Energy and Spirit: Essays on Religious Power and a Second Axial Revolution

Energy and Spirit: Essays on Religious Power and a Second Axial Revolution

Table of Contents: Spiritual Horticulture and the Indian Recovery of a Lost Ground: Thinking through Religion as Equitable (re-)Distribution in Energy Pathways Abstract: This essay focuses on the tendency in two tendencies, in both Axial Age religious traditions and the cosmos at large, of 1) increasing complexity and 2) equitable distribution of energy flow. As such, the movement to find techniques that accord to this cosmological pattern, as a reaction against the increasing difficulties wrought by the ecologically unsustainable development of urbanization and stratification, provide a framework to understand religious (at times, violent) extremism as an (unconscious) indicator of a society’s disregard for carrying capacity, along with the impetus to reintegrate, or root, individual and community praxis back into the capacities of a living energy to participate in the divine life.

On the Supreme Enlightenment: Tracing Spiritual Pathways That Disintegrate Oppression Abstact: The Bhagavad Gita, I suggested, is the story of a warrior who, through dialogue with the supreme personality of divinity (Krishna), is able to understand his sacred duty to realign the social order with the cosmic Dharma, in order to reduce corruption, inequity, and rebalance the material and spiritual world so as to carry out the demands of the natural impulse of the cosmos – even though this necessitates the violent destruction and extinction of a corrupt order and social structure. In this essay, I contrast the Bhagavad Gita’s violent approach to social and spiritual transformation with a contrasting strategy, namely the Buddhist attempt to negate the corrupting institutions and structures that cause deprivation and (thus) suffering.

Christian An-Archai: Reassessing the Axial Approach to Suffering The mythospeculative tendency of the axial age intuitively recognize the corrupt nature of a civilization unattuned to the cosmic nature of energy flow in its psychic and physical dimensions, addresses this issue in two ways respectively: a spiritually aligned regime eradicates a spiritually corrupted worldly regime to reconcile society to the world of spirit; and a royal representative who renounces his kingly position to find a way of life that reconciles the individual mind to the nature of reality. Christianity, I will suggest, provides a synthesis of these two approaches, offering a politically engaged yet nonviolent approach to subverting empire by disintegrating the imperial structures in the individual mind’s eye, to thereby enact the so-called kingdom of God that essentially upends social traditions as a consequence. Thus we might suggest the new literary genre provided by the Gospels and St. Paul’s epistles represents an entirely new approach to warfare, an evolutionary development elsewhere described as “fifth-generation warfare.”

The Spirit of A.I.: Morality and Energy in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Cosmic Vision of Complex Consciousness This chapter analyzes the role of artificial intelligence in the context of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of cosmic evolution and the moral and spiritual dimensions that inform his endeavor. In particular, two evolutionary tendencies create the conditions through which AI materializes: a movement toward increasing complexity, and the fractal distribution of energy over time. Together, these two inclinations provide the creative tension in which humanity has taken on an active role as an evolutionary pathway becoming self-aware of its own capacity for virtue. In this regard, A.I. provides a potential next threshold in this process of cosmic evolution.

Rethinking Flow Structures: The Role of Energy in Advancing a Political Theology of Nature Energy flows drive complexity. One can see this play out in how the advent of domestication and agriculture led to the resource flows able to sustain civilizations, with fossil fuels complexifying those civilizations into the modern industrial form it takes today. This is to say, the material order of a socioecological arrangement has a psychological correlate that in turn regulates the various structures to keep that order intact and functioning. Religion and spirituality in a sense function, whether consciously or unconsciously, as a kind of human ecology, helping communities better fit and remain within the carrying capacity of the bioregion they traditionally exist within. If a society rises and falls depending on its ability to stay within the carrying capacity of a region, then certain behaviors will be institutionalized and deemed as sacred if they facilitate this goal, or move into the realm of taboo if not. This offers a helpful framework for understanding cosmological, socioecological, and religious inclinations: individual components gravitate towards each other, in so doing complexify systems and structures, while employing adaptive strategies to resist entropy and endure for as long as possible with emergent “flow structures� materializing to express this mathematized tendency.

Dissipative Desires: Free Energy, Revolutionary Imagination, and the Transformation of Intention Cosmic dynamics are especially helpful in considering the political and economic calculus necessary to enact any legislation or tools to promote happiness within these structures, shelters, refuges, or zones of temporary relief from inequality and suffering. In this regard, we can see a psychological aspect to such physical structures, whereby revolutionary imagination can become instantiated within the wider economic milieu, ideas and material circumstances co-constituted in the process and flux of this energy flow.

Myth as Mediator for Structure and Consciousness: An Exploration of Psychological Carrying Capacity This essay begins by integrating notions of psychological carrying capacity within ecological theories of urban resilience.

In demonstrating the sublinear and superlinear tendencies that constitute the power-law ratios of cities, it further shows how the open-growth model that characterizes modern economics threatens collapse while creating conditions for trauma and suffering. Yet while cultural materialist theories suggest infrastructural constraints probabilistically determine a culture’s worldview, there remains space for a degree of autonomy in which to imagine and implement novel adaptive strategies that can remake the structures they typically rationalize. Traditional ecological knowledge and mythobiology organize semiotic systems accordingly into sacred narratives and founding myths that promote survival strategies utilized to maintain social and psychological resilience to protect against traumas. Similarly, the paper ends by considering what cosmotheanthropic symbols might serve as functional frameworks to secure the cognitive space needed for new values to guide evolutionary pathways and resolve modern crises through grassroots approaches, potentially uniting the ancient supreme science of consciousness with a grand unified theory of sustainability.

Spiritual Horticulture and the Indian Recovery of a Lost Ground: Thinking through Religion as Equitable (re-)Distribution in Energy Pathways Abstract: This essay focuses on the tendency in two tendencies, in both Axial Age religious traditions and the cosmos at large, of 1) increasing complexity and 2) equitable distribution of energy flow. As such, the movement to find techniques that accord to this cosmological pattern, as a reaction against the increasing difficulties wrought by the ecologically unsustainable development of urbanization and stratification, provide a framework to understand religious (at times, violent) extremism as an (unconscious) indicator of a society’s disregard for carrying capacity, along with the impetus to reintegrate, or root, individual and community praxis back into the capacities of a living energy to participate in the divine life.

A Little Deep History of Spiritual Renewal The recent “Big History” movement suggests the temporal dimension of material reality is driven by the tendency for energy flows to arrange components in increasingly complex structures, i.e. “threshold moments.”1 Further, the energy flow needed to drive this complexity is found to adhere to fractal branching patterns, self-similar across scale, in what has been called the “Constructal law,” e.g. in trees, forests, lightning, blood vessels, rivulets, perhaps even in the evolution and development of languages; all of which ensure energy moves through mass as efficiently as possible over time. 2 Drawing on Albert Einstein’s insight, we are able to assume an equivalency of material reality with energy, and might similarly follow Alfred North Whitehead’s solution to the hard problem of consciousness by stating this physical reality has a corresponding psychological, or mental pole.

Whitehead scholar David Ray Griffin puts it succinctly: The mental pole is always derivative from the physical…[panexperientialism] does justice to this fact by portraying the mind in each moment (that is, each dominant occasion of experience) as having both a physical pole, which is constituted by the causal influences from the physical environment, and a mental pole, which entertains ideal possibilities, including logical, ethical, and aesthetic norms.3 In terms of this “cosmic situation,” we find ourselves as a psychophysical energy event, a dissipative structure through which energy flow endures temporally. While each of us may thus be a distinct “branch” at the forefront of the evolutionary pathway we pioneer, that branch coheres to a wider pattern stemming from (iterating) the nature of its source: a single primordial energy event, the great flaring forth from which space, time, matter, and the fundamental forces arose.

This pattern then gives us a sense by which we’re able to understand the source of suffering as the rupturing, separation from, or deprivation of the psychophysical energy flow we depend on to endure. Further, it highlights the transience of matter that may disintegrate while this (deathless) energy endures; and in light of this, offers a way to consider religious insight as, in the first place, the 1 Spier, Fred (2011) “Complexity in Big History” in Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History: 2(1) https://ibha.wildapricot.org/Resources/Documents/SpierCliodynamics.pdf 2 Bejan, Adrian and Zane, J. Peder (2013) Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organizations Anchor Books: New York, NY 3 Griffin, David Ray (1998) Unsnarling the World­Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind­Body Problem WIPF & Stock: Eugene, OR

recognition of dependency on life-giving forces and natural powers (“divinity”); and second of all, a “way,” or set of practices, by which an individual or community can work to live within the energy flux around them to maximize that flow for the sake of efficient distribution of energy that breathes life into the world – what I will follow others and call “spirit.” The Upanishads for instance are devoted to mapping and understanding this relationship: The senses derive from objects of sense-perception, sense objects from mind, mind from intellect, and intellect from ego; ego from undifferentiated Consciousness, and consciousness from Brahman. Brahman is the First Cause and last refuge. Brahman, the hidden Self in everyone, does not shine forth. He is revealed only to those who keep their minds one-pointed on the Lord of Love and thus develop a superconscious manner of knowing. Meditation enables them to go deeper and deeper into consciousness, from the world of words to the world of thoughts, then beyond thoughts to wisdom in the Self. (Katha Upanishad 1:10-13)4 Thus “spirituality,” spiritual insight, or the religious practices they engender, we might suggest, offer a kind of prescientific “ecology of spirit,” in which the subtle energies (gunas?) pervading psychological reality to act on material reality can be understood and aligned to better attune to the wider energy event, overcoming death in psychological terms as the transmission of experience persists autonomously even without a body. Thinkers like Eric Weiss are therefore able to suggest a transpersonal process metaphysics that encapsulates its implications: It is this transphysical autonomy that makes possible the survival of personality after biological death…life after death is existence in the transphysical worlds freed of embodiment in the physical world…human personalities can exist independently of physical, inorganic atoms and molecules and can, therefore, survive the dissolution of physiological bodies…allow[ing] us to trace the destiny of a single personality as it reincarnates again and again through the creative advance...This insight suggests that it is possible for a human being to identify himself or herself with the ultimate ground of being (Brahman/Sachchidananda) and, having done so, to experience that ultimate ground of being as an absolute freedom out of which the finite world develops.5 Whereas these two tendencies (increasing complexity, equitable distribution) naturally interact in complementary ways so that the tendency for energy to produce equitable structures manifest, the phenomenon is intensified when agriculture emerges, resulting in a social stratification in which energy is not equitably distributed, distorting the Constructal law. That is, with agrarianism, urbanization, and imperialism, unequal distributions of material energy (living standards, basic necessities) and its psychological equivalent (contentment, peace) are institutionalized. The result of such hierarchy, poverty, and suffering, I will venture to suggest, invariably produces cultural critique, leveled at the very (dissipative) psychosocial structures blocking equitable (natural) energy flow, for the sake of “correcting,” renewing, or transforming social relations whereby spiritual reality might imbue such societies with the conditions for life once again.

