, and that there is no rule which bars the presence of consciousness at the instant of the Big Bang which subsequently expanded with the spacetime substrate into the entire universe, to be coextensive with it. Awareness is, therefore, omnipresent within every ‘point’ of the spacetime continuum and within all matter-energy structures.

We conclude that the weak version of the anthropic principle is an exhausted argument erected as a flagging defense to the rather simple propositions set against materialist cosmogonies. It is rather facile to argue at the last that humanity exists in a universe that gave rise to life, that just to happens have conscious beings among one of its products, simply because humanity so happens to find itself in the one cosmos that is conducive to life, with the right cosmological coincidences for life. And because otherwise humans otherwise would not be around to see it.

We find it just as illogical to conclude, as some do, that the nothing which preceded the Big Bang was unstable and so that it gave rise to the somethingness of the manifest universe. This inflationary model represents the illogical end stages of the reductionist worldview.

When a worldview becomes dominant and stays dominant for a long time, it follows the same course as the biological and human historical worlds. It becomes tyrannical and stale, and its energy must be broken up, recycled and utilized for new ideas. Among other premises, evolutionary epistemology concludes that ideas themselves evolve through selective forces. Indeed, the evolution of ideas and the history of science proves that even the most ironclad ‘laws’ of science are eventually broken down into new ways of seeing. Scientific thought is always provisional.  Like an aging monarch at the end of his reign, the human institutions which enforce an obsolete worldview will tend toward defending their hegemony. This can breed close-mindedness and extremes of opinion. The materialist worldview is perhaps exhausted. Its conclusion that disorder and mindless cause could have yielded order and the preexisting structures of human consciousness is still a possibility. However, this conclusion is less likely than not.

The Limits of Science

Of course, no one knows what existed in the moment prior to universal conception. Scientific hypotheses and theories are constantly revised, and hardly one that existed in the deeper historical record holds up in its then-extant form today. Science presents its conclusions as provisional. Although the conclusions of science are provisional, the mind often tends toward fixed opinion. As we age, it becomes more difficult for us to accept new ideas, or to revise old conclusions which more closely correspond to newer data.

As the ability to measure becomes keener, older theories and speculations are revised. Thus, what is considered natural law is rewritten because human understanding of it evolves. The intellect assumes multitudes of facts not in evidence, and, as with its pattern-finding which works to fill in gaps in its perceptual field, it must make these assumptions in order to help its organism survive. So many of the assumptions the intellect makes, buried at the foundations of scientific, mathematical and other logical proofs and theorems, are subsequently shown to be in error. So many theories – from a geocentric and heliocentric cosmos, to the age of earth, to the causes of mass extinctions – have proved wrong.

Scientific understanding must be constantly revised regarding that which seems to stand before human eyes. Matter appears solid and hard and was once assumed to be so. Yet now it is described as mostly empty space. How, then, can theoreticians claim to really know such unimaginably distant conditions as the nature of the early universe, and what came before its inception?

Yet intuitively, humans grasp that the pre-phenomenal cosmos may have been a steady state which was in balance, that it was changeless. We acknowledge that this assumption, based as it is on intuition, is no more provable than the assumptions of the inflationary hypothesis that nothing gave rise to something, and that randomness and chaos gave rise to an objective, ordered, consciously-perceived reality which is amenable to rational understanding. And yet, while it not any less falsifiable than the assumption that randomness gave rise to consciousness, we hold that our assumption is more likely.  How the changeless changed, how balance could have given rise to imbalance, is, we admit, difficult to grasp.

How balance gave rise to imbalance may be a property of the essential unknowability of reality. It simply means that this fact, should it be the truth, is inaccessible to the intellect and its methods. It means that the ultimate questions are possibly beyond the grasp of the logic.

This unknowability may be the result of an imbalance of which the intellect is insufficiently aware. Being a part of this imbalance, the mind cannot probe the ultimate causes of asymmetry. This is precisely where other forms of understanding come in, and why they become essential to fill in the picture. Yet the intellect’s tendency, once fully developed, is to crowd out all perceived threats to its preeminence in the same way that conscious ego often seeks to conquer unconscious, uroboric forces which it deems a threat. Any way of knowing which is at odds to the intellect’s way of apprehension is rejected as illogical and unprovable. This rejection of prelogical understanding by logic creates its own imbalance, an imbalance of understanding.

Since the intellect concludes that it can discover the first principles by which the universe operates, and so solve fundamental human problems, and since it sees abundant proof in the world to confirm its omniscience, it discounts and sometimes wholly discards other ways of seeing and knowing. It sees these ways of understanding, most of which predate science’s arrival on the human scene, as primitive, antiquated, lacking in rigor, or obsolete. Human intelligence is reinforced in its preeminence by the enormous benefits which the technology it has introduced provides. Although these advantages have been offset by exponential levels of population growth and concomitant ecological damage, human intelligence seeks through the transhumanist movement to apply technological solutions to problems created by technology. The faith of the intellect is in itself, and in the technology it can engineer. Yet both human history and fundamental principles of physics show that the intellect’s confidence in itself and its solutions is misplaced. Utopianism is a collective human tendency that has been observed throughout history. Idealistic movements – and we count transhumanism as one of these movements – have been almost uniformly unsuccessful in remedying human ills. Transhumanism may be regarded by historians of the future as another utopian movement, should humanity survive its current struggles.

What the intellect ignores is all the evidence in the world that its solutions to problems, if left unguided by other ways of knowing, actually cause additional problems. Technology appears to offer progress, yet the net amount of human misery and unhappiness are probably the same today as they were 2,000 years ago, if only because there are many more people experiencing adverse conditions. Malthus’s prediction about overpopulation and the penury caused simply by having too many on the planet is already borne out. There is no way of quantifying this observation to prove it, but most people grasp that science cannot make them happier.

The intellect applies itself to solving these other maladies which are byproducts of its previous solutions (such as overpopulation) and creates yet other problems. The best it has accomplished is delay of the day when the problems it has created through its intermediate solutions must be faced. Yet since the effects of all unsolved problems are cumulative, eventually, the problems build and become global in scope and almost inescapable in the sense that their effects can no longer be postponed. The Gaian system becomes overwhelmed. This is the situation in which humanity finds itself as the result of the scientific age.

If this is doubted, consider the arthropods. Arthropods are land-based animals without backbones, and which exhibit exoskeletons and segmented bodies. They have paired legs and include spiders and insects, among other organisms. They are an enormously successful phylum. Insects alone exceed the biomass of humans and greatly exceed mammals in both number and diversity of speciation. Due to their small bodies which radiation poisoning, their burrowing behaviors and their high reproductive rates, they have historically been resistant to human-inspired environmental degradation. Yet even insects are dropping in biomass across many species. Hexapod numbers appear to be falling across the planet. The basis of food chains as well as essential pollinators responsible for fertilizing 75% of human crops, many insects are in decline. In some regions, flying insects have decreased in biomass by three-quarters of their number over less than 30 years. The great bulk of insect species which are being studied have decreased by 45% on average. The food web may crash if these insect numbers continue their decline. Reasons for their decrease may involve deforestation, but are also likely due to the monocultures engineered by humans as part of industrial-scale agriculture. Thus, in order to feed their burgeoning numbers, humans are creating other distortions within the Gaian system which may actually decrease food stocks over the longer term.

Toward Balance

In every mathematical equation, two expressions, one on either side of the equal sign, must balance, or the equation isn’t true. In balanced equations, both sides balance. Mathematical equations are similar to chemical equations which represent material reactions. The number of atoms for each element in the reaction and the total charge is the same for both reactants and products. Charge and mass are balanced on both sides of the reaction. There is conservation of mass and charge.

Apart from chemical reactions, this is also true for positive and negative charges within atoms and molecules. Atoms usually have the same number of electrons as they do protons, resulting in neutral charge, or homeostasis. Atoms link by forming chemical bonds in which electrons are shared, forming molecules. When they engage in chemical reactions, atoms may end up donating or receiving one or more electrons, resulting in positive or negative charge, which form ions. Ions of opposite charge form associations – ionic bonds- because they attract one another, creating molecules of neutral charge which reacquire balance. For example, oppositely charged sodium and chlorine atoms form sodium chloride, a crystal-forming molecule. In a similar way, covalent bonds share electrons in a mutually-stabilizing relationship.

In summary, molecules and atoms of positive charge – representing an insufficient number of electrons – seek out molecules and atoms with an excess of electrons, which are negatively charged. These molecular and atomic configurations seek each other out in order to achieve a balance of charge. Balance is sought and if possible, attained. The same propensity exists on a universal scale. The Second Law holds that the evening out of matter and energy throughout the cosmos is a natural, essential propensity which will eventually result in the even distribution of heat.

Particle theory holds that every particle has its antiparticle. There are electrons and positrons, protons and antiprotons, neutrons and antineutrons. There is matter and antimatter. This symmetry is everywhere in the universe. And it has a further effect: wherever there is symmetry, there is conservation. Wherever there is symmetry in terms of particles, conservation laws hold that a particle and its antiparticle can only be created or annihilated in pairs. These conservation laws – of energy, of charge, of mass, of momentum, of probability itself – are all expressions of balance.

We hold that this same tendency for a return to balance exists on more complex scales. On a biological scale, counter-evolutionary adaptations are a reply to evolutionary changes. Predator-prey ratios also seek balance, as do whole biomes. In human relationships, it is commonly observed that opposites attract. In dyadic relationships, we have observed that minimizers discount the severity of a problem, while maximizers amplify it. We have also noted that systems theory, as applied to family units, holds that a family as a system will seek balance. Relationships are structures which re-express and mimic the balance-seeking tendencies found in atomic charge and chemical reactions, since we hold that they are extensions of it.

Alliances between nations are also a way of re-acquiring balance when a hegemon or an opposing alliance is perceived as too powerful. The tyrannizing effects of empire can also mean periods of relative stability, such as the Pax Romana. While hegemons oppress, they can also stabilize, suppressing conflict between lesser powers. Although the Cold War saw many die through proxy wars, it also marked decades in which total war was avoided between the Great Powers of the time. Interregnums can be times of greater disorder because they lack a dominant yet stabilizing international force.

From atoms to empires, all these arrangements seek complementarity in order to attain and maintain balance. Whether the structure is mathematical, atomic, molecular, electrical, familial or geostrategic, the system seeks balance.

Any self-contained system within the cosmos, of which earth and its near zone is one, seeks stasis. In fact, the concept of Gaia is based in part on the description of such homeostatic mechanisms. Terran life requires an acceptable range in terms of temperature, Ph, atmospheric composition and pressure, gravity, moisture and other factors. Some of these balances are complex and easily upset. Examples here include human and human-made systems, which often require sensitive and difficult to maintain economic, cultural or psychological complementarity. The balance of other systems, such as the charge, spin, and momentum of subatomic particles, are more basic and more easily acquired and maintained.  In fact, some particles themselves are so stable that they will exist indefinitely unless they collide and are annihilated.

The more complex and later-evolved systems, which are human-engineered and artificial systems, are most vulnerable to exogenous shocks which create imbalances. These civilizational and technological change over more frequently and require more frequent resets. They require more energy to maintain. Physical systems and simpler biologically systems are most able to maintain balance and re-achieve it if that balance is upset. The more basic the system, the greater its chances of remaining balanced in the event of a shock. For example, complex, mammalian lifeforms are far outnumbered by simpler organisms with faster reproductive rates. Mutations which lead to the loss of a complex characteristic are more common than those which lead to the gain of a complex characteristic. Thus, although the maximum degree of complexity in certain organisms has increased over time, complexity as a trait and complex organisms as a share of all creatures represents a lessening proportion of all living things.

The vast proportion of life in terms of speciation, sheer numbers and biomass consists of lifeforms which are simple, microscopic organisms whose types have been around much longer on a geological timescale than complex forms like us. Due to sampling bias, it only appears to humans that more complex, larger lifeforms predominate in terms of diversity. Since the selective pressures encountered by complex, multicellular organisms are less due to the lower numbers of these organisms, they tend to increase in complexity through a process called constructive, neutral evolution. Yet this rise in complexity only occurs up to a point. The level of complexity (its common value or mode) has remained constant over the history of life on earth. The idea of orthogenesis – that evolution is progressive in its expression of complexity and intelligence – has been largely discredited.  The longer a system has been in place, the more likely it is to maintain balance. The simpler a system, the less vulnerable to shock and imbalance it is. For this reason, simpler, smaller creatures tended to survive the last mass extinction event which destroyed the dinosaurs. Although ecosystems do tend to evolve in complexity over time due to the profusion of speciation, complex ecologies also have a tendency to crash during extinction events.

We believe that this complexity may work up to a point, but that since the central tendency of the Second Law leans toward arrays which are simple structures rather than complex representations of matter-energy, natural selection does not favor complexity in the long run. Our evidence is that simpler systems are more common, longer lasting, and less vulnerable to exogenous shocks.

