Deflating the power of secret societies

Will the truth about the origin of human civilizations ever surface, and if so how will we recognize it among the untruths and half truths of the specialists. Perhaps bias is built into human nature in service to the will-to power?

My hypothesis is that the ancient Sumerian-Egyptian civilizations were not the origin of the Indo-European civilization, but that it was late migrating Cro Magnons or Proto-Indo-Europeans who were the origin of both the Indo-European and Sumerian civilizations. How the geographical migrations took place is not clear, from the North, from East to West, or some combination of these?

If Cro Magnons founded these ancient civilizations then the myths and symbols of these civilizations are untrue or inaccurate.  For example, occult knowledge in formerly secret societies has said that these civilizations were founded by amphibian-like beings from the Sirius star system.

Here is why it matters.  If we are trying to decentralize the world to save the world, this can mean decentralizing the secret society-occult structure, which is more or less based in this Sumerian-Egyptian-Sirius myth---that is, the Neo-Platonic-Gnostic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic-Rosicrucian-Masonic traditions follow this mythology. 

The truth can deflate the power of these secret societies, and secret societies and occult religions seem to be more, or less, involved in imperialism and supremacism in the world today.

On Conspiracies

I assume that private power has had control over political institutions more or less for some time. Private fortunes have outstripped public governments, and private corporations provide money to politicians who then represent them. But is this a “conspiracy,” and if so what kind of conspiracy is it?

It appears to be more like several powerful independent groups conspiring together, and going in the same direction, but going in the same direction only as long as it serves the individual group. Meanwhile competition between the groups continues. Individual groups with ethnic connections as well as economic connections seem to have stronger bonds and more success than groups with only economic connections. The biggest problem comes from imperialism and the supremacy of one group over the others.

The solution to imperialism and supremacy is for people to demand decentralization, small separate states, with their independence protected by a light federalism. I don't see the individualism of libertarianism as the way to go. Ethics and morals have always been created by the group ethics of mutual love and self-sacrifice, not by individualism.

Powerful men need to see that it is in their own best interest to support and protect a decentralized world.  Supremacy and imperialism have been tried throughout history leading to dysgenic wars that stop ordered evolution.

And no civilization has been founded or lasted for long without the bonds of religion. The Ordered Evolution and Revitalized Conservatism of the Theoevolutionary Church affirms these decentralizing social doctrines.

Sociobiology and Revitalized Conservatism

Real conservatism, the Russell Kirk kind of conservatism, is based in the knowledge that there is vast amounts of unconscious wisdom in the culture. This necessarily limits the power of rationalism. Culture cannot or should not fight against human nature, otherwise human nature will snap back, often in revolution.

Ethnic groups are often culturally distinct, and this is good, not bad. Raymond Cattell points out that cultural natural selection essentially operates on ideas. Genetic patterns affect the acceptance of cultural patterns and cultural patterns help to mold genetic pools. Sameness everywhere is not good for the creativity and invention that comes with variety.

Human nature can be released from the bondage of social philosophies such as Marxism, and the cultural Marxism of the academic world, which deny or ignore what human nature actually is. Human nature can be affirmed in the form of many small states, with a light federalism protecting their independence. States and regions can be seen as places where different ethnic groups can thrive in variety. What we need to avoid is imperialism and supremacy on the part of any one people. This is deeply conservative and does not fight against basic human nature.

Then we can get on with the sacred religious mission of evolving to Godhood in the cosmos through Revitalized Conservatism and Ordered Evolution.

Happy Thanksgiving

Congenital Optimism versus Realism

I think what made me more understanding and less critical of people in general was the understanding that people are simply far more optimistic than realistic. People are not so much dishonest or cunning, they sacrifice realism for happiness. (see "First-Rate Madness,” by Nassir Ghaemi)

For example, people overestimate how much control they have so that they may feel happier. This may be at least partly why realistic assessments of our political situation, eg. Buchanan's “Suicide of a Superpower,” are quickly buried. People congenitally insist on thinking happier thoughts.

The question is, what makes realistic individuals? Dr. Ghaemi suggests that depressed individuals are not so much misapprehending reality as they are starkly seeing reality in a world of overly optimistic people.

Starkly realistic leaders do seem to rise when we need them most to handle a crisis that only realism can handle. If realistic leaders do not rise than the culture can bury itself in congenital false optimism and decline or fall.

The affirmation of the sacred in art

It has been said that a true artist tends to see unconnected things as harmonious. Modern artists seem to do less of this. Philosophers, scientists and others can also see harmony in unconnected things. This seems intuitive, which one may be born with.