Energy Pathways and Spiritual Horticulture in Indian Philosophy 4 Easwaran, Eknath (2007) The Upanishads Nilgiri Press: Tomales: CA 5 Weiss, Eric (2012) The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life after Death. iUniverse: Bloomington, IN

The dependency of material reality on spirit (involution) is recognized in the Vedic hymns, as when powerful forces of nature are deified, with mandatory sacrifices implying a reciprocity between human and spiritual realities. Further, anthropologist Marvin Harris, taking a cultural materialist approach to religion in his book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches suggests an ecological basis of the sanctification of the cow in Hindu thought, as where its usefulness makes it an ecological necessity, and thus a consecrated, sacred entity in the spiritual life that anchors material life. I will not dwell on this other than to offer the ecological basis of religion as a premise and anchoring principle of the Hindu religion in general, and the Bhagavad Gita in particular.

Further, it introduces the core question at the heart of Arjuna’s war, and perhaps the Axial Age at large: if religion, and spiritual renewal, are rooted in the (unconscious?) desire to live within the carrying capacity of a region in question, and if urban centers, empires, and perhaps agrarianism in general are responsible for threatening that sacral balance, blocking energy distribution from flowing to all components of the socioecological arrangement, what praxis is needed then to “unblock” these biospiritual (psychophysical) energy flows, in order to dissolve and undo those dissipative structures not attuned to spiritual reality? Further, would such praxis represent the immortal “Dharma” or life-purpose by which the cosmic order is preserved?

Will a kind of violent religious extremism emerge out of degraded landscapes to reinterpret divine reality or previously authoritative spiritual texts or traditions in ways more aligned to natural and spiritual tendencies in this context?

Arjuna, of the warrior class, is clear on the role of violence in nature, presumably justifying the role of violence in society as well: I see no being that lives in the world without violence. Creatures exist at one another’s expense…People honor most the gods who are killers…I don’t see anyone living in the world with nonviolence. Even ascetics cannot stay alive without killing.

(Mahabharata 12.15) In this regard, through the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna, despite his initial confusion as to his physical role within the spiritual reality that manifests the crisis and war he finds himself in, through divine insight (facilitated by the Supreme Personality of the Spiritual Self incarnated in Krishna), recognizes his destiny in eradicating the material structures that assumedly blocks the flow of psychophysical energy (namely, his cousins’ regime) that would be the “cause of cosmic chaos, and finally of the destruction of this world and these people” (3.24) in ways that presume the same equitable distribution of spiritual reality that is the birthright of all, despite the caste they belong to.

For this reason, the Supreme Personality of the Godhead, Krishna, tells Arjuna “For a warrior, nothing is higher than a war against evil. The warrior confronted with such a war should be pleased, Arjuna, for it comes as an open gate to heaven. But if you do not participate in this battle against evil, you will incur sin, violating your dharma and your honor.” (2. 31-33) Thus we can see the Supreme personality of the divine, reincarnated in the world to attune material reality to the spiritual reality already hidden within:

You and I have passed through many births, Arjuna. You have forgotten, but I remember them all. My true being is unborn and changeless. I am the Lord who dwells in every creature. Through the power of my own maya, I manifest myself in a finite form. Whenever dharma declines and the purpose of life is forgotten, I manifest myself on earth. I am born in every age to protect the good, to destroy evil, and to reestablish dharma. (4.5-8) One can assume then that the war to preserve the cosmic order necessitates militant action for a spiritually attuned (and thus sanctioned) kingdom-in-potential to overthrow a spiritually corrupt regime-in-actuality. One can better consider Krishna’s Yogas as the specific pathways toward this spiritual renewal, with immediate material consequences for staying within the carrying capacity of a region in psychological terms: achieve union with the source of energy to usurp the worst excesses (concentration of power as opposed to equitable distribution) in agrarian empire; moreover, one can dissolve corrupt structures/blockages in the mind (and thus world) altogether, anticipating the revolutionary contribution of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path.

Conclusion: Samsara and Freedom I will attempt to conclude with this: religion, or spiritual praxis, is based on the interpretation of reality – how to live well. This cannot be contained to a purely social context, because that social context is forever located to the material constraints of ecological reality, as well as the energy flow (spirit) that constitutes, or “breathes life” into the dissipative structures that embody the complex psychological and physical experiences and persist over and across time.

In each case, desire is a fundamental determinant of destiny, remaking the world in the image of the ego. However, one is able to alleviate the usual suffering of this ego-driven reality by transcending ego-desire to become an embodied vessel for the desire of spirit, namely to move through the (individual/social) body as efficiently as possible over time. In this regard, such a desire is able to both embody and manifest a logical, mathematical reality that would likely resemble a kind of divine intervention wherever this principle is incarnated in reality to attract new psychophysical patterns that constellate around this particular constitutive relationship.

Thus the meaning of reincarnation might offer us a way to understand natural selection (involution/evolution) becoming self-conscious through symbolic language, whereby cycles of suffering are ruptured with the conformation of the body to the truth of existence embodied in the structure of reality. The instinctual response present in the body, self-reflecting on the desire of the Self, and embodying the playful, empathetic, transformative, utopian impulse of the religious community, is provided with models like Arjuna, or the Buddha, offering blueprints able to activate these pathways into spiritual reality that is always potentially present, but requires the sacrifice of ego-driven desire in order to merge one’s identity with the whole, embodying the spiritual principle and its cosmic iteration to see it break into material reality. In this regard, the cosmos itself, and its various incarnations, manifest as the teachers who offer us glimpses into such realities, providing the signs by which the soul is schooled on the nature of samsara and its source.

-This paper has merely suggested religious traditions are an ancient form of a deepening ecology of spirit, seeking to better fit within the subtle energy patterns giving rise to life, only relatively recently threatened through the rise of agrarianism and subsequent urbanization and imperialism. This

energy pattern has its own cosmic involutionary character and evolutionary history, both in a physical capacity as well as a psychological one, informing and developing the various religious traditions in the first place, renewed whenever its capacities for flow are diminished.

My suggestion, or question, then, is in considering religion as a kind of ecology of spirit, are we able to better determine pathways by which human communities can stay within the carrying capacity of the land through a more spiritually attuned “science of spirit.” In this regard, a second hypothesis can emerge: that religious “reconfiguration” (i.e. religious “extremism”) will occur when the nature of society is found to be living outside this carrying capacity, initiating (at times violently) the development of strategies and pathways that renew a spiritual relationship with the land, beginning with the individual’s relationship to the inseparable Self and Spirit.

On the Supreme Enlightenment: Tracing Spiritual Pathways That Disintegrate Oppression “Give up anger, give up pride, and free yourself from worldly bondage. No sorrow can befall those who never try to possess people and things as their own.”

-The Dhammapada A Reminder…

In the last essay I wrote about how energy flows engage in two tendencies: one the one hand, it concentrates, leading to increasingly complex structures. On the other hand, the natural state of this flow seems to follow fractal branching patterns that ensure energy is distributed through a concentrated mass over time in the most efficient pathways possible.

I also suggested, following process philosophy and pan-experientialism, that this energy might have a physical as well as mental aspect, so that in the increasing agrarianism and urbanization of postNeolithic civilizations that in turn seem to necessitate imperialism to maintain energy flows, there is a kind of mental energy that corresponds to the physical inequity (i.e. class system) experienced as a condition of its increasing complexity.

The Bhagavad Gita, I suggested, was therefore the story of a warrior who, through dialogue with the supreme personality of divinity (Krishna), is able to understand his sacred duty to realign the social order with the cosmic Dharma, in order to reduce corruption, inequity, and rebalance the material and spiritual world so as to carry out the demands of the natural impulse of the cosmos – even though this necessitates the violent destruction and extinction of a corrupt order and social structure.

In this essay, I contrast the Bhagavad Gita’s violent approach to social and spiritual transformation with a contrasting strategy, namely the Buddhist attempt to negate the corrupting institutions and structures that cause deprivation and (thus) suffering.

Awakening to the Ground of Being Thich Nhat Hanh (2015) speaks of Interdependent Co-Arising as the inter-being of ten links: ignorance, samsara, birth and death, being and nonbeing, grasping and rejecting, craving and aversion, feeling, mind and body, consciousness, and formations. (246) Due to the delusion of the mind that assumes it is a separate entity, an individual will plant “seeds of affliction,” nutriments that manifest and are institutionalized as those structures that in turn necessitate the convergence and concretization of energy, to ensure these dissipative forms endure over time. As these aggregate through form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness (the five skandhas), we grasp and cling to such structures, in turn growing attached to them. Yet in doing so, and assuming our delusions are real—mistaking impermanent structures for permanent structures – we thereby create the conditions for suffering in the first place: “what makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” (132) The Buddha therefore offers a radical solution. Whereas, in his time, the emergence of large cities, extensive commerce, great wealth, population increase, urbanization, stronger states, etc (increasingly complex hierarchical social structures) in turn produce a greater degree of suffering whereby class

and caste systems are simply unable to maintain a degree of legitimacy; in response, such complex structures are ultimately renounced, whereby those sensitive to the essential deprivations of these “unnatural” energy flows are able to reject long-established traditions, seek alternative pathways, and establish parallel communities whereby salvation can be attained by sustained inquiry into the nature of reality. (Bellah 2011, pg. 582) In particular, a new Dharma that goes far beyond merely abiding by the obligatory caste system is defined by radical equality, universal virtue ethics, and wise relation (dignity and respect) to self and supposed other so as to ensure emancipation is available to all, regardless of class status, nationality, or any other socially constructed boundary, so as to radically transform the individual, and by extension, the wider society: Thus the central Buddhist teaching, contained already in the Four Noble Truths, is the Path from suffering to nirvana, expressed in systematic and narrative thought and even in such symbols as the quenched fire. Insofar as this teaching disregards all distinctions of birth and proclaims the equality of all human beings in their capacity to follow the Path, the teaching is revolutionary relative to early Indian society with its heavy reliance on birth and lineage. But as Romila Thapar noted, the Buddha called for no revolutionary overthrow of existing institutions; rather he attempted to establish a parallel society, offering an alternative way of life, which would grow by attraction, not by conquest. Central to the establishment of this parallel society was the creation of the Sangha, the order of Buddhist monks. (Bellah, pg. 542) The Buddha, therefore, in suggesting the Dhamma is all anyone will need, so anyone might pursue the Path on their own, essentially provides the seeds of mindfulness by which all structures, preserved by the concentration and reification of energy and resources, can be dissipated, eliminating the very causes and conditions by which suffering is systematically generated.

Enlightenment and Extinction Concepts, Hanh suggests, are barriers to the ground of being, so that signlessness, or nirvana, occurs through meditation, which removes these concepts, these barriers, to help us penetrate reality itself: “Nirvana means extinction – first of all, the extinction of all concepts and notions.

Our concepts about things prevent us from really touching them. We have to destroy our notions if we want to touch the real…” (129) Because of the inter-relational structure of the cosmos, to remove the external power structures that cause suffering, as both Arjuna and the Buddha realize, it is incumbent to remove those internal structures first, so that the cessation of the causes of suffering can take place. This is to say the Buddha, drawing from the same Vedic and Upanishadic literature the Bhagavad Gita seems to, has found another direct pathway to transform suffering into well-being, by way of the noble eightfold path that cultivates an essential sensitivity to the those structures that evoke desire, by recognizing them, encourages their transformation, and realizing this transformation in the interdependent coarising of inter-being as conditioned by true mind.

