Oeaohoo

Of course but you have to start somewhere. Once you have the increased virtuosity, you should be able to apply it to new patterns. Both of those ways out sound like they would be effective. Maybe you should transcribe a little segment of the inhuman stuff you imagine and try your best to play it. Repeat that enough times and maybe you would learn to improvise it? Also, your post reminded me to listen to this again: Great fun!

The more you improvise the more you should be able to immediately identify the notes you want to play. I mostly play piano so this is a little bit easier (as it is easier to visualise and conceptualise intervals and scales) but it should be true for guitar too. Obviously improvisation will always be limited by the degree of technical virtuosity that you currently have. I don’t think there’s anything that can be done for that except unfortunately mechanical practice routines. Time to dust off the inner robot! I don’t quite agree with you about the boredom and impenetrability thing. I can see why you would feel those things listening to someone like Holdsworth but only during his weaker performances. Like you said, good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise, and Holdsworth made some great music. I never really liked Guthrie Govan, but Holdsworth has an excellent album called I.O.U. I also like his songs “Funnels”, and the improvisation on “Non-Brewed Condiment” is phenomenal. Now I understand your description: “To balance beauty and complexity so perfectly is a divine mystery”!

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.’ - Opening stanza of The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. With these evocative lines, Yeats describes the progress of time as a centrifugal spiralling outwards from an original source or principle. Once this process of manifestation has reached the point at which the original principle can no longer sustain it, the centre cannot hold and everything collapses back into its source. This is more or less exactly the testimony that all of the world’s traditions laid down regarding the anatomy of time, history and becoming. These testimonies were described not by crusty dogmatic theologians clinging to a distant and unretrievable past but by those who were known as: rishi (“seer”), druid (dru-wid- "strong seer”), völva (“seeress”), to name but a few. They were not expressions of stale conformity and banality but were essentially visions: the vision may be described in terms that are more or less vague or precise, poetical or analytical, but the story is always the same. A myth common to Greco-Roman antiquity, Vedic India and many other ancient civilisations describes history in terms of cycles of Four Ages: Golden Age (Satya Yuga), Silver Age (Treta Yuga), Bronze Age (Dvapara Yuga) , Iron Age (Kali Yuga). Here are some descriptions of the Kali Yuga from the Vishnu Purāna: You can decide whether any of this is recognisable today. Of course, it is also noted that the Dark Age may provide unique opportunities for liberation from all conditioned existence, which is after all the ultimate goal of all life down here. One might even grow a little too comfortable in the “Golden Age”! Some other traditions do not describe the process in such detail, but the trajectory remains the same. They speak of an original purity, nobility and divinity which is gradually corrupted by covetous identification and material attachment. I will assume that one or another of the Abrahamic expressions of this truth are known to anybody reading this - Original Sin, the Fall, the Messiah, Revelations - and so offer an example from a lesser-known civilisation. In the Nordic Voluspa we find the following descriptions from a female priestess of Ragnarök (Twilight of the Gods): This post could be indefinitely multiplied with further examples, but there is no need to belabour the point. Original sin; the fall of man into duality; the primordial sacrifice of Being for the sake of becoming; the cycles of time and the four ages of man; the ubiquitous motif of the messiah and the eschaton. Everywhere we find the same theme and the same pattern, to such an extent that most definitions of religion require that an eschatology (literally “last-ology”, an account of the end of the present cycle of time) be present. How is it then, that a theory which claims to “integrate” all of these traditions and religions, denies a fundamental aspect of all of them?

@AtheisticNonduality It is only unhealthy to the body that exists in this fallen world. That doesn’t bother me. Ascetic practices have generally been unhealthy. Like I said, “life is a journey in the nighttime hours”. Regarding Nietzsche, I know this but the point stands. His life was an ascetic one, and I agree with you that he overcompensated with his exaltation of “life” and “the instincts”. There is a good book on this called Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle by an early postmodern author if you are interested. Yes, I was just showing how the idea of holons could be used as a proof of the cyclical view of time I have described. I know you will just keep saying that things are getting more complex so we had best leave it at that. I find your conception of God a little peculiar but we have already discussed it quite a lot. It seems to be rather limited, for example: Can God see it? What do you mean by this?