I think what is needed is to take this talent for connecting unconnected things and apply it to sacred things, sacred values---then you can have great art, an affirmation of the sacred. But this must not become bogged down in didactic art, art needs to have what Kirk called “moral imagination.”

A God Not Manifest Is Not God

An unmanifest God, which can be seen in Hinduism, and in the Christian Meister Eckart, is a definition, or principle, or denotation, or an intuitive experience of God, but this is not Godhood. Plato too saw an unmanifest God, as did his followers. God or Being has been seen as unmanifest all the way to Heidegger, whose Being remains a hidden Being, or is a process of the human mind where Being needs thought to manifest itself.

Heidegger's chilly Being seems not to be exactly the same as the loving God of Aquinas, but both thinkers see Being as not an object in time but a process happening through human thought or special experience. Aquinas at least does say that even if we can not know God completely, God is there knowing himself, God is a mystery but not to himself. Although the God of Aquinas does manifest the world, his God remains a nonmaterial, unmanifest God, and not a manifest-supermaterial-evolved-Supreme Object-in time-Godhood, as Godhood is seen in the Theoevolutionary Church.

This God or Father-Within of Aquinas (and the Eastern religions) is found in the Involutionary Inward Path, it is the “unmanifest” God contained in the virtual tabula rasa Soul. This Father Within is attained or experienced by first ridding the body of all material desires and surrendering to the Soul. Nevertheless, it is only through the Evolutionary Outward Path that one can attain Real Godhood in the cosmos. This requires not ridding the body of material desires but fulfilling the goal and promise of material desires in evolving to Godhood, the supermaterial zenith of the material world .

Philosophers and theologians have compressed too many things in God, for example, God as Creator, Sustainer and Destroyer, when these things derive from different things, even if they are related. Primal Matter and the Spirit-Will within Primal Matter are the creator, and natural evolution is, at times, the destroyer, and Godhood is the manifested Zenith of natural and supernatural evolution.

Resolving Ancient Tragedies In The Twofold Path

Material things are totally denied in the Involutionary Inward Path to the Father Within or God Within, but material things are affirmed in the Evolutionary Outward Path as the means and vehicle to evolve from the lowest Primal Matter to the highest supermaterial Godhood.

If tragedy is defined as the "celebration" of  irreconcilable conflicts, and if genius is described as finding the "invisible" link between things, the Twofold Path can resolve the tragedies between the material and spiritual worlds, between pagan and Christian worlds, between science and religion. We evolve materially and supermaterially in the Outward Path to the God first seen in the Inward Path of the Revealed Religions.  

This Twofold Path can be seen in the projected floor plan of the Theoevolutionary Church --X-- with one half for the traditional Mass of Sacrifice of the Inward Path, and the other half for the Mass Of Joy of the Outward Path.  Ordered Evolution and Revitalized Conservatism can resolve the tragedy of conservatism versus revolution.

Not materialism versus spiritualism

Meister Eckhart, Thomas' successor, spoke of God as the divine abyss, divine nothingness, divine wasteland. But this is the God of the Involutionary Inward Path reached by stripping all materialism out of life and centering on the passionless Soul.

Eckhart said “I ask God that he rid me of God,” which Caputo calls Eckhart's “mystical atheism.” Caputo doesn't mention the similarity of this to the Eastern religious view.  But Caputo does say that Eckhart's mysticism unites Aquinas and Heidegger ( if Thomas' unspoken mysticism is taken into account.).

Godhood, or Being, is “withdrawn” from view not because Godhood is spiritually purer than creatures, but because Godhood is the highest evolved being in the cosmos and we have to evolve to Godhood to see or become Godhood.

This is an important distinction which keeps Godhood both in the world and of the world. Why should the “highest” have no comparison to the material world, what is wrong with the material world, why must the material world always be hated by the mystics?

The God of the mystics is the virtual God of the Soul reached through the Inward Path and is only mankind's first hint of Godhood, reached in reality through the Evolutionary Outward Path. This God of the mystics is a God beyond God. This is a not-yet-manifest God, which is, in realty, only a blissful and empty definition, a denotation, of Godhood. It is not materialism versus spiritualism that is the distinction, it is higher and lower levels of evolution that are the distinction.

Frankly, too much is expected of God, which leads to God's disappearance from reality. Godhood is not the Being from which beings emerge, Primal Matter is the "being" from which beings emerge, and the beings who emerge then have the activation of the Spirit-Will to help them evolve to Godhood, the highest evolution in the cosmos, who is attached to the world by having been evolved from the world to the supermaterial zenith of the world.

