The true God is not yet, but the true God will be, because the creational process is.
There is no creator and creature (the cosmos) in want of it. It is a creature, a reality, that generates from within itself its own transcendence.
This Infant God, or Gods (perhaps as many as there are solar systems) are autonomously generating organisms. They are organisms generating consciousness, consciousness generating anticipations (hypotheses and simulations), anticipations investigating action, action expressing and acting out the manipulative and transformational power of organism. The Infant God is operational.
The metamorphosis of matter into spirit is conducted moment to moment by a techne of transformation. How else could it be? Seen in its totality (a process the Infant God is engaged in), it is a technology of divinization, a theotechnology, the making-creating of that which is not, by that which becomes.
What is technology? This is not an idle question. For we are on the verge of consigning ourselves lock, stock, and barrel to technocracy via technology. Our reasons for doing so are unclear. If we frame technology within a “mega machine” of reality we might hit upon some clarifications.
We are better off epistemologically if we forthrightly accept a bio-technology of immense subtlety, present within and “running” all organisms; a latecomer technology. And we humans are its quasi-fiendish exponents and promoters.
Technology is the deus ex machina. Every thing that comes about does so by way of a technology that forges Becoming out of Being.
One can speak of prototechnology, of cosmic stuff going about in quasi probabilistic ways. But can one speak of post-technology? Perhaps yes, but only if one foresees the convergence of biotechnology; with the brain as its fruit. And also if one foresees a supertechnology of the mechanical; with the chemical and the microcircuitry under a spell; under an exorcism of mind-spirit. The ensuing “product” would then be a divine technology of grace-equity-beauty.
What is the future of flesh, love, grace, sex, beauty, etc.? Can they be transferred into a silicon mind? Or is such a mind above them; a pure, understanding, logical, acting world? Probably this question is poorly posed. For mind is neither flesh nor silicon. It is how flesh speaks to itself and to others. It is how silicon speaks to itself, in its otherness. Perhaps because the self is flesh via mind, while logic is mind via silicon.
Is it the purpose of life to develop technology so as to produce life larger than life? In biological terms this is just what evolution has been doing for a span of time that has cosmic dimensions (over 3000 million years).
With the shift of emphasis from biotechnology to technology, and from evolution to metaevolution (evolution conscious of itself), one has to expect all sorts of crises and disruptions. Ours is an age of transition handling powers never dreamed of before. So much of today’s turmoil can be optimistically seen as an excruciating invocation of the living upon the non-living in order to make the non-living an “image” of the living.
Why does technology bloody the living stuff of biotechnology so often? Probably because of the mindlessness of technology. I mean this quite literally. The instruments, the equipment we invent, are deprived of mind. They cannot discriminate or do so only coarsely. They are mineral stuff only slightly rearranged and reorganized to perform single (mindless) tasks. They are matter without a master coerced into absurd profiles.
Materialism is the pathology of a society that, unable to discriminate between feasibility and desirability, takes the road of less resistance and drowns life in a sea of per se innocent, re-ordained mineral stuff. It is a shopping center, psyche bugging, collective mesmerizing alchemic tunnel with no visible light at the end.
Technology is the setting up of a neo-nature that we in the west believe to be more direct, more participatory in the venture of becoming (i.e. iron ore becoming useful tools, etc.). Materialism, seen in this way as an inclination to an enchanted manipulation of matter, might well then stand for spirit at the embryonic state; but a state that is more advanced than “determinism,” the mineral state of matter still expectant of a fecundation by the mind, via technology.
Technology at its best is the connective tissue that is more and more indispensable to becoming. People, as the living unities of body/mind and as the aggregation of all things they have invented and developed, are slowly merging into a larger, more complex creature (the urban effect) that is true to the evolutionary inventiveness and the imperative of complexity.
We are, as individuals, immensely complex bundles of flesh who congregate into complex social, economic cultural systems and institutions. This congregation is then sustained by complicated servo-systems. These are the services and utilities that are expressing themselves and are expressed by a complex physical system, the habitat. In the best of cases this belongs to the esthetic, as also do the arts in general. We are engaged in trying to make the combination of the three manageable, and hopefully self-transcendent (a frightfully tall order).
It is somewhat inevitable for machines to acquire their own momentum.
The marketplace, through coarse or subtle manipulation, can rapidly make the human environment into a theater of the absurd. The shopping center is the warehouse where human equity is flushed from human conscience by way of slow, minute, deceptive persuasions pinned, like hidden price tags, on every gadget or thing displayed.
We are truly involved in a monumentally ambiguous project. Optimistically we are engaging the living in processing the non-living, and by so doing upgrading itself.
Technology is the principle or method(ology) employed in making the genetic structure of reality, and attaining the objective of equity and beauty (divinity). The making (the technology) of such genetic structure, the cosmo-gene-sis, will take all the time needed for the total metamorphosis of reality, and all the space (expanding and contracting) necessary for such metamorphosis to implement itself; and all the mass-energy available to structure and fuel the process. The fully concluded metamorphosis will imply the termination of time (change), the implosion of space into zero space, and the exhaustion of physical, mass-energy reality. This genesis involving the whole of reality is a cosmogenesis.
