The Senses and the Spirit

St. Thomas said, “Nothing is in the intellect before it is in the senses,” and this is largely true, but the Spirit-Will is in the mind/body before it is in the senses. Knowledge comes in the mind from the outside world via the senses but then it is synthesized, knowingly or unknowingly, with knowledge from the indwelling Spirit.

The Spirit Within has wisdom from the past going back through our descendants all the way to Godhood from whence it came. This knowledge exits at the Zenith of the Soul, and the Soul exists at the Zenith of the Mind, and the mind takes in knowledge from the body and the senses.

We think in terms of following or getting in harmony with the wisdom of the Universal Spirit-Will more than the Individual Spirit-Will. The Universal seeks Godhood through evolution more directly, but the individual may not be aware of this, or seeks Godhood in a far more round about way.

Angels, Godhood, and Being

I don't see Angels as form without matter, Angels may be understood as supermaterial, as is Godhood, only Godhood is on the highest evolved level of supermateriality.

Both Godhood and Angels are activated by the Spirit-Will, as all life is, but in Godhood the Spirit-Will has reached the Zenith of Evolution.

Godhood's “destination” at the Zenith of Evolution is like all of life to create a cosmos
where life can be uniquely and eternally represented. The dream or ideal of all life and endless evolution.

Life in the old cosmos, which often falls back into collapse or begins again in Big Bangs, is also activated by the Spirit-Will, or the Will To Godhood seeking Godhood through the evolution of the material to the supermaterial and then Godhood. This defines "life."

Supermateriality will allow us to comprehend Being-Itself or Godhood yet not understand the qualities and substance of Godhood. But this too may be better understood as we and our intellects evolve.

It seems that St. Thomas shifted from Aristotle to Plato in describing abstract God (Caputo, “Heidegger and Aquinas”) which I don't go along with. This Platonic God becomes a God of definition, rather than describing God and Angels as different levels of substance and supermateriality by way of evolution.

The abstract idea of “pure perfection” always blockades the real material world, as if the world is evil. But when the material is seen to evolve to the supermaterial then this Great Spiritual Blockade of the evolution to Godhood will be opened, and true Godhood can be reached. But even Godhood never stops evolving, there is no ending or beginning.

Life differs greatly from abstract life, Being is supermaterial life, abstracts only define Being. Also the “act” of Being is not Being, acting is part of Being, but acting alone is not Being any more than the definition of Being is Being.

We cannot split Being into pieces and define one part of Being as Being. Metaphysics needs to be brought back/forward to the material and supermaterial minus the spiritual-only definitions.

Soul and Spirit

The way to Godhood is through the Soul to the Spirit-Will at the Zenith of the Soul. The Inward Path is Soul-centered, the Outward Path is Spirit-centered. The Soul in the the Evolutionary Christian Church ECC resembles the Spirit of Traditional religions. The Soul is the part of the human psyche which can see and allow the Spirit-Will.

The Father, or Atman, is the deepest part of the Soul, not the deepest part of the Spirit-Will. Atman and the Father are not Godhood. “Christ” is the desire-free, blissful, virtual condition of Godhood, the Father, the Godmind within the Soul. Jesus was both God and man in the sense that he saw and knew this Bliss of the Soul, which is the virtual God within. This means that “Christ” is also an ecumenical state, sharing the Father-Within with other religions which have seen or experienced the same Soul, at the Zenith of the Mind, but naming the experience somewhat different.

In the ECC the Spirit seeks Godhood by activating the material body to evolve from the material to the supermaterial, shaped by evolution from without.

In the Twofold Path of the ECC the Traditional Inward Path leads to the Soul and the Outward Path leads to the Spirit, which then activates life to evolve to Godhood, shaped by evolution from without. Seeing the Outward Path is seeing the “dharma,” the order, getting in harmony with the activating Spirit. This is the Will To Godhood and the Will Of Godhood. The Inward Path gives us a blissful hint of this real Godhood.

New beginnings need to be attached to Tradition

I disagree with Alain DeBenoist that the West, and the East, as designations, should be forgotten. 