Yes you are right. At least, I despise the present world because I view it as corrupted and fallen. I have reached a point in life where more or less everything I do is simply to remind me of this fact, an asceticism of sorts. Naturally, this despising must not be allowed to contaminate the tranquility and blissfulness of Being, for this would be to buy into the illusion. In another time, I might agree with you that there is no reason to be detached from it. Given the present world situation, however, I believe that love and happiness can in almost all cases only be a delusion based on comfort and inertia or false promises of the future, like the happiness that Nietzsche ascribed to the “last man”: A prophecy which could happily be appended to the others that I have mentioned. Nietzsche was a despiser of life at heart too. His life was clearly an ascetic one. I mean, come on, a 40-year old virgin! He could have found himself a nice Victorian lady if he had wanted to, but he was more occupied with the (anti-)metaphysical. Yes, that is a good argument. A projection of the destruction of their own civilisation onto the world itself. Then again, you have spoken a lot about holons, and as I have pointed out this idea was known to the ancient world as “man as a microcosm” and “as above, so below”. Therefore, if you concede that every civilisation, as a holon, has an ascending and descending phase and therefore a cyclical pattern, doesn’t it logically proceed that this world, as a greater holon, has the same cyclic pattern? I didn’t mean to imply this. Of course there is no going backwards. When I say that the past was better and when I use the word “involution”, I am only talking about within this cycle of time. There is also the matter of initiation and inwardly following the thread of the process that has lead to your manifestation (like the Buddhist “Twelve Links of Interdependent Origination”), but this is not about going back into the past as such. It is more about retrieving what has been lost. Don’t you believe that God must have lost something to become a puny little human? Maybe even, lost everything? We have already stated our positions on this. “Everything is perishing except His Face”, so to me there can be no defying of entropy. As a question, what do you believe will happen at the “ascension” or omega point that is depicted in the picture you sent? Is it unknowable to us present humans? Is it knowable to God? Wow, “fucking disgusting”! Of course all of those things have their place, but the point is that Lucifer celebrates them over all else. Just like people do today. The whole should be greater than its parts. It seems to me that the purpose of religions like Christianity was as a last opportunity for men to attain liberation before the end of this cycle of time. That is why they can seem very one-sidedly stuffy and puritanical, and why everything that has emerged out of them is so one-sidedly Luciferian. I know you will disagree with this.

If you think it is absurd to mention Lucifer, here is a description of Lucifer’s vainglory from the Danish composer Rued Langgaard’s opera Antikrist: Sound familiar? This opera has a beautiful finale when God finally banishes Lucifer: https://youtu.be/gLWa7DSEYZE

@AtheisticNonduality I am only returning dismissal with dismissal. What else can you do? Even “Stage Red” is necessary sometimes, but Lucifer is “Stage Blue”! After all, how can you be free if you don’t have access to every “stage”? Maybe you are just being smug because you don’t want to address my arguments which threaten your worldview.

What a smug and self-satisfied answer. “Men of all degrees will conceit themselves to be equal with Brahmans.” Then again, what could I except from a forum run by a guy who thinks he’s the most awakened man on the planet whilst spending most of his time chasing “pussy”! Go to hell. After all, Lucifer didn’t need tradition. Lucifer didn’t need order or truth. “Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven!” Lucifer was a progressive just like you.

