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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000

Glossary

ANGUISH. The common state of "being human." A sort of positive-negative chronic ailment of each mind afflicted by the unknowability and unpredictability of the real, near and far. Anguish is the daughter of reflection. In the absence of reflection, anguish does not exist. Plants and animals do not suffer anguish; animals suffer fear, perhaps, but not anguish.

The whole of Christianity (like all other theologies) can be seen from the angle of an immense and prolonged cry of anguish, and throughout its tortured history only one thing has given resolution to it: the esthetic act such theological anguish generates. The history of Christianity is a long sequence of esthetic creation transfiguring personal and collective anguish into esthetic objectifications.

ANIMISM. A reality authored by a creator is a reality animated by the creator's pneuma.

Animism makes sacramental that which it animates. Under a spell of this sort, reality is in constant peril of blasphemy. It is as if at the moment of creation the creator injects into reality a sort of paralyzing substance: "Thou shalt not." In the same way, the wasp injects a paralyzing substance into the cicada so that its babies can feed upon the living corpse. It may be a sort of virtual cannibalism. In the shadow of animism, reality, an original goodness turned sour, has to worship its maker and is often at a loss about the truthfulness of the whole enterprise. Somewhere the intrinsic warpage of the sequence of goodness -- generating badness -- worshipping goodness is clamoring for resolution. But resolution is inhibited by an intrinsic incoherence: Reality diminishes God, the hypothetical deity. A self-generating reality is exempt from dependence on a creator. It does not have the imprint that the creator unavoidably makes upon its creation.

By abandoning animism and unveiling the deceptive nature of theological simulations, which are the longing for a perfection mistakenly thought to exist, the knot is undone. The presence of il Mistero Tremendo is unveiled, and reality is face to face with the awesome task of bringing itself into the nobility of love and grace ... at all costs.

ART. The esthetic incarnation in specific objects or events. The nature of the esthetic is found in the idiosyncratic transcending into the universal. When the esthetic incarnation takes place, anguish is transfigured into the esthetic, and the incarnation becomes an end in itself.

Art is a persuasive and powerful example of frugality. It does so much with so little. Think of a short sonnet rebounding from one culture to the next, leaving minds in awe.

ARTISAN. A person who engages in the methodical, humble, lifelong dedication to a well-honed skill applied to a medium, such as clay, metal, glass, wood, fibers, stone, or plastic images. Patience, repetitiveness, love for what you do, and a sort of serenity unknown to the artist typify the self-confident artisan. The artisan has deep roots both in place and in his past.

BECOMING. The endless and uninterrupted process altering reality, in the sense of evolution, by means of space-time operating on mass-energy. (More recently, I advanced the hypothesis that reality is space in metamorphosis and "nothing" more.) All the "presents" in the space-time sequence are the fuel the Becoming "consumes" toward the generation of the past. Being is in the making. Each present constructed by space-time, by change, is the Becoming and is automatically consigned to the past. Present and Becoming are inseparable. They are the two most elusive of all agencies because as soon as they incarnate, they are gone: As soon as they are, they are no longer. Becoming is the alter ego of the present, of all presents.

BEING. A state outside of space-time: therefore. Being's nature is a kind of "non-mass-energy." The nature of Being is lodged where space-time and mass-energy have no hold. The past is Being: it is the only and total Being. Being is constantly augmented by the labor of Becoming.

BETTER KIND OF WRONGNESS (BKW). Living reality is a progression of self-improvements from bacteria to fashion ... Given the tabula rasa each present is equipped with, the locus of the next present, and given the impulse, the pressure exerted by the past presences, there is an "inertial" reconfiguring progression of the improved pattern: "I'll do the same thing but I'll do it better." If the "thing" turns out to be wrong in the first place, the improved thing driven by the inertial drive will turn out to be "wronger."

BIG BANG. The Big Bang seems fairly secure as one of the moorings science is counting on to develop diverse models of reality. There isn't a "before the Big Bang" because there isn't such a thing. The "not to be" has no existence. It is not the before.

The inconceivable nature, structures, rules, etc., that one conjures up by way of metaphors and/or by way of almost-as-inconceivable mathematical and astronomical wizardry point at mystery number one: il Mistero Tremendo from where reality explosively leaps out.

The presence of mass-energy and space-time, the offspring of mystery, tells us that the notion of "before the Big Bang" is nonsensical. Being begins at the Big Bang moment, in that very first moment where Being turns into Becoming. The whole of reality is that Becoming "mothered" in the Big Bang.

BIG CRUNCH. Whereas the Big Bang seems to be a given, the Big Crunch is hypothetical. It would be a sort of symmetrical condition to the Big Bang: the Big Bang as the explosive origin of reality and its Becoming; the Big Crunch as the end of reality, a "collapse" of reality.

