Emanuele Chimienti

ANTONIO MERCURIO’S COSMOARTISTIC

ANTHROPOLOGY

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 Published by the Solaris Institute of the
SOPHIA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

© Copyright: Sophia University of Rome, 2010

All Rights reserved

Author: Emanuele Chimienti

O r i g i n a l t i t l e : L’ANTROPOLOGIA COSMOARTISTICA DI ANTONIO MERCURIO

Translated from Italian by Martha S. Bache-Wiig.

Translation authorized by the Author.

ISBN 9788895806082

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Subtitle

Cosmoartistic Anthropology is an existential discipline that Prof. Antonio Mercury began

proposing in the 1970s. Since then, it has been developed at the Sophia University of Rome,
which he founded, and at the various Institutes in Italy and abroad that are associated to it.
This discipline cultivates theoretical and experiential research on the meaning of life, that is
seen as both a science regarding humanity and as a new form of art within the art of living.
Thanks to this method, Cosmoartistic Anthropology develops a unified view of humanity, of the
universe and of all of reality, that are seen as cooperating parts of an organismic whole. This
whole, after having created many forms of beauty that then die, intends to create also an
immortal type of beauty, which is the result of a fusion between truth, freedom, love, humility
and chorality, and which is capable of transforming even pain and death into life. Cosmoartistic
Anthropology is thus a type of research done on humanity (= anthropology), which is open and
connected to the totality of Life (= the cosmos), together with whom it attempts to creatively
accomplish (= artistically) full immortal beauty, for now and forever after.

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Table of Contents

FOREWARD...................................................................................................................... 6 
IN THE WORDS OF ANTONIO MERCURIO ......................................................................... 8 
Our goals and our dreams ....................................................................................................8 
Our Myths ..........................................................................................................................11 
Proposal for a Cosmoartistic Pact for Beauty .......................................................................17 
THE COSMO-ART MANIFESTO ...........................................................................................20 
First part.........................................................................................................................20 
Second Part.....................................................................................................................24 
THE COSMOARTISTIC PROPOSAL.................................................................................. 29 
A new science of humanity .................................................................................................29 
The two wings of the Cosmoartistic proposal .......................................................................31 
The internal steps of Mercurio’s thought .............................................................................32 
1.  Existential Personalistic Anthropology .......................................................................32 
2. Sophia-Analysis...........................................................................................................34 
3. Sophia-Art...................................................................................................................35 
4. Cosmo-Art ...................................................................................................................36 
ALONG THE PATHWAYS OF EXISTENTIAL BEAUTY........................................................ 40 
Some operative principles of Sophia-Analysis for the recovery of lost beauty ........................40 
Some dialectical syntheses of Sophia-Art ............................................................................48 
that promote the beauty of life ............................................................................................48 
Some regenerative nuclei in Cosmo-Art that ignite secondary beauty...................................52 
IN DEPTH EXPLORATION OF SPECIFIC TOPICS ............................................................. 62 
Love in the couple relationship ...........................................................................................62 
Life is Feminine ..................................................................................................................65 
The feminine principle in action............................................................................................65 
The Cosmoartistic Concept of Life .......................................................................................67 
Secondary beauty as a possibly new emergent property of Life ............................................69 
Cosmoartistic Chorality ......................................................................................................72 
Pain and Death...................................................................................................................75 
The meaning of pain. .......................................................................................................75 

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 The other bank of the river ..............................................................................................76 
Pain and religion .............................................................................................................76 
Types of pain ...................................................................................................................76 
Pain is a cosmic force just like wisdom and art. ...............................................................77 
Pain faced with art and wisdom. ......................................................................................77 
Pain serves to create........................................................................................................78 
Creative pain is different from masochistic pain. ..............................................................79 
The pain of life and secondary beauty. .............................................................................80 
Pain produced by humanity’s evil and secondary beauty. .................................................80 
Pain and death. ...............................................................................................................81 
Cosmoartistic Anthropology and Intrauterine Life................................................................81 
Secondary Beauty...............................................................................................................82 

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 FOREWARD 

This booklet is for those who are looking for a more convincing meaning for their lives.

It speaks of interior values that have been the foundation of the path of my existence for many
years and that, I believe, can also help others who are seekers.

I have personally gone through and brought about many syntheses in my life, whose content
are all collected around a common conceptual axis: being means more-being.

In fact, it seems to me that this is the only way that life can bring about a satisfying fullness in
human beings.

These pages are a re-edition of a pamphlet I wrote fourteen years ago on Existential
Personalistic Anthropology. I have added new blossoms, new perspectives and new shapes that
transfigure that original pamphlet.

The structural elements of its content are not mine, they come from the ideas of a great humble
master of contemporary life, Antonio Mercurio, who has been proposing a new way of being
human for over forty years. This is why the quick overview of his thought contained in this
book coincides with the history of my own transformations, and, viceversa, by looking at the
steps of my own transformations it is possible to trace the essential lines of his thought.

His ideas are based on profound humanistic, philosophical, cosmological, anthropological and
existential research (that today Antonio Mercurio calls Cosmoartistic Anthropology), which
grasps the value of humanity in its will to cultivate knowledge that is global and unifying, and
that can generate a form of life that carries a beauty within that knows no end.

This particular anthropology, in contrast with the other types, does not study about what
humanity has done or how it expresses itself. Instead, it looks at what humanity is and what it
can be, and it outlines a viewpoint of it in its process of becoming, a viewpoint that has been
extracted piece by piece from a life lived with complete realism and complete inner awareness.
This realism and inner awareness allow for the discovery of humanity as not only a point of
arrival in cosmic evolution, but also as a departure point for new horizons.

There is nothing prepackaged in this viewpoint, nor is it intellectualized or dogmatic. Instead,

each one of its organizing or propositional hypotheses is a direct result of experience: personal
experience, involved experience, questioning experience, propositional experience.

Therefore, the definitions that emerge from such an attitude are never absolute and defined,
but rather they are always growing and restructuring. This is possible thanks to an ability to
reflect honestly, always with courage but never with arrogance.

For this reason, the types of truths that are identified or proposed regarding the life that
animates us and the universe that nourishes us are recognized or confirmed by a very special
type of joy: a warm, silent joy that comes forth in the very moment that the surface and the
depths converge, or rather every time that the soul’s sincerity rests on the truth of things... In

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fact, although there are many seas and oceans on the Earth, all of them share the same
bottom, which is uninterrupted and foundational.

This booklet begins with some reflections written by Antonio Mercurio. Following these are a
collage of my own personal way of looking at the same ideas.

In fact, I continue to ask myself many questions, questions which may seem to some to be
strange or useless, if not downright crazy. Questions such as: why do I exist? What is life with
all its vicissitudes? Why so much pain? What is the reason for the relentless pain of incurable
disease? Why is there so much suffering caused by the evil and greed of human beings? What
does death mean? What does birth mean? Does time exist or is everything eternal? Do the past
and future exist or is everything just the present? What is the sense behind so many billions
and billions of human beings that have disappeared forever from any type of memory? What is
that endless mass of stars and galaxies doing in the immensity of space? How does matter end?
Where am I inside with the whole cosmos in this very instant? Where does the rhythmic beat of
my heart come from? Why is it that a single cell multiplies and diversifies into those billions
and billions of cells that make up a human being? What was it that thirteen billion years ago
exploded in the big bang? Do other universes exist, so that ours could be only a leaf on a great
tree? What is it that we call reality and what is it that we call the I ? How can we say that
today’s human beings are the result of a long period of evolution without saying that the greater
results from the lesser? If everything that exists is a knot connected to all the other existing
knots, is every thing peripheral, or is it at the center? And if every thing must be connected to
other things to exist, are the other things external or internal to every thing? And what if the
fact that the earth goes around the sun were only just a partial viewpoint, and it were more
true to say that everything goes around everything else? And what if black holes were doors to
new worlds towards which matter runs to throw itself into, instead of just places that swallow
matter?

For me, such questions are not just games of mental curiosity that are far from my daily life,
but they are rivers of living water, because my daily life is carried out both thanks to and inside
of them.

Much has been said about these topics by the religions and philosophies, by science and the
arts, but too often the viewpoint is anthropomorphic or anthropocentric, or else is only partial
or insufficient.

This is why the proposal of Cosmoartistic Anthropology to unify all these disciplines and dare to
gain a viewpoint that is always spherical can be important. Such a viewpoint is capable of
containing and producing globality, because this is the only way that that little point of light
that is our life can have meaning, and is each time filled up a bit by the sense of totality that
has turned it on.

E.C.

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 IN THE WORDS OF ANTONIO MERCURIO
 

Our goals and our dreams∗

Just as a tree transforms energy (it transforms light energy into chemical energy),
synthesizes energy (it makes a synthesis of the energy it takes from the earth with the energy it
takes from the sky) and creates, condenses and transmits energy (it produces flowers, fruit and
seeds and produces oxygen that keeps the ecosystem alive), human beings can also, if they
wish, transform, synthesize, create, condense and transmit energy.
In fact, human beings transform biochemical energy and mechanical energy into
relationship, individual and cultural energy; they make a synthesis, both within themselves
and outside themselves, of all the types of energies that exist on the face of the earth; and by
doing so they produce every type of handicraft and they create every type of familial, social and
cultural works, especially those we call works of art, that are actual centers of condensed
energy; energy that is then transmitted outward through time and space without end.
But while a tree must only follow the laws of nature to create and must not face any type
of internal conflict or internal tribulation, this is not true for human beings. At birth, human
beings are reactive and they are controlled by the iron law of action-reaction and stimulus-
response. Many remain there for their whole life and they devour energy and create none at all.
But there are instead those who wish to become persons, and they individuate and they
differentiate themselves from the masses. They are able to break free of the law of action-
reaction so they can elevate themselves to the spiritual dimension where they can transcend
reactions and live according to values, virtues, ideals and projects that they wish to realize. The
reactive human being becomes a human being who can make plans and create. This is the type
of human being who can transform and synthesize the energy found in nature and who can
then also create a type of energy that is not found in nature.
I would like to give the name soul to this very special energy and I would like to define it
as follows:
“The soul is a field of energy which is both material and immaterial at the same time. It
is made up of freedom, of love, of truth and of beauty that are created day after day; it
condenses and concentrates around a central nucleus that is the I of an individual or the I of
an entire populace, because this is the goal that the individual or the populace has set for
themselves and they are willing to give their life so as to reach this goal”.

                                                            
∗
 This text is also found as the Introduction to Antonio Mercurio’s book The Ulysseans, published by The Solaris Institute of the 
Sophia University of Rome, 2009. 

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 Works of art are such because they have a soul; and they have a soul because the artists
that created them were capable of giving them a type of energy that they didn’t have before,
through a painful and ingenious process of materialization and dematerialization. Every work of
art is a field of energy where material and spiritual forces combine to create life that is superior
to natural-biological life, because it is a type of life that is no longer subject to the law of death
and entropy.
Not every populace has a soul or is capable of creating one for itself. Those who are
capable of doing so develop and prosper and those who are not capable decline or disappear
forever. A populace distinguishes itself from another populace by the type of culture it has been
able to create and for the type of soul it has managed to instill in its culture.
Experts say that humanity is moving towards a terrible conflict between cultures;
cultures that have a soul and cultures that don’t have one at all because their only value is
money. The fear that the West no longer has a soul is well founded, because the one that it had
has been incapable of passing the test of time.
For years we have been working to create centers of energy that are capable of giving a
new soul to tomorrow’s Western World; a soul that can handle the massive invasion of cultures
that are different from ours or the barbarians that are advancing, not from the borders of the
empire but from within its confines.
We ask you to unite your strength with ours.
We ask you to see if our goals coincide with your goals; if the suffering and the life crisis
you feel inside is a potent stimulus rather than an illness that must be cured, that is pushing
you to get out of the ignorance and laziness or the depression and desperation that attack you
from all sides; a stimulus to become transformers, creators and transmitters of this energy that
does not fear death, nor time or space, because it can give life and continuously regenerate it.
Our goal is to become PERSONS and ARTISTS of our lives and of the life of the
universe.
This is an impossible project that can only become possible with the choral help of a
group.
It is a project which unifies human beings within themselves and with the life of the
cosmos.
We call those who are capable of freely loving themselves, of loving others and of being
loved Persons.
Artists are those who are capable of making their own life and the life of the universe into
a work of art, and they also work together with others to transform a group of strangers into a
single living organism that is capable of creating truth and beauty by following the laws of life.

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 Persons that are Artists of their own lives and of the life of the universe can give rise to a
new kind of people: people who have a soul, a soul made up of the energy of love and the energy
of art, who know how to face pain and death and to transform them into a source of eternal life.
Our dream is that the Western World can become a single living organism made up of
Persons who are capable of putting truth and beauty in first place instead of money and
power; they are capable of choosing life as a gift instead of life as something to be stolen, life as
a work of art instead of life as violence.
Our dream is that not only the West but the whole planet Earth can begin to move
towards this goal.
And then we have an even bigger dream.
We all know by now that the trees and the forests are necessary for life to develop on
earth. But why do human beings exist? To destroy life on earth? It is by now certain that
humanity has this kind of power but we also know that it doesn’t only have the power to
destroy; it also has the power to create. And while mankind is incapable of producing “good-
smelling flowers” like trees do, it is capable of creating a type of immortal beauty that does not
die like flowers when they wilt. This is the beauty of life as a work of art, which never wilts.
Perhaps the universe needs this type of beauty to keep it from dying and, perhaps, the
universe needs human beings to produce this beauty, because only this beauty can give the
universe a soul that will make it immortal.
If there has been life and there will be death, if there was a Big Bang and there will be a
Big Crunch, what difference does it make?
Only one thing is important: that the universe has had the time to create an immortal
soul that will continue to exist beyond the physical confines of this universe, together with
those that have participated in its creation, before the natural course of life to death is
completed.
If this is true then the universe will not have existed in vain and all the pain that fills the
lives of human beings won’t have been in vain either. And it will become obvious that all the art
that has been created up to this point had a hidden meaning that can now come to light: to
prepare the path so human beings could one day become artists of their lives and artists of the
life of the universe.

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 Our Myths
Our myths are:

- the myth of life as a work of art;

- the myth of life as a gift;

- the myth of Cosmo-Art.

I described these myths in the book “The Ulysseans”.

Now I want to briefly describe the creation of The Cosmo-Art Myth.

Creating a myth is a work of art; a work of art that rises from the collective unconscious
of a populace or from the personal unconscious of an individual, that gathers and transforms
the myths of a people and gives them a form that is the result of its artistic creativity.

The two most renowned classical examples of this last case are: the Iliad and the
Odyssey, written in poetic form by Homer, and the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. We no
longer know who created the single myths that Homer gathered together in his poems. We no
longer know what “divine comedies” were circulating during Dante Alighieri’s time. The two
poets, however, immortalized them all.

A myth, in and of itself, is also a work of art.

A work of art requires the intervention of an artist who creates it, and creates it in such
a way as to condense vital energy within it that can overcome the centuries and stay alive
forever.

Every work of art undoubtedly contains Truth and Beauty, and is capable of
comunicating both to their audiences.

There are various types of truth:

revealed truths (examples: the Bible and the Qu’ran);

philosophical truths (the works of philosophers that reach across the centuries);

scientific truths (the result of scientists’ research and ingenuity);

artistic truths (the result of artistic ingenuity);

existential truths (the result of one person’s or a group’s research on existential

problems).

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 Every myth contains truth and this truth is most certainly artistic truth, in other words
intuitive truth that is artistically expressed.

Reason can only explore it, describe it and confront it with other truths, but it cannot go
beyond that.

If we are convinced that every myth contains truth and that every myth must be
structured as a work of art for it to exist and affirm itself, we can now ask ourselves what the
structure of a work of art is.

A work of art is a field of energy that is unified and unifying.

It is unified if it contains syntheses of opposing energies.

It is unifying if it has the same effect on its audience, over the short or the long term, to
unify the audience and the work of art itself. It is also unifying if it manages to somehow unify
the internal and external life of the work of art’s audience, through what it expresses.

Furthermore, a work of art is a field of energies that is the result of the transformative
journeys that the artist has had to make within himself to create the work, and it is the motor
that sets off similar transformative journeys within the lives of its audience. The transformative
journey is what generates the beauty the work of art carries. And it is the work of art’s beauty
that attracts the audience and generates within them the drive to undertake yet further
transformative journeys.

The truth of the Cosmo-Art Myth is one that is the result of intuition and reason.

We have tried to create a synthesis of opposites: intuition on one hand and reason on the
other. Every synthesis of opposites contributes to creating a work of art.

On the other hand, even scientists often have an intuition and they then develop it and
validate it with reason; after this they create experiments that are best suited to demonstrate
the validity of their discoveries, or they entrust to others the research necessary to obtain the
experimental proofs of their hypotheses. This, for example, is what happened with Einstein for
the demonstration of the validity of his theory of relativity.

The reasoning that is used in the creation of the Cosmo-Art Myth is not deductive or
inductive reasoning. It is instead reasoning by analogy, which is often used in philosophy.

The strength of reasoning through analogy is completely based on the cosmoantropic

principle, which affirms that anything that is valid for the human organism is also valid for the
cosmic organism, because one is made in the image of the other and viceversa.

In synthesis, the Cosmo-Art Myth says that the universe is looking for the possibility to
give itself an immortal soul that will allow it to continue to exist beyond the physical and space-
time confines it lies within, should it ever die in a Big Crunch. It also says that

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so as to create this immortal soul for itself, which is, I repeat, capable of going beyond the
physical and space-time confines of the universe we live in and continuing to live elsewhere, the
universe absolutely needs human beings that are capable of acting as artists of their lives and
artists of the life of the universe.

This is because by analogy we know that only artists are capable of emitting a spiritual
energy; they are capable of incarnating it in an external medium and they are capable of
imprinting within this energy so much vital strength that it conquers death forever, and can
continue to not only exist, but can also act upon and influence its possible audiences that will
be born even thousands of years after the artists themselves are dead.

We cannot speak about energy without asking ourselves what life is.

Neither philosophy nor science know how to define what life is. They can only describe
the characteristics of the life of a living being, according to the various existing species, but
they cannot say what the essence of life is. For any definition to be valid it must contain the
essence that defines it.