A lot of what I have said above is largely irrelevant so let me distill it down to a few essential points. Like I originally said, it was not just eastern seers: Hinduism testifies to it; Zoroastrianism testifies to it; the Chaldean oracles testify to it; Egyptian mythology testifies to it; Greco-Roman antiquity testifies to it; Nordic and Germanic paganism testifies to it; even Judaism, Christianity and Islam testify to it. It is not just that I view these civilisations as having been in every truly important way more significant (I know this will annoy you but: if less fundamental!) than our own, and if you don’t agree we can even forget about that altogether. The important point is that I see this mass convergence of vision across time and space as evidence, or at least as something which has to be explained in a sophisticated way. “That was just primitive superstition” is a very weak response for such a universal phenomenon, and sticking a colour-coded spiral badge on it like a good five-year-old is surely no better, for reasons I have described in my second comment in this thread. But, in terms of empirical evidence, I would ask you this: when has there ever been a civilisation that is so one-sidedly materialistic as the post-renaissance European one? Every time I mention this you just say “matter is for the lower holons” and so on but let us look at the evidence: St. Augustine wrote that everything natural contained an “admixtio diaboli fraudis”, an “admixture of devilish fraud” (Note: I am NOT using St. Augustine as an authority here. He might have been a total moron. I am simply using him and others below as examples of attitudes towards matter in the major civilisations of the past); of course the older Vedic texts are absolutely steeped in anti-materialism (a further refutation of your claims), for example: “That which transcends hunger and thirst, grief, delusion, decay and death is your innermost Self. Knowing this very Self the Brahmans renounce the desire for sons, for wealth and for the worlds, and lead a mendicant life”; Buddha said to his disciples, “Look at your body. A painted puppet, a poor toy of jointed parts ready to collapse, a diseased and suffering thing with a head full of false imaginings”; and so on. Now, let us turn to the typical confessions of a modern “thinker”: “Body I am and body entirely”, “Do not believe those who talk to you of over-earthly hopes”, “We know better, we have put man back among the animals” (Nietzsche). If I had the time to wade through the trash-heap that is modern “philosophy” I could likely produce many more examples (the absolute amateurishness of the “new atheists” and the postmodern anti-Platonic war against transcendence in the name of “pure immanence” being notable ones), but I don’t. Anyway, Nietzsche was one of the less materialistic of the modern “thinkers”! I will repeat again, I am not appealing to any authority here. I am just providing evidence for a change in worldview. Of course I am not denying that anyone in the past was materialistic. Materialism in the past, however, was an aberrant oddity. Today it is the norm. It could be said that so-called paganism was somewhat naturalistic, along with certain cults of Hinduism, but the “pagan” conception of nature was heavily suffused with spirit. Yggdrasil was not just a tree! Given the spiritual dearth of western modernity new “spiritual” movements have emerged - Theosophy, Spiritualism, Cat-lady astrology right up to Teal Swan, Law of Attraction and mindfulness - but even these are generally heavily influenced by the materialism of the present degenerate (in the literal sense of having lost connection to the original animating principle) age. I think the best proof I have given of the absurdity of the spiral progressivism view is this: How do you explain this? I see this is as evidence that the progress you speak of must terminate. Do you imagine a future in which every day is a new spiral stage? Every minute? Every second? That is the only other alternative because each stage is clearly - empirically, no superstition required, as you demand! - getting shorter. I think the basic disagreement here is that I see the world as the unfoldment of God whereas you see it as the evolution of God. To me the idea that God itself could evolve is a metaphysical absurdity. What evidence is there that “the purer forms of God require evolution”? You have made many assertions for which there is no evidence whatsoever yet accuse me of empty appeals to authority. For example, you say that the pattern you describe is one “that is physically, vitally, mentally, supra-mentally, and spiritually unfolding as a knowable process”. This is only true because you are relying on modern thinkers and theories. If it is a knowable process, why did practically nobody know of it it until the modern progressivised world emerged? You say that this is because we have access to “more advanced systems” but this is just an appeal to the same authorities.

Hyperreality. The progressive disconnection between the signifier and the signified, the cause and the effect. Real protest: to call for change. Hyperreal protest: to protest for media coverage, corporate sponsorship, virtue signalling, social media, just because everyone else is, and so on. Even when the motivations are sincere, most protests today are hyperreal so they have no impact on reality. This is exacerbated by the hyperreality of postmodern society itself. Also, what some will call “late capitalism” has gotten very good at consuming the various ideologies that exist today into itself, wearing them like a pretty dress and make-up to conceal its inner vacuity and ugliness. What makes you think it used to work in the older days? Generally, a protest only works when the general situation is ready for change. The French Revolution only worked because the old regime was totally rotten to the core. There had been many peasant uprisings before but none of them had much of an impact because the ancient regime was still sufficiently stable. For example, do you think Rosa Parks was the first black women ever to refuse to comply with the rules of racist America? Of course not, but the time at which she did it was ripe for change. Many people who did similar things to her in the earlier days of post-slavery America are probably totally forgotten. Also, most of the successful protests of the past had a leader that everybody was more or less willing to follow. Today most people are too “entitled to their opinion” to follow anybody but themselves. Most protests are therefore bound to be a “conference of the hedgehogs”. Not like there are many great leaders around today, anyway. Maybe Leo’s upcoming conscious leadership video can change this!

@AtheisticNonduality Ok. Enjoy your progress to spiral infinity and beyond!

@AtheisticNonduality They are both based on actual patterns. I’ve given plenty of evidence and you have generally just called it ignorance and superstition. Never mind! What is “the one entry to a truth”? The truth itself?

