Emergentism | Chapter 5: Designing Meaning 3.0
Writing New Cultural Code
By now, it should be clear that, far from being some opportunistic scam or intriguing art project, re-designing religion is a spiritual imperative in this new theology of divine evolution. For God to emerge, we must play our part. Evolving the symbolic code is precisely how God continues evolving.
Religions have always been rich repositories of symbols, treasuries of evocative metaphors and images. Now that we have a sense of the new cosmic narrative, and the ethos it is gesturing towards, we can begin to consider what a religion in this mold might look like. We can consciously evolve the Divine.
So let’s get to work, shall we?
At the outset we can note that religion was always better than modern science at offering a clear and compelling image of the whole (particularly given modern science’s birth in reductionism). The word “cosmos” means “an ordered whole,” and it was just this that was obscured and eventually lost in reductionist science. Now that science has returned to a holistic vantage, though, we can finally acquire that all-embracing cosmic scope of a capital-U Universe in a manner informed by complexity and emergence. So it seems a good way to begin our design process would be to try to represent the whole that Emergentism has been relating, offering a clear, lucid translation of its grand narrative into symbolic form.
The Wisdom Stack
Our first symbolic rendering begins with the four most fundamental emergences we have been considering: Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture. Though not the only emergent levels to have evolved, they are the most important because each represents a radically new, more advanced way for the Universe to know itself on its way to God consciousness. In more technical terms, each represents a quantum leap in terms of information processing.
From Matter, Life emerges and learns through DNA; from Life, Mind emerges and learns through experience; from Mind, Culture emerges and learns through symbolic language. Each one constitutes its own distinct domain, and so we shall consider this the principal “stack” of levels of the Universe to date (cf. Henriques’s “Tree of Knowledge,” p. 54).
Because the Stack emerged in linear time, one level after another, it has what we might think of as a horizontal axis. However, because the Stack represents hierarchical levels on top of one another, it also has a vertical axis. One way to symbolize this is as a spiral. Spirals are ubiquitous in Nature because they are open-ended growth patterns. A nautilus or snail shell can get bigger and bigger following the same pattern because a spiral is always building on itself in a way that has no inherent limit. Since the Universe is also a living organism, with an open-ended developmental trajectory, and constantly building larger wholes out of smaller parts, its growth can also be well-represented in terms of the spiral.
Because each level emerged out of the previous one, each is dependent upon all of its predecessors. Complexity builds on complexity, such that the most complex levels are represented at the “apex of the pyramid” and the simplest at the base. Not all Matter is Life, and not all Life has Mind, and not all Mind participates in Culture. When we render this rising spiral, we are presented with our first symbol, the Wisdom Stack:
This image presents us with the main “levels of being” that the British Emergentists had begun to theorize about, and which the new science has now filled in. Knowing what they are is important, for it offers a crucial grounding orientation to ourselves and the cosmos. How so?
Everything we see and experience falls into some level of the Stack, and being able to track this this allows us to gain a better sense of our relationship to the world and what we encounter in it. More than that, we are ourselves a manifestation of this hierarchy. As organisms that emerged in and through Culture, we are phenomena based on Mind, Life, and Matter—the substrates for all that we do and experience as self-conscious beings. As such, we can no more ignore these aspects of our being than an engineer can ignore the lower floors of a building.
All of the richness and beauty of our complexity as self-conscious, Cultural beings rests on the structure of the whole Wisdom Stack. We have the whole Stack within us. Elemental matter forms the stuff of my cells, my neuronal cells form the stuff of my brain, and my brain forms the basis of my culturally mediated self-conscious ego. I am all the levels at once. I am the very stuff of the Universe rising up to know its Self.
Recognizing this puts me in touch with the fullness of my being. I am Matter, I am Life, I am Mind, I am Culture. I am comprised of all the levels, working together as one whole.
Losing sight of this multi-tiered aspect of reality is the source of considerable suffering today. Failing to feed the roots of reality will cause the flower to wither.
This is true at both the individual and collective scale. Learning to optimize and integrate all of our levels is key—something we will return to in Chapter 8. But empowering action must begin with knowledge, and the Wisdom Stack symbolizes the range and depth of our emergent levels of being, laying bare the anatomical skeleton of the Universal organism (i.e., Self; i.e., God).