Intelligence is the latest evolved and a highly complex system, relative to other, natural systems within the Gaian world. The issue which confronts humanity is whether intelligence is necessarily best able, through the process of natural selection, to enable intelligent organisms to survive. Are intelligent animals, including humans, best adapted to survive ecological changes? Are they fit to survive the onslaughts introduced by intelligence itself? Natural selection may determine the answer. This is the issue regardless of whether that intelligence is biologically or artificially derived. As a relatively recent development, intelligence can be conceived of as an evolutionary experiment. Ultimately, is intelligence an agent of balance or imbalance? Is it an efficient distributor of mass-energy throughout spacetime, or does it ultimately serve as an impediment to this redistributive tendency inherent in the cosmos? The answers to these questions may provide one of the solutions to the riddle of Fermi’s Paradox.

All systems strive for achieving and maintaining balance. The ultimate system of systems, the cosmos itself, seeks to attain materio-energetic balance. This universal tendency is emblematic of the cell which seeks to achieve homeostasis, the molecule which tends toward chemical equilibrium, and the atom which moves to attain equalized charge. The balance of more complex systems such as a lifeform, and even more so its biome and the civilizations which evolved from biology, are more difficult to maintain over longer time spans than these simpler systems. The more complex and artificial the structure, the shorter its lifespan. Their complexity cannot be maintained without a great input of energy. Yet the cosmos and all of its subsystems – from galactic threads and superclusters, to individual galaxies and the black holes conceivably at their centers, to stellar systems and planets, down through biomes, civilizations and their technology, to the artificial systems developed by technology, to individual organisms and their organ systems, to tissues to cells and molecules within the cells, to atoms and particles – all these seek rearrangement into simpler structures because these simpler arrangements require less work, in the sense that physics conceives it, to maintain energetically.

Stated probabilistically, there are a greater number of probable states with low energy/simple atomic and molecular combinations than there are configurations and structures of greater complexity. It takes energy to create and maintain complexity, which is why the most complex evolutionary schemes on earth have collapsed in the past. Extinction events have wiped out ecologies of greater complexity, first affecting larger fauna that are more exotically evolved, collapsing back in favor of simpler, smaller lifeforms.  Whether the system is a civilization, an empire or a dinosaur, the entropic tendency is toward decay. If the transhumanist movement is to succeed in staving off this entropy, its proponents have their work cut out for them.

As complex, evolved, intelligent organisms, humans perceive this universal tendency in physics as the tendency toward chaos, and what thermodynamicists call entropy. Humans perceive decay as death. Yet on a very simple level, all the cosmos seeks by this universal entropic principal is balance; energetic balance. There are great imbalances of energy in the form of unevenly distributed heat entities throughout the universe. Without these aggregations and disparities, matter and life itself would not be possible. Yet we conclude here that these complex natural and artificial forms are temporary in nature. When viewed as processes rather than entities, these complex forms are intermediaries which serve to catalyze balance by facilitating the transport of matter-energy more equably throughout spacetime. Thus, humans, which have regarded themselves as the measure of all things, are essentially intermediate forms.

Stars form, and from planetary accretion discs, planetesimals and eventually, planets coalesce around them. The stellar systems form into great globules called galaxies, and at the galactic hearts, supermassive black holes conceivably serve as powerful engines of creation and destruction. Between these extremes of heat and temperature, of matter and gravitic pressure, are cold expanses of spacetime which are not quite vacuums. An expanding universe seeks to redistribute this clumped heat energy so that everything is uniform and in balance once again, as it was before the explosion which set the phenomenal universe in motion.

Matter as Imbalance

Quantum field theories describe the boundaries between particles and the space immediately surrounding them as indistinct, rather than as hard and sharp. Quantum electrodynamics describes particles as local condensations in fields. The appearance of matter corresponds to those locations in space where the field is extremely strong. A relatively large field energy which assumes very high values within a small space manifests as matter. A bundle of energy corresponding with our idea of a subatomic particle spreads across the local region of spacetime represented by that field, yet where the particle ends and the field begins is not represented by a distinct boundary or membrane.

Matter may be regarded as a disruption in the field. The quantum field exists in a balanced state prior to the introduction of the disturbance represented by the material particle. We should remark that the field exists everywhere throughout spacetime as a continuum in its own right. When the condensation of the field spikes, this manifests as a particle – as matter. Wherever a particle manifests, the continuum of the quantum field has been interrupted by a discontinuity. A disturbance has arisen, represented by the nonconformity of a granulated entity which we identify with the particle aspect of matter.

There is a psychological facet to viewing matter as a field disturbance in an otherwise balanced field. In a very real way, this material disturbance represents ego consciousness arising from an undifferentiated, uroboric field. It may be likened to a simulation, since the condensation in the field can form images and objects when particles aggregate and bind to one another.

The spike in values in the universal field of quantum continuity causes the precipitation of the field energy into material disturbances. This spike coincides with the act of observation of a conscious observer. Observing causes the superposition of all probable outcomes of any act of observation in the potential which exists prior to observing and measurement to collapse into a single act of observation in a single measurement. Probability moves into actuality. The condensation of energy comes from the decision to observe a particular thing behaving in a particular way. What is seen and experienced is what is expected. An observation collapses the wave function of probabilities (of potential) into an actuality.

But matter itself, which we have described as a stable, yet malleable form of energy, is an imbalance introduced into a previously balanced whole and continuous quantum field. It is the act of observing which creates the universe seen by the conscious mind. This manifest simulation, a form of dream on a level more ‘concrete’ than the phantasms of sleep and of hallucination, is itself an indication of imbalance.

Poets from Wordsworth to philosophers such as Schopenhauer and writers like Don Miguel Ruiz, along with peoples like the indigenous of the Kalahari, have all likened the cosmos to a vast dream dreamt by a single mind in which the figures in the dream also dream. In a way, the dream dreams the dreamer. It is a form of auto-narration, or auto-simulation in which the imagery of the cosmos takes on a life of its own and begins to operate without the need for conscious intention.

On the level of psychology, this simulation, this imbalance, may be a necessary, intermediate stage in the evolution of consciousness. Yet eventually, ego consciousness represented by overt and manifest reality must return to the uroboric state of equilibrium. The ego must withdraw its projections – the latent dream content – back into itself. Yet something new will have been added, an expanded awareness. As emergent properties in evolution add something to the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, as Gestalt psychology shows that in the perception of wholes, something different is perceived than would be experienced in the mere sum of the parts, so, too, in this expanded awareness, something qualitatively different is known than existed prior to the ego’s own development in the uroboric state. This emergent awareness is qualitatively different than what was known before the emergence of the ego.

If we move down one level to manifest dream content, we utilize the language of science to describe what is happening. It may appear to us that science describes what occurs on a high level relative to more ancient human systems involving myth, but when it describes physical entities and interactions quite literally, science actually operates on a lower level of awareness than do lexicon which describe the simulation of matter-energy on a symbolic level.

Yet even on the level of manifest content which science describes, the return to balance will be accomplished through the most fundamental of tendencies: the redistribution of matter-energy. This may occur through the heat death of the universe, coupled with an infinite expansion of all objects away from one another past the cosmological horizon, the abyss which no thing can cross. This fate occurs if there is insufficient dark matter to force a recollapse of the cosmos to its primordial state. the heat death scenario will occur in an open or flat universe, and this structure is corroborated by current data. If heat death occurs, redistributive tendencies will push phenomenal reality back to the balanced state which we believe existed prior to the instant of the Big Bang.

Alternately, the balance may be restored through a Big Crunch, if there is sufficient dark matter to force the recollapse of the cosmos into its superdense particle, the cosmic egg of myth. It may be argued that this superdense particle is unstable and therefore unbalanced, which will lead to another Big Bang in an infinite cycle of explosions and collapses, as Hindu cosmology describes. There is good evidence that in the primordial universe, matter was in thermal equilibrium. This is based on the background microwave radiation which serves also as the best evidence confirming the Big Bang theory itself. The early universe was remarkably uniform in terms of its matter distribution. It became more imbalanced as matter began to condense out of the quantum field and to clump. If this is the case, then the cyclical nature of balance/imbalance leads at least to the moment of balance at the instant the universe was born. 

Down to the Human Scale

Whether the universe will reattain balance through cold death or a Big Crunch, this ultimate redistribution and return to balance is far away in time and does not concern humanity today. Understandably, humans are much more preoccupied with problems of instant concern, such as poverty and ecological disruption. Yet even when it is preoccupied with these immediate problems, humanity is still concerned with redistribution and a return to balance. The redistribution of wealth is a response to the imbalances inherent in poverty. The international movement toward green, renewable energy sources is a way to return the earth to a balanced ecological state. Thus, this universal propensity toward balance, a simple tendency, expresses itself through the complex systems of the mind, the body and society itself.

When people look out farther past the survival concerns of their immediate environment today, they may look upon the problems which beset humanity along the farther horizon and see repeating human calamities such as war or famine which may beset them in the future. We can be proactive as a species and seek to avert problems over the longer term. For example, NASA recently test-fired a spacecraft – the Double Asteroid Redirection Test -at an asteroid far out into space in an experiment to see if its engineers could deflect its trajectory, and so practice deflecting a bolide which may impact the planet in the future.

It is understandable why humanity puts at least some of its intellectual capital into averting disasters, such as the DART technology described above, which may afflict the earth. We applaud such efforts. Yet these technologies provide somewhat easy fixes to rare events. Most of the chronic problems afflicting humanity and the planet as a whole have so far defied solution. It is obvious that humanity is not really any closer to coming up with ultimate, once-and-for-all solutions to the more pernicious problems which threaten the survival of individuals and the species than it was at the dawn of its civilizations. Problems such as poverty, hunger and disease are not really caused by or manifested in scarcity, as humans often perceive them to be. Rather, they are problems of allocation, of imbalance.

Humans see symptom and seek to treat the manifestation. They see effect and try to alleviate the effect. They do not perceive ultimate etiology or cause, and so the problems remain, and solutions to them multiply into additional problems which surface later. Some interventions effect temporary solutions. The ‘winning’ of a war by an underdog may rectify old imbalances which once stood in favor of the losing side, yet the historical recognition of pyrrhic victory is a human admission that war solves nothing. War simply rearranges old imbalances – often expressed in the form of perceived injustices or disparities – without rectifying them. The same can be said of the results of violent political revolutions, drastic attempts to redeploy wealth to remedy poverty, and the treatment of diseases which lead to overpopulation. These simply cast new imbalances. The result is a world of unintended consequences, of unintended side effects.

The intellect sees the world as a complex of causes and effects. Human sciences – and in this category we include the hard, STEM sciences along with the ‘softer’ social sciences – have rejected and crowded out other ways of understanding cause. They see causation as mechanistic formulation. They often have statistical formulas at the bases of their conclusions about reality, even when the subject of study is not, with current computational capacities, necessarily amenable to statistical treatment.

The hard sciences concretely perceive the manifest content of a physical reality. Death is viewed as biological cessation. Poverty is lack.  Illness is diagnosed as some form of mechanical, genetic, or biochemical dysfunction. War is viewed as conflict, and peace is therefore defined as the absence of conflict. These formulations are surface descriptions which misdiagnose the problems because they misapprehend cause. Or rather, they apply to the patent content of a physical description of reality only. As we have outlined above, we attribute ultimate cause as being psychological in nature. The scientific method misattributes mediating cause to ultimate cause and prescribes solutions which treat symptoms rather than root causes.

In the West, the rise of allopathic medicine has made strides in the treatment of diseases, but its remedies often have serious side effects which make some individuals question the efficacy of some of its procedures and medicinal cures. At least some over-the-counter medicines and even some prescription medications, while not representative of Western medicine as a whole, tend to treat symptoms rather than ultimate causes. On a broader level, the symptoms of certain societal problems ‘treated’ by technology may temporarily resolve, but they often re-emerge later on, either in the same form or in an altered expression. This is due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in concert with the conservation laws. These place ultimate limits on certain operations of any system, particularly in its production of energy and the byproducts leftover from any reaction involving energy. Although humanity is gaining in technological prowess, science has not arrived at a solution which averts the laws of thermodynamics and the conservation laws.

The Big Bang

We begin by noting some key facts about what the Big Bang theory is not. The Big Bang model does not attempt to describe or explain exactly what the cosmos is inflating. This theory does not try to answer what the universe is expanding into. It does not attempt to theorize about what gave rise to the Big Bang itself. There are speculative models which address these issues, but they are not falsifiable.

According to currently accepted cosmogeny, the phenomenal universe began when a superdense ‘particle’ exploded into uncountable shards of matter and clumps of energy, distributed unevenly throughout a lumpy substrate called spacetime which had not existed the instant before the explosion. As this spacetime came into being to ‘contain’ the universe and by which we may measure the rate of its expansion, clumps of matter-energy condensed from exotic particles. The shape and configuration of spacetime is contingent on the dispersal of matter-energy. Space appeared simultaneously at all points, and so the universe did not arise from any particular point in space. The Big Bang did not occur at any one location, since space has been expanding to accommodate the separation of matter which existed at all points.  This matter-energy began to separate as it cooled from the moment of its hot birth. Four universal interactions (formerly called forces) which had once been unitary – electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak interactions – eventually separated. Prior to the moment the universe was born, these forces had been ‘welded’ to spacetime and matter-energy, which themselves were unified, in an unbroken whole. The early universe thus had no internal structure, and matter and energy were distributed uniformly throughout.