This hypothesis of a reality that pulsates between a single and singular-point beginning and a single and singular-point collapse will be possible only if the gravitational forces, or better, the space-time curvature of the cosmos, are able, via a sufficient amount of matter, to slow down the expansion of reality and eventually reverse the expansion into contraction to the ultimate implosive moment of the Big Crunch.

BRAIN-MIND AND BRAIN-D. I use these terms to emphasize the need to abandon the brain-mind dualism because more and more facts are showing that there is a one-to-one relationship between what the brain does, self-reconfiguring, and what the mind thinks. (I now acknowledge the oneness of the thinking brain and mind, and I identify the persona as body-brain.)

It took a protracted labor for the brain to "become mindful," but whereas the "mindless brain" is a perfectly performing organ, the "brainless mind" is pure fantasy.

BUBBLES. Virtual "membranes" approximating boundaries of different domains. The domain embracing the immediate past and the present I label the Political Correctness Bubble (PCB). The domain embracing a past reaching back into human history I label the Historical Fitness Bubble (HFB). The domain embracing (reaching) a past reaching back into the 3.5. eons of evolutionary history of life on earth I label the Evolutionary Coherence Bubble (ECB). The domain that encompasses the cosmos at large, reality, I label the Cosmic Relevance Bubble (CRB). All the bubbles have one and only one point in common: the present, ever changing, as it consigns itself instantly, instant after instant, to the past.

One's assessment of things "present," and consequently her course of action, is influenced if not defined by the position in the bubbles domain where the person is "located."

For instance, the behavior promoted in the PCB is more than often devoid of meaning for the behavior that the ECB would promote. The discrepancy denotes an incoherence ill-fitting the evolutionary drift. Therefore, an incoherence, if prolonged, might conclude in the death of the evolutionary drift itself.

The bubble expedient can help to find the appropriate, coherent compass in occasions big and small if we never forget (as we habitually do) that we, as stardust, will find relevance -- that is, grace -- only in the conclusive act of total knowledge, that is, in the resurrectional conclusion. No conclusion and a very specific conclusion, no grace or meaning. Only a fatal endless unraveling via an endless chain of lost occasions. Feasibility deprived of desirability.

CLOSED REALITY. If science were to determine that enough matter exists for the cosmos to stop expanding and start contracting, then a reality with a beginning, the Big Bang, could end in a Big Crunch symmetrical to the beginning. If this is not so, then the conjecture could be that even though reality had a beginning, the Big Bang, it will not have an end -- an open-ended reality.

COMPLEX, COMPLEXITY, COMPLEXIFICATION. Complexification is the "metaphysical" side of Miniaturization. Without Complexification, Miniaturization is hollow, a container in search of content, a mechanism devoid of intent. An intent ... by a beholder because physical reality has no intent. Complexification is a measure of how many interactions are being added to a process in which mass-energy, space-time dimensions do not increase thanks to progressive Miniaturization.

Complexification is an animating agent. The liveliness of an event is proportional to the Complexity that makes the event possible in the first place. But animation and liveliness are not possible if the Miniaturization side of the equation is not up to the animating task. In all events, the frugality that Miniaturization is authoring is the measure of the Complexity present.

Complexity is the causal agency in the internalization of matter, and internalization is the distinctive character of living systems. Many events and processes cluster wherever a living process is going on. The makeup of the process is immensely complex and ever intensifying.

COMPLICATED. Below a certain threshold of Miniaturization, Complexity, and Duration, a threshold all manmade technological devices are still below, we are not in the presence of true Complexity, but in the presence of complicated, at times exquisitely organized, instrumentation. The same is true for most, if not all, human institutions: financial and economic institutions, social institutions, productive institutions, cultural institutions, etc. Even the theological models and simulations are complicated, not complex. Aside from life in general, only the true esthetic event perforates the ceiling of the complicated to become part of the domain of Complexity, the realm where Miniaturization, Complexification, and Duration are truly at work.

COSMIC RELEVANCE. As intensive as all presences-actions are, they are all relevant. When the feasible is also the desirable, cosmic relevance has reason to smile: Cosmic relevance has an end to target on by way of the living. The more the action is coherent with the sought-out end, the more the act has cosmic relevance.

CRAFTSMAN. The person engaged in circumscribed action in which idiosyncratic impulses do not quite break through into the esthetic realm, perhaps because the individual's personal anguish falls short of the "cosmic anguish" of which it should be a reflection.

CREATION. That which space-time does in acting upon mass-energy. If space-time is the coauthor of the Big Bang and the Becoming it originated, creation has been an uninterrupted process from that Big Bang first moment on. Only at the exhaustion of space-time will creation end, because only such exhaustion will put an end to change, to Becoming. Creation is the Becoming and not a one-shot deal in a particular, privileged moment.

DESIRABLE. That which is beyond immediate survival demands and naked opportunism. In that sense, desirability is the trigger to transcendence when by transcendence we mean evolutionary steps that the genetic imperative per se is unable to take, deprived as it is of reflective know how and knowledge.