What we need is a Revitalized Conservatism, as the Evolutionary Christian Church advocates, not a “new” form, not a new culture that makes the same revolutionary projections as all idealism makes.

New beginnings need to be attached to Tradition, and this is difficult enough. We need a world of thousands of ethnostates, with all people, all races empowered to evolve to Godhood at their own pace. But this is not the same Godhood as the old involutionary Godmind, that is really a state of bliss within the mind-Soul of man, which is fine as far as it goes. The Twofold Path adds the actual supreme object, Godhood, evolved to in the Kosmos, from the material to the supermaterial.

With this revitalized Twofold Path, Christianity and other Traditional religions can remain viable.

Science can join religion in this, and politics can be made sacred once again, but without imperialism or supremacy.

For example, the United States, which Benoist rarely has a good thing to say about (with some justification) need not have a revolution, it's original Constitution gives great power to small states, which can be seen as ethnostates. And Europe too can devolve to its original small states, as it seems to be doing anyway. And a light federalism can protect this new/old configuration.

Kosmogenesis and the Supermaterial

Ultimate reality should be called supermaterial rather than spiritual. Spiritual is the older term before the micro-world we are discovering. Even so, the supermaterial has many of the qualities formerly defined as spiritual. Even Godhood is supermaterial.

The Spirit-Within, which is also supermaterial, is the principal activator of life, the purpose of which is to activate life to evolve to Godhood, shaped by evolution from without. Although Teilhard De Chardin sees spirit as the withinness of matter, there is not the synthesis of matter and spirit he suggests at the end of evolution because spirit and matter are never separate, they are only different levels of material and supermaterial evolution, with the material evolving to the supermaterial, and the Spirit-Will always activating within. The Spirit Will is never separate from the material body, so it needs not a synthesis with matter. The Zenith of Evolution, rather than the so-called “synthesis,” is the Great Union when Godhood is attained, and from this Union new Kosmic Godhood is born.

Evolutionary Christianity declares a kind of living animism where every living object contains the Spirit-Will, as well as a kind of monism, with one reality on a continuum from the material to the supermaterial. This spans the history of this philosophy skipping over dualism, mentalism and idealism, although there is a kind of idealistic materialism in projecting the Zenith of Evolution, or Godhood, which remains mysterious.

It also remains for science to find the properties of supermateriality, which for the time being science does not admit. Religion has been examining this field for centuries.

The Basic Ontology: Being, beings, essence, existence and evolution

The distinction between Being and beings is the evolutionary level of being. Being or Godhood is the Zenith of Evolution, and beings have not yet evolved to the zenith of evolution. This is the central distinction. Also Being or Godhood has powers which beings do not have, which we do not fully understand and will not until we evolve to Godhood.

Otherwise Being and beings have the same Spirit-Will activating them as we do, and the same substance defined on an evolutionary scale from the material to the supermaterial, with no duality between spirit and matter.

Essence is the Spirit-Within, and existence is the material and supermaterial body, and they are never separate, essence activates existence at every level.

Principles, or definitions, are always subordinate to the object that is defined. The definition or principle does not qualify as either Being or beings, existence or essence. Spirit is defined as supermaterial rather than spiritual. Being is not pure thought or pure idea or pure spirit.

When this evolutionary ontology is compared to St. Thomas and Heidegger (a worthy if quixotic PhD thesis) I think this religious view of evolution is the central change necessary. Being or Godhood is also a being and is an existing object, or objects, Godhood is not a Being beyond being in this sense. Godhood is the Zenith of Being and is attained at the Zenith of Evolution. The evolutionary level is the main difference between Being and beings.

On Causes

The cause of the cause, the Spirit-Will, or the Will to Godhood, is not the same as Godhood. The cause of the cause is to attain Godhood. The Spirit-Will requires Godhood. The fact that the Spirit Will needs something, desires something, means it is not complete until It attains Godhood.