In general, anything that can be born, can generate and reproduce itself into a similar
being is considered living.

Therefore, trees, plants, animals and humans are living, because they are capable of
reproducing themselves.

But according to this criterion, atoms and electrons cannot be considered living beings,
because they are not capable of generating and reproducing themselves. Thus a stone is not a
living being, nor is anything made up of atoms.

Nevertheless the sun, which is a star, is made up of atoms that burn and create other
atoms with a different atomic number. How can we say that the sun is not a living being?

Galaxies are made up of billions of stars and the universe is made up of billions of
galaxies.

How can we affirm that the galaxies are not living beings, or that the universe is not
living?

But if stars, galaxies and the universe are living beings, they must necessarily also be
mortal beings, because every living being is mortal. And just as every human being is
tormented by the problem of how to become immortal, at least as far as we can tell from as far
back as the epoch of Gilgamesh up until the more recent one of the Pharaohs, it is also
conceivable that the universe itself is tormented by the problem of how to become immortal.

In my opinion, the true problem is as follows: that which we call Life with a capital L,
and that finds a way to express itself through all the forms of life that we are aware of, it is this
Life, in absolute, that poses itself the problem of how to transform itself from being mortal into
being immortal. And if through biological, plant and animal reproduction it somehow assures
that it will have a certain type of immortal life, nevertheless this solution most certainly does
not satisfy it, because otherwise we could not understand why human beings,
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which are the highest expression of life as we know it, must be so anguished over the fact that
they are not immortal.

Life does not settle with having created the possibility to express itself through forms of
life that continuously die and reproduce. Life creates a way of existing in forms that don’t die
but, that by conquering death they transform themselves from being mortal into becoming
immortal.

In my opinion, this explains the apparition of art in human history: this explains the
principle meaning of art; the creation of a form of life that goes from being mortal to becoming
immortal.

If these reflections seem convincing, then the importance of asking ourselves about the
form of life that characterizes works of art and that is different from every other life form that
exists in nature becomes evident.

A work of art essentially becomes such only when it demonstrates its ability to conquer
death and to give itself an immortal form of life. And this happens without having to use the
mechanisms of generation and reproduction. Instead, the mechanisms applied are those of
artistic creation, which have yet to be studied in depth and understood.

This brings us to wonder about the question of the soul that exists in every work of art,
that is a center of vital energy that never dies and, therefore, can be called immortal.

The Platonic conception of the immortal soul, which is a prisoner of the body, does not
help us solve the problem that, in my opinion, torments Life. In the same manner, the Oriental
conception of the soul that is immortal but must incarnate many times in the body so as to
completely purify itself cannot be satisfying, because it is full of contradictions. Before this
immortal soul incarnated for the first time, was it pure or impure?

And if it was pure, why did it have to incarnate? Why did it need the body? On the other
hand, if it was impure, how could it have been immortal?

Besides containing truth, a work of art contains beauty.

If a myth is a work of art, it must contain beauty, as well as truth.

No one really knows what beauty is, although many have tried to define it.

However, one thing is certain: everyone innately possesses within themselves a sense of
beauty and a need for beauty.

Nuclear physicists, for example, as well as mathematicians and cosmologists, never

accept a new theory unless they are convinced that it is beautiful as well as being right or
convincing. And since in the field of science there are always two or more theories that contend
for recognition in a certain field, whether or not a theory is also beautiful is a determining
factor in which theory is chosen.

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 At the same time, it is certain that no one accepts the creation of a myth unless they are
not just as convinced of its beauty, as well as of the truths it carries within.

However, there is one important consideration to keep in mind. Art history shows us that
sometimes it takes time for a work of art to become recognized as such.

We all know that Van Gogh died before any of his paintings were appreciated by his
contemporaries, while today they are sold at staggering prices. And not everyone knows that
the audience booed Bizet’s Carmen the first time it was presented.

Certain Oriental myths say absolutely nothing to us, but they are essential to the life of
entire populaces. Every populace chooses its own myths, and we do not yet know what inspires
one populace to choose a certain myth that is instead rejected by another. We only know that a
populace or a religion is built around a certain myth, and the rites of both are essential for the
perpetuation of the life of that myth, beyond its intrinsic value as a work of art.

The theme we are touching on is most certainly very complex, and it does not lend itself
easily to immediate comprehension. It takes time to enter into the deep comprehension of a
myth, especially when we are at the dawning of its appearance.

An ineluctable question:

what will the creation of this Cosmo-Art myth bring us in a practical sense?

One first answer can be as follows:

Those who unify the I and the SELF , and who within the SELF unify the I and the
Cosmos, create a work of art that has an immortal soul.

Those who unify the masculine and feminine principles, both within themselves and
outside of themselves, create a work of art and they give themselves a double immortal soul
that is the result of a synthesis of opposites.

Those who unify themselves and a group create a choral group self.

Those who unify themselves with a large group create a great soul (Gandhi), which is the
synthesis of both equals and opposites. By unifying both equals and opposites, within and
outside themselves, through inner action and action towards the outside, around a choral group
purpose, they create a work of art that transforms people who are complete strangers into a
single living organism¸ endowed with a specific task in life and in the history of the world’s soul.

Those who create an immortal soul for themselves contribute to the great work of the
universe who pursues the goal of creating an immortal soul for itself.

They become part of the whole and they become part of the flow of life that incessantly
searches for ways to break the continual passage from one form of life to another, so it can

  15
definitively transmute itself from a mortal life form subject to death, to an immortal life form,
that always is and is always becoming, and is no longer ever subject to death.

With the creation of the Cosmo-Art Myth we are proposing a choral group work of art, a
work of art created by many and not by just one person that will be good for us, for all of
humanity and for the entire universe.

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 Proposal for a Cosmoartistic Pact for Beauty

THE COSMOARTISTIC PACT FOR BEAUTY

I affirm that Life is my Mother and the Universe is my Father, and that with their
immense love for me I can become capable of separating from my biological parents, with
grateful forgiveness and love.

I affirm that Life is powerful, but it is neither omnipotent nor perfect, and as such, I
accept it with all my heart and all my strength.

I affirm that Life and the Universe are the creators of everything living and not living on
Earth and in the entire Cosmos.

I affirm that everything that is organic and inorganic in this Universe forms a single
living organism, and that every human being is a precious component of this living organism.

I affirm that human life is continually evolving, as is the universe that it is a part of, and
its essential purpose is to develop the properties emerging in this universe: the creation of a
form of life that is immortal beyond this universe’s space-time.

I affirm that a mortal life, such as a human one, can create a form of immortal life if it
creates Secondary Beauty¸ as described by Cosmo-Art.

I affirm that my desire for immortality within myself is the same goal that Life has, and
that if I become a co-creator with Life, we can reach this goal.

I am convinced that pain is one of the cosmic forces that human beings can use, along
with wisdom and art, to create secondary beauty, which is the result of a fusion of cosmic and
human forces.

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 I am convinced that pain is like death. In nature, death encounters life to create new
forms of life that are also mortal, while pain encounters human life to incite us to create a new
form of life that is now immortal. By doing so we realize the deepest desire of Life in this
universe, which is immortality.

I affirm, along with the great poet Homer, that those who manage to create a fusion
between an I and a You create the beauty of glorious concordance. This is what Ulysses did with
Penelope.

I affirm that those who realize the fusion between their own I and their SELF become
One with the Cosmos, and this is what Ulysses (the I ) did by always listening carefully to the
goddess Athena’s advice (the SELF).

I affirm that just as Ulysses won over his monsters and poisons, I can also win over my
own internal monsters and my own poisons. By doing so, I can make my life a work of art, that
is a fusion of truth, love, freedom and beauty, without, however, demanding that this happens
overnight.

I believe that the moral perfection the great religions have proposed is only one step in
human evolution, and that it is not an end in itself but is finalized to humanity’s next
evolutionary step: to transform oneself into an artist of one’s life and of the life of the Universe.

Any life begins and ends, but a life that creates a form of immortal life such as secondary
beauty overcomes every beginning and ending and transforms the continual flow of life and
death into a form of life that never ends, and no longer must die.

Artists create immortal works of life within the space-time of this universe. They are the
first ones to have created an immortal soul and to have infused a mortal, material medium with it.

Cosmo-Art is a continuation of the path opened up by artists, so human life can create an
immortal soul and infuse this mortal universe with it.

  18
 Cosmo-artists create works of art that have a soul that is immortal even beyond the space-
time of this universe. In this way, after death they can navigate forever from one universe to the
next.

I affirm that if those of us who follow Cosmo-Art can unite in a pact to create Secondary
Beauty, we can create a Group SELF that goes beyond the narcissism of those who want only
their own well-being, whether it be spiritual or physical, and we can accomplish a goal that is
not only individual, but is Cosmic.

I thus affirm that friendship is a value that those of us who aspire to a cosmic goal must
loyally cultivate: a cosmo-artistic friendship that we are sealing with this pact. It is a friendship
based on our decision to help each other fight our poisons, and make the internal
transformations we must make in our daily lives.

“Today is a new day and I choose love and I choose beauty.

Love that is a fusion of truth, freedom and the love force.

Beauty that is a fusion of opposites and a fusion of pain, wisdom and art”.

Whoever remains faithful to this pact can find peace, joy and happiness, today,
tomorrow and forever.

Strengthened by these convictions and affirmations, those of us in Cosmo-Art hereby

swear to cultivate our faithfulness to the Pact for Beauty, and every morning, in complete
freedom, we will renew our vow.

  19
 THE COSMO-ART MANIFESTO

First part

THE SONG OF COSMO-ART

THE SONG OF THE ULYSSEANS

AND THE SONG OF PLANET EARTH

SEARCHING FOR UNKNOWN WORLDS

AND OF PARALLEL, INFINITE UNIVERSES

I want to sing of Cosmo-Art and I want to sing the song of the pact of friendship between myself
and all of those who want to become artists of their lives and artists of the life of the universe.

I want to sing the creation of a new artistic movement based on the organismic principle and on
the goal of creating secondary beauty.1

I want to sing the Cosmo-Art movement and its offspring the Ulysseans, those who, beyond
wanting to recover enjoyment of primary beauty, want to dedicate their lives to researching
secondary beauty, to become capable of navigating from one universe to another in endless
enjoyment. 2

I want to sing the lives of those who are dissatisfied with the soul they received at birth, and
want to make a soul that is immortal not only for themselves, but also for the entire universe that
contains them. 3

I want to sing the lives of those who, even though they are aware of the indispensable richness
that love knows how to give, also know that love alone is often impotent if it is not united with
strength, wisdom and art. 4

                                                            
1
 See The Ulysseans 
2
 See The Odyssey 
3
 See the movie Scent of a Woman 
4
 See the movie Scent of a Woman 

  20
I want to sing the birthing of a new time where it is possible to affirm that pain is necessary for
creating and is no longer a form of expiation, and it is necessary for learning how to give oneself a
life form that is stronger than death. 5

I want to sing the possibility that while in pain I can gather the synthesis of all the pain of the
world and all of your pain so we can together become capable of transforming ourselves and pain
with Cosmo-Art, in the choral song of a new and unknown type of beauty that only human beings
can create, and to make it such that no one’s pain on this earth has been in vain.6

I want to sing the birth of a new time in which it is possible to affirm that everyone, absolutely
everyone, is endowed with creative artistic power and where it is possible that the life of human
beings and the life of the universe become a work of art that is even bigger and even greater than
all the works of art created up until now, because this is what we have decided to do to respond
to the goal of Life. 7

I want to sing the birth of a new time for the Orient and the Occident, where the only possible
horizon is no longer the immobile return to the beatitude of the One, nor is it the return to
dissolving into Nirvana or the return to this planet earth for a continual purification that leaves the
world on this side and the world on the other side unchanged from what they were before, but
instead is the return to Ithaca where everything is new and everything is different from what it
was before. 8

I want to sing the “mad flight” of those who at death want to go beyond the space-time of this
universe and enter into the space-time of all the possible universes, according to the myth of
Ulysses and the myth of Cosmo-Art. 9

I want to sing the return of the Ulysseans to a new Ithaca, that signals a break with the past time
and with every-day time and instead gives rise to the creation of an infinite time: the time of
secondary beauty, beauty that never dies, beauty that knows how to navigate beyond this time
and this space in another time and another space, where there no longer is pain and there is no
longer death but there is Life that flies happily from one universe to another and I am one with
it.10

                                                            
5
 See the movie The Shawshank Redemption 
6
 See the movie Forrest Gump 
7
 See the movie Don Juan de Marco 
8
 See the Odyssey 
9
 See the Odyssey 
10
 See the movie Don Juan de Marco 

  21
I want to sing Life that so dearly wants to go beyond the cycle of death-rebirth, with which it
eternally reproduces itself in billions and billions of forms, each one different but each one subject
to death, and wants instead to conquer a life form that is both immortal and eternal and not just
eternal or not just immortal, each one separate from the other and opposed to the other, and
dispenses to me and you the gift of an immense artistic power so it can accomplish this. 11

I want to sing the ability to transform my life and the ability that you can transform yours in a
unified and unifying energy field, which is rich and dense of the energies of truth, freedom, love
and secondary beauty, and which is capable of attracting to itself many, many people, like what
happens to the great works of art of every kind. 12

I want to sing the possibility that many people unknown to each other can transform themselves,
just as one time the unicellular organisms transformed themselves and gave rise to the
unstoppable growth of multicellular beings, and become the living cells of a single living organism,
starting with those who today make up the body of the SUR and ending with those who want to
create a united body of planet earth and a united body of this universe together with that of all
the other universes where it is possible to navigate with the creation of secondary beauty. 13

I want to sing the power of life that knows how to evolve, beginning with human beings that are
mortal, and that can create a superior life form that is immortal.

I want to sing the power of art that knows how to evolve and how to create a type of artistic
energy, which is immensely more powerful than atomic energy, and that is capable of giving
human beings and the universe the immortal life that human beings have always imagined and
dreamed about since the era of Gilgamesh, and that up until today have not been able to
accomplish.

I want to sing the journey of art and of all the artists through the history of art throughout planet
earth who, concentrated in their powerful efforts to celebrate primary beauty, have given their
lives so as to prepare the way for the search for and the creation of secondary beauty. None of
them knew from the first day what they had to do to create a work of art. They placed themselves
before the mystery of art with an iron internal and external discipline, with their passionate study
of the masters that came before them, with the humility and passion of those who incessantly try
and try again until they are capable of wresting the secrets hidden within matter and spirit so
they could make the miracle of the work of art appear. 14

                                                            
11
 See the Odyssey 
12
 See the movie Don Juan de Marco 
13
 See the movie The Shawshank Redemption 
14
 See the movie Shine 

  22
To them I express all my gratitude for the immense gift they have given us and I build my own
faith in being able to create a superior art form on their example, certain that just as they made
the impossible possible we, too, can do the same in this new challenge that Life is calling us to
undertake.

And, finally, I want to sing the beautiful song of all those (almost one hundred fifty people who
came from all over Italy) who signed this manifesto at the end of the Cosmo-Art Laboratory, on
November 29, 1998, and who expressed with their own personal song the wishes, dreams and
hopes that they want to accomplish through their participation in the artistic movement of Cosmo-
Art.

Antonio Mercurio

_________________________________________________

  23
Second Part

THE PACT OF FRIENDSHIP

BASED ON THE ORGANISMIC PRINCIPLE AND ON THE GOAL

OF THE CREATION OF SECONDARY BEAUTY

Just as the sun, in perfect harmony with the earth, the stars and the laws of the cosmos, is a
humble servant of life and primary beauty, I, too, in complete harmony with my Personal SELF
and with the Cosmic SELF, want to be a humble servant of life and of primary beauty as well as
a creator of secondary beauty, in accordance with the laws of life and with the gift of its creative
power.

Secondary beauty, spoken of in the song of Cosmo-Art, can only happen through a choral
group birth, can only come from a choral group uterus, and can not be the work of a single
individual. For this reason, I decide to unite with those of you of the Sophia University of Rome,
making this pact of friendship based on the organismic principle and on the project of the
choral group creation of secondary beauty.

And just as the sun has its spots even though it is luminous and shining, I, too, who am not
yet as luminous and shining as the sun is, have my spots, and I would like to no longer be
ashamed of seeing them nor of showing them to you so that all these parts of light and shadow
can become precious parts of a single living organism.

I want to be able to sincerely and honestly affirm what I have said up until now. But I know
that I am heir to an oppressive consciousness that forces me to be perfect, and I cannot tolerate
not being so. Therefore, I do not tolerate your judgements and your accusations. Your
imperfections wound me as deeply as if they were my own, and I easily let myself be overtaken
by an insane desire to eliminate you with my disdain and with my condemnations that allow for
no appeals.

This is the first obstacle that I want to decide to overcome, every time it will be necessary, so
that this pact is not in vain.

I don’t want to shut myself every day a bit more in the prison of my infinite feelings of guilt and
my absolute perfection, which condemn me to an endless solitude and a life that is devoid of
beauty.

I want to decide together with you to give myself the indestructible hope that I will be able to step
out of my prison, even if I might have to fight for all my life to do so.

The love that I will decide to give myself and to give to you, and the love that you will decide to
give me and to give yourselves are the foundation of my hope.

  24
This hope brings me to firmly believe that the secondary beauty that we will chorally create
together, you with me and me with you, is that very reality that can make me fly beyond the
walls of my prison, beyond the walls that my own limitations and the limitations of this
universe I am enclosed within.

Therefore, I decide to see you as my friends and not my enemies. I therefore decide to present
myself to you as a friend and not an enemy. What is important is not that I am always
successful at doing so, but rather that I am successful at doing so every time it is necessary.

The friendship I am underwriting is one that supports the other and is in solidarity with the
other, just as what happens between all the living parts of a same organism, and where it also
happens that every part demands that other parts die when they don’t want to respect the
organismic principle that animates and unifies them all.

It is a creative friendship for which I feel lovingly and actively commited to doing something that
is greater than the sum of the things that each one of us can do individually. It is a creative
friendship that manages to magically unify many people who think, act, are joyful and suffer
individually, in one single living organism, almost like in a single person who, in certain
moments, can be capable of creating with the strength and the breadth of an entire universe.