Whereas the feasible is inseparable from technology, from how things are done, and is thus an agency present from. the very onset of Becoming, from the Big Bang on, the desirable is strictly a mental invention. Plants, animals, and minerals do not dwell in the desirability domain. Their domain is opportunistic, probabilistic, and deterministic. The thirsty gazelle does not desire water. It is driven by its organism to connect with that mineral substance.

DETERMINISM. Determinism, with all of its statistical muscles, typifies the fatal sound of a reality that, step by regressive step, shows its own evolution as a sort of grand deception. At the beginning everything was: the blueprint was not just the map, but the territory itself. The singularity and utter creative process carried on by space-time is then sort of a cosmic farce. For the benefit of what? The "what" itself is there from the start, full of data, knowledge, "wisdom," and "experience." What of the puny me 15 billion years in the "making," 15 billion years dwelling in the deterministic hypermind of the creator?

Determinism, at its purest and best, predefines, predestines, predooms all of reality. Evolution, which is process, and all of its fireworks are just old hat under the hat of the all-knowing and all-loving maker.

Determinism and animism are kin because for animism the anima has been afloat from the first day, predefined and preplanned, an empty anima indeed.

DISCOVERY. The finding out, the uncovering, of an existing phenomenon or event, which is independent from the existence of the discoverer (quantum physics has its own reservations about this). Mapping a landscape is a discovering of it.

DUALISM. Because in my Omega Seed Hypothesis I now maintain that reality is space uninterruptedly reconfiguring itself and nothing else, I am discarding the existence of any dualism ill. favor of an immensely subtle and powerful transformism.

The matter/mind dualism is a case in point and the brain is the culprit. Because it appears that the working of the mind is nothing more or less than the working of the brain, it is not possible to distinguish between the two. There is only one: the brain-mind. I will call it the brain-d. Though the mindless brain of most reptiles, birds, and mammals is a less complex brain, it is not an opposition domain to the mindful brain of Howness sapiens. The dialectic is absent. Process, evolution, is the name of the game, not duality. The same goes for Becoming and Being: Becoming pours endlessly into Being.

DURATION. The offspring of Miniaturization and Complexification. There could be no Duration in a reality not animated by the Miniaturization and Complexification methodology. Duration is the memory of the past, that is, the past itself, when released from its isolation and made operational. The remembered past, those operational fragments usable by life, is Duration in discreet dosages.

If the past is the whole of reality, full Duration is the exact and exacting recollection of it. In other words, the full recollection of the past is resurrection: It is the total revelation of the past to itself.

Duration is then the completed evolutionary sequence registered in the past when awakened in the self-revelation that the Becoming may eventually generate. Memory is the "disorderly" display of Durational fragments.

ECOMINUTIAE. Ecologically modest habitat.

EQUITY. A state in which all the components of evolution, if and when the self-revelation of reality is achieved, find themselves not only documented, but relived in all their specificity. Means have finally transcended into ends.

Equity can only be a "terminal state" when the Becoming has ended and the past is fully reawakened as full Duration. Before then, only anticipatory fragments of equity, pseudo-equity, can be locally achieved.

ESCHATOLOGICAL HYPOTHESIS. My Eschatological Hypothesis is framed in the proposition that a meaningful end is in the realm of the possible and definitely in the realm of the desirable. This hypothesis sees the resolution of the Becoming, of reality, into Omega Seed, that is, into the reawakening of all the past in a state of total self-acknowledgement of self-revelation.

The truth is in the making and is not a given for the obvious reason that reality itself is in the making, and reality is the only arbiter, in fact, the only definer of the truth, because it is the truth. Therefore, the eschatological end is not predefined, preordained, predestined, or predesigned. Reality and the truth are not mandated from above. This hypothesis has no guarantees in the sense of explaining the What and the Why.

This grassroots procedure is the one that might develop the "Howness," the process conducive to the slow emergence of the What and the Why, that is, the What and the Why of what the desirable could be.

ESTHETIC CREATION. The very rare space-time and circumscribed event that from its very inception speaks of an end beyond means.

ESTHETOGENESIS. A process generating a reality in which all components, besides being the means to the self-revelation achievement, are also ends unto themselves, the very meaning of self-revelation. Esthetogenesis describes a final state of grace that only consciousness, or some equivalent of it, can generate through evolution.

EVOLUTIONARY COHERENCE. The bulk of living evolution has defined for itself (created) the evolutionary momentum; the genetic invention per se and what the genetic domain keeps inventing (space reconfiguration all the way) have an innate self-coherence. The cultural innovations via memes must find a fit in evolutionary coherence, including the fit of transcendence.

FEASIBILITY. Feasibility is utterly tangled in the space-time web. What was not feasible at one time is feasible now; what is not feasible now will be feasible then. In this mode of thinking the irrepressible optimism of the desirable easily drifts in.