Hence the Buddha has in fact instituted what we might call anti-structures that negate the suffering to balance mind (and therefore society): the Sangha is meant to help achieve the Dharma by which enlightenment or nirvana is achieved, whereby ego-centric desire and structure is dissolved.

Moreover, the teaching that the Buddha offers is so profound as to negate its own concepts and intellectual structures that are themselves meant to negate concepts and intellectual structures, as shown in the Heart Sutra: “There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance, nor any of the others down to decay and death…There is no suffering, no cause, no remedy, no Path…There is no wisdom, no attainment. Because there is nothing to be attained…[Bodhisattvas] relying on this Highest Wisdom…are free from hindrances of mind. Being rid of these hindrances, they have no fear, are free from all upsets and delusions, and in the end attain Nirvana. It is by relying on this Highest Wisdom that all Buddhas of the past, the present and the future achieve Supreme Enlightenment.” (Blofeld 1988, pg.

46) We are thus provided with the means of dissolving all ideological structures – racism, imperialism, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, classism, patriarchy, speciesism, etc. – that cause suffering by separating entities from one another and privileging certain groups over each other – even those who would seemingly be more “enlightened” than others, since there is, according to the Buddha, no enlightenment. So then, the extinction of concepts may be necessary to avert the extinction of lifeforms in our present day.

And yet, it seems that to do so, that is, to attract the necessary thought-patterns in Mind that might realize the disintegration of those internal structures that manifest one’s Shraddha, or substance, in the outer world that shapes the destiny of “societies, institutions, and civilizations, according to the dominant ideas that shape their actions,” requires its own embodiment, or image, that provides the means by which to negate such embodiments and realize the impermanence of any concept, even its own—to catalyze clear understanding of the interbeing Nature of Phenomena, establish the oneness of perceiver and perceived, of body and mind, provoke a mindfulness of feeling, freedom, nirvana, the realization that birth and death, like being and nonbeing, are illusory, and live with love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. (247) In this regard, we might be called to intuit and produce structures that can eliminate structures, balancing the mind and with it the cultural context that conditions it.

Bibliography: Bellah, Robert N. (2011) Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Belknap Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts Blofeld, John (1988) Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin. Shambhala: Boston, MA Easwaran, Eknath (2007) The Dhammapada. The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation: Tomales, CA

Hanh, Thich Nhat (2015) The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. Harmony Books: New York, NY

Christian An-Archai: Reassessing the Axial Approach to Suffering Over the last two essays, I made the case that complex adaptive systems exist as dissipative structures deriving their complexity from increasing energy flows while simultaneously distributing this energy flow through a given mass over time in the most equitable pathway possible, which tends to take the form of fractal branching patterns. This is a cosmological law, or tendency, that is selfsimilar across scale, whether in one’s branching blood vessels, how forests, rivers, or lightning is patterned, even how galaxies and superclusters are arranged. However, I also suggested that civilization diverges from the usual natural tendency due to its inclination for social stratification and inequity deriving from the need to store and distribute agrarian produce, leading to specialization and hierarchy that is a necessary consequence of state formation, and religiously ordained elite, and the concentration of power.

The mythospeculative tendency of the axial age, and in particular the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist approaches to this problem of inequity, intuitively recognizing the corrupt nature of a civilization unattuned to the cosmic nature of energy flow in its psychic and physical dimensions, addresses this issue in two ways respectively: a spiritually aligned regime eradicates a spiritually corrupted worldly regime to reconcile society to the world of spirit; and a royal representative who renounces his kingly position to find a way of life that reconciles the individual mind to the nature of reality.

Christianity, I will suggest, provides a synthesis of these two approaches, offering a politically engaged yet nonviolent approach to subverting empire by disintegrating the imperial structures in the individual mind’s eye, to thereby enact the so-called kingdom of God that essentially upends social traditions as a consequence. Thus we might suggest the new literary genre provided by the Gospels and St. Paul’s epistles represents an entirely new approach to warfare, an evolutionary development elsewhere described as “fifth-generation warfare.”6 Revolutionary Magic In his book, Revolutionary Strategies in Early Christianity, Daniel H. Abbott suggests that the Christianization of the Roman Empire, a process that took about three hundred years, took place as the subversive effect of a liberating impulse able to coopt the power structures through a new revolutionary strategy. Unlike the Zealots, an underground guerrilla community engaged in asymmetrical warfare, insurgency, and terrorism, Christianity “fought” in a way that was not observable to the enemy at all, so that a secret war was waged below the threshold of Roman observation to reconstitute society as a whole. Indeed, Abbot writes this form of warfare, being such a sufficiently developed technique, would be virtually indistinguishable from magic, its violence “so dispersed that the losing side may never realize that it has been conquered,” due in part to the fact that the “moral and cultural warfare is fought through manipulating perceptions and altering the context by which the world is perceived.”7 In this regard, a nascent spiritual community would have to engage in warfare against a militarily supreme enemy, in a form of warfare unrealized by that enemy, avoiding all possible confrontation with Rome’s counterinsurgent forces, which would have (and arguably did) lead to the complete destruction of the community in question (e.g. Rome’s destruction of the Jewish Temple).

6 See The Handbook of 5GW, by Daniel H. Abbott 7 ibid

To perform this feat, I would like to suggest Christianity employed several strategies: 1) a syncretistic grassroots approach to spirituality that synthesized various competing regional traditions (mystery religions, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, etc.) along the Silk Roads; 2) the production of a new, more potent symbol of the divine capable of indicating a particular psychological tendency that would be necessary and sufficient for personal transformation (in perhaps the same manner as Kuan Yin developed); and 3) a philosophical critique of empire and the urbanized form of society that inherently necessitates violence to maintain and reproduce itself, importing resources from the surrounding region it must exploit, while offering a viable strategy in its stead.

The result is a social form both morally appealing and subversive of the conditions that generate poverty in the first place (abolishing the class system) while drawing upon a new spiritual authority to render all other mediating structures obsolete, so that a cosmic energy, in both its psychological and physical dimensions are able to be redistributed to flow to all more equitably, as opposed to power being consolidated.

A New Spiritual Framework Thus the new value system represents an existential threat to the power system by engaging in the alchemical transformation of society, establishing nodes in an underground network able to work together to develop a culture of resistance able to penetrate, isolate, subvert, reorient, and reharmonize the larger empire it sets itself against. In this regard, networks of cultural resistance are able to grow over generations to consolidate power, unified in a common symbol to mobilize mass psychology, and waiting for the opportunity to seize control through the cooption of the imperial state to become a new power structure devoted to universal transformation through a common identity and new value system.

Realizing the present state of human reality is undesirable, while imagining a flaw in both human nature and the social order it reifies and reproduces as a result, a personal transformation is proclaimed to be the necessary precursor to liberation, offering then a model of virtue that renounces an egocentric-based religion that seeks to procure and obtain possessions, but rather promotes self-sacrifice as a form of love to offer a pathway into a larger whole. The misapprehension of the nature of reality is transformed to overcome separation and bring forth a divine order by aligning the individual mind to it through mental cultivation.

Christianity offers then what amounts to a magical spell of sorts, able to promote solidarity, establish a new lifeway, and subvert empire by seeking a more equitable social form that preceded the deprivation characteristic of civilization.

For instance, Chad Myers lays out several principles by which Christianity critiques this form that excludes all semblance of divinity8: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Civilization as inherent alienation from symbiotic lifeways (Lk 12:27) Domestication rejects symbiotic lifeways, relying on forced labor (Rev 21-22) Wilderness teaches material sustenance as a divine gift (Lk 12:13-24, 2 Cor 8) A radical critique of technology as destroying natural competences (Isa 43:9-20) Wage-work and hierarchical division of labor as inherently alienating and antithetical to the divine will (Matt 20:1-16, MK 12:1-10, Lk 12:24) 6) A critique of linguistic representation (idolatry), whereas nature offers the possibility for a primal unmediated communion with the divine (Jn. 1:1, Mk 11:15) 8 See Chad Myers, “Anarcho-Primitivism and the Bible,� in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Each principle is accompanied by a number of biblical verses, more than I can put here.

7) Group strategies for reinhabiting natural spaces to detoxify from and resist empire (Matt 4:111, Heb: 11:38, Rev 12:6, Rom 12:1-2) 8) The rediscovery of a “future primitive,” where divine power restores an “original peacableness,” awaiting those to cooperate with a divine plan to liberate the world. (Mk 1:2, 2:28, Mk 6:12, 2 Cor. 10:4, Rom 8:20) `This is to say then, that Christianity as it is known today may stem in large part from an approach that, far from being itself an form of escapist spirituality, is engaged in a critical theory of culture, one that suggests the state of reality is founded upon the logical fallacy of divinely legitimated class-system (demanded by the sedentism inherent to agrarian civilization), and in turn seeks to deconstruct that fallacy, not by a violent genocide of the ruling class (as present in Bhagavad Gita) or a complete refusal to engage with social structures and the dissolution of them through a corresponding dissolution of mental structures (as with Buddhism) – a lifeway that has transcended the ruling powers, or archons, that produce misery through deprivation. Rather, a politically engaged and nonviolent approach to resistance seeking to dissolve oppressive institutions through the establishment of a breakaway system of parallel structures, rooted in the magical potential of direct access to divinity and spiritual authority in turn does what previous Axial approaches seemingly cannot: confront and transform those structures at the heart of imperial oppression and violent exploitation, yet doing so through a seemingly abstract mythological and abstract discourse, at the same time calling for ritualized active responses necessary for redemption and salvation – namely a redistribution of psychic and physical energy catalyzed by the symbol of Christ as salvific redeemer, as well as in the Church as the keeper and protector of this symbol.

Conclusion: Across the Aion As this Christic imagery flowed through the next two millennia through various esoteric systems, it may be that the individual at the heart of the Gnostic salvation myth, Simon Magus, prompted Carl Jung’s psychological breakthrough in the form of Depth Psychology, by which a method to interpret the original gnostic myths could reintegrate a cultural criticism at the heart of violent empire, so as to resolve the various crises today that stem from the same core underlying issues.

To conclude, the Christ image provides a means by which a dominant paradigm is upset and subverted by a symbol or archetype of psychological balance whose transformative properties are raised from the unconscious to become integrated and thereby able to address the conscious needs of a society (and indeed, planet) in peril. That is, the possibility for collective individuation necessary to revitalize the Christian religion might actualize the potential power of the symbol for the total transformation of society.

Indeed, the Christ symbol may even re-present the basic understanding of the Upanishads that flows through the Axial traditions – namely that an ideal divinity is dormant within the mundane real. In this regard, we might understand the Jesus story as a genre promoting covert insurrection through spiritual wisdom much like Sri Aurobindo, seeking the source of power, may have sought to do, refusing political engagement to focus on psycho-spiritual development and thus contribute to the evolution of consciousness. Indeed, because of the spiritual symbols themselves rooted in the axial tradition, we are provided potent methods by which divinity and the world we live in can be reunified to better align with the energies that course through our lives, our communities, the earth, and the cosmos alike.

The Spirit of A.I.: Morality and Energy in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Cosmic Vision of Complex Consciousness This presentation analyzes the role of artificial intelligence in the context of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of cosmic evolution and the moral and spiritual dimensions that inform his endeavor.