There is no point in us just stating our own experience, axioms and sources of authority back at each other. Like I said to Barna, if you want to take people like Teilhard de Chardin and Ken Wilber and the optimistic euphoria of "New World" America (or the Soviet version of this in the case of Vernadsky) as your guides and authorities in this world, that is your choice. There is also no point in us getting into a non-duality war and they are apparently not allowed on this forum. You can respond to what I say here but I probably won't go any further with this particular line of argument. Yes, but the "unity of the world as Brahman and Brahman as transcendent to the world" is itself transcendent of either of those. Otherwise, what are Parinirvana and Mahasamadhi? I never said there is no world in God. All worlds are in God. We aren't tied to the world of form. The world of form only exists within God! I think you have changed what you mean by "the world", but otherwise I agree with everything you have said here. God is eternally itself without having been created except through self-existence, but that is not true of the "world of form" which we presently inhabit. It has been created by God, it is preserved in God and it will be destroyed by God. The problem with your analysis is that you conflate God with the present world only, thus this world has to evolve forever otherwise God would be finite. I like the phrase "more fundamental but less significant". I find it peculiar that you insist simultaneously that everything will continue to evolve onwards and upwards for all eternity but yet that it will culminate in the non-dual realisation of Spirit. That sounds like the end of evolution to me. There are no cycles? Isn't every civilisation is a cycle with an ascending phase and a descending phase? Rome ascended, Rome descended; Egypt ascended, Egypt descended; Christianity ascended, Christianity descended. These are all cycles. Now just extend this pattern to history itself. Time manifesting in cycles is not the same as history repeating itself. I agree, "history repeating itself" is at best an imprecise phrase. It would be pointless to repeat the exact same thing over and over again like Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence of the Same. I never said there was any going back. Sorry for "staining your mind"! I have repeatedly stated that I am not just appealing to empty authority. Do you have any relevant examples of Plotinus' teaching that refute the cyclic and involutional view of history? Greek culture was saturated in the teaching of the Four Ages. I think his idea of the One fits very much with what I have been saying. I can see how he fits into your love of "holons" though, but this is just the traditional doctrine of man as a microcosm. The Corpus Hermeticum, one of the most influential texts to survive from ancient times, is full of this idea. "As above, so below". Nobody needed Wilber to come up with "holons" (besides, he probably borrowed it from someone else like he always does). There is no decay? Your body is decaying! Your house is decaying! Your country is decaying! The Earth is decaying! Everything is decaying! Buddho-Wilberism will have to discard the Fire Sermon as a heretical treatise of "evil"! Chaos is always lurking behind Cosmos. When Cosmos fails, Chaos rises to consume everything back into itself. If all you have to say to any of this is "that is just not true" then we might as well simply agree to disagree and leave it at that. I only mentioned Nietzsche because he is a good case study in the inadequacies of the modern mentality, particularly the Darwinian and “vitalist” aspect of it. His madness is a testament to the dead ends and vicious circles that the modern mentality entails. Many of the greatest thinkers of recent centuries went mad because secular society was unable to guide them towards true transcendence, yet a “stage purple” society doesn’t seem to have struggled with doing this. Strange, almost as if things haven’t progressed at all... You might say that things have changed now and that there is presently a resurgence in spirituality. On that note, I can do no better than to quote the master of modern times René Guénon from the preface to his book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times: That is why you always get a perceived resurgence of mystic sects and spirituality during the end of any civilisation. It is the near-complete absence of God masquerading as God. Just read about the decadence of Rome or any other collapsing civilisation, heresies and false cults of every description always abound. This is just another appeal to the modern myth. When I say it is a myth, I don't even mean that isn't true. It is the story that animates modern life and society, hence it is the modern myth. "Stage Purple" India had a very sophisticated social structure in which every aspect of life and transcendence was taken into account. Our "society" is a sick joke in comparison. So what? How does that refute what I said about the modern cult of materialism? The people who worship matter are Descenders, and there are a lot of them today! More than ever, methinks...

That’s true. The developments of modern science are like an ever closer approximation to something which itself could never be fully captured by science. Thinking about it, this is probably true of any attempt to capture reality symbolically. In a certain sense, you could even call this progress, except that it has all ended in the self-destruction of science itself thanks to the dead end inherent in most academic scientific disciplines and the inevitable emergence of postmodern deconstruction.

The Satori in Zen, assuming that is what you mean, is not really a sudden awakening. Zen monks prepared for it through often gruelling asceticism, generating a metaphysical state of tension which could then finally explode into transcendence. That was the point of meditating on Koans, for example; to drive the mind into a state of frenzy and force it to recognise its own absurdity. Of course, the awakening itself always happens suddenly because it is an awakening to that which is beyond time. The final accomplishment was therefore often instigated by the Zen master forcing the student into a state of spontaneity by surprising them or taking them (in a final moment of) unaware.