The present is the seducer that can and does take feasibility into irrelevance and/or into fields of horrors ... the hyperhorror of the H-bomb, the irrelevance of 90 percent of our shopping center and merchandising Utopias where thc goods arc mistaken for the good.

FRUGALITY. Because things and events are the endless variations that life is able to generate within the space-time sequences, the "presents," one could say that frugality is the most sophisticated use of space-time.

The ability of reality to generate has found an extraordinary improviser, inventor, coordinator and creator in the human mind. The more complex the event, the more stringent the coordination of the elements entering into the making of it. The event that is the canary is more frugal than the event that is the jumbo jet because the cause-and-effect process in them works on different space-time beats.

The Miniaturization-Complexity-Duration (MCD) paradigm is frugality made operative. The extreme instance of this is the Omega Seed event within which, in a nullified space-time, the whole cosmic experience from the beginning at the Big Bang to the end at the Big Crunch would be revealed to itself The event is total and is pure Being.

Frugality is a process of internalization because MCD is fundamentally a processor of the outer into the inner. This is why frugality is superior to the materialism now expressing itself in our hedonistic hyperconsumptive society. Frugality is a necessity capable of resolving itself into a virtue.

THE FUTURE. The future is a semantic fiction because the word is a sort of self-denial. In order to be true to itself, the future cannot exist.

What exists is the tide we call the Becoming, which in some sort of coherent fashion makes anticipation possible. Perhaps instead of "future" we should me the word "anticipation." We anticipate presents based on physical, genetic, and cultural memories delivered by the past.

GRACE. Because I call Esthequity -- esthetic and equity -- the ultimate achievement of Mind and reality, I feel discomfort at defining grace as the all-inclusive terminal state of reality. They are interchangeable. Esthequity points at the "magical" convergence of the esthetic and the equitable. It is a convergence so inevitable when the evolutionary sequence is positively guided that the two agencies become one, the Omega Seed. Grace points at the transcendence of conflict, not in a sort of despairing resignation, but in the luminosity of a prodigious and concluded reality.

THE GRAND DELUSION. The gray cloud, the obfuscation impeding an efficient exploitation of the evolutionary momentum. The memes are tangled up in a sort of sadomasochistic match, a self-punishing game that has its origin in the fearsome presence of nature, secretive, moody, exhilarating, punishing, cruel, nurturing, and boundless. Life means boundaries (e.g., the skin boundary of organisms). Reality has only one boundary, its own total self. There from the anguish ... the tragic sense of life, the human condition. The Grand Delusion is the dense fog of animism and all the ghostly theologies it nurtures.

HISTORICAL FITNESS. In the delusory practicality of political correctness, history has not much to offer. The historical fitness mold seeks to connect with that crude ignorance about the recent past (200 years or so for the USA). In the historical fitness attitude is the shining light of the Founding Fathers' wisdom. In lesser hands, such light turns easily into xenophobia: fear of English, French, German, Indian, Brazilian, Chinese, and other peoples. The notion of national destiny looms large and threatening to all "foreigners." Historical fitness has little room for the family of man, the human species. In the eyes of the perpetrator, historical fitness often legitimizes genocide, slavery, murder, and all associated cruelties of history.

HOWNESS. How space goes about transforming itself is the gist of reality. For eons, brainless reality has been transforming itself. It has been evolving into ever altering "Whatness" within the quasi-unalterable rail track of its own "natural laws." Any presence comes equipped with its own rules. The presence of this reality, the cosmos, comes equipped with her own laws. It is how this presence works with and around those laws, life itself, that is the Becoming at its best. The "What" is generated by the "How."

IDIOSYNCRATIC. We all are "I" by constitution. This results from the opportunistic domain we evolved in and remain in. Now and then some are able to elevate the idiosyncratic expression into the universal expression. That is where the esthetic is made.

INTERNALIZATION. When the natural laws of physics, still acting upon a process, no longer dictate the next step, the main governor of change resides in the internalization process. The process is then the organism itself, and its drive is an internalization faculty.

Living mandates the organism, via genetics and adaptations, so that it can cope with the outer, the world around it. This is an inner-guided process. One of the virtues of this phenomenon is that it moves the process from the complicated to the complex, a virtue of sufficient Miniaturization. If internalization ever became universal and total, reality would reach the self-revelation state, the resurrection into Omega Seed.

INVENTION. The combining and recombining of separate phenomena or events previously unconnected by the brain of man, generating one or more domains for action. The electric motor is an invention. "Howness" is solicited by invention. Thus, invention is a trigger for Howness.

THE LOVE PROJECT. The Love Project supersedes the probabilistic machinations of micro mass energy and the opportunistic drives of protohuman life. It supersedes them but does not exclude them. It could never exclude them and remain real.