Godhood, not the Spirit-Will, gives birth to the next Kosmic Godhood, in this sense the cause of Godhood is the the Spirit-Will.  Godhood offers Eternal Representation as the Great Reward for life attaining Kosmic Godhood at the zenith of evolution, just as we we seek survival and reproductive success in our own realm.

Life and evolution must overcome the entropy of the cosmos, which nevertheless offers many chances for life to evolve again. The Spirit-Will never expires, it only contracts within the devolution of the material world. There is always life evolving.

There seems to be an infinity of causes, and not a first cause, although metaphysics and science do not like this. There seems to be numerous cosmos old and new. Even Godhood has the cause of creating a new Kosmic Godhood.

“I Am,” Not

The documentary film “I Am,” by Tom Shadyac was entertaining and interesting but ultimately biased in cherry-picking science and philosophy to fit its narrow definition of human nature and the social order.

We all need to learn to cooperate, and we are all connected to one another organically, as the film pointed out, we are even interconnected through some sort of as yet unknown radial energy, but cooperation is only one part of human nature.

Human nature is altruistic and cooperative mainly toward kin and local community, and there is nothing wrong with that. Human nature is also fundamentally territorial, even ethnocentric, and these parts of human nature don't go away even if we try to throw them under the bus of egalitarianism.

Certainly we need to emphasize cooperation on earth, and yes, we are all the same in basic human nature, but we are also different, with great variety, and this needs to be included in our social and political philosophy.

The experts interviewed by Shadyac for the film were all of the growth and power of the central state variety, who continue to try to legislate one-size-fits-all politics and cultre, which so far has only managed to virtually destroy local communities, churches and schools, where true cooperation really works.

Liberalism, Bio-liberalism and Revitalized Conservatism?

Christianity seems to have helped initiate classical liberalism so that Christianity could pursue its “equality of man” and the “rights of man.” (Pierre Manent, Modern Age, Summer 2010) Christianity needed government to protect this equality for the individual and so liberalism developed in philosophy in the 17^th century.

Aside from the equality of the Spirit Within all life, what if men or individuals are not equal? What if equality is not natural? Does this call into question the Christian and Liberal view of human nature?

I suggest that we can retain the liberal idea of government protecting freedoms but we need to shift the emphasis to protecting groups, small states, or ethnostates rather than merely protecting individual freedom. This does not enslave individuals or take us back to feudalism, it places individuals within groups, as true human nature has always done. Small states affirm the new “rights of man.” Government retains the liberal task of protecting this group freedom and discourages imperialism and supremacy.

This bio-liberal view, if I can call it that, takes into account the sociobiological view of human nature, which sees men as naturally kin-centered, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and bio-liberalism protects this as the natural freedom, which best fits human nature.

A revolution is not necessary to supplant liberalism, but liberalism needs to be supplemented with sociobiology. Even the original Constitution of the United States saw the wisdom of protecting small independent states.  With this bio-liberal view, Liberalism and Conservatism may be synthesized into a Revitalized Conservatism. 

The Soul and Spirit-Will

“The body is the sheath of the soul,” tradition has said, but we say the mind is the zenith of the body, and the Soul is the Zenith of the Mind, and it is the Zenith of the Soul that is the sheath of the Spirit-Will. We believe that the Soul has been the destination and definitionof the virtual Godmind, not Godhood, but the Spirit-Will activates the body to evolve beyond the Godmind to Godhood in the Kosmos. This is the Twofold Path.

Is divergence or convergence dominant in evolution?

The glass is half empty with centrism, implosion and convergence, the glass is half full with divergence, which is dominant in evolution. Divergence is activated by the Spirit-Will within every particle in the Kosmos, and convergence is the entropy which divergence contends against. This is a different perspective from convergence-affirming Teilhard De Chardin's evolutionary spirituality. Collectivism and centralization tend to stem from convergence, whereas variety and independence stem from divergence, although there are elements of both in both.

Comparing Ontologies

Comparing the ontology of St. Thomas, the Spirit-Will of Evolutionary Christianity would be the "agent cause" of the world, the Spirit-Will would be God in the world of St. Thomas. The Spirit-Will is also close to Aristotle's idea of a changing Being, or “pure act” as the cause, and not Being as such. Both St. Thomas and Aristotle seem to have seen a Being or cause who is free of material or supermaterial substance, I do not.

