Eschaton

Eschaton: the final event in the divine plan; the end of the world

Setting

When people ask me, "how would you describe your philosophy - do you favor materialism or idealism?" I find myself saying "both".

Charles Sanders Peirce was probably the first person to etch out a philosophy of reality where material reality is concomitant with meaning. Look around you - the sky above you, the space beyond it, and the infinity beyond which your eyes can't see; the "stuff" you see is matter; in space, there is less of it, and between the matter lies a void resonating with electromagnetic energy.

All of this, imagine, is the mind of God. The Universe is not merely God's creation; It IS God. Indeed, when you realize that we exist at the spatial scale between the smallest conceptualized unit of matter (dark matter) and the largest conceptualization unit of matter (supercluster of galaxies), it is hard not to see us as the mystics do - as the microcosmos of the macrocosmos. God - as the Universe - creating a miniature version of Itself within Itself.

"We humans are almost exactly at the center of all possible sizes – at the bottom of the Cosmic Ouroboros, halfway between the smallest and the largest. That is our place whether the units used are centimeters, nanometers or light-years, so this is not merely an anthropocentric bias. If we used different units, the only change would be the numbers in the exponents all the way around the serpent; we would still be central.” – Nancy Ellen Abrams, Joel Primack, The New Universe and the Human Future; pg. 33; Yale, 2011

Phase Shift

Human beings operating at a lower level of consciousness find it hard to understand that there are higher levels of consciousness. All significant integrations of new information (mattering) into consciousness (your brain matter) is a developmental process concomitant with evolutionary processes; evolution doesn't stop with you, but in fact has reached a new stage where it has become aware of itself in many complex modes.

It's hard for me to say "humans are more evolved today", when by 'evolved', people have material technology in mind. If medical science is invoked, even then, I find myself wondering, "you don't know the significance of what you don't know". The philosopher Eric Voegelin thought getting caught up in the "intramundane" without any concept or awareness of the transcendental source of your being led to the "apocalypse". By apocalypse, he of course means the catastrophic breakdown that precedes the end of a society - or "world". Voegelin was right on the spot in his diagnosis, although I would have preferred a description that refers to symmetry dynamics as embodied in self-other communicative transactions mediated by mirror neurons between brainminds that are inherently tied into one another.

Voegelin wasn't a dualist, yet he spoke like one. "Spirit", "Soul", "body" is a primitive lexicon. He didn't have the advantage of where science has gone since he left this earth (1985). In 2018, I can think of the substance of the human being as having begun over 320,000 years ago at the latest. I can also think of consciousness as an emergent property of interacting brain region whose purpose and function I know; I know how the brain evolved; I know what attributes and properties of cognition it brought into being; I know that these attributes emerge from the tensegrity between organism and environment. I know that the organism can be thought of as a superposition of its own internal structuring and the targets in the environment it is entangled with. I know that cells are quantumly entangled with objects in this way; that every living cell is a decoder, an interpreter, and a rudimentary basis for what human beings have become.

The phase shift of consciousness is not an arbitrary phase shift, but which continues on from the evolutionary theme of symmetrical complementarity between an organism and its semiotically meaningful environmental objects. For humans, this is undoubtedly other humans; and the 'salient objects' which we must be semiotically congruent with is our non-verbal experience of reality. This, in truth, is what we are no longer properly aware of, because the languages we have and the dominant themes in culture (sex, sports, shows, movies, etc) dissociated and continues to dissociate us from a more coherent relatedness to our own embodied experience of meaning.

The greatest trick of civilization is how it can get a mind to 'disown' and 'unknow' its own primal truths. By 'primal' I don't mean essential. Everything is emergent; evolving; changing. But there is a lawfulness and directionality of feeling; there is a plus and a minus. We perform best and operate in our ideal mode when we respect the symmetry known as the golden rule. When it is experienced as a truth of our bodies, and logically understood as a deepening of the quality of symmetry as it pertains to resolving existential conflicts of being by caring for the other and having the other care for you in return.

The reduction of threat is brought about by the feeling of safety. Feeling safe in humans is described by the word "trust". To trust another, ideally, is to not even be aware of a problem to begin with: such a feeling is most powerfully secured when you have a psycholinguistic representation of the other in a past conversation explicitly making clear their love and care for you, and their desire to 'be for you'. Such a past experience operates as an unconscious 'symmetry' process which relaxes amygdular threat dynamics, and thus the free flowing of feelings between people.

3 to 4 generations

Modern epigenetics shows that psychoneurological trauma can be passed on to the 4th generation. It's effects can be reversed and dampened by nurturing behavior, as Michael Meaneys experiments at Mcgill in Montreal has shown in mice.

There is an interesting parallel with the Hebrew Bibles statement that the sins of the father are passed on to the 3rd and 4th generations. Are the sins the inevitable errors created by acting from an egoistic 'deficiency' cognition, and so spreading it far and wide? Perhaps this was an observation; or perhaps some higher 'source' communicated it. In any case, the coincidence is interesting.

There are feedbacks between material culture, social class relations, emotional regulation, and narrative, that constitute different levels of 'organization' that regulate the way we experience 'coherency' in our cognition. These feedback processes basically reinforce the dominant narrative, which is generated by the 'tension' between the actual physical brain (emotion regulation processes between hemispheres) and the social class relations to which the narrative generated 'binds' you to. The material culture and the personal narrative are the 'counterpoles'; we live within a material culture, and a narrative occurs within our heads; but these two explicitly expressed dimensions are governed by symmetry processes within us (emotion regulation between hemispheres in the brain) and between us (emotion regulation between people). Social power - and so social class - is the defining feature of commnication, and so 'between'. Homeostasis and affective processes are right hemispheric; whereas languaging processes are left hemispheric.

Don't leave me hanging Astro.

AND??

a reply to: Astrocyte

You got one on your hook Astro, better reel him in before he gets away.

Yet our society, such as it is, allows us the freedom to explore Eschaton and what may be an evolving consciousness or God's plan and that is good.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. Gandhi

What is the true meaning of an eschaton?

Is it to further the egos needs?

Or does it suggest a cyclical creating and destroying of existence..by various forces or Gods..?

a reply to: Astrocyte

Eschaton ...

Sounds like a heavy snail ...

a reply to: Astrocyte

I learned a new word "tensegrity"...nice, lovely even.

Interesting read, thanks.