When experience is a dirty word, the password becomes: “Do your own thing, the sooner the better.”
The present Now is as good a candidate as any for the fulfilled Now. Hence, the Buddhist concludes, only when we realize this and disengage ourselves wholly from the future orientation can we begin to progress toward the emptiness that is the only true fullness.
The function of the Urban Effect is to generate novel ideas of such a sort that the preexisting ideas are retained but revitalized and included in a larger, more adequate whole.
A universe totally conscious that its last hiatus, full knowledge and creation, is nondimensional because it is infinitely complex, and not temporal because it is utterly durational.
The most verisimilar analogy to God is not the economist, the politician, the lawyer, the legislator, the technician, or the priest. It is the artist, and it could not be otherwise, as it is the artist who is end-oriented while the others are means-oriented.
We are all participants in the act of creation since none of us could make it alone.
A vow of relative poverty is the most direct, realistic, and influential road available to us if we are seriously engaged in human affairs.
If one considers that the primeval earth was not much more than molten rock, one can vaguely gauge the miracle of the life-spirit and the massiveness of its ecological transmutability. Life itself is the transformer, made of mass-energy particles, extruding spirit from stone.
It is common wisdom to say that we are all children of God. What if it were truer to say that an infant God is moving toward adulthood through the actions of all of us, provided that life continues to evolve? Then the long journey of divinity into adulthood is neither a return to something old and lost nor a commute between two specific stations; rather, it is a journey into the unknown.
Technology developed by man—an offspring of biotechnology—can imprison human development in a cage as deterministic as the one that imprisoned the anthropoids. The tragic, joyful music of life becomes then a naked confrontation with fate; the magnificence of the biotechnical machine containing the whole hordes of crabs and beetles yields a muted cry for an unachievable God.
The health of ecological habitats and any meaningful future for mankind and evolution at large can only be realized if ecology and theology are seen as aspects of each other.
These minor loops, the maintenance and continuity crowds with their fantastic machines (us, most of the time), are forced to transcend themselves by transforming routine into ritual through grace and reverence. These rituals are offerings, if one chooses, to the existential, immanent, fragmentary, helpless Omega God; ritual offerings otherwise expressed as the reverence for life.
The bridge between the Alpha God of the sun and the Omega God of the spirit is the lengthy purgatory of matter transfiguring itself into fragments of god under the pressures of complexification, intensification, understanding, sensitization, and miniaturization.
Life seen as the eye of the storm making matter into spirit.
The folly with a secretive intent of the solar system has been to pollute the terseness of space with bundles of mass-energy in a gravitational, electromagnetic net, the planets.
When one believes strongly enough in what one is doing, one becomes possessed by it. In that state of being, a mental construction can well strike the soul as revelation. In countless instances, man hears voices from within that he sincerely believes must come from without, or from a “within” which is much more profound than one’s own.
The new religion humankind needs is the religion of God-making, a continuous realization of the responsibility bearing on any and all thinking beings for taking charge of the evolutionary thrust by putting into it their own personal component in a manner each can handle and a bit more.
This does not rid life of the mortifying fact that, more than often, the most opulent display of machinery fails to generate even the most timid effusion of joy.
A nonlogical, nonstatistical, nonrandom, nonerratic process has taken hold: the living phenomenology.
It is plausible or perhaps inevitable that that which is going on sporadically throughout the universe (consciousness) will eventually extend itself and totally pervade (the) becoming.
Since the Omega being is an anticipation and not a reality, its creation is contingent on the will and action of our intellection and that of others who might be elsewhere in the cosmos.
Every living thing is participating in the process, consciously or not, willingly or unwillingly, but to be willfully and concretely part of the process.
Life, conscience, and spirit are not generated by other than themselves. They are a phenomenon without parents, powerfully and irreversibly urging the winding up of the cosmos into the synthesis of divinity.
Life has been urbanizing itself from its inception. The first organic molecule was the first urbanization, that is to say, the appearance of the first bond of cooperation-information-knowledge-response-interdependence capable of transcending the deterministic dogmas of mass-energy. Eventually such bond will blossom in that which we call love. Therefore true urbanization is a love bondage. Arcology, that is, architecture as human ecology, is one of the many stages of such urbanization.
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. If, in addition to being feasible, this potential animation of the cosmos is also desirable, then the responsibility of life lies in the transfiguration of an immensely powerful physical phenomenon into an immensely loving spiritual one. An eschatological imperative. The esthetogenesis of the universe.