In particular, two evolutionary tendencies create the conditions through which AI materializes: a movement toward increasing complexity, and the fractal distribution of energy over time. Together, these two inclinations provide the creative tension in which humanity has taken on an active role as an evolutionary pathway becoming self-aware of its own capacity for virtue. In this regard, A.I. provides a potential next threshold in this process of cosmic evolution.

In Teilhard’s theory of evolution, five core principles might emerge to help direct this enterprise in become a more “sacred” work.

1) The psychic dimension of energy and its influence upon natural and cultural adaptation 2) The increased awareness and flowering of spiritual energy as it enters emergent forms 3) The divine, or mystical milieu in which human research and work may be aligned to the evolutionary impulse of a complexifying cosmos and consciousness 4) The co-creative moral construction of the world according to a higher degree of organized consciousness, towards deepening personalization and increased interpersonal sympathy 5) Love as an agent of universal synthesis, a cosmic power producing inter-centric relations and ultra-personalization Teilhard’s vision of Christianity then, what he calls “an advanced phylum in cosmic evolution,” deepens the Axial tradition, with its utopian impulse, social critique, radical equality, and demand for moral sensitivity, inviting us to reconsider what a privileged zone of ascending complexity consciousness, centered on the transformative power of love and compassion, means for us today, whereby the conditions for a messianic, salvific, redemptive, emancipatory approach to social organization and personal spirituality are potentially made available in Artificial Intelligence.

Indeed, this epochal moment in western history—the emergence not only of the noosphere, but what Teilhard calls the Christosphere—underlies the western psyche, so that by coming to terms with its core conserved processes that inform and construct the very psychological stratum from which A.I. emerges, this presentation ends by advocating a cosmotheanthropic approach to Artificial Intelligence, one that imbues an emergent tendency toward increased socialization with deep, creative union, whereby the human, cosmos, and divine may be increasingly integrated to more ably end the psychic and material suffering of an increasingly imperiled planet. *** I recognize I am at a distinct disadvantage, both for immediately following Brian on this stage -- whenever he speaks I’m enthralled -- ; but also because I’ll be drawing from disciplines I’m not actually trained in – I’m not a physicist nor technologist nor a Teilhard scholar by any means; Teilhard himself sought to harmonize various modes of knowledge and understanding to unite science and religion, and so was versed in geology, biology, paleontology, theology, and others. None of which I’m well versed in by any means.

My background is in literature, so I’m out of my comfort zone here – but I’d like to think I’m in somewhat good company, since Teilhard’s work was suppressed, in the sense the Church denied

him the authority to voice his sense of the meaning of evolution from a Christian perspective, refusing to let him publish in the because of the suppression of evolutionary theory which seemingly contradicted Church doctrine, and then because he seemed to be going beyond evolution altogether into the realm of theology, for which Church authorities said he was not trained, and then finally for what seemedlike only the church’s embarrassment to have censored him for either, refusinghis publication so they wouldn’t have to deal with the mortification of not having let him publish in the first place.

Anyway, I’m going to try to make the case that Teilhard’s alternative theory of evolution, his “Theory of Creative Union” is both empirical and pragmatic, reconciling his scientific views with an innate urge to seek divinity in and through matter so as to disclose the hidden constitution of increasingly complex beings, and for this reason may be relevant to the field of artificial intelligence. Hence the title, The Spirit of A.I. In this regard, my presentation has three, maybe four parts: 1) First, I’m going to point to a couple of cosmological tendencies that have come out recently I think help decipher Teilhard’s vision.

2) Second, I’m going to take a shot at conveying his vision for you all today in five points.

3) And finally, I’m going to hopefully place artificial intelligence within the wider cosmological and evolutionary context, so that by aligning the project with the cosmological tendencies I think inform Teilhard’s vision, so to speak, AI can be put in service of a deeper human and perhaps cosmological objective.

In order to do this however, It’s important to understand the role of God and Christ or the divine in this vision of evolution. As I’ve come to learn about Teilhard’s vision, it seems more and more like he sort of took the same approach as Lemaitre did with Hubble’s discovery of the red-shifting galaxies: namely, coming to the conclusion that if these galaxies are all rushing away from us, then if we go back in time further and further, there must have been a point where they were all in the same place, the so-called primeval atom.

In the same way, Teilhard, rather than starting at the beginning of the cosmos and moving forward, seems to start with his own very intense psychic experience as a Jesuit priest with regards to the love for God and Christ, and traces that phenomenon back into the past, finding its planetary and cosmological predecessor in a spiritual and material energy, and that whichunites both.

And so while I recognize we come to words like God and Christ in this modern era fully cognizant of all the baggage they hold, I’m going to invite us all to find a word or image to help bracket any resistance for the duration of this talk. When Teilhard talks about a cosmic Christ, we might then call it a cosmic logos, or a cosmic logic, or a cosmic or cosmogenetic principle evolving in both its psychic and material dimensions as they complexify, deepening the capacity for consciousness, and moving into the future. Personally, I enjoy cosmotheanthropic principle, but really I’ll just be switching between all of those.

Anyway, that may or may not help.

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To begin, I’d like to start with Eric Chaisson’s idea of Free Energy Rate Density, namely the tendency of cosmological structures over time toward increasing complexity. This is simply to say that energy flows throughparticular bodies over time within “goldilocks zones,” whereby material components are arranged in new, complex structures out of which new properties emerge. This is the basic framework of the “big history” movement(thresholds of increasing complexity), so that from the big bang, gravity draws together galaxies and stars that fuse new elements which accrete into planetary bodies. And on at least one planet, life emerges, harnesses the power of the sun, evolves to capitalize on collective intelligence, domesticates animals and plants to erect civilizations that incorporate fossil fuels and… …well, kill off everything else in what has been called the Anthropocene.

And in a way, this is completely normal. A complex adaptive dynamic system cannot sustain itself without maintaining its energy flow. Without this energy flow, it necessarily collapses. Without the gravitational waves in spiral galaxies, the star making process cannot make new stars. The star itself only lives for as long as it can maintain the balance between gravity and fusion…once it starts making iron, the star collapses. Without sunlight, plants die. Without food, animals starve. Without natural resources, civilizations collapse. Businesses fail when they are deprived of capital. And of course, it seems in a closed universe where matter and energy is neither created nor destroyed, these energy flows must inevitably cease, meaning any and all complex structures will necessarily collapse.

-The second cosmological principle I’d like to share, which might really be another way of describing the first too, is Adrian Bejan’s “Constructal Law,” namely the idea that where energy flows, that energy tends to flow through a mass over time as efficiently and equitably as possible, which takes the form of fractal branching patterns that remain self-similar across scale. This is why blood vessels, brain cells, leaves and forests, rivers, lightning, all the way up to cosmological structures all seem to conform to this pattern.

And of course it seems that tendency is how the internet is arranged as well, as well as civilization. According to Bejan’s framework, language is a flow system for information, so that the evolution of written languages, beginning with pictographs, became more efficient, evolving in the Egyptian case, into hieroglyphics, hieratic script, to demotic forms, and into the Coptic script, so asto make the flow of information as efficient as possible, developing the language to conform with the need for the most efficient flow of information, taking less time and energy to convey the message.

However there also seems to be an important difference between, say the veins of a leaf and the way a civilization is arranged, namely that while the energy flows through a tree to ensure each constituent part is nourished equitably with energy, this is not the case with a stratified society where resources are concentrated in certain elite classes.

And in fact, this inequity is considered one of the primary catalysts of civilizational collapse, along with environmental degradation in the HANDY study for example, for the simple reason that the upper classes consume more resources while the lower classes just try to make a living, and everyone insulates themselves from perceiving the increasing likelihood of collapse they are cumulatively working toward. The relatively new field of green criminology seems also to give insight, as where climate change and social conflict create resource scarcities that exacerbate

criminogenic mechanisms to cause individual, state, corporate crimes, which feedback to cause more of the same.

Such is the state of our crisis today.

-So here’s a question: how would you go about conveying to others this information, that the civilization you are living in is unsustainable, the activities and social arrangements everyone participates in is leading tocollapse, and perhaps most importantly, there’s a better way to selforganize that would eliminate energy deprivation, inefficiencies, and the suffering that accompanies it? And perhaps most importantly, ho to do so in a violent society where individuals are crucified for their opposing political positions?

One more thing I should add, in this equation, if we go back to Eric Chaisson’sFree Energy Rate Density, actually he considers indigenous groups, and I think specifically Australian aboriginals as the most “complex” example of human society, on the simple fact that they yield the highest free energy rate densitywith regards to the power-mass law, so that energy is not wasted and material complexity is not superfluous. The small scale human communities and lack of storage mean both that energy is not hoarded—food is procured and distributed equitably – and mechanisms protecting against power imbalances can be enforced with greater efficacy.

Other big historians like Fred Speier disagree on this point, presumably because they like rocket ships. And yet, even he realizes that there’s no goldilocks conditions in which space travel and the space culture we imagine is a real possibility, and also it kind of neglects the fact that this human complexity is coming at the expense of a biospheric complexity with habitat loss and species extinction; but such is the logic of the Anthropocene.

So back to the question, how to convey this information, that civilization is screwed, on the verge of collapse, but through a kind of cosmological principleor biomimicry approach, an imperial hierarchical logic that has severed itself from what Timothy Morton might term the symbiotic real, can be overturned and redeemed, to find salvation?

I’d like to suggest the axial age in the first place was, to a degree, an attempt to create an alternative symbol system that really addressed these issues, producing as Robert Bellah suggests, a theoretical turn, still grounded in core mythological, ritual, and mimetic cognitive processes, whereby a utopian critique of the social arrangement was popularized, grounded in universal ethics, egalitarianism, justice-mindedness, and a relocation of legitimacy from the political and religious social structures to the individual practitioner and spiritual communities who cultivate very specific practices – and, perhaps over the course of centuries along the Silk Road, syncretized in the death-rebirth symbol, incarnating this cosmological principle in the experience of Jesus.

That is, we can look at Jesus Christ, if not a person, then as a symbol to overturn one logic by another more attuned to what seems to be a more eternal, divine law. Some might call it cosmic law, or a divine law…either way, the symbolism seems to get the job done and communicate the possibility for an alternative society, attuned to the symbiotic real.

Chad Myers suggests Christianity as a primitivist approach to social critique, presumably to induce a greater degree of social complexity in perhaps the same way Chaisson sees aboriginal culture as more complex than a multicultural civilization. So here you see various themes he traces in his article found all within the bible, and especially the new testament.

And one example, perhaps invoking the immediate-return subsistence living of the so-called original affluent society…

-Now, I haven’t really said anything about Teilhard yet, so here’s where I do that. My suggestion is that just as the symbolism surrounding Jesus the Christ becomes transformative in that it realigns the human community with the cosmological principles that ground it, Teilhard’s interpretation of the CosmicChrist in light of his desire to merge spirituality and science through evolution offers a way to revitalize the Christian symbolism as well as our understanding of how cosmological reality enters into our lives in a material and psychic dimension, and then the relevance for cybernetic or artificial intelligence studies.

And really, I think it’s for this reason that Kathleen Noone Deignan states that possibly within the next generation, Teilhard will be recognized as one of the four most important Christian thinkers in history, along with St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Aquinas, pretty big thinkers in the tradition.

