Shouting at Hegel

Reading Hegel and his painfully pedantic but worthy attempts at synthesizing the individual and the group and the group and the universal is an absurd exercise. At one point I shouted out loud: "The biological origin of social behavior answers your dilemma!"

The endless word-making and verbiage of Hegel and those who try to explain Hegel (and this could apply to Nietzsche too) are simply answered by the famous statement of the father of the evolutionary science of sociobiology, E.O.Wilson: "Within groups, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals."

Religious and political universalism sits weakly and lightly at the furthest end of altruism, or being-for-others, which is why world peace and harmony are so difficult. And as for Hegel's universal Spirit or entirely spiritual God, it does not exists---but Godhood does exist or can exist as a supermaterial object or objects at the zenith of material evolution.

We don't need to lose religion, Godhood, or morality, the biological origin of social behavior can be expanded to high culture, which may not create the ideal world of philosophers and ascetics but it will create a real natural world with the possibility of evolving all the way to Godhood.

We can arrange ourselves in a protected ethnopluralism of ethnostates, in harmony with our genetically kin-centered and ethnocentric human nature---not Hegel's imperial state, and not the state of Marx, or Hitler---then we can evolve, with variety, toward Godhood.  Let the haggling  academics have an international research center objectively directed to that worldview.

The sacred activating dynamic of life

The "maker's mark inscribed upon the soul" (Mark Amorose) is not really inscribed upon the soul because the soul, which is probably the deepest part of the material mind, is itself activated by the even deeper evolutionary will-to-Godhood (or to tie this in with the past, the "spirit"), and it is this that is the sacred activating dynamic of life, as described in theological materialism: this is the material/supermaterial drive which is, to quote another well known poet, "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower."

What is divine in man?

To the religious gurus I ask, do not gaze down at man, head tilted with condescending patience and disappointment at man seeking to live, survive, reproduce and evolve. Do not smile with presumptuous compassion. Most religious and philosophical ideals have no existence apart from definition. There is little behind the religious and philosophical veil but words.

The hatred of materialism by the gurus has been mainly motivated by the goal of experiencing the God or Father Within, which required a blocking or cessation of material desires. That alone is a hedonistic goal and not enough. Real evolving life seeks real Godhood by way of the very drives that the gurus hate. The Twofold Path in theological materialism conservatively retains that first hedonistic glimpse of God but transforms it in the Outward Path of evolution toward real Godhood.

The fundamental and sacred orientation of life is activated from within material life toward evolving to Godhood in the material world, working along with whatever outside environment that evolution brings in the selection process.

What is divine in man is the activating Will or Spirit-Will, which is material, and activates material life toward evolving toward supermaterial Godhood. This is what drives life toward real truth, beauty, and goodness and not merely a non-material definition of these things or merely a blissful inward experience of the God Within. Life seeks to become these things as living objects with Godhood as the zenith of evolution.

Just because materialism has little direction today by man does not mean that materialism is evil and needs to be blocked in a Great Spiritual Blockade. Materialism can be aligned toward evolving to Godhood. This is what can revive religion, philosophy and science, and the cultures and civilizations that rise from these things.

Cutting The Gordian Knot Of Phenomenology

(reblog from April 2011)

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.

Why a new religious Mass of the Twofold Path is required

It is, of course, the ascetically negative way to describe it, but the experience of the God Within or the Father Within of Christ and Buddha requires the “death of life,” that is, all the desires of the flesh and the material world need to be blocked or dissipated to experience the real bliss of the God Within. This goal of the God Within defines the basic origin of Christian and Buddhist values and morals, which were later dumbed down by religious philosophers to make the extreme life of asceticism more palatable to the public. The Vedic thinkers had perhaps the best solution in declaring stages of human life allowing survival and reproduction but advocating asceticism at the end of life.

The God Within is not real Godhood, it is the first historical glimpse or experience of what Godhood may be like when life evolves in the material world to supermaterial Godhood. There seems to be an endless evolution of improvements in beauty, truth, power and goodness, with many starts and stops along the way. But this does not lead to the rejection of the Inward Path of the great religions, it describes the transformations of the Twofold Path, the involutionary and evolutionary paths, described in theological materialism, which includes both paths and both philosophical naturalism and religious theology.

The charge of megalomania is not enough to stop the call for a new religious Mass, which is required to affirm the Twofold Path, patterned after the traditional Mass in the conservative way of including the best of the past in the present and future, to help bond and give solace over the long term evolution of life toward Godhood.