The first living thing on this planet had, as a necessary support system, the entire existing cosmos, since only the existence of a specific if unknown cosmic balance made possible a specific if unknown solar system balance. This made possible on earth the appearance of a specific organism (one had to be the first). The cosmos in toto was the “territorial imperative” of a bacteria-like organism. No cosmos as such, no bacteria as such.
The eschatological imperative is issued from reality as an inescapable command: do unto matter (the mass-energy universe) what you do unto yourself. Make it into conscious matter.
There is a sort of premonitory situation which must be read even though it justly (but unjustly) sends shivers down one’s own spine. It is written in the invertebrate, on land and sea, in societies of insects, in slime, mold, slugs, in the various (and infamous) ant or termite colonies, wasp and bee nests. These are aggregates of acting matter, and why not thinking matter comparable perhaps more to the mammal brain and its own specialized hierarchy than to anything else? Gravity itself seems forgotten for the time being, so much is the living matter inner-oriented, totally absorbed in itself, pure living matter, flesh, thinking flesh. These are protoconscious cities, anticipatory, if brutishly so, or urbis where the dependence on matter becomes less and less measured by bulk and more and more measured by arrangement and discrimination, complexity and miniaturization, intensity and transcendence.
It is a reinstatement of the concept that the bridge between matter and spirit is matter becoming spirit and the process cannot be halted at any accidental moment, the present.
It would not suffice that the cosmos might sit in adoration around earthly magnets of intellection, as many of them as there might be scattered throughout it (thousands of millions). Intellection must move into the cosmos and consume it into consciousness, make it suffer the intellection of itself and cause it to transcend itself and create the “not yet,” the divine.
A careful scheduling of our means, intellectual, ethical, and otherwise, might show that the best defense against the squalor of the lifeboat theory and carrying capacity miscalculations is the ultimate frugality of a life thrust which can and must pervade the cosmos.
Complexity is explosively affirming its own power to synthesize spirit. The Urban Effect presides over this process of interiorization and sensitization. This genesis of the divine is the tidal wave we are part of and partaker in.
The thesis is that the process which will eventually dissolve the mystery and abate the anguish is the Urban Effect. Fundamentally, it is that original phenomenon in which two or more particles of physical matter begin to interact in ways other than statistical and fatal (the Laws of Physics), that is to say, in ways which are organic or living and eventually instinctive, conscious, self-conscious, mental, cultural, and spiritual.
What would a blood corpuscle say or do if his longings and his compulsions were divided between a lung 15,000 yards away and a kidney 18,000 yards away? Would his choice make any difference? The poor corpuscle would never make it to either organ, nor could it respond to dozens of other institutions wanting and begging it to join them. Many of our “corpuscles” never make it either. Our corpuscles are ourselves and those inherent rights that a civilization dutifully makes available to its members.
The facts are that we deal with a finite world, a finite personal life-span, a finite energy endowment for each individual, a finite intelligence, a finite patience, a finite capacity for sufferance, a finite solvency. All those finitudes are under the umbrella (or in the iron fist?) of the mass-energy, gravitational rules. It might be quasi-sane to ask what in the hell we think we’re doing. We are furiously destroying life, while shouting with the wind left to us by frustration and pollution, “I am free, I am free at last.”
The plain truth might be the unwillingness to really feel the massiveness of the problem, its intrusion into all facets of life, and the rejection of the responsibility for both atonement and redemptive action. If one divorces oneself from responsibility for a certain situation, one finds a thousand excuses not to feel guilt or to do anything about it. Our actions either reveal reverence for life and ourselves within it or they do not.
Am I not a bundle of electrons myself, anyhow?
My god is dust, an immense whirl of dust among infinite whirls of dust.
Ignorance is the lock on the door that needs opening.
As a direct consequence of one’s willful abdication of affluence-opulence, the wealth of the earth is given a chance for more equitable distribution.
We are all pupils of someone who most of the time we do not know and we do not need to know. Each of us is, in fact, the pupil of literally thousands of teachers, our fellow travelers on the journey from beginning to end, our contemporaries or our ancestors.
We, the humankind, are matter transcended into spirit, a spirit as yet raw, fragmented, dark, violent, and excess-prone.
Life, supported by science and technology, is a creational process, an esthetic process.
It is the nature of life to seek ever more complex and conscious relationships.
At times a small group has to come out and beat new paths for the sake of all of us.
A divine radiant God-in-the-making, whom life creates out of itself.
Only an environment which is constructed for an ideal and, in many ways, unknowable society, will not shortchange the society which eventually inhabits it.