The Mandala of Emergences
To further develop our symbolic translation of Emergentist cosmology, we should recognize that each level of the Wisdom Stack is dependent upon all the levels beneath it, is a subset of these levels, nested deeper and deeper—like a set of Russian dolls.
Here, complexity increases as one approaches the center. The point at the very center of such a circle thus represents the asymptotic infinitesimal singularity of God (symbolized by Omega, Ω): the true point and telos of existence.
So we get a cosmic mandala, a kaleidoscope of complexity, leading from Matter to Culture, then passing on through the hypothetical additional levels which have not yet emerged, on their way towards Ω, or maximally realized God consciousness:
Within the primary emergences in our cosmic mandala (Matter, Life, Mind, Culture), secondary emergences arise and are depicted as thinner sub-circles. It is hard to know the exact number of these sub-emergences. In his 2002 book The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, complexity scientist Harold Morowitz tried, identifying 28 distinct emergences that might be used to fill out the transitions between the principal levels, and thus the various additional layers in the development towards God. He posited the following series:
[Matter]
The Primordium
Large-Scale Structure
Stars
The Elements
Solar Systems
Planets
The Geospheres
[Life]
The Biosphere
Prokaryotes
Eukaryotes
Multicellularity
[Mind]
Neurons
Two Animal Subkingdoms
Vertebrates
Fish
Amphibians
Reptiles
Mammals
Arboreal Mammals
Primates
Great Apes
Hominids
Toolmakers
[Culture]
Language
Agriculture
Technology and Urbanization
Philosophy
The Spiritual
However we further specify the layers, the complete Mandala of Emergences should certainly be more intricately filled in with intra-level sub-circles: distinct layers marking out the sub-stages of development of the growing organism of God. The full richness of Emergentist cosmology would thus be even more elaborate, levels on levels and layers within levels—a true kaleidoscope, worthy of meditation and contemplation:
Thus we get a richer, more variegated image of the mandala of the Universe, as ever new emergences build off of the prior ones on their way towards deeper complexity.
The mandala is a recurring symbol in religions the world over. The word “mandala” simply means “circle” in Sanskrit, and we can find countless depictions of the sacred circle in Eastern traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Shintoism, where they serve as maps of the cosmos that double as objects of meditation. Maps of the cosmos in the West were also traditionally mandalic in nature (see p. 6), tracing the circles and sub-circles of the “heavenly spheres” on their way up to the Empyrean: the nine-fold hierarchy of nested angelic spheres, at whose center was God Himself. In modern times, the cross-cultural significance of the mandala symbol has been reflected upon by psychologists like C. G. Jung, who observed:
The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.
That is, according to Jung, the mandala is a symbol of the Self just as God is the archetype of the Self. The mandala thus represents Self, God, and Cosmos, all at once—which is, indeed, the fundamental existential unity suggested by Emergentism.
Thanks to the insights of complexity science, we can begin to reframe these ancient intuitions and modern psychological insights in contemporary scientific terms. The Mandala of Emergences offers a succinct cosmological icon that captures the reality of our new understanding of the Universe in a manner reminiscent of the rich traditions of religions the world over.
The Complexity-Consciousness Continuum
Complexity, as we noted, is only the outward manifestation of an inner deepening of consciousness. As structural complexity increases so does the inner richness of experience. When we consider the full breadth of the Mandala of Emergences in relation to its associated increase in depth, then, we can imagine the attractor of the Omega singularity (God consciousness) drawing all the Universe towards it, just as a cosmic singularity curves all of space-time towards itself.
Indeed, much as Einstein appreciated that space and time are like a single fabric warped by mass, so might we symbolize objective complexity and subjective consciousness as one single fabric — complexity-consciousness — warped by something like free energy rate density towards greater and greater subjective depth:
The Double Helix of Metamemes
Zooming in on the level of Culture specifically, we can begin to render the rich process of cultural evolution, too, in iconographic form. This requires symbolizing the layered development of symbolic justification systems themselves—that is, the specific worldviews, cultural codes, or metamemes that arise as societies complexify.