On the mythological level, we have referred to this lack of differentiation as chaos. In psychological terms, we have called it uroboric energy. We have postulated that it is the act of observation which channels, composes, and structures these raw, random substrates into the phenomenal universe experienced today. This act is similar to the act of observation as defined in quantum mechanics in that both involve moving undetermined states to determined ones and both ‘kinds’ of observation involve an element of ambiguity which prevents complete knowledge of any system or object which is observed. Yet quantum observations are defined by physics as conscious measurements, which are inherently quantifiable. At psycho-mythological levels, observations are neither quantified nor quantifiable, and they are often unconscious.

According to current cosmology in physics, the early universe contained uneven clumps, some regions concentrated with matter and energy that further condensed into bodies. Gravity, which had separated out from the other three universal interactions (the strong, the weak and electromagnetism), reinforced this clumping process. As material bodies formed, they were able to pull more material into them, thus gaining in mass. At first, these entities were inanimate. Some spacetime condensed into packets, into filaments of heat which gave off light and other forms of radiation. Matter and energy began to further aggregate, to radiate temperature and impose internal pressure.

We have stated that matter is a manifestation of imbalance, and imbalance means asymmetry. There exists an asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, for example. In the early universe, there were more electrons than positrons, and when these two antiparticles collided, the resulting matter-antimatter impacts resulted in the annihilation of more positrons than electrons. This has left us with a surplus of matter (electrons) in the universe.

On a psycho-mythological level, this physical development paralleled the arising of ego consciousness, which separated out from the raw uroboric substrate of chaotic, undifferentiated energy. As they were observed by the nascent ego consciousness, specific, yet still inchoate and undetermined structures were formed.

In the astrophysical model, atoms aggregated to form vast clouds of dust, which swirled into planetesimals and planets, into stars and other bodies. These sought to consume more matter and energy which swirled within their orbits, and so to grow larger. Their trend was to increase disparities of all kinds; of size and mass, gravity and pressure, of temperature and energy. Eventually, some grew so massive that they threatened to swallow everything else. Only the expanding tendency of the universe, brought into motion through the initial explosion, counteracted this movement to consume and to aggregate matter-energy, and so to sustain imbalance.

On the level of myth and psychology, the uroboric energy threatened to overwhelm and consume the nascent, yet still fragile, developing ego consciousness which was carved out from the vast store of undifferentiated potential. This ego existed collectively, but also expressed itself through the development of every individual human ego, which initially sees itself as unified with the whole, and which the ‘devouring’ nature of the uroboric substrate seeks to consume. Individuation requires that the individual ego hold off this tendency of the undifferentiated unconscious to reclaim the human ego. Many archetypal dreams of the individual, and archetypal myths in culture, describe this tension between conscious and unconscious forces.

In the cosmologies of physics, balanced against this unevenness in the distribution of matter-energy was a universal propensity which sought and still seeks to disperse matter and energy equally throughout spacetime. This predilection toward symmetry is so strong that it may be the fundamental force driving the universe.

On the level of the psyche, this universal tendency is inherent in the ultimate demise of every individual consciousness back into the unconscious whole. In mysticism, it is described as the final stage where the individual soul is reabsorbed back into the Godhood. It is known as union. In Jungian psychology, it is known as conjunction.

In pure scientific cosmology, the thermodynamic tendency toward balance and even distribution of heat was balanced by the continued formation and breakup of materio-energetic bodies. Atoms were created, and they condensed into molecules, driven to form by seeking out the balance of charge. Eventually, through mechanistic processes propelled by randomness and probability, inanimate matter crossed a ‘line’ in which molecular plasms contained within lipid membranes became self-reproducing. Through further mechanistic processes driven by random mutation, genetic drift and gene flow, now selectively reinforced by environmental pressures, animate matter came into being. Eventually, unicellular organisms which produced their own energy, called autotrophs, evolved into complex, heterotrophic organisms which derived their energy by consuming other organisms within their environment.

Organisms developed perception through the process of natural selection, as perceptual abilities provided an evolutionary advantage to survival. Perceptions became more acute, as keener perception of the environment outside the organism’s membrane led to greater odds of survival. More sensitive homeostatic mechanisms led to greater perceptual awareness of the internal processes taking place within the organism. This heightened sense of what was happening outside the lifeform as well as inside itself led to an inside-outside distinction, which became heightened during the evolutionary process. The organism’s sense of self intensified, as did its sense of what was not itself.

This greater perceptual acuity led to a more acute sense of self, and to a reinforcement of the sense of boundary which separated the organism from its environment.  These heightened perceptions led to a greater awareness of the environment, but also to a more acute sense of the self which perceived, and the boundary which separated the organism from its environment. This keener sense of a separate self evolved eventually into an intelligence, by which the organism could create an internal model, or inward projection, of the environment of which it was a part.

There was the environment, and there was the organism’s inward perception of its environment. The organism began to conflate its actual environment with its internal model. With the development of language in particular, this confusion between inner model, which could never completely and accurately represent the external world, became an inherent feature of intellect. Language, first evolve to describe reality, became reality. Yet because of the inherent uncertainty innate to every observation, and due to the psychological defense mechanisms described above (rationalization, displacement, sublimination, fantasy, repression, denial, escapism, reaction formation, compensation and projection), intelligence was often insufficiently aware of the differences and gaps between reality and its internal model of reality. Of utmost and fundamental importance, the intellect was insufficiently unaware of the inside-outside distinction which the human ego had made, and thus that its model of the world would always remain inherently subjective. It confused the subjective inner world of modeled reality with the objective, outer world beyond its own membrane.

On a psychological level, this development of an increasingly sharpened internal model of its environment corresponded with the further development of ego consciousness. The ego’s sense of itself as a separate entity became more acute. As it was able to further differentiate itself from its environment, the dangers of being overwhelmed by and reabsorbed into unconscious forces receded. On a collective level, the development of civilization and technology allowed the organism’s fear of its natural environment and of competing species to recede, while the net fear present in the closed system of psychic energy in every human system remained constant. The human ego was now somewhat autonomous from uroboric energy.

With the advent of scientific understanding, it began to decouple from unconscious forces and from the ancient, knowledge which represented human attempts at understanding these forces. These older knowledge bases included magic, religion, and myth. Yet what the ego suppressed, displaced and projected through its defense mechanisms was the unconscious energy itself, which had to be accounted for since net energy in any closed system like the individual human psyche, is always conserved, at least as humans understand it. However, it was the drawing of the boundary, the inside-outside distinction, which is another way of expressing a human belief in limits, that required humans to adopt into their new, scientific beliefs the conservation laws themselves. In other words, the ancient belief in limits is expressed scientifically as the conservation laws.

As the human intellect, in parallel with human ego consciousness, developed still further, the environment of which it was aware expanded beyond its immediate biome to include the planet, and eventually the stellar group called Sol, then the galaxy, and eventually to include the boundaries of the cosmos. It must be asked whether intelligence expanded in parallel with the expansion of the universe itself, since we hold that the primordial beginnings of consciousness were present at the moment of universal inception, and thus coextensive with expanding spacetime itself. The intellect began to expand as spacetime extended.

At the same time, the intellect’s inner working model of its environment also expanded to include these larger and larger systems of which it was becoming aware. Most Western religious, mythological and even protoscientific and scientific models of the cosmos described this cosmos as much smaller than it actually is now measured as being. Even within the past 200 years, the cosmos was thought to be much younger than it now is.  As consciousness expands, so do our measures of the cosmos. On a psychological level, this may represent an intuitive, human notion that awareness itself is much more ancient and expansive than individual humans and even humans in the collective are consciously aware.

Yet since the spacetime dimension is enormous, the farther away in space and in time that this inner working model attempts to describe the spacetime dimension, the rougher and less detailed this model becomes. It becomes less accurate and less explanatory, and more descriptive and conjectural. Intellectual awareness, aided by its imaginal capacity, has expanded enormously in a short period of time relative to the lifespan of the cosmos as a whole. This awareness and the rate of its rise parallels the instigating expansion of the universe from a superdense particle into a vast dimension, as measured relative to any organism that evolves inside of it. Since awareness evolved in conjunction with and as a characteristic of the primal explosive force, this rapid expansion of awareness along with the extension of spacetime should come as no surprise. The early universe expanded and evolved extremely rapidly, as does the evolution of intelligence today.

Since it could not be directly physically aware of the extent of its solar system, galaxy or the universe, the intellect’s working model of these larger environments had to be an inward projection of these larger, mostly inanimate ecologies, rather than something experienced directly. Its working model of the farther reaches, which could not be experienced through sensate experience, necessarily relied on the accuracy of the earthbound measuring devices and the probes which it dispatched to explore these extraplanetary regions.  The mental model is constantly revised based upon new telescopes, probes, experimental evidence, observations, hypotheses and theories. Astronomers make no apology for their revisions. They rely upon the scientific method, which is provisional in nature, constantly revising its conclusions based upon new information, which is acquired through the increased accuracy of its astronomical measures. Inferences regarding these far-flung environments are generated by the brain. New information from these measurements is used to correct the brain’s working model of the cosmos. The predictive model changes based upon new measurements received from the astrophysical environment, or the data is disregarded or made to fit the model, which is composed of hypotheses, theories and laws. From a scientific standpoint, the intellect interprets data from the environment so that it is consistent with its inner model until a tipping point is reached and the model must either be radically altered or entirely abandoned in favor of a revolutionary new model more consistent with observational data. This process has occurred repeatedly throughout the history of science, from the overthrow of the geocentric and heliocentric models in favor of the Copernican model, to the revision of Newtonian mechanics as objects approach the speed of light in favor of relativity theory.

Just as the quantum world is governed by an essential unknowability, so, too, is the large-scale universe is partly unknowable, based upon its ancient depths. The older theories of how it was structured, of what it was composed, how it came into being, and how it behaves have been largely discredited. The provisional nature of all scientific extrapolation recognizes this hypothetically and theoretically, but on the purely human level, current hypotheses, theories and laws are often regarded as unchanging fact defended by an establishment. In other words, the inner working model invented by the brain to correspond to its outer environment is regarded as fact. It is conflated with the environment itself. The problem with any language – and scientific concepts are indeed lexicon in their own right – is that it become confused with the actual experience, and often is substituted for it. This is especially true of facts assumed to be in evidence, yet which are not validly recorded or reliably repeated due to the inaccuracy of measuring devices, of measurements themselves, and due to the inherent ambiguity of the dimensions observed – such as at the scales of quantum boundaries and the vast scales of the cosmos as a whole.

Inside-Outside Distinction

To humans which inhabits it, the universe is, essentially, a series or set of membranes which, upon closer examination by the intellect and its sensory apparatuses, break down into yet further membranous subsets or boundaries. The human body has boundaries. Its organs have boundaries. The ells which comprise these organs have membranes. Molecules which make up the cells have boundaries. The molecules are composed of atoms which have electron orbits. These shells, or valences, may not be hard and fast like the bounded surface of a rocky planet, but they define the atom as a discrete entity.

The number and complexity of these boundaries and their surface areas, as demonstrated by fractal theory, is in reality infinite, at least in many cases. For instance, a coastline is composed of repeating, self-same iterations of the same fractal pattern – the same shape and outline – on a small scale as it is on a large scale, making the coastal length of any landform essentially impossible to measure with complete accuracy. This fractal repeatability makes the universe itself infinite, and the idea of boundary, which represents limit, somewhat illusory. Where is the boundary of a rocky planet? At its surface? At its stratosphere? Its magnetosphere? What is the true area of its rocky surface, and with more sensitive instruments, wouldn’t we be able to measure the microscopic bumps of every atom of its topography? What about making even finer measures of surface area which include every particle of each atom? As with a coast, even boundaries cannot be measured with precision since thy are infinite in number and extent.

Bounded surfaces are rather illusory, and any entity which seems defined by one type of boundary can be readily divided by and defined by other boundaries. Humans define each individual person by the boundary associated with the skin. Yet each individual throws off electrical coronal discharges, a Kirlian aura, which surrounds the skin in roughly the way an electromagnetic field can be associated with living tissue. in a sense we serve as larger ecologies for the billions of cells which we play host to. We play host to bacteria and viruses which are their own ecologies within each one of us. We serve as encasements for our brains, which do all the thinking for us. An infant does not sense itself as separate from its larger environment, and certainly not from its mother. Is it not possible to identify oneself today by genotype, since theoretically every human can be cloned by their DNA? What about cyberidentity, which is becoming as important as personal identity? Each of us possesses unique human identifiers, the biomarkers, by which we can also be defined. Our personalities are each unique, based upon an unrepeating set of experiences and memories of these experiences peculiar to each individual on the planet. As members of close-knit social groups, do wed not also define ourselves by our families, our clans or tribes, our nationhood?

Yet despite the many other ways by which we could define our selves, the fundamental unit by which each of us demarcate ‘me’ from ‘not me’ remains the skin. As the individual human ego develops and sharpens, once it develops sufficient perceptual ability to sense boundary, the intelligent organism cannot abandon this dichotomous perception of me/not me or the organism itself would have no identity. It would have no reason for being.