And there are also two more obstacles that I want to decide to overcome so as to give strength
to this pact.

I don’t want to be a victim anymore, because all victims at some point become perpetrators;
it’s only a question of time as to when this happens.

I don’t want to suffer anymore to expiate, no matter what my guilt is, but to create.

If today I so decide, every painful experience that life will deliver to me will serve me to create
an ever newer and richer identity. I don’t want to be a victim anymore, I want to be an artist of
my life and of your lives and I know that it is not possible to accomplish this new identity
without having to stay in the melting pot of pain for a long time, just like Ulysses had to do,
who was the man of the many woes and of infinite patience.

I place this pact of friendship within my life like the fig tree that Ulysses grabbed on to to
escape from the jaws of Scylla and the vortex of Charybdis, with the hope that when it will be
my turn to go through first one and then the other I will have something solid to hang on to so I
can save myself.

I especially make this pact with you so I can have your help in exploring all the pain of my
intrauterine life and in facing the pain that is part of my intracosmic life, just as Ulysses did in
his odyssey, and therefore be able to create withy you a new, powerful energy with which I can
get out of the former and the latter as well, and be born so I can fly towards new horizons and
new universes, instead of staying closed in and imprisoned in the narrow confines of my pride
and my insane will for power.

  25
If I so decide today, every conflict that will arise between me and you will be like a telescope
that will allow me to see what happened during my intrauterine life and has remained invisible,
and then I will utilize this to try and transform, a bit more every day, my reactivity into
creativity, and my homicidal and suicidal drives into a desire to love myself and a desire to love
you, so we can fly together in the mad flight of Ulysses and the just as mad flight of Cosmo-Art.

I therefore PLEDGE

- to recognize in myself and to recognize in those who will underwrite this pact the ability to
give themselves a soul and the ability to develop their wisdom and their artistic abilities to
become artists of their own lives and of the life of the universe.

- to not be ashamed of my parts that are obscure and repressed, to recognize them even when
they hurt me and destroy the idealized image I have created of myself; and, above all, to
overcome the fear of not being accepted and not being loved, because I can learn to make a
specific request for acceptance and love every time it will be necessary.

- to look for truth together with you with loyalty, humility and constancy, because I know that I
do not possess all the truth and because I know that I am possessed by an existential lie that
often deforms my existence and my actions, without me knowing it is happening.

- to step out of my ego-centeredness and my pride so I can know you and let you know me, so I
can give the best of myself, without expecting myself to be the best, because I have chosen to
follow not only the pleasure principle but also the joy principle.

- to recognize my destructiveness and my envy – as well as that of others – and, after I have
contained them and owned them, to transform them creatively in emulation and to make
myself available to becoming capable of forgiving myself and others.

I don’t want to condemn myself to death and I don’t want to condemn you to death, but I ask you
to not condemn me either with your judgments and condemnation.

And since I am aware that conflictual situations can rise between myself and you

I PLEDGE

- to think of the conflict as a help and not an obstacle, and that I too can be wrong or commit
errors, not just others, because I know that if I do not accept this truth no type of beauty can
be created.

- to practice talking about it immediately with non violent communication and to not act like an
offended god in his divine majesty, that only wants the death of others and not their
transformation, because with my actions I want to introduce something new in history and I
don’t want to stupidly repeat the past.

  26
- to recognize, on my part, the evil I have acted out and continue to act out, asking you to be
willing to tell me about the suffering that I have caused you, even without wanting to, because I
want to affirm that my ability to make amends exists and I want to affirm my faith in your own
creative ability.

- to utilize conflict to transform dislike into liking, lies into truth, ugliness into beauty, because
human history shows that this is possible.

- to recognize my truth and your truth, my value and your value, my originality and yours, my
beauty and yours. I have value and you have value and you and me are both precious parts of
the same living organism we want to create.

- to live with you in a relationship of reciprocal recognition and respect that is translated into
concrete words and actions. The creation of secondary beauty is a difficult task and we are not
all starting out from the same point. I therefore pledge to recognize the difficulties we will
encounter as my own, and to cultivate, like Ulysses, the patience that will allow me to accept
both my limitations and yours, because I want to continue navigating with you and not all by
myself.

Solidarity and reciprocity are cardinal elements of the organismic principle. I pledge together
with you to develop them and to give ourselves creative rules that everyone can embrace.

I pledge to develop the dialogue between the I Person and the Personal SELF and the Choral
Group SELF with transparency and truth, learning how to recognize, each time life requires me
to, my obscure parts and to transform them, so that the stellar light contained within me can
come out and continue to shine even after my current body ceases to exist.

And, finally, since the organismic principle cannot exist if it does not have a physical body in
which to express itself, I also pledge to contribute on a professional, financial and cultural level
to the development of the life of the SUR by adhering to the many goals that it will decide to set
so it can accomplish the creation of the living organism that both myself and the SUR are a
part of, in full respect of my individuality and in a relationship of reciprocity.

I adhere to this pact of friendship because this is the first practical way for those of us in the
SUR to affirm that we want to create secondary beauty and to contribute to the creation of the
Cosmo-Art myth. When we will have truly managed to make of many people who are unknown
to each other a single living organism, that lives and operates to create beauty that never dies
with all of its efforts, we will then know that secondary beauty is possible and that life has won
over its challenge with death, and us along with it. Then we will also know that we have won
over the challenge with ourselves and that we will be able to extend this same pact to others as
well.

The Cosmo-Art goal is a very big one, and it scares me. I am afraid of losing myself in this
immense sea, especially when I must renounce my own individuality, which poses itself as an
absolute, so I can completely become a part of the chorality that is created when the organismic

  27
principle is in action. I accept this fear and I ask you to accept it and to share it with me, so we
can all overcome it much more easily.

Between myself and you there is a wall of pain, and my journey towards a choral goal cannot be
carried out without bringing this wall down, which is a very difficult thing. But if the desire to
try to do so is already a pact, I can say yes; if connecting ourselves in our thoughts and actions
is already a project, I can say yes; if by coming closer together there is already beauty, I can say
yes, with the passion of an artist who tries and tries again to create what he has in mind,
without ever giving up.

I want to tear down this wall and I want to fuse my song with your song. I want to amplify my
inner space and I want to create a fusion of sounds that makes me and you a shining trail of
the cosmos that knows how to navigate forever.

I adhere to this pact so that the impossible can begin to become possible and so that a turning
point occurs in human history that, on a biological level, happened hundreds of millions of
years ago, when the first cell was created as a single living organism, and then when many cells
that were separate came together and created a unified multicellular organism that was a single
living organism. That was a work of art of Nature, and now the time has come that Life, using
the artistic power it has given to us, wants to accomplish through us its work of art and
transform, in time, human beings that are separate from each other into a single living
organism that acts on an existential level, just as the cells of a multicellular organism act on
the biological level.

This is the goal that Life and the Cosmic SELF have given to us of the SUR, as a first step in the
turning point to introduce a new type of living organism, and I hope to accomplish this
grandiose work of art together with you, that can, as it happens with works of art, leave a trace
in history that has the strength of immortality that is capable of unifying us and the rest of
humanity.

Ulysses is alive, he is immortal amongst us, because he knew how to create with his wisdom,
his pain and his art, his own part of secondary beauty.

Why shouldn’t we be able to create our own part?

I want to respect this pact and I want to share it with you, freely choosing to adhere to it every
time it will be necessary.

Frascati, Italy, November 29, 1998

IV Cosmo-Art Choral Group Laboratory

Antonio Mercurio with the choral contribution in the writing of this second part of the entire
populace of the SUR.

  28
 THE COSMOARTISTIC PROPOSAL

A new science of humanity

The preceding brief presentation of some of Antonio Mercurio’s ideas contained in

Cosmoartistic Anthropology allows for a glimpse into the vastness and complexity of such a
cultural proposition.

What we are dealing with are, in fact, themes that are simultaneously theoretical and practical,
psychological and existential, individual and choral, growth oriented and creative.

Due to this unique approach, Cosmoartistic Anthropology can be seen as being a new
discipline, one that is both a science and an art.

As a science, Cosmoartistic Anthropology leads the individual to become a Person; as an art, it

brings the person to become an artist of life.

As a science, it looks at the person as a whole, endowed with meaning and finalized unto him
or herself; as an art, it looks at the person as a part of a greater whole, endowed with a special
function and finalized to that greater whole.

As a science, it uses linear and analytical reasoning; as an art, it dares to engage in circular
and synthesizing procedures.

As a science, it grows and encourages growth through organized steps; as an art, it grows and
encourages growth through foundational upsets.

If as a science Cosmoartistic Anthropology resembles an architectural construction, as an art it

resembles a many-bedded river that opens its way to the sea in an unpredictable manner.

Another element that brings us to identify Cosmoartistic Anthropology as a new science is its
maieutic goal; in other words, its main objective is not to make known, but to give birth: to be
born as persons and to grow as existential artists. For this reason it can not be said to be a
doctrine, but rather a womb. And as such it realizes itself in places of growth that are like
existential wombs for those who build them or participate in their activities: small centers made
up of cultural and personifying experiences, which become gymnasiums of humanity, choral
labortaries of values, artists’ workshops of life, small universities of the science of the soul. In
fact, if it is true that we need a uterus so we can be born as indivuduals, it is also true that we
need a uterus so we can be born as Persons and artists of life.

No great artist or scientist was born from him or herself, or from the street, or from books, or
by chance or because they improvised. They all forged their talent over time and with great
effort, in environments that were appropriate and with proper guides.

The same thing can be said about the art of living, and perhaps with even greater emphasis.
This is what happened, for example, with the followers of Pythagoras or among Socrates’
  29
friends, in Plato’s academy or at Aristotle’s Lyceum, in Epicurus’ Garden or in Zenone’s Stoà,
places where the search for truth coincided with the search for virtue, for harmony with the
world,for a correct social organization and a joy for living. And where the answers were not any
more important than the questions themselves.

  30
 The two wings of the Cosmoartistic proposal

Cosmoartistic Anthropology unfolds across two co-essential movements that are interdependent
and interacting:

a) the search for meaning (of humanity, of life, of the universe): information gives form to
human beings;

b) the generative experience ( driven by needs): living develops being.

It is, in fact, through experience that the search for meaning avoids being a simple mental
theory about things; at the same time, it is through reflection that the act of living avoids being
a mere flow of our drives.

In this way, the truth that one hopes to find about humanity and its existence is not a cerebral,
schizoide truth (which instead is typical of much of our modern culture, child as it is of only the
goddess of Reason), but an existential, vital one. This is Sophia, or wisdom, in which our
ancient fathers placed health or salvation and in which Cosmoartistic Anthropology simply
looks for a correct joy of living.

Reality exists before the I , and the I grows by nourishing itself with reality; but in doing so the I
transforms things into a new reality. For this reason, Cosmoartistic research is a science that is
transfigured into an art as it goes along.

We study mountains not so much to describe them, but so we can climb them. We observe life
not so much so we can understand it, but so we can live it. While the term research refers to
the world of thought, the term experience opens the door to the world of living: to acting on our
own feelings, affective or affermative; to making decisions that modify our reality; to entering
into concrete relationships; to risking taking action that breaks us from the unknown, to
making choices that limit us; to entering into society with goals; to attempting to find
innovative solutions; to doing, moving, getting dirty, daring ....

We cannot become experts on humanity unless we experience life with deep involvement. On
the other hand, life will reveal things that the mind alone could never either understand or
suspect existed; life will always bring us back, for example, to what our faces are truly like
(which we so often modify with the make-up of our narcisism or our pride). Or it will send us
back an exact image of reality (that is so often deformed by the fog of our fears or our arrogant
demands).

Through such action, our knowledge becomes wisdom and this, slowly but surely, will allow us
to taste the wonderful flavour of daily existence.

  31
 The internal steps of Mercurio’s thought

1. Existential Personalistic Anthropology

The original branch of Cosmoartistic Anthropology is represented by a powerful personalistic

theory, which through time became Existential Personalistic Anthropology. In it, Antonio
Mercurio articulated a science on human beings (Anthropology) , seen as Persons¸ as active and
creative subjects (Personalistic) that are completely open and connected to the existence of all of
reality (Existential).

Such research on human beings (in its esse in – subsistence - and its esse ad – in relationship
to others), was found to be rigorously scientific, but according to the following parameters:

1) According to a concept of science that is much broader than the natural sciences;
this is true because human beings, since they are endowed with subjectivity, can
never be reduced to being objects among other objects, as the exact sciences demand
of those things that pertain to nature. Every human fact is, in essence, a human
gesture, or rather it is an act with which humans not only pose things, but they pose
themselves through these things. For this reason, the actions of every human being,
while they sometimes might be similar to those of some and other times will be
similar to those of others, will most often be similar in no way to the actions of
anyone else.

Modern science can touch upon, illuminate and describe certain areas of human
gestures, but it cannot de-fine them ( in other words finish and exhaust the surplus
meaning of the subjectivity that is present in each gesture): “ no logical system can
integrally describe its own structure” (J. Monod) and “not even a single act of
behaviour can be described without things being left out” (E. Fromm). This is because
in our lives “besides those problems we comprehend, there is the ontological mystery
that comprises us” (G. Marcel).

2) Exactly because the human system is a surplus system, or rather a structure that
cannot be completely expressed within its own function (just as the musical
possibilities of a piano cannot be completely expressed in the music of Mozart, Bach,
Chopin etc.), such studies go forward on the basis of the assumption that every truth
that is found is an open truth, open, that is, to further development.

3) Due to all of this, this method came about as a new method, based on the
convergence of the many, where each truth came forward to both amplify and correct
all the other truths, while at the same time being amplified and corrected by them.

4) Therefore, the truth that was being sought after was not an intellectual truth (sought
after and found only with the mind), but existential (the result of as well as the
source for things that have been experienced).

  32
In practical terms, Existential Personalistic Anthropology proposes to offer human beings
affirmations and hypotheses that are the result of a fusion between the four perspectives that
humanity has always used, up until now almost always univocally, to observe reality: Religion,
Philosophy, Science and Art.

For this reason, Existential Personalistic Anthropology has made an effort to put an end to a
constant juxtaposition or contrast between these four disciplines, and instead encourages the
creation of a dialectical relationship between them, to produce, through reciprocal enrichment
and mutual correction, the truth-wisdom-joy that humanity needs to live.

When we speak of Religion we are referring to everything that connects (religio from religare, or
connect many times, or connect tightly) and unifies human beings around a search for the
ultimate purpose of life and around the ability to help people transform themselves, through
truth, love, beauty, reciprocity and freedom, in the transition from the reactive dimension to the
spiritual and creative one.

When we speak of Philosophy, we are referring to humanity’s ability to ask itself, using the
tools of reason, questions concerning what is visibile and also concerning those invisible truths
that cannot be perceived through the senses, but can only be reached through intuition and
reasoning.

When we speak of Science, we are referring to all the research carried out by the modern
sciences that study humanity, both directly (Physiology, Evolutionary Anthropology,
Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Educational Scienzes, Medicine, Sociology, History, Paleontology,
Archeology etc.), and indirectly (Cosmology, Physics, Astrophysics, Biology, Chemistry, Etology
etc.). The truths found in these disciplines are ones that continually undergo questioning, so
that prejudices and ancient conceptions can be left behind, and new truths can emerge as the
horizon changes that are ever broader and are the result of such knowledge.

When we speak of Art, we are speaking not so much of a specialized knowledge of works of art,
rather than of a knowledge of the path that every artist undertakes so as to accomplish his or
her creation. This is because art extracts beauty from truth.

The goal of Cosmoartistic Anthropology is to use all these forces as partial and complimentary
elements to produce the super-force of unifying thinking. In fact, linear thinking that pertains to
the principle of non-contradiction ( either something is true or it is false), which Western
civilization is founded upon, no longer seems sufficient to allow for a complete understanding of
humanity. To the contrary, in this particular field it can easily transform itself into a
schizophrenic way of thinking.

It is interesting to note, en passant, that this pluralistic vision was somewhat entertained by
Freud when he was young, and later revised by him towards the end of his life, as he says
himself in his Postscript to his Autobiography written in 1935, three years before his death:
“My interest, after making a life-long detour through the natural sciences, medicine and
pyscho-therapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I
was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking ... I perceived ever more clearly that the events of
human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the
precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no
  33
more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego,
which psychoanalysis studies in the individual – are the very same processes repeated on a
wider stage” (Autobiography, translated by James Strachey, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New
York 1935, pgs. 148-149).

The method of Cosmoartistic Anthropology, which utilizes everything that has been said by
many passionate explorers of the human continent, can take us a long way, not so much
because those who cultivate it have some kind of special value, but rather for the simple reason
that what they experience is similar to what Bernard of Chartres, the founder of the Schola of
Chartres in the beginning of the XII century, used to tell his students: “We are like dwarfs
standing upon the shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see farther than the ancients,
not because our sight is more acute or because our bodies are taller, but because we are
supported and carried high by the stature of giants” (attributed to Bernard by his disciple John
of Salisbury).

Through the convergence of multiple viewpoints, Cosmological Anthropology actively pursues

the discovery of the laws of the cosmos and of life that still regulate today the future of
humanity, because it is only through the synthesis of these laws that humanity can develop a
safe future, since they are laws that produced a certain past. Therefore, by grafting itself onto
those laws, Cosmoartistic Anthropology formulates basic assumptions and creative hypotheses
for the growth of human beings as individuals and as a society.

The entire body of Existential Personalistic Anthropology has been absorbed and enriched by
Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, through a succession of stages. Today Antonio
Mercurio refers to the wealth of the whole journey as “Cosmoartistic Anthropology”.

2. Sophia-Analysis

After about ten years of developing the theory and practice of Existential Personalistic
Anthropology, Antonio Mercurio structured his ideas under the name of Sophia-Analysis.

In this manner Sophia-Analysis came under the context of psychotherapy, that at that time
was just beginning to be developed in Italy, even though from the very beginning Sophia-
Analysis was already a type of psychotherapy which proposed some strikingly atypical
approaches. The goal of Sophia-Analysis was to unite the conscious I of the individual with his
Existential Unconscious, which is full of events, reactions and decisions made within the
subject as early on as intrauterine life, and which, especially due to repressed hatred, amply
feeds every type of adult suffering.