The Love Project is a Becoming in which both probabilism and opportunism are present. The Love Project has its obscure, ambiguous, uncertain beginning with the advent of pain in the animal kingdom. It has its explosive emergence with the advent of suffering in human beings. Eros, per se, is the potent drive that occasionally transcends into love. Love germinates from the turbulence of good and evil, the double agency that grants us joy and suffering.

MEANS AND ENDS. A project entails the definition of means to implement it, to reach the end. But a project presupposes a planner. For a reality that from the onset has no planner, the notion of developing projects is an empty one. Perhaps the means, the How of things, generate the ends. Chances are that the first project coincided with the debut of life. Life is a self-planning event. It is full of contingent projects. Opportunism is the master of such projects.

In terms of procedures and scheduling, it seems that the protohuman phenomenon produces forms that by way of mutations and adaptation emerge in a conspicuous number. Those forms "invite" functions in a sort of projection in reverse gear. There isn't so much a need seeking a form as there is a form "generating" a need. An example is the brain. Form is a solicitor of content long before content emerges to seek a form or container.

Matter is in no need of sight and has no desire to see. That notwithstanding, sight becomes a cornerstone of life via the forms-function sequence generating the sight organs one formative tiny step after another.

Self-awareness, self-consciousness, and Mind put a different spin on the process. For Homo sapiens and all her projects, a planned function needs an appropriate container or form. Form follows function, a bouleversement of function following form in nature.

The planet was not formulated in such a way as to accommodate the functioning of life. To the contrary, the form, the planet, per se a turmoil of functioning processes, by its formality "invited" the novelty of life to appear and to define its own forms that here and there were to see the inception of new functions (activities).

In a way, for the model of a God creator, the content will generate the necessary forms. For the model of a process creating the creature, the containers will induce the fitting contents. We are given reality, the form: we seek to generate the most meaningful content for it. Man is a planner if he is anything ... project after project ...

MEMORY. Memory refers to three domains: the physical memory, the genetic memory, the cultural memory. Because memory is about past experiences, it is the instrumental agency for the Becoming. There is no Becoming where there is no memory. The past is still with us and fuels present after present. Through memory the past produces more of itself via the sequence of presents.

MIND. That part of life and knowledge engendered by organisms but not limited to or by genetic knowledge. Animals are intelligent, but they are not mindful. Culture is the phenomenon that the mind constructs, founded upon the genetic experience and intelligence of Homo sapiens.

The flame that makes the mind unique is reflection: the conscious and operational distinction between the "I" and the "other than I." Of all of life's achievements, this may be the most astonishing and the most revolutionary. It may entail the redirection of the cosmos evolution.

My thinking no longer makes a distinction between brain and mind. The brain is a reality. What the brain does by reconfiguring itself many call the mind. I no longer do. The mind is the doing of the brain, no less, no more. The brain can operate without the mind. But the mind is nowhere to be found where the brain is absent.

MINIATURIZATION. The progressive reduction of the physical dimension of an event favoring a tighter performance among contiguous events. The mass-energy, space-time savings is locally critical, and such frugality rebounds throughout reality. Through Miniaturization the impossible becomes possible.

This makes Miniaturization the physical side of complexity without which Complexity cannot hold. Complexity is content in search of a container-Miniaturization. Through this Miniaturization-Complexification process, a threshold can be reached where matter becomes life and knowledge.

The nature of complexity demands the rigorous utilization of all resources, including mass-energy and space-time. Therefore, whenever Complexity is at work, Miniaturization is mandated and a part of the process.

MINIATURIZATION-COMPLEXIFICATION-DURATION (MCD). In the universe to which we belong, a universe in which space-time is the agent "manipulating" the media of mass-energy into Being, the MCD triad is the critical determinant in the creation of such Being, in the creation of the past. Miniaturization-Complexification is the binary methodology by which reality is inching toward self-consciousness, toward the Mind. Because mass-energy is unrelentingly stirred by space-time in ways that generate more and more information and knowledge, more and more Complexity, contained in less and less space-time, the process of Miniaturization. Reality witnesses the mineral memory at first, then the genetic memory, and finally, the cultural memory. Duration is taking hold in the sense that the past, reality, sees more and more fragments of itself being "relived" in memory. Perfect remembering is tantamount to a "Second Coming," that day when I will be remembered in all the details of my Becoming. On that day I will be resurrected. It goes without saying that this could only happen in a reality purged of space-time. We call this reality the past. The past is the only Being.

IL MISTERO TREMENDO. Italian for "Tremendous Mystery." In my hypothesis it refers to the ultimate meaninglessness of reality unless consciousness is able to make it self-revelational in toto, the Omega Seed, from meaningless to meaningful.

NATURE/REALITY. Nature is reality in the process of creating itself. It is a Becoming and not a Being. But such Becoming is automatically and instantly consigned to the past: Beingness.

Nature is the razor edge where Becoming, the present, pours into Being, the past. The tendency to isolate the natural world as the biosphere from the remaining reality is an added obstacle to the understanding of nature and reality. Perhaps the greatest surprise in nature's Becoming is the emergence first of life, then of mindful life.