Consideration of this generation of consciousness within the folds of matter, this transformation of the raw and savage power of the sun into the biosphere and homosphere of the earth, is not to be seen as the cult of a cosmic furnace but as the homage and investigation in awe and bewilderment of the order of a physical cosmos capable of generating within itself a consciousness of itself.
We are a methodology, successfully developing itself into an aim. We are free agents inasmuch as we have methodologically invented ourselves from the first ambiguous living cells into what we are, quasi God-like automatons, free within the most subtle portion of ourselves, the mind, to prognosticate, indeed, to plan, for a less coercive future.
Why is it a general premise that space per se becomes sacred space as soon as it is perceived? It is because perception implies consciousness of some sort, and since consciousness is a manifestation of sensitivity (the sensitization of matter), it follows that whatever might be the sacredness of matter, more sacredness impregnates the humblest parcel of living stuff than can be found in a whole galaxy from which life has been subtracted. The perception of matter makes it glow with the vicarious sacredness of consciousness. Space, time, structure… all are a quivering emergence when touched by the sentient stuff of the living.
The value of utopia has to be found where it ceases to be utopia because it has become reality. Reality can have a future only if it is able to make the future, the next utopia, into reality.
It is this magic which breaks through the barrier of the thickest hide and forces a swelling of the ego, even if for a few moments, into a matrix which transcends it into the self, and through the self breaks into the communion of universal consciousness. The lightning of perception and its moment of knowledge measures the length, in durational beats, passed in constructing the magic of the instant.
Each one of us must come to feel in the most tangible, touchable way that he/she is part of an immense creature whose ideal nature is to be conscious of all its parts.
If a model of reality is a device by which knowledge enacts itself, then the validity of the model, its truth, is proportional to the effectiveness it demonstrates in the pragmatism of enactment.
It is more realistic to expect that fragments of locus-consciousness will be the pluralistic foci for this reality, the reality where the person is more than itself.
Evolution moves against the direction of entropy; as matter moves toward more probable states of maximum molecular disorder, life moves toward increasingly more improbable states of maximum molecular organization.
“The best spirit comes from the greatest torque” and how could it be different? De-stress life and you have nonlife.
Controlled Survival Technology (C.S.T.) parcels out to each monad, each person, that kind and amount of environmental energy, information, and interaction computed by the Calvinist computer which “knows,” via simulation, the future.
True humility is the gate through which vicariousness itself becomes fused into the act of creation, since the humble person fuses himself back into the whole living creature. The humble and the meek are, thus, of the Kingdom of God, not at a certain future time but at the self-creating “now” of the theoecological immanence.
We do not need to fake robots. We have them in the flesh.
It seems, however, that we have become addicted to the specialization of dependence. Every one of our acts is dependent on a chain of instrument-energy performances which become bulkier and more unique, not in singularity, because the pride of democracy is in number, but in specialization. Even in trivia like toothbrushing or meat cutting, we advance far into the realm of umbilical cords and connections, conditioning a simple, direct act on and with a remote and polluting power source.
Our independence seems to be conditioned, glued in fact, to an ever-increasing dependence. The glue that defrauds of a clear consciousness of this dependence is money. As long as we can depend on the ability of money to keep our dependency solvent, we call ourselves independent.
Taking matter as outerness, each particle of matter is exterior to all others and interacts with them statistically. Taking spirit as innerness, a sort of polarization of the same particles makes them participatory beyond the statistical rules. It is, in simple terms, as if at a certain point a mechanical process would find itself incapable of fulfilling its own deterministic aims because too many digits have appeared. At that critical stage, process ceases, determinism breaks down, and life begins. With it the outer imposition of determinism itself retreats into the environment to become one half of life’s maker, the environment, the other half now being the organism in its inner self. Consciousness then appears as an interiorized universe, as maker and creator of a new universe of the spirit.
I do not speak metaphysics. I speak the pragmatism of the spirit, that is to say, I speak mass-energy in the process of making itself into spirit. That happens to be the extant reality, the only one available to man, the only truly human one. I speak bootstrap physics, physics that by its bootstraps pulls itself beyond itself: the mineral ecology of this earth at the beginning of its evolution transforming itself into the noösphere of today, the current human ecology.
We foretaste the future in every act composing our lives: the meal we will consume, the journey we will take… We plan these events and we sense them before, at times years before, they become the present. This foretaste is often better than the real thing. The present becomes, thus, the prefuture and this prefuture is the context in which we act, whenever we act as self-conscious creatures.
It is not pure coincidence that theology and ecology come to be one indivisible process.