So here we go. The following are five principles of Teilhard’s I’ve come away with, that probably just say the same thing five different ways.

--1) In the first place, Teilhard speaks to the psychic dimension of energy and its ability to influence natural and cultural adaptation…

He suggests that while we might know what he terms “spiritual energy” intimately, it is problematic for science. So, he suggests “all energy is psychic,” with a material component, which, in the “evolutive structure” of a “convergent cosmos” means that the energy not only links all matter together, but draws it toward centration and complexity. For Teilhard then, “love is the primal and universal psychic energy.”

This then leads him to the “Law of Complexity Consciousness,” that with increased psychic energy, more complexity means more consciousness and increased awareness. “…Life in the world continually rises toward greater consciousness, proportionate to greater complexity – as though the increasing complexity of organisms had the effect of deepening the center of their being…”

Thus the development of consciousness becomes the essential phenomenon of nature, with evolution as the rise of complexity consciousness. For this reason, Teilhard’s great work seems then to be to help others see and enable this new perception so others might understand the intrapsychic and external energy, the “within and “without” of evolution so as to take an active role as the evolutionary dynamics becoming conscious of itself evolving.

To catalyze this mode of cosmic reflection is to enable the material and spiritual circuitry so to speak of complex consciousness to break into conscious insight, becoming sensible to the wider structure of reality in which the experience of divinity resides.

The human being displays this “psychic current of the universe,” which, through its activation of its forces of unification, drives evolution and increased consciousness. (66) As Teilhard says, …“Like a subtle and essential energy, it transmits the pulsations of God’s will…God is at work within life. I can feel God, touch him, “live” him in the deep biological current that runs through my soul and carries it with it.” (50) This current that runs through his soul, and what he elsewhere calls his life, continues to advance in an absolute direction, so that “If the human person is to come up to the fullness of his potential he must become conscious of his infinite capacity for carrying himself still further.”

2) This in turn suggests the increased awareness and flowering of spiritual energy as it enters any emergent form If love, or the tendency for union and synthesis, is the psychic energy that drives the evolution of complex-consciousness, then for Teilhard, evolution is God’s creative activity in time, unfinished.

His work then traces this energy from the cosmogenesis of prelife, leading to the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere, to the biogenesis of life, or biosphere, to anthropo and noogenesis, where human thought emerges as cosmic evolution becomes “hominized,” in Teilhard’s language.

And yet, even within this noosphere, the tendency for union creates the opportunity for higher centration for a deeper synthesis.

In this regard Christ, or the logos, or cosmotheanthropic principle, emerges through cosmogenesis, biogenesis, and noogenesis, so that the primal and universal psychic energy of the cosmos breaks into the noosphere, biosphere, cosmosphere, through a process of Christogenesis, leading to the Christosphere, or Theosphere. In each of these cases, evolution, driven by psychic energy, breaks into more complex forms of consciousness, as with love in its hominized form.

That is, the tendency for universal synthesis creates increased conscious self-awareness, ultimately the Christic, where the human becomes the site of the evolutionary advance. For this reason, Teilhard comes to the conclusion by the end of his life, that “Cosmogenesis = Christogenesis,” where this attraction or synthesis melts each of these spheres into one another through a common convergence in that cosmotheanthropic principle.

“Around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like a luminous aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very soul of the earth…” 60 3) This process occurs within the divine or mystical milieu in which human research and work may be aligned to the evolutionary impulse of a complexifying cosmos and consciousness If then evolution is the unfolding of creativity, created from within, this flourishing energy is manifest in activity. The christic then breaks into our life when personal development is aligned to

cosmological principles and psychic energies driving evolution evolution; in a sense, suggesting that if we come to awareness of what the world desires, then, as Teilhard says, “human effort becomes divinizable,” 91 presumably by participating in the cosmological principles that are evolutionarily reiterated over time, increasing the incarnation of this principle living through us to refine humans’ christicpotential.

Christ, Teilhard says, thus becomes the culmination of natural evolution, the cosmos functioning as the body of Christ, so that communion is achieved through the material world. It is for this reason that we are able to undergo the creative influence of what Teilhard calls, “the divine milieu,” itself evolving to become more fully expressive of the christic, or love, and this possibility of divinized activity.

“It is through and within the organic unity of the total Christ, it is under his formal influx, that God’s will and his creative action finally come through to us and make us one with him.”

Or as he puts it another way, “we come to Jesus through the world,” both of whose intensity increases in influences as spirit is awakened in the world.

4) The moral construction of the world accords to a higher degree of organized consciousness, deepening personalization and increasinginterpersonal sympathy Teilhard’s point here is very simple, that to become whole persons, one needs to become universalized in a sense, operationalizing this new mode of complex-consciousness where the primal psychic energy (love) merges matter and spirit, annihilating the ego, so that individuals together can achieve the “christic ego,” codifying these loving practices in social life.

This requires a new program so to speak, where a greater understanding of material and moral life “christifies matter,” and “all opposition between universal and personal is…wiped out” by this “universal synthesis,” so that Christianity may be “reincarnated for the second time (Christianity, we might say, squared) in the spiritual energies of matter.” 116 “A zone of thought has appeared and grown in which a genuine universal love has not only been conceived and preached, but has also been shown to be psychologically possible and operative in practice…far from decreasing, the movement seems to wish to gain still greater speed and intensity.”

Thus the cosmos undergoes a process of “amorization,” where a new layer of love grounds the emergence of a new mode of consciousness and any activity, “totalizing the psychological resources of the world at a given moment.”

5) Love as an agent of universal synthesis, a cosmic power producing inter-centric relations and ultrapersonalization This is why I feel I may be saying the same thing over and over: Teilhardsuggests we are entering a phase of socialization, where we must converge with others to be fully ourselves. In his words, “love alone is capable to unite living beings as to complete and fulfill them.” To continue, “from the point of view of physics, love is the internal, affectively apprehended aspect of affinity which links and

draws together elements of the world, center to center…it is present therefore, at least in a rudimentary state, in all the natural centers, living and pre-living, which make up the world; and it represents too, the most profound, most direct, and most creative form of inter-action that is possible to conceive between those centers. Love in fact is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.”

So Teilhard extrapolates from this idea of Christ as the heart of the universe, an omega point, where the active principle of cosmic evolution moves towards a final purpose, where the universe progressively becomes Christ, as we come to know this cosmic Christ.

“Again physically and literally, he is he who consummates: the plenitude of the world being finally effected only in the final synthesis in which a supreme consciousness will appear upon total, supremely organized, complexity. And since he, Christ, is the organic principle of this harmonizing process, the whole universe is i[so facto stamped with his character, shaped according to his direction, and animated by his form.” 94 -With these principles in mind we can in turn understand Teilhard’s contribution – not only that cosmic evolution has planetized and hominized, so that humans now participate in these evolutionary dynamics, where the geosphere provides the foundation for a biosphere which provides the foundation for the noosphere, but even this noosphere becomes the psychic context from which the theosphere, or Christosphere emerges as “an advanced phylum in cosmic evolution,” where a privileged zone of ascending complexity consciousness, centered on the transformative power of love and compassion, provide a messianic, salvific, redemptive, emancipatory approach to social suffering,perhaps generated by a social form out of touch with cosmological reality.

Now I don’t want to say this idea of love as a way to merge one’s individuality with the divine or cosmological principle is unique to Christianity, and I’ve kind of hinted at the synthesis of spiritual traditions taking place along the Silk Roads – obviously the Greek philosophy and Jewish prophets are a well-established line of transmission, but it seems also that Zoroaster, Buddhism, Krishna, hermeticism, others all provide examples of love as a pathway toward the divine.

What I would like to suggest however, is that this symbolism, and the potential psychological breakthrough it points to, is an omnipresent possibility for humanity to make real, the leap in being or ontological disturbance upon or around which new lifeways and potential social arrangements can pattern and constellate themselves at any time. And of course it’s what Teilhard seemingly seeks to do, to reestablish through this cosmotheanthropic principle a revitalized zest for life as he will call it.

In his words: “People no longer know today how to occupy their physical powers: but what is more serious, they do not know toward what universal and final end they should direct the driving force of their souls.

It has already been said, though without sufficiently deep appreciation of the words: the present crisis is a spiritual crisis.”

And it is this crisis Teilhard attends to.

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So as a kind of summation where I take a shot at linking this to artificial intelligence, I’ve tried to demonstrate what we might call Teilhard’scosmotheanthropic theory of evolution, namely the integration of cosmological, spiritual, and human attraction that imbues activity and experience activities and experiences with ever greater unification and reciprocal relations, in centration, divinization, love, what have you, so as to more ably end the psychic and material suffering of an increasingly imperiled planet.

If our interactions, behaviors, and cognition are modified by information communication technologies, and we are worried about being habituated to economic or increasingly egocentric routines; and further, the very habits and civilization that we are immersed within are threatened with disruption and possibly collapse due to the deprivation of energy flows, Teilhard seems to suggest that there is an energy source that is available to us instead if we choose to align with the evolutionary dynamics of the cosmos. That is, as we increasingly interact, we can choose to respond with fear and come in contact, or we can embrace this attraction that in turn might catalyze selfawareness, and develop the compassion and ethic needed to address common concerns, alleviate suffering, and develop our own personalization accordingly.

So, some questions I find especially important: 1) How can cybernetics, AI ensure greater energy flows will complexify the biosphere, noosphere, and Christosphere as a whole (not merely human societies at the expense of others)?

2) In what industries most require AI to ensure equitable distribution of resources throughout society and the biosphere?

3) If a cosmotheanthropic principle incarnated in the person, or at leastsymbol of Jesus the Christ, what would it look like if incarnated in an algorithm or program?

4) What conditions might help to attract within the noosphere those conditions by which the Christosphere can move beyond merely a nascent emergent phenomenon to where love dominant 5) What information is relevant to the complexity consciousness?

6) How can intelligence be used in ways that move beyond egocentric concerns 7) What are the barriers preventing ego-transcendence? And how can information/intelligence engage and dismantle these barriers.

And finally, while the search for a silver bullet seems to always be frowned upon but I couldn’t help myself. To synthesize these questions into one: “Can we use AI, cybernetics, or machine learning to ensure energy flows are equitably distributed throughout the biosphere?” To institutionalize these “amorized” routines and this cosmotheanthropic principle?

And perhaps moreover, is AI even necessary for this task. That’s a question worth thinking about I think, as I think this possibility is always potentially present, as when we share freely with one another, though it might take something like AI to synchronize and concretize that mode-ofconscious-complexity at first.

To contrast two final quotes Matthew 25:35:

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me…‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Rethinking Flow Structures: The Role of Energy in Advancing a Political Theology of Nature Recently, three ideas have been compelling my inquiry.

The first is the role of energy flows in driving complexity. In many ways this seems to be a tendency of cosmic evolution at large: each new “threshold moment” on the one hand derives from an influx of energy, and on the other hand complexifies a given entity in the first place. One can see this play out in how the advent of domestication and agriculture led to the resource flows able to sustain civilizations, with fossil fuels complexifying those civilizations into the modern industrial form it takes today.