This requires a complex and difficult unification, which becomes possible thanks to a gradual
taking ownership of one’s own wisdom and of one’s own purpose, called the Personal SELF,
which is so often unknown to those who are suffering.

  34
The whole process is facilitated by two uninterrupted guidelines: the increasing awareness that
the I itself was the principal cause of its own good and its own evil, and the always attentive
and involved presence of a guide that is wise and is found within the I.

3. Sophia-Art

Later on, the very same elements of Sophia-Analysis nurtured the Sophianalytical sprout so it
could open up and blossom into Sophia-Art, thanks to the fact that Mercurio’s intuition
managed to avoid becoming fixed on a misleading, medically-oriented approach and to clearly
affirm itself as an art of living with wisdom and creativity.

In other words, all the elements that within the field of psychotherapy were judged as
pathologies that had to be cured, in Sophia-Art they instead were considered normal aspects of
human nature, even though they are often blocked or coarse or insufficient. In such an
approach, what was needed was not so much the scalpel of the doctors of the soul, but the
chisel of the artist of life.

The task of Sophia-Art became, therefore, that of making of one’s very life a work of art.

With Sophia-Art, in a more explicit way, what was looked for was not preeminently simply a lost
state of well-being, but a new dimension to give to life, through an evolutionary turning point
that can be proposed to ourselves and to all of humanity; this is what allows one to recover
well-being that has been lost or that has not yet blossomed. The same joy of living, in other
words, was no longer seen as something broken that must be fixed, but something in an
embryonic state that must be developed in a creative way.

The royal roads of religion, science, philosophy and art, that humanity had already explored
separately to achieve joy, had left intact the ruins of unconscious guilt and the mask of the
existential lie, the greediness of life lived with a sense of entitlement and the ugliness of life
lived with thievery, the pride of one’s absolutes and the desperation of one’s solitude. Those
single pathways had created saints, ascetics, thinkers, warriors, heroes and even geniuses, but
they had not created Persons full of the profound freedom and grateful reciprocity that
accompany true, spontaneous joy.

Their pathways, in fact, were laid down according to a schizophrenic vision of opposites (good-
bad, true-false, healthy-broken, right-wrong, beautiful-ugly...), which never allowed human
beings to live wholly: a part of their being was continually rejected, alienated, amputated.

Instead, Sophia-Art encouraged people to use all of themselves, just like a true artist does with
a work of art, so as to put together light and shadow, noble elements and poor materials,
delicate touches and vigorous strokes: this criterion was no longer applied to a canvas, a block
of marble, a piece of music or a movie, but to one’s very life, on a personal, relational and social
level.

Obviously, this existential art did not consist of a simple juxtaposition or of a mere succession
of opposites, but of an effort towards fusion and transcendence: “nothing was negated or
castrated; everything was affirmed and transcended” (A. Mercurio).

  35
Furthermore, this ability to fuse opposites to create new realities was not just a simple
instrumental technique used for a temporary goal, but was an attitude that was to be cultivated
for one’s entire life: in front of the many internal conflicts and in front of life’s infinite
contradictions, no longer were unambiguous and definitive solutions looked for, but rather an
ability to overcome them in a spiralling movement, open to new antitheses so as to accomplish
yet more syntheses.

We are, in fact, born Persons and we become Persons, but we never become so once and for all.
Even Homo Sapiens is what it is because it is the emergent result of numerous transformations
that matter, life, the species and some individuals have undergone through time.

And just as evolution through continual emergent properties had been the law in the past, it
could also become the law for the future.

This Sophiartistic perspective on reality allowed for a disintegration of the same obsessive
binomial of positive and negative forces (god and satan) through the discovery of creative forces,
which no longer made the first absolutely good and the second absolutely bad. Instead both
were used as complimentary elements that can create new dimensions of the soul.

For this reason, in Sophia-Art not only is there no longer anything that is absolute and
untouchable in positive terms, but there is nothing that is radically negative that must be
stigmatized and thrown out: traumas and shortcomings, handicaps and misfortune, neurosis
and psychosis, limitations and illnesses, errors and guilt ... these become no longer cursed
words to fight against, but they themselves are things that represent a moment of a possible
new future.

4. Cosmo-Art

The propulsive force of Sophia-Art could not stop at the destiny of humanity without asking
about the meaning of the universe, which generated it and continues to nourishes it.

For this reason, the blossoms of Sophia-Art matured into the fruit of Cosmo-Art.

With Cosmo-Art, the former Artistic I in Sophia-Art realizes that it is called to create a work of
art not only of its own life, but also of the life of the entire universe.

This goal can be glimpsed and accomplished only if human beings begin to truly face the two
major opposites that they encounter along their journey: pain and death.

These are two realities that collide with the concepts of wellbeing and vitality, but if they are
faced with art and wisdom, they cease to appear as elements that are anti-life and they begin to
reveal themselves as portions of life itself.

Pain and death in this context no longer appear as two realities that are external to and
inimical to life, the first one something to be fought against and the second to endure. Instead
they are seen as two parts of life itself.

  36
And if they are portions of life, they are equal to every other part of life:

- they cannot be against the rest of life, just as an arm cannot be against the rest of its
body;

- they are temporary realities, continually in evolution;

- they are also words of life,

- they have meaning

- and they bring great gifts.

These affirmations bring up many other considerations.

For example, it makes one begin to think that the world that gives a living being Life is not inert
matter, but it is also a living reality, because the greater cannot come from the lesser.

To the contrary, since the continuity of life is completely dependent on the external world,
humans should stop thinking they are separated from the rest of the world, and they should
start seeing themselves as a part of it. And since they are not only vitalized by nourishment
from outside themselves, but they are also vitalized by an active inner reality, they should begin
to think of themselves as a specific organ of a greater cosmic organism. In fact, the special,
simultaneous and reciprocal giving and receiving is what happens and can only happen
between an organ and the entire organism.

And if humanity is a living organ within a living organism, it not only shares the destiny of the
entire organism, but it works towards its goals in terms of meaning and purpose. And this is
true even when life shows the critical aspects of its suffering and its mortality. Consequently,
these considerations should bring us to think that humanity should be capable of bringing the
concept of god into real life, so that life itself is an expression of the divine; a divine being that
is not, however, as perfect as the prideful mind of humanity has tried to make it out to be, but
for the true life that it is: complete but also incomplete, strong but also vulnerable, full but also
continuously evolving.

Such a divine being is not so much a god, but a parent, and as such is powerful but is not
omnipotent, and, just like a true parent, it needs adult children to accomplish what it has not
yet been able to accomplish.

For all these reasons Cosmo-Art considers the journey of humanity as a part of a greater whole,
which is the global purpose of the universe itself.

Of course by using the term “part” we are not intending something unfinished, but rather
referring to an element that is perfectly complete within a whole. Just like in an orchestra,
where a violin is an instrument that is already complete, while it is also a partial element of the
orchestra. Or like within the human body, where every single organ is perfectly whole in its own
specific role, even though it must function together with the entire organism.

With Cosmo-Art humanity discovers that its ability to create beauty is not only useful to its
own life, but is useful to the life of the entire universe, and that the beauty that is useful to it
  37
and the universe cannot be produced without the cooperative action of the universe as well.
This is exactly similar to what happens with the procreative ability of a woman. Without the
whole organism, the function of the uterus would be useless. And at the same time, a woman’s
desire would be impotent without the specific organ of the uterus.

Seen in this light, humanity is both the unique and irreplaceable instrument of cosmoartistic
beauty, and is also a completely useless instrument without the cooperation of cosmic forces.

This is why, in such a viewpoint, human beings are not only artists of their own lives, but they
are artists of the life of the universe. Together they intend to create a new type of beauty that is
superior to all other types of existing beauty, both in terms of content and of strength.
Consequentially, Antonio Mercurio has given the name immortal secondary beauty to this type
of beauty, to distinguish it from primary beauty, which is mortal.

Just as Sophia-Art went beyond Sophia-Analysis, even though it maintained its contents,
Cosmo-Art goes beyond Sophia-Art.

There are three important new elements in Cosmo-Art that indicate it has gone beyond the
former viewpoints:

a) humanity, by pulling down its false omnipotence, ceases to think of itself in singular
terms, and begins to think of itself in the plural;

b) humanity, by pulling down its false impotence, ceases to passively endure pain and
death and decides to go through them creatively, like an artist;

c) human beings cease to be a victims of fate and to act as such, and instead decide to
think of themselves as artists of their lives and of the life of the Universe.

As far as the first innovation goes, to begin thinking of life in plural terms means essentially
two things:

- with regards to one’s similars the I stops considering itself to be at the center of other
people’s lives (= egocenteredness) and it begins to think of its center and its purpose
as being in the choral group

- with regards to nature, to animals and to the cosmos, human beings stop considering
themselves kings and owners (= anthropocentrism) and begin to think of themselves
as being part of a whole.

It must be clear that a choral group does not mean the masses or collectivism (where the I
disappears), but it is instead an art with which the integrity and the specific talents of the
single builds the beauty articulated by the whole together with the integrity and the specific
talents of others.

At the same time, the fact that each human being is a part of the whole does not mean that the
individual loses the importance of its unique qualities, or is no longer responsible for its own
particular task.

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As far as the second innovation goes, regarding pain and death, Cosmo-Art dares to ignite a
cultural revolution that turns over our deepest mental schemas. In fact, we are not dealing with
cultivating new sprouts of thought, but with radically changing our very way of thinking,
beginning by reasoning with some of the cerebral mass that neurology has told us is silent.
There are exactly three things to be pointed out:

- pain and death must no longer be seen as elements that are negative and anti-life,
instead they must be seen as parts of life, and as such cannot be against life. Exactly
as an arm cannot be against the body, since it is a part of the body;

- pain and death must no longer be seen as being life’s last words, but as momentary
manifestations of it, just the same as every other manifestation of every other part of
life;

- since pain and death belong to life as parts of it, they too must be seen as words of
life, as carriers, that is, of the meaning and purpose of life.

In this new vision the many deeply ingrained and common ideas within our thinking lose their
hold. Examples of some of these ideas are: the idea that pain and death came into the world
because of mankind’s original sin; that the liberation from death can happen only thanks to
divine intervention from outside of humanity; that life (believers would say god) is perfect and
complete unto itself; that outside of human beings there is a principle of good and another of
evil; that pain is only an obstacle to fight against; that death is complete annihilation...

Thanks to its new viewpoint, Cosmo-Art instead affirms that pain is a cosmic force that is
necessary for creating and that the death of the body can be the beginning of an immortal life,
if it is the last of many deaths related to both egocentrism (or egotism) and anthropocentrism
(or pride).

In this manner, whereas Sophia-Analysis promoted the recovery of lost beauty through the full
restoration of one’s identity, and Sophia-Art promoted the unfolding of the beauty of life
through infinite propulsive syntheses of opposites, Cosmo-Art proposes the creation of
secondary beauty through a creative experience of pain and of death.

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 ALONG THE PATHWAYS OF EXISTENTIAL BEAUTY

Some operative principles of Sophia-Analysis for the recovery of lost beauty

Sophia-Analysis helps the individual to become a Person, through the recovery, the
recomposition and the activation of all the elements of his or her identity.

The Person always has a value as an end unto itself, and never as a means. The Person is never
finalized to anyone or anything outside himself (parents, a partner, the family, a party, the
state, an ideology, a divinity etc.), but to his own Self.

The Person is not only a reality that receives or endures things, but is above all an active and
autonomous principle that brings things into being with its own subjectivity.

In psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic literature, the idea that the human person is a
“principle” (Mercurio), that is “not a collection of acts, nor a place where they are carried out, but
the source of the acts themselves” (G. Allport), is a concept that is hardly ever theoretically
affirmed.

• The Person is therefore a spiritual principle, where spiritual (not to be confused

with religious) indicates a quality that makes of a human a free being. Free like
the wind ( = spiritus) that blows caressing and going beyond everything.

The freedom of the Person is made up of three powers:

a freedom from, or an ability to transcend itself;
a freedom to, or an ability to create itself;
a freedom for, or an ability to determine itself.
• Freedom from is a substantial freedom from every type of determinism, both
internal and external. By substantial freedom what we mean is the ability to
overcome even necessary conditioning (for example a physical misfortune or a just
social punishment), by dialectically accepting it as a part. Thanks to such
freedom, the Person can be conditioned by thousands of things, but determined
by none of them.

• Freedom to is the real ability to act and to find solutions that are completely new.
Thanks to this freedom, the Person can truly bring to light things that previously
did not exist, either internally or externally.

• Freedom for is the ability to choose and to decide, between two opposing
alternatives (love and hate, growth or stagnancy, forgiveness or revenge...), or
between two valid alternatives (one partner instead of another, one profession
rather than another, one home rather than another..).

The first choice denotes an ethical necessity and responsibility in the Person; the
second denotes an existential necessity and responsibility.

  40
 • Due to these three freedoms, human beings cannot ever be completely a product
of their parents, of the environment or of society; nor can they ever completely be
a passive container of the events that happen, nor completely an automatic
response to external and internal stimuli; the person is, instead, truly capable of
autonomous beginnings (decisions, choices, resolutions, goals, changes, gifts,
creativity, forgiveness).

• From this ability to make free decisions the responsibility of human beings arises
with respect to themselves, in the sense that they are always the ones who are
mainly responsible for their own suffering or their own wellbeing. Responsibility,
in fact, is the ability to “respond” for oneself.

• The healthy power of a person is always a power to (or creativity), and it excludes
every type of power over (or domination): of adults over children, of one partner
over the other, of an authority over employees, of one populace over another, of
those who offer their services over the customer, of humans over animals and over
nature.

• Human beings are not born with the death instinct or with destructiveness, as
some anthropologists and psychoanalysts think; absolute destructiveness in the
form of anti-life cannot belong to life because this would be an intrinsic
contradiction. It arises, instead, from a free decision of the individual who has
been grabbed by the pride within his mind. Distructiveness as an end in itself is
an exclusive prerogative of human beings, and it exists in no other entity or place
than within their own will.

• Because of the freedom to make decisions, within the person there are not only
guilty feelings, there is also real guilt. Real guilt is not only that which is
conscious, but it is above all that which is unconscious, that nourishes itself with
destructive hatred of itself and others undisturbed. Society is never crazier than
when it denies guilt by calling it madness.

• Guilty feelings are activated by the Super Ego; real guilt is brought to the surface
by the SELF.

• The Person is made up of the Body, the Psyche and the SELF; while the containing
subject, or carrier, or owner or manager of those components is called the I
Person. The body, the psyche and the SELF are not free agents, they are
deterministic (that is, they can not not be what they are); freedom is found only
within the I Person.

• The I Person can decide to stop and live with only one or two of its components,
but this would not allow for true wellbeing. The human Person must animate, and
be animated by, all three levels of its being.

• What vivifies a human being at a corporeal level is called bios or vital force: this is
supported by the principle of homeostasis ( the constant equilibrium of the
functions). What moves a human being in terms of sensations and feelings is
  41
 called the psyche: it is supported by the pleasure principle; what drives a human
being in the regions of the SELF is called the spirit: this is supported by the joy
principle.

• The non dyadic composition of the human being (body and soul), but rather
triadic (body, soul and SELF), is in line with the most ancient cultures:

body, psyche and logos (the Greek conception)

body, soul and spirit (the Hebrew conception)
body, soul and heart (the Arabic conception)
body, soul and Ka (= the divine) (Egyptian conception).

• Body, Psyche and SELF can also be called Corporeal I, Psychological I and
Transcendental I, when the I Person identifies with each of its parts, or else
Corporeal Me, Psychological Me and Transcendental Me, when they are objectified
parts of the Person.

• The I Person is not the Person, but is, rather, the part that is free and capable of
making decisions of the Person. The Person is the whole including the I Person, the
Corporeal I, the Psychological I and the Transcendental I.

• The Person is a living reality thanks to its connection to the body; its being a
psychological reality comes from its connection to the psyche; its being a spiritual
reality derives from its connection with the I Person and with the SELF.

• Spiritual does not coincide with psychological. The psyche is made up of

sensations, fantasies, affects, thoughts, sentiments and passions that are directly
and exclusively egocentric, while the spirit contains the faculty to see and enjoy
things in reference to their objective value.

• The spiritual dimension also has an autogenous operative energy, or, in other
words, it is generated by itself, and does not have external sources.

• The way in which reality is seen and dealt with, that follows the psychological
criterion of any immediate utility that is present or not for the individual, follows
the law of the pleasure principle; instead, the spiritual dimension that acts
according to the criterion of existential truth follows the joy principle and the
principle of death-rebirth (the many deaths of psychological viewpoints and
demands that allow for the many rebirths into the intrinsic value of things). These
principles must always come to terms with a nucleus of pain and always give
birth to a quantum of joy and a quantum of beauty.

• The essential modality of psychological functioning is reactive¸ or in other words:

action-reaction, stimulus-response; the modality of spiritual development is
instead active, or action-choice-action, stimulus-decision-response.

• The egocentric position of the psyche is not necessarily a bad one: it is only a
partial one.
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 It is something that has always been part of human evolution and will always
remain so because:

- it is an evolutionary necessity;
- it is a positive evolution.

It is a necessary event because it is the only possible way that humans can reflect
on nature: if human beings are the point of departure, then they are also the
inevitable first measurment of every thing. This in itself has been a positive
necessity, because it has allowed the species and the individuals that are part of it
to achieve some extremely important things, such as:
- the primary differentiation from nature (human beings are no longer an object
among objects);
- the development of an ability to be capable of always representing reality,
without depending on it externally;
- the possibility to intervene in reality with greater efficacy and rationality,
thanks to the previously developed ability to make connections, to anticipate
what is going to happen, to confront situations etc.;
- the possibility to deal with reality in such a way to assure that life is lived with
pleasure;
- the ability to not only see reality, but to admire it.
• All of this points out that the relationship between psyche and Personal SELF is
not one between positive and negative parts, but is rather one between partial
instances and global instances within the person.

