Foundation

Returning to the origin to recreate civilization

If we are going to attempt to “resurrect” or “redeem” human civilization and human dignity in this treacherous 21st century, we must start with the most basic question of ontology: We must go back to the origin. We must rebuild from there.

Ontology is “the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.” Some of us have to make the effort to be precise about our ontology: How we define "the nature of being:” The foundation underlying reality. Once we have secured this understanding, we must share what we know. The future depends on this.

Based on their ontology, humans build up their model of the world. This model determines how they approach all other issues, including governance, economy, social policy, and technological development. Because humans are story-based creatures, our choices and actions derive from our beliefs and myths. Very few people seek coherence in how they understand the nature of reality, and how they apply their metaphysical framework to their actions.

Across the world, we find a number of different ontologies in conflict with each other, unleashing destruction across the Earth. If you are a Christian Fundamentalist, you take the Bible as literal truth. You believe God created the world in six days (although what was a “day” before there was a solar system or a universe?). You believe we rapidly approach Judgment Day or Revelation. During Revelation, the faithful are eternally redeemed while sinners and nonbelievers go to Hell forever. Given this, there is no reason to enforce environmental restrictions or pollution controls. These are irrelevant. They might even slow down the Second Coming or Revelation.

If you are a reductive materialist, you believe human self-consciousness, our ego-based sense of identity and agency, is an accident of evolution. If you are primarily motivated by self-interest, you see no reason to care about the long-term health or biodiversity of the Earth. Since your personal death means utter cessation, non-existence, it is logical to seek any technological means to extend your ego-based consciousness: This is the first priority of the transhumanist movement.

Over the last centuries, the reductive materialist worldview provided the scaffold for the technocratic system that dominates our lives today. It enabled the rise of industrial capitalism and continues to support ongoing technological innovation. It also unleashed spiritual alienation, social fragmentation, and global ecological collapse. The materialist paradigm insists that humans are no more than biochemical machines. Since consciousness is an accidental byproduct of neural activity, the universe, itself, is a soulless mechanism without inherent meaning or purpose.

While still dominant in many institutions and in our universities, reductive materialism is an obsolete model of the world. Not only have neuroscientists been unable to solve the “hard problem” of consciousness, but physicists have learned that consciousness is embedded in the nature of reality in an inescapably creative way. The 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for experiments that overturned one of our most fundamental beliefs: They proved that the universe is not locally real.

Without an observing consciousness to cause the wave collapse, there is energetic flux without fixed reality. Establishing the primacy of consciousness is a huge paradigm shift. In On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543), Nicolaus Copernicus proved the Earth is not at the center of the solar system. This discovery began the modern age, based in empiricism and the scientific method, overturning old religious doctrine. The discovery that consciousness is primary similarly re-positions humanity in our relationship to the cosmos.

What are the alternatives to to reductive materialism?

The two options are monistic idealism and panpsychism. Panpsychism proposes that everything in the universe possesses “mind-like attributes” in some way. Panpsychism still posits a dualistic split between consciousness and matter.

According to monistic or analytic idealism, the universe is made entirely from consciousness. Consciousness is the underlying reality. This underlying, instinctual consciousness projects, gives expression to, everything we experience as the world. This is the same basic idea we find in Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, expressed in different ways. The more deeply you consider it, the more it becomes obvious.

Consider that, when we dream, our dreaming mind creates a nonphysical world that seems entirely tangible. Our sleeping mind populates this dream-world with what seem to be many different characters but are, in fact, simply projections of our singular consciousness. With idealism, we are, as individuals, temporarily differentiated aspects of the underlying, unified, interdependent field of consciousness.

Through monistic or analytic idealism, we can harmonize or integrate the many world religions, animist and mythological beliefs in a way that imparts meaning and dignity to indigenous and faith-based communities. The radical atheism and skepticism implicit in reductive materialism often induced a sense of superiority: Rational skeptics tend to dismiss people who hold religious or animistic beliefs. They are seen, at best, as quaint, and, at worse, as dangerous and regressive.

The universe as the collective dream-projection of the temporarily differentiated expressions or containers of the underlying consciousness field (you and me). From this vantage point, we have not a negligible but a crucial role to play in the ongoing manifestation. The various religions, esoteric systems, mythological expressions of the past are ways that human beings choose to interact with the underlying consciousness field, giving it definition. This work of naming and defining via myth or theoretical framework is primordially creative and open-ended. However, religions were trapped within the limited cultural knowledge of their time. It makes no sense to adhere to ancient texts literally, but we can understand then allegorically and prophetically.

We can understand reductive materialism as another mythology or mythological variant — an inversion of the transcendent worldview found in almost all cultures outside of modern technological civilization. Because materialism is unproven, those who adhere to it lock themselves into an irrational religious ideology or faith: As “true believers,” they trust in the received, unproven idea that the world is meaningless and absurd: There can be no strand of spirit, no filament of soul, that continues on after death.