The inside-outside dichotomy made possible by the perception of boundary is the first distinction made by a conscious self, and it remains the fundamental one. There is you, and there is everything else. Because ‘you’ subsist in a substrate of space and time, of materio-energetic causation in which all is unevenly distributed, there are other bodies out there, be they stars or birds, mountains or humans. Their discrete outlines, their endings in space and time, mean that they are inherently limited. Being limited, they are closed and subject to the Second Principle of Thermodynamic Regulation, which continues to operate unceasingly in the background, if not in the forefront of the organism’s perception and consciousness.

A closer examination of these boundaries based upon molecular chemistry and quantum mechanics show that these membranes are, in some senses at least, illusory. Quantum physics would conclude that the hard-and-fast, sharp boundaries between particles and the objects which they compose are much fuzzier than they appear to be. The theory of nonlocal causation also shows discrete objects to be embedded in a unified field, since what happens to one particle which is split from its ‘sister’ in experiments happens to the other particle as well, regardless of distance and without regard to the speed of light, which eliminates electromagnetic signaling as a possible cause.

In a psychological and a mythological sense, boundaries represent abstractions, which are ideas. Ideas are derived from the archetypes, which are the ancestors, so to speak, of ideas. Ideations are abstractions which represent primal images. They are ‘force carriers’ of information, and upon these ideas and images are encoded the libidinal energies of the archetypes. Expressed in discrete quantities, these ideas are distillations of archetypal forces and interactions between various raw psychological energies.

The inchoate ego was closer to the unconscious uroboric energy, and in a sense was captive of it. Many myths which describe the devouring mother encapsulate this threat to the developing ego consciousness. As it evolved further in its particularity, the nascent ego developed an intellect, and the ego became the site of ideas. This intelligence, a byproduct of the ego’s own evolution, believed that it was the sponsor and originator of its ideas. Yet all concepts are themselves fallen from archetypal contents. They are inherited. As the ego developed, it anthropomorphized archetypal material in order to experience and metabolize those collective psychological contents individually, and so to understand them on an individual level. Through myth and dreams, the individual ego and its intellect were able to experience this chaotic, undifferentiated energy without being overwhelmed by it.

The conscious ego experienced direct contact with the raw, uroboric energy as threatening. These ‘confrontations’ with archetypal material became confined to mystical, mythological, artistic and dream experiences, and they were often pathologized as mental illness. so that mysticism and creativity in particular were sometimes confused with mental illness. With the advent of civilization, naked archetypal contents were now driven largely into the unconscious, both collectively and on an individual level. They had to be disguised, since the conscious ego would not accept their meaning directly. They often became heavily symbolized, and their meaning was obscure. The ego defense mechanisms were often employed to further decrease the anxiety associated with these unrefined images.

The further refinement allowed by conscious separation of egoic from unconscious forces corresponded to the evolvement of intellectual powers. Science developed as a discipline and began to assign discrete values to the entities and interactions within its sphere of observation, further relegating unconscious forces to the margins of conscious understanding.

The idea of separate entities, made possible by the concept of a boundary, is a useful one for the intellect to entertain. It helps ego consciousness to operate within its environment, and so the idea of boundary remains practical. For without an individual organism with which to associate itself, an ego cannot define itself as itself, and so it cannot exist. The organism, and the intellect which perceives itself as housed within the organism, defines itself by these boundaries. The concept of a boundered consciousness is particularly useful, for it locates consciousness within the brain with which it seems associated. There is brain. There is body. There is self and other. All these are defined by and dependent upon the boundary. The scientifically-predisposed Western intellect believes that body came first, followed by brain and then mind. Even the ego can see that the mind is a purely subjective constellation of abstractions created by its own notions of itself. However, it cannot see that the brain and body are similarly subjective creations of an ego in its early stages of discriminatory evolution between thisness and thatness, between eachness and suchness, which are based upon boundary and the development of perception. All of these definitions and identifications, the very sense of an ego’s selfhood, all depend upon the perception of boundary.  Although useful, this concept of boundary is also problematic. The idea of boundary breaks down when applied to unconscious, archetypal forces, since these collective impulses, images and ideas cannot be as easily located within any discrete membrane. In addition, the boundary definition necessarily implies limits, and limits mean scarcity.

Complex, self-reproducing matter housed within a membrane requires energy to sustain itself.  Organisms need energy in order to sustain their forms or else they are subject to immediate decay and death, the final problems.  Being born, organisms are subject to death; this again is a manifestation of the Second Law and its redistributive tendency. What the ego fails to acknowledge is that this entropic tendency is only possible because of boundaries, which are subject to conservation due to the closed nature of these systems. Open systems are limitless and not subject to decay.

In addition, the ego fails to acknowledge that its definition of a membrane is conceptual rather than actual. It is a useful, working psychological model which assists in the intake and metabolism of archetypal contents which otherwise would be overwhelming without the boundary through which they are filtered. Yet the membrane itself is simply part of the ego’s working conceptual model of reality, rather than reality itself. It is a way to order and define experience, and not experience itself. Thus, to some extent at least, the boundary lies in the realm of language. The boundary’s function is lexical in the sense that it depends upon definitions, and any lexicon is simply an aggregation of terms which define one another. The boundary stands for reality, yet it is not unfiltered reality itself. The boundary may be the cell or the body, the tree or the forest, the brain or the mind. These are all terms, which arise in language. As with all languages, boundary is open to a vast range of interpretations, based upon the subjective nature of each individual’s prior experience and perceptual filters. Yet what all experiencers have in common is that, as boundered entities, they decay and die. This decay and eventual termination are the fundamental, final problems that confront all organisms. There has yet to arise an evolutionary or technological mechanism which circumvents these inexorable tendencies. And there are other implications for defining oneself by boundary.

Needing something from outside the membrane to sustain themselves, organisms entertain desire. This fundamental desire, then, or appetite, drives the organism to consume. This heterotrophic instinct is a manifestation of the perception of limits. Being bound by a membrane, the organism confronts its own finite nature in spacetime. It must consume in order to continue in space and to endure in time. Thus, desire is appetite, and appetite is instinct. Instinct is the result of the perception of a limited, materio-energetic system which defines itself as the organism. Desire has no pejorative definition here. It is not a moral failing. It has no religious connotations. Desire is simply indirect evidence of the perception of limits, of the organism’s perception and consciousness of its own limitations. Desire would not exist, if it were not for the perception of the existence of discrete membranes around which conscious entities define themselves as organisms within spacetime.

In humans, this instinct, or drive to consume emanates from basic brain mechanisms. This drive is translated into desire once it is filtered through midbrain processes which often experience these instinctual drives in terms of their own lexicon: emotions. When mediated through the brain’s cortical laminae, the perception of membranes becomes the belief in boundaries. The intellect is then placed in service of these beliefs, emotions, desires and drives. Intelligence devises strategies to satiate the appetites and desires. The most highly-evolved and aware part of the brain is placed in service of its most primitive processes. This is the ultimate consequence of the perception and belief in boundary.

The Development of Ego Consciousness

Evolution works on individual and collective scales. Scope refers to the extent over which selective forces operate on the higher, macroevolutionary level to shape the larger taxonomies, creating biodiversity. Agency and hierarchy refer to the capacity of natural selection to act on more than one ‘unit’ (such as an organism, a group or a species) at the same time. A group of organisms of the same species can be more or less adapted to survive than another group within that species. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould postulated that, acting through qualities such as scope and hierarchy, macroevolutionary mechanisms also drive evolution.

Although not universally accepted by evolutionary biologists, the idea that the mechanisms of evolution may act across units greater than genes has gained credence since the modern synthesis of Mendelian genetics and traditional Darwinism was achieved in the 20th century. Microevolution describes the genetic mechanisms for evolution as it is traditionally understood. In microevolution, the gene is the unit of selection. In macroevolution, the unit of selection may be the individual organism, its group, the species, or even larger categories of organisms. Species themselves may act like organisms that reproduce and eventually become extinct. Species may thus be selected for or against, depending on their adaptability. As anecdotal evidence for these larger units across which macroevolution operates, the fossil record does show differential survival rates for different species.

We conclude that the development of ego consciousness tracks evolution, paralleling it in a gross sense. The uroboric substrate is raw, undifferentiated, unconscious energy. It lacks form. It moves from the general to the specific. It is structured and organized into highly specific forms. It moves from the impersonal archetypes to the highly individualized forms of the human personality in which those archetypes may be expressed. Individual organisms act as microcosms which reflect broader evolutionary trends. Embryonic development parallels this through its progression from general to highly individualized forms unique to the species, and within that species, it develops from each embryo in even greater detail unique to the individual.

On a cognitive level, it is believed that infants experience themselves as connected to their environments without boundary, as the centers of all things. This is consistent with a cosmological view of a centerless universe, of every point of the cosmos as being a center from which the universe expands. As the individual ego evolves, it perceives itself as separating from the unified field of awareness. It begins to develop its own sense of self. Its perception of boundary heightens.

On a collective level, this same tendency is perhaps best studied by anthropology and collective, depth psychology. This has been described as the era when the ancestral, human psyche had not yet fully separated from the primal, uroboric state. Early myths described this psychic dawn as a time of gods and heroes, of superhuman deeds performed by characters which fought off monsters. Knowledge was ‘stolen’ from the gods and given to humanity, and so the center moved from deities to humans. With its emergence from the oceanic proto-consciousness, the human ego which created and which was in turn conditioned by civilization began to lose touch with its instincts. Indeed, thinker, scientist and author, Rupert Sheldrake, has postulated that clairvoyance, still evident in some ‘higher’ mammals, is an adaptive feature that arose to provide mammals with a survival advantage, and that it has already atrophied in humans surrounded by their artificial environments.

The conscious ego began to repress awareness of these ancestral beginnings, forcing the dreamtime from human consciousness in the ‘civilized’ world. Yet simply because these memories were repressed does not mean they were extinguished. This split of the mind into conscious and unconscious aspects, where the unconscious has been repressed, denied and then projected through the defense mechanisms, has consequences, since so much of the mind is spent divided against itself. Its libidinal energies are expended in an effort to (1) separate primal energies from the domains of consciousness and civilization, (2) subjugate these now unconscious energies to conscious forces, and (3) hide the existence of this primal, collective self from conscious awareness.

It is probable, but unprovable, that the major share of all energy is now suppressed as unconscious libido (a term used in a nonsexual context to refer to raw, unconscious energies). It is estimated that 99% of all species are extinct and that the vast share of all organisms to have ever lived are dead. Yet the awareness, the lifeforce of those which have passed on, did not evaporate. We conclude that the conservation laws apply to lifeforms more generally. These lifeforms were once energy aggregations and, more particularly, concentrations of awareness. We believe that the law of conservation of energy applies more broadly to awareness.

Although we cannot prove that the dimension which gave rise to use has an ultimate purpose, it does seem to us that this dimension adheres to orderly processes. Almost everyone would agree with that conclusion. If this universe is opens itself to rational understanding, it is probably because the dimension is rational itself. If the dimension we find ourselves in behaves according to rational principles, it most probably had rational properties contained within its ‘seed,’ the superdense particle from which the cosmos initially expanded. And that which is rational is conscious.

The counterargument made in materialist philosophy is that life arose from random processes, governed by probabilities. We do not disagree with this argument, since it comports with quantum observations. We agree that an observer influences any system she observes by attempting to measure it. We also conclude that by imposing this measure, the observer constrains the system observed into certain probabilistic parameters – or boundaries – which spike from all the potential superpositions which she could possibly observe into the actual observation which she does observe and measure. This transforms the potential into the actual. On a psychological level, it transforms undifferentiated, uroboric flux and chaos into the actual, conscious world of discrete objects and energies. The bottom line: an observer must have been present at the outset of the cosmos to bring the phenomenal universe into being.

Since we hold that an observer was present at the beginning of all interactions – at the onset of universal inception – the energetic presence of lifeforms which have passed on must be represented and modeled in our equations. The evolution of ego consciousness simply encapsulates this universal observer into separately delineated boundaries. Yet these boundaries cannot ultimately define or contain it. Boundaries are simply convenient definitions, abstractions by which to organize the cosmos and more particularly, awareness. The total amount of awareness which is now present was also present at the initial boundary condition of the universe. Being without form, this lifeforce had to ‘go’ somewhere. If so, then the energy represented by these lifeforms must be accounted for in some other time and some other place, and since total awareness is conserved, that place and time are here and now. We hold that it was conserved, both in the collective human psyche and in the individual human personality.

As within, so without. The energy of awareness, represented by the initial observer present at the instant of the birth of the universe, may be conscious, or it may be unconscious. Yet it cannot be destroyed any more than energy itself can be destroyed. If matter and energy are aspects of the same force, and information is stored within matter-energy structures, then matter-energy-data are all conserved. They cannot be destroyed. The highly particularized forms which conscious energy may assume in human personality may revert to less differentiated unconscious potential, yet it remains in these archetypal wells.