For example: falling in love, anger, suffering and pleasure are feelings and they have
to do with the psychological sphere; love, hate, pain and joy are emotions and they
pertain to the person’s globality.

The psyche becomes an obstacle in the development of the person when it must act
and impose itself as the person’s complete horizon.

For this reason the passions that devastate life do not arise from corporeal instincts,
as was believed for many centuries, but instead they come from the pridefulness of
the psyche (psychological imperialism).

In this light, the I Person that decides to live closed off within the confines of the
psyche and its laws decrees its own evil and its own suffering, because it poses itself
against reality and against the needs of its own globality.

• Whereas the psyche demands that things and the body itself are finalized to its
own subjective truth, the body declares its own wise opening to the objective
truths of being.

This is why the body is the true home of the SELF, while the psyche is the
vestibule before it. The body is never the prison of the SELF; the psyche, however,
can become so when it demands to be its true residence, instead of being a
transitional area.
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 • The SELF is named as such because it corresponds to one’s objective truths and
values (the Personal SELF) and to reality (Cosmic SELF). The SELF spoken of
within Cosmoartistic Anthropology does not coincide with the feeling of oneself or
the concept of oneself or the image of oneself (= the objectified self as perceived by
the I ), spoken of in psychology and psychoanalysis (Hilgard, Kohut, Rogers,
Jacobson...); nor does it coincide with the religious concept of the soul (= spiritual
and immortal element infused into the body by the divinity); nor does it coincide
with the important Jungian archetype of the totality called also the Self (= the
point of departure and convergence in the person, both the center and the
confines of the individual). The concept of the SELF proposed in Cosmoartistic
Anthropology is different from these other definitions in the following manner:

- the SELF is always only a part of the person,

- it is a part that opens up to the truth of things, even before it opens to the unification
of the subject or to interaction with the surrounding environment;

- it is an energetic reality that is connected to the Cosmic SELF, which it is a spark of;

- it is thus an autogenous source of love and wisdom;

- it is a source of energy that cannot, however, have any power over the I Person, as it
is not a function of it;

- it can however have a great influence, in as far as the I Person opens itself and allows
itself to be guided by its light.

• The Personal SELF:

is a source of truth, love and joy that is present within every human being as an
integral and constitutional element;

it is present from the time of conception, and it does not come from either the
parents nor from an external god;

it determines the unique and unrepeatable identity of each human being (in terms
of its subjectivity, its purpose, goals and itinerary);

it is an inexhaustible source of energy for one’s life;

it is the seat of the laws of life;

it is the highest point from which both the past and the future of one’s existence
can be seen correctly;

it is the voice of truth of one’s being, that speaks to us from both within and from
outside of us, sometimes with tenderness and sometimes with terror;

it is the seat of all future evolution of humanity;

it is the seat of one’s own possible unique story;

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 it is the opening of the person to endless harmony and beauty: that which has
already been created and that which can be created in the future.

• In fact, those who are capable of being born beyond their parents are individuals;
those that are capable of being born from their own SELF are Persons.

• The love received from our parents, whether it be from them specifically or from a
substitute, is only an initial push: sooner or later, the motor of one’s own life must
begin to turn, thanks to the love that comes from one’s own SELF.

• It is extremely difficult to be born from own’s own SELF if, in some way, we are not
born from the love of someone else (a real parent or a substitute one): we begin
feeling that we exist when someone loves us; but we feel this above all when we
decide to love ourselves utilizing the love that comes from our SELF.

• It is not easy to reach the open, deep sea of the SELF, if we don’t first go through
the shallow, rocky waters of the psyche.

• The love that generates a true life is not just any kind of love given to a child, but
a love for him (the child as an end unto itself, and not as a means).

This is why both inadequate mothers (those who are excessively absent) and
possessive mothers (those who are excessively present) generate children who are
existentially un-born.

• An inadequate parent is not only one who does not know how to give their child
love, but is also a parent who does not know how to receive love from their
children.

• A mother who is emotionally partnered with her child instead of with her husband
often generates in the child an absolute, which is made up of a greediness for
power and a yearning for things.

A mother who is cold and rejecting instead develops in the child an absolute which is
made up of an unchangeableness in thought, and a avarice for esthetic beauty.

• The unconscious that is contacted through Cosmoartistic Anthropology is not only

the unconscious of the psyche (= the dimension of the drives that is governed by
the psyche), whose importance and mechanisms were magnificently described by
Freud (the individual psychological unconscious) and by Jung (the collective
psychological unconscious). The existential unconscious is taken into
consideration as well.

• The existential unconscious is the whole world of events that happened outside
ourselves from the moment of conception onward (= the factual unconscious), the
whole world of the reactions that emerged within us in response to these events (=
the reactive unconscious), the whole world of the freely made decisions in response
to those events (= decisional unconscious) and all the movements and sub-

  45
 movements produced in us by the revelations coming from the SELF (= the
creative unconscious).

• In Cosmoartistic Anthropology the psychological unconscious (individual and

collective) and the existential unconscious (factual, decisional and creative) are
always, from the very beginning, closely intertwined, even though one or the other
alternatively prevails.

It takes great art and much wisdom to be able to identify them, respect them,
decodify them and elaborate them: analytical science is necessary for the
psychological unconscious, and an existential encounter is necessary for the
existential unconscious.

Cosmoartistic Anthropology looks at the individual with both perspectives,

because only a binocular view of things allows for a profound perception of things
in this case as well.

• Dreams are one of the fullest moments of the life of the unconscious. The images
within the flow of dreams are:

- photographs of the factual unconscious;

- self-portraits of the psychological unconscious;

- revelations coming from the creative unconscious;

- beginnings suggested by the decisional unconscious.

• Cosmoartistic Anthropology offers an interpretation and a solution to the Oedipal

complex (the child’s attachment to the parent of the opposite sex and hostility
towards the same-sex parent) that are different from those offered in
psychoanalysis. In Cosmoartistic Anthropology, the Oedipal complex is not solved
with an abolition (aufhebung). Instead, it proposes first a realization of these drives
and then a renunciation. When interpreting Sophocles’ drama, Freud skipped over
all the evil that Oedipus’ parents, Laius and Jocasta, did first to each other, and
then to their baby son, to the point of ordering that he be killed.

Only in such a destructive context is the tragic solution that Sophocles offers is
developed (incest, parricide, suicide, blinding and exile), or can the solution
offered by Freud, annulment, be feasible: these two options, either giving in or
escaping, do not resolve the Oedipal knot.

If the parents, instead, manage to establish a dimension of sincere love between

themselves and towards their children, the children can enjoy an active infantile-
oedipal possession of the parent of the opposite sex after they have enjoyed being
possessed by the pre-oedipal mother. In this manner, the child can easily
renounce their need for an adult-sexual possession of the parent.

  46
 For Freud, the Oedipal complex ceases to exist “due to a lack of success that is the
result of its internal impossibility”. In Cosmoartistic Anthropology, instead, it
ceases to exist through a decision that first allows for enjoyment, and then moves
towards renunciation.

• First one possesses, and then one can give. But to be able to give a gift ¸ one must
necessarily go through both an active and a passive possession.

The mother must give the oedipal daughter to the father. The father must give the
oedipal son to the mother.

The parents must give their adult children to their partners and to their own
power to make decisions. The Oedipal children must give the parent they have
possessed back to the other parent. The adult children must give their parents the
dignity of their history and the responsibility of their past. Cosmoartistic
Anthropology calls all of this circular love.

  47
 Some dialectical syntheses of Sophia-Art

that promote the beauty of life

Through Sophia-Art, the I Person discovers that its substance is of being an Artistic I. What this
means is that its ability to make decisions, to be free, to embrace truth and love all make sense
when through all these elements it creates beauty both inside and outside of itself.

The beauty of love is the basic element of Mercurio’s thought: this type of existential beauty is
the value that all the other values are founded on.

• The spiritual dimension of the beyond, or of the relationship between the I Person and
the Personal and Cosmic SELF, pushes the individual to look for meaning, or to find
an ever more unified significance for the reality of events.

For this reason the Person becomes a unifying principle:

- of its own parts within itself,

- and of itself with external reality, both near and far, visible and invisible,
material and immaterial.

Therefore it is an active center of comprehension, of orientation, of selection, of

organization, of reordering, of coordination, of hierarchical definition, of integration,
of transformation, of harmonization, of fusion.

• A unifying way of thinking (and-and) is proposed, that is dialectical and circular, and
a goal is placed before the existential artist, who continuously attempts to overcome
the vertical fracturing of oppositional thinking (either-or).

Ratonality and emotions, power and limits, adult part and infantile part, giving and
asking for, being right and being wrong, past and present, inside and outside, truth and
lies, wellbeing and suffering, mind and body, mine and yours, activity and reflection, love
and hate, science and conscience, acceptance and rejection, us and others, possession
and renunciation, life and death ... These are not couples of opposites where one of them
must be eliminated, but couples of different and complimentary aspects of the same
being. “The opposite of a profound truth is not error, but is another profound truth” (E.
Morin).

• The Orient, which cultivates fusion, and the Occident¸ which cultivates separation
(science=splitting), are two other extremes that must be brought together and unified.

• Another important unification that must be carried out is between the masculine
principle and the feminine principle.

The first regards the ability to penetrate and transform reality, where the second is the
ability to welcome and develop that same reality.

  48
 • Feminine receptivity is unifying thought. It is warm and welcoming, it is intuitive
clarity, it is the ability to wait and be constant. It is a love for detail, it is diffusive
softness, it is an ability to act within, and is horizontal creativity, the pleasure of
being and staying still, it is the grace of beauty.

Feminine receptivity is not passive, it is true activity.

Masculine penetrativeness is thinking that differentiates, it is the courage of taking

risks, it is rational clarity, it is the power of decision-making, it is the view of the
whole, it is the strength to set limits, the ability to act externally. It is vertical
creativity, the pleasure to act and to become, and it is the source of objectivity.

And just as a child is the result of the combined action of a sperm and an ovum, a
true evolutionary work is always the child of a synchronized activity of the
masculine and feminine principles. The masculine principle and the feminine
principle must both be present within every single person, even though men must
be the motors of the masculine principle and women the motors of the feminine
principle. Furthermore, both principles must belong to the entire person, in the
sense that they move through and color the body, the psyche and the SELF with
different values.

• Six thousand years ago, with the invention of the plow and the harrow and the
domestication of the ox and the horse, primitive agriculture was transformed into
a heavier type of technical work. Men began substituting women first in the fields
and then in leading the village, where the magician priests took over the place of
the fertility priestesses. When, after another thousand years, bronze was
discovered, and later iron, weapons were created, and along with them came
warfare. The city-state overtook the village, which was definitively led by an
androcratic regime.

In the same manner, culture and spirituality passed from being feminine to
masculine. Fertility, the slow and silent mother earth, was overcome by the strong
and violent productivity of masculine vigor; the power of nature was substituted
by the law of the state; the god Mars, which had been the god of vegetation (from
whom the month March, a spring month, got its name) became the god of warfare;
the Great Mother gave up her throne to the Father God. In the binomial death-
rebirth the distinction between the two terms that previously was only a
dialectical tension within the same horizon became a metaphysical change of
levels: the weight of death became humanity’s misery, and the “more” of rebirth
became a divine overlord. Humanity became nature and god supernatural; life on
earth was considered profane, sinful and painful, whereas the hereafter was
considered sacred, graceful and full of beatitude.

Religious-ness became religion: the animistic and polytheistic divinities of

psychological transcendence became the monotheistic and theocratic god of
metaphysical transcendence; the mystery cults of inner transformation were
substituted by the rites of salvation that came about outside of human beings.

  49
 The lunar, feminine light of partial but continual knowledge was eclipsed by the
solar, masculine brightness of definitive and absolute dogmas; the truth as a word
to be searched for was supplanted by the truth as a word that was revealed.

Unfortunately, society today is still immersed in this battle of the masculine over
the feminine, even though the first lights of a possible complimentariness are
beginning to appear.

• Maternal and paternal is another important couple that we must receive from
outside ourselves and unify within us: the mother as giving and the father as
norms; the mother as unconditional acceptance and the father as conditional
acceptance; the mother that helps to be and the father that helps to act; the
mother that recovers the inside and the father that encourages the outside; the
mother that watches over growth and the father that pushes for reproduction.

• Dependency and autonomy: it is impossible to become truly and happily

autonomous if one has not first been clearly and joyfully dependent. The “no” of
extrauterine birth can exist only if there first has been the “yes” of intrauterine
attachment.

• Autonomy (= to have within oneself one’s own law) therefore does not mean
independence, but mature dependency. By oneself does not mean alone.

• A mature person is one who knows how to give of oneself and then take oneself
back; it is one who knows how to give of oneself without annulling oneself, and
knows how to take oneself back without annulling the other.

• There are three phases in the relationship with the other: symbiosis, individuation,
union.

The Orient runs the risk of remaining in symbiosis without individuating; the
Occident runs the risk of remaining in individuation without reaching union.

• Every passage from a state of symbiosis to a level of differentiation never comes

about in a spontaneous manner, it can only happen by making a decision. None
of the decisions that must be made are without pain.

The necessity for differentiation is signalled by pain.

Suffering arrives when the ground for a new seed is ready.

• Many are not capable of deciding, because they do not realize that such decisions
don’t mean so much choosing one thing, but rather separating from another (de-
cide = cut onself away from).

• Attack and escape: escape can be just as vital as an attack.

• If we want to receive, first we must begin to give. In fact, when we want to get
warm, first we must light a fire.

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 • We are not dealing with just our conscious will, but also with an unconscious will:
unconscious does not mean there is an absence of responsibility, but rather that
there is a misunderstood responsibility.

• Strength and weakness: walking is a form of rhythmic coordination between two

incessant disequilibriums.

• Rigidity and tenderness: in our lives we need both the hardness of the oak, with
which we build bridges, and the tenderness of the blade of grass, which remains
intact when a hurricane passes that brings down even an oak.

• Another difficult unification that a subject must make is to accomplish within

itself the simultaneous ability to express affect (love, yes, connection) and
aggressiveness (contrast, no, detachment), even towards the same person.

• Knowledge and truth: the first requires work, the second brings pain with it.

• The Person needs both the earth and the sky, the down here and the up there of
the past and the future, just like a plant does, which can live only under two
conditions: that it have good roots that it can take nutrients from the earth with,
and good leaves that absorb the air from the sky.

• We must not confuse aggressiveness with destructiveness, nor should we look at

destructiveness as something only negative. Aggressiveness is the strength that
humans need to affirm themselves, to impose themselves and to oppose
themselves when affirming their positive qualities and carrying out their goals.
This aggressiveness is insufficient in some cases, for example when we must
strike out or stop parts of ourselves or others that damage us. In such cases we
need another type of power, a strength that can strike out at and destroy those
parts, like a laser does with the damaging nuclei in an organism. This type of
destructiveness is positive, and Cosmoartistic Anthropology calls it destructive-
constructive hatred, or functional hatred.

Healthy aggressiveness faces obstacles and difficulties; healthy destructiveness

faces the obstacles that are like killers. Negative destructiveness that must always
be avoided is that which aims at destroying not just a part of a person but the
whole person: this is called destructive-destructive hatred.

• Alongside the fertile maternal and paternal principles to be welcomed there are
castrating maternal and paternal figures that must be fought against: the first
keeps us from becoming autonomous, and the second keeps us from accessing the
future. We can do only one thing when we are faced with these types of maternal
and paternal figures: kill them, so we can take away with us the fertile maternal
and paternal principles.

This is the universal myth of the hero¸ who, well-armed on his horse goes off to kill
the dragon that is keeping a damsel prisoner within a cave. The knight kills the
dragon, frees the damsel and then marries her: by doing so he becomes a hero, or
  51
 in other words, an adult. The damsel is the healthy part: of one’s self, of the
woman, of the parent, of the other; the dragon is the castrating part.

This is why every true freedom is the result of a liberation.

• Castration and expansion, to breathe in and breathe out, to eat and to eliminate,
to welcome and to reject: the conditions of life are two, not one. The steps of life’s
cosmic dance are two, not just one.

• One of the most powerful and difficult syntheses that the Artistic I is called upon
to accomplish regards guilt and forgiveness.

Normally these opposites are seen as being two actions; instead, if we look closely
we can see that they are two accomplishments¸ or two things that are continually
present and move in a spiral fashion.

Those who are aware of themselves always find pieces of guilt in action; this is
why forgiveness must also be continually in action. This view of things may be
very difficult for linear thinking to accept, but it is normal within dialectical
thinking.

Guilt and forgiveness are truly an infinite double movement.

Some regenerative nuclei in Cosmo-Art that ignite secondary beauty

The beauty that Cosmo-Art intends to generate in our lives and, through the action of human
beings, in the life of the universe, is a form of life that can not be extinguished through any type
of death, including the biological death of human beings or the cosmic death of the universe.

We are dealing with an immortal type of beauty that is the synthesis of many energies that are
subject to expansion, but never to cessation.

This type of beauty is born from the strength of Life and of pain, of wisdom and of art that are
created by human beings: human beings that know how to renounce their false omnipotence
and false impotence; human beings that realize they are always a part of the many; human
beings that know how to transform their voyages through pain and death into pathways of life.

• The dark moments of life don’t necessarily coincide with negative moments: the
new moon is the moon we cannot see. And if the light of day allows us to see the
beauty of the earth, the darkness of night allows us to see the magnificence of the
stars.

• The goal of Cosmoartistic Anthropology is not just to know oneself, nor is it to

know oneself and own oneself: it is, instead to know oneself, to own oneself and
then to give of oneself.

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 • The Cosmic SELF is the originator, the definition of and the horizon of the Personal
SELF. This is why the evolution of a single being follows the evolutionary laws of
its species, of life and of the cosmos.

• The laws of cosmic evolution (nuclear, molecular, biological and anthropological),

that we simply call the laws of life¸ are the words of the Cosmic SELF, words that
created and that continue to create the world.

• Gratuity: everything exists because of the intrinsic overabundance of being: it does

not look for things, but it creates them; life does not run after reproduction, but it
proposes it. Life and being are, therefore, a gift.

• And since everything that we are and that we have is grace, the highest realization
of a Person is to live life as a gift, according to the rhythmic dance of giving-
receiving-giving back.