The fear of determinism in every field

The pervasiveness of the fear of determinism in every field of knowledge is surprising. It exists not only in the nature/nurture debates of sociobiology and psychology but within the debates over which national territories were the first to evolve Homo sapiens, the traditionalism/Marxism debates, and even within physics where the “indeterminacy” of the “superposition” now seems to rule.

It always comes back to the physical, the material, at least for me, where seemingly free and random movements are more like the boulder rolling down the mountain with physical forces determining the paths. When the wind blows the leaves of the tree it is not a mystical force, it is physical, planetary, weather forces.  I think the superposition in physics remains tied to physical forces still needing to be better determined.

And in the same way Godhood, the Spirit, and the Soul are material or supermaterial forces, they are not immaterial, spiritual, indeterminate, mystic forces. The Spirit, or Spirit-Will-To-Godhood, is a material or supermaterial force within life that helps activate life to evolve steadily toward Godhood in the universe, with many starts and stops along the way due to having to work in conjunction with the ups and downs of natural evolution.

So why this pervasive fear of determinism? It seems tied to our drives toward survival and reproductive success, mostly unconscious, and we simply can't accept any force as being determined to control us or win over us, unless it is a force which allows us to win---even if we have to invent the force. This makes the truth about these things hard to come by.

Can the lamb and the wolf be friends?

The “immaterial” lamb (the God or Father-Within) of the revealed religions has largely not brought the material “wolf” into the fold where they might lie down together in some leafy glade. The revealed religions have said that only the lamb can be king and wear the crown, and in response the wolf has denied the lamb. Material life demands life.

This is not a dance of destruction, the lamb and wolf can live together in the leafy, but competitive, glade of evolution, but differences and separations need to be protected. The God Within of the Inward Path is the virtual Godhood which is attained in the reality of the Outward Path of evolution toward Godhood.

The wolf needs liberation from the Great Spiritual Blockade which has hung over the religious world for so many centuries, but the ascetic vision of the lamb is not destroyed by the wolf, that has been the mistake of nonreligious liberalism. The Twofold Path conservatively retains both.

In theological materialism the lamb-God-Within is seen as the precursor of the wolf-God-Without. The Involutionary Inward Path of the lamb leads to the Evolutionary Outward Path of the wolf. (One could also use the symbol of the tiger as the Outward Path and the domesticated horse as the Inward Path)

A Religious Material Solution to the Great Spiritual Blockade

My hypothesis is that a very ancient split between the warriors and the priests led to the religious split between the material and spiritual, and finally led to a great spiritual blockade of the evolution toward real Godhood. Some of this history is brought down to us through the Vedic history of India, but it becomes such a tangled story of different meanings for the same words, such as the Devas and Asuras who competed in ancient India and Persia, that it is very difficult to decipher this split.

I think it is likely that warriors came before priests in the history of mankind and I think priests probably evolved to enhance warriors with ascetic practises that calmed or encouraged warriors before battle. Then at some point priests branched off from warriors toward an asceticism that blocked material actions and material desires, which would include making war. The discovery from deep meditation of what came to be known as the God Within was as big a discovery for religion as the wheel was for secular life. The experience was so blissful (see Christ or Buddha) that the gurus wanted to do nothing else, and certainly did not want to make war, yet alone make love.

But priests eventually had to learn to rationalize materialism and moved away from strict asceticism, perhaps due to the necessities of actual survival success, and we see this in religious philosophy from that time to this time. For example, in the Indian Bhagavad Gita warriors are taught how to kill yet still be spiritual. And there was also the really brilliant solution of having practical stages of life for every season of man in Hinduism. Then later St. Thomas Aquinas found a way, with help from Aristotle, to affirm real sexual reproduction and the general business of a living and breathing in a culture outside of the monastery. If everyone was celibate there would not even be monasteries yet alone human life. This warrior/priest split even arose in the more recent Traditionalist School where Evola seems to have preferred the dominance of the warrior and Guénon the dominance of the priests, although this has been rationalized as being only stages in the same spiritualism.

Judaism and Islam have found a way to conduct themselves like a pendulum which can swing to the extremes and back to the middle when living circumstances call for it. (see Scott Richert's essay in Chronicles, Aug 2016) Even terrorism has been justified this way. But Christianity and Buddhism have had a harder time developing a philosophy for living in the material word, in spite of the brilliant efforts of thinkers like Aquinas, since their founders were so obviously calling for a non-material celibate life in order to see or experience the God Within.

In all of these religions and religious histories God remains strictly a non-material spiritual God.

The religious philosophy of theological materialism has another way to join materialism and spiritualism within the dynamic movement of the evolution of material life to supermaterial Godhood, with the transformation of the mistaken idea of spiritualism into supermaterialism. Theological materialism does not reject the old religious Inward Path of asceticism but sees this as the first symbolic glimpse of the real Godhood reached through the Outward Path of material evolution. The Twofold Path can be harmonized. The war between the material and spiritual can really end, without all the past rationalizations, and without the great spiritual blockade.

On telling the truth

Telling the truth and hating lies was probably initiated by my parents who hated lies and would punish lies but rarely punish the truth. I hate lies.

I will occasionally tell a white lie to keep from hurting people, but even this much can be a danger to a truthful social modulation. I always hope that people can tell the difference between social and anti-social truths, but they often cannot, and so telling the truth does have social consequences---so courage is required. (As an aside I think actor Marlon Brando was right when he said the essence of great acting is lying truthfully.)

But the truth is harder to find when you wade into philosophy. The lesson here is that you tell the truth as you know it, never lie, and correct yourself when you are wrong about the truth.

Where does no duality between the universal and particular lead?

This philosophical argument can be resolved by understanding that in a secondary way human nature is universal and works along with particular individuals and groups, and in a primary religious way a universally determined material Will-Spirit-To-Godhood activates within the life of particular individuals and groups. I see no real duality necessary in this structure. This seems to cancel out the dualities of eastern religions, Plato, much of the Enlightenment, on up to Leo Strauss, as well as many of the postmoderns.

The universal is also concrete, particular, and material, and even Godhood is concretely material/ supermaterial, arrived at through natural evolution, helped along by reason. Evolution defines the good, beautiful, and true as hierarchical culminating in Godhood. This calls us more to action than ascetic retirement. The religious, philosophical, cultural and political question then becomes, how do we best evolve in the world toward Godhood? For example, the ethnopluralism hypothesis stems from this consideration.

How do we recover beauty, nature and the reverence for religion?

It was a shock to the Rousseauian primatologists and anthropologists to discover that Chimpanzees hunted live monkey meat, it greatly disturbed their fond idea that the primitive world was nonviolent and harmonious until modern human cultural came on the scene. Even today sociobiologist's have not made much of a dent in the cultural Marxism which controls the academic world.

The art world too has held back the movement toward realism, being infected by the same cultural Marxism. Art went insane over the last hundred years of modernism and postmodernism and became full of triviality, ugliness and ironic political propaganda, since they were allowed nothing to believe in.

The religious world lost its connection with nature long ago with the non-materialism of the religious founders, who pursued the experience of the God Within by first blocking or overcoming all the natural material drives of life. Plato and many philosophers did the same thing pursuing abstract pure reason.

How do we recover beauty, nature and the reverence for religion? By seeing and understanding that nature evolves toward the beauty and reverence of Godhood, aided by religion, art, science, and culture. This means the ascetic Inward Path to the God Within is adjusted or transformed (not rejected) in the Outward Path of material evolution to supermaterial Godhood.

In theological materialism, religion pursues beauty and nature in evolution. Nature moves toward Godhood by way of evolution. And religion, art, science, and culture can be an aid in this great mission bringing the unification and harmony that many of us now lack, but want.

How life has more meaning than modern philosophy or science claims

Those who suggest that life cannot have objective meaning, or that life can only have relative values, do so by rejecting the unfree activation of life itself. We may be free to choose but it is always choice within the realities of determined elements which define life.

Life has real objective meaning in that biology activates life to do real living things, which we are not legitimately free to reject. To reject the meaning of the real activation of life and biology is to virtually accept death as meaning.

We can even go further in finding determined meaning in life when we affirm the objective reality of  goals in biological evolution, or a teleology of biological evolution, that moves---with starts and stops---toward the zenith of higher evolution, which defines Godhood. This of course is rarely accepted by modern philosophy or science (or even religion) but I think it defines the ultimate or highest determined meaning of life, biology and evolution. This theological materialism gives a vital religious foundation to the meaning of life.

Solving the diabolical problem of human nature

Very strong drives within human nature take human nature away from human nature, with bad consequences. For example, the will to live, or the will to power of individuals and groups often denies real human nature as a means to power. Universalism and equality are promoted even as the individuals and groups who promote these things consciously or unconsciously drive for their own unequal superiority.

Throughout human history human nature has been, and remains, kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Culturally and politically if we want to harmonize with real human nature we will form ourselves into ethnic regions and states protected by some sort of federalism.

I think we have a chance to be realistic and to harmonize with the laws of nature, and find a way to overcome this diabolical problem of human nature, because I do not believe that the will to power, although very powerful, is the central activator of life. I think the will or spirit within life, which I have called the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood, activates material life to evolve toward the supreme success of attaining Godhood within the cosmos, and this drive, working along with the natural selection process, is dominate even over the will to power, which is only a means. That is the origin of the instinctive and logical hope behind advocating theological materialism and ethnopluralism.

The unification of the material and non-material

Non-materialism did not balance with materialism, it merely gave a grudging nod to real life while it placed spiritualism over all things, and so mankind lost its way. The worship of non-materialism, really nothingness, caused the Great Spiritual Blockade of life itself.

The same un-balancing followed as traditionalists worshiped the past, and revolutionaries worshiped the future, which blocked real life from evolving. In philosophy, words, ideas, and numbers were worshiped over living things, even though words are only symbols of living things.

Real balance and unification comes from retaining the past as it is transformed by the present and future. And in the same way the non-materialism of the symbolic inward God can be retained as it is transformed by living and by evolving toward supermaterialism. Religion balances with the rest of life when Godhood is better understood as the zenith of material evolution.

This is the real unification of not only all the arts, but the unification of religion, science and general culture, which can join with the past, present, and future, and with evolving life, as the Great Spiritual Blockade is unblocked.

What is human nature and how are we to behave?

The old Greeks seem to have taken it for granted that if they defined “education” as bringing human nature out of us, the next stage would tell us how to behave. But as time went on these things split apart and science centered on who we are without telling us how to behave, and religion centered mainly on telling us how to behave. Now religious ideas on how to behave have been largely rejected and science has offered only amoral empiricism which few pay attention to. So hedonism and nihilism have become common in the modern world.

I think both religion and science are required to answer the question: what is human nature and how are we to behave? If we are to define education as bringing human nature out of us, then education has to feature the evolutionary science of sociobiology, which tells us that human nature remains mainly as it has been since it was formed in hunter/gatherer times---even the smallest change in human nature and our DNA structure, for example, in our immune system, takes hundreds of thousands of years--- we remain kin-centered, ethnocentric, gender-defined, and so on, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection. Sounds like traditional conservatism doesn't it?

Well, almost. Religion does not always line up well with this definition of human nature. Altruism, devotion to the interest of others, was evolved to be successful with distinct local groups competing with other groups, and was not evolved to be a universal devotion to everyone. This fact of human nature leads instinctively and logically to ethnopluralism more than to a universal political love.

In a crowded world of distinctively different groups preferring their own people, who pay little attention to religion or science, ethnopluralism is the old/new educated way to define human nature and to tell us how to behave. Future religion and science can point toward our material evolution to supermaterial Godhood, which was first glimpsed inwardly in traditional religion.

Theological materialism is idealism without spiritualism

Theological materialism affirms idealism but doesn't involve spiritualism, mere words, numbers, the philosophical games of epistemology, or the phony political versions of materialism which mistakenly believe human nature is internationally altruistic, when altruism is really kin, group, national, and sociobiologically-centered.

 

The way to affirm idealism is to affirm the idealism inherent in the materialism of evolution.  We may be limited in how we see the world, and frogs are even more limited, but it is just foolish to suggest that the world we see cannot be proven to exist.

Life evolves in this material world where at best it can evolve toward a supermaterial world, defined as real Godhood. This world of evolution can be seen as unlimited as long at it is understood as existing within the real material world.

Real limitation exists in spiritualism, mere words, and number games, and the phony political versions of materialism, not only because they define and try for an unreal world that does not exist, but because they block the limitless dynamic of material evolution.

Why are space, time and materiality thought of as “limited” by religion and philosophy? It is the wish fulfillment of spirituality, numbers, words and symbols. Are night dreams still shamanistically thought of as real life? Apparently, daydreaming, asceticism (glorified sweat lodges), and now drugs, are not enough.

We can evolve in the material world to supermaterial real Godhood if we can overcome the limitations of fantasy and spiritualism, and the mistaken political and philosophical versions of materialism and idealism.

The deeper tragedy of virtual reality, and the return of the real world

Is the world of virtual reality so new? Religion and philosophy have for centuries worshiped ideas, words, numbers, and symbols over natural reality. The real tragedy of the acceptance of virtual reality is that it has largely blockaded the evolution of material life toward real supermaterial Godhood. This is what I call the Great Spiritual Blockade. The “permanent things,” which conservatives rightly affirm, have nevertheless been taken away from the natural world and human biology, which are the foundation of the real permanent things, and a non-material spiritual world has been defined as permanent. The world of religion and philosophy have largely been as much a virtual world as the world of artificial intelligence.
 

Computers are evolving not people. The “revenge of the nerds” has become a revenge against human evolution, which has been labeled politically incorrect. I have no problem with the advance of artificial intelligence and computers in general, and I have no problem with religion and philosophy, as long as they do not worship virtual reality in place of real life and real evolution. The philosophical world of postmodernism now taught in our colleges and universities, which claims to be superior to old religion and philosophy, also worships a virtual world of ideas, words, and numbers over real life. This is really the unreal  “brave new world” we were warned about.
 

The philosophy of theological materialism seeks to remedy the great blockade of reality and restore the real permanent things, so that we may continue the evolution of material life to real supermaterial Godhood. The old, virtual, inward God can be conservatively retained but transformed in the Twofold Path, as the virtual world becomes secondary and the real world returns. A big task, yes, but it has to be done if real life is to survive and evolve on earth and out into the cosmos.

The remedy for mere words and numbers which undervalue life, religion, and philosophy

We know that words and numbers operate as symbols. All of the world can be seen as symbols. There are things in the cosmos that we don't know yet and so we may not as yet have attached words or numbers to them. Like numbers, words have “hidden” meanings. But living things are not words or numbers, things are things, objects are objects only artificially represented by words and numbers.

The problem is that we soon start to make sense of the world only through words and numbers, and this is where we can move away from life and reality. Words and numbers can be seductive, words and numbers can seem better than living things, or things experienced. The understanding of the world only through words and numbers can be like a musical drug.

Words and numbers can symbolize things which do not exist or exist only in words and numbers in our minds. This can be a fun game and does little harm as long as it is known only as a game. Problems come when fantasy words and numbers are worshiped.

So as not to undervalue words and numbers, it it possible for us to think of things by way of words and numbers that are at first known in words and numbers and only later known as real actual things. Theoretical physics has occasionally done this, or in ancient times the Pythagorean numbers represented actual or projected musical harmonies in the world. The problem here is not that words and numbers can predict future real things, the problem comes in worshiping the words and numbers. 

This is the condition of much of religion and philosophy (especially the more esoteric versions) which often represent only words and numbers, however sacred, or worship things that are only fantasy words and numbers rather than real things. Life is undervalued this way.

When Godhood is understood as a living object, or objects, living and continually evolving in this world, and reached through material and supermaterial evolution, then this allows us to become Gods through evolution, and so we cannot and will not worship words or numbers alone as God.

This definition of evolutionary Godhood is at the present time thought and known mainly in words and numbers but must also eventually be seen and experienced as the zenith of the evolution of real living things. The tragic mistake of worshiping only words or numbers will not be made in this philosophy of theological materialism, because real concrete life needs to be guided in this world as best we can, through science, religion, and culture in general, toward evolving to real Godhood.

The older traditional words and numbers and inward experiences of God which define God need not be rejected, they can be seen as numbers, words, and symbolic experiences within the Inward Path, which now are known as real living objects that we evolve to become in the Outward Path. So conservatism in this transformation can prevail.

The Next Utopia?

If the nefarious elite who control politics today manage to block populists like Donald Trump from leadership positions, it will be the beginning of the end for the present white majority culture, because the Clinton's, who are complete demagogues, will play to the minority ethnic groups who will soon be a majority of the population---demographics will have its way.

If this happens---if not now it may soon happen---then things will change, and there will be civil disruptions and even civil war as ethnic groups naturally compete with one another. If we were to design fair and biologically healthy rules for a politics of the future, rules that would harmonize best with real human nature, I propose the following:

We would need to design rules of politics which organize the state not primarily to transfer the wealth of the people to an elite, who also control the military, but we need to organize around the biological dynamic of the upward evolution of life. Free enterprise and the military are vital but they would follow the evolutionary dynamic.

Something like the polis or city states of ancient Greece, the ethnostate would be the fundamental political unit, protected by a federalism advantages to all. International research centers of sociobiology could aid in guiding healthy evolution---something like Raymond Cattell and Wilmot Robertson suggested---and the philosophy of theological materialism could help guide the Church.

This would create the variety and independent living and breeding patterns which encourage real progress in evolution, if merit is seriously considered. This would harmonize with real human nature which continues to be kin-centered and group-selecting, among other traditional traits. The federated states of the United States, with their constitutional principle of the separation of powers and states, could even accommodate this structure.

This political dynamic tends to happen naturally, as empires always eventually fall back into natural ethnostates. It seems far off for now but I think we should be taking steps, gradual, legal steps, to eventually make this a reality for all people, all ethnic groups. The present attempt to force all people together into one motley center, controlled and exploited by an elite, does not work well and will only cause destruction and decline.