I don't see the Spirit-Will as the cause of the world, the Spirit-Will reaches It's goal of Godhood, the cause of the world is Godhood, not the Spirit-Will. The Spirit-Will always activates life to Godhood, which is the goal of evolving life.

Heidegger sees Being as rising up out of concealment (Caputo), but this looks to me like the old metaphysics, making Being pure Spirit separated from the rest of the world. I would interpret this “rising out of concealment” as a description of the creation of the world, but I see no real concealment, I see only different levels of evolution where only a God could be evolved high enough to understand (unconcealed) a God, who is necessarily concealed from the lower evolved through levels of intelligence and complexity. I doubt that Heidegger meant “unconcealed” in this way.

I like the Duns Scotus idea of shifting “modes” of actuality, only I like the term “transformation.” Following the attainment of Godhood in evolution, Godhood transforms into the next world ---this is Godhood's Great Reward of Eternal Representation---and another “mode” is really the offspring of Godhood which must then evolve up to Godhood.

The beginning of it all remains a mystery which can't be solved without inventing fictional Beings of definition only, beyond the real world. It appears to have no beginning and no end, which suggests some other kind of Kosmic “logic” that does not need a nonmaterial Being to define eternity, but is always an evolving material to supermaterial Being.

The Word is not Godhood

It is making a God of definition to say that the Word is God. This is animating concepts. Religion and philosophy are fond of doing this.

Godhood is a Supreme Object which only secondarily contains the Word, Godhood is not the Word alone. Godhood does not speak our language, although It could.

The language of Godhood is not independent from time, time defines the duration taking place of the actions of objects, including the actions of Godhood.

The Word means logos in Greek, intelligence, wisdom, but this alone does not define Godhood, it defines attributes of Godhood.

A virtual or symbolic “Word” exists within the Soul of man, this is the Christ, the Atman, but this is not Godhood, it  allows a few to virtually see or experience Godhood.

Godhood can only be reached through the evolution of the material world to the supermaterial world of Godhood, activated by the Spirit-Will.

This is the Twofold Path, to supplement not supplant tradition.

A revitalized “rights of man”

We cannot create cultures that outlaw the deepest tribal elements

Protecting the rights of small states, even thousands of ethnostates, becomes the revitalized “rights of man,” the revitalized “human rights,” which preserves the “natural rights” and the natural conditions of human nature in the state of nature.

“Cooperative competition” becomes the high virtue of this natural movement in evolution. The movement which moves men and nature is evolution, activated by the Spirit-Will within and shaped by evolution from without.

The problem has never been tribalism, or ethnocentrism, the problem has been supremacy, racial supremacy, one group demanding supremacy over another. We cannot create cultures that try to outlaw the deepest tribal elements of human nature. But we can encourage variety and outlaw the attempt of one tribe to demand supremacy over another.

A nation of small states, as the original United States, or a world of thousands of ethnostates, protected by light federalism, is the only way I have ever seen to harmonize true human nature with culture. The states can then be free to seek their own interests, their own evolution.

But give all people voluntary access to the Church in its mission to guide men to Godhood in evolution. Let the state guarantee justice in this freedom.

This is a process that unites the temporal and the spiritual, which helps answer the question of how the Church can harmonize with the political world.

Toward a simpler, more elegant metaphysics

Angel's may be Penultimate Gods

Heidegger thought that Scholastic metaphysics constitute an oblivion of Being (“Heidegger and Aquinas,” Caputo), but I think religion and philosophy in general have created an oblivion of Being.

How much simpler, elegant, to suggest that all is materiality and supermateriality, which may even explain Angels and Godhood, as well as human life. The lower material evolves to the higher supermaterial. Hairsplitting arguments about “form” and “substance,” “Potentiality,” “purity” and “spiritual versus material” no longer apply.