• Life as grace and as a gift: not as something to be stolen and robbed, nor as
merchandise and markets, nor as a right or as something we are entitled to.

• In front of the false balance of things (selling – buying) of the mercantile system,
and in front of the false equality of law (to give – to give back) of the judicial
system, Cosmoartistic Anthropology proposes an alternating inequality (receiving
– giving back) of the system of giving.

• We are not children either of fate (as modern man believes), or of necessity (as the
ancients believed) because we are continually gener-ated by the gener-osity of
being.

• Gifts are not presents nor are they offerings. Presents are things we give (in earlier
times kings demanded presents), whereas with a gift we give a part of ourselves.
With an offering we give a part of ourselves ( in the past offerings were given to the
god-authorities) that is sacrificed, while when we give a gift this part does not die,
it multiplies in those who receive it.

• Following the logic of giving, Cosmoartistic Anthropology does not intend to

cultivate any type of domination either over the earth, over animals or over our
similars, but rather it intends to encourage a desire for reciprocal belonging¸
according to the free obligation of love, that sometimes knows how to give,
sometimes knows how to receive, and sometimes knows how to give back. Those
who reason with a judicial mentality are unable to conceive of a true obligation,
nor can those who reason with a mercantile mentality see any true disinterest in
those who give and also need to receive. Those who reason with the wisdom of the
heart, though, can conceive of this.

• The spiritual quality of humanity is not a product that comes from outside human
beings, but rather is a conquest of the human species. Spirituality is a quality
that the bio-psychological hominids began developing as they began seeing and
speaking with their own SELF and with the Cosmic SELF. Today this phylogenetic
  53
 acquisition, just like any other acquisition, is transmitted when every human
being is born. During the course of life, some humans utilize this power to
continue amplifying their living and transformative dialog with the SELF; others
bury it under the ground of their own passiveness; yet others use it against
themselves.

• Since the Personal SELF expresses an openness to all the truth, and since every
Personal SELF goes towards the same direction, it is not egoism to affirm that the
Person is finalized to its own SELF. To the contrary, in this common journey
towards the truth of things there is the possibility of a great closeness and a
universal reciprocity: “That which is most personal is most general” (C. Rogers).

• Love for oneself is not an easy thing that can be taken for granted. If this were
true, individually we would not be depressed and dissatisfied so often, nor would
we have collectively ruined the earth, which is our home. Love for oneself is not a
spontaneous feeling, but rather is a free, active and continuous decision.

To accomplish this love, human beings must be:

- capable of making choices that aim at the globality of the person, without
making what is partial an absolute;

- capable of using often a healthy aggressiveness, that power of self-affirmation

that needs strength and courage to assert itself and go forward in life
(aggressiveness, from gradior = to walk);

- capable of constructive destructiveness, which is an offensive power aimed at

striking out at and destroying parts that are actively damaging in oneself and
in others;

- capable of forgiving, especially oneself, the evil one has perpetrated or allowed.

• The body is not violent. The SELF , instead, is sometimes violent, but in a
transformative way. Only the psyche can be violent in a completely destructive
way. Those who believe that violence is the nursemaid of history have only
superficially read the facts of life. Violence is not and never has been a nursemaid,
it has always only attacked life. The life of history, just as the history of life, is
carried out in every instant by the winning meekness of its creatures.

• Sometimes a serious attack against the body (an illness, an accident, a limitation)
is the only way that the SELF can shake us out of the illusion that life is
something we can take for granted, instead of being a precious gift that we are
given moment by moment.

• Often anger and hatred against oneself or towards others cover a great pain, the
pain of a need that has not been listened to or has been betrayed. In such cases,
only forgiveness can regenerate our hardened hearts.

  54
 • Those who own their own guilt show that they are capable of taking responsibility
for their own lives.

• It is indispensable, even though difficult (and that is why a guide is necessary), to

go down like Dante did into the inferno of one’s own unconscious guilt, to meet
the Beatrice of one’s own joy and the Paradise of one’s own truth.

• Often our lives seem like Ulysses’: an incredible Odyssey. But we must be careful:
odyssey means to hate (odyssemai). An odyssey that is a journey of rebirth from
hatred is precious; an odyssey that is an eternal expiation is a life not worth living.

• Every time we have the urge to kill someone, it is time to kill some part of
ourselves.

• In our epoch, the most refined, efffective and common form of violence against
oneself is the tyranny of the Ideal I (or Ideal of Absolute Perfection). This pushes
human beings to chase after a perfectionistic, instead of a maturational, vision of
themselves and of what they need.

Kidnapped and estranged by this ideal mirage, they leave behind every limited
although real joy that life brings; they end up dying of deprivation, in the midst of
tons of food, internally consumed by their theomanic greed. Humans must stop
placing themselves at the center of the world, and begin orbiting around the
centrality of the whole, if they want to become completely and exclusively human
beings.

Our Earth, which is so marvelous and surprising, is, after all, only a small planet
that orbits around the Sun. The Sun, in turn, is a star that is found on the
periphery of our galaxy. The Sun, however, has a volume that is 1,300,000 times
greater than the earth. But the Sun is only one of 100 billion stars that make up
our Milky Way galaxy. Space, then, is sprinkled with galaxies, each containing
about 100 billion stars; there are many, many galaxies, and astrophysicists affirm
that the galaxies, and not the stars, are the building blocks of the universe.

Modern astronomers have already counted an immense number of galaxies, and

some scientists affirm that there is an infinite number of galaxies. In front of such
information it takes humility to take oneself out of the center of the world, and it
takes audacity to place oneself as centered by the whole.

• Just as a branch can not contain the whole tree, humans cannot ever definitively
embrace the ultimate horizon of reality, of which they are only a small part.

• When we recognize our limits we are capable of accepting our needs; when we
accept our needs, we are capable of recognizing also the other.

• Needs based on our own limits and on the power of the other favors the ability to
move from making demands to making requests.

• A true request is one that:

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 - can recognize a need as being one’s own and as being normal,

- can show that the need is truly one’s own and

- can clearly ask that the need be met

- by someone who is external to oneself,

- and who is clearly recognized as having the power to meet the need;

- it is asked for with respect for the other’s freedom.

- and knows that an eventual refusal is legittimate;

- it can receive a yes with visible gratitude,

- and can enjoy the beauty of receiving,

- while cultivating within oneself the pleasure of giving.

• Making a request is not the same as asking for permission: asking for permission
expresses submission, whereas a request requires equality.

• There are times, situations and people where a true gift is one given before any
explicit request has been made.

• Need, desire, hallucination:

a need is a request made by the laws of life and requires a necessary satisfaction: in
fact, this progressive chain of needs and satisfaction of needs is part of the journey of
life;

a healthy desire is a practical search for the possible satisfaction of one’s need:
healthy desire brings about a real satisfaction of the need and it develops from needs
that have been enjoyably satisfied as the basis of the formation of new desires;

hallucination is, instead, a desire that does not depart from the experience of having
enjoyed the satisfaction of a need, and it looks for pleasures that one’s fantasy (not
the reality) believes would be satisfying: the more there has been an absence of true
enjoyment of needs being satisfied during childhood, the more the convictions and
constructions that one’s fantasy has declared are satisfying will be difficult to modify.

• Arrogance is often a result of impotence. Impotence is not an absence of power, it

indicates, rather, the presence of omnipotence.

• Every time we pass from a fantasy that is a substitution of reality to a reality that
substitutes the fantasy, we experience pain: this is the narrow door of real
limitations. Much neurotic suffering is a defense against some pain that is legitimate
and creative.

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 • There is a type of loneliness that is not the result of a lack of affection, nor is it due to
a situation of isolation or to the loss of a loved one: this is what is known as
existential loneliness. This is a passage that no one can avoid, no one can go through
it with someone else, and no one else can do it for us. No one can not go through it.
The risk is, however, that one can pass through it, instead of entering into it.

• Those who enter into the limits of their own existence with humility have the
opportunity to encounter the beauty and the positivity of both Personal and Cosmic
Being. In this particular close encounter with the SELF, all of the scales of the feared
infinite loneliness fall from before the eyes of the I , and every thing and every person
become a moving given presence. Therefore, what was once felt as loneliness is now
enjoyed as fullness.

• Arrogant demands and greed are twins, both children of theomania, or of the absurd
will to be like god, to be everything and thus to want everything.

• Greed is completely different than an opening to being. Opening to being means being
able to enjoy what is partial, to enjoy what comes gradually and the rhythm of
presence-absence. Greed, instead, follows the theomanic law of instant gratification
and it is never satisfied by anything. Greed is not, in fact, something that has to do
with having, but with being. Greed (from the ancient verb aveo = ardently desire) does
not indicate a need to nourish oneself, but indicates the longing present in our
desires.

• If within every psychological disturbance we looked also for the demand of the subject
to be like god, perhaps we would also find the true instigator of the suffering
experienced. “Insanity, to the contrary of what is commonly thought, is not an illness, if
we look closely, but rather it is a particular way with which one resolves human
existence ... Insanity is an attempt to negate human impotence and to affirm, through a
certain function, that such impotence does not exist” (E. Fromm).

• The Person is always greater than its guilt.

The Person is always greater than its infirmity.

The Person is always greater than its death.

• The words of good and evil are expressed with facts. Facts are truth.

• From the ancient Indo-European root med the following words are derived:

- the Greek meditate (mèdomai)

- the Latin medicate (medèri)

.... could it be that true medicine is meditation?

• Among the human myths there is a remembrance of a happy golden age, of a fall of
the gods, and of a lost paradise. This is the memory of intrauterine life. In that
paradise, the trees spontaneously produced the fruits that were to nourish us, we
  57
 walked around naked, we had no experience of fatigue, thorns or travails of any kind.
We continuously carry within us a nostalgia for this lost world and we often project it
outside ourselves as a nostalgia for a future paradise, whether it be near or far.
Fortunately, there is always someone or something that kicks us out of this
enchanted world. In reality, this magical uterus is a mortal hoop.
We must break the enchantment and the regret of our childish thinking, that believes
that the greatest beauty is found and created by others. Instead we must walk into
the land of a new beauty that we create for ourselves. The thorns and tribulations, the
sweat and trials we undergo will therefore no longer be a curse, but will be the
normal effort we must make for this new creation.

• Chiron, the centaur who taught medicine to Aesculapius and to humans, had a
painful, open wound on his knee that kept him from doing what horses love to do
most: running.
• When life wounds us along our journey it is asking us to fly.
• An intense, broken encounter can light the flame of a dream of a lost paradisiacal
love. Some remain with their hearts stuck for their whole lives on that lost paradise¸
without ever being able to look their real or possible partner in the eye. This is a
common and powerful way for people to never leave the infancy of their heart.
• Authentic love of self is not something separate from love for others; nor can a true
love of others be separated from a love of self.
• Love for one’s own SELF necessarily pushes the I Person to open up to a You: and
together with the You it pushes to an opening up to an Us, and together with this Us
it pushes to an opening towards Others.
• The Choral SELF of a group is neither the sum total of the Personal SELVES that are a
part of it, nor is it a sort of common decalogue, but it is that same feeling of truth and
towards truth¸ that extends from the smallest difference to the greatest similarity.
• The Choral SELF is like a meeting point between many lighthouses that allows the
single person to see more, to feel more, to be able to do more within him or herself.
• Within the Choral SELF every Personal SELF is:
- confirmed in its value and its identity,
- clarified in its nature and in its polyhedricity,
- that blossoms in its richness and in its purpose,
- strengthened in its ability to make reparations and to create.
• The Group, capable of listening to the Choral SELF is:
- the best place for individuals to truly confront themselves and to face their
own darkest and hardest nuclei (the unreal image of themselves, the absolute
ideal, envy of creativity, arrogance, existential lie, unconscious hatred,
theomanic pride, manipulative victimism, fetal greed ...) without succumbing
to them ...
- a place that favors the creation of new evolutionary solutions, because of the
sharing of goals and feelings with others;
- an excellent place to comprehend the prismatic nature of the Personal SELF;
- an eminent place for developing the ability of co-presence between the I and
the You;
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 - a privileged place for the production and fruition of the power and
magnificence of secondary beauty .
• Just as in the art of sound, in the art of living there is the beauty and grace of the
soloist, and there is the beauty and warmth of the duet, and there is the beauty and
power of a chorus and an orchestra.
• One of the precious fruits of Cosmoartistic Anthropology is to make everyone more
definitively capable of building friendships, based not on the absence of diversity or
conflict, nor on simple attraction or affinity, but on the radical equality in the SELF, in
its multifaceted beauty and in its internal purpose.
Also between a guide and the person who has been assisted, if at the end of their
journey of growth a sincere and active friendship has not been created, it could be
that something has not worked well.

For the existence of a healthy aggressiveness, three conditions are therefore

necessary:
- It must not be a reaction, but an action. When it is simply a reaction to an
injustice, it is already a loss, because the simple response of anger or
complaint or protest would do nothing but confirm that greater strength of
those who acted first. Healthy aggressiveness, instead, requires that one acts
basing their actions on themselves, with a clear goal, a fully evaluated
initiative, a well thought out decision and a well prepared movement, first of all
within oneself.
- It also requires that one starts out already victorious, meaning that whoever
acts on healthy aggressiveness must be sure of what they are doing, having
already accomplished within a precise intention, an honest motivation and a
strong plan to carry it out. Paradoxically, healthy aggressiveness is not
victorious in the end result, but in the point of departure.
- When facing internal obstacles, healthy aggressiveness does not aim at
colliding with the other, but at an encounter. And it is exactly because what is
wanted is an encounter that one dares to contrast what is unhealthy or
unformed and that does not allow for the encounter.

• The most important, most difficult and most constant target for cosmoartistic
aggressiveness is always oneself, or rather that part of the I that wants to cultivate
and realize a fetal, theomanic, absolute, greedy and pretentious vision of itself.
• The kind of maturational perfection that Cosmoartistic Anthropology cultivates:
- includes the Paternal, the Castration, the Super-Ego, the Limit, and the
permanent Distance between desire and reality.
- Promotes a search for perfection, not a demand for it.
- A search for possible perfection (or rather subjectively and objectively possible
to accomplish), not just what is desirable.
- Includes the connection with the Personal SELF, with the Choral Group SELF
and with the Cosmic SELF.

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 - It grafts onto the universal law of growth: conservation of the past, affirmation
of the present, restructuring addition of the future in a gradual, partial and
continual way.
- It transforms desire (= absolute will) into will (= limited desire).
- It contemplates the possible existence of error and guilt, in both oneself and in
others.
- It foresees and accepts pain:
pain arising from error and guilt;
pain arising from reality’s limitations;
pain arising from the tribulations of evolutionary passages.
- It affirms the statute of plurality (through the introduction of the father as a
third party, besides just the mother).
- It contains the power of the transformation (and of the co-presence) of subjects
– objects of love into subjects-subjects of love.
- It is the way of practical delimitation and thus of concretization, or rather of the
only way towards truth fecundity (con-creteness = growth-with).

For Cosmoartistic Anthropology much joy is connected with the outpouring of

every form of absolute; and to go past an absolute is a task that lasts a lifetime.

• The guilt that Cosmoartistic Anthropology aims at digging out from within us is not
conscious guilt (which the religions address), nor is it judicial (that is crime), but
rather is unconscious guilt, which is made up of hatred. Hatred consists of homicidal
and suicidal urges, and its ultimate instigator is pride.
The situations of unconscious hatred that we guiltily cultivate within ourselves are
many and many are also unsuspecting: a will for revenge, for domination, arrogant
demands, sadomasochism, absolutes, greed, destructive envy, the existential lie,
victimism, self-denigration, strumentalization, centering on one’s fetal dimension...

• Forgiveness in Cosmoartistic Anthropology is not a simple act, nor is it a simple

gesture or something that happens quickly. As Antonio Mercurio says, it is “an
infinite story”.
Forgiveness has three directions:
- giving forgiveness
- forgiving oneself
- asking for forgiveness
The first is the most common, the second is the most important, and the third is the
most difficult.

There are many things that cannot be accomplished through individual or even group
psychotherapy. They can be accomplished only through other paths.

This is the case, for example, of the ability to give; of chorality; of the spirit of service; of
the feeling of unity of mind-heart, giving-receiving; of continual gratitude as a natural

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 state and of overcoming living life with a sense of entitlement; of no longer thinking of
oneself in terms of lack, of wounds, of resentment, of inferiority, of superiority; of seeing
whatever it is that hurts us as a push to look more closely within ourselves; of the ability
to truly perceive the beauty in every thing and every person; of the awareness that
nothing that happens to us is something we cannot handle; of seeing reality in its
newness in every moment; of feeling here and now that we are the living result of the
entire journey of the universe; of feeling how all of reality is concentrated and pulses in
the present instant; of feeling that the whole universe is our true body ...

We believe that all these elements, and others as well, strictly pertain to the
anthropological sphere, in the sense that without them, human beings cannot realize
themselves as truly human.

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 IN DEPTH EXPLORATION OF SPECIFIC TOPICS

Love in the couple relationship

The first and most important form of organismic totality where secondary beauty can be
created is the couple relationship.
For Cosmoartistic Anthropology the love in the couple relationship (be it an intimate
relationship or a friendship) is a necessary path; and, at the same time, it is the only path that
the individual can take where the cold of absolutes can be left behind and the warmth of
universal concordance can be embraced.
Cosmoartistic Anthropology does not consider love as coinciding with falling in love, which
has contents and functions that are different from love.
Falling in love is a feeling, love is a decision. The first serves to choose the I, the second
serves to touch a You. Falling in love is like the dawn, whereas love is like daytime. The first is
the vestibule, the second is the home. Falling in love represents the pleasure of finding; love is
the joy of giving.
The great majority of people, though, speak of love but they are really speaking of falling in
love, and they spend their whole lives looking to continuously fall in love.
These are people who want to avoid having to make the effort of going from falling in love to
love, but in doing so they deprive themselves of the preciousness of love.

