Tirips and the sacred process of evolution

As long as we are alive every cell in our body is activated to demand life and survival and reproductive success. This natural activation can be blocked, subverted, or it can be unknown to us, but it can't legitimately be intellectually or instinctively denied. This activation seems to reign within material life before form develops, but it is not a spiritual force it is entirely material. It is the “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”as Dylan Thomas poetically put it, and until science takes it up it will often be described poetically. I call this sacred material activation Tirips.

Scientist Francis Heylighen wrote, “ ...it is assumed that evolution is largely unpredictable and contingent on a host of uncontrollable factors, which may steer its course in any of an infinite number of directions. However, it is noted that directions in which complexity increases are generally preferred...Though fitness is relative to the environment, it has two components that can increase in an absolute sense, internal fitness (strength of linkages between components) and number of environmental perturbations that can be counteracted. Increases in these two components tend to be accompanied by respective increases in structural and functional complexity...Still, it can happen that systems evolve towards a simpler organization, although this seems rare. It is most likely to occur when the system enters a simpler environment, as when an organism becomes an internal parasite or moves back from the land to the water, but these are obviously unusual examples which go against the general trend of environments becoming more complex. The net effect will tend to be that the new ecosystem, formed by environment together with the newly added system (parasite, cave fish, aquatic mammal, etc.) will become more complex than it was before the appearance of the simplified system..."

The goal of evolving to Godhood need not deprive us of either science or religion. Defining life as evolving toward higher and higher forms and eventually to Godhood, and shaped by natural outside evolution, may be a bit further than some men want to go, but we go there. I see evolution moving inevitably in a pattern, even though it has its random elements, and the pattern has a discernible direction, in spite of instances of stagnation and retreat, toward “higher and higher more effective living forms,”as Cattell put it.

I see the universe as having an endless number of worlds moving and always evolving, with “life” evolving in some worlds, and perhaps with a few worlds evolving material life to the highest ascending supermaterial levels of life, called Godhood. The origin of sacredness and the origin of deep religion come from trying to understand this process of numberless material worlds always evolving toward supermaterial Godhood, and from seeking to understand how life can become best synchronized with this sacred process of evolution, and how we can help it along.

With the sacred material activation of Tirips working along with the process of evolution and natural selection we can indeed immanentize the eschaton, attain Godhood directly within nature and evolution.