The Good, the True and the Beautiful

The Good, the True and the Beautiful have been desacralized by the secularist, in art and in every other way, but they have also been desacralized by the Traditionalists when they deny a biological imperative, or evolution, leading to the Good, True and Beautiful. Seeking the zenith of these things means seeking God, through both the Traditional, Involutionary Inward Path, and the Evolutionary Outward Path.

On The Evolving Catholic

God is the end of all our actions.

The Inward Path: Seven Involutionary Virtues
Prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope and charity.

The Outward Path: Evolution

The goal of the Involutionary Virtues is to understand God, the goal of the Evolutionary Ethics is to evolve to God.

“ There are six main entities to which an individual's ethical values can be functionally oriented: fellow group members, the group government, other group governments, members of other groups, individuals committed to a Beyondist Ethic, and, above all, the Evolutionary Purpose. Each of these objects calls for precise alignment of its loyalties, in a situational hierarchy among them. For example, a man's ethical loyalty to his own group exceeds that to members of "mankind" generally. However (a) the injunctions of the different "object" ethics are different, mostly, in kind, and (b) circumstances put emphasis on the primary survival of all groups, if the total existence of man is threatened. The rose diagram of ethical values should answer many ethical questions now troubling teachers and religious-political parties.” “A Concise Beyondist Catechism” (Raymond Cattell) This can work in harmony with the Catholic social structure of Subsidiarity.

As we said in an earlier post, to love ones neighbor is not literally to love the whole world, which would be contrary to human nature, it is to love one's kin, one's group. This definition harmonizes with the definition of love of God: evolution takes place best in diverse, separate groups, thus in loving one's group and loving ones neighbor we love God, and we love God by evolving to God. We love the world in the sense that we affirm the right of every group to love its own neighbor, its own group, then all groups may love God by evolving to God.

Material law is in harmony with spiritual evolution, the Classical joins the Christian, science synchronizes with religion.

God is the end of all our actions, thus we must understand the right way to reach God, and if He is not the end of all our actions then our actions our meaningless, or ignorant, or perhaps even evil.

God Has Given Limited Freedom

If God chose to He could predict every free evolutionary action of man and the world, yet He allows His children the freedom to compete in the world. This defines us as mainly determined yet partially free, even though we are completely determined from God's perspective.

God has given us limited freedom within the boundaries of nature and human nature. God created natural evolution as a proving or testing ground for virtues, God desires the best to evolve to Him.

Metacorporeality

Plato's “Ideas” or Forms seem to have existed outside the mind of God, and Augustine and Aquinas rightly relocated the Ideas inside the mind of God, in the Trinity.

In a like manner or method, we relocate the separation of spirit and matter by these sages and place spirit and matter inside Godhood. However “matter” in Godhood is the highest evolved materiality, which has been defined as spirit.

God is more than an incorporeal Idea. The separation of the definition of God from the material has led to the destructive war between religion and science.

We introduce the term Metacorporeality because metaphysics is a term that separates spirit from matter, and we think that causes confusion.

Unlike Marxism

Unlike Marxism, which takes Hegel's dialectical operation from heaven to earth, or spirit to matter, the Evolutionary Christian Church transforms earth and matter through evolution to the heaven of the supermaterial and to Godhood.  This is theological materialism.

The Evolutionary Basis of Political Philosophy in the Theoevolutionary Church

Transforming Cattell's “Beyondist” perspective, we agree that evolution is the primary process in the universe, however, we believe evolution was initiated by God and is ordered by God's laws.

Human evolution indeed proceeds by natural selection among groups, which is determined by natural selection among individuals, genetically and culturally.  Natural selection among groups and individuals requires variation among groups and individuals, and one important factor in group survival is the laws that govern the group. The evolution of the best values is based on intergroup competition and survival, but more importantly, values are based on the attainment of Godhood through the Outward Path of evolution as well as the Inward Path of Christianity.

These principles are transformed into Christian social philosophy in general, where subsidiarity and federalism or small ethnostates are the preferred social and political structures, which best allows for evolution, variation and competition.

We believe that the end goal of evolution is Godhood, that is, the Outward Path attains the same Godhood that is seen in the Inward Path of religion. These two paths relate to the Two Laws of Practical Evolutionary Law and Speculative Evolutionary Law, which are, in the Theoevolutionary Church, the transformed laws of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Primordial wisdom and new myth-making in the Evolutionary Christian Church

We intuit as well as reason that there was an original primordial wisdom which was dispersed, like a prism refracting light, into various later religions. Today the Vedas of India, and perhaps a few oral dispensers of Vedic wisdom, probably contain the largest amount of material that remains from that primordial wisdom.

Christianity, and other religions refocused wisdom which had in some cases lost focus. Christ came to complete this wisdom. Catholicism contains the largest amount of primordial wisdom in the West.  The Theoevolutionary Church (TC) is again refocusing Christianity, not only back to the primordial wisdom but forward to the world of the Enlightenment and modern science.

In this sense, ECC initiates a new symbol-making or myth-making, while at the same time relating back to primordial wisdom. Basically, we have defined primordial wisdom as having been the Inward Path, which we affirm, and in addition, we have included the Outward Path of bio-spiritual evolution to God.

TC redeems the inward vision of God, that primordial glimpse of the ancient knowledge of God, while at the same time refocusing and defining Godhood as also Him who we must evolve to in the Kosmos. As a consequence of this task we have refocused old symbols, or created new symbols, since there seems to have been only hints, if that, of the conception of evolution to God in the primordial symbols and myths, although we are still searching.

“Climbing Back Down The Complexity Ladder”

An excellent article in “New Scientist,” (April 2, 2008) “Why the Demise of Civilization May Be Inevitable,” by Debora MacKenzie, is to me an affirmation of conservatism, or rather paleoconservatism.

Researchers in various fields have been suggesting that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile, eventually it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down. This seems to have been inevitable in all past civilizations.

We need to shift to decentralized networks, our strength will be in our distributed decision making, we can't be afraid of redundancy. Efficiency leads to complexity which leads to rigidly connected systems where one small shock can bring the whole system down.

If industrialized civilization based on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture breaks down, the urban masses—half the world—will suffer most. Subsistence farmers will suffer the least. This suggests not being against technology but against bigness, and globalism.

The American Constitution affirms a system of independent “redundant” states, even perhaps ethnostates if so desired, but the Constitution has been greatly distorted and abused. Paleoconservatives and constitutional libertarians may yet have their day, even if it comes after collapse.

Who has the courage for this?

Aquinas (thesis)
Cattell (anti-thesis)
The Evolutionary Christian Church (synthesis)

Notes toward unity

Inward Path Involution—Primordial Tradition-- "Integral Catholicism” as agreement on Principles with other authentic Traditions, while retaining traditional Catholicism.

Outward Path Evolution—united with Primordial Tradition, adapting Beyondism, etc., unblocking The Great Spiritual Blockade to Materiaspiritus and Godhood.

Post-traditionalism?

In what sense would TC be Post-traditionalist?

Traditionalism—keeping the old old
High Modernism—making the old new
Modernism—making the new
Postmodernism—making old or new okay
Post-traditionalism—making the new old.

But then, wouldn't Post-traditionalism be Conservatism?

Affirming Jung's bio-spiritual view, more or less

Carl Jung located his world view, his view of the psyche, in the physical or biological world, even if he seems to have had doubts about it later, and admitted some belief in the supernatural beyond the physical. We would more or less agree with this biological assessment, accept that we affirm the Spirit or God-Within as beyond the physical yet still housed in the physical, as a source of knowledge of God, as well as a spiritual activator.

The Spirit could be described as a Divine Manifestation, or Enlightened-Intuition, or it can and has been described in many other terms, with many planes and levels of existence. What we do affirm, unlike the Traditional view, is that the Spirit-Within, the Divine within, is not Godhood but is a glorious aspect or spiritual hint of the Godhood which we can reach at the culmination of biological-spiritual evolution.

Our view of the Spirit-Within is more in line with Jung's biological view than perhaps with the religious or esoteric sages. We agree that the Divine, which the great sages were describing, was correctly beyond Jung's physical world, yet perhaps unlike the view of the sages, for all intents and purposes the Spirit remains housed within Jung's physical world until It reaches Its destination after eons of bio-spiritual evolution to Godhood. The Spirit is thus both immanently and transcendently within.