• Falling in love is a movement of the psyche that precedes the spiritual dimension of
love. Essentially, falling in love is not a need to love, but is a need to be loved , and
not to be loved by just anyone, but by one’s idealized parent. In general, the stronger
one feels the feelings of falling in love as an adult, the more absent the parent was
during childhood. There are at least three types of falling in love:
- oceanic (or fetal) falling in love: this type reproduces during the falling in love
phase the situation that the fetus experiences when in the mother’s womb and
during the first months of extrauterine life: the partner does not have a life of
its own, but is a hallucination produced by falling in love that satisfies its
endless need (... you are my whole life; I cannot live without you);
- symbiotic (or pre-oedipal) falling in love: this is what reproduces in the falling
in love process the connection that the infant has with the mother up until it is
two years old: the partner is perceived as being painfully outside oneself, but
one tries to bend it to function as a part of and an extension of oneself (.... and
have the same desires, the same thoughts, tastes, interests);
- passionate falling in love (or Oedipal): this reproduces during the falling in love
phase the attraction the baby (from three-six years) has for the opposite sex
parent.
This is marvelous and intense love, but it is unattainable. Western culture
celebrates this type of love as a supreme emotional value: impossible love. It
fills one with yearning, not because it is a love that is realized, but because it
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 is desired. In fact, just as the parent can never be completely possessed by the
child, the loved person must never be completely obtainable: in this type of
love the obstacle is a necessary ritual, because it keeps nostalgia for an
enchanted world in place, and for this reason is the expression of fantasies of
desire.

• A mature love within a couple, instead, is one that can make the passage from:
love as a right to love as a gift;
love as a necessity to love as freedom;
love as a demand to love as a project;
love as symbiosis to love as concordance;
love as a projection of one’s I to love as recognition of the You;
love as a mirror to love as duality;
love as passion to love as a decision.

• The object of ideal love is very different from a positive object of love. The first is an
exciting and frustrating object (H. Guntrip); the second is a nourishing and
maturational object.
• Love within the couple is difficult because it forces the individual to accept real
limitations to its desires, it continually files down one’s absolutes and the incessant
appearance of a fetal viewpoint, that is egocentrical, of life.
This is why many avoid entering into a couple relationship, or else they leave one
when it is most important to remain.
• The intimacy that can fuse the I with the You is either always within one’s heart or
else there is no intimacy.
• The Choral SELF of the couple is the SELF of the two partners when they fuse to
realize harmony within their couple.
• Following are some examples of how the Choral SELF can be activated within the
couple:
Reciprocity: a real ability to give and to receive on both parts in such a way so that
it is not always one who is giving and one who is receiving.
Alternance: an ability to sometimes only give and sometimes only receive.
Divergence for a Convergence on a higher level: so as to create secondary beauty
with Penelope, Ulysses stays away from home for many years (see the Odyssey and
see “Amore e Persona” {Love and the Person} by Antonio Mercurio).
Retraction of one’s demands: when there is conflict with one’s partner, it is
important to immediately ask oneself: what are the demands I have that I must
renounce?
Objectivity: to see oneself and the other realistically, by reducing one’s projections,
one’s criticism, negation, splitting, idealization and delegations (... on the level of
thought).
Dealing with projections: “When it is obvious we have projected something on to the
other, it is important to have the humility to tell one’s partner which projection we
have acted out or imposed upon them, and, if possible, decide to ask them to forgive
us. If this is difficult to do in person, one can do so in writing. This is very important:

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 we cannot ask a ghost or a blank screen that is useful for our projections to forgive
us. We can only ask forgiveness from a Person whose otherness, dignity and
existence we are willing to recognize and show respect for” (A. Mercurio).
Transcendence: an ability to treat the other for what they are, and not as a part of
one’s own I, as an instrument of the I or as a response to the I (... on the level of
actions).
A promise of reciprocal help, to which we must refer to specifically when with
prideful will we prevaricate over the other so as to win a conflict.
Initiative: the action necessary to create secondary beauty must be taken on one’s
own part, without waiting for the other to make the first move.
Concreteness: it is a relationship that is not made up of desires, discussions or
interpretations, but of concrete actions.
Forgiveness: the decision to detach from one’s own hatred to be able to comunicate
without violence with the You that has offended us.
Ownership of one’s guilt: when one or both partners are culpable, the one who is
guilty must recognize their guilt and look only at their own guilt.
Giving: everything must be considered a gift: not a right, or a demand, nor an
obligation, or things taken for granted. If it is not a gift, there is ugliness. A gift is
freedom in secondary beauty.
Gratitude: every gift that is received must be recognized with explicit gratitude.
Pain as a narrow doorway: we cannot enter into secondary beauty without passing
through the narrow doorway of pain: the pain of many small and large deaths that we
must look at with wisdom and go through with art, or rather with the intention to
create something new.
Prayer to the SELF as the nursemaid of the I-You fusion: when there is conflict,
resentment, darkness, loneliness or fear either provoked by the You or by the I , or by
both or by life itself, we must ask the SELF that lives within us and within the
cosmos: “What is it that you want me to create?”. And the SELF, who speaks both
within us and from outside of us, will help us see with clarity, will help us pulsate
with its feelings, and will help us act with its strength.
“A cosmoartistic couple that is capable of creating secondary beauty requires an
immense transformation on every level of both partners, and it requires almost an
entire lifetime to accomplish the ascensional path that can bring about the fusion of
the I with the You, step by step. It is a life long project, not one that lasts for just the
period of falling in love”. (A. Mercurio).
Ulysses gave the name of GLORIOUS CONCORDANCE to this goal of the couple, when
he expressed to Nausicaa his wishes that she would be able to realize a couple where
there was a fusion of two wills opposed to each other, in a single will (see the Odyssey
and see A. Mercurio “Hypotheses on Ulysses”, published by the Solaris Institute of
the Sophia University of Rome, 2009).

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 Life is Feminine

The feminine principle in action

The masculine and feminine principles within the human being are two reflections of the
masculine and feminine principles of Life.
The feminine principle of Life can be intended as a principle that is the source of “being”, or
rather of the pleasure of the fact of being, the pleasure of bringing into being and the pleasure
of amplifying being.
For this reason, it is everything that gives existence and consistency, presence and co-
presence, value and convalidation, caring and continuity.
In other words, everything that favors being, expression, participation, cooperation and
growth.

Genetically and evolutionarily speaking, the female sex is the basic one, while the male sex
is an element that comes later, is derived from and functional to the female one.

If the feminine principle is a promotion of being, it is also the will to live and the joy of
living, the will and joy to value everything that exists, the will and joy to realize that which can
exist, the will and joy to create and to give gifts. It is the will and joy to serve life, even when
circumstances would seem to push in the opposite direction. As an example of this last
statement, only a woman is capable of loving and serving the fruit of her womb, when it has
been conceived through an infamous rape perpetrated by soldiers of a different ethnicity, that
have killed her husband, children and relatives and destroyed her home.

As far as the pleasure of being goes, the feminine principle is also beauty, harmony,
loveableness and grace.
This is why women, radically in direct contact with the feminine principle, are centers of
attraction and propulsion of sweetness and tenderness, warmth and trust, passion and
compassion, lightness and forgiveness. It is also the reason why a woman is interested in love
above all, in the sense that she is interested in relationship, in closeness, in concordance, in
corporality, in every type of sensititivity, in the body’s needs, in the soul’s suffering and in the
needs of the heart.

As far as being a source of being of the feminine principle she is also maternity, of which
physiological maternity is only one of the many possibilities.
This is why a woman is a mother because she is a woman (she is a carrier of the feminine
principle); she is not a woman because she is a mother. She generates because her feminine
principle is in of itself generosity.
If a woman is feminine, she can be a mother in many ways; while, if she is a physiological
mother but is not also feminine, she will be neither a good mother nor a happy woman: the
world is full of these mothers who are not women.

The masculine principle of Life, that Cosmoartistic Anthropology calls the Cosmic SELF and
the Personal SELF that is derived from it, is what aims the being of Life towards a certain goal,
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and organizes the energy, instruments and ways of carrying it out towards this specific
purpose.

Therefore, as we mentioned earlier, the masculine principle is functional to the feminine

principle; and in this sense, women have more power than men.
In fact, it is Life that creates the Cosmic SELF, and not viceversa.

These two principles are not two realities that are equal and complimentary in the sense
that they are two halves, but in the sense that they are two concentric realities, where the
feminine principle is in the center and the masculine one is a vortex that surrounds it and
carries it. The feminine principle is the substance, and the masculine principle is the direction;
the first is the motor of the plane, while the second is the wings and steering mechanism.

The feminine principle, in as far as it is a source of love for Life, is completely estranged to
war, to cruelty, to prevarication: these are realities that came into the world along with a
mistaken masculine principle, the male that 6,000-5,000 years ago wanted to emancipate
himself from the woman in the worst of ways, by dominating her and trying to substitute
himself for her. The theocratic religions that at that time began forming were nothing else but
the glorification of such sexist absolutism.

In these conditions, women have cultivated for a long time their devaluation and their envy
of men, their need for revenge and rivaliry, their silent power of manipulation, their need to
possess and to win.

But at the same time, the future of the world lies in her heart, or in the hands of the
feminine principle (when it is protected, supported and valued by the masculine principle).

Women therefore have within themselves the greatest values of Life and they do not need to
follow men and imitate their pseudo-values.
When women will feel their fullness within themselves, they will cease running around and
manipulating, complaining and serving, seducing and being servants.
By nourishing herself with the vital values that she – in her body, mind and spirit - is in
direct contact with, she will be able to help men stop being warriors and begin being heroes,
those who defend and spread the eros of Life.

Men, on their part, must become sensible to how precious the healthy feminine principle is
that is present within women and within themselves as well, by putting the lucidity, the
strength and courage of the masculine principle at the service and promotion of the pure
feminine element, by recognizing, organizing and channeling its continuous potential.

In this manner, society won’t have to “globalize” through the domination of one over many,
but through the concordance of all the realities that make it up; such guidance won’t be
extorted through the arrogance of strength, but will be turned over to those with the biggest
heart; life won’t be a battle to get more, but will be a cooperation in being: all beings, all
together.

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 The Cosmoartistic Concept of Life

In Cosmoartistic Anthropology, Life is written with a capital L and it corresponds to

everything that exists, that brings into existence and that can exist.
For this reason we cannot identify it with biological life, that is only a part of it (together
with quantum life, corpuscular life, atomic life, molecular life, plant life, psychological life,
spiritual life...). If we compare the different existing forms to the shape of a brick, a plate or an
amphora, Life would be like clay, without which those forms could not exist.

For this same reason Life doesn’t have a face, because all faces belong to it.

Therefore, Life is not only an external power that brings into existence everything that
exists, but it exists in what is in existence. In other words, it is found neither completely
outside existing reality (as the religious god is described as being), nor completely within it (as
the pantheists see it). Life is simultaneously immanent and transcendent: for this reason, it
comprises the dignity and preciousness of every thing that is here as well as the vastity and
mystery of all things that are beyond.

Since human beings are intelligent, free and creative, it stands to reason that Life, which
humans are only a part of, is intelligent, free and creative: the greater, in fact, cannot come
from the lesser. A child that is born is a human being exactly because it was generated by two
human beings and is then educated by them.
And since Life dwells in everything that exists, then every thing, from atoms to more
complex organisms, is a carrier of the intelligence, freedom and creativity of Life; in other
words, everythng is intelligent, free and creative. The differing quantity or quality of intelligence,
freedom and creativity of beings does not depend on the content of Life that is put into them,
but rather on the ability to contain them that they have depending on their specific structure.

Life has always existed and always will exist, before, during and after this universe,
expressing its infinite possibilities (= potential Life) in just as many infinitely possible concrete
realities (= Life in action).

The thousands of forms of concrete realities, then, are nothing more than the thousands of
parts of a living system (or rather of Life itself), which cannot but express itself as a living
organism, where:

- for a what is meant is a unitary complexity of meaning, action and purpose;

- for organism what is meant is a well-organized system into sub-systems (or
organs) that are cooperative and interdependent;
- for living what is meant is an intelligent, free and creative reality that exists at
different levels.

When we stand before the infinite potential and infinite dimensions of Life, we cannot but
remain speechless, overwhelmed by its mystery.

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 By mystery , however, we don’t mean the impossibility to know, which, for example, the
religions speak of.

The mystery of Life is not something that cannot be known. To the contrary, it is something
that is all too knowable; what we mean here is that our ability to know it is so vast that the
human mind can only grasp it by partial steps: the mystery of Life, in other words, does not
pertain to what is contained, but to the quality of the container.

The ways in which cosmic purpose unfolds are called the laws of Life in Cosmoartistic
Anthropology.

Some of these are as follows:

aggregation: evolution without aggregation does not exist; evolution has taken place in only
4% of the matter that has been able to aggregate;
organization: aggregation alone is not enough, it must be organized and harmonious: this is
why beauty is proof of truth;
complexity: the simple elements have power in the future only if they come in as
constitutional parts of a complex whole;
fusion: complexity comes about through fusion, which is a type of union that requires the
renunciation of a part of oneself;
contraction: every phase of expansion and irradiation follows a maximum ability of
concentration within oneself;
openness: an exchange with the environment is a necessity; isolated systems, or those that
are too rigid or closed don’t survive;
death-rebirth: stars, life and persons are always alive because they always die on some level
within themselves;
duality: protons and electrons, DNA and proteins, sperm and ovum, masculine principle
and feminine principle: the stage of birthing is always a duet; absolute solipsism does not exist
at any level of reality;
chorality: the parts, be they few or many, are not only harmoniously aggregated, but they
are reciprocally both active and receptive simultaneously;
equality: because every part is necessary to the whole;
error: often interior evolution is like biological evolution: there are errors, or rather a
wandering∗ in search of a better way; life evolves through trial and error;
transformation: this is not either a simple change nor a new equilibrium, but is rather an
amplifying of reality; for this reason well-being = more-being; this more being regards the fact
that we are the ones that must create it;
globality: life implicates all levels of reality; for this reason the person must realize all levels
of its being to have well-being, by subjectively activating its objective relationship with the
whole;

                                                            
∗
 translator’s note: errare in Italian = to wander, it shares its root with errore = error.  

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 unity: where did the universe begin? – Everywhere. Before the parts aggregate to form a new
whole, there is an original whole that generates the parts. Thus on a different level it is not that
the parts are born that then form the whole, but it is the whole that unfolds into its parts. For
this reason, all the things that exist are organs within a single great organism. Reflecting on the
concept of Life, on its structure, its purpose, its functions, its laws, is not an empty discussion
of world systems, but is a practical discussion of our present, that only exists because it is a
live cell inserted in the immense cosmic body.
Our small present is, in other words, possible and has meaning only because the great Life
system exists and has meaning.
Furthermore, stretching our gaze towards these horizons helps us to develop unified and
unifying thinking, which is an indispensable tool for realizing within ourselves an organismic
perception and a cosmic being, that are other terms for secondary beauty.
Unifying thought makes us experience and makes all beings experience how each one is
aware of all the others and all the others are aware of each one.
In this network, in fact, every thing is either a direct or indirect cause of everything else (=
con-causality), in this way every thing reaches all the others (= confluence), every thing works
for the proper functioning of the others (= confluence), every thing moves and is simultaneously
moved by all the others (= synchronicity).
Finally, since Life is not here or there, but is everywhere (only single things are either here
or there) and since the single things can exist only because they are vitally set within Life, it is
then justifiable to affirm that every being, including humans, are already everywhere.
Human beings are already everywhere (because they are connected, touched and nourished
by the everywhere of Life) and they will never be able to get away from their ubiquity.
If we think that Life is being, abundance, positivity, grace, gift, truth, freedom, love, beauty,
fullness ..., then the ubiquity of Life is not a cage that holds us prisoner, it is an open sea in
which we can joyously swim.

Secondary beauty as a possibly new emergent property of Life

All of existing reality, from elementary particles up to humans, is Life in action.

Life in action, or actualized, was produced by Life’s infinite potentiality and power as a
potential.
Temporal actualization of such potential came about through continual, successive
emergent properties.
Emergent properties do not involve all of reality, but only a part of it; therefore, while
some elements that emerge always remain the same, others, by aggregating in a certain way,
create new structures that have always greater levels of being and of power.
An emergent property can not be produced by only one element, but by the aggregation
of two or more elements, even if we can imagine that it is always one of them that first
promotes the process of aggregation.
The causality that is necessary to create an emergent property is not of a linear type
(first a stimulus and then a response), but is, rather, circular (more than one cause that
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simultaneously interact and are reciprocally dependent): this makes of every property that
emerges a system, a network, an organism.
An aggregation of constituent elements does not regard sympathetic elements (equal or
similar), but rather dystonic ones (opposite or different). The reason why opposing elements are
necessary lies in the fact that only they contain two complementary necessities of the whole
potential, and thus they are two elements that encourage growth.
The type of aggregation necessary for emergent properties does not happen through
conjunction (where the single elements remain whole), but through fusion (where the original
elements lose a part of themselves): the conjunction reinforces something that already exists,
where fusion creates something that did not exist before.
Fusion is not in relation to subjects, but rather to projects: in other words, fusion does
not mean that the subjects will disappear when the final product emerges, what disappears is
their preceding existential modalities that they must renounce.
The elements that aggregate must already be complete within themselves. This is true
because if one is not complete one cannot renounce something: one must have both legs to be
able to renounce taking a walk.
An emergent property can not be known before it has emerged, just as a mountain peak
can not be seen until it has been reached. What the constituent elements know beforehand is:
the by now insufficient arrangement of their situation; a possible opportunity within the
operation; the fact that other similar operations have been successful and have brought about
positive results.
Every property that has emerged brings certain qualities and a type of power that both
the existing Life system and the unified single elements did not have before, both within the
entire Life system and within the elements that produced it.
Since more cannot come from less , the new and greater power of the property that has
emerged cannot come from the constituent elements (either single or fused), but from the
potential Life through these elements.

On the other hand, not even potential Life can create an emergent property if some of its
existing elements don’t fuse together. Life, that is, does not create from nothing, but creates
from itself, or rather through parts of itself. Therefore, every emergent property is the result of a
conjunction of cosmic forces and of the forces of some of the already existing elements.