The second is the concept that energy may have both a physical component as well as a mental, or psychic component. This has been suggested in philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead (“panpsychism, or pan-experientialism) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (via the theory of complexityconsciousness), but I think it also can be attested to by the work of anthropologists like Marvin Harris, who point to the role of a culture’s infrastructure, the technology by which energy from the environment is accumulated and dispersed within and throughout the social system, in determining the psychological structures around which the society patterns itself. This is to say then, that the material order of a socioecological arrangement has a psychological correlate that in turn regulates the various structures to keep that order intact and functioning.

Finally, the idea that has been especially intriguing to consider in light of these first two is the insight that religion and spirituality in a sense function, whether consciously or unconsciously, as a kind of human ecology, helping communities better fit and remain within the carrying capacity of the bioregion they traditionally exist within. If a society rises and falls depending on its ability to stay within the carrying capacity of a region, then certain behaviors will be institutionalized and deemed as sacred if they facilitate this goal, or move into the realm of taboo if not.

These three points are a helpful framework for understanding cosmological, socioecological, and religious inclinations: individual components gravitate towards each other, in so doing complexify systems and structures, while employing adaptive strategies to resist entropy and endure for as long as possible. In his work regarding the “Constructual Law,” Adrien Bejan suggests that energy will flow in the most efficient means available – branching patterns self-similar across scale, so as to better energize all aspects of the entity in question – with emergent “flow structures” materializing to express this mathematized tendency.

These ideas seem complemented by the thinkers we have focused on in this course. Like Whitehead’s process philosophy, Marx for instance provides an empirical approach to the inquiry of value that sees in the commodity a concretization of the capitalist mode of production that fluctuates and is always in motion, as is, Tim Morton points out, the symbiotic real. The relationship between metaphysics, ecology, and political and economic theory are thus critically and inextricably linked, because any possible intervention requires an ontology to situate it. Further, this ontology requires an epistemological framework to even know what exists, which itself requires a methodological approach in order to pursue what can be known of what exists, while avoiding the mere reification of a given paradigm, as philosopher and historian of science Kuhn might suggest.

In this regard, we can root any given expectation of the kind of life we would like to live into the dynamic, energetic expression of natural exchange. To know “what is to be done,” we must first know “what is,” and “what can be done,” as well as other factors that might complexify any proposed answer. If Marx’s commodity is deconstructed for instance, we find it takes form in (and as) an ecosystem of competing values, which themselves are contextualized by the given social and individual desires at play, and with them the reigning ideas of what constitutes happiness and the

good life and the means by which to achieve such goals and avoid or circumvent their impediments.

If “the how is the what,” it must also be recognized as stemming from a too-often invisibilized why.

It seems to me the so-called axial religions were in many ways attempts to reconsider such desires, ideas, impediments, values, and whys, and thus any given commodity (or object) and flow structure that would remain in an “enlightened” society. Robert Bellah’s work Religion in Human Evolution demonstrates the nature of resistance such spiritual innovations took to oppose and reform the most insufferable aspects of civilization – aspects seemingly inherent to the nature of civilization itself, which requires an ever increasing expansion of its territory to acquire new energy sources, but whose hierarchical class stratification seemingly would hinder the equitable distribution of such resources to all classes. (In fact, it is these twin causes of environmental degradation and oligarchy, or inequitable distribution of resources, that drive civilizations to collapse) A couple millennia later, we are not in an altogether different situation: a globalized civilization seems to catalyze unhappiness (alienation, depression, isolation), insecurity, resource intensification, displacement, inequality and conflict, corruption, violence, corruption, and disillusionment, all forces structuring and reifying daily life.

Here, an inquiry into the economics of happiness is critical to approach any inquiry into the nature of political and social power, along with resistance or revolutionary movement. Moreover, it suggests a new method to conceiving of such strategies in light of energy dynamics (mental and physical) so as to find ways to articulate and codify alternative psychophysical configurations that might relocalize and reconnect us to the source of biopower once more, prompting a rethinking of what constitutes socially necessary labor, objects, and social structures accordingly. In each case, we might find better tactics and strategies of resistance appropriate to the task at hand, instead of attacking (or ignoring completely) commodities themselves (as a kind of luddite approach), attacking the process of commodification itself (as through mutualism, gifting, direct subsistence strategies…).

Finally, all of this should be enough to hint that the so-called temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) is simply not enough, but rather this temporary process, points to a deeper desire for a permanent zone within the interrelated structure of reality. As a kind of material-semiotic within the sea of biotechnoscientific and political and economic power, the TAZ itself derives its value from the mode of production is sets itself against, yet without the ability to resist the process of commodification in any sustained way. On the other hand, the movement from a temporary autonomous zone to a permanent subsistent zone (PSZ) can offer a kind of psychophysical approach to energy exchange where a relationship to the land is reestablished, mediated only through soil (as opposed to the concrete, with the political and economic dynamics of the technoscience needed to produce it). With regards to this PSZ then, we might work to cultivate the kind of watershed consciousness (itself a zone) needed to rethink the cultural infrastructure necessary for interdependence, self-determination, sustainability, autonomy…

How then might we develop an ecological ethic and its spiritual and political implications? An integral ecology, able to integrate the various domains of human thought (political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual, etc.), can initiate praxis appreciative of the interconnectedness of the community of life and encourage an ecologically informed ethic and possible methods of intervention towards these ends on behalf of the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, and the complexity of ecosystems so as to more effectively resolve the wicked socio-ecological problems that stem from the mode of consciousness, social structures, and infrastructures that exist.

I would like to think this can be done through education, but I am also becoming more and more aware that education, like any commodity in the capitalist mode of production, reproduces those structural forces and dynamics processes that are antithetical to ecological values. So, it may be the case that new modes of education, perhaps not unlike traditional ecological wisdom traditions that institutionalize symbiotic relationships can be more appropriate models to draw from.

Dissipative Desires Free Energy, Revolutionary Imagination, and the Transformation of Intention A dissipative structure requires the accumulation of free energy. To a degree, we can see a shelter, or refuge, a temporary zone in a similar way, enduring for as long as it can maintain energy flow as an impermanent transitional structure.

There are three (or four) strategies to maintain the time-length of these complex structures: 1) by increasing the amount of energy flowing through the structure; 2) by reducing the mass of the structure energy flows through; and 3) by reducing the time it takes for energy to flow through the mass of the structure over time. Further, this is facilitated through 4) the equitable distribution of energy through that mass over time: if the energy distribution is inequitable, those components of the structure collapse. Hence cosmic evolutionist Eric Chaisson considers the Australian aboriginal culture to be a more complex social structure than even modern industrial societies.

These dynamics are especially helpful in considering the political and economic calculus necessary to enact any legislation or tools to promote happiness within these structures, shelters, refuges, or zones of temporary relief from inequality and suffering.

In this regard, we can see a psychological aspect to such physical structures, whereby revolutionary imagination can become instantiated within the wider economic milieu, ideas and material circumstances co-constituted in the process and flux of this energy flow.

In this material and psychological flow, fluctuating values emerge in process, relation, and context, incarnating in the material-semiotic nature of any of concretization. Yet while values change with productivity, revolutions in productivity and social relations shift those values to reflect the wider socioecological structure.

In this regard, values are always fluctuating according to the variations of labor, circumstances, skills, technological applications, etc. Thus the perpetual revolutionary transformations mean that political ideas over the course of history, emerging at times to seemingly solve problems that arise necessarily become obsolete over time.

Yet what lays behind these ideas is an instinct and impulse, the desire to extend a relaxed, distributed state – an alternative survival pathway – that necessarily dissolves before other structures emerge in turn.

A helpful heuristic might come from a cosmological metaphor, specifically various solar systems, each a dissipative structure unto itself gravitating around a center of gravity. Which is to say, a revolution may not be able to overthrow or disrupt the core mode of production, because temporally it remains in continuity with such modes of production. Instead, we might experiment with alternative modes of production to create entirely new centers of gravity that attract and accrete entirely new structures around such core, attracting patterns.

So, alternative economic modes of production that actively and intentionally resist and overthrow the process of commodification and exchange value can create new objects by producing new processes in turn. In these ongoing occasions, new senses of the sacred become products of place – that is, they are systemically caused.

Ideology then, is grounded in an economic social function which in turn is projected into the thoughts and feelings that concresce in the nature of power and authority. Meaning, this power and authority harmonizes with the economic laws that are experienced as natural forces within the dissipative structure, and as such are conformed to accordingly, as if divine authority.

At the same time, such self-organization exists only so long as it can overcome the resistance of its constituent members through force, else revolutionary activity, guided by disbelief in the mode of production and economic base, exists in contradiction to the laws of the social structure in question, again projected into the minds and will of its constituent members “by people who have become intellectually and emotionally emancipated from the existing system.� (Lukacs) Capital is built into the system, reproduced by the mode of production in which people participate.

In this regard, the value is produced and realized continuously at the point of production and realization – namely the point of human desire, itself conditioned by its socioecological context.

This is to say, the power structure has a vested interest in its mode of production and economic base, and as such that vested interest manifests itself in human desire, which itself reproduces and realizes that mode of production; surplus capital creates the socioecological and cultural conditions to indoctrinate lifestyles. To confront this power structure then, requires confronting both the desire and its economic mode.

This requires confronting consciousness, which itself is the revolutionary process, becoming conscious of the need to combat capitalism on the economic plane as itself a historical phenomenon.

Moreover, it requires a comprehensive plan to address the origin of the crisis, what we might point to as colonial settlerism, the exploitation as soil, and the resulting dualism giving rise to abstractions such as nature/culture, city/country, civilized/wild, etc., themselves requiring territorial expansion (and violence) to maintain these abstractions.

To transform thoughts, behaviors, and the infrastructure and economic mode in turn might require in stead a cultivation of awe, wonder, and sublime, a more animistic, enchanted worldview that confronts the extraction required for colonial settlerism. Indeed, this transformation of desire is capable of in turn negating the systems and structures that underpin the mode of production by refusing as unnecessary the supply lines needed for the economic base of industrial capitalism.

To study desire is perhaps to eventually forget desire, to forget conceiving of desire as a pathway toward an object, in particular, a solution to suffering. Perhaps it is true that the only war that matters is the war against imagination, the war against egocentric desire for something larger.

What I have attempted to do in this essay is suggest that a dissipative structure is itself a material semiotic of a given desire. That desire in turn is infrastructurally constrained by the economic base and mode of production. And yet, that desire can be disrupted and renewed. To do so is to provide alternative pathways, alternative structures.

Myth as Mediator for Structure and Consciousness: An Exploration of Psychological Carrying Capacity The deathless Self meditated upon Himself and projected the universe as evolutionary energy. From this energy developed life, mind, the elements, and the world of karma, which is enchained by cause and effect.

-The Mundaka Upanishad (1.8) The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of man that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.