Seeing the Becoming of nature and reality as an unwarranted, not predetermined series of mineral, biological, and mental transcendence, the question of proportionality becomes critical. Is the living an irrelevant, puny, and short-lived accident, or is it the beginning of something with an impact that might eventually transfigure reality in toto? The Omega Seed Hypothesis counts on this second outcome.

NIRVANA. The cauldron of the animistic Grand Delusion, it vaporizes all of the theological ghosts by the obliteration of their authors -- actors: life itself is at last a grand delusory nothingness, the abyss of nonpresence is Nirvana.

OMEGA SEED. As the seed is functionally and emblematically the encapsulation of that which an organism will become, the universal Omega Seed is the ultimate encapsulation of all the information/learning generated by evolutionary development. The "organism" of such a universal seed is Duration.

Information/learning is, in this extreme case, the "lived" experiences of evolution contained in the ultimate seed. This content will find animation in the exhaustion of mass-energy and space-time characteristic of the "infinite" Miniaturization, Complexification, and Duration present at the end of space-time. It is the animation of self-revelation, of resurrection.

OPEN REALITY. For a reality that has always been, there is no logic in anticipating an end other than the cold death of entropy. Therefore, in such a case, reality is an open-ended event with perhaps the Big Bang at the beginning and with no end.

OPPORTUNISM. Opportunism presupposes stresses that go beyond physical laws. There is no opportunism in the coming together of oxygen and hydrogen to generate water. The fact that is water is intrinsic to the "nature" of reality. Biological stresses are anchored to survival, a novelty in the "physical" reality.

In the simplest manifestations of life there is not a consciousness guiding and staying the course that is most opportune. Selection and adaptation in their most impassive selves are the arbiters of life and death. Throughout three or four eons of the food chain on this planet the opportunity to survive and procreate is all that living reality could offer. Consequently, opportunism is the agency that saturates the activities of life. If they began to be felt, tolerance, consideration, generosity, abnegation, and self-sacrifice were and are of a protoloving nature, though they strongly hint at love and relate to populations, not to individuals.

Opportunism is and remains the most innate of our drives and is more and more adopted by individuals of the Homo sapiens population as a legitimate expression of the ego generated via consciousness. Capitalism is the most recent incarnation of opportunism, and therein are its strengths and its limitations. The evolution of man and Minds will be the story of postopportunism, that is, post-capitalism, or it will be a story of sorrow, sadness, and suffering.

THE PAST. The repository of all that reality is. It is Being -- a Being constantly enriched by the Becoming generated by space-time, present after present.

The past is reality. There isn't any other reality outside the past. (There is the reality of the past producer: the Becoming.) The past as the only Being is the repository of all presents and therefore the repository for the Becoming continuum. But the past, inasmuch as it is outside of space-time, of Becoming, participates in the creational process only if and when memory makes it available to the present. One could suggest that the past is the only reality by default. That is, for lack of a better, more substantive alternative, let's dump reality in the bin of the past.

This is far from the "Truth." Imagine a reality for which the "present" is the only thing around, and you get a cruel farce. The presents make sense only because they come loaded with the past, the memory of what is. Memory is the stuff of reality and of that great or small amount of coherence it can inject in its own self-creation.

Our deafness to the concreteness of the past is consequent to our makeup as space-made events. And the past is not an event made of space. It is a Duration-made event, but it is the offspring of all the space-made events: reality in evolution.

Because all things, my makeup and my cohort of welcomed or un welcomed guests included, are past things, we should bask in our good luck. Think: Every single bit of reality, 10-15 eons of it, is the past meticulously constructed by the "infinite" number of presents gone by. None of those would have had any concreteness, not a single blurb of it, if not doused by the past, by the memory of it, by physical memory, genetic memory, and cultural memory. The past is Being, the only Being.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. The postures where expediency can be sold as wisdom dressed up as a realistic compromise, felt and accepted for the good of the people. Political correctness has to be up to the fashionable, therefore, be with the buzz of the political moment. Its correctness is the measure of its adaptability. In an ideal world, in Utopia, political correctness would be the right menu for keeping things running. Since Utopia is the best of the animistic delusion, political correctness feeds on delusion, or on hypocrisy.

PROBABILISM/PROBABILITY. A sort of escape hatch away from the deadly call of determinism: determinism, for which a full database automatically anticipates what comes next and next and next and next to the end of "time." The gods have ALL in their "minds" and are holy determinism in personae.

The probabilism postulated for the subparticle domain teases determinism and its sacramental prison by challenging the whereabouts of each single neutrino on the stage, but then withdrawing from the challenge because for all purposes the statistical result has been a priori determined.