I am aware that many traditions teach the ultimate non-duality of God and the world. I never denied this. I agree with everything you have said so far (except that Brahman also isn't the world, and Nirguna Brahman is totally beyond all manifestation. Like Buddha said, "Gone, gone beyond, gone beyond beyond, Hallelujah!" You know, maybe Ken Wilber could add something to that. ). This is where I find these models to be extremely blasphemous (and I do not mean against any specific religion but against God). What is this based on? Teilhard de Chardin? A Jesuit Darwinian vitalist? You yourself say that "worship of matter is for the lower holons". Darwinian vitalism is surely that. This is what I mean. All these modern Western "thinkers" are just arrogant goofs. That's why I like Nietzsche, at least he thought his arrogance through to madness! It has nothing to do with "ignorance" and blind faith toward ancient culture. I have already attempted to make clear that faith and devotion were already signs of decadence. I do not cling to any tradition: as the Muslim tradition tells us, "everything will perish save his Face". As the Buddhist tradition tells us, "everything is burning". And like a Buddhist said: "When you meet Ken Wilber on the road, kill him"! I never said it wasn't leading anywhere. No religion ever said that it wasn't leading anywhere. It is leading towards the total unfoldment of God which is an eternal process, and it is leading everything that is created back to God. Ancient culture tells us that this enfoldment takes place over an infinite number of cycles of time, each of which arises out of God (where else could it arise from?) and eventually perishes into nothingness. It is not that God is totally abstract from creation. It includes all of creation but is simultaneously beyond it, in the same way that the category "man" includes all men but is beyond all of them. I don't understand why you believe that it could not be returned to except by an infinite evolution. In that case, no one could ever have achieved total union with God. I understand that to the modern mind it is untenable. This is because the modern mind has been moulded by the ideologies that have motivated the revolutionary upheavals of recent centuries. Some countries, like modern America, didn’t even exist before these upheavals. Like the playwright Israel Zangwill wrote: “Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!” America is a utopian project in its very foundation: this, it seems to me, is why Americans are particularly attached to the idea of progress; an idea which seems to have no real justification other than a bubbly optimistic euphoria. Of course it is not just America, similar things could be said for the political apparatus of other modern European nations and anywhere else that has subscribed to the new gospel of the Future, Humanism, Democracy and Progress. Six face palms, I must have hit a nerve! Well that’s sort of my point, do you deny that people worship matter today? Have you never spoken to a modern scientist?

Does it bother you that evil might not matter? Would you prefer that evil mattered absolutely? Wouldn't that be a disaster? In that case, evil could tarnish all existence forever. Most religions would go even further than to say that 'evil matters only because it hurts our survival'. Our very existence (to exist meaning literally "to stand out" or to "take a stand", much like Lucifer, Iblis and Prometheus took a stand against God) is only facilitated through evil: the evil of deluding ourselves into being separate from God. This, for example, is why the Gnostics reinterpreted the Old Testament so that the original creator God Jehovah was actually an evil Demiurge, and the Snake in the Garden (possibly related to Kundalini) was helping Adam and Eve to escape Him, like Odysseus escaping from the clutches of Calypso at the beginning of the Odyssey after seven years of captivity (relating to the theme of Kundalini, seven could refer to the seven planets or "chakras" that our subtle body passed through in order to be corporeally manifested). Of course, this evil itself is only relative and is included in the ultimate Good.

The case of Al-Hallaj is slightly unique - Christ also fits this category to a certain extent - because in declaring himself as God he was deliberately violating the law of his time. Many of the people who venerate him still believe that he deserved his punishment; after all, he had shared an esoteric teaching with the exoteric masses. The passage you shared of Rumi reminds me of something else that Al-Hallaj said: It is likely Al-Hallaj was a Malāmatiyya Sufi.