Angels may be Penultimate Gods, made of nearly the same supermaterial substance as Godhood, which are not nonmaterial pure spirit or pure act. Angels and Godhood are the highest evolved Beings in the cosmos, yet made of the same material and supermateriality as the rest of the cosmos.

But then, perhaps the term Angel has too much past tradition with it to apply to evolution of higher beings in theological materialism.

The Godmind and Godhood

Being “rightly ordered” in traditional religion means attaining the Inward Path to the Godmind, and does not mean attaining Godhood of the Outward Path. It is condescending and incorrect of those who speak of the Kingdom of the God (Godmind) within and say they are not opposed to action, they are beyond action. Acton is the only way to attain Godhood, the action of material and supermaterial evolution.

We need not kill the Outward Path when we affirm the Inward Path. The great mystics did not come to destroy traditions but to fulfill the traditions. “Christ” is the Godmind, not Godhood. Jesus is the Christian path to the Godmind. Someone called the Gospel, the Christain Veda, or you could call parts of the Vedas the Hindu Gospel. Other traditional religions have slightly different paths to the Godmind, eg. Lao Tze, Krishna, Buddha, etc.

Becoming “one with the Father” (Atman) is attaining the Godmind which resides in the Soul-Within. Becoming Godhood is the goal of the Spirit-Will which resides at the Zenith of the Soul. The Evolutionary Church affirms both paths in the Twofold Path, the Inward Path to the Godmind and the Outward Path to Godhood. One could call the Soul and the Godmind the Lower Mind, and the Spirit-Will and Godhood the Higher Mind. We can be both Godmind-centered and Godhood-centered. The mission is to move from the Lower Mind to the Higher Mind.

The Primordial Instinct and Teilhard De Chardin

Teilhard De Chardin said that Jesus was not only a historical person but also the inner energy and goal to which the universe is moving. Teilhard should have said Jesus was the historical person and Christ is the goal to which the Inward Path is moving to the Godmind. The Inward Path moves to the Godmind in the Soul, not to Godhood in the Kosmos.

It is the Spirit-Will that is the “inner energy” not the Godmind of the Soul. The Spirit-Will is the Primordial Instinct both immanent and transcendent in supermaterial life, whereas the Godmind is the desire-free state that the mystics have sought within the Soul of man. This is not Godhood, it is the virtual experience of the desire-free mind of God. The goal of all desire is Godhood, not merely the virtual mind of God who has attained all desire and is therefore desire-free..

Teilhard synthesizes the material and spiritual by saying that the material is really spiritual. I synthesize the material and spiritual by saying that the spiritual is really material and supermaterial. Defining the material as spiritual can lead to defining material life as evil, or at least far less important than spiritual life. This can lead to defining God as “Nothing” or God as definition or word only, which is an error.

Central to the whole view of Evolutionary Christianity is material and supermaterial evolution to Godhood. Everything has some degree of consciousness, no matter how low the measurement, and life becomes ever more conscious, more intelligent, ever more beautiful as we evolve all the way to Godhood.

“Humanism” believes in human progress, but scientific humanism denies the Spirit-Will and Godhood. I think science will find the proof it needs for The Spirit-Will and Godhood, but the data needs to be deepened to supermateriality. I have faith in the material and supermaterial world, which has wrongly been defined as non-material. Material and supermaterial evolution is the path to Godhood.

Being Without Existence

“...If metaphysics is the summit of philosophy, it is necessary to look for the root outside of metaphysics.” (Gilson)

Generally, both religion and philosophy have been a philosophy of being without existence, or being is considered beyond at least material existence. This has been a great error. This has defined God as a non-object, or even as “Nothing” in relation to material life. Philosophers and theologians have seemed to “animate concepts,” as John Caputo put it, with “absolute idealism.”

Godhood is a supreme object with essence, existence and being, and not Being without existence as we know it. Godhood is not beyond the material, Godhood is supermaterial, which is not the same as nonmaterial spirit. Godhood is in the world as we are in the world, but Godhood is at the zenith of evolution in the world. The Being of Godhood has existence in the cosmos, or will have when evolved to as all other objects have existence.