( Here is a sort of Wilberian and interesting introduction to Jung by M. Alan Kazlev. )

Evolution Follows Natural Law

According to Aquinas the point of ethics is to discover the essence of each aspect of creation and then pursue actions that promote the flourishing of that essence. This also affirms evolution and natural selection. Evolution seen through reason, and before that seen with the intuitive intellect, needs to be transmuted into the Church. Both empirically-minded reason and the non empirically-minded intellect can come together to define evolution in natural law.

For example, we can say that life seeks God by way of biological evolution as well as by seeking God through the Traditional involutionary methods of prayer and meditation (the Twofold Path). The finer points of evolution can enlarge ends and means within natural law. Political philosophy can affirm subsidiarity, federalism, variety,  and constitutional liberty on the bases of the natural law defined in evolution. We are all on the path to Godhood.

Materiaspiritus

Two roads converge,
The vertical is preserved,
From involution to
Evolution, one does
Not exclude, we must
Redeem the material,
Fully misunderstood,
The trees and flowers
And mankind are no
Satanic seduction,
God exists Materiaspiritus,
Evolution must travel there.

Good and Evil In Evolution

It is not only part of our metaphysical nature to seek God, it is part of our physical nature to seek God. We were evolved to be able to make more or less free choices within determined aspects of nature and God.

God creates life of “necessity” but with the “contingency” of meritocracy. Men make choices in evolutionary competition. Thus evolution becomes one more way to become “good” in God's eyes.

“Evil” is the “privation of the good,” which affirms Aquinas. God is the highest good. Evolution is the contingent meritocracy necessarily set up by God, the goal of which is to attain Godhood. The other virtues also remain as aids in this end goal.

The Fatal Flaw and the Return

The U.S. Constitution is the best and most realistic secular system for securing classical and Christian justice for all, if is is not altered. The fatal flaw of this system is that the Founders were so cynical about power that they underestimated the Church in its role in guiding power, and we see the consequences. The Capitalists have chosen material gain over moral principle. We are falling apart while the Capitalists cast their lot for the leftover pieces.

Can the Constitution still secure morality and justice? To do so we must return to the original unaltered version (see Ron Paul.) Other solutions to our decline seem revolutionary, while Conservatism works best over the long term. It seems that what will happen first will be the revenge of socialism on capitalism, as the cycle continues with extremes. The middle ground is when Capitalism yields to agriculture and small business, owned by many men, not by a few, supported by our great Constitution and the Catholic Church. (Distributism examines this idea)

The Child and the Adult

The Traditional sages spoke of simplicity and poverty, of being like a child or a poor man, when referring to attaining the involutionary kingdom of God-Within, in contrast to the multiplicity of materialism. The Evolutionary Christian Church affirms this traditional path, yet we also go on to call for the complexity of becoming an adult, to attain the evolutionary bio-spiritual kingdom of Godhood. These are not contrasting paths.

Bird And Snake

Traditionally, material life is symbolized as the snake coiling itself around the Tree, or around a man who does not involve himself in action without desire, desire is this way symbolized as the snake.

We apply another symbol, the Firebird, the Phoenix who rises from the state of involutionary nirvana to evolve to the evolutionary God.

Action With and Without Desire

The term “action without desire” describes involution, the term “action with desire” describes evolution. The latter is virtually left out of all Traditional religions in what we call the Great Spiritual Blockade, which creates a conscious indifference to the fruits of action (see the Gospels and the Bhagavad-Gita, also this work of Rene Guenon.)

The Evolutionary Christian Church combines involution and evolution, uniting religion and science this way expresses unity not separation. In the history of religions new forms express unity more broadly and more deeply.

Heaven and nirvana can be attained in the involutionary path, this has been called “immortality,” where the sage has reached the “primordial state,” the source that man dwelled in “before the Fall.” But this is only half the goal, if that, obtained by “action without desire.” The danger is to stop here, at involutionary nirvana, blockaded by the bliss of this experience.

We must not stop, we must proceed to evolutionary Godhood, attained through long bio-spiritual evolution, the hint of which we attained in the involutionary blissful reflection of God-Within.

The Ouroboros

The involutionary symbolism of the Traditionalists, and those who study the Kabbalah, and others, can be an aid, although a complicated aid, in reaching the Soul-Within, but God is only "reflected" here, in the Soul and Spirit which are the God-Within. Much of this involutionary knowledge can be mistaken for ultimate wisdom, but it is knowledge like the Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its tail. The God attained by evolution, which is reflected in the Spirit-Within, is far beyond.

The Whole

The individual is important, family is important, kin is important, race is important, region is important, state is important, nation is important, the world is important, yet overall, the Church is important. This is subsidiarity, and light federalism.

The Esoteric In the Evolutionary Christian Church

Closing the gap between science and religion

To continue applying the shell and kernel symbol here in a new way, and not as Rene Guenon applied them in the traditional way: when one sees through the shell of exoteric religion to the kernel, or at least discerns the path to the kernel, then one can see a glimpse of the path to the Center, to the kernel, to Godhood. In becoming conscious of the path, one can then follow the path; this knowledge then enters the evolutionary path, the esoteric path.

Bio-spiritual evolution to God becomes this next stream of the esoteric, and the traditional esoteric streams now become exoteric. The paths of involution to the Soul-Within, formerly, in tradition, defined as esoteric, become exoteric, however difficult they are to attain.

“Science” this way enters the esoteric realm, in knowing, or at least learning the arcane bio-spiritual ways to evolve to Godhood. The huge gap between religion and science, East and West, is closed.

Godhood is this way both disguised and protected by the very nature of things. Wide are the exoteric ways, but the esoteric path to God in the Kosmos is rare.

Why Small Government

The main objection to big government is often overlooked. It is not merely because free people are happier, more creative and more natural, it is because solving human problems and seeing human destiny cannot be accomplished merely through the worship of secular government, but by the religious, moral influence on society and government, which is necessarily therefore of a light federal form.

How could one not notice?

How could one not notice
the garden that grew
the star, a far away
magnet, a shuffling
of immaculate earth,
a window of perfection,
directing the future,
spinning the world,
unfurling the flag,
on the path to Godhood?

The Niche

The atomic niche is small,
yet the power of the Kosmos
is there, and revolutions
begin quietly, the atom
grows to Godhood, numinous
truths are sealed within the mountain,
the numbers are bizarre.

Symbols and Primordial Truths

Many secret societies appear to be using ancient primordial symbols, which were originally meant to aid elite “religious” seekers in reaching the involutionary Soul within, for nonreligious, materialistic and even sinister purposes. And the Jungians tend to apply symbols to the human psyche, and less to a beyond-human religion, so they can mislead as well.

For a purer reading of primordial symbols examine the esoteric writings of Rene Guenon. Or you could skip the others, which can lead to great confusion, and begin with TC, which is cutting the Gordian Knot of confusion, rather than endlessly trying to nitpick and unravel the symbols.

Inseparable Natural and Supernatural

Affirming the Catholic Church

Catholics have believed that there should be no false separation between the natural and the supernatural. The natural is seen as the path to the supernatural. The Church believes that there is perfect compatibility between faith and reason.

We see this as being an essential Western perspective, and we interpret this as the way for the Church to affirm science and evolution. This is why the Catholic Church is superior, and this is a central reason why we affirm it.

We see the natural path of biological evolution, which can be mostly understood by reason, as leading to the supernatural and Godhood, which can be mostly seen by faith. Catholic universities reaching back to the very first universities believed that there should be no separation between the natural and supernatural, and this is how we expand and affirm that concept. Will the Church agree? I suppose we shouldn't hold our breath.

Saving Christianity

The “new religion” of science, which has been very gradually growing since the Renaissance, does have something to add to religion. This new religion may eventually destroy Christianity. We must transmute this new religion of science into the old religion of Christendom, the way the stages of the human nervous system did not destroy the old nervous system but incorporated-while-transcending the old system, the reptilian brain led to the mammalian brain built upon it, not the exclusion of the reptilian.

The combination of involution and evolution, representing religion and science, which is synthesized in the Theoevolutionary Church, can save religion from its increasing deterioration. We see no other organization which seems concerned with this great task. If Christianity rejects the bio-spiritual (but really supermaterial) aspects of evolution it will doom itself to the fate of the old pagan religions. But when Christianity rises again it will contain these evolutionary bio-spiritual elements.

No Split

The ideas (or truths) of the Theoevolutionary Church do not contradict the Church, they are of another evolutionary realm, whereas the truths of the Church are involutionary.

We have affirmed the material world, after centuries of neglect by religion. This is a reconciliation of the spiritual and the material by way of material evolution to supermaterial Godhood, not a split, and not a denial of the truths of the Church; both realms are needed to attain Godhood. We very much want to retain the unity of the Church.

The Sacred Conjunction

Traditionalists denounce “evolutionism,” it seems to me, because it talks in terms of “progress” in evolution: the origin of the thing is less important than the form the thing eventually attains. That is, they say God is greater than any evolving thing could be, so how could there be “progress?”

The Evolutionary Christian Church affirms the conjunction of two worldviews: we acknowledge the sovereignty of God yet we affirm cosmic evolution as the way to arrive at progressively higher states, and life forms, until the highest Godhood is attained.

We join with the Traditionalists in their ancient involutionary way to see and contact the God within. Many of us may resemble our earthly father, but more importantly, we contain the image within of our heavenly Father, at the zenith of evolution, which is not merely an image.

Affirming The Continuity Of The Church

We insist on transmuting the evolutionary side of the Theoevolutionary Church to the involutionary Traditional Church, which contains the continuity of civilization from the time of Christ to the Roman Empire to today. A break from this continuity or unity is not affirmed. From our side we acknowledge no break with the Church, regarding the Involutionary Inward Path. We have added the Evolutionary Outward Path. This is our Twofold Path.

Opening The Floodway

Opening The Floodway

The Evolutionary Christian Church initiates what we call “Opening The Floodway” to release The Great Spiritual Blockade ( i. e. the denial by Tradition of biological-spiritual evolution.)

The Great Spiritual Blockade has blocked at least the following: The Traditional ( Primordial Wisdom, the prototype ), Various Sacred Forms (secondary spiritual centers to the original ), Ethnic Chosen (claims of exclusive ethnic knowledge of Primordial Wisdom ), Exoteric Shells ( religions with external aspects of Tradition ), and Litterali (profane rejection or ignorance of the sacred .)

Inner United With Outer

In the general view of Christian history the “outer” barbarian is always wrestling with “inner” traditional Christianity, and this view was set from the beginning by the general ethos against “materialism.” The Evolutionary Christian Church wants to retain every scrap of the inner tradition, yet it also wants to include  outer evolution, based on the inner Soul and Spirit must evolve by the outer means of bio-spiritual materialism. Godhood is the highest evolved Objects in the cosmos.

Beyond Satori

The Evolutionary Bodhisattva

It is another New Age cop-out to describe eternity as “timelessness” in the “present moment,” or to describe the “now-moment” as eternity. The notion of “everlasting time,” or biological immortality is thus disparaged, (see Ken Wilber or Andrew Cohen) and so the Christian as well as the materialist view is disparaged.

Deeper knowledge within the now-moment, which Eastern religions are so found of, is blocked out by what we call “The Great Spiritual Blockade,” where Gurus East and West enjoy swimming and engorging themselves in their personal satoris.

That which we see and experience in the satori is a virtual glimpse of that which we must evolve to, biologically and spiritually, so that we can attain everlasting life and Godhood --- not merely dwelling in the Spirit's present moment.

A “Virtual Bodhisattva” seeks to sink the material world into the now-moment of human satori. The “Evolutionary Bodhisattva” seeks the evolution of the human-experienced satori all the way to God-experienced Godhood, by way of material-spiritual evolution.

Involve to awaken Evolve to arrive at who awakened you

It is not enough to directly unite with divinity in prayer or meditation, yet this is often the sole goal of most religions and most metaphysical schools.  This is called “Holy Silence” in Christianity, and “Nirvana” in East, etc. This uniting is a very profound connection with the Infinite, yet it is more a glorious, virtual connection, meant to help us toward our larger goal. To truly unite or reintegrate with the Infinite requires evolution, material-supermaterial evolution, all the way to the God we have first seen within. As our saying goes: Involve to awaken. Evolve to arrive at who awakened you.

Intellectual Intuition, Not Only Revelation

Explaining knowledge from intellectual intuition loses something in translation. We do affirm the theological knowledge of the Church, which is based in faith, yet metaphysical knowledge seems to be more direct, not always accessible to all who believe through faith alone.

We think our knowledge can be in harmony with the Church. The Church must be formal to communicate to large groups of people. Yet we hope to enliven the form, which has lost much of its spiritual force.

We speak in a new mode which we think is appropriate for our modern, or at least our future, environment. After years of preparation we still feel like solitary, spontaneous initiates, and so we cannot speak as accepted spiritual masters. The Primordial Truth lives on in any case. it is material and supermaterial, sacred and religious.

Evolution and the Traditionalists

The rejection of evolution by the Traditionalist School always troubled me, I see it as a great error on an otherwise superior view of religion. Evolution has to be understood within religion and metaphysics, as part of the activating way of the Kosmos to attain Godhood.

Before we can attain Godhood we do have the consolation of contacting the God-Within, the Soul, and here at least the Traditionalist School and traditional religion can help. Science, or at least future science, can help in evolving to the God we have first contacted within. We must better learn how to evolve to Godhood.

Beyond the Noosphere

We need to go far beyond the grand unification of human consciousness, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin defined as the “godhead” or the “omega point.” We need to go beyond the “noosphere,” beyond Teilhard's “thinking layer,” which he hoped would surround the planet (much like the Internet came to do) like a collective mind (not unlike Jung's collective human unconscious in the interior of our minds and souls.) We must evolve beyond the noosphere if we wish to reach Godhood.

We have been moving from matter to life to mind, and we will continue to move to supermind, but mind and body evolve together, and on to future species, and beyond to Godhood. Scientific materialism soon must include this religious perspective within its calculations, we must have an evolution-friendly vision of science and religion which celebrates both. Theological materialism and the Evolutionary Christian Church affirms this vision.

The Evolutionary Archetype: Uniting Jung and Teilhard

We see no need to make a split between Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin, where Teilhard's spiritual yearning is wrongly judged as only evolutionary and not archetypal. The yearning for God is found within the Evolutionary Archetype. The urge comes not only from the depths of our psyche but also from the depths of the Kosmos where God dwells.

Jung need not be confined to the past, to ancient archetypes, and Teilhard to future evolution, since the Evolutionary Archetype contains both, and these great thinkers saw aspects of the same archetype.

As Carter Phipps pointed out, the root of the word archetype is “arche,” which means “first principle,” and the Evolutionary Archetype is the first principle in both the past and the future.

Jung's archetypes need not be placed merely in the conservative camp and Teilhard's in the progressive, since Jung's archetypes and Teilhard's evolutionary force are united in the Evolutionary Archetype. This means we need not speak of “post-traditional” or “post-mythological” as Ken Wilber and the New Age tend to do.

Jung might have been trying to align his concept of archetypes with the process of evolution. On his bed stand three weeks before his death was a copy of Teilhard's book, “The Phenomenon of Man.”

Jung, Teilhard, and the Evolutionary Archetype of the Theoevolutionary Church

Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin are considered to have contrasting archetypal and evolutionary worldviews, yet since both virtually stop at human consciousness, no matter how advanced, they are in this sense occupying the same turf of human consciousness.

We suggest that one can take Jung's inner search to the deepest past archetypes and arrive at Teilhard's “evolutionary motive force,” which is the Spirit within, what Teilhard calls the energy of Christ in the world. But we go much further than Jung or Teilhard when we suggest that the motive force within, which we could call the Evolutionary Archetype, or Spirit Archetype, is helping to activate evolution (guided by the Soul, which is the zenith of the mind-body) beyond human complexity-consciousness all the way to Godhood. We do not and cannot stop at human consciousness, no matter how advanced that consciousness. We must evolve immensely farther, far beyond the human, to future species with far higher consciousness, all the way to Godhood, which will then fulfill the deepest Evolutionary Archetype or Spirit Archetype of the Will-to-Godhood.

When Jung's archetypes are this way deepened to affirm a truly evolutionary archetype, Jung then becomes an involutionary religious thinker. And when Teilhard's evolutionary motive force is seen as an archetype, he too is understood as applying involution more than evolution toward his noosphere. We affirm a truly evolutionary scientific perspective toward Godhood, as well as the involutionary religious path to the Soul-Within; we go far beyond human consciousness, or global consciousness, beyond the present political correctness of both religion and science. God awaits those who make the evolutionary adventure.

(For a more politically correct comparison of Jung and Teilhard see “The Cosmos, The Psyche And You” by Carter Phipps at “What Is Enlightenment.”)

Esoterism, Religion and the Evolutionary Christian Church

We prefer, at least at this time, not to get caught up in the arcane “battles” of the Traditionalist School with exoteric religions, because going inward, which we call involution, and seeing God, or at least experiencing an astonishing aspect of God, is only half (if that) of our spiritual path. We think that it has been possible in both authentic Tradition and inauthentic religion to find the God within, although a Traditionalist initiation is probably the better path to inward enlightenment. Roman Catholicism in the West possesses such a way to know God within, as witnessed by the mystics and saints, and Catholicism has included other excellent Western knowledge. Hinduism also has its saints and it has, perhaps, preserved more of very ancient, authentic Tradition than any present organization, with the Abrahamic Tradition following close behind.

Our task has been to introduce the entirely neglected bio-spiritual element which leads to true Godhood, that is, biological evolution. We think that a Great Spiritual Blockade has taken place in Tradition and in religions, which has blocked knowledge of the bio-spiritual path of evolution to God, and we have found no evidence that this is a hidden dimension within Tradition, to the contrary, biology has been considered almost satanic when in reality biology is the method to evolve to Godhood. We would have compared our actions to cutting the Gordian Knot, had we not appreciation for the Traditionalists, who prefer to laboriously untie the knot, so we respectfully leave them to their ritual. Also, our respect for the general philosophy of Conservatism keeps us working within “the possible.”

Conservative Evolution

The inclusion of evolution and genetic engineering in religion is, of course, considered absurd, at least until it is understood that we must evolve to Godhood. Political totalitarianism is also assumed, at least until it is understood that the classical, Western, American system of equal justice under law is certainly affirmed. Evolutionary programs can work in harmony with the American concept, which affirms equality of opportunity but not equality of final reward. America is a Christian nation, therefore, the typical 20 percent who always need assistance should be given the opportunity to advance, especially the children. People cannot be forced to advance. Totalitarian systems always end up destroying all classes of people. We need to maintain the classic balance of order, freedom and justice, which the American Constitution champions, as we evolve.

Teaching Democratic Principles

During this election period we might do well to reread “The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft,” by Russell Kirk and James McClellan. Ron Paul's attempts to teach democratic principles resemble Taft's battles to restore federalism, the separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights.

The framers of the Constitution clearly knew that every democracy in history finally degenerated into tyranny, an empire or a kingdom. Listen to this 1946 quote from Taft: “We have fooled ourselves in the belief that we could teach another nation democratic principles by force. Why, we can't even teach our own people sound principles of government.”

The present task of conservatives

When Ron Paul attempts to educate the public on basic conservative principles (and educating the public is part of the job of a statesman) his opponents only grin at him condescendingly and then go back to making their usual concessions to prevailing opinion and popular programs. The Republican party today is not a party of principles, and the so-called neoconservatives are little more than a group who support world economic interests, and entanglements in the affairs of other nations. The task of conservatives today is to do as Ron Paul is doing, to educate the public about basic conservative principles, which they have forgotten. Attaining high office will necessarily have to come later. Here is a Ron Paul site that articulates the issues.

Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all

By Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875 - 1926)

English version by Stephen Mitchell

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

-- from Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Ken Wilber and the Great Spiritual Blockade

As I have said, basically, Ken Wilber defines involution as evolution. His slogan of “transcend yet include” sounds, on the surface, like evolution but he means by it inward spiritual evolution. Like most religious thinkers, Wilber can lead us to the Soul-Within but he speaks little of the God-Without Whom we must bio-spiritually evolve to.

Wilber's path is a consciousness involution not a consciousness evolution. Biological evolution has been making us more conscious, and that consciousness has been preceded by biologically-evolved brain power or Soul-power. “Spirit-in-action” is primarily biologically evolution, with the Soul-Within as our spiritual guide, all the way to Godhood.

Becoming more fully conscious of the Spirit-Within, we see that the Spirit is taking us on a bio-spiritual journey to Godhood. We cannot stop for long and swim in the bliss of Soul-Consciousness, this can become a Great Spiritual Blockade to further evolution to God. We are the image of the Trinity, which is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, which activates spiritual evolution within natural evolution, is taking us to the highest evolution possible: the Trinity, and Godhood. We are the image of God, but God is the image of us fully evolved.

States Rights? Power to the Neighborhoods!

Here is an excellent review by Bill Kaufman of a book about Jefferson's last years by Alan Crawford. (Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, Alan Pell Crawford, Random House, 312 pages )

“...Crawford’s Jefferson speaks to the current crisis in his late-life responses to the steady growth of the central state and the resultant erosion of the political role of the local citizen. Crawford emphasizes, as so few writers on Jefferson have done, the “ward republics,” Jefferson’s radical yet practical plan for decentralizing government. His “single most profound contribution to American political thought,” in Crawford’s phrase, was explicated in a series of letters in 1814-16. He proposed that almost all governmental powers devolve to “ward republics,” five or six miles square, which the country could rely upon for “the eternal preservation of its Republican principles.” Crawford abhors the enlistment of historical figures in present-day crusades, but Jefferson’s ward-republic idea, though firmly set in a place and time, offers us a way out of Empire—a path of refreshment, a revitalizing end to our torpid condition...”

The “gradation of authorities,” in Jefferson’s phrase, parallels the Catholic concept of subsidiarity.

See the review here at The American Conservative.

On The Philosophia Perennis

Followers of Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, and the Philosophia Perennis, are courageous and deep thinkers who nevertheless do not affirm evolution, (both men converted to Islam) and their problems with science seems to derive from an entirely involutionary view of Godhood.

While the Evolutionary Christian Church can affirm many of the insights of the Philosophia Perennis, we view it as seeing only half the picture. God, glimpsed after great effort, in perennial philosophy, must be bio-spiritually evolved to, with even greater effort.

Religion

The modern pattern
doesn't fit no matter
how we situate
the pieces, a holistic
mood hangs over the room
of art and Mathematica.

Altruism and Spirituality In The Evolutionary Christian Church

In his book, “Integral Psychology” Ken Wilber says, “Authentic spirituality is not about translating the world differently, but about transforming your consciousness.” Mystics and New Agers may wish to deny it but generally their idea of spirituality is “feeling good,” then, because they feel good they hope to do good. To put it bluntly, everything can be considered beautiful when you are high. Altruism has, and needs, a deeper base than this. Transforming your consciousness into God-consciousness requires far more than Wilber's “integral spirituality,” which merely goes inward within the human being to attain God-consciousness.

Peace in this world, if it is possible, will not come by denying or repressing biology, and it won't come by making everyone feel good through drugs or self-centered versions of religion. Altruism is grounded in biology, in kin-centering and group orientation. You sacrifice to advance the genes you hold in common with your kin and group. Evolution takes place at the group level and the group is affected by the evolution of the individuals and the culture within the group: this is the ground for spirituality in evolution, here is the true vehicle for evolution to God.

As we have said before, we think Christian social values (eg. as seen with subsidiarity, or the Catholic version of federalism ) can harmonize with the ethical values which define several degrees, or hierarchies, of ethics toward group members, group government, other group governments, members of other groups, individuals in the Church, and the Evolutionary Goal of Godhood. A man's ethical loyalty to his own group naturally exceeds that to members of “mankind,” unless the survival of all groups or the total existence of man is threatened---this was developed in Cattell's Beyondism.

Authentic spirituality is about transforming the world through evolution, as well as about transforming the self inwardly. The Spirit within is the God we evolve to without. The Inward Path relates to the Outward Path.

Let us involve and evolve to Godhood

Religion tends to be subjective, science objective, both seem to be limited by excluding the other.

The Theoevolutionary Church says the “subjective” Soul, seen from within through involution, contains the Eye of God, the Eye of Soul, which needs to be reached outwardly by way of the activation of the Spirit-Will, or “objectively,” through material evolution.


Traditional religion says, let us involve to God, science says (or could say), let us evolve to Godhood. The Theoevolutionary Church says, let us both involve and evolve to Godhood. This is the Twofold Path.

The Soul And Spirit In Evolution

Ken Wilber's noble attempt to integrate all things stops half way. Although going inward to examine the Soul and Spirit can bring us to see the future God we must evolve to, this is not Godhood, and it may be blasphemous to say it is.

Wilber's definitions of superconsciousness leave the impression that this is as high as we can go, when superconsciousness can only be attained through supermaterialism. Involution goes inward and backward to the Soul and Spirit, evolution goes outward and forward to God, but both must work in harmony. Evolution defines the ascent of consciousness within the ascent of material evolution.

What we call the Great Spiritual Blockade is going inward to see the Essence of the Soul, and defining this as the final goal of religion and of evolution. It is a dazzling blockade, nevertheless, Godhood must be materially evolved to, activated by the Spirit-Within, guided by the Soul, which knows best the God that It must evolve to.

Selection

There could be intelligent
warlords kayaking through
the fjords, or geeky scientists
comparing sun shields. Will we
meet in the Arctic after
civilization is destroyed?
Offense tends to win over
defense. Will there be walking
over corpses? It could be that bad,
it's the curse of being stupid,
but life is congenitally
optimistic; if we don't
evolve to Godhood someone
else will.

Catastrophe looms: predictions of James Lovelock and Guillaume Faye...and solutions

James Lovelock's book, “The Revenge Of Gaia,” predicts extreme weather by 2020, and by 2040 the Sahara will "move into Europe, Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad, Atlanta will be a jungle, Phoenix will be uninhabitable, as will Beijing, which will try to move up to Siberia and thus clash with Russia, we will have severe epidemics after mass migrations.

Lovelock says we should use the term "sustainable retreat” rather than sustainable development. Remaining humans could go nuclear, desalinate the ocean, grow synthetic food, prepare for chaos, and engineer the climate. Smart cities will prepare by shoring up hospitals, securing dependable food and water. Dumb cities will be overrun and descend into chaos.

Lovelock's scenario of our grim future on earth suggests that survivors will retreat to the northern latitudes of Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and the Arctic basin. The self-regulating system of the earth is out of whack and will make a jump to a hotter state, as it has in the past. Of the present 6.6 billion people only 500 million will survive.

In examining Guillaume Faye's predictions, Michael O'Meara says that Faye (like Lovelock) believes “...social and economic upheavals are likely to be compounded by ecological devastation and radical climatic shifts that accelerate deforestation and desiccation, disrupt food supplies, spread famine and disease, deplete natural resources (oil, along with land and water), and highlight the unsustainability of the world's present overpopulation..."

Faye continues his predictions: “...the cancerization of the social fabric that comes when an aging European population is deprived of its virile, self-confident traditions; when drug use, permissiveness, and family decline become the norm; when a dysfunctional education system no longer transmits the European heritage; when the Culture Industry fosters mass cretinization; when the Third World consolidates its invasion of the European homelands; and, finally, when the enfeebling effects of these tendencies take their toll on all the other realms of European life.

- The worsening social conditions accompanying these tendencies, he predicts, will be exacerbated by an economic crisis (or crises) born of massive indebtedness, speculation, non-regulation, corruption, interdependence, and financial malpractices whose global ramifications promise a "correction" more extreme than that of the 1930s.”

- The scarcity and disorders these man-made disasters bring will not only provoke violent conflicts, but cause the already discredited state to experience increased paralysis, enhancing thus the prospect of global chaos, especially as it takes the form of strife between a cosmopolitan North and an Islamic South.

These catastrophes, Faye argues, are rooted in practices native to liberal modernity. For the globalization of Western civilizational forms, particularly American-style consumerism, has created a latently chaotic situation, given that its hyper-technological, interconnected world system, dependent on international trade, driven by speculators, and indifferent to virtually every non-economic consideration, is vulnerable to a diverse range of malfunctions. Its pathological effects have indeed already begun to reach their physical limit. For once the billion-plus populations of India and China, already well embarked on the industrializing process, start mass-producing cars, the system will simply become unfit for human habitation. The resource depletion and environmental degradation that will follow are, though, only one of the system's tipping points.

No less seriously, the globalizing process creates a situation in which minor, local disputes assume planetary significance, as conflicts in remote parts of the world are imposed on the more advanced parts, and vice versa. ("The 9/11 killers were over here," Pat Buchanan writes, "because we were over there.") In effect, America's "Empire of Disorder" is no longer restricted to the periphery, but now threatens the metropolis. Indeed, each new advance in globalization tends to diminish the frontier between external and internal wars, just as American sponsored globalization provokes the terrorism it ostensively resists.

The cascading implication of these developments have, in fact, become strikingly evident. For instance, if one of the hijacked Boeings of 9/11 had not been shot down over Pennsylvania and instead reached Three-Mile Island, the entire Washington-New York area would have been turned into a mega-Chernobyl -- destroying the U.S. economy, as well as the global order dependent on it. A miniature nuke smuggled into an East Coast port by any of the ethnic gangs specializing in illegal shipments would have a similar effect. Revealingly, speculation on such doom-day scenarios is now seen as fully plausible.

But even barring a dramatic act of violence, catastrophe looms in all the system's domain's, for it is as much threatened by its own entropy (in the form of social-racial disorder, economic crisis, and ecological degradation), as it is by more frontal assaults. This is especially the case with the global economy, whose short-term casino mentality refuses the slightest accountability. Accordingly, its movers and shakers think nothing of casting their fate to fickle stock markets, running up bankrupting debts, issuing fiat credit, fostering a materialistic culture of unbridled consumption, undermining industrial values, encouraging outsourcing, de-industrialization, and wage cutting, just as they remain impervious to the ethnocidal effects of international labor markets and the growing criminality of corporate practices....”

“...Nothing, Faye argues, can halt the system's advance toward the abyss. The point of no return has, indeed, already been passed. Fifteen years of above average temperatures, growing greenhouse gases, melting ice caps, conspicuous biological deterioration, and the imminent peaking of oil reserves, combined with an uncontrolled Third World demographic boom, massive First World indebtedness, social policies undermining the state's monopoly on our loyalties, and a dangerous geopolitical realignment -- each of these potentially catastrophic developments is preparing the basis of the impending collapse.

Those who think a last minute international agreement will somehow save the day simply whistle pass the graveyard. Washington's attitude (even more pig-headed than Beijing's) to the modest Kyoto Accords -- which would have slowed down, not halted greenhouse emissions -- is just one of the many signs that the infernal machine cannot be halted. The existing states and international organizations are, in any case, powerless to do anything, especially the sclerotic "democracies" of Europe and United States, for their corrupt, short-sighted leaders have not the slightest understanding of what is happening under their very noses, let alone the will to take decisive action against it. Besides, they would rather subsidize bilingual education and Gay Pride parades (or, on the conservative side, ban Darwin) than carry out structural reforms that might address some of their more glaring failures. For such a system, the sole solution, Faye insists, is catastrophe...”

Cheers. So, what does Faye suggest we do?

O'Meara continues: "While rejecting its technological, bureaucratic, cosmopolitan, and anti-white practices, Faye fully accepts modern science. He simply states the obvious: that the great technological and economic accomplishments of Europe cannot be extended to the world's six billion people -- let alone tomorrow's ten billion -- without fatal consequence. For this reason, he predicts that science and industry in a post-catastrophe world will have no choice but to change, becoming the province of a small elite, not the liberal farce that attempts to transform all the world's peoples into American-style consumers. Similarly, Faye does not propose a restoration of lost forms, but rather the revitalization of those ancient spirits which might enable our children to engage the future with the confidence and daring of their ancestors.

Thus, as befits a work of prophecy, Faye's survey of the impending tempests aims at preparing us for what is to come, when the high flood waters and hurricane winds clear away the system's ethnocidal illusions and create the occasion for another resurgence of European being. It aims, in a word, at helping Europeans to resume the epic course of their history...” Though rejecting liberalism's monstrous perversion of European life, Faye does so not as a New Age Luddite or a left-wing environmentalist. He argues that a technoeconomic civilization based on universalist and egalitarian principles is a loathsome abnormality -- destructive of future generations and past accomplishments.

Faye proposes what he calls “Archéofuturisme,” and EuroKnight suggests he does so “...in terms that at times recall the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, the construction of a European Empire founded on essential, archaic values and on a bold, aggressive exploitation of science and technology: hence the concept of “archeofuturism,” the re-emergence of archaic social configurations in a new context.

It is probable that only after the catastrophe which will bring down modernity, its world-wide saga and its global ideology, that an alternate vision of the world will necessarily impose itself. No one will have had the foresight and the courage to apply it before chaos erupted. It is thus our responsibility – we who live, as Giorgio Locchi put it, in the interregnum – to prepare, from this moment forward, a post-catastrophic conception of the world. It could be centered on archeofuturism. But we must give content to this concept.

It is necessary, first, to return the word “archaic” to its true meaning, which, in its Greek etymon archê, is positive and non-pejorative, signifying both “foundation” and “beginning” – that is, “founding impetus.” Archê also means “that which is creative and immutable” and refers to the central concept of “order.” To attend to the “archaic” does not imply a backward-looking nostalgia, for the past produced egalitarian modernity, which has run aground, and thus any historical regression would be absurd. It is modernity itself that now belongs to a bygone past...”

“...The issues that disturb the contemporary world and threaten egalitarian modernity with catastrophe are already archaic: the religious challenge of Islam; geopolitical contests for scarce resources, agricultural land, oil, fisheries; the North-South conflict and colonizing immigration into the Northern hemisphere; global pollution and the physical clash of empirical reality against the ideology of development. All these issues plunge us back into age-old questions, consigning to oblivion the quasi-theological political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were little more than idle talk about the sex of angels.

Moreover, as the philosopher Raymond Ruyer, detested by the left-bank intelligentsia, foretold in his two important works, Les nuisances idéologiques and Les cents prochains siècles, once the historical digression of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has finally closed, with egalitarianism’s hallucinations having descended into catastrophe, humanity will return to archaic values, that is, quite simply, to biological and human (anthropological) values: distinctive sexual roles; the transmission of ethnic and popular traditions; spirituality and sacerdotal organization; visible and supervisory social hierarchies; the worship of ancestors; initiatory rites and tests; the reconstruction of organic communities that extend from the individual family unit to the overarching national community of the people; the deindividualization of marriage to involve the community as much as the couple; the end of the confusion of eroticism and conjugality; the prestige of the warrior caste; social inequality, not implicit, which is unjust and frustrating, as in today’s egalitarian utopias, but explicit and ideologically justifiable; a proportioned balance of duties and rights; a rigorous justice whose dictates are applied strictly to acts and not to individual men, which will encourage a sense of responsibility in the latter; a definition of the people and of any constituted social body as a diachronic community of shared destiny, not as a synchronic mass of individual atoms, etc.

In short, future centuries, in the great pendulum movement of history that Nietzsche called “the eternal recurrence of the identical,” will in some way revisit these archaic values. The problem for us, for Europeans, is not, through our cowardice, to allow Islam to impose them on us, a process which is surreptitiously occurring, but to reimpose them on ourselves, while drawing upon our historical memory.

Recently, an important French press baron – whom I cannot name, but known for his left-liberal sympathies – made to me, in essence, the following disillusioned remark: “Free-market economic values are gradually losing out to Islamic values, because they are exclusively based on individual economic profit, which is inhuman and ephemeral.” Our task is to ensure that the inevitable return to reality is not imposed upon us by Islam.

Obviously, contemporary ideology, hegemonic today but not for much longer, regards these values as diabolical, much as a mad paranoiac might see the features of a demon in the psychiatrist trying to cure him. In reality, they are the values of justice. True to human nature from time immemorial, these archaic values reject the Enlightenment error of the emancipation of the individual, which has only ended in the isolation of this individual and in social barbarism. These archaic values are just, in the Ancient Greek sense of the term, because they take man for what he is, a zoon politicon ("a social and organic animal integrated into a communatarian city-state"), and not for what he is not, an isolated and asexual atom fitted out with universal but imprescriptible pseudo-rights.

In practical terms, archaism’s anti-individualist values permit self-realization, active solidarity and social peace, unlike egalitarianism’s pseudo-emancipating individualism, which ends in the law of the jungle...”

_____


Our reaction to this doom? We believe that the The Theoevolutionary Church is the right blend of past and future, with the Conservative advantage of including Traditional Christianity, rather than paganism in the future; that is, we place the inclusion (or transcendence) of the involution of traditional religion, within the spiritualization of material evolution.

Conservatives believe that there exists a legitimate presumption in favor of things long established. Centuries of accumulated wisdom make the Church like a Golden Age---at least substantial parts of a Golden Age---which still exists.

We have said before in this blog, the The Theoevolutionary Church has seen the same global catastrophe, and our solution contains a similar harmony of the past and future. We prefer the term Evolution to “Futurism,” and Order to the “Archaic.”

The The Theoevolutionary Church seeks to transmute Traditionalism---which contains essential insights of the Traditional religion---with supermaterial Evolution---which contains essential insights of the sciences. Traditional Christianity teaches us how we may see and know God, and how to live in the world. Evolution, understood bio-spiritually, teaches us how we may evolve to God. This is how we reconcile the so-called opposites of the material and spiritual, the immanent and transcendent, traditional and modern, archaic and future.

David Livingston reminded us (Chronicles) that the thousands of little localities, which the New Right prefers, were seen from around 1100 to 1500 in the Christian Commonwealth. There was no central authority, although the Christian civilization was vast. There were thousands of divided sovereignties, secular authorities were independent of one another. There was no such thing as the State in Christendom. And in the center of Europe was the light federalism of the Holy Roman Empire.  Something like this can still work.

The West is dying, yet even individual action can profoundly alter the drift of the times. As I have said before (remembering Russell Kirk), think of one brave little French girl, Joan of Arc, who changed the world.

Involution Is Not Evolution

The main problem with Ken Wilber and other religionists is that they see spirit and soul as only the interior of nature, the within of the Kosmos, they look only within, they do not look up. They abandon the outward biological path of the spirit. This abandoning we have defined as The Great Spiritual Blockade.

For Wilber and other religionists involution is evolution. Quite a reduction. Evolutionary spirituality is more than interior development, it is mainly exterior biological development. Perhaps this is done out of political correctness since talk of future human biological evolution remains taboo.

We say that involution—which is evolution to Wilber—allows us to see the Soul Within, which is not God. Traditional religion helps us to see the Soul-Within. The Evolutionary Christian Church seeks to guide biological evolution to actually reach the God who activates the Spirit within to evolve to Him.

We do not separate the material from the spiritual. We look both within and without for God, Who is evolved to from the material to the spiritual, guided by the Soul-Within, activated by the Spirit-Within, through God's grace, and by material or bio-spiritual evolution.

Desire, Reason, And Love

The Classical world said that one can live by emotions, like the barbarians, or by reason, like the civilized world. St. Augustine pointed out the impossibility of emotion-free truth, calling it a mutilation of human nature and that we must turn emotion toward the service of justice and love.

Theological materialism and the Evolutionary Christian Church say that the desires and emotions are not uniformly evil, as strict Classicism and traditional inward religion might suggest, desire must be turned toward sacred evolution to God, which means reproduction directed toward higher consciousness, higher intelligence, greater beauty, until the Absolute of all things is reached, which is real Godhood.

Defining Love Of God And Neighbor

We are told that the sum of Christianity is to love God and to love our neighbor as our self, yet God and neighbor need defining, then the character and conditions of these definitions can follow.

To love God is to desire to reach God, to attempt to become one with God. In the Evolutionary Christian Church this goal is accomplished through evolution to God, from the material to the spiritual, ultimately evolving to God, guided by the Soul-Within, and activated by the Spirit, working along with evolution.

To love our neighbor is not literally to try to love the whole world, which would be contrary to human nature, it is essentially to love one's kin, one's group. And it follows that this definition harmonizes with the definition of love of God; evolution takes place best in diverse, separate groups, thus in loving one's group and ones neighbor we can love God and evolve to God. We love the world in the sense that we affirm the right of every group to love its own neighbor, its own group, then all groups can love God by evolving to God.

Material law is in harmony with spiritual-material evolution, the Classical joins the Christian, science synchronizes with religion.

Evolution Is Not A Nightmare

In his book “A Brief History Of Everything,” (no hubris there) Ken Wilber makes a statement that reveals the involutionary reductionism of his world view. “There in the Heart, where the couple finally unite, the entire game is undone, this nightmare of evolution, and you are exactly where you where prior to the beginning of the whole show.”

First of all “the couple” do not unite in the Heart, one “only” sees into the Soul in the Heart. Seeing the Soul, blissful as that is, may help us identify the goal of the Spirit, which is Godhood, but Godhood can be reached only through material evolution all the way to the materiaspiritual, and ultimately to God. Thus evolution is not a “nightmare,” it is seen as a nightmare when the involutionary, internal methods of religion reduce Godhood to the Soul-Within.

We require both the involutionary methods of religion and the evolutionary methods of nature and science, first to see God, and then, with God's Grace, to reach God. Both methods are applied in the Evolutionary Christian Church.

The Fall and the Rise

For the Theoevolutionary Church the sin of the Fall which supposedly made men subject to death, even as the Spirit of man is naturally immortal, is related to ignorance as well as to The Great Spiritual Blockade. Knowing the Spirit-Within is only half the required wisdom. Evolving the material, the bio-spiritual body, to Godhood is the Forgotten Half of God's law. This great forgetting, or ignorance helps define the Fall.

The pagan idea of perfectibility through virtue, is still affirmed, as it was in the West via the “Gentleman” ethos, and this is attached to Christian Love, which was missing from the classical virtues. Unlike Classicism, Divine Grace may also be needed to reorient us from love of self to love of God, God reached secondarily by the traditional involutionary path to the Soul-Within, as well as the primary, natural, evolutionary way to Godhood, for the few.

For the West, Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself to reveal the Soul to save all men. We work in this tradition, being conservative. Yet we add the Evolutionary Outward Path to attain true Godhood.

Nonduality Not An Emptying

Nonduality is not accomplished by emptying all the material elements, as so many mystics advocate, although this is the blockading method to see the blissful Soul-Within. When the Spirit-Will is discerned one sees that the Seeing-Spirit must not become Blockaded.

The inner suggests the outer and the outer suggests the inner regarding the evolution and involution to God. Godhood seems to be the only true Nonduality.

Our task is to evolve to God. We can first identify the inner God of the Soul, which can help guide our way to seeing the Spirit-Will at the zenith of the Soul and seeing our material evolution to Godhood, where the Spirit-Will reaches Its goal.

"Youth Without Youth"

Can love and the quest for knowledge work in harmony? This question suggests a deeper question: can the spiritual work in harmony with the material? These were the main themes of Francis Ford Coppola's beautiful 2007 film version of Mircea Eliade's novella,"Youth Without Youth." Did Eliade resolve this conflict? He seems to have painfully chosen love over all in this story, yet he had to sacrifice knowledge. Or perhaps he arrived at a final knowledge that love is the most important knowledge. Still, he only implicitly, almost reluctantly chooses love.

That is the right choice, it seems to us, but it need not have been such a painful conflict. The Theovolutionary Church (EC) resolves this age old philosophical and theological difficulty with the knowledge that love does not conflict with the evolution of the material to the spiritual, which is really the supermaterial, indeed, love is the sacred means by which the material evolves to the supermaterial. The involutionary God of Jesus Christ is the God we evolve to in the cosmos.

However, there is a sacred and profane love, defined in evolutionary terms. That which evolves toward God, toward higher consciousness, toward Absolute Knowledge, is sacred love, that which does not is profane love. The Traditional Conservative perspective of EC does not dictate these values, the virtues and social philosophy move men, educate men, in this upward path. With this perspective the hero of “Youth For Youth” might have resolved his conflict over how to use his knowledge during World War Two. Here is where there could be a real dramatic conflict. But that is another story.

Redeeming Materialism In Spiritualism, And Spiritualism In Materialism

“Idealism failed to explain matter, which it defined as 'all-but-nothing.' " Charles Norris Cochrane

Materialism failed to do justice to the problem of Spirit, saying there is no spirit. Classicism found no escape, it was either upwards by way of transcending materialism, or rejecting spiritualism downward into positivism.

Theological materialism and the Evolutionary Christian Church says the material evolves to the spiritual-material, all the way to God, thus overcoming the problems between Idealism, Spiritualism and Materialism.

Christianity saw the Divine Nature as a Trinity, thus it explained the logos of Being in motion, the Holy Spirit. ECC explains this motion as the Will to Godhood, or the Spirit-Will to Godhood, defined as evolution, thus redeeming materialism in spiritualism, and spiritualism in materialism.

The Unique Offering of the Theoevolutionary Church

Science makes sacred the biosphere, religion makes sacred the noosphere, the Theoevolutionary Church makes sacred both, but does so not by trying to integrate the biosphere into the noosphere, or the noosphere into the biosphere, (which is really done through the blocking of either world) but by affirming the inner world of the Soul, seen by the great sages, as the blissful hint of the evolutionary goal of the outer world of biospiritual forms evolving all the way to the Form of Forms, Godhood. This is the unique, integrating offering of the Theoevolutionary Church.

Sixth Veda Comparison

Speaking more in Perennial religious terms, the Theoevolutionary Church could be likened to an additional  Veda in the sense that it integrates the sensory with the spiritual, it brings the finite to the infinite by way of evolution.

The TC takes the whole person with his/her worldly desires into account, whereas most spiritual traditions teach that the material and the spiritual are mutually exclusive. The evolution of material life to Godhood reconciles the two desires.

Would the Theoevolutionary Church be better described as a Sixth Veda, an advancement in the Fivefold Christian Ministry?

Science Joins Religion In Polonyi's Work

We implicitly accept Michael Polonyi's definition of science, truth and reality, which is, that both scientists and theologians can be guided by implicit knowledge, not merely the Enlightenment way of knowing through strictly logical and methodologically provable facts. (Modern Age Summer 2007 )

Polonyi defines truth and reality in terms of an idea or theory's potential for future manifestations, its capacity for revealing future awareness, or deeper meaning.

“We know things that we cannot tell.” Knowing must include our awareness of truths we may not be able to state explicitly. Of course, doing serious work in this way of knowing should not be exploited subjectively, it is implicit knowledge based on a trained capacity, after years in fields of study.

E8plane

Here is an intro to the E8plane model, from the Telegraph uk.



Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.

Inevitable Decentralization

The decentralization movement we see growing in the world is not radical, and need not be, although at first it may seem to be so. The present industrial complex, with its depleting energy sources, will mean the end of globalism and national giantism, because they will be unsustainable, they will fall apart. All the old dynamics given for why Empires fall, of course, still exist, eg. growing cultural and biological differences from the founders, leading to separations, etc.

Therefore, decentralization is not an abstract ideal prepared for with revolutionary zeal, it is a movement basically preparing for the decentralization that will inevitably come. This movement includes the American conservative ethos of limited government against the ever-expanding state. Examples would be the Swiss system of multicultural federalism from communes and cantons, or the corresponding unit of the state in the United States, or Jefferson's "little republics."

The Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC) emphatically resists the totalitarian temptation to mobilize the masses for a mytho-ideological or religious cause. The principles of decentralized federalism and Catholic subsidiarity harmonize with the evolutionary goals of ECC.

In the future, the all too human march back to centralized power will have to be prevented again.

(An excellent essay on this subject can be found in the Summer 2007 issue of Modern Age--”Secession and American Federalism,” by Arthur Versluis)

Implicit/Explicit Psychology

There is an interesting relationship to Michael Polanyi's views, mentioned below, and the views of controversial psychologist Kevin MacDonald, who applies an implicit/explicit dynamic regarding truth to the psychology between modern races. MacDonald's essay can be found in pdf form here.

Polanyi's Truth

The dreams of the communists and Nazi's were not, it seems to me, mainly the result of the mistaken hopes of the Enlightenment ideal of trying to solve all problems with reason, science and technology, which was suggested by the great modern epistemologist Michael Polanyi. It was more the “tacit intimation,” the implicit knowing that took the dictators on their paths of radical change. It seems to me that the dictators defined truth more in Polanyi's terms, that is, something is true if it reveals deeper meaning, if it has potential for future discoveries or manifestations, and not merely because something could be true because it could be proven exactly with scientific methodology.

We generally affirm Polanyi's preference for implicit truth, but we do not then blame Enlightenment science for the political philosophies of the twentieth century. We might instead turn the standard dynamic around and begin with science, the way intuition is often used first, and use implicit knowledge as the final or deeper meaning of truth. This way science, and implicit knowledge that comes from religion, can work in harmony, without having to disparage either side.

Gerhart Niemeyer's Ideology

Professor Niemeyer, of course, brilliantly argued against ideology on the grounds that the dreamlands which ideologies try to create have been most dangerous in the world, eg. Marxism, Nazism.

But then Niemeyer proceeds to develop his own dreamland, his own cosmic totality of transcendence and spirit, which he admits are beyond our immediate, sensory experience, received through faith--- a faith, however, held in balance and in natural tension with reason.

We think this is not the way to include religion in reason or science any more than were the total ideologies of the early 20th century. We can remain within both the hypothetical or theoretical realm of science, and within the faith of religion, when God can be reached through both the Involutionary Spirit within and through the bio-spiritual evolution to God, as is done in the Evolutionary Christian Church. The balance between reason and faith this way is brought into harmony without unreasonable dreamlands, while including both science and religion.

Perhaps we could mention another of Niemeyer's thoughts suggesting that religious dogmas need to be moistened and kneaded anew if they are to serve as guides to faith.

Uniting the Christian, the Enlightenment and the Romantic

An excellent essay from the Summer 2007 issue of Kirk's old journal “Modern Age,” by Andreas Kinneging, points out the differences between Conservatism, the classical pagan, the Enlightenment and the Romantic, which for Professor Kinneging are not united accept for the “Christian gentleman” who is, or was, a combination of the classical pagan man of virtues and the Christian man of love.

The Theoevolutionary Church unites these philosophies. We unite the reason of the Enlightenment and modern science but with the divine natural law of evolution to Godhood. We unite the feelings and emotions of Romanticism, and the Enlightenment conception that desires motivate man, with the drives of material, superbiological evolution, which leads to Godhood for the virtuous, therefore we add to the pagan-Christian virtues the higher, sacred, material evolution of life to supermaterial Godhood.

Conservative Perspective On Evolution And Change

Edmund Burke said in “Thoughts on French Affairs (1791)... “If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will grow that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.”

Burke said this without abandoning his criticism of ideology, of abstract theory. As Jeffrey Hart put it, “Burke now understood the irresistible character of social forces when they move toward institutional and cultural change.” (Modern Age, Summer 2007).

We believe that Evolution is an irresistible force and it will one day be included in traditional Catholicism. But we affirm this change while still very much affirming the religion and cultural traditions of the West, of Christendom.

It really is arrogant, as Conservatives well know, to think that we understand all the intricacies of human society and nature enough to form a guiding ideology. We must accept what reality shows us, and intricate reality fits no ideology, as yet.

Three In One Conservatism

Unifying Religion

Unlike the the elegant Christopher Olaf Blum (Modern Age, Summer 2007) we do not believe we have to choose between the two (we would say three) kinds of Conservatism, that is, those that defend the Enlightenment of a century ago, those that defend the older traditions of the ancients, including the Christian, and those of the Traditionalist School who defend pagan “myth” and its connection with Perennial religion.

We transmute these three versions of Conservatism in the Theoevolutionary Church(TC), and we add to the science of the Enlightenment the modern element of bio-spiritual evolution. The Traditionalist School is affirmed in acceptance of cycles and hierarchies, both spiritual and biological.

The Conservatives and the Liberals (classical or modern) overestimated the flexibility of human nature in regard to social behavior, whereas TC is more in accord with sociobiology. Man has primarily seen God through the involutionary Spirit-Within, which has been the activity of traditional religion. TC has at last included in traditional religion the biological and spiritual evolution to God, which deepens the natural law. Past versions of Conservatism were not wrong, they were an incomplete part of the whole.

Not Wrong, Just More Complete

“When we upend things in physics these days, it's not necessarily that old things were wrong. It's just that underlying it is a more complete theory.”

Lisa Randall, Theoretical Physicist

Back To Hyperboria?

James Lovelock's scenario of our grim future on earth suggests that survivors will retreat to the northern latitudes of Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and the Arctic basin. The self-regulating system of the earth is out of whack and will make a jump to a hotter state, as it has in the past. Of the present 6.6 billion people only 500 million will survive.

Lovelock's book, “The Revenge Of Gaia,” predicts extreme weather by 2020, and by 2040 the Sahara will move into Europe, Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad, Atlanta will be a jungle, Phoenix will be uninhabitable, as will Beijing, which will try to move up to Siberia and thus clash with Russia, we will have severe epidemics after mass migrations.

Lovelock says we should use the term "sustainable retreat” rather than sustainable development. Remaining humans could go nuclear, desalinate the ocean, grow synthetic food, prepare for chaos, and engineer the climate. Smart cities will prepare by shoring up hospitals, securing dependable food and water. Dumb cities will be overrun and descend into chaos.

Soul Fallacies

The old terms Immanent and Transcendent remain better terms to describe the Soul and Spirit than such newer terms as “prerational” and “transrational” which Ken Wilber uses.

Immanence describes the Soul within the body, which can guide the Soul and body to Godhood. The Soul is not God, one does not “evolve” to the Soul, one “involves” to the Soul; one evolves to Godhood.

It has been politically incorrect, to say the least, to speak of future evolution, and this may have been an influence in the recent New Age confounding of evolution to God with involution to the Soul-Within. However, old masters also confounded these dynamics before evolution had been defined as we now define it.

Contact with the Soul-Within is dazzling, even life-changing, and such contact can lead to a Great Spiritual Blockade, but the Soul is to God as the spark is to the fire. We can contact the Soul-Within through involution for guidance in the bio-spiritual evolution to Godhood.

The Values of the Flesh

Bearing witness to the truth of the Christian God need not define the heroic ideal of Classicism as a far lesser value, contrary to St. Augustine. Can reason guide us further than Augustine thought it could?

Augustine asks how to satisfy the demands of human consciousness in their fullest measure. The “concupiscence of the flesh” cannot satisfy the ultimate demands of consciousness, he says, materialism is like “a runaway slave.” Theological materialism and the Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC) suggests that this view wrongly puts matrimony on a less exalted plane than a chastity which triumphs over the lusts of the flesh.

Elements of God survive in the Spirit-Will, which activates bio-spiritual life to Godhood. Augustine did not have knowledge of the science of evolution (too Manichean?) Chastity remains an important virtue in the traditional, involuntary, meditations of the Church, but religiously directed evolution raises the value of marriage. Ambrose and St. Paul declared: “marry and weep,” but the ECC does not speak of marriage in this way. Profane Reproduction leads away from God, in that it moves against evolution, whereas Sacred Reproduction enhances our evolution to Godhood. This is not to say that discerning the path to higher consciousness, higher intelligence, and beauty in evolution is easy, both science and religion are required.

Two Enlightenments

There are two goals, two enlightenments, which have in history been virtually two ways of viewing the cosmos: the involutionary and the evolutionary. For most of the world's religions the involutionary has defined spiritual enlightenment. The evolutionary goal is the goal of evolution to Godhood, or ultimate evolution. The evolutionary goal brings biological-material-supermaterial evolution into traditional religion, which has been almost exclusively centered on involutionary enlightenment.

New Age thinkers speak about “wholeness” and integrating the “shadow,” but wholeness and integration will come only when ongoing and upgoing biological evolution is affirmed and included in traditional religion. This will not be easy, of course, since the subject of continuing human evolution remains profoundly politically incorrect. This period of change in history is perhaps as great a period of change as the times of St Augustine, and later St. Thomas Aquinas, in their transmuting of the classical world.

It is understandable that the bliss which comes (but rarely for the few) from involutionary enlightenment might blind adherents, or create what we have called “The Great Spiritual Blockade,” yet we need to move on to the Second Enlightenment or Ultimate Evolution , which is our biological-material-supermaterial evolution to Godhood.

A Christian Nod Back To Classicism

Early Christianity rejected the classical view of apotheosis with the great understanding that all of humanity can be deified by learning how to believe in Christ, whereas the classical view thought that only heroes and supermen could reach Godhood.

St. Athanasius, in the fourth century, said that we are rendered immortal by activating our latent spiritual powers through the indwelling Word, which we share with God. Eastern religions also contain this departure from Classicism.

The Evolutionary Christian Church, with a nod back to Classicism (and forward to modern science) defines the process of connecting with our spiritual inward nature as only half of the great task of attaining Godhood. The other half of our religion relates to the evolutionary outward path of material and supermaterial evolution all the way to Godhood.  This is the Twofold Path.

On Reconciling Religion And Science

The radical position taken by traditionalists on reconciling religion and science is basically to reject science. The radical position taken by science on reconciling religion and science is basically to reject religion. The position that the late Pope John Paul took on this was a Conservative one, although it followed Vatican Two, which traditionalists see as not conservative.

John Paul's position was put this way: “...there are two autonomous realms of knowledge. There is what reason can attain through the use of the scientific method; and there is that knowledge which has its source in revelation. Both science and faith have points of contact: they both illumine an aspect of reality. Science considers the world and the human person on the horizontal level, the level of physical/chemical processes and of quantifiable matter. Religious faith, on the other hand, considers the vertical level: the level of the human person's transcendent origin, dignity and destiny: the level of the human person in his or her relationship with God.”

The Evolutionary Christian Church accepts John Paul's position on this as the Conservative way to proceed, but we do not rest there. We move forward and seek to join religion and science and make them one, we prefer not to see them as a marriage of different things. Yet we think we should proceed on this conservatively, moving ever toward the future, when religion and science are finally seen as one, as we are seeking to see it.

ECC's Eco-Philosophy

Eco-philosophers (e.g. Worldchanging) seek evolution toward the sustainability of our material circumstances and social formations, and traditional spiritualists seek the interior, involutionary structures of consciousness. The Evolutionary Christian Church wants the Green vision of sustainability to include the future, sustainable, evolution of human life, all the way to Godhood.

A. Material-social sustainability
B. Involutionary spirituality
C. Sustainable, human, bio-spiritual evolution