What are these changes? What is going on right now? That graph is a very amusing attempt to combine Christianity and evolution! Maybe they should just teach that to evangelical Christians who still deny evolution. The omega point will obviously be an ascension because life is what is below. “Life is a journey in the nighttime hours”. The traditional view of Creation is something like this: first (obviously, this is “before” even time) there is only God; God splits itself and is split into an original duality between an active, spiritual and masculine pole which could be called essence, and a passive, material and feminine pole which could be called substance (Purusha and Prakriti, Shiva and Shakti, Adam and Eve). This substance has also been called prima materia: it is the uncarved block out of which the sculptor (essence, the masculine principle) carves His creation, the womb that is impregnated by the male seed, and so on. The best way to describe both of them, though, is as: Being (essence) and Becoming (substance). Though everything that is created partakes both of essence and of substance, the material aspect of creation is predominantly substance. Would you be happy for me to say that this is what you mean by “God unrealised”? This is how I understand it. The material world lacks essence. This is why, for example, a key part of the alchemical opus is distilling the essence: an allegory for tracing back the process of creation to the penultimate original principle of Being. It seems to me though that the idea of evolution is only true from the perspective of God unrealised, if at all. Obviously from the perspective of God, the lesser comes from the greater; God is superior to all creation. From the perspective of what we are calling “God unrealised”, however, it originally lacks being, only gaining it through interaction with the masculine and essential principle. Incidentally, this is one of the ways in which certain aspects of the contemporary Western mentality appear to me as a sort of secularised “cult of the Goddess”. The way people today worship matter - with the related devotion to change, becoming and flux and the abolition of any essential principle which could fix or hold it all - is like a peculiar parody of the way in which certain sects of the past worshipped Maya or Shakti. This is very true. Generally speaking, though, this model gets used to justify pre-existing ideas of progress (even by Wilber himself, for example). The problem I have with attempts to integrate science and religion is that it seems very obvious that modern science is rooted in a denial of metaphysics and tradition (the positivism, rationalism and empiricism of the 19th and early 20th century particularly so, which to my knowledge is where most of the scientific models which Wilber attempts to integrate come from). Recent attempts to re-spiritualise science in the key of quantum and string theory I find mostly unconvincing, though they do show the inevitable self-immolation of any isolated field of knowledge (postmodernism has a similar value in philosophy). The attitude of love has nothing to do with any ideas of advancement or decline. The attitude of love would have no need to “ever-accelerate towards love” because it would already be love. Like I said earlier, I view all narrow and argumentative attempts at “proof” like most of the ones I have given above to be superficial and profane. I only included them for the sake of completeness and because I felt I had been overly blunt in my earlier responses to you. I am not interested in pushing petty personal beliefs on people, I am simply using this forum to clarify my understanding for the love of the truth. I certainly don’t want to “progress”, that much should be obvious! Interestingly, the word “belief” itself is derived from the word “leubh-” which meant “to care, desire, love”. Even words become corrupted!