If metaphysics kills the material world then science should be the science of being, seeking to discover the substance of the supermaterial. Until then, until science knows it has to be thus, by deepening its search to religious subjects, I can agree to an idealistic materialism, or theological materialism which seems contradictory but is not.

Existence does not have supremacy over essence, as St Thomas suggests, even if St Thomas does not expel essence from his considerations. Essence always exists within existence as the material Spirit-Will, activating existence from the inside, and shaped by evolution from outside to evolve. Kierkegaard seems to have expelled essence from existence, which was equally wrong. They did not define essence as supermaterial within material existence.

Heidegger said Being “rises up into unconcealment,” but being is never concealed, although at this stage in our evolution it may be concealed from us.  Being is always the existence of the material or supermaterial object which has essence or Spirit-Will within itself. In all life, all the way to Godhood, being is not merely the definition of the object, being is the existing object, from the material to the supermaterial.

Approving of Vatican Two, and then some

It should be obvious from this blog that I approve of Vatican Two. But I know how hurtful these changes were. The Church seemed to have lost its identity. Latin was beautiful (and it is returning), the choir was sacred, fasting was vital, the Rosary to Mary was wonderful, all the saints were heroes, the dress code was the correct respect given.

I love the Tradition of the Inward Path, but I also like the Vatican Two emphasis on aligning with the world of science, politics, and I like ecumenism extended to other religions---as long as this is truly reciprocal and not exploited by one or the other side.

We can reach the Godmind of the Soul with the Traditional Inward Path, but we cannot reach Godhood without following the Outward Path of evolution. Lord have mercy, this Twofold Path of Evolutionary Christianity will be considered heretical.

Pure logic is first a real object

"Man is God in the making." (Manu)

Definition or denotation is first an object and secondarily a definition. Numerical or linguistic identity is always less than an object.

Pure logic or pure thought do not really exist outside our perceptions and experience of these things, it's an epistemological game to say otherwise. Pure logic may exist without us, but someone in the future has to think the pure logic. What I am thinking may be interesting, or even beautiful mathematics, but so what? What is important is the real object. Do the mathematics relate to real objects or is it only mind games?

Pure logic, definition and denotation become idols that can lead to a rejection or downgrading of material life, which has happened in both religion and philosophy where definitions are often physically irrelevant. Objects are not pure logic even if pure logic can define them.

I understand Godhood as a Real Object, that is, a Real Supreme Object, or Objects, a supermaterial object, and not something reduced to a number or definition in my mind, however beautiful.  Some have even made a God of "nothing" as the dialectical opposite of "something," which is the ultimate put-down of real objects.

Men of the mind have always tried to usurp men of the body. The epistemological domain and ontological definitions do not effect real objects, and this is true all the way to Godhood.  Perhaps we need a new philosophy. 

Christ and the Outward Path

Ravi Ravindra said “Christ is the way but Jesus is a way.” I agree that Christ, Lao tze, Krishna, Buddha, and others, taught essentially the same Inward Tradition, which was attaining the Godmind Within the Soul, by ridding the body of all desire so that we might experience the bliss of the Father, or Atman, within. The great mystics taught us how to transform ourselves so that we can find the Godmind Within. All the references to miracles were ways of speaking about this transformation of being, which were symbolized as being raised from the dead, or turning water into wine.

However, I do not believe that the Godmind we reach through the Involutionary Inward Path within is the “supreme identity.” I do not believe the Inward Goal is the sole end of religion. The Godmind is the goal of only one of the Twofold Path. The goal of the Inward Path is not the goal of the Outward Path. The Evolutionary Christian Church brings the addition of the Outward Path to the Inward Path.

The Outward Path redeems the material world after it has necessarily been sacrificed in order to see the Godmind of the Inward Path. The Inward Path leads to experiencing the bliss of the virtual and symbolic Godmind but does not lead to true Godhood. To attain real Godhood requires the Evolutionary Outward Path of material evolution to supermaterial Godhood in the cosmos.

