Thing-In-Itself-With-A-Goal

The Spirit, or the Spirit-Will-To Godhood, is the Thing-In-Itself-With-A-Goal, the Goal of Godhood at the zenith of evolution.

This does define a teleology, design in nature, (evolutionary teleology) which is within nature and it can be explained materially, with Godhood perhaps existing in some kind of supermaterial “spiritual atoms,'' called spiritual because it has not yet been explained by material science, although it has been much examined and limited to the non-material by religion.

Blood Activated By Spirit

We cannot and should not abolish Tradition, we cannot remove the moral or ethical foundation. We do not seek to demolish the old so that the new can be built, as all revolutionaries do. Yet we can recall that our tradition was once new.

We do not reduce humanity to biological origins when we acknowledge the biological origin of much of social behavior. Our foundation is not placed in biology, genes, race or in spiritless matter. It is not a choice between “blood or spirit,” blood is activated by Spirit to evolve to Godhood.

We do this by synthesizing Tradition and Science, the Spiritual and the Material in the Inward and Outward Paths leading to God.

Political nature of man

The nature (constitution) of man is not really democratic, it is led by the Spirit, and guided by the Soul. We are the instruments of the Spirit, individualism and democracy must be approached from this perspective. We evolve as a group. This more suggest the hierarchy of Monarchy as the smoothest running, natural system, under the right conditions. But the Spirit is flexible, adaptable, and it may advance itself best through democracy, or at least representative Republics. We could just as well say “The Republic is dead, long live the Republic” as we could say “the King is dead, long live the King.”

Good/Bad, Spirit/Body, Definition

Regarding the Spirit we can say that It is the doer and we are the instrument by which the Spirit moves the body through evolution to Godhood. But care must be taken here with the religious tendency to define the body and the person as “delusion.”

The Spirit cannot be defined as the only good and the body as the only bad, dualism should not be set up here. We do not “save ourselves” by losing our body, the body is the instrument whereby the Spirit evolves all the way to the Supreme Body of Godhood.

Both Spirit and Body are good, as the Holy Spirit and the Son are the highest good, defined by the Father.

Function and appearance in art and religion

There is a strong tendency toward dualism between function and appearance in Traditionalism making appearance far less important. In art this means the creation of icons and archetypes representing the function rather than the appearance.

However, when God is seen as a Supreme Object then the dualism between function and appearance does not apply. God is not merely an idea. More than the intellectual virtues must survive death, these need to be carried forward by the successful survival and reproduction of our genes and our body.

Let the Body be unblocked from the Great Spiritual Blockade in art and religion. We can have an archetypal art with heroes and myths representing universal functions, but appearance deserves equal treatment, the Body and Spirit both evolve to Godhood.

We need to avoid the extremes of modernism that seems to care only for appearance, and Tradition which cares only for function. Contrary to many mystics, we need not use the lowest symbols to represent a God who is only an idea, there is nothing nobler, at least on earth, than the highest evolved human body, representing the Beautiful, the Good and the True.

Imitating nature's manner of operation

The Evolutionary Outward Path in the Evolutionary Christian Church imitates nature in her manner of operation. Art was said to do this in Traditionalism.

The art of God is the work of the Son and Holy Spirit through which all things are made and evolve, defined by the Father.

Contrary to the Traditionalists it is the looks of existing things and not the ideas that is important, and it is the destination of things that is primary.

Soul and Spirit

The Soul searches for the absolute order and truth of things as they might exist in the mind of God—this is the Soul defined as the Zenith of the Mind.

Deep within the Soul is the Spirit, the Zenith of the Soul, which activates the Soul to Godhood, guided by the genius of the Soul.

Genius lies in the Soul, the immanent Spirit activates genius as individual, but the Spirit is both individual and universal.