This is why we believe that a transhumanist philosophy will fail. It ignores the vast sea of potential energy and guidance available to humans just below the level of the collective human consciousness. This data must be assigned a value, or the human equation will not balance. The external world is merely a reflection of the inner world, and the two must balance. Unconscious wisdom and energy are available to apply to human problems. Yet consciousness increasingly fears unconscious forces and regards these ‘unknowns’ as alien, as adversarial. This is because it does not fully understand these forces and cannot control these drives through acts of will or intellectual understanding. The laws and forces which seem to bind humanity can also liberate it. In dream and in myth, monstrous archetypes often shift into liberating beings once humans cease trying to tame and control them, but rather surrender to them and accept them as native shadow energies within themselves. The fearsome aspect of the demon is transformed into an angelic force in this way. This unity of opposites takes into account this unconscious energy, whereas a transhumanist philosophy does not. The unconscious will treat consciousness in the way that the conscious mind regards the unconscious.

And yet, on both an individual level within each human personality and collectively within civilization, consciousness spends greater and greater proportions of its own energy trying to repress unconscious forces from awareness. It is this repressed energy which is available to liberate it, and which in turn must be liberated from the boundered consciousness of a purely individual awareness as manifested in the human ego. In myth, the ‘rescuing’ of the archetypal animas represents the liberation of its energy, which is now available to help guide the conscious animus. The Gnostic myth describes light as being imprisoned within matter.

Ego stakes out its share of conscious energy by carving it out from unconscious, uroboric forces. The ego defense mechanisms deployed to repress unconscious forces in favor of civilizing forces have created enormous imbalances, as represented by civilization and its egocentric orientation. The unconscious energy of the anima must be liberated to provide power and guidance, to reacquire balance. Jung stated that the goal of human life is completeness, and not perfection. Yet this sense of wholeness aimed for by evolution and its unity of opposites such as animas and anima are a threat to the ego, which fears being devoured by unconscious chaos. In art, in science, in technology, in the utopian movements such as transhumanism, the ego seeks perfection, an unattainable goal. Even evolution strives merely for adequacy, and not perfection. No lifeform is perfect. A gazelle evolves to be just slightly faster than a cheetah, which coevolves to be just fast enough to catch some gazelle. Neither species evolves to be twice as fast as the other. And so the caribou on St. Matthews Island, introduced by a flawed human intelligence, ate up all of their primary food source, the lichen, much faster than the lichen had evolved to grow.

Neither the form nor the performance of any organism ever reaches perfection. Like science, evolution is always provisional. It is in the process of becoming. It is only as a whole that an ecology achieves balance, and thus perfection. It is like this with human awareness. It seeks memory of its own wholeness, and only in this completeness is it perfect.

We do not advocate the elimination of civilization, individuality or ego consciousness. Individuality must assert itself or the unified field of awareness which realizes itself through each life will never culminate in full memory of itself. Thus, though imbalanced, consciousness must express the hero. This hero, a manifestation of ego consciousness, must assume a specific form and move through the 12-stage narrative of the world myth described by mythologist, Joseph Campbell. We simply observe that the enormous imbalances created by technocratic civilization threaten to swamp civilization itself.  There must be a return to the middle, a unity of opposites which is achieved in the resurrection, the 11th stage of the world myth.

An infant begins life totally identified with the uroboros. As it progresses through developmental stages, it becomes relatively autonomous and manifests a specific personality. It begins to forget this unity. This forgetfulness is expressed in the ancient myth of the Eternal Return. According to this myth, humans are born and die, only to be born once again. But before we are reincorporated, we drink from the waters of forgetfulness and return in ignorant forgetting of the suffering of human life and revolve back to our human forms. Cognitive psychology and theories of human development have their correlates in the myths of antiquity. We hold that the perceived loss of unity in the development of infants is a necessary stage in ego development. Yet it is only a stage, and evolution demands that stages must be left behind if the individual is to grow.

Unity of Opposites

Identifying with one side in the innumerable pairs of opposites created by the ego or the group with which that ego identifies, the mind must project the other side in that pair into an adversarial other. This adversary is in reality buried deep within the individual or its group as an unconscious constellation. In other words, the polar opposite is within the mind. This adversary cannot be located within the mind in a physical sense, since the mind is an abstract concept. If the concept of boundary is illusory, then the mind is in reality everywhere. There is nowhere awareness is not. Yet the boundary allows the mind to project threatening or unwanted contents outside the perceived boundary. That boundary may be an individual’s skin in the case of a single human being. It may be the family or a clan or tribe. It may be a political party, a religion or religious denomination. it may be a nation or an alliance of nations. However it is defined, the boundary allows the ego to project unwanted psychological content of an individual or collective nature.

The individual ego and its group are heavily invested in the reality of the boundary. The inside-outside distinction therefore seems very real. It is an I-thou distinction, an us versus them dichotomy.  In order to avoid acknowledging the fact that the polar opposite is located within, the individual and its group project it outside the boundary as an opposing force.

Yet awareness is, in reality, a totality in which the ego participates. The mind, which may be defined as the container for awareness, includes all opposites. Consciousness is ‘raised’ when the projecting ego subsumes its perceived opposite. Consciousness may always be enlarged since consciousness, as represented by the ego, is finite by nature. We have stated that awareness can neither be created nor destroyed, since it is already infinite. Consciousness is a subset of total awareness. Conscious and unconscious energies together make up awareness. Therefore, consciousness can always be expanded by claiming greater shares of nonconscious energy from the uroboric substrate and transforming it into conscious awareness. The site of this transformation is the ego. The process of transformation is the act of observing, whereby raw potential, undifferentiated awareness, is made into actuality. The explanation of this process is evolution, insofar as it can be explained. All of the sciences, and all forms of human knowing, tend toward parallel descriptions of this progression, yet on different levels. Whether considered on the level of the supersystem of the cosmos, a particular planet or planetary consciousness, an ecology, civilization or culture, or an individual, evolution follows a similar arc. This arc unifies parts into wholes. Each part, as a holon or a monad, is a microcosm of that whole.

Based on the conservation laws, which we hold apply to consciousness as well as to physical processes, any projected, opposing force represents a repressed psychic energy. It must be accounted for in the balanced reaction that is the whole of awareness. Problems are not solved merely though technology because science neglects to account for this unconscious energy as a variable in its equations. In order to compensate for the repression of the opposite, the ego projects it out onto others and onto the ‘world’. Yet this maintains an unbalanced state within each human personality and group. In its projections, the ego identifies with me and us, and throws off its unwanted psychic content – the opposite in the pair of opposites – onto you and onto them, onto a physical, religious, political, tribal, national or economic other. This is the essence of participation mystique.

The ego associates itself with groups, institutions and collectives which are mixtures of expressed conscious and repressed unconscious material. Every human psyche and the collectives in which that psyche participates contain all that they judge to be good, and all which they hold to be bad. Since the boundary outside of which this unconscious content is projected is illusory, there is nothing lower that any human is capable of that the highest person is also not capable of. And the lowest of the low is also susceptible to the highest of human deeds and traits. In other words, humans participate as a collective in the acts of one. The act of one is the act of all. Undesirable content – whether that material is expressed as impulse, emotion, thought or action – is projected because it is considered so threatening to the individual or its group. It is denied, repressed, and then projected. The boundary makes this possible.

Since organisms are as much processes as they are entities, people are an admixture of altruistic tendencies as well as perfidious acts. Thus, humans and humanity are capable of noble sacrifice and unselfish love. However, every act in the human realm is also tainted with desires driven by fear and pleasure, and by the blinding pursuit of power. These drives represent highly unevolved states. Each individual must find and make their place in the world, and these drives for acquisitiveness, power and goal attainment assist the human ego in its development. Civilization could not advance without them. Yet they also cause much destruction. Rather than take responsibility for their destructiveness, we project these drives onto other individuals and groups.

The anxiety produced by the guilt associated with our baser impulses and deeds is too great to allow any individual or its culture to function, so it focuses its unacceptable ‘transgressions’ onto certain individuals and outgroups.

These acquisitive drives are necessary for the development of ego consciousness, so that it may separate itself from the uroboric substrate and transform unconsciousness into consciousness. Yet as imbalance is a necessary but intermediate stage in the evolution of all things, so, too, the imbalances created by the conscious ego are also intermediate stages in the evolution of awareness. The ego must relinquish those imbalances in the later stages of every human life. At the end of every life, everything which the ego seems to have gained in the course of its existence must be surrendered back to the undifferentiated, oceanic being. Yet, something new has been added, an indefinable something described as an emergent property of consciousness which represents more than the sum total of its parts, and as something qualitatively different than that sum would suggest. We conclude that this emergent property is a greater awareness.

On a grosser level, the evolution of the universe itself condenses from an undifferentiated matter-energy state into highly specific forms. Yet the cosmos, too, must relinquish those forms in the later stages of its development in favor of an even distribution.

In Gnostic and early Kabbalistic traditions, the phenomenon of the pleroma is described. Defined as fullness, the pleroma represents an undivided nature. Within the pleroma itself, all the pairs of opposites are unified and cancel each other out in a kind of emptiness. In the human mind, these pairs of opposites stand as opposing dualities which must be reconciled; not by identifying with one opposite or the other, but by embracing that disowned opposite which is projected outward onto a perceived adversary. In a symbolic sense, the journey of the hero in the world myth represents the reconciliation of these opposites. In psychology, it is the withdrawal of projections back into the self. This unity of opposites is possible because the opposites merely seem opposed, but are in reality constellated, polar aspects of the same force within each individual and within the cosmos as a whole.

The mind is split, divided from the beginning. This division is expressed in terms of symmetries perceived as objective realities in the external world, but which in fact exist as a priori structures within the mind itself. These polarities are projected out and perceived as particles and their antiparticles, with opposing charges. These dualities are often cast as good versus evil, as darkness against light. There is above and below. We have right-handedness and left-handedness. Most fundamentally, there is within and without, the prime distinction the human ego makes between itself and everything which is not itself made possible by the delineation of the boundary. Almost every trend of which humans are cognizant has its opposing trend, which according to Daoist belief shows itself as breaking into existence at the very culmination of its opposite.

When a particle meets its antiparticle, the result is annihilation. The pleroma, and many spiritual and metaphysical traditions, are sometimes associated with emptiness. Yet this should not be confused with nihilism.  The joining of a pair of archetypal opposites does not yield the annihilation of consciousness. It is perhaps more appropriate to define the unity of these psychic poles as balance between opposing forces, and not a true emptiness. Even in the apophatic spiritual traditions which describe reality as a great emptiness, emptiness should not be equated with a nihilistic nothingness. Rather, the void from which the universe sprung may be described as a void simply because it is so transcendent that it cannot be compared with the somethingness of the manifest universe. Emptiness simply means, according to some Eastern philosophies, that a thing is defined as and interpreted according to the perspective of its observer – subjectively.

In physics, there is no such thing as empty space, as a true vacuum. Rather, empty space is filled with virtual particles which pop into and out of existence in unbelievably short instants of time. Physical reality is contingent, not unconditioned or absolute. This is the quality of the emptiness which can be attributed to the consolidation of opposites. In any particle collision, annihilation of the particles does not result in their destruction, but rather in their transformation. Conservation of matter means that matter cannot be destroyed, but that it can only change aspects and be expressed in different form, perhaps as energy. Particle interactions which ‘obliterate’ the particles merely allow the particles to express themselves as different particles. Particles are messengers, and as messengers, they are carriers of information. In physics, when a particle and its antiparticle meet, the seeming obliteration creates enormous energies. The matter contained in the particles, rather than being annihilated, merely changes form. Nothing can be destroyed. Since matter and energy structures are both containers for information, these interactions express the possibility that awareness, too, as a form of information, also cannot be destroyed. For this reason, we conclude that it was present at the beginnings of our universe. Like matter in particle collisions, this awareness can only be transformed from unconscious into conscious form. And yet, after the full evolution of ego consciousness, something new has been added, an emergent awareness.

Evolution moves in the direction of balance. Inevitably, it reaches toward a greater unity which is attained when the ego rises above and beyond the opposites, refusing to identify with either side. In their unification at the site of the ego, an emergent awareness arises which is greater than the sum of these two opposites when the ego identifies with either of them as conscious forces. For example, adding the shadow energies of ‘evil’ as humans have judged this force to the force for ‘good’ creates not a mutually-repudiating neutrality, but a transcendent awareness. These opposing forces had their beginnings in the grim struggle for survival, as perceived by and in a bifurcated mind which grasps all experience through the basic filter of approach and avoidance, of fear and pleasure. With greater and greater extensions of conscious awareness, opposites are synthesized, subsumed, and experienced simultaneously. In the process, they are transcended.

Early in the stage of individual evolution of awareness of every human ego from the original, uroboric unity, archetypal forms are unconsciously realized and expressed through highly particularized expressions of personality. During this phase of individuation, the ego’s significance is emphasized and grows as it carves out more psychic energy for itself from the undifferentiated, unconscious substrate. Awareness associated with the ego relies upon splits of subject from object, I from not I. When we refer to the separation of subject from object here, we mean the distinction between the external aspects of any event from the ego which projects (which observes) it. This separates the literal from the figurative meaning of any experience.