Recall that such worldviews represent a fluid dialectical relationship between the social environment and the constellation of specific ideas that inform its associated metameme. Such social-linguistic metamemes are “downloaded” by individuals to better navigate the specific complexities of their environment, helping keep human beings (and the society they live in) far from equilibrium. The psychologist Clare Graves was the first to map this relationship between environment and worldview in terms of a double-helix shape: that is, two interlocking spirals of growth and development, pairing unique environments to their associated adaptive worldview. Appearing like a strand of DNA, this compelling image helps to foreground the way such symbolic systems work as the information processing code at the level of Culture as it complexifies:
Here we see the unique cultural codes (Animistic, Imperial, Traditional, etc.)—which are constructed by the increasingly complex dimensions of consciousness—paired with the social environments that give rise to (and are in turn shaped by) those codes due to adaptive pressures. So Culture complexifies, increasing its information processing capacity, and evolving God at each level of the process: from a diffuse impersonal power, to a constellation of domain-specific deities, to a fully unified transcendent Being, to a further abstracted set of universal principles, to a broader encompassing of contextually aware perspectives, to a normative processual evolution of all such perspectives on their way to comprehensive teleological realization of Self-knowledge:
The Great Spiral of Becoming
We can now try to paint the entire big picture of Emergentism in symbolic form. Such an image can help us intuit a sense of the whole which Emergentism seeks to convey. With scientific reductionism, as we know, the old holistic worldview of traditional religion and its Great Chain of Being were lost. This marked both an advance, in terms of a better understanding of the parts, but also a regression, in terms of how richly we perceive the whole. With the rise of scientific complexity, however, the neo-holistic worldview of Emergentism has arrived, uniting science’s understanding of the parts with religion’s appreciation of the whole.
This scientific revolution has allowed us to understand far more accurately aspects of what our religious forebears partially intuited, so that we can now re-integrate our findings into a comprehensive vision of the full richness of reality. When we do this, we are confronted with a truly remarkable vision. The cosmos is indeed organized according to a graded, hierarchical sequence. However, this sequence is arranged according to complexity. All its levels are made of the same basic stuff, and the scale unfolds through time, endlessly evolving and developing on its way towards an infinitely receding realization of perfection.
So the new science has taken us from the largely discredited Great Chain of Being to a new sense of evolving, emergent levels and layers, which we shall call the Great Spiral of Becoming, an image that most fully renders the dynamic evolutionary narrative of Emergentism:
Here the fundamental levels of the Wisdom Stack are shown unfolding from the Big Bang, referencing a few emergent layers of note along the way. These are accompanied by their estimated free energy rate density (Φm), a helpful metric for approximating the degree of complexity, thus showing the quantitative increase of complexity over time. Culture, passing through the increasingly sophisticated metamemes, spirals on, towards our immediately uncertain future (whose next, likely digitally-mediated emergence is marked ?) and concludes, ultimately, with the realization of infinitely deepening God consciousness (symbolized by Omega, Ω).
The Kaleidoscopic Eye of God Consciousness
And what, ultimately, is God consciousness? Since the Universe dawned as pure Matter, consciousness has been struggling to emerge—the experiencing agent out of oblivious substance, the Knower breaking forth from the dreamless sleep of the Unknown. Out of the timeless abyss of unconscious being, a perceptible world arose. Parts of the whole began to learn.
Energy coursed through the Void, and Matter organized, yielding Life that could be sculpted by its environment into an information-rich model of reality. The Universe gained code that carried information—about its Self. So knowledge progressed.
Then Life learned to learn in a whole new way, evolving elaborate sensory nets that interfaced with what it encountered. So was born the “inside” to the “outside” world—an interior model of the exterior Universe. With this emergence of Mind came a whole new way to relate to reality. Pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, emotion of every sort—the inner universe ripened into an unimaginable new reality of its own. The true subject was born, in which resided an increasingly rich simulated reality approaching more and more the full depth of the world in which it lived, a vibrant map growing ever more like the territory it aimed to represent. And so knowledge continued to progress.