THE PRESENT. The most enigmatic process of all. The enrichment of the past is generated from the alteration produced by space-time working upon mass-energy. (In my recent hypothesis, space-time and mass-energy are alter egos of space, the only reality of Becoming.) This comes about through the purely nondimensional agency called the present. It is nondimensional because in the very instant of happening, the happening is already no longer a present. It has passed, it is the past.

One could perhaps say that the present is a membrane of infinitesimal thickness separating the past, which is Being, from the future, which is non-Being. The present, this membrane, is the Becoming conducing its magic construction present after present.

The present, the generator of Being, is a sort of sequence of stills constructing reality in a particle mode of light in preference to a wave mode of light. The dynamic Becoming is constituted of static packets of each present.

The present comes with two types of "appendices": The "tail" appendices refer to what has been, the lingering of the present; the "head" appendices refer to what will be, the anticipation of the present. Those appendices are two pseudo-presents connected by the real present, the now.

REALITY. In a multiverse reality, perhaps it might be admissible to pluck this (our) reality out of the many (quasi-infinite number of them?). In such an event would there still be ... realities right and left projecting shadows on this reality' If left adrift from all others and from their influence, reality would be the account of all that goes on. Since the only accounting is the registration of the Becoming into the Being, the past, the past is reality, courtesy of the Becoming.

RECONFIGURATION OF SPACE. As the fundamental maker of reality, space arranges itself in the whole constellation of "things" from quarks to the entire cosmos. The brain is an exotic hypercomplex-miniaturized space configuration -- space-geometry, the basis for a unified theory.

As for space-time, one can propose that it is the reconfiguration of space that makes time and not that the reconfiguration of space takes time. Space is the maker of time, not the user of it.

RELIGION/RELIGIO. The search for methodological and normative guidelines eventually resulting in how reality may bind itself (religio) into an ultimate grace, a grace achievable only in the self-revelation of a concluded reality.

Given the onslaught of "religosity" in the contemporary scene, it seems necessary to separate the "belief in God" of all theologies from religion, the quest for a oneness that has all the qualifications of a bootstrap enterprise and none of the mandate from above voiced by hypothetical deities. Religion is democratic; theology, despotic.

In view of the developing scientific knowledge, those deities, of whatever coloration, are more and more pathetically inadequate at attending to the human condition. They are a faithful mirror image of such condition, wretchedness included. They are a kind of collective idiosyncrasy incapable of any true transcendence.

RESIDUAL ANGUISH. A condition that conscious life cannot escape because of il Mistero Tremendo from which life emerges and evolves, the meaningless triggered into Mindfulness. This inescapable condition finds its own resolution in esthetic objectification. The esthetogenesis of reality is achieved if and when the process of anguish transcendence is completed.

RESURRECTION. The event at the conclusion of evolution if and when evolution, by way of MCD, has reached the state of total recall and self-revelation. Resurrection is then the reexperiencing of not only the subjective history of each event, but in synchronicity, all and everything reality has been and has become.

Full knowledge is "to be what you know." It is total resurrection because Being and knowing refer to the whole, to the number of eons between beginning and end.

THE SECOND COMING. The very fact that reality is a Becoming, and therefore evolves, calls into question the status of all events emerging and dissipating throughout this Becoming. As instruments in the making of reality they all seem to be of a disposable nature. Unless reality is at last able to "testify" to their existence and contribution, reality remains an engine without virtue.

The Second Coming responds to the fatal flaw of an un-Mindful reality (il Mistero Tremendo). The self-revelation of reality at the end of its Becoming through evolution is the location for the Second Coming of all those events and things that have preceded, including organism and Mind.

Their resurrection in Omega Seed transfigures their instrumentality as means into the finality of ends. Reality's self-revelation, total recall, resurrection, Second Coming, and Duration are one and the same in Omega Seed.

SELF-RELIANCE. Utopia that has shed its pernicious garments. It is all that Utopia should grope for. It is a nonparasitic agency attempting to render to reality more than what reality is willing to give.

Self-reliance is a bartering engine that should be fueled not just by opportunism, but by opportunism with the long reach that only love, compassion, and knowledge can sustain: the opportune way of Becoming among the Becoming, not in spite of it.

SELF-REVELATION. The very special nondimensional point-moment when the past, reality in toto, has fully acknowledged itself. The act of self-knowing is the act of self-revelation, the revelation of itself to the whole of itself. It is Duration at its purest and most comprehensive. In theologies, what passes for revelation is in fact invention upon which simulation scenarios are constructed.

Revelation needs the reality of what is revealed. Whenever that which is "revealed" is a fiction or an autosuggestion, revelation is robbed of its content. That which is revealed is naught, and what is left is the simulation of that which one wished reality would be.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY. A condition for Utopia; an abused label hiding a fundamental deception. By now we know that the whole of reality is the only instance of self-sufficiency, but only if one accepts that it is a dynamic, a process, a "self-sufficiency," chasing after a constantly receding fullness, the fullness of a true self-sufficiency.