After it has reached its apogee and has become highly particularized through this perceptual cleaving of subject from object, the task is to guide the individual psyche back into its transpersonal state, which is expressed as a completely distributed awareness, as a totality. The dark force [the shadow] is no longer experienced as the independent, ontological entity defined in the West, depending on one’s theistic orientation, as the devil or as human evil. This shadow is ‘dark’ because, like dark matter and dark energy, it is not directly detectible by consciousness and is therefore not fully understood. It can only be perceived indirectly and is not capable of being fully understood in an intellectual sense since the shadow arose prior to the advent of human intelligence. It is prelogical. Since these unconscious, archetypal shadow energies cannot be fully quantified, any measure of them necessarily remains incomplete.

Yet through the unity of opposites (which is a psychological interaction), this shadow force is reconciled with the conscious ego. The psyche is integrated into the unity of awareness. In order to attain this level of awareness, the material repressed by individual ego consciousness – fear, aggression, the pleasure principle and the unbridled use of sheer power – must all be tempered and redirected, often through the process of sublimation, whereby the energy which powers the primal approach goals of instinctual drives is reharnessed in service of a greater unity.

In the human personality, these libidinal energies are trapped in immature psychological structures. The ego incarnates into individual forms as human beings, other organisms and entities. At this stage, the ego is an autarky in its own right. Yet this autonomy brought about by the growing of a membrane around the physical entity requires that a price be paid. The autonomous organism now subjects itself to decay and eventual demise. The fear of death is the primary fear of all sentient beings.

In the 12-stage world myth, the hero encounters death in the supreme ordeal, and again in the final battle. In drama, this theophanic experience leads to the defeat of human will, the death of ego consciousness, and the manifestation of total awareness in its place. Yet what the ego perceives as a death struggle is in reality a radical, internal rearrangement of psychological energies. If human will and ego oppose this interaction with death (with the shadow force), they perceive the shadow energies as evil or demonic forces intent upon inflicting destruction and death. If they intentionally embrace this ‘death’ process, they constellate and embrace life in all its intensity. The shadow can thus either destroy the human personality, or it can be integrated into it, expanding it in the process.

The ultimate goal of the evolution of consciousness is realized when the ego begins to withdraw its projections from the external environment. It comes to realize the relative nature of all human experience. Empathy is often strongly felt at this stage, where the perspective of the other, formerly regarded as an enemy, is taken. Self-centeredness is relinquished and the individual personality of the human becomes an integrated part of a totality. The ego realizes its temporary and contingent nature. In exchange for its ‘death,’ it gains an identity with the whole. The individual nature of subjective experience is surpassed, and the individual ego identifies with an all-pervading consciousness. The fear of death is abandoned because the boundary is no longer seen as real. The boundary must still be used, but the distinction between outer reality and the inner model of that reality created by the individual mind is finally seen for what it is: illusory. There is now a distance between language and experience, as the immature ego no longer collapses and confuses the two to create its own meaning, and its own suffering. Approach and avoidance goals of the basic brain mechanisms are left behind as the ego de-identifies with itself as an organism. I-thou distinctions are abrogated. The membrane through which the organism formerly defined itself and its own individuality is deemphasized. The ego does not necessarily dissolve into the totality of awareness as much as it identifies with this totality and, like a shadow dissolved by light, is no longer aware of itself as it contemplates the whole. This is the goal of the hero in her 12-stage journey, which is the mythological equivalent to evolution.

In this journey, the hero does not venture alone. The ego needs the guidance and direction of a greater awareness to guide it. In turn, the ego serves as the site for the transpersonal to move from undifferentiated potential into actuality. Raw, uroboric energy is transformed into transpersonal awareness. This is the ego’s true purpose: to serve as a situs of transformation. Hindu scripture refers to a personal and an impersonal aspect to the Self. When these two aspects are combined, they bring the cosmos into consciousness.

In Jungian terms, when the greater awareness contacts and binds with the lesser awareness of ego identity, it is known as centroversion. Centroversion refers to the emergent property of a whole fostering unification among its fragmented segments in order to synergistically create through these differences within itself a greater unity, a unity beyond opposites. The totality of awareness needs the sites of individual egos in order to actualize itself. The ego serves, then, as a kind of structure, a container for awareness, rather than as the content of awareness itself, which is beyond any definition. Rather than being the ultimate goal of evolution, as it regards itself as, the ego represents a structure through which awareness moves from the potential of uroboric unconsciousness into a fuller awareness. The ego is in the nature of a crucible through which consciousness is refined and transformed. Indeed, a crucible is necessary in order to transform ordinary matter – the prima materia – into gold. Jung believed this alchemical process to be a metaphor for the transformation of self into Self. This transfiguration is the true purpose of all evolution on every level, from the quantum to the cosmic. This process of the mating of the whole Self with the individual self creates illimitable energies because the totality of awareness, being an open system, is not subject to the Second Law, to entropic decay, or to death.

We have consistently described closed systems and the conservation laws to which they are subject. In this sense, we have regarded awareness as conserved. Yet we have also characterized awareness as infinite, and infinite systems are by their very nature open, and not subject to conservation. Reality is both what it is (the somethingness of the ego) and what it is not (the emptiness of the transpersonal). The unity of opposites refers to the reconciliation of any two seemingly irreconcilable opposites into a transcendent force greater than the sum of both opposites combined. Instead of the either/or, black and white lexicon in which the ego is conversant, it is a both/and synthesis. In this second sense of an open system, death is not the cessation consciousness, but rather its transmutation into something greater.

This psychic transformation cannot be accomplished through science alone. It cannot be found in traditional religious or ethical practices, since those rote forms can prepare one for the experience of and lead the sojourner up to the threshold of transformation but cannot substitute for the transformative experience itself. Neither religious nor scientific practices, being abstractions and languages, can substitute for the journey itself, which is a voyage of experience. Purely human methods in science and religion simply relegate a deeper knowledge to the service of civilization. They use ethics, religion, science and psychology for the agenda of social control. The unity of the opposites, and therefore of awareness, is to be found rather in mystical experience, as expressed in mythological truths. These experiences and truths lie closer to the heart of a transcend awareness.

First, the ego must separate itself from unconscious, archetypal origins. Yet later on, after it has been fully individuated, the ego of every human being must, in a way, return to these origins. It will not return to this unified field of awareness from its human journey the same as when it started. Although the hero of the world myth returns in the 12th stage to her ordinary world, which is where she begins the adventure in the 1st stage, she is not the same. In emergent evolution, something new has been added which cannot be accounted for logically or through quantifiable methods. Although the journey is in the form of a circle in that it ends where it begins, the inward journey along the lines of the mandala means that the hero may look the same outwardly when she finishes as when she started, she is radically altered in her capacity for awareness.  In Jungian metaphor, an alchemical purification has occurred.

For humans, awareness of the shadow is the key, not its absence. Through avoidance goals, Freud’s id seeks to eliminate fear from its environment. The superego seeks to repress and project this shadow outward in order to manage anxiety and maintain balance within the personality.

A primary function of the largest portion of the brain with which the superego is associated, the cortex, is inhibition. It seeks to control base impulses through executive functioning, planning, the foreseeability of consequences, and the delay of gratification. Therefore, a major goal of the more highly evolved brain is repression. The superego seeks to harness and perhaps to subvert the natural tendencies of more basic brain processes associated with more primitive parts of the psyche. In seeking control, the cortical brain may be more the great tyrant than the great liberator of humanity.  

These intrapsychic processes do not realize in their ignorance that the net amount of fear is always conserved because fear emanates from the mind, and not from an environment external to the organism’s skin. The shadow is simply an unconscious force which must be acknowledged and harnessed. It is not evil, and it does not come as the purveyor of annihilation or of human misery. The shadow force must be accounted for in all human interactions and equations. The human enemy is not evil, but ignorance. And this ignorance emanates from the human mind, not from outside it. Death is transformation, not end. Darkness is only darkness when it remains unknown. And it remains unknown only so long as it is repressed, denied and projected. One its energies are embraced, awareness expands to include the shadow force. This unknown unknown becomes part of a renewed and evolved human awareness. This shadow force transcends human notions of good and evil.

The ego may beg to differ, equating a Last Judgment with reward for the earthly chaste, and punishment for the worldly wicked. Yet the ego is not capable of judging itself accurately. This is the final implication of the uncertainty principle. There may be reincarnation. There may be a transmigration of souls, a cycle of birth and death. We cannot tell from here. If there is, then we surmise that an individual is ‘assessed’ for return to this world based not on the criteria of their deeds, but by their level of awareness. And we believe that they assess themselves until, emptied of subjective content which the ego relinquishes by choice, there is nothing left to assess. Paradoxically, one the ego empties itself of subjective content and becomes nothing, it has simultaneously withdrawn all projections into itself and attains all there is. It identifies with the all. This may be the enlightenment to which some Eastern traditions refer. For there is no more return to this world once all boundaries have been erased. Without boundary, there is no world to return to. Belief in all boundaries is gone, and with the surrender of this belief, there comes the knowing that all is deathless. Emerging from the raw totality of the uroboric chaos completely unaware, one returns to this transpersonal state, but with full awareness. Unconscious chaos has been transformed into conscious knowing. What once dreamed is now fully woken.

Collectively, human understanding evolves. The philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, referred to morning knowledge and evening knowledge. Morning knowledge is awareness of the transcendent. Evening knowledge is awareness of science and all things human. In its present state, civilization devotes vast shares of knowhow to technology. This falls under the rubric of evening knowledge and ego consciousness. At the same time, nonscientific understanding is a lesser proportion of all human knowledge than it was in the past. Transcendent concerns are obscured in favor of human intellect, and the placing of all trust in that intellect relegates morning knowledge to the margins of human understanding. It is an essential tenant of Daoism that once a trend reaches its culmination, it gives rise to its opposite. And so, the ‘light’ of the human-centered world – human faith in secular ways of knowing – will reach its apogee and crest toward its opposite.  We believe humanity is at such a turning point now.

Limit as the Fundamental Problem

The fundamental deficiency of limit is re-expressed in all organisms as the impulse for continuance. Upon this urge to continue, all other instincts and desires are based. In humans, the instinct to continue represents the expression of limit in the basic and midbrain brain complexes. This instinct is complimented by the basic fear, experienced in and mediated by the midbrain processes. This is the fear of death. From this fear, all others are derived. In the more complex processes of the cortical brain, it may be expressed as a desire for immortality, the belief in a God or gods, and in an afterlife.

In the supreme ordeal, one of the stages in the world myth, the hero confronts their greatest fear. Often this fear is baldly portrayed as a brush with death itself, but just as often death is embodied in another form. This supreme ordeal represents a taste of what the hero will encounter in the final battle, when they fight the nemesis, who embodies the forces of the unconscious. In the final battle, all seems lost, just as it does when humans confront their own mortality. Yet in a figurative and sometimes literal transformation called the resurrection, the energy yielded from the confrontation between conscious and unconscious forces leads to an unexpected rebirth. In this final battle with the unconscious, the unconscious shadow is reconciled with the conscious ego. In physics, when a particle meets its antiparticle, an annihilation occurs which generates tremendous energies in the interaction. In the final battle of myth, the annihilation of the old self makes way for a new self. An elixir – some special gift, often in the form of an expanded awareness – is attained by the hero for themselves, and in some stories even for all of humanity.

The world myth is not a Christian motif, and it is not confined to Western cultures. Striking parallels are encountered between myths across cultures and human eras. It persists from preliterate societies to modern day movies. It provides anecdotal evidence of a collective experience, underlain by a collective unconscious. In psychology, the ego (represented by the hero) has a role in this transformation. It must withdraw its projections from the world. The process requires the conscious decision of the ego so that the prima materia of unconsciousness can be transmuted from potential to the actuality of refined consciousness. The interaction between these two aspects results in the expansion of awareness in the cosmos.

As an individual entity, the ego has little awareness of these larger interactions at work in evolution. Due to its self-centric orientation, it is most often uninterested in the expansion of a universal awareness. It is concerned rather in the satisfaction of desires, and in righting the disequilibrium it experiences as anxiety when the satiation of impulses is threatened or frustrated.

Together, impulse and emotion combine to create desire. The fundamental desire – to continue – is re-expressed in and assumes highly specific forms which seem unrelated to continuance of the boundary which defines the organism’s perpetuity. The individual organism, as a discrete materio-energetic entity, must consume other matter-energy in order to subsist in spacetime. It must reproduce. And with the foresight developed by some organisms to seek out shelter and to store carbohydrates for future consumption, it sometimes hoards. These other desires may be experienced in humans as a strong sexual impulse, gluttony or avarice. They have at root, the impulse to continue. This is its necessity, which has been so conditioned and reinforced over millennia that it has assumed the shape of instinct, of drive. Yet the desire for perpetuity can take more abstract forms as well. Ambition, reputation, wealth and fame are also expressions of the desire for continuance, as experienced by the more evolved parts of the brain. In service of this impulse or survival instinct, all other drives operate, just as all fears are re-expressions and re-manifestations of the fear of death.