If humans are a phenomenon of relevance within the cosmos, are we to be stewards of the Earth or are we to transform the Earth in the direction of the improbable?
Should we be modest, tranquil upkeepers of a marvelous ecosystem that is slowly, irresistibly recycling itself? Should we be troublemakers constantly at odds with it; yet impotent in the face of it and scornful of its complex ways? Or are we developing the knowledge and wisdom that will eventually “carry” the ecosystem of the cosmos into spirit? I think the answer will only be found on spiritual and religious grounds, even at the risk of reaching non-religious conclusions.
What if becoming is a creational process? What if the universe has begun to take hold of itself via intellections?
A realization that in this transformative power technology will not only be explained and justified but experienced as the hope of life. For technology is the ship that is capable of taking life to its ultimate end—to spirit, by means of a process (evolution) that takes with it all of reality.
Reality is a process of transcending, it is a self-creative proposition endlessly on the move.
The inception of consciousness within the cosmos may have triggered the beginning, albeit weak and insecure, of a willful evolutionary progression; and that intrinsic to such a progression is the process of complexification of reality.
We already are a methodology successfully developing itself into an aim. We are, when we are, free agents—inasmuch as, and only inasmuch as, we have methodologically invented ourselves from the first ambiguous living cells on, into what we are—quasi god-like automation, “freed” within the most subtle portion of ourselves, the mind, so as to prognosticate, and to plan for a less coerced future.
A “God” is being slowly and painfully created; a potentially monotheistic divinity out of the utterly polytheistic reservoir of mass-energy and conscience. Of the many components in this process, the human kind is a pivotal element.
The word “arcology” (architecture and ecology) is the term I use to indicate one of its objectivations: the (imploded) organization of the physical into a sophisticated instrument capable of serving and ex-pressing what might be called the transpersonal consciousness of the society, a cultural-theological-creating genesis.
I choose to call the city of the future “arcology” simply to remind one that in human terms a good city is an “architecture of ecology.” This simple fact bears radical fruits; bitter fruits for individuals who believe the world to be their private hunting ground; and exhilarating fruits for individuals who believe there is a theological component to their significance.
The space program becomes necessary as an urbanization program: the cosmos injected with mind.
We are the barely-conceived embryo of a possible, if remote, grace. To allocate to ourselves more than the very humble tasks of brick-makers and brick-layers is pretentious, even if clad in modesty and love. We are elected not to be the elected by the very nature of that of which we are a part.
Scientific knowledge and technology have opened a whole new way of seeing humans in relation to the cosmos.
Touched intellectually and emotionally by the tremendous mystery, to go about creating bits of mystery of one’s own, by making spirit out of matter.
The Urban Effect is that fundamental phenomenon in which two or more particles of physical matter begin to interact in ways other than statistical and fatal. That is to say, in ways which are organic or living, and eventually the instinctive, self-conscious, mental, cultural, and spiritual ways. It is the Urban Effect around which the whole experiment of life is clustering itself.
Theology guesses at the meaning of the mosaic. Science attempts to scrape away the covering of ignorance and uncover the true nature of the mosaic’s image.
Omega Seed is the past stored in the future.
The cosmos is involved in an attempt to generate its own seed. Cosmogenesis is the creation of its own genetic matrix. The super egg is not “dropped” by a pre-existing cosmic superbird. It is instead the receptacle of all that the cosmos has been while creating itself in the future, until the consumption of all futures. The cosmic seed will then be all that there is, and what there is, is all that there has ever become.
Since the devil is ultimately entropy, there will be no kingdom of god until entropy fades to an impotent and forgotten notion.
We are the bearers of a cosmic responsibility and we respond with a cosmic cowardice that is the original sin. We pretend that our gods are real, we pretend that grace exists. We pretend that the pursuit of happiness is the gift of existence. Reality catches up with us, mandatorily.
The make-up of reality is the totality of all fleeting moments. Those fleeting moments are present after present, each taken as a timeless slice of reality. They are moment after moment. They are the cosmos. To lust for the Omega Seed is to live each fleeting moment of the cosmos in the durational infinity of “the last moment,” as the resurrection of all the fleeting moments that had become aware of each other and are now the occasion for all occasions to coexist in and rejoice with one another.
Because of the birth of consciousness within a quite possibly meaningless universe, and because consciousness is mind-full of values, reality might now be seeking and pursuing meaning.
My fundamental hypothesis is that reality, “equipped” with consciousness, is attempting to create its own semen. This reverses conventional theological thinking. What religion places at the origin—the seed, the source of divine power, the fountainhead—is to be seen at the end instead. Cosmogenesis, as the word says, is the creation of genes, the ultimate genes of the cosmos. In this case, such process involves the total consumption of the media available, the physical cosmos itself. Then, at the final juncture of consummation, the cosmos would replay itself completely (resurrection) as any good seed replays itself through the organism it “contains.”