But the subject was still ignorant of itself, and ignorant of so much of the incredible complexities of the world it inhabited—until a new breakthrough insight occurred, and the subject at last became self-aware. The self itself was discovered, and the boundless domain of conceptual knowledge opened up before the horizon of Culture.
Since then, the knowledge of that self has deepened infinitely more, as has the knowledge of the world which that self inhabits, through philosophy, science, art, and all the other fields of Culture. The inner world is now as wide an expanse as the outer; the complexity of subjectivity approaches the complexity of the objective realm, as humanity now stands poised to embrace emergences of its own making, which can propel knowledge exponentially further still.
In all of this, there is a single simple story. It is a tale of the Universe becoming conscious of its Self. With the emergence of the subjective, there was a model invented to reflect the unconscious reality of the objective. Indeed, until the subject related to the objective, neither could be said to truly exist. Over time, the subjective model has grown more and more to reflect its objective referent. That is what knowledge is. The Universe, unconscious and unknown at first, has become conscious and known to its Self through the duality of subjects relating to an objective reality: self and world, interior and exterior, map and territory.
However, as the Universe has developed, the gap between these has narrowed. The Universe is getting closer and closer to closing the chasm between perceiver and perceived. As it does, it draws closer to perfect knowledge. This absolute knowledge is the telos of existence, the final aim of being, and it has been the attractor point driving the evolution and development of the cosmos.
The realization of this state is God consciousness, where all distinctions between subject and object disappear, and Self is all in all. Therein lies maximal unity, maximal comprehension, maximal satisfaction, maximal equanimity, maximal whole-ness.
This Point toward which all things tend is, however, infinitely receding into itself. It is the asymptotic limit, never fully attained, and so always growing infinitely more and more perfect. It is not a static end, but a dynamic eternal unfolding. It is both realized and unrealized; its dynamism and growth are its perfection, and its endless and abundant Self-transcend-ence is its very nature. It is All. It is the Universe awakened as subject. It is the “I AM” of the Universe. As such, it is all I AMs—including yours. You are that I AM; you are the awakened Universe; you are God. When you awaken to this knowledge, not just as thought but as lived reality, your subjectivity unites with the objective world and you near God consciousness. When you awaken to God consciousness, God awakens to Self-knowledge. The meaning of the Universe is completed. Amen—and thank you for playing.
The Emergentist symbol for God consciousness we have been using so far is the Omega (Ω), the letter of culmination and completion. To this we now add another symbol: the Kaleidoscopic Eye. Here we find the full Mandala of Emergences, which is the Universe, wreathed in an ascending spiral of half-awakened forms, all deepening in consciousness through the progression of the layers, towards the Center: the finally awakened eye of God.
Along the way, inchoate senses of Self and God have emerged and developed, gaining greater accuracy and resolution as they approach the divine Attractor. Though serving as necessary scaffolds to higher-level emergences, these are but pale impressions of the true God they seek to portray. Each advance only reveals the inadequacy of the previous attempt.
So development betrays (in retrospect) the fundamental constructedness of every so-called “God,” the profound partiality of every approximation of the Transcendent Omega, according to which it now shows but a barely comparable condescension, like a child’s scribble of the Sistine Chapel.
Even the heights of our symbolic toolkit, language, fall infinitely short. The truly awakened Eye is simply inconceivable according to our current conceptual paradigms, and we can only await a higher emergence than Culture to begin to understand and articulate it better.
In full and humbled awareness of the failure of all “Gods” to date—from the animistic spirits to the great pantheons, from the Great Judge to reason, relativity, and restless Novelty—Emergentists acknowledge this “God beyond God,” this God of all Gods, and know that the word can no longer suffice, its referent is so far away as to be lost in divine darkness.
And so, to refer to this God above all “Gods,” we cross out the word and gesture only towards an annulment, a negation: God. The awakened Eye is but a symbol of an apophatic aim that transcends all known attempts, all embryos of former Selves. It is the “I” that can only be known in union, where all objects and thus all referents themselves fall away, and there is only All, and All is I, and I and God are One.
NEXT: Chapter 6: Myth: Poeticizing Reality
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