The origin of the cosmos in theological materialism

Primal Matter manifests the cosmos and all existing things. Only the definition or denotation of Primal Matter is “unmanifest, Primal Matter is manifest.” This unmanifest defining aspect of Primal Matter is only a reflection of Primal Matter---this is the opposite of the Revealed Religions and early philosophers who saw Primal Matter as a reflection of the unmanifest definition of matter.

Primal Matter also contains the Spirit-Will within Primal Matter, which is the all-pervasive cosmic activator inherent in all existing things. This means that Primal Matter is the source, support and activator of all things.  

Creation is conceived by Primal Matter and the Spirit-Will within Primal Matter. This is not male/female, or Prakriti/Purusha, or the Mother Goddess of primitive man, this is simply the creative Primal Matter and the Spirit-Will within, although the above have sometimes been useful symbols.

Without the Spirit-Will, Primal Matter is like a dead mass. It is the Spirit-Will that activates Primal Matter to evolve to Godhood, from Primal Matter to supermaterial Godhood. This means that Primal Matter and the Spirit-Will are not Godhood and that Godhood is attained through the evolution of Primal Matter. Cosmic Godhood is the Zenith of Primal Matter and the Zenith of Evolution.

This defines the mission of the Evolutionary Outward Path. The Involutionary Inward Path to the Father Within or the God Within is the traditional path, which is also included in the Twofold Path of the Theoevolutionary Church.

This defines the origin of the cosmos in theological materialism and the rise to Godhood in evolution.

Becoming Godhood: How "something" can be "not-something" at the same time

If “something” is the object and “not-something” is the definition of the object, then something can be not-something at the same time, contrary to some logicians.

Theology, philosophy, science, and even the humanities, have been dominated by an intellectual leadership which features the “not-something” of definition and denotation. This has separated man from life and nature, this has also made of God merely of definition or denotation or intellectual intuition. Aquinas even thought that the highest mode of knowledge as well as the highest mode of Being was intellectual intuition, and Heidegger more or less agreed.

Godhood is not an intuitional movement in metaphysics to “union.” Godhood is attained through the evolution of the material to supermaterial objects. To “see” God we need to step back from metaphysics and intellectual intuition and “become” Godhood in nature through evolution. We evolve in the real material world to real supermaterial Godhood, not a definition or denotation of God, not a number or principle of God, not a non-material, spiritual, non-object God, but a real supermaterial Supreme Object.

Contrary to many intellectuals, the world is not a dream, the exterior world is real, the world has meaning. This is not an anti-intellectual stance—equations and definitions have helped to create life-saving technology and great books---this is the crowning of intellectual intuition with reality, with nature, with life, and an understanding of the evolution to Godhood.

On group competition

Group competition need not be seen as a misinterpretation of Social Darwinism, as man against man with tooth and claw. In the name of humanitarianism, Cattell speculated about competition between groups without genocide. Societies that are ill can be saved from extinction through research in sociobiology.

Virtually independent and self-sufficient societies can learn from one another regarding how a healthy evolving society can continue. But “progress” alone is not good enough, there is a sacred direction of evolution to Godhood which all groups can avail themselves of, and the Church can be a guide in this, even as light federalism protects the independence of many small states.

Human beings are capable of this behavior, although it requires effort. Life on earth, as well as evolution beyond the earth, may depend on it, and the bonding of religion in this will be crucial.

A key principle bringing religious meaning back to the meaningless modern world

To Aquinas, and perhaps Heidegger, the beatitude of man is the perfect act of seeing or feeling the divine being, which to them is also the highest mode of Being. This position undervalues both God and man. Buddha did much the same thing in advocating the non-material path to nirvana.

The Revealed Religions are slowly fading from human history (with a few flareups now and again) largely because of the anti-material stance, which has gone against all that people see, all that people are. Religion and metaphysics (and much of philosophy) have been an attempt to overcome any representation of real, material or supermaterial, divine objects. Even if religion bows a bit to real life (eg. everything has a season), it is not really an affirmation of real life but a plan for living a life designed to lead to an affirmation of pure, anti-material, intuition.

Godhood is not merely calculation, not meditation, not presence, not intuition, not deduction, not the human experience of bliss. Godhood is a Real Supermaterial Object, or Objects, reached through material and supermaterial evolution. The highest act of life is not merely to have intellectual intuition of God, it is to become Godhood in evolution.

Even so, in the Twofold Path we can retain or include the intellectual intuition of God, seen in the Involutionary Inward Path to the Soul-Within, but we must not be blocked there in a Great Spiritual Blockade. We must move on to the Evolutionary Outward Path, which is activated by the material Spirit-Will, so that we can, through material and supermaterial evolution, become Real Godhood.   