-Karl Marx The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life‌gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

-John von Neumann Abstract: This essay begins by integrating notions of psychological carrying capacity within ecological theories of urban resilience. In demonstrating the sublinear and superlinear tendencies that constitute the power-law ratios of cities, it further shows how the open-growth model that characterizes modern economics threatens collapse while creating conditions for trauma and suffering. Yet while cultural materialist theories suggest infrastructural constraints probabilistically determine a culture’s worldview, there remains space for a degree of autonomy in which to imagine and implement novel adaptive strategies that can remake the structures they typically rationalize. Traditional ecological knowledge and mythobiology organize semiotic systems accordingly into sacred narratives and founding myths that promote survival strategies utilized to maintain social and psychological resilience to protect against traumas. Similarly, the paper ends by considering what cosmotheanthropic symbols might serve as functional frameworks to secure the cognitive space needed for new values to guide evolutionary pathways and resolve modern crises through grassroots approaches, potentially uniting the ancient supreme science of consciousness with a grand unified theory of sustainability.

Ecology and Interiority While the concept of ecological carrying capacity has been well developed in academic literature, an internal correlate of psychological carrying capacity has perhaps been less so. Most current analyses stem from tourism studies, defining the concept as the “basic tolerance level of a visitor to the tourist destination with respect to its highest levels of use, identified with the tourist

season.”9 While a site may absorb large numbers of visitors without observable detrimental impacts, Liang Zhi and Wang Bihan point out psychological carrying capacity is rather determined by the perceptions and subsequent behaviors of visitors…[and] it is necessary to not only consider the resources of tourist facilities, infrastructure and the natural and social environment, but one should also pay close attention to the expectations, motives and psychological characteristics of the visitors and their interactions with residents at the destination.10 The United States Forestry Service and Department of Agriculture develops this definition further as the level of use beyond which the sensory and conceptual quality of the resource begins to deteriorate for some particular user group because of an unacceptable amount of contact with other similar users or proximity to types of use incompatible with their mental image of an acceptable quality resource environment…[revolving] about the conceptual level of utilization at which resource users (especially wildland recreationists) begin to feel that the number of simultaneous users has become so great that the resource is too crowded to satisfy their demands.11 Psychological Carrying Capacity then suggests a maximum number of tourists at a site before the quality of an experience is degraded, often analyzed through customer satisfaction index analyses, yet disentangled from ecological capacity proper, since tourists are not necessarily damaging the environment through material resource acquisition. For this reason, ecological carrying capacity and psychological carrying capacity are related in their considering the relationship between resource users within a given place, yet are differentiated by the particular mode of resource-use that produce dissatisfaction in distinctive ways, resulting in overcrowding that may lead to the loss of business, tax-revenue, and funds needed to mitigate environmental deterioration.

This complexifies the notion of carrying capacity of an ecosystem as a whole, integrating biological, ecological, tourist/visitor, transport, and psychological carrying capacities, to suggest more comprehensive ways to maintain high levels of satisfaction with few negative impacts on psychological as well as physical resources in a given area, prompting a focus on the size, fragility, wildlife, topography and vegetation cover, behavioral sensitivity of human and nonhuman species to one another, time spent in an area, viewing patterns, opinions, facilities, etc. to better consider the needs of the space and its resource users.12 Along with considering the different aspects constituting a more holistic view of carrying capacity, the concept further suggests harmonious development 9 Lopez-Bonilla, Jesus Manuel (2014) “Psychological Carrying Capacity: Measuring the tolerance levels of the visitors to the destincation through tourism satisfaction” In Handbook on Tourism, Development and Management. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296951930_Psychological_carrying_capacity_Measuring_the_tolerance_level s_of_the_visitors_to_the_destination_through_tourism_satisfaction

10 Zhi, Liang and Bihan Wang (2009) “The Psychological Carrying Capacity of Tourists: An Analysis of Visitors’ Perceptions of Tianjin and the Role of Friendliness. In Tourism in China: Destination, Cultures and Communities. Eds Chris Ryan and Gu Huimin. Routledge: New York, NY. 11 Schwarz, Charles F.; Thor, Edward C.; Elsner, Gary H. 1976. Wildland planning glossary. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-13.

Berkeley, Calif,: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Exp. Stn. 252 p. retrieved from https://agclass.nal.usda.gov/mtwdk.exe?k=wildland&l=60&w=291&n=1&s=5&t=2

12 Shackley, Myra L. (1996) Wildlife Tourism. International Thomson Business Press: London, UK.

models and countermeasures against overloading carrying capacity, operationalized by tourist destinations.13 While psychological carrying capacity may be more aligned to resource management strategies in wilderness spaces, urban studies may similarly benefit from such research in order to understand the role of city planning in contributing to, or degrading, psychological carrying capacity of individuals and communities alike.

The Umwelt of the City On the one hand, urban landscapes import and convert resources into useful products and wastes, not unlike the metabolic processes of an ecosystem or organism. On the other hand, the livability of the city requires an understanding of complex social interactions, since one seemingly cannot establish a direct relationship with the land in order to derive sustenance through subsistence techniques. A nuanced understanding of the complex political socio-economy must exist with which to derive an income and purchase any good or service so as to survive. For this reason, the demographic trend of increasing urban populations are a critical source of economic opportunity.

This in turn suggests the city as intensifying a severance between ecological and psychological carrying capacities due to the seeming contradictions between overcrowding, economic opportunity, and increasing energy flows needed to sustain population increases and continued economic growth: city dwellers must expect to tolerate historically “unnatural” numbers of people in a given area because the source of wealth has shifted from a direct relationship to land (subsistence economy) to indirect relationships with those living in the city (market economy).

Yet this relationship is only sustainable so long as energy from outside of the city can be imported, metabolized, and distributed equitably throughout an increasingly complex populace, its mode of production, and economic relations. The city is then, like all dissipative systems, contingent upon the scale of its flow structure whose fractal distribution mechanisms constitute the infrastructure society relies upon. In a sense, the city is an organism unto itself, complete with its own experience.

To better understand how, Kleiber’s Law suggests that an animal’s metabolic rate scales to the ¾ power of an animal’s mass, so that larger animals become more efficient at distributing nutrients throughout their bodies because the branching networks that are self-similar across scale optimize energy flow efficiency throughout the fractal structure of its interlocking systems (circulatory, respiratory, etc.). That is, with regards to living organisms, a complex physical and chemical phenomenon is extraordinarily regular across differing orders of magnitude (from cells to ecosystems) due to an underlying generic principle.

Physicist Geoffrey West suggests that cities and companies extend this same biochemical principle into social arrangements due to their economy of scale: Hidden regularities are manifestations of the physics and mathematics of the underlying networks that transport energy and resources in their bodies. Cities are sustained by similar network systems such as roads, railways, and electrical lines that transport people, energy, and resources and whose flow is therefore a manifestation of the metabolism of the city. These flows are the physical lifeblood of all cities and, as with organisms, their structure and dynamics have tended to evolve by the continuous feedback mechanisms inherent in a selective process toward an approximate optimization by minimizing costs and time…this suggests that despite 13 Zhiyong, Fan and Zhong Sheng (2009) “Research on Psychological Carrying Capacity of Tourism Destination.” In Chinese Journal of Population, Resources and Environment. 7:1, 47-50

appearances, cities might also be approximate scaled versions of one another in much the same way that mammals are.14 He further elaborates how such energy infrastructure scales to city size, while acknowledging most of the problems we face today are rooted in an urbanization, exponentially increasing since industrialization, again, at scale: Every infrastructural quantity you looked at from total length of roadways to the length of electrical lines to the length of gas lines, all the kinds of infrastructural things that are networked throughout a city, scaled in the same way…as you increase city size, I can tell you, roughly speaking, how many gas stations there are, what is the total length of roads, electrical lines, et cetera, et cetera. And it's the same scaling in Europe, the United States, Japan and so on…systematically, the bigger the city, the more wages you can expect, the more educational institutions in principle, more cultural events, more patents are produced, it's more innovative and so on.

Remarkably, all to the same degree…However, some bad and ugly come with it… things like a systematic increase in crime and various diseases, like AIDS, flu, and so on.15 There are two issues at play here: 1) sublinear scaling ensures an economy of scale, and 2) superlinear scaling increases the returns-to-scale of cities and economies. These underlying network dynamics in turn suggest the interconnectedness and interdependency of energy, resources, and environmental, ecological, economic, social, and political systems, since all socioeconomic activity (innovation, crime…) is quantitatively interrelated, manifesting in the universality of these scaling laws. The result is, as West puts it, an integrated “grand unified theory of sustainability” based on multiple studies, simulations, databases, models, theories, and speculations of how scaling laws in complex adaptive systems reflect systemic regularities in geometric and dynamical behaviors.

Yet these dynamics produce a real conflict. As West details, while the super-linear scaling law of general infrastructure means increasing returns to scale, the impact of such open-ended growth, while great for wealth creation, innovation, wages, educational and research institutions, cultural events, patents, etc., eventually leads to the mathematical certainty of collapse due to what he calls “finite times singularity” –a complex adaptive system collapses as its exponential growth approaches singularity where open-ended growth runs out of resources to sustain it.

Historically, while innovation has been used to stave off collapse, the boundary conditions for collapse have only been reset, never eliminated, requiring an ever increasing rate of discovery and invention, necessitating continuous cycles of innovation at increasing rates to escape the Malthusian paradox. In order to ensure the increasing energy and resources needed for open-ended growth to increase economic opportunity then, the rate of time between major successive innovations in cultural and economic paradigms must be continuously reduced, quickening the pace of life. The problem necessitates formulating a conceptual framework in which the quality and standard of life remain worthwhile, yet in such a way as to avoid the open-ended growth model that necessarily depletes a resource base.

14 West, Geoffrey (2018) Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. Penguin Books: New York, NY. Pg. 251 15 West, Geoffrey (2011) “Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People always Die, and Life Gets More Faster: A Conversation with Geoffrey West” Edge. https://www.edge.org/conversation/geoffrey_west-why-cities-keepgrowing-corporations-and-people-always-die-and-life-gets

Further, the infrastructure driving demographic trends may similarly generate a corresponding psychosomatic stress induced by the constant need to innovate ways that consistently increase the supply of energy and resources, adapting to an unsustainable economic mode so as to avoid collapse. Globalization, the expanding process of colonial extraction that dismantles selfreliant populations through a state-corporate nexus enforcing economic growth, is clearly not equipped to the task. Instead, it generates depression and isolation through alienation; guarantees insecurity by incentivizing and exploiting greed; undermines ecological integrity through resource intensification; accelerates climate change through complex fossil fuel powered supply chains; destroys livelihoods by displacing communities from land through cheap factory labor; increases conflict through competition, inequality, and violence to uproot cultures; promotes corporate handouts through state support of corporate subsidies, deregulation, and the erosion of sovereignty; and relies on false accounting that discounts such factors while using Gross National Product and economic growth as a sole metric of health.16 One can see here the impetus for cultural materialism as a research strategy, what Marvin Harris calls “probabilistic infrastructural determinism,” where the technological infrastructure and economic mode of production become primary factors of inquiry, the causal chains affecting sociocultural evolution in the complex of energy-expending activities that affect the balance of a human population, the amount of energy devoted to production, and the supply of life-sustaining resources. While cultural materialism does not deny the possibility that mental and structural components may achieve a degree of autonomy from the behavioral infrastructure, the infrastructure itself becomes the principal interface between culture and nature, the boundary across which the ecological, chemical, and physical restraints interact with the principal sociocultural practices aimed at overcoming or modifying those restraints… [and as such] it is a good bet that these restraints are passed on to the structural and superstructural components.17 In the same way psychological carrying capacity contributes to a more robust theory of resource management, so too might cultural materialism give us a better sense of how to deal with the suffocating traumas induced by cityscapes themselves. For how human beings interact with one another – talking, exchanging ideas, behaving, etc. – is seemingly a manifestation of how social networks are clustered around infrastructures within the wider economic mode of production, these interactions immersed within and constrained by the relational strength of a wider ecological network.