An Earth process that brings spirit out of matter, sensitivity out of coarseness, compassion out of indifference.
It should by now be clear to anyone that the energy crisis is but a misnomer for that explosion of greed hidden within the consumerist proposition. Tone down consumerism and greed (human diaspora) and the energy crisis fades away. Stay with consumerism-sprawl and the energy crisis will starve our world population.
A society incapable of a quality of boldness of the spirit is a listless society regardless of the monumental quality of its gross national product.
If science is correct in determining the Earth to be composed of the same stuff which makes up the cosmos, and if life is the technology through which such stuff becomes animated, then life, which now appears to be the exception to the rule within the physical cosmos, could eventually become the rule.
The living phenomenon is order wedging itself into the relatively inertial spin of physical things.
As genesis and as totality, Omega is the seed of the cosmos. It is the seed that generates from the endless metamorphosis of evolution. It is a seed that is the genetic matrix of its creator (evolution) and the trigger for resurrection. Since a seed is in a way the resurrection of the parents, the ultimate seed, at times consumed, is the resurrection of all of reality.
As “matter” is not burden but media, the transformation-metamorphosis of matter is not expedient but substantial to the process of “divinization.” Then if science is a dialogue between physicality and mind (Ilya Prigogine), then something more must be going on besides dialogue if “spirit-God” is to eventually create itself. This something more is “manipulation”; that is, the technology of creating God via the metamorphosis of reality.
We would not allow a mountain of chipped away marble to surround a puny statuette, the ring of entropy (disorder) to surround a tiny bit of order that “has caused it.” Therefore, for God’s sake let’s at least prophesize that the whole of cosmos will “order” itself into grace without ignoring any piece.
Only the total “manipulation” of matter into “spirit” will bring about grace, love, beauty in full.
Homo scientificus, the seeker of “truth” as such, is always turned to the past (the only reality), while homo theologicus, eternally fantasizing, is anticipating the loving one, God. If homo scientificus and homo theologicus get together, they can develop a technology of knowledge that is both past rooted and future oriented. A lot of love must shower on them to lubricate the cogs and keep to a minimum the heart of ignorance, intolerance, bigotry, self-deception, and arrogance.
For the technocrat-technologist the true vocation could be found in the realization that matter is wanting in consciousness, sensitivity, spirit, and that to metamorphosize it into beauty it takes a technology of grace. The technologist must become a technologian, the theologian of reality.
An infant self-creating reality beginning to see the possibility, dim and remote, of a process that co-involves each step of the process itself in the creation-construction of a graceful, beautiful, divine occasion.
Evolution might be divinity in the making.
Holy evolution is so generously but sternly working at producing ever more complex futures so as to transform the simple non-living reality into a complex, live, and vivifying process.
Reality and life in it goes on creating itself no matter what the mind makes of it.
The understanding of an original reality that is not benevolent (revelation) but indifferent (evolution-creation) is only the first step toward a productive context whose task is to construct systems that more and more are capable of transforming “inert matter” into organisms or occasions radiant with spirit. Then the knowledge applied to good stewardship becomes the knowledge applied to metamorphosis with all the inseparable impending dangers.
The notion of scale as an icon to being human is understandable but hardly meaningful, unless one sees the whole context. I would propose that if the task is performed well (humanly), the system is right regardless of size. The ferry does better than the two-seater boat, the power loom better than the hand loom, the city organism better than an aggregation of houses, and so on.
Reality is originating an aim out of its aimless beginning.
Simplicity is not only immanently dull, but it is also eschatologically evil. It is an obstacle to transcendence. It is entropy. Entropy mandates simplicity so as to postpone indefinitely the onset of entropic death. Unfortunately this says that a non-living reality is less entropic than a living one. It is also the death wish of a reality that, having had a taste of life, says “no” to it.
The revelational mode puts up—and rightly so—countless red lights warning of impending disaster. The creational mode has to be serious in investigating the charges and act consistently with the findings, but it also has to be true to its own imperative: the creation of the, as yet, non-existent. A non-existent that is going to be unimaginably different from the present for the same logic that makes the present unimaginably different from the past, the ten billions of years of uninterrupted metamorphosis.
The “how-to” manual for a responsible present is to pick up the pieces of a still alive composite of civilizations, reorder them, and in so doing transform them into more intense, more alive (more miniaturized), more interactive learning and performing enclaves. It is an active, willful commitment to the urban effect and what it means in evolutionary creational terms.
Without passion in what we do, the future is gray at best. But if the ego is the passion, the future is full of dread, dread-full. To step out of the ego (Buddhism?) without leaving out the passion (Christianity?) is the “trick” that only a trust in something that transcends the values of the ego can perform.