Redefining universalism in religion

Cattell pointed out that all religions seem to secumb to imperialism in ethics (one could add that all civilizations do too) because they take on universalism in ethics, which then weakens and destroys the founding culture. The contrast to this is the religions of national loyalties, eg. Shintoism and Hebrewism.

The Theoevolutionary Church affirms national loyalty in a universal way, each people, each small state has the right, or the duty, to contribute to the survival of its own group, this is deeply natural and it is the original basis of much of ethics. The difficulty comes with group competition, where cooperative competition needs to be strongly affirmed.

This defines universal variety, with each individual contributing to the survival and evolution of its own group. The church can help guide ethics, as can scientific knowledge from sociobiology, as all groups rise in evolution to Godhood. The God first seen in the Inward Path to the Soul of Traditional Religions was the sole goal of ethics, now the evolutionary goal of the Outward Path to Real Godhood is added to the older ethics.

“Progress” alone is not the goal, the Inward Path to the Soul alone is not the goal, Godhood by way of evolution is the final goal, which does not replace old ethics, it is added to them, with Ordered Evolution and Revitalized Conservatism.

Human beings are capable of our great, sacred, natural mission to evolve to Godhood.  Human survival, and future species survival, probably depend on advancing human intelligence to help us survive.

A Revitalized View of the Sacred in Art

Richard Wagner thought that the Ancient Greeks had created the perfect art-work, the total-art-work, (Gesamtkunstwerk), which combined music, dance, and poetry, best seen in the tragedies of Aeschylus. Later this total-art split into various factions and specialties for various reasons, which Wagner said was related to decline.

I would rather use the term “total-religion” than total art in the sense that the word “culture” comes from “cultus” or cult. This has (or at least once had) religious dimensions, because culture refers to the sanctification of daily life, architecture, clothing, art, literature and music.

We seem to instinctively know the principles of beauty, as balance, clarity, moderation, simplicity, things handsome, pretty---these are classical values. Mozart did not invent many of the patterns he used, he improved on the work of past composers. This defines Ordered Evolution.

Art can grasp the evolutionary pattern toward higher forms of beauty, toward Perfect Beauty, which defines Godhood. Truth gives meaning to Beauty---Godhood is first a Supreme Object and only secondarily a supreme definition. This view can help us move away from abstract thinking in art and back to the concrete, back to the material, back to the object, but also forward to the supermaterial.

Evolutionary Realism in the art of the projected Theoevolutionary Church can provide art content, with the new yet very old narrative of life evolving from the simple to the complex, toward Absolute Beauty and Godhood.

Using “moral imagination” in art (Russell Kirk and Burke's term) can keep moral art from becoming didactic and boring. The greatest art showed this creative moral imagination. This grounds art in the affirmation of the sacred, but with a revitalized view of the sacred.

Preventing violence by affirming human nature

Real human nature operates best in small states with harmonious populations. It is completely natural for human beings to prefer their own people and it has been disastrous to try to socialize against this deep aspect of human nature. One-world communism killed millions. But the attempt at supremacy and imperialism by one people over all other people also goes against this universal aspect of human nature, which exists in all people, all of whom seek to advance their own kind.

This strongly suggest that a light federalism protecting many small states is the most natural political configuration, and this old paleoconservative perspective can be revitalized with knowledge of sociobiology. Differences need to be protected, not abused or manipulated. Violence can be prevented by affirming real human nature in this way. Will we eventually understand this before it is too late to save human life on earth?

Look to who benefits (or wrongly thinks they do) from seeking to upset the balance of true human nature. Imperialism, multinationals, racial supremacists, those who think they alone are chosen, one-worldism in all its forms, they have been the destructive ones throughout history.

First Cause Or Endless Creation?

The refusal of the Revealed Religion to grant permission to exist, to be, unless creation is derived from God has set up the tragic confrontation between the material and spiritual world, between religion and science. The Theoevolutionary Church (TC) speaks of a cosmic evolution to Godhood, a cosmos created from Primary Matter and the Spirit-Will within matter which activates matter. Rather than a first cause we speak of endless creation and evolution. Even St. Thomas left a doctrine of creation at least somewhat open, saying that the ultimate human knowledge of God is that we do not know him.

The “perfect” seems not to be the "cause," that which seeks the Perfect is the cause, which explains why there is a cause to go somewhere it needs to go. The Spirit-Will seeks Perfect Godhood by way of activating life to evolve to Godhood.  Evolution then shapes life, not always toward Godhood. This may even be seen in relation to pagan cosmogony, where Earth Mother (Primary Matter) gives birth to life, activated by Sky Father (the Spirit-Will.) This is how the TC resolves formerly irreconcilable differences in religion and philosophy, and ancient and modern history.

The Twofold Path is a reconciler, a synthesizer, a uniter

Modern philosophy, like ancient philosophy, seems to have gone the way of religion, both Aquinas and Heidegger arrive at the mystical intellectual intuition of the Inward Path, which John Caputo describes as the “seinserfahrung” of Heidegger, and the “pati divina” of Aquinas. It is time to go beyond the Inward Path to the Outward Path, while yet including the Inward Path.

The immediate experience of God in the Inward Path to the Soul needs to be expanded outside of ourselves, even outside of the bliss of the Soul, to affirm the Outward Path of the Spirit-Will, which actives life to evolve to Real Godhood in the cosmos.

Religion and philosophy have been mainly content to immerse themselves in the presence of the Inward Soul, now we need to bring religion and philosophy back to representationalism, to the Supreme Object Godhood, evolved to in the material and supermaterial world. Godhood is grasped at a distance, or intuitively within the activation of the Spirit-Will, the virtual presence of God in the Soul is not Godhood.

It has been said that to no man can see God and live. Fear of God has blocked the path to Godhood. The natural goal of evolution is Godhood. Man tends naturally to evolve toward the divine in nature, which is Godhood.

Reaching the Inward God is the terrestrial fulfillment of the Involutionary Inward Path, reaching the Outward God is the celestial fulfillment of the Evolutionary Outward Path. The Twofold Path is a reconciler, a synthesizer, a uniter.

Religion and Evolution

Raymond Cattell and others have pointed out that it was the natural selection of groups rather than individuals (listen up libertarians) that gave us concern for ethical values, often tied to religion. The natural selection of individuals had to fit the natural selection of groups, otherwise the group would disappear. Ethics developed from this inter-group selection for the group, and religion usually fostered mutual love and self-sacrifice, as in the Ten Commandments.

But it is not just the ethical values of the survival of the group, it is what behavior contributes to the evolution of the group as well. The religion of the Theoevolutionary Church (TC) emphasizes the sacred evolution to Godhood. And it is also important to emphasize what ethical rules govern interacting groups. This then leads to a worldview of many small states, each with its variation of bio-cultural ethics advancing toward Godhood, and with all the states protected by a light federalism.

The Church guides, voluntarily, and includes research on human behavior, and examines which ethics lead to  successful survival and evolution, and the workable interactions between groups.TC does not replace the ethics of the Revealed Religions ( as Beyondism seems to advocate), TC adds research from sociobiology to the Involutionary Inward Path of the Revealed Religions, on the great mission of all groups evolving to Godhood by way of the Evolutionary Outward Path. This defines the Twofold Path.  Ordered Evolution and Revitalized Conservatism are the methods, not revolution.   

The four-pillar historical continuity

The Theoevolutionary Church contains a four-pillar historical continuity: affirming the Primal Materia of the pagan world, the Inward Path of the Middle Ages, the belief in human progress of the Enlightenment, and the futurism of evolving in the Outward Path to Godhood in the cosmos.

Resolving the Tragedy: The Return to the Source

God has been thought of as beyond the “limits” of materialism, there is always this great debasing of materialism, and along with this debasing comes the Great Spiritual Blockade against material evolution to Godhood. This is a tragic theological error because it is through material and supermaterial evolution that we evolve to Godhood.

We never overcome representationalism even if we can temporarily lose all representation in the vision of the Soul. God is not beyond representation, God is the Supreme Object, whereas the Soul is the ridding of objects from the mind.

This explains the difference between the Involutionary Inward Path to the Soul Within and the Evolutionary Outward Path to Godhood.

The mind is driven to go beyond reason to intellectual intuition, and here metaphysics ends in the beatific vision. But this is not the end. Intuition and the mind also return to the Primal Source, to the supermaterial Spirit-Will, based in matter, and activating the material world to evolve to Godhood.

The Zenith of the Mind is the beatific vision of the Soul, but the Zenith of the Soul is the return to the Source, the dynamism of the Spirit-Will, which activates life to evolve to Godhood.

We can come out from under the dark, anti-material, withering of life and get on with the cosmic task of  materially and supermaterially evolving to Godhood, while at the same time affirming the first inward, non-material, vision of God. This can resolve the tragedy of the irreconcilable and catastrophic conflict between spiritualism and materialism, paganism and the Revealed Religions, religion and science.