Like I have said, I am not denying that there is progress in material terms. It is like a slider moving from spirit to matter, from angelic to demonic, from quality to quantity. The more there is of one, the less there is of the other. All of these things are only true in a certain sense. I don’t know enough about energy so I will pass over it, except to say that sustainable energy is largely just a way to artificially prop up the false needs of modern consumer society. There was no need to be sustainable before because there was no need to use absurd amounts of energy to drive to your big appointment with nothingness or beam porn into your lonely bed at night. I would say that most people should not have access to meat at all. In the Middle Ages, the carnival was a celebration in which the entire social order was inverted: the lords would become serfs and the serfs would become lords. Ordinarily, only the lords would eat meat so, during the carnival, the serfs would enjoy meat instead. That is why it is called a carnival, from the same root as carnivore. Today, we live in a permanent carnival (“clown world” as the meme goes, though most of the people who use it are equally misguided) so everybody always has access to meat. The price of this is factory farms and brutal mass exploitation of animals. This is an example of what I called “artificial egalitarianism”. Charles Taylor calls societal conventions like the carnival “anti-structure”, a temporary respite from the stifling structures of society. Today the society itself is anti-structure: a society against “social constructs”, a society against walls and borders, a society against the very existence of any distinction or “discrimination”, a society which denies the most basic facts of human nature like the difference between a man and a woman, to say nothing of the absurd self-hatred imposed on people either by largely false ideologies of guilt and privilege or by the imposition of false ideals and standards. Many of these things are simply products of the present postmodern confusion so they don’t necessarily prove that history overall isn’t progressing, but I still can’t agree that any of this constitutes progress. Many people have become vegetables today, so you are right there! There is no need to progress towards love! Love existed before time and history came into being. The point of this world is simply as a test of love. Like you say later, decay and death are but one more test of love. I understand that you say this because “God forgot everything to become human and to learn to love from scratch”, but I do not believe that this is so. Infants know very well how to love; they basically are pure love and acceptance. In almost all cases today, however, they are immediately traumatised by a society in which there is very little love left. You are absolutely right that spirituality is about letting go of more and more of our identity, and maybe that is why the last age is worse than the first. Hell will burn through a lot of identity! After all, in every religion I am talking about the ultimate state is one of negation: Ain Soph Aur, Fana, Nirvana, Nirguna Brahman, the Godhead. The mystics with the deepest experience always spoke in negative language. Leo shared an excellent quote from Meister Eckhart recently, something like: ‘Only the hand that erases itself can write the truth.’ The most fundamental problem I have with your claims is that the love that is celebrated today is a very one sided-form of love, a compassion without wisdom. Not only that, but often a compassion which hates and fears wisdom. Ultimately, Love is not separate from Truth. I didn’t mean to suggest that, just that the overall view of history in his theory is one of “ever-accelerating progress towards love”, as you said yourself. His exposition of metaphysics is generally pretty good. I read his shorter book in the same vein on Buddhism, something about a “fourth-turning of Buddhism” where it finally becomes women, gay and transgender friendly… The Buddha himself only reluctantly allowed women into the Sangha in the knowledge that the Dharma would last for half as long! But I guess Ken Wilber knows better than Buddha what Buddhism should be. Why not just call it Wilberism and be done with it? Maybe Buddho-Wilberism! Only a pathological narcissist could refer to “Wilber 1”, “Wilber 2”, “Wilber 10”… They aren’t even his ideas! But I shouldn’t turn this into a character assassination. I started reading The Religion of Tomorrow but I didn’t get very far. Maybe I’ll try it again. This is just a statement of the modern myth. However, there might be something in your last sentence: “It is all God, but not all of it is a realisation of God”. What is is it a realisation of then? The demiurge? The devil? Nothing (as the opposite of something)? Exactly! Wilber reveals himself as half-postmodern schmuck, half-William-James loving American pragmatist who just cares about the “hard data”. Everybody was crying out for those two things to be “integrated”! Forgive me for having some childish fun. I am not very convinced that there is any more empirical evidence for spiral progressivism than for the traditional view of decay, but your response is clarifying. To me it just seems like there is no need to muddy the waters of pure metaphysics with modern methods of empiricism and skepticism.

Spiral dynamics is an integral (!) part of integral theory - Wilber uses it as his main model for the historical element of his attempted synthesis - and spiral dynamics clearly describes a view of history in which every stage is more “advanced” than the last, which is in direct contradiction to the testimony of more or less every major religion. Thus to imply that the idea of progress and a denial of eschatology is not an important part of integral theory is simply false. What does that mean? In a way I agree, in that the feeling of being part of history - in the sense originally created by Herodotus and gradually refined over the last two millennia to the point of total absurdity - was already a sign of decadence, in the same sort of way that people remember trauma much more clearly than peace and tranquility. Or do you mean that the next cycle of time will be better than this one? And onwards and onwards forever? If so, why do you say that? That idea suffers from many of the same problems I have raised above: how could the greater come from the lesser? how can becoming be greater than Being? why is there a necessity for ever greater progress if everything is already God? Or just that the new dawn will be better than the dark night? Obviously this is true. Or are you just insisting based on nothing, like the original self-help guru Emilé Coué, that “every day, in every way, it’s getting better and better”?

It is interesting to consider why the intersubjective belief has changed though. Do you know how these models explain that? Earlier stages value the wisdom of the elders and tradition while later stages (such as ours) value teenage rebellion and youthful exuberance; therefore the former value the past and the latter value the future? A problem I see with the model in the picture you attached is that it consumes everything into itself and thus denies the reality of anything being true outside of a given cultural context, probably because Wilber is more or less a product of postmodern relativism. You could say that the whole purpose of integral theory is to include everything within itself, but that isn’t exactly what I mean: describing how all human belief systems fit within a given cultural context tells you nothing about the truth or falsity, the value or disvalue, of any given context.

I don’t deny that the integral model might find a way to explain away eschatology, but what does simply calling it “intersubjective” change? As an example, if I said to you that society denies outsiders, you could say: no it doesn’t, they fall under the “rejected” category. It still denies them! After all, “progress” belongs to the intersubjective category too. Why choose one intersubjective belief over another?

As far why I believe it? I experience it to be true in a way that is hard to articulate. I will grant that this could just be an illusion from having studied many texts of this sort, but it seems very real to me (as real as anything else, that is!) As far as what effect this has? Of course it is necessary to balance a clear eyed assessment of reality with the possibility of pointless gloominess and pessimism: all of this could be used merely as an excuse to justify pessimism and hopelessness, which might all just be inspired by a specific personal or even collective predicament having little to do with any overarching pattern. One should also never be fatalistic or deterministic. Incidentally, this is all illustrated in Nordic mythology by the figure of Odin, who studies and toils relentlessly to prevent the inevitable Twilight of the Gods. Also, certain aspects of the Hindu doctrine of Yugas were kept relatively secret (particularly regarding anything that allowed an application in terms of “divination” or an immediate prophecy of current events), and it was probably for this reason.

As far as proving that the real quality of life - that is to say, the quality of life as a means towards liberation from life (which might not exclude integration into the world) - has gradually deteriorated over the years, there are various ways we could go about this. Firstly, a simple observation: If every stage is more advanced than the last, then why is every stage shorter? Stage Red lasted for thousands of years, Stage Blue for over a thousand, Stage Orange for under 500, and Stage Green has so far only lasted under 100 years (and it already seems pretty strained)? Isn’t longevity a sign of peace, order and stability, and frantic activism a sign of disorder and chaos? And if every stage is getting shorter, then logically there must be an end of the cycle! (Or “third tier” stages will only last for an infinitesimal duration!) On this note, maybe you could try the Actualised method: contemplate the nature of history with the possible aid of an unspecified substance. Questions could include: “If God is already truth and love, why does the world exist?”; “If God is already infinite, why would it need to progress?“; “If God is Being, why would it need to become anything?” I would also ask you now: how could the higher come from the lower, the expansive and all-encompassing from the narrow and finite? After all, this is the implicit claim of all ideas of progress and evolution. Now we get to data. The other problem I have with any argument based on data is that data only means anything within the context of more data, thus relying on data can lead you down an infinite vortex of mere information. This is a trap. That being said, there is much evidence to suggest that people have grown stupider and weaker over time: IQ levels (I am quite against the idea of IQ, but it is still a somewhat meaningful measure) have decreased and testosterone levels are rapidly decreasing. The world today is an extremely toxic physical environment, many people’s neurological (and even spiritual) function is impaired by exposure to micro-plastics and heavy metals. True there have been some advances in profane medicine (though traditional forms of healing have been mostly forgotten or survived in more or less counterfeit forms), but almost all of these come with serious drawbacks. The only area of medicine in which I would be willing to concede advances which don’t have many drawbacks is emergency medicine. On the whole, modern medicine has only served to artificially prop up a lazy and entitled population of mass obesity and senility, requiring even further false support from cheap foreign labour and recently the “locking down” of society itself (this is not intended as a criticism of Covid restrictions per se). Besides, death is a reminder to the living of the importance of life. And what of the total loss of all after-death practice? The traditional societies which have left us the Tibetan and Egyptian “Books of the Dead” would likely be appalled at the total lack of support that profane society provides for the soul in its journey back to God. Another way I could attempt to prove the truth of the traditional description of history would be to compare cultural artefacts of the past with those of today. The trouble with this is that most cultural artefacts are products of one or another given phase of a civilisation, and thus don’t necessary reflect any broader pattern. For example, it is very easy to see that postmodern brutalist architecture is very much inferior to a Christian cathedral, but that could just be because postmodernism represents a local minima as the decline of the Christian West. Another problem I have with this is that outward manifestations of culture are not what is really essential. Like the text I originally quoted says, today people are outwardly wealthy (excluding many very notable exceptions) but inwardly malnourished. Regardless of all this, there are no brutalist monstrosities lingering around today from ancient times. Then again, that could just be because they aren't exactly built to last... And isn't that in its own way another proof: nobody today builds anything to last, there is no faith in the future anymore. That is why instant gratification and social media have found their perfect host-body in the postmodern mass man. This is why more people today are addicted to opiates and hyper-stimulant drugs than ever before, to say nothing of the indefinite number of more trivial addictions which are rife today. When in human history have there been more school shootings and utterly useless and instantly forgotten outbursts of violence than in postmodern America? Violence in the ancient world was often not a merely profane activity; it took on a profound, heroic and even ascetic function. This can be seen not just in the Abrahamic doctrine of Holy War but in many older traditions. Most violence and conflict today is gratuitous and pointless. Anyway - given that these are all rather superficial forms of proof, I’d be interested to hear any retort you might have or additional domains in which you think progress has occurred (but please no appeals to fake freedom and artificial egalitarianism!).