If, on one hand, the elements that aggregate are inferior to the emergent property they
produce in terms of their quality and their power, on the other, the property that emerges is
always inferior to the potential that cosmic Life has within itself, which pushes for and
nourishes all possible emergent properties. For this reason human beings, which are also an
emergent property, are superior to the other hominids that came before, but remain inferior to
cosmic Life, of which they will always only be children.
The creative motor of Life through emergent properties has moved forward also in our
human horizon, within which properties such as groups, couple relationships, the family,
religion, art, culture, civilization and spirituality have been created.

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 We must think that the same mechanism must be present not only for the creation of
emergent properties, but also for their maintenance; otherwise, the property that emerges could
not continue to exist. The same thing is true if we see an oasis in the desert: we must realize
that not only was it created in the past by subterranean waters, but it is fed by them also in the
present.
Cosmoartistic Anthropology looks at the fact that for millennia the aspiration for life after
death is a universal given (it has been present in all cultures and upon this aspiration beliefs,
myths and religions have been founded). It also recognizes that no human, in their most
intimate self, wishes to drop into an absolute void at their death, like a total annullment.
Therefore, it imagines and proposes to those who are interested the creation of immortal
beauty, and it hypothesizes that the capacity and the art of creating secondary beauty can be a
new emergent property of Life and thus of Humanity.

The aggregation through fusion of more than one element corrisponds to chorality; the
loss of an initial part corrisponds to the pain of the various deaths one must face; the opposing
elements indicate what a difficult task this is; the fact that one cannot know beforehand the
exact reality that will be found when the goal will be reached indicates how much courage, risk
and solitude the whole operation requires; the union between cosmic forces and the forces of
some existing elements is the same as the union between the Cosmic SELF and human beings
(in the Odyssey between Athena-Zeus and Ulysses).

We all know that trees have the precious task of creating oxygen, and that without
oxygen neither human life nor any other type of biological life could exist. Not everyone knows,
however, that three billion years ago the biosphere did not exist, and that it was the
cyanobacteria (blue alghe) that created, through photosynthesis, all the oxygen necessary to
create the biosphere (and the atmosphere). Each microscopic bacterium created a quantum of
oxygen and then it died, but the oxygen, once created, did not die. It kept accumulating more
and more until the biosphere was created, where now all living beings exist.
This primordial event helps us understand by analogy how to conceive of secondary
beauty. Every human being creates a quantum of beauty that once created no longer dies, if
they decide to become an artist of their life and not be a victim. The accumulation of the beauty
that is created throughout millennia of history can create a field of energy of immortal beauty
that A. Mercurio calls secondary beauty. This field of energy is not subject to gravity, as oxygen
is, and thus it can travel from one universe to another forever, along with those of us who have
created it.

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 Cosmoartistic Chorality

Life is a whole of parts, that affirms itself in the form of a system, or rather through a
harmonious organization of interactive elements. Its cooperative fusion generates continual
emergent properties, that recreate, enriching it, the entire system of origin.
The chorality of Life is taken as a model for human chorality in various sectors: the
instrumentalists of an orchestra in music; a team of players in sports; medical teams for
health; technical teams in science ... The choral activity of these groups produce the realization
of things that the single elements could not accomplish by themselves.

The existential type of chorality proposed by Cosmoartistic Anthropology is the will of a

number of self-sufficient people who decide to freely realize between them a form of life that is
relational, made up of truth, freedom and love, capable of producing within each one, among
them all and around the group an inextinguishable type of beauty, called secondary beauty.
If we think of global Life as a system (sun-istemi = staying together), this brings us to
consider our personal life as a system as well. This means that we should not consider it as
instinctual (en-istemi = something that stays within iself, on its own), or as a chance (=
something that happens without having looked for it), or as a necessity (something actuated
without freedom), or as static (= a reality deprived of creativity), or as nirvana (= the annullment
in the whole of parts of the constituent elements), or as destiny (a plan decided by external
forces).
The proposal of Cosmoartistic chorality is nothing more than another gear inserted into the
motor of Life’s chorality.
In fact, in terms of substantial chorality, Life can exist only as an immense network of co-
creating parts, since the whole cannot exist without multiple parts; however, at the same time
the parts that do not compliment each other within a cooperative whole have no evolutionary
future.
The fear of losing one’s individuality is the major block encountered in understanding,
accepting and participating in a chorality. Therefore it is necessary to have a clear idea about
the fact that the fusion necessary to produce the emergent properties of a chorality does not
require that the identities of the constituent elements disappear in the final product. Instead,
the ability of the parts to lose their convictions and behaviours that pertain to an absolute and
autistic singularity favors active and receptive reciprocity. The music of a choir does not mean
that the single voices dissolve in the choral music: the music could not even exist if the single
voices did not remain intact from the beginning to the end of the song. Choral music only
requires that every specific voice renounces its solipsism in favor of a collective harmony, whose
potent vibrations could never be accomplished by just a single voice.
Therefore, until there is this continually emergent whole of Life, what is continually needed
is parts who want to create a better future, by freely taking part in a new intelligent whole.
But the parts don’t exist unless they become parts. And since within Life we already exist
as parts, becoming a part means nothing other than beginning to express onself as a part, for
example by:
• thinking of oneself as a part (and not as all or as nothing)
• feeling that one is a part (and not feeling one is an isolated monad)

  72
 • acting as a part (and not with a closed, autarchic project, even if one feels it is
marvelous).

This triple modality of “being a part” is simultaneously the result of and a source for
unifying thought, of unifying feeling and unifying action, that all pertain to the existential artist
that is capable of cooperating in creating the emergent property of secondary beauty.
The whole that can produce quantums of secondary beauty is not one that tries to ammass
and englobe everything within itself, but rather one that pushes to express itself as an integral
and integrated part of the existing whole. This, in turn, can then vibrate completely within each
part, just like the vibration of a net whose general movement is completely felt by every knot
that is a part of it.
As far as Cosmoartistic Chorality goes, its specific intent is to create an immortal quality of
human life, because it is internally animated by the energy of an immortal type of beauty.
We can better understand such a proposal by looking at the analogy offered to us by the
execution of a symphonic work.
To realize the music of a symphony it is not enough to have just one orchestra member. It
takes many. Nor does it require a number of generic individuals, because what is needed is a
number of people who know how to play an instrument, and specific instruments at that. Nor is
it enough to gather a group of well assorted instrumentalists, because they also must all have
the will and the ability to play together, according to times, melodies, rhythms, pauses and
melodic interweavings within a single common work.
From these considerations we can extrapolate the four coordinates that make the chorality
for secondary beauty possible:
• a plurality of subjects
• that are endowed with specific personal abilities
• that they want and know how to contribute
to a common goal, which is useful to each one singularly but is not possible for
anyone to accomplish alone.
Going from the musical model to secondary beauty, it is evident that this cannot be created
by the ability or by the good will of an individual, nor by the desire and action of many.
Because it is not the subjects themselves, whether singularly or together, that create secondary
beauty, but chorality.
To produce secondary beauty what is necessary is:
• more than one person (more than one orchestra member)
• that have become capable of being already sufficiently subjects that are
ends unto themselves (= they know how to play a specific instrument)
• that want to and know how to harmonize among themselves as artists of
life (= they know how to play together)
• in view of a co-presence of life, made up of truth, love and freedom (= the
same piece of music).
In practical terms, Cosmoartistic chorality is the ability of more than one person, be they a
few or many, to first realize themselves as wholes, as being self-sufficient and specific, and then
to place this special wholeness as part of a whole that is greater and more organic, cultivating
among themselves a permanent dimension of truth, freedom and love. From this actualization
in them each time a state of being emerges that is made up of a quantum of secondary beauty,
  73
or of a quantum of just-ness, fullness, joy and strength that can be considered everlasting, or
subject to expansion, not cessation.

A person is choral every time they are faced with diversity or an opposite, and they promote
a change for the better in themselves or in the other or in both within an organismic reality. An
organismic or choral group is one where
- a group of people have welcomed each other and recognize
- they are necessary to each other
- in the sense that they intend to grow thanks to their reciprocal exchanges
- made up of true generosity and healthy aggressiveness
- in line with truth, freedom and love
- and tending to nurture a fusion of hearts
- that does not entail losing one’s individuality
- but rather strips one of every silly individualism, of every exagerated narcissism, of
every false Self and every form of arrogance,
- in light of a beauty to be created that is a fusion of pain, wisdom and art,
- made up of co-presence, of exactness, sharing and joy
- that are ever growing.
Because of all these components, Cosmoartistic Chorality is not only a source of secondary
beauty, but it is also a form of secondary beauty, thus it reveals itself as being another name for
secondary beauty.

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 Pain and Death

The meaning of pain.

There is no Cosmoartistic Anthropology if there is not an active confrontation of humanity

with pain and death, since before these two words there is no longer a shaking of the head or a
not knowing what to say.

Pain is anything that in any way interrupts the flow of wellbeing.

It is not mere coincidence that its etymology dar → dol {in Italian the word for pain is dolore
– translator’s note} indicates cutting, splitting, lacerating.

If for wellbeing we mean the pleasure that accompanies what Life has already realized, for
pain we can mean the affliction that accompanies every halt that Life must go through before it
finds a new evolutionary pathway.

This means two things: that Life, even though it has realized many things, is nevertheless
still limited and unfinished; and at the same time, that every insufficiency is not definitive, but
is in the process of being overcome.

If Life were only limited, pain would not exist: pain, in fact, reveals that Life looks for
something more, and that it thus “suffers” until it hasn’t produced it.

Therefore, wellbeing reveals what Life can create (Life either becoming or as potential).

Since Life as becoming is an essential part of Life, it would seem erroneous to think that
the purpose of our lives is wellbeing, just as it would be mistaken to say that the purpose of our
lives is only creative pain.

This is why Cosmoartistic Anthropology affirms that the purpose of Life consists in the
development of existential beauty, which contains the wellbeing of the properties that have
already been realized (the beauty of life), but also includes the pain for the realities not yet
created (secondary beauty).

Unfortunately, all of the West, at least, leans almost exclusively on the first affirmation, and
keeps any thought about and every form of pain far from its heart, along with all those people
who carry pain within themselves.

For many people, pain is a mortal enemy that destroys all their dreams, and thus it must
be fought against and stopped, as if it were a terrorist.

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The other bank of the river

For Cosmoartistic Anthropology, instead, pain is one of the banks of the river of Life.

Without banks, a river would lose its water.

Pain is, in other words, a part of Life. And if it is a part of Life, it cannot be against Life.

Let’s look at a simile: if an arm is part of the body, it cannot be against the rest of the body.

Naturally, if the relationship between pain and wellbeing is equal in terms of necessity, it is
not equal in terms of the objective to be reached. In other words, joy is the goal, and pain is the
path. Therefore we don’t look for and love pain in and of itself, as though it were a value (=
masochism), rather we go through it in view of a greater joy.

We must make it clear that joy obtained in this manner is not the commonly known joy
(that coincides with happiness or wellbeing or pleasure), which, as we said earlier, excludes
pain and fights against it. It is, rather, a type of joy that includes pain: this is the joy of
secondary beauty, that we could also call secondary joy.

Pain and religion

While the ancient religions accentuated the value of Life in action (= present life), today’s
monotheistic religions accentuate Life in becoming (= the hereafter).

This is why Cosmoartistic Anthropology distances itself from both the former and the latter.

Furthermore, the meaning attributed to pain in Cosmoartistic Anthropology is radically

different from the meaning attributed to it by the religions.

We can even say that up until now, this new meaning has not even been given by
philosophy or by science. But staying with the religions, and considering just Christianity
which is what gave the West its form, the presence of pain in the world is explained as an effect
of and a punishment for humanity’s sins. Therefore, if human beings want to free themselves
from sin, they must accept, tolerate and expiate the effects of sin through pain, which then
becomes an instrument of purification. In front of this way of thinking that is substantially
anthropomorphic and very mental, Cosmoartistic Anthropology more simply states that pain
expresses and reveals the incomplete and coarse part of Life, which in that particular area
laments because it has not yet managed to make a new vital organization emerge.

Types of pain

  76
 There is pain produced by the bad will of humans against their own lives or against that of
others (greed, hatred, revenge, war, injustice, pollution, abuse, absurd desires...) and there is a
pain that is part of Life, which on some or many levels is insufficient and therefore is evolving
(illnesses, lacks, aging, death...).

There is physical pain (= Corporeal I) and psychological pain (= Psychological I) that we can
call suffering, and there is true pain (= of the I Person) that can be existential (produced, that is,
by Life, for example the loss of loved ones) or moral (produced, that is, by the ill will of human
beings: guilt).

In Cosmoartistic Anthropology, the pain that pertains to Life must be gone through with art
and wisdom to produce an emergent property of secondary beauty; pain provoked by human
beings must be eliminated by transforming the heart of humans, which also in this type of
transformation can create secondary beauty.

All types of pain can therefore be utilized to create secondary beauty, which can thus spring
forth from the body, from the psyche, from the soul, from the heart and even from one’s guilt.

Pain is a cosmic force just like wisdom and art.

Cosmoartistic Anthropology asserts, instead, that pain is a true cosmic force. What it
intends to say here is that not only is it not an enemy of life, but it is, to the contrary, a
powerful and necessary resource, without which human beings cannot create for themselves or
for the universe any type of secondary beauty.

This is not to emphasize pain as a sort of reaction, but to point out the simple fact that to
produce a transformation that pertains not only to humans but also to cosmic life, an
equivalent cosmic force is necessary.

Humanity’s part in this (also necessary) consists of utilizing this force with art and wisdom,
just like someone who is sailing a sailboat does not create the wind, but knows how to use it
with art and wisdom so as to reach their destination.

For this reason secondary beauty is the result of two factors: the art of Humanity and the
force of Life.

Pain faced with art and wisdom.

Using art with pain means first of all not enduring it (neither as being defeated by it, nor as
victims, nor as masochists, nor as expiators), but to embrace it as part of our lives, thus also as
a carrier of words of life.

Embracing it means going through it and experiencing it not with anger, as one would
against an invader, but with the expectation that winter has as it prepares for the spring.

  77
 The waiting we are talking about is not passive, but rather is active, cooperative and
creative: it is the waiting of an artist before his raw materials.

Using wisdom means choosing to act like an artist and not like a victim when faced with
pain, and to know how to see the many powerful nuclei of strength found in pain, that are
indispensable for the creation of secondary beauty.

For example:

- pain makes it clear to us how things in life really are: what is important and what is not
so important, what is permanent and what is transitory, what is essential and what is
instrumental, what is real and what is insane;

- it helps us see where we stand exactly and what we must do, without being able to run
away from it;

- it obligates us to empty ourselves of everything that up until that time has been useful,
but that now has become a burden and makes us run the risk of falling into a dimension that
has no future. This happens both with regards to what we have (material goods) and what we
are (various ways of identifying with our knowledge, our roles, our works, our tasks, our image,
our activities...);

- with respect to our true essence it helps us identify what within us is still separated and
must be unified, and what opposites we yet must fuse within us;

- it activates and helps us become more sensitive to the heart, that only during the night
can make us become aware of how precious immaterial values are, which are normally
underestimated because they are invisible;

- it prepares us to make a leap, or better yet a flight, towards an even fuller identity, made
of “new skies and new lands”.

For this reason, those who are carrying pain within themselves, even though they are in
great need of love and caring, can give to those who are healthy something very important.

In such a perspective, if a healthy person approaches someone who is ill only in a spirit
of giving and not also in a spirit of receiving, they are worthy of praise, but they are not just.

Moreover, since those who suffer are on the most tiring and strategic front lines of Life,
not only must they be listened to with love, but they must also be approached with honor: the
honor of the spirit that renders precious those who give it and those who receive it.

Pain contains death, art transforms death into life and transforms a mortal form of life
into an immortal one.

Pain serves to create.

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 Creating does not mean creating something from nothing, but rather means making
something that does not yet exist emerge by utilizing all the art and wisdom we have both
inside of us and outside of us.

Pain allows for the creation of secondary beauty.

If we compare our lives to the life of a plant, only pain can make the flowers of primary
beauty fall so they can make way for the fruit of secondary beauty.

Wellbeing allows us to enjoy the mortal gifts we have found; pain makes us create immortal
gifts so we can enjoy them.

Every birth necessarily means experiencing pain.

Creative pain is different from masochistic pain.

Masochistic pain is what is considered a value, and as such it is experienced as both a

means and an end. And since it is a value, we also look for it and cultivate it.

Masochistic pain as an end unto itself is what is considered as a value. Some examples:

• victimistic heroism (to demonstrate one’s strength through suffering);

• self-affirming self-destruction (to demonstrate through painful protest that one is
right);
• vengeful self-dissolution (to make of one’s death an act of accusation).

Masochistic pain as a means is what is considered as an instrument to cultivate another

value. Some examples:

• purifying penitence as proposed by the religions (so as to clean one’s dirty

conscience);
• reconciliatory expiation (to go back to being pious and good in the eyes of those
we have offended);
• propitiatory sacrifice (to obtain something from those who are above us).

The creative pain described in Cosmoartistic Anthropology is, instead, neither an end unto
itself nor a means, but rather has to do with a factual end that must be faced.

And exactly because it contains an end, such pain is also a force that pushes towards and
allows for a new beginning; for example, the end of an asphalted road forces us to leave the car
and to find pathways to walk down.

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The pain of life and secondary beauty.

As we were saying, all the types of pain in life (connected to the body, to the psyche, to the
soul and to the heart) can produce secondary beauty.

The body: illness, physical disabilites, physical misfortunes..

This type of pain can push us to live, to love and to act with the image of a new corporeal
identity.

Psyche: traumas, lack of affection, disorders, difficulties ...

This type of pain can push us to live, to love and to act not longer according to a favorable
adult world, but thanks above all to the force of Life.

The soul: the loss of a part of our egoism (both in terms of what we have and what we are).

This type of pain can push us to live, to love and to act with what is left over of our I, that
is always greater than what it has managed to accomplish in the past.

The heart: a disintegration of one’s convictions of being the most, being first, of our self-
sufficiency, our visibility, our egoism.

This type of pain can finally push us to live, to love and to act as a part of a universal
chorality.

Pain produced by humanity’s evil and secondary beauty.

Even the type of pain that is provoked by human evil can be an opportunity to create
secondary beauty, when we decