Questions of God

I think Humankind, in fact, may need an interim "Buddhist period" of a secular, non-theistic centred relatedness to one another, before the theological questions about the nature of reality (termed "ontology") can be reconciled with the nature of human experience.

Symmetry

The reason for this prohibition, or rather, "needed constraint", is that when people have a certain kind of experience of being, and seek to relate it to a meaning-of-self-in-the-universe, they always formulate these meanings from the ontological and semiotic (meanings, which are formed by signs, or when understood ontologically, as 'semes') in the early life period.

People are still believing, still looking to Nietzsche and the ancients, for "wisdom" - which is absorbed and assimilated into a mental-structure that needs to see reality as a story. Since symmetry is the nature and essence of things, and each living being, indeed, all MATERIAL things, come into being via symmetry. As Camelo Castillo, author of Origin of Mind: A History of Systems (2017), writes:

“Symmetry is transformation with preservation of structure where structure can be not only real physical things, but also the relationships these things form and that form them – their patterns of interaction, their rules of transformation.” - pg. 22

“In a phrase, the furniture of the universe can be defined as the regularities in the processes that maintain them. Through symmetry, structure inheres process and process inheres structure.” -pg. 23

“Informational symmetry is the reduction of uncertainty in the transformations that preserve the systems structure.” pg. 24

“Since time is isometric to change, synchrony is also order through change. In this simple sense synchrony is informational symmetry. It is the reduction of uncertainty in the transformations that preserve the relationship between at least two systems, or two components of the same system, over time.” pg. 25

“When all systems are reduced to the regularities that describe them, these regularities are transformational; they are dynamic, not static. What this means is that in a massively interactive universe where transformation is the natural state and regular versions of this transformation are only rarely selected for persistence, symmetry itself can be expressed as synchrony. All systems can be expressed as regularities in both time and space. Essentially, one result of treating space and time as a single fabric is that symmetry and synchrony are unified.” pg. 28-29

“In both internal and external contexts some degree of symmetry, trivial or not, must be preserved for a thing to remain a thing.” – Camelo Castillo, Origin of Mind: A History of Systems; pg.31, 2011; Allardice Creek Press

Think about this, but with light to the phenomenology of self-experience. How do you hold your body - feel in our body - read your bodies cues? Castillo's evolutionary reconstruction contains the phenomena of embodied self-experience, in that we can feel good (symmetry) or bad (asymmetry). The only fields up to the task of understanding how the embodied, affective sensorimotor experience of self-emerges is developmental psychology, particularly as it has been described in the works of Daniel Stern (Columbia), Beatrice Beebe (Columbia), Edward Tronick (UMass) and Peter Fonagy (University College London), whose reconstructions of formation of perception and action - and the way they relate through "meanings" psychodynamically generated, have been revolutionary for the understanding and treatment of trauma in terms of early-life relational disturbances. I am such a beneficiary of such views, which is what underlies my own conviction that interacting with your own past is an effort in semiotic-reconstruction: where past 'semes' can be reconfigured so that old meanings and the semiotic affects they leave in sensorimotor affective experience can be put to rest, or at the very least, relaxed and controlled by the minds new relation towards it.

The field of attachment theory, kick-started by the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who combined what was of value in Freud (i.e. transference, unconscious) with Pierre Janets incisive insights into the nature of trauma and dissociation, with the evolutionary views of Darwin, and the systems perspective of Uexkull and Bertanlaffy, after studying the effects of the London bombings on infants who were sent outside the city, and who received little interaction with adults who were understandably being affected by the social chaos around them.

Bowlby came to the conclusion - quite logically - that human infants need love and care, and if they don't receive it, they don't develop right at either an affective (temperamental) or cognitive (perceptual, symbolic, self-regulatory) level. This view, strangely enough "shook" the Freudian (essentially gnostic) worldview, being met mostly by skepticism by the male establishment. However, work by Brazelton, Ainswoth, Main and Sroufe, has via experimental studies of both a latitudinal and longitudinal nature, that Bowlby's evolutionarily informed hypothesis was right on the dot: human beings are exquisitely sensitive to the relational signs present on the faces of others and implicit in their spoken voices - namely, the "others" feeling-states. Feeling-states are what the infant first senses, knows, and adapts towards, such that by the time narrative-cognition forms, the mind is already "fixated" upon a particular perspective on things - essentially whatever it is that the social environment and the interacted with culture "affords" as a coherent-meaning to the individual.

Gnosis

Given how much meaning is impressed upon the developing brain before language capacities emerge, it is tragic shock to know that the leaders of our planet suffer from a deep spiritual illness, largely mediated by the explosive reactions that occur when the brain-stem is hardwired to dissociate signs-of-love from the environment, and is built, from the "ground up", to relate to the world in terms of "fire": to imposes ones own "truth" upon the world around them.

Gnosticism, in effect, is a Human disease - a virus - that "seizes" the minds of human-beings which, being so sensitive to the divine and transcendent 'signs' of nature, cannot tolerate the meaning - the light - which shines upon them, because their early-life, as a matter of fact, has been co-opted by sensory impressions of relational asymmetry; angry voices, angry faces, shame-filled voices, shame-laden faces. These signs are not innocent, but information that the early brain-stem, mid-brain-cortical connections extract meaning-from. Indeed, the interactions between the various neural systems constitute a "sign" of what exists or is being interfaced with in the perceptual-surround. Long before the linguistic mind emerges, life is being given its essential affect-tone and reality-quality.

The fact is, God as a concept is too much for us traumatized humans. Its too much! And anyone who understands how we work will understand the necessity of "reducing" the informational complexity to the fact of our togetherness: we exist as a single being, yet some of us are so overwhelmed by their alienation to being itself, as being, that they feel they need to follow through with what they believe to be the case.

“We introduced it [Nietzsches, the “night song”] by asking whether the gnostic thinker really wants to be God, or whether the affirmation of his will is not just another deception. The “night song” appears to admit the deception: its not that he wants to be God; he has to be God – for inscrutable reasons. But this latter conclusion…immediately prompts us to ask if we have to accept it. Must we now consider the game of deceptions ended? I do not think so. Let us continue with the game and ask if the “night song” is not yet another mask. Bearing in mind that Nietzsche confesses that he knows his occlusion and suffers in it, let us turn his confession against him and ask, Does a man really have to make a virtue out of the misery of his condition, which he perceives to be the graceless disorder of the soul, and set it up as a superhuman ideal? Does his deficiency entitle him to perform Dionysian dances with masks? Let us, with the brutality that the times compel if we are not to fall victim to them, ask if he is not rather obliged to be silent. And if his lament were more than a mask, if it were genuine, if he suffered from his condition, would he not then be speechless? But Nietzsche is not in the least speechless; and his eloquence is convincing proof that the lament is only an act of sympathetic understanding, that it has not been allowed to touch the core of his existence in rebellion against God, and therefore that it is not genuine, but a mask.” – Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, pg. 24, ICI, 2004 [i/]