If a maker intruded into the scenario, then reality would never be a sufficient agent for its own Becoming, much less its Being. Would this maker, God, be a self-sufficient agent? Not if it is caught or trapped in the Becoming of which it is supposedly the generator.

SPACE-TIME. The change reality undergoes on its mass-energy foundation. An instant or an eon without change negates the reality of space-time, a self-contradiction. Space-time does not exist if change does not exist, and vice versa. The labor of space-time is evolution itself. Space-time is the Becoming. The exhaustion of space-time, in a Big Crunch for instance, is the end of Becoming. It is where and when the possibility of self-revelation into Omega Seed becomes possible. (As of 1996, I consider time a true human invention with not one ounce of concreteness. We give some sort of cage to the reconfiguration of space. which reality is, and we label it "time." It is a convenient "nonthing" for measuring the hard-to-measure. But in the absence of the measured, of space, time is an empty word: it is nothing. One can conjure a timeless space, a sort of frozen bouillon. One cannot conjure a spaceless time. Time of and for what?)

STEWARDSHIP. The caring for those things that are the responsibility of the steward. He keeps the things in his care in top form. It is said that man must be the active, involved keeper of nature. So far, so good, if you are laboring under the assumption that the keeper has knowledge and wisdom sufficient for the task, a task of conservation by definition.

A strict adherence to this model can be immediately faulted: Evolution is not only conservation. Evolution is transformation and metamorphosis. A single-minded preservation of the present and the past is an automatic dismissal of the "future," which is the invention of more of the past.

Thus, a stewardship that is not bigoted is a stewardship that is clearly, let's say, half of that which is going on and in need of understanding and participation. Eons ago, this continent, or the entire planet, had no biomass of any sort. Fortunately, "stewardship" as it is often practiced was not around then. The same can be observed for the 3.5 eons since. The biomass now has a Mind, us. This Mind, the latest invention of the biomass, has to be part of the stewardship and conservation drive. But it also has to be the spearhead of metamorphosis, the other half of the equation.

It is important to note that all local ecosystems are in a perennial dialogue and bartering with all the other ecosystems, near and far. If the North American continent suddenly "went native," going back to those things truly indigenous, it would lose the majority of its plants and animals. Very rarely can one speak of "truly" indigenous life. Buffalo and Native Americans do not even fit that mold, not to mention tomatoes and corn.

TECHNOLOGY. The present, the now, is a preceding present, a preceding now, altered by the Becoming of reality via space-time. The technology, the Techne, used for such an alteration is such a Becoming via space-time. The Becoming is a cosmo-technology in action. Technology, from the root Techne, is then the oldest of all agencies working at generating reality.

The genesis of life is biotechnology played out in this solar system for three or four eons. The prodigiousness of this phenomenon is made possible by MCD at work. It displays itself in an immense and beautiful variety of living forms. The brain, a most exotic and most secretive biotechnological miracle, could be a transfiguration of matter beyond any possible anticipation if someone to anticipate had existed when the process began. The Mind, this radiance of the person with a brain, is hypertechnology in operation. Religion, among the other Mind's agencies, is or ought to be, theo-technology, the generation of divinity.

THEOLOGY. An invention and simulation generated by the Mind in search of benevolence, meaning, and resolution. It is an invention and simulation of divinity. Mistero Tremendo and the anguish it generates are the main cause of theological inventions.

THE TRUTH. A complete and predictable reality where all is a given, a reality like the one in the mind of God, is true and a full Truth. A reality that is Becoming, where space-time is not a figment of the imagination but a maker, is itself a maker of a Becoming truth. Such a reality is a conditional, fragmented groping for truth, not the ultimate Truth. It will remain so until the end.

That is why the Mistero Tremendo -- and the anguish and suffering it engenders -- is "constitutional" to reality itself. Reality is searching for its own truth. The Mind now knows that such truth does not exist yet, so it cannot be uncovered, discovered, or even invented; it can only be created. Anthropomorphically, we assign attributes of our inventions, with love at the head of the line, in order to describe a meaningful and benevolent reality, Mother Nature ...

URBAN EFFECT. Generated by MCD. The evolution of the Urban Effect is the best example the synergy of the MCD Paradigm is proposing. All organisms are per se like different stages of the Urban Effect and its binding power, its religio power.

The MCD religion is pointing at the "city of light" that throughout history has been emblematic of the highest of all transfigurations, matter transfigured into Mind.

UTOPIA. The emblematic example of the great delusion of self-sufficiency. It is the parochial pretending to be the catholic, the fragment pretending to be the whole. Even when unpretentious, it shows an arrogant sort of blindness toward the reality it is inescapably nesting within.

The perfect community, the Garden of Eden, and a just and loving reality are all fatally flawed floundering presumptions and are the prime causes of suffering and cruelty. They, like all Utopias, are good intentions bringing catastrophic results.

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