A. Coomaraswamy said the immanent Spirit is equally artistic, moral and speculative.

Immanent Pantheism

We do not place divinity in the transcendental beyond the object universe, that is, purely as in Classical Theism (see definitions here), which held to the transcendence of God, his existence over and beyond the universe. Panentheism—unlike pantheism, maintains that the divine can be both transcendent and immanent at the same time. Whereas Pantheism holds to the divine immanence, or immanent pantheism. This places the Divine within and around mankind, indwelling and near dwelling as the Spirit or the Will to Godhood which activates within life rather than as completely remote---yet Godhood, at the zenith of material evolution, is far evolved from man and the general cosmos as to be mistaken for transcendent.

Synthesizing Religion and Psychology

The Will, or Will to Godhood, is both instinctive-unconscious and superconscious-supraconscious. There need not be a split between modern psychology and Traditionalist religion. The instincts have been wrongly driven out of religion, or virtually so, which in effect blocked the true activator to Godhood with a Great Spiritual Blockade. The Ideal of the Instincts has been grossly limited and virtually thrown out of religion.

The “demon “ of psychology is the same as the “daemon” of the mystic, the “libido” is the same as “Eros.” This is how the innocent primitive, unaware of style, art or religion can apprehend God as well as the refined metaphysician. This is not the “reduction” of religion to psychology, or reduction of psychology to biology, this is the amplification of the Material to Spirit. The material and the spiritual should not be forced apart. Eros leads to Godhood, the material evolves to the material-spiritual.

The Will to Godhood is universal, it is our way of apprehending it that may be individual, or define our “style,” our art, or our religion.

(For the Traditionalist perspective, which tends to reduce all things to Involutionary theology, see “Christian and oriental philosophy of art” by Ananda Coomaraswamy.)

New Right Definition of Tradition

Brief Excerpt: New Culture, New Right

"New Right identitarians believe a people is a living organism. As such, it can die. To guard against this a people needs a common heritage to define itself and maintain its will to live together. In this sense, tradition serves as the scaffolding around which a people constitutes itself. If there is no heritage – no transmission (traditio) from one generation to another – a people has nothing to live for and no reason to remain together. It is, then, as the horizon against which a people's existence is worked out that tradition imparts purpose to its common endeavors. As [Arnold] Gehlen writes, 'without it one can keep restlessly active...and yet lack any inner sense that all this busyness carries any moral significance.' This is why identitarians believe Europe's pagan, mythic traditions are key to its renaissance..."

Excerpt continues here..

Freedom, Abstinence and Order

The discipline of “freedom through abstinence” can be useful in concentrating the mind and body on attaining the Soul-Within, as is applied in the Involutionary Inward Path (Thanatos), which is taught in the Revealed Religions and in Stoic philosophy. But beyond this specialty it cannot be applied to the whole of life, the social and political order, where it becomes a negative freedom and can devalue the material world, even to the point of creating a Great Spiritual Blockade against evolving to God.

The Evolutionary Outward Path redeems or balances this misapplication of the Inward Path in relation to the material world, creating order through the evolution to Godhood (Eros), an order that is not the extreme of abstinence but material evolution directed by evolutionary knowledge (Ordered Evolution) to Godhood.

On reality that transcends our grasp of it

The Absolute Truth (AT) can be known only by the Supreme Objects of Godhood. AT is “in the world” only in it being in God the Object's mind and not outside his mind. Abstract Truth is Abstract Truth and does not exist on its own as an object, it exists only in the mind of a living object.

Kant closed off “the possibility of correspondence with a reality that transcends our grasp of it.” (see discussion here) We don't exactly agree, because Godhood is beyond our grasp and God perceives truths beyond our grasp yet grasps truths that are within his/her grasp.

What we would say is that we close off the possibility of truth if we try to go beyond the living object who grasps it. The denotation or definition of God does not exist as an object in itself but exists in the mind of God, which exists in the body of Godhood.

The Theoevolutionary Church responds to the challenge of the fallen culture

According to the wise Russell Kirk (Redeeming The Time) a culture develops and civilizations arise by a process of “challenge and response” (Toynbee). If a culture vigorously enough surmounts the challenge, the culture will grow in strength. But if the challenge is so great that it damages or distorts the culture—the culture can become stunted and possibly fall.