The ego is the abstract association which the organism makes with its individuality. The ego is the inner model the organism has of itself. It is idea of itself. Once formed, it seeks, above all, perpetuity. As it develops from infancy, this sense of self sharpens. And as the brain evolves, the drive for perpetuation is projected by some into a future, immortal state. This idea of an afterlife developed in very early humans. The ego often projects the process of individuation onto this afterlife state. In the great suffering described the myth of hell common to many cultures, this fundamental desire to continue is manifest. Eternal torment is preferrable to some than not to exist at all.

A fundamental objective of many transhumanists is the immortality of human consciousness. While the materialist philosophy which gave rise to science may discount the idea of an afterlife as an archaic holdover from humanity’s religious age, the investment in mortality remains a prime goal of science. This objective is an approach goal, as translated into the binary language of the baser brain centers.

The goal of immortality which some transhumanists envision may be accomplished through mind uploading, a future technology where human consciousness is uploaded to a server, to AI, or to an application of quantum or biological computing. Mind uploading is simply this yearning for an afterlife, for individual immortality, which was formerly associated with religious beliefs.

Pulling against the drive for perpetuation is the Second Law, the tendency of everything to unravel. This is the inexorable pull of what the organism sees as death. We work ceaselessly against the inevitable thermodynamic tendency toward decay by sustaining biological and artificial order. This requires energy, the consumption of which is one of the fundamental problems afflicting our planet. There are, therefore, energy shortages, ecological damage caused by energy production and consumption, and energy wars. This tension between human needs and objectives (which require energy) and the tendency toward thermodynamic equilibrium (which distributes energy) represents its own balance. Yet this balance has been destroyed by the uncontrolled growth of civilization, which threaten survival itself.

Limit as Continuance. Continuance as Imbalance.

Individual entities within spacetime seek continuance. They require energy due to an inherent deficiency in their structures. That deficiency is limit, based upon boundary. An energy deficit is simply a manifestation of a limited spacetime structure, defined by boundary conditions.

As matter, organisms are local disturbances in quantum fields. They are condensations – imbalances – with enormously high field values confined to very small regions of spacetime. Organisms seek to maintain this imbalance, the imbalance needed for their own continuance. Yet creatures which have evolved without civilization and technology can still be maintained and balanced overall within the naturally-arising ecology that gave rise to them. Their energy requirements can be satisfied. The system sees to it. Equilibrium is maintained in the totality of the biome, even if disequilibria exist within any part of the system at any given time. There can be spot imbalances, yet overall equilibrium has been maintained for billions of years without exhausting the energy of the ecology, the planet as a whole, or the organisms operating within it.

In the ordinary nexus between prey and predator, natural selection behaves in a dynamic symmetry where both species benefit when the weakest prey are culled by predators. An over-efficient predator with a dramatically improving kill ratio would eventually deplete its favored prey species and, unless it found new species to exploit, would itself go hungry and starve. Thus, the overkill hypothesis holds that on islands, newly introduced predators of high efficiency which have not coevolved with prey species endemic to the island can lead to the rapid extinctions of these prey species. This is what occurred on Maria Island east of Tasmania, where Tasmanian devils were introduced in order to save the species. These predators decimated and locally extinguished a species of penguin. Larger, continentally-based biomes have the advantage of widely-dispersed herbivores and predators upon which selective forces can operate to maintain predator-prey balances. Prey species may be able to adapt. Here, the overkill hypothesis is more controversial as a cause of the megafaunal extinctions which occurred around the end of the last glacial retreat. Still, it is undisputed that most of these extinct megafauna species died off around times and in regions where humans first appeared.

The correlates of the most recent extinction event, the Anthropocene, are clearer and harder to ignore. Humans have developed technology, resulting in massive overkill not only of megafaunal species, but increasingly of scores of smaller species. Thus, while naturally-occurring Gaian biomes can and do maintain balance despite spot imbalances created by organisms themselves (too many lynx may hunt too few snowshoe hares and lead to local extirpation of the lynx), humans have recently created significant imbalances which have accrued faster than natural systems can recover.

There is, therefore, a fundamental tension between the objectives of the Gaian system, which seek balance, and the purely human system and its technological civilization. The means for achieving balance by the Gain system includes, but are not limited to, the evolvement of individual organisms as vessels of transport for matter-energy transfer to more equable states. This allows any given ecology to continue to utilize the individual entities operating within its environment as conduits for the transportation of matter-energy toward the objective of total symmetry, a form of wholeness. For instance, a forest may serve to stabilize soil within the region where it is planted, while also producing oxygen for the benefit of aerobic organisms moving throughout the atmosphere and which benefit the planet as a whole. That such a balance has been maintained is obvious, since life has continued since its inception on earth for billions of years despite catastrophic events. In fact, lifeforms have, until the dawn of civilization, served to stabilize the Gaian biome. The synthesis of oxygen for the benefit of aerobic lifeforms was made possible by other lifeforms, resulting in a vast proliferation of species, great complexity, and the development of intelligent species.

However, when the individual entities within the Gaian system, in this case humans, evolved intelligence, they became proficient at the accumulation of imbalance, which represents the parochial interests of humanity and its civilization. The first human-created imbalances occurred at any measurable scale when agrarian societies began to store agricultural products. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic pastoralists also created imbalances, such as with slash-and-burn agricultural techniques, but the effects of these were negligible on the planet as a whole since these small human bands operated at subsistence levels. As noted, however, there are overkill hypotheses which argue that even the introduction of intelligent hunter-gatherers crashed some populations of megafaunal prey to the point of collapse.

In any case, intelligence had become an agent of imbalance, whereas it had originally evolved to more efficiently distribute matter and energy. Therefore, a fundamental mismatch occurred between the objectives of the Gaian system and the objectives of technologically-driven civilization. The Gaian system sought balance. The human system sought the prioritization of human needs and desires, which were expressed in various imbalances. Human good prevailed over the needs of the Gaian system as a whole, even if this human good resulted in imbalance. In the West, Judeo-Christian values used scriptural passages to rationalize human dominion over the planet as a whole. Yet now industrial and post-industrial technologies have proliferated to almost all cultures.

The movement toward secular humanism has not averted this trend. In fact, through its focus on ‘man as the measure of all things’, the focus of Western civilization since the Renaissance and on scientific development since the Enlightenment has accelerated the trend of technology’s preeminence. This is why we believe the transhumanist movement, with its faith in technology to avert the catastrophes created by technology, is misguided in its focus. It seeks, among other goals, the prolongation of human life. Since population pressures threaten to overwhelm the planet itself, prolonging human lifespans will only further tax the Gaian system.

Before industrialization, it was evident that humans feared the wilderness and tried to tame it in an effort to avoid being absorbed back into it. This was representative, we believe, of the ego’s fear of reabsorption back into the uroboric chaos of undifferentiated unconsciousness. In flight from wilderness, humanity tamed it, and then proceeded to extirpate it from the face of the planet. Through absorption of the natural world by this technological world of their own engineering, humans fleetingly warded off the death they believe waited for them in the uroboric chaos. Yet now, it is the civilization and technology created by this same fearful, ego consciousness which threatens to absorb the entire wilderness of the planet. In an effort to beat back an untamed wilderness before it reabsorbed them into itself, humanity created a devouring golem – an all-consuming technology – through which they may be absorbed and arrive at the very same fate they feared in the first place.

The universe seeks its own death through a distributed equilibrium. Organisms seek their own perpetuation through a structured disequilibrium. These tendencies pull toward opposing polarities. Yet the primordial conflict between heat death and the survival of more primitive creatures did not upset the interim balance, established when life evolved and stabilized Terran homeostatic mechanisms. This allowed life to survive and even flourish on earth. It was not until human intelligence rapidly evolved that it introduced imbalances which threatened to overwhelm the planet itself.

The Belief in Magic

With the first complex structures of civilization came formalized logic. The first logical systems – belief systems which involved the manipulation of the world through magic – correctly recognized that by consuming that which was perceived to be like the partaker, the one who consumed became like that of which he partook.

We do not endorse magical belief systems. We note the parallels between relationships described by magic and principles described by science. For example, on a magical level, the eater eats the power contained in other beings, in other forces and entities, and becomes the same as that which is consumed. The consumer metabolizes power and becomes powerful. The partaker eats energy and becomes energetic. In primitive belief systems, this practice is related to the law of similarity, which holds that like produces like, and that an effect resembles its cause. On a biological level, heterotrophic organisms like humans must consume the carbon and energy stores of other beings in order to replace depleted energy.

The law of contagion holds that once two individuals or objects have contact, they are linked. This a principle of sympathetic magic. On the level of physics, the magical principle of contagion parallels the scientific principle of quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement describes the continued interrelationship between separated daughter particles. What happens to one particle influences what occurs instantaneously to the other, without regard to time (with no electromagnetic signaling) in what is referred to as nonlocal causation.

These principles are also to be found in religious belief systems which espouse the use of saintly relics and reliquaries and the establishment of sacred places of worship, rite and pilgrimage. In these cases, objects and places are considered holy, often imbued with supernatural powers to heal. In clairvoyance and psychometry, objects and individuals are thought to be linked. Parapsychologists study this same link between individuals. Legitimate scientists study this psychic link between closely connected individuals and even between humans and their pets. Again, while we do not endorse sympathetic magic, we note the deep persistence in the human psyche of these beliefs in the correspondence between organisms, objects and places. Its basic ideas can be found throughout all cultures since prehistoric times, and they continue to be influential today.

In the systems of physics developed tens of centuries after the development of magic, physicists observe that as matter consumes energy, it temporarily gains in energy. Agricultural and industrial processes have harnessed this energy. Humans eat produce grown in fields or livestock raised in pens, and gain in the energy stored as carbohydrates in food. Civilizations burn hydrocarbons consisting of partially decomposed organic matter that once lived and transfer the heat energy to human bodies and to necessities and luxuries manufactured for the benefit of humans. On a metabolic level, the content of what is consumed is reasoned to become part of the consumer so that the consumer exhibits the same molecular and cellular traits inherent in the substance consumed. If protein is eaten, muscle is built. If carbohydrates are consumed, they are metabolized into energy. Although these chains of reasoning are scientific and medicinal in nature, the basic premises of magical belief systems – that like produces like and that the consumption of a substance transfers the structure and power of that substance to the one who consumes it – is much the same as it is in scientific systems of belief.

The logic is the same as when a shaman seeks to acquire an enemy’s power through a power object such as a mask or when, through the consumption of an animal perceived to possess certain attributes, it is believed that those attributes are transferred to the consumer. To this day, this a foundational principle of ‘primitive’ magical as well as to some ‘advanced’ medicinal systems in highly technological societies. It has led to the near extinction of certain megafaunal species.

We discuss these magical beliefs to show how little humanity’s approach to problem-solving has really changed over thousands of years. It remains somewhat primitive in some respects, and the transhumanist worldview, which seeks to apply technological solutions to age-old problems, may not represent a qualitative leap in problem-solving ability.

Carbon-based life as a whole on Gaia may itself be at risk through thermal dysregulation. Runaway feedback loops on nearby planets such as Venus should serve as examples of what can happen to earth. Over the short and intermediate timeframes relevant to human lives and their civilizations, if such technological processes continue unchecked, the balance necessary for life as humanity knows it may be irrevocably destroyed.

The Limits of Humanism

Humans believe in imbalance. They have invested in it. Technology is built upon the assumption that imbalance is necessary, in the form of consumption. Humans see this consumption as required for the sustenance and enjoyment of human life. Technologically-based civilization consumes an increasing share of the biological and energetic products of the planet.

Humans must consume matter-energy in order for their forms to be sustained. Whether this fuel is in the form of food or fire, hydrocarbons or the light let off by the furnaces of stars, they must consume it, directly or indirectly, in order to sustain the imbalance that is their global civilization. When human numbers were relatively low compared to other lifeforms, and when the level of technological development was also low, the Terran system could absorb the spot imbalances accrued by preindustrial cultures. In post-industrial civilization, industrialism has not been shed. It has been added to; built upon. Increasing numbers of humans still need manufactured goods. Only now, they ‘need’ increasing flows of data as well. An information environment has been built on top of the industrial one. The cyber-ecology built atop the industrial economy must be fed enormous energies which can no longer be sustainably mined, processed and disposed of. The need to consume, the desire to be fed, is founded upon ancient beliefs in magic, which have simply been re-expressed in first religious and then scientific beliefs.

The alternative is to come to view human life as part of the Gaian world, and to develop sustainability within it. This will require the rethinking and remaking of civilization, as well as the adoption of a worldview in which humans are not the center. The increasing share of the biome which humans occupy and consume must decrease. Human populations and their consumption patterns will need to decline by choice, or they will be culled of necessity, by agents beyond the human will. This painful lesson may be meted out by the Paradox of Fermi. Yet perhaps, there will be no one around to learn it.