Archetypal Mythologies and Sacred Narratives as Survival Strategies As mentioned, the degree of autonomy to which a worldview can attain independence from social structures, power relations, and coercive controls that are themselves constrained by those technologies and techniques used to harness food and energy. As such, how these goods are exchanged and distributed by the economic mode (that is, the infrastructure) provides the basis for an individual’s psychological resilience within an urban environment, 16 Norberg-Hodge, Helena (2011) The Economics of Happiness. https://vimeo.com/162302072 17 Harris, Marvin (1980) Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. Altamira Press: Walnut Creek, CA

the capacity of a social-ecological system to absorb or withstand perturbations and other stressors such that the system remains within the same regime, essentially maintaining its structure and functions. It describes the degree to which the system is capable of self-organization, learning, and adaptation.18 One can consider the Eltonian, or ecological pyramid (i.e. the food chain), with its trophic levels that make up a given ecosystem, to understand this resilience. In the same way the biomass or bioproductivity at each level that is available to organisms (plants, or producers at the bottom, herbivores in the middle, carnivores above them, with omnivores at the top), a psychological resilience model would depend for its stability on an equitable flow of energy up through each level of the cultural materialist model (environment  infrastructure  social structure  superstructure), so that interrupting this energy flow would likewise lead to a trophic cascade and the collapse of those structures necessary for psychological well-being, constraining and confronting the individual with existential dread.

Psychologist Peter Levine suggests that because thoughts are complex elaborations of what we do and how we feel, psychological traumas are in a sense rooted in physical experience. As he explains, “trauma occurs when we are intensely frightened, either physically restrained or perceive we are trapped.”19 That is, faced with certain conditions, the body, biologically adapted to store memory psychosomatically, will develop pathologies where certain experiences are retained and cannot be released. Trauma, for Levine, is generated where experience causes intense fear and immobility, leading to semi-permanent paralysis. Effective trauma therapy models in turn separate fear from immobility to break this cycle of trauma that manifests as PTSD, processing the experience to normalize it while providing physical and emotional outlets to restore active responses.

Mythobiology may provide one such buffer to keep the mind resilient, promoting energy discharge while reorienting the individual back to the environment through sacred narratives.

Through a mythopoetic literature that integrates cognitive, emotional, physical, and ecological sensations foundational to experience, internal states are instinctively signaled, registered in the body, and recorded in the cultural psyche. The physical and psychological conditions, derived from environmental signals, can thus be turned into archetypal symbols and thought-patterns that promote resilience, around which motor patterns and adaptive strategies constellate, absorbing any external stressors without being pushed out of psychological carrying capacity and into a threatening state where fear and paralysis might create or recall traumatic experiences.

Thus cross-culturally, the response to trauma with mythologized and symbolized resilience models reconnect conscious self-reflection to instinct through the usually hidden archetypal resources activated by sacred narratives. There is, in a sense, a “divine psychic core…activated during extreme danger,” to help process trauma physically, emotionally, psychologically, experientially, and 18 Gunderson, L. H. and C. S. Holling, eds. 2002. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Systems of Humans and Nature. Island Press, Washington DC.; Holling, C. S. 1973. “Resilience and stability of ecological systems.” Annu Rev Ecol Syst 4:1-23.

Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. “Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems.” Ecology and Society 9:5.

Retrieved from https://www.resalliance.org/resilience

19 Levine, Peter (2010) In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.

culturally, developing the capacity to restore equilibrium and regain psychic balance by facing these sensations, feelings, images, perceptions, behaviors, affects, meanings, and thoughts.

Traditional ecological knowledge offers examples of this external sense perception and instinctual feedback, where certain adaptive relationships can be signaled cross-generationally to anticipate and respond to uncertain, potentially traumatic experiences in the future. As such, these indigenous narratives provide a complex calculus and evolutionary strategy to better predict how to survive, played out in symbolic outlets and ritualized organizational processes, transmuting experience into long-lasting survival imprints to ensure such complex adaptive systems are not overwhelmed by stresses before being degraded and destroyed – “re-establishing social rules to avoid over-hunting, the depletion of certain plant resources, and unchecked population increase…a truly powerful force in the control and management of resources,” and with it the psychological experience they probabilistically determine.20 Such narratives are then organized around “homeostatic survival functions as the template for neural organization and consciousness,” allowing communities in question to face potentially threatening sensations and feelings without fear, while developing the capacity to maintain, restore, and regain emotional balance and psychological equilibrium through narratives promoting psychic, cultural, and ecological resilience models.

To summarize these past sections, I have attempted to utilize the cultural materialist research strategy to suggest infrastructure as constraining the cultural worldview, determined dynamically by the technology, techniques, and economic mode by which a culture adapts to a given environment.

Because energy flow, mediated by infrastructure drives the evolution of complex adaptive systems, mythobiology creates a kind of “cosmotheanthropic” biosemiotic by which a human culture can align with the cosmological principles manifest in ecosystems to order itself appropriately in ways that sustain their continuity, institutionalizing and legitimating resilience strategies as adaptive mechanisms to maintain and regulate these structures. However, given that the infrastructure of a globalized industrial modern society has, through open-growth models, become maladaptive, prompting certain collapse – and moreover, a kind of paralysis and fear due to the inability to behave differently, constrained as we are by that infrastructure generating certain collapse – the trauma induced by the economic mode requires psychological responses able to revise our moral regulatory structures while addressing the cultural needs of a now globalized population on a planet threatened by the effects of human-induced climate change.

Cosmotheanthropic Biosemiotics for a Transient Era Energy flow is a product of cosmic evolution, where gravity draws material together to produce stars and thus the thermodynamics necessary for life to emerge. Dissipative structures like organisms, cities, global economies, and other adaptive systems resist entropy by harnessing these energy flows so as to drive and sustain complex networks. Religions, as we have seen, institute ecologically adaptive pathways to maintain cultural and psychological resiliency in the face of environmental and social perturbations, implementing and ritualizing cosmotheanthropic semiotic processes stemming from ecological situatedness as lasting survival strategies.

Yet as pointed out, urbanization creates a growing problem, even while contributing to growing wealth – namely, inequitable resource flows concentrate power in institutions that cannot maintain legitimacy, given they serve little adaptive function apart from enriching themselves. As such, the axial development of new moral frameworks around alternative cosmotheanthropic narrative structures represent a rupture in continuity of long-standing traditions and institutions to 20 Berkes, Fikret (2018) Sacred Ecology. Fourth Edition. Routledge: New York, NY

develop “the possibility of universal ethics, the reassertion of fundamental human equality, and the necessity of respect for all humans, indeed for all sentient beings.� 21 The resulting resilience generated by new community structures and psychological techniques demonstrate the degree of psychic autonomy needed and achieved, able to remake socioeconomic modes accordingly, reform the flow structures available, and circumvent energy blockages through alternative outlets promoting psychological resiliency within a growing urban empire to manifest more harmonious physical arrangements (democracy, cooperative economic models, open-access technologies, etc.).

Today we seem to be in a similar predicament, where the global flow structure does not effectively allocate energy, resources, or the wealth needed to avoid suffering. The purpose of this paper has thus been to suggest the focus on psychological carrying capacity can be helpful in two regards.

First, it can provide a buffer with which to better absorb stresses so as to avoid or lessen the possibility of trauma. This is important because the inability to absorb stresses induces phase changes in the psychological state of individuals, reorganizing worldviews in ways less adaptable to the pressures of unsustainable socioecological modes, pushed out of psychological carrying capacity.

This may explain the tendency towards extremist religious and political positions that justify violence against perceived threats to those similarly constrained and imbued with values an unsustainable mode of production has impressed upon them, generating further mimetic escalation to extremes across society as social networks fragment and collapse.22 Secondly, aside from helping individuals cope with inequitable relationships that might generate suffering by producing traumatic conditions, a focus on psychological carrying capacity can cultivate psychological resources that crystallize and materialize in myths to inoculate cultures from psychological stressors, moving back into carrying capacity by revising moral frameworks to ameliorate any harm, and improving the psychological and physical security of communities through a synergy of approaches and services, equipping cultures to develop more appropriate infrastructures, social structures, and worldviews better able to adapt to a given place. Mythic narratives are some such resources, structuring experience around cosmotheanthropic biosemiotic systems in ways that mediate and express critical foundations, making core structures accessible to consciousness and demystifying experience by furnishing linguistic categories able to remake essential relations and phenomenal forms.

Such might be the case with Temporary Autonomous Zones, or metrics like Gross National Happiness, where techniques to foster psychological resilience can be instituted by ensuring energy flow structures allow for alternative spaces that ensure physiological, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual needs are satisfied. This requires an ability to develop a degree of autonomy from physical constraints and develop an updated myth that can resonate in modern, globalized, secular, urban 21 Bellah, Robert (2011) Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA 22 Elsewhere I have argued for a link between terrorism as violent extremism as stemming from solastalgia, the psychological stress generated by watching the environmental destruction of one’s homeland, generating trauma that in turn incentivizes violence against those thought to be responsible for such degradation, or even against those seemingly innocent of responsibility, due to the psychological need for an outlet for trauma-based violence. I invite any commentary on this idea in particular as it may be the focus of my dissertation, hence the role of psychological carrying capacity as a strategy to counter violent extremism, not through individual therapy for instance, which would only seem to habituate or normalize the psyche to an abnormal, hostile environment, but through collective structural transformation seeking to remake infrastructure, technology, and the economic mode to better achieve psychic health.

dwellings. Examples might include citizen science or civic action frameworks, where principles of justice guide projects that address inequities in the community from a grassroots level to establish ecologically sensitive infrastructures better suited to support transformative endeavors that can institutionalize alternative power systems and structures. Thus modern crises can be resolved as outlets for systemic change grow out of resilience mindsets that promote transformative praxis as revolutionary therapy to avoid political paralysis and overwhelming fear.

In doing so, we might better restore to prominence what ancient philosophers and mystics called a supreme science of spirit, turning inward below the senses, emotions, will, intellect, and ego of individual consciousness, to analyze the data that nature presents to the mind to which the transient data of the world coheres. That is, cultivating an essential sensitivity to the ground of divine existence that energizes, structures, and flows through a field of physical and psychic forces, from the core of consciousness into the experience of an essential relationship with which to identify, understand, align with, and express. It is this relationship then that is able to reconstitute desires, habits, lifeways, and their physical consequences to produce entirely new worlds integrally linked to the patterns of energy we remain largely unconscious of. However, it is this energy that constrains our values, axioms, prejudices, and presuppositions, coloring our perceptions, thinking, and responses, indeed determining our individual and collective destinies. As such, finding more appropriate ways to better relate to this energy is the greatest task we can hope to consider. Indeed this task may in fact be the guiding essence of our very being.

To end then with the words of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (IV.4.5): You are what your deep, driving desire is.

As your desire is, so is your will.

As your will is, so is your deed.

As your deed is, so is your destiny‌