Modern culture has been such a formidable challenge that it has in fact distorted and nearly destroyed Western civilization, and particularly the Anglo-American culture. The Christian West has not been able to mount a vigorous enough and deep enough response the the great challenge. Conservatism was missing the power of science, and particularly the knowledge of sociobiology that could have a direct biological, demographic, response to the declining West, which is virtually missing in Modern Conservatism.

The Theoevolutionary Church (TC) with its Revitalized Conservatism (RC) has the great potential to be the vigorous response to the challenge of modernism and postmodernism because science and sociobiology are synthesized into traditional religion and conservatism with the Evolutionary Outward Path. The question is, will TC and RC be applied in time, or will it be the foundation and revival of our culture and our people, along with all cultures and all people, after the fall?

An End To Dualities

An end to dualities means an end to separating the physical from the metaphysical (we would rather say “tranrational”), but unlike modern science we do not eject the metaphysical, and unlike religion we do not virtually eject the physical. We include the physical and metaphysical in one whole, one evolutionary continuum, from the simple all the way to Godhood. The spiritual is material and the material is spiritual in evolution.

False Dualities

Conservatives have said that the material order rests upon the spiritual world, but this is a false duality. The material is spiritual and the spiritual is material.

The Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC) attaches science to religious aims and has not detached science or detached religion. Two Paths lead to, A. the Inward Soul and B. the Outward God, both Paths are affirmed in ECC. There is no duality here.

We must recover the religious order to survive. And the choice is not between a “Savage God” and a "Civilized God." ECC is not merely reviving paganism, we are reinvigorating the Civilized God of Perennial Religion.

Kin, Cult and Conservatism

The missing element

Russell Kirk, and a few others, (Dawson, Voegelin, Toynbee) pulled a bit of a fast one when they proposed that once a people join a cult for worship (religion), then, out of this the human community grows. Biology, genetics, kin and race are the first element out of which the cult and community grow. Perhaps this fast one was understandable, given the bias against discussing the genetic origin of social behavior following World War II. Much courage would have been necessary. Even Edward Wilson, the brilliant father of Sociobiology from Harvard University, who is not a racist, was dosed with water for suggesting such a thing.

Yes, culture arises from religious ties, but before that culture arises from kin- bonding. The reality is that dwelling together in relative peace usually relates to genetic similarities. The biological origin of much of social behavior should not be ignored. The achievements of our civilization stem from this as well as from religion.

Could this “fast one,” placed at the base of modern conservatism, explain why conservatism and the culture are not reviving? With Revitalized Conservatism this missing, vital, biological aspect of human nature is finally addressed through the Evolutionary Outward Path, synthesizing it with the Traditional Involutionary Inward Path of Religion.

The Idolatry of Denotation

“Supernatural divine influence” is said to not come from any “object,” but this is when God is defined as only the “Father,” which is a definition, a denotation. When God or Godhood is seen as a Supreme Object of Supreme Divine influence, then indeed “supernatural divine influence” can come from Supreme Objects.

The Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC) separates the intellectual form or definition of God from the ruling power of the world—as mystics have often done--but we do not “worship the dead letter,” the Idolatry of Denotation. This worship, this idolatry, has created an aversion, or more seriously, a Great Spiritual Blockade against everything material, and against positive theology.

Even so, there is a place for this “idolatry” in the Involutionary Inward Path of ECC, which works in harmony with the Evolutionary Outward Path to Godhood.

A Very Great Sin

If sin is---to use a phrase by traditionalist Ananda Coomaraswamy---“a departure from the order of the end,” then The Great Spiritual Blockade of material evolution to Godhood by traditional religion, diverting human actions toward the Soul-Within alone, has been a very great sin. The Inward Path leads to the Soul, a great goal in itself, but the Outward Path of evolution to Godhood has been left out of religion, and that is where the great sin has occurred.