This is Revitalized Conservatism and not revolution. The Inward Path is retained and the Outward Path is added.

Cooperative Competition Among Ethnostates

Cooperative competition (the term Raymond Cattell used) certainly does not move outside of biology or human nature. Humans have been both violently aggressive and altruistically cooperative (see Frans de Waal). Only a few psychopaths do not feel empathy, the rest of us do. There seems to be a balance between selfishness and altruism in human nature.

I believe the way to affirm variety, competition and cooperation among humans across the world is to have thousands of ethnostates, protected with a light federalism. This is certainly possible and in harmony with true human nature. The real evil is not ethnocentrism, which is deeply embedded in human nature, but selfish supremacism, the demand of only one noble or chosen group to exist above all others, or its opposite, trying to root out all ethnocentrism with a broad, bland, egalitarian sameness.

The violent supremacist actions of Hitler, supposedly in response to the supremacist chosenness of the Jews, set back the discussion of ethnostatism for many decades, and still block these ideas, but slowly, slowly the reasonableness of ethnostatism is coming forward, beginning with outsiders and slowly slowly moving toward the mainstream. (see "The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," in Foreign Affairs, and Buchanan's various articles. )  

I believe the long term mission is to evolve humans upward to Godhood, and to do this, our ability to cooperate needs to emphasized even as we hold on to our competitive natures. This is not a utopian dream, this is harmonizing with human nature and the natural world.

Ethnonational wars

"...A few years back, professor Jerry Z. Muller wrote in Foreign Affairs that World Wars I and II were at root ethnonational wars of Europeans fighting to create nations where their own tribe ruled and their own culture was predominant...."

Here is a very powerful essay by Buchanan, "Is Tribalism the Future?"

The Mind-Games Of Being

Mystics say that all is a continuum of spirit, that matter is really nonmaterial spirit. Always it is matter that is sacrificed, which has allowed religion and philosophy to demean and devalue the material world and life itself.

Teilhard De Chardin's attempt to bring spirit and matter together also demands a non-material Spirit, even if it is Spirit Within matter. Teilhard therefore does not end the duality between Spirit and Matter, he tries to stuff the piano of matter down the clothes chute of Spirit by saying that matter is really spirit, not unlike other religions and philosophies.

Spirit is really supermaterial matter. Life is a continuum from the material to the supermaterial and not from the material to the non-material spirit. “Being” has to be brought back to existing, living and reproducing, and then seen as evolving to its highest Being, Godhood. Being and life are far more important than any definition of being.

Someone said that rationalism is a philosophy of being without existence, but religion does the same sort of thing making spirit nonmaterial. The mind-games of intellectuals need to join the concrete world of the non-intellectuals.

Is it only a mind-game to say that Being is a thing-in-itself, where the “thing” is the Spirit-Will within, and the “in-itself” is the body that the thing lives within, and these together are called Being, with existence and essence never separate? Evolution develops different levels of being of unseparated essence and existence all the way to the Supreme Being or Godhood. No duality is necessary.

Did Political Correctness Kill David Foster Wallace?

Glancing over Lev Grossman's review of Wallace's heavily edited new book, “The Pale King,” I was struck with the idea that if Wallace had been allowed to understand and write about real human nature, for example, as defined by sociobiology, such things as the importance of the biological origin of much of social behavior, human differences, hierarchy, evolution, even future eugenics, rather than following the hollow path of postmodernism, it might have offered a real foundation for Wallace's troubled mind.

Postmodernism is what is left when political correctness decides the subjects. It seems to go back to the phenomenologists and existentialists who decided that man is trapped in his own ego, where only subjective truth is possible, unless you go through philosophical contortions to try to prove parallel egos working, subjectively, together. Heidegger wrote brilliant and deep philosophy, but he must have known that he would be crucified if he wrote about true human nature---attempts have been made to try to destroy him anyway, motivated, it seems, by the fact that Heidegger held a job during the Hitler madness.