Inexorable Drift

Organisms, matter and energy represent somethingness, while other regions of spacetime which surrounds humans seem to manifest nothingness. Somethingness requires nothingness in order for somethingness to be something. These ’empty’ regions represent the nonbeing necessary to define being. They define the nothingness which, by contrast, makes somethingness possible. Yet the something/nothing dichotomy is simply another pair of opposites defined by the mind. Empty space is not nearly empty. In nature, there are no such things as vacuums. Rather, nothingness is a concept of the human mind. It is an abstraction put forth as a contrast by which to define its perceived opposite: somethingness.

In order to sustain civilization, its somethingness must continue to consume energy and to excrete the fuel’s byproduct. The cosmos has a different affinity. It tends to revert to a changeless state in order to regain its balance. Everything around us should alert us to this very basic drift toward decay. It is the fact of existence. Entropy is inevitable. Why? Because ‘nothing’ is stable, while ‘something’ is unstable.

Changelessness is the only stable condition. This stability will be attained through the heat death of the universe, or through its compression back into a uniform singularity. These are the only possible outcomes of evolution. Either end state results in balance. All probabilities winnow down to changelessness. The changeless is the only condition which is balanced, and therefore the only end state which is inevitable. The arrow of time moves inexorably toward this outcome.

One may ask whether these alternative outcomes, which will take place far in the future, are practical for humanity today, especially given all of its current problems which call for immediate solutions. We answer that humanity’s problems today are related to this inexorable outcome, or rather to the tendency toward decay which will lead to this outcome far in the future. In other words, decay is happening now.

Humans resist this tendency toward decay through the performance of work and the maintenance of form, which requires work in the sense physics defines it. Yet because of its increasing complexity, civilization requires greater shares of energy to build and to maintain its infrastructure. It requires more work to maintain. This has become unsustainable. Instead of working against the tendency toward entropic decay, we hold that humanity could find ways to harness that very entropy, and to work with it.

Dynamism is unstable. Or rather, change is the process by which the something of the cosmos reacquires its balance.  The universe will unwind to a steady state. Every attempt intelligence makes to sustain itself and its technological extensions simply delays this inexorable decay. The problem is one of imbalance introduced into the changeless state. The problem is not the ultimate inability to perpetuate the something of the physical universe, which is merely a manifestation of imbalance. The ‘battle’ between something and nothing which expresses itself in the drive against extinction is a false dichotomy. Like all dualities, it is resolved through paradox, which is the resolution of two seemingly irreconcilable opposites to reveal a truth and a reality greater than the sum of either opposite. This is the conclusion which can drawn from emergent evolution, and of the journey of the human ego through the perceived abnegation of death to attain heightened consciousness. Only this awareness is stable, the cosmos seeks return to this balance of formless awareness.

Somethingness, standing by itself, is unstable, and into this state of imbalance, form arises. Form, standing by itself, is unstable. The apophatic spiritual traditions grasp this truth. They see its eventual decay due to its imbalanced nature. Yet somethingness is not annihilated in its devolution to nothingness. Somethingness, in combination with nothingness, leads to balance. As matter and antimatter unify to produce untold energies, so the awareness which arises from the combination of unconsciousness (the apophatic spiritual tradition, equated with nothingness or emptiness) and consciousness (the cataphatic tradition, equated with somethingness or fullness) yields an infinite awareness which cannot be measured. Indeed, as one approaches the singularity of the Big Bang, the values in the equations become infinite. This is thought of in physics as being the result of something wrong with the theoretical approach. Yet we interpret it to be an indication that awareness, as the unity of the opposites of consciousness/unconsciousness and of somethingness/nothingness, is indeed infinite.

The evolution of form seems the natural progress of evolution. Yet evolution is truly only the evolvement of awareness, which in the end is seen to have nothing to do with the forms with which it is now associated. The cosmos evolves only to devolve back into an undifferentiated state. In this undifferentiated state alone is balance found. Yet ‘undifferentiated’ here does not mean chaotic. It means ‘undivided’. The uroboros may have been chaotic prior to the formation of ego consciousness, yet when the ego willingly cedes its identity back to an undivided state, it will become aware of an ordered, if formless, reality. The awareness acquired during the human stage of evolution is not destroyed as humans perceive it to be from this side of the life/death boundary. Rather, materio-energetic form is surrendered as no longer being necessary for holding and containing consciousness. Change exists to move toward the changeless. The urge, the motion of all dynamism is to cease urges, to spend all motion, to let dynamism die to itself. For this dynamism is a product and property of the human ego.

The Gaian world is dying, attempting to throw humans off its surface. Imbalances are growing. They arise from a shattered unity which continues to fracture despite humanity’s best efforts to reunify the whole.

Disparity of Quantity

Humans see scarcity as the fundamental problem. Housed in limited membranes, there is limit, and with limit comes scarcity. True shortages are almost always dislocations of energy and materials rather than their ultimate scarcity. Humans are surrounded by a universe of immeasurable quantities of matter and energy. Therefore, much of what humans regard as necessary or valuable is not truly in short supply. Scarcity represents spot shortage, rather than a deficit in ultimate supply. It should be evident that earth is surrounded by a universe which contains ample resources of energy and materials. The problems are more often ones of extraction and distribution. These disparities in quantity are imbalances, and not ultimate deficits.

If the universe was balanced perfectly in its matter-energy-space-time (METS) continuum, energy would be evenly distributed throughout the cosmos in what is referred to as the heat death of the universe, or, if there is sufficient dark matter in spacetime, energy would be evenly concentrated in a particle so dense it is referred to as a singularity in which no definable boundary could survive. These alternative end states – heat death due to infinite expansion or heat immeasurability due to infinite collapse – are also opposites and represent the final pair of such polarities which the physical dimension can express. What they have in common is that they represent the end states of materio-energetic structures.

As a kind of death, humans fear these end states and go to great lengths, spending vast amounts of energy, to forestall this termination in themselves and in their civilizations. Yet in the value expressed as the organism, their efforts are always unsuccessful, for all forms must die.  Thus, although the death of the cosmos is far away in time, the processes which will bring it about are happening now. This entropic decay affects humans today. It results in the death of economies, of civilizations and of human lives. Yet instead of cooperating with entropy, we resist it.

Our very being, in the material sense, represents a disturbance in the quantum field. Beings themselves are representations, icons of this unequal distribution. They are condensates, ripples in spacetime.  Matter and energy, structures for containing data and representing its value, are distributed unevenly throughout spacetime. This means that the energy needed for beings to survive is also distributed unevenly. This disparity guarantees that there will be lack. With lack comes suffering, yet what sponsors lack is imbalance, and not true deficiency. Humans see the cause of suffering as insufficiency, yet its true source is really imbalance. Poverty is disparity, and that relative deprivation will be experienced as a comparative lack regardless of the level of material sustenance available to the impoverished.

Suffering and lack cannot be remedied because humans are a part of this imbalance, and they see some of these imbalances as necessary for survival, and as the ultimate good.  Civilization is a form of imbalance. Matter is a kind of imbalance. The human body is representative of a disturbance in the quantum field and is thus an expression of imbalance. To feed these imbalances will not restore equilibrium.

We are not advocating for the destruction of civilization or the end of human life. We do not excuse poverty as an acceptable condition. We simply note that insofar as it is attributed to lack, the causes of human suffering are misdiagnosed, and therefore that the wrong remedies are prescribed to alleviate them. It is a part of a problem to treat surface manifestations of the problem rather than to see root causes. The problem will simply resurface in some other way, at some other place, in some other time.

The attempt to create a world without disparity is a delusion as long as humans desire to keep some of these imbalances in place, while attempting to irradicate others. In this way, humans will continue to seek a balance with disparities, an unequal equality. This guarantees that manifestations like poverty remain with humanity, for these are symptoms of imbalance, and not causes of it.

For this reason, all human attempts at redistribution have been limited, piecemeal, ad hoc, and unsuccessful in their lack of comprehensiveness. They seek to preserve some imbalances, while eliminating others. None of these schemes have solved the problem of scarcity. Redistribution must be radical, total, holistic and comprehensive in order for it to be effective. The redistributions required are much more radical and comprehensive than are the most radical human ideas of revolution and collectivism. And at the same time, they require nothing: no work, no expenditure of energy, no violence. For they seek to cooperate with the tendencies toward disorder, rather than to fight against them. As strange, as counterintuitive, and as threatening to the human ego as it seems, the true solution to human problems is surrender, and not action.

Beliefs power human life, for they determine the direction in which an individual and their society are headed. The belief in action must be relinquished. It must be replaced with a surrender to and cooperation with the forces of chaos. A force resisted concedes energy to that force. This, in truth, is where all human energy is truly spent: in resistance. Once we begin to cooperate with entropy, we will realize that it possesses an order all its own, and that it never threatened to consume us. The fear of death precludes us from seeing what lies on the other side. and this indeed is an ordered changelessness, an awareness which does not absorb the human ego, but transcends it.

Disorder

Illness is imbalance, yet it is perceived as natural. A new kind of balance is achieved in which the imbalance of illness is perceived as balance. Sickness is normalized. It is experienced as normal and is accepted as a part of the natural order. This acceptance of imbalance as normal and natural extends to all the expressions of imbalance which are encountered. These are perceived as implicit, as ‘nature’s way’.

Change is seen as a kind of balance. Time, which by its very arrow from past to future is asymmetrical, is implicitly recognized as natural, as a given. It measures the rate of change. Time would not be possible without change, for there would be no reason for it and no way to mark its elapse. This is its physical aspect. It is used to measure the rate of decay of all organized systems, which are seen as aging and dying over time.

To address the problems introduced by disorder – such as disease and decay – many systematic disciplines have been devised. These include magic rituals, religious rituals and the more recent scientific method and its subdisciplines. Some ancient disciplines are classified as magical and invoke powers and allies. Other disciplines seek to appease a God or gods, seeing a deity or pantheon as responsible for creating the imbalances in the cosmos. Cause is attributed here to an external agency, outside the will of the human. Modern systematizations are categorized as scientific and seek to manipulate impersonal forces which have at their root the mindless processes of randomness and probability. These, still, are seen as causes operating outside of the human will.

What all these disciplines share is that, through a combination of systemization, method, investigation, ritual or rite – which are all forms of order seeking – they attempt to restore a balance, an order. They also share the trait of seeing cause as residing in an agency external to the human mind. However, all these disciplines ultimately fail to address disorder and decay because they seek to redress imbalance in only a part of the system: they seek to heal this body or that class; they seek to clean up this part of the atmosphere or that bay of that ocean. On a more fundamental level, they project cause as exterior to the human mind.

Yet healing must be total or it is not at all. The cosmos is disordered because, once imbalance was introduced into it, that imbalance spread to its boundaries, to its zenith and to its azimuth. The property of entropy, of the tendency toward disorder, is a universal propensity in all matter and energy. The universe itself is disordered since it was conceived in parts, in separable aspects which, when scrutinized more closely, are composed of yet more boundered constituents. Any attempt to heal a part simply reinforces that the whole exists in parts, and thus reinforces the original disunity. More fundamentally, the cosmos exhibits disorder because the mind is fragmented. It is disordered, yet projects that fragmentation and disorder out onto a physical reality. In order to heal, it must withdraw these projections into itself.

Human efforts at a reintroduction of balance into their world fail because these efforts aim at a perpetuation of disparity. Their attempts are based on the instinctual urge to self-perpetuate parts within the whole rather than the unity of the whole. Human objectives at healing seek to perpetuate certain parts of a system, such as the individual organism and its civilization, at the expense of other parts which are deemed less important. At the heart of this ideal is the sacrosanct nature of human beings, which are considered as worth more than any other beings or entities within the Gaian system. Therefore, human attempts at healing have as their objective the reinforcement of certain imbalances inherent in the system itself. Implicit in this objective is the reinforcement of disparity. Civilization will always have as an attribute this disparity in one form or another, since it was ultimately invented to reinforce these disparities.

On a more basic level, human efforts at the restoration of imbalance fail because they are usually focused one externals, when they should more properly be focused on the mind itself. Once it becomes aware that cause is always internal to the mind, and thus psychological in nature, the mind can begin to withdraw projections, which are effects, back into itself.

Shorter term imbalances introduced by biological developments into the Gaian system took time to evolve and thus allowed whole ecologies time to adapt and maintain overall balance around and in relation to them. This is adaptation and coevolution at work.  Yet the disparities introduced by human intelligence occurred very rapidly and have resulted in imbalances which are overwhelming the planet. Although the Gaian world can tolerate short term and spot imbalances, comprehensive balance was maintained overall until the advent of civilization. Technology works against this organic balance by aiming at a selective preservation of certain imbalances which are prioritized by humans as desirable, such as industrial scale agriculture. This artificial selection, in part, drives ecological degradation.

An imbalance redressed in one social class, poverty for instance, may create yet other imbalances within the larger culture when other groups are disadvantaged as a result. One nation may prevail in a war and redistribute disparities formerly existing within the international order to another nation which loses the conflict. Civilization itself almost always seeks its own perpetuation at the expense of the larger natural order, creating the largest offset.

What all human efforts at restoring balance have in common is that they lead to an offsetting imbalance somewhere else, in some other people, place or time. Human efforts to rebalance any system result in displacement, and not a true balance. The law of entropy requires this.