Instinct and Culture

Defining ordered evolution

It is overdo time to synthesize instinct and culture, which to this day Conservatism says is the distinction between man and animals. The Ideal of the Instincts, driven by the Will to Godhood, or the Spirit, leads to Godhood, for man or animals.

Culture changes as natural selection moves forward, but instinct requires ordered evolution to maintain positive changes. Ordered evolution affirms Conservatism.

Revitalized Conservatism defines ordered evolution in the following virtues and ethics of the Evolutionary Christian Church:
The Involutionary Inward Path, virtues: (Traditional Christianity) Prudence, justice, courage, temperance (Greek), faith, hope and charity (Christian).
The Evolutionary Outward Path, ethics ( Beyondism): Development, group solidarity, diversity, individualism, plus, intelligence, truth and beauty.

The goal of the Involutionary Virtues is to understand and see the Soul-Within, the goal of the Evolutionary Ethics is to evolve to God, activated by the Spirit.

Ordered Evolution

On Redeeming Conservatism

We take seriously Russell Kirk's (also T. S. Eliot) advice to find imaginative ways to renew our proscriptive freedoms and our inherited moral and constitutional order. Kirk thought the culture can be renewed only if the religion (cult) is renewed. This is a central concern of the Theoevolutionary Church (TC), although our “renewal” is a Revitalized Conservatism which Kirk would probably find too radical. Evolution is not an impersonal force of destiny or history, it is guided by the Spirit and the Soul, ultimately leading to God.

We do not want the conservative legacy to seem like a burden to this age, as it now does. We understand that Conservatism is a foundation, not a burden. We describe the balance between “Order and Evolution” rather than “Order and Freedom.” “Ordered Evolution” is the term we use.

A Future Less Fearful

The Theoevolutionary Church cannot be described as merely converting our religious belief into an instrument of social transformation, as secularizing religion has done, or was trying to do before it simply gave up on religion; we affirm the sacred nature of evolution which grounds our religious belief.

The doom and gloom of Conservatism at the prospect of the future, harkening up Orwell's “1984” and Huxley's “Brave New World” need not be such doom and gloom. To read the great modern Conservative writers, with their brilliant descriptions of the death wish of modern life, has tended to lead to stagnant traditionalism, rather than ordered evolution. Young people are not attracted to stagnation.

Ordered Evolution is the Conservative/futurist balance which can make the future less fearful. Our hope is that even in the “depths of calamity” (Kirk) on the ruins of Western Civilization a foundation can be laid for a greatness going into the future.

We cannot entirely foresee the future, historical determinism can be undone by evolution. But future evolution need not be severed from the order if the Conservatism of human nature—now affirmed by sociobiology-- is the ground of future evolution, as it is in TC. The Involutionary Inward Path of Traditional Religion is the anchoring structure of the Evolutionary Outward Path, as we proceed with Ordered Conservative Evolution.

Defining Philosophy

We embrace the old definition of philosophy as theology, ontology, biology, and wisdom regarding how to live.

How The Holy Ghost Can Be Love

Dante thought of the Holy Ghost as “love.”  Without invoking the Tantra, this can be true in relation to the Spirit being the Zenith of the Soul, the Seed of the Kosmic Beginning, which helps activate evolution through survival and reproduction to evolve all the way to Godhood.

The Best of Both Truth and Objects

Truth can exist outside our human minds yet not exist as an object. This sort of truth can be respected but should not be worshiped as the only supreme goal. God's mind can know Absolute Truth (we cannot) yet even with God, Truth is not a living object, it is both inside and outside God's mind, only God can think Absolute Truth or know It. Absolute Truth can be known and thought of by God but it is pure definition to Godhood the Object, as it is, or will be to us.

Higher Truths may be known in the mind of Angels and with Penultimate Gods who live on the evolutionary continuum, where truth still remains “nothing,” it is nonexistent definition, not alive, not an object. We seek to evolve to the Supreme Object, first, and only then know the Supreme Truth.