With this postmodern foundation, of lack of foundation, it is no wonder that writers like Wallace wrote plot-less, but poetically brilliant books. Postmodernism and existentialism instigated a phony, politically correct death to art and culture. I think it was this that helped to drive an already unstable Wallace to kill himself.

Harmony in religion and social structures with what is

The distant goal of Godhood in Evolutionary Christianity does not preclude the advantages that can come from the religion in this world, such as human bonding and cooperation toward the goal, which leads to social order. The political structure can follow evolutionary principles and relate to true human nature. Evolution supports a great variety of kin groups, and small states or ethnostates, social cooperation and limited federal government. The activation of life by the Spirit-Will is a primary instinct, and then life is shaped outwardly by natural selection. The mission is to find harmony in religion and social structures with what is, the ongoing evolution of life to Godhood.

Being is not what it is defined as

Being is not the “act” of being, being is what it is and not “what” it is defined as, being is not the “idea” of being, or the “form,” or the “unity,” being is substance configured in what substance is configured in as matter and supermatter. Being can be the things I just mentioned secondarily, as definitions, etc. of being. This applies from the smallest being of a cell to Godhood, being is the configured substance of what is existing as a being.

The “essence” of being is the Spirit-Will which activates being, the “existence” of being is the body that the Spirit-Will activates, the existence of being therefore includes both essence and existence. There is never a separation between essence and existence, or between being and existence and essence. Existence is the body, mind, soul and Spirit of a being at various levels of evolution.

Aristotle seems to have come close to this definition or description of being, and prephilosophers seem to have also thought this way without analyzing this way. But it seems that Aristotle slipped back into Platonism by preferring “form,” or the species-definition to the individual in defining being.

Is This Outsider Electrical Theory of Everything The Answer To The Dilemmas Of Quantum Mechanics?

“...The "something absolutely fundamental" that is missing in our explanation of gravity and quantum behavior is the electrical structure of matter. Here we are not talking about negative electrons and positive atomic nuclei. We must "go down" one more level and propose that all subatomic particles, including the electron, are resonant structures of electric charges of opposite sign that sum to the charge on that particle..."

Essay Here

Cutting The Gordian Knot Of Phenomenology

My personal thought is that Husserl's phenomenology is just too complicated to be useful or correct.

It was obviously very difficult to build his intricate mazes and puzzles which analyze consciousness and how we know what we know. The alter-ego, intersubjectivity, self-alienation, self-externalization, and on and on, seem to be scaffolding built around the pet idea that we are solipsistic, trapped in our own ego, our own consciousness. This is its presupposition even though they claim to be “presuppositionless,” a word they would like.

Heidegger continues the maze, he was a student of Husserl. And philosophy students in this field continue to enter the maze and trap themselves, or even add new structures to the maze, or are forced to do if they want to be professionals.

I don't buy it, at least not the complication. I pull an Alexander and cut the Gordian knot of phenomenology, rather than sitting there, for years, trying to untie the pretentious knot. The truth has to be simpler. I offer the Four Givens which I believe are simpler yet deeper than phenomenology.

The first given is what comes in from the senses, the second is our memory of what comes in from the senses (mind), the third is the supermaterial Spirit-Will activating the material world, fourth is the synthesis of these givens (Soul-Mind). It is the Soul not the ego which is the center of the mind's integration. The Soul-Mind, with great effort, can even rid the mind and body of all desire, as in Traditional religion, which is only one of the Twofold Path. The central mission of life is to evolve materially and supermaterially all the way to Godhood.

A priori and a posteriori

The only a priori (innate knowledge) I can find is the Spirit Within or the Will To Godhood. Everything else seems to be a posteriori (from sense perceptions, experience).

Yet even the Spirit-Will is a form of sense perception, a substance, supermaterial, an existing real object descended from the origin of the cosmos.

All the Four Givens are a posteriori other than the Spirit Will which is a meta-sense perception.  One: our sense perceptions of the world. Two: the mind's memory of past sense perceptions. Three: the Spirit-Will ( a priori but also meta-a posteriori). Four: the synthesis of these things in the Soul-Mind (not the ego).