Today, many people think in a muddled way, confusing different ontologies. For instance, the tech investor Peter Thiel frequently proselytizes on Christian concepts such as the Antichrist. The Antichrist appears in Book of Revelation as a harbinger of the “End of Time.” While Thiel is a materialist, he also believes in parts of Christianity — such as the approaching messianic return — which have no justification within a purely materialist worldview. He interprets Christianity through his eccentric Libertarian philosophy, influenced by thinkers such as Rene Girard and Ayn Rand.

Monistic idealism is a far more coherent and capacious paradigm which gives us a completely logical way to approach the nature of reality that, also, encompasses our individual and collective potential for transcendence. Idealism makes room for psychic phenomena, subtle bodies, and the paranormal. It allows for other “dimensions" of reality that may include spirits, ghosts, demons, and so on. It gives us permission to understand the imagination as a generative function inherent in the universe itself. It reunites us with Anima Mundi, the soul of the world.

As I will explore in more depth another time, idealism gives us logical reasons to live decent, compassionate lives and to fight courageously, even sacrifice ourselves, for what we believe to be true, good, and beautiful. The metaphysical stability of monistic or analytic idealism is what the modern psychedelic movement lacks, in my opinion. Lacking this ontological perspective and trapped in a quasi-materialist worldview, the psychedelic movement no longer meshes innately with an emancipatory political project. It can be hijacked by Libertarian ideologues, Ahrimanic sorcerers, and transhumanist/nihilist thrill-seekers.

Contemporary progressivism, liberalism, and Leftism are failing now because they lack a defined ontological framework, which provides the basis for an overarching weltanschauung or worldview. The currently triumphant Right Wing offers an awkward ideological mix of Christian fanaticism and hardcore materialism/cynicism. To launch a resurgent alternative, we must begin with a coherent ideological and ontological framework that corresponds with science. Monistic idealism provides this. Instead of retracting from the ideals of the European Enlightenment into a Neoreactionary “Dark Enlightenment,” monistic idealism allows us to advance those ideals in a far more systemic and profound way.

The underlying ontology also, inherently, informs a society’s ideals and inspires its sense of vision, purpose, and meaning. The ontology provides the basic orientation and sets the direction that the people follow. For instance, in our culture of materialism and hyper-individualism, accumulation of wealth is, for many, the highest value. As I mentioned earlier, the nihilism that underlies reductive materialism leads to the rampant pursuit of technological progress to perpetuate the existence of the individual ego-based consciousness, which sees mortality as complete annihilation.

What would change if our contemporary civilization was to recognize, and embrace, monistic idealism — the primacy of consciousness — as its ontology?

I suspect that such a shift would also lead to the realization that there is likely to be an aspect or element of our being that continues beyond this life. The evidence around reincarnation is very strong. Ian Stevenson investigated children who remember their past lives in Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, summarized in condensed form in Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. I recommend Amit Goswami’s Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation, and Immortality. Goswami, a physicist, develops a hypothesis on how aspects of our being (soul, spirit) continue from life to life via quantum mechanics. Subtle bodies like the chakra system may exist as quantum aggregates, maintained in the underlying field of consciousness which transcends time and space.

When enough of us realize we are not atomized individuals but differentiated expressions of a unified field of consciousness that dreams us into existence (as part of its “divine play”), we will choose to live differently. We will reorganize our society according to principles of interdependence, reciprocity, or “ubuntu.”

Many of us will find accumulating material wealth and power far less valuable than pursuing the inner adventure of the spirit. We will recognize that our actions in this present life create the conditions for our future rebirths. Hoarding wealth or supporting policies that harm others is senseless and aberrant from a more encompassing awareness of “self interest.”

We will collaborate to build a social and technological infrastructure designed to liberate humanity as a whole from deprivation while enhancing long-term biodiversity. Everyone needs to be free to explore the depth dimensions of the psycho-cosmos in their own unique way. Those who wish for it can pursue spiritual realization, or develop their psychic abilities in a healthy and productive context. Technology will find its proper role as an instrument to assist us in deepening our psychic abilities as we attain deeper states of de-conditioning and liberation.

We would seek to preserve the sanctity of life and replenish the Earth’s natural systems because we enjoy contributing to our world’s inherent beauty and creativity. From an idealist perspective, we would no longer see the need to push the growth of technological and industrial civilization to achieve Capitalist productivity goals or rapidly reach a transhumanist outcome. While we might seek to develop new technologies and markets, we would do this from a perspective of interdependence and universal care or compassion. Everyone, everything, and all of nature is an innately harmonic, interconnected expression of the underlying source-field of consciousness: It is, altogether, what it takes for each and all of us to learn, love, and explore.

Please let me know what you think about this — where you agree or disagree — in the comments.