A clear, sensible essay on our economic problems

"...On the consumer end, “normal” was a death wish, “shop ’til you drop” – an obsessive compulsion by the profligate many to spend money they didn’t have but had to borrow...If it was an economic Pearl Harbor, the enemies were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, A.I.G., Countrywide, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and all the other banks, brokerages, speculators, insurance companies, hedge funds and leverage buyout specialists that had launched the sneak attack on the American economy..."

The rest of the article here, "Looking Back on the Greatest Depression" by Gerald Celente

Nature First, Definition Second

Godhood As The Good Object

God is not defined as “Good” only because the Idea says God is Good, Godhood is first the Supreme Object, or Objects, at the Zenith of Evolution, and only with this is God truly defined as Good. The Supreme Object is Good before It is defined as such by or as the idea, contrary to Plato and much of philosophical history.

Nature First, Definition Second

When we say “according to nature” we mean “as things behave” and not as Plato seems to think “as things should behave.” Nature comes first, and the ideas and definitions come second. Ideas are a product of nature but they require a living Object to think the idea, and a Supreme Object to think a supreme idea.

Definitions

Godhood is not invisible, only the definition of God is invisible. Confounding these leads to the Great Spiritual Blockade against the world, and against material and supermaterial evolution toward Godhood.

God Is Within The Cosmos

Metaphysics usually thinks things are beyond space, time and change. Earlier religions had the Gods involved in the Kosmos even as they changed the Kosmos. Zarathustra was one of the first if not the first to say that God was both within the Cosmos and beyond the Cosmos. But many thinkers were describing this "outside" or "beyond" aspect of God as merely a definition, an idea, a form, a definition, or an equation. Other religions and philosophies followed.

Even "time" is within the Cosmos because when photons are traveling the speed of light, time seems to stop. We take the earlier position that Godhood is within the Cosmos, as a Supreme Living Object, or Objects, not outside the Cosmos.

In the Evolutionary Christian Church "outside the Cosmos" is a definition, an equation representing, for example, the Father in the Trinity. We might ask, did Zarathustra and Plato more or less think of the "Father" and God this way?

Zoroastrian discusses some of these things.

On The Gnostics

One does not “become a God” and “perfect the universe” through only Gnosis, or knowledge, while existing as a human, any more than the Inward Path leads to Actual Godhood. Attaining the Soul-Within, the goal of Traditional Religions---also the Involutionary Inward Path in the Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC)---is a very worthy goal, but it is not Godhood.

To attain Godhood we must take the Evolutionary Outward Path of material-spiritual evolution–-along with the Soul activated by the Spirit—to Godhood. These are the Two Paths in ECC.

On the Kundalini

From the perspective of the Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC), turning one direction in the Kundalini of Hinduism---and also seen in the esoteric wisdom in Orthodox Judaism---takes you to the Soul, and turning the other direction takes you to the Spirit. In EC the Soul-Goal is of the Involutionary Inward Path, the Spirit-Goal is of the Evolutionary Outward Path.

The direction of the Spirit is not “downward” to sexual desire and “upward” through the Chakras to spiritual insight, as the above organizations suggest, this creates the Great Spiritual Blockade against the evolution of the material world to Godhood, because the mind seeks the Soul, which is the Zenith of the Body, and not Godhood.

The Soul is of the Body, of the Mind, and is the Zenith of the Mind, whereas the Spirit is the Seed of the Kosmic Beginning, the Will to Godhood, the Activator of the Body-Mind-Soul to Godhood in Evolution.

The hope is for the Soul-Mind to help balance and guide the Spirit, and not extirpate the Spirit. The Spirit knows where it wants to go—to Godhood—but it can use Soul-Mind guidance along the path of evolution to God. The Soul is the rider of the Spirit steed. And the Spirit can have the Grace of God.

Religion has concentrated almost solely on the Soul and not the Spirit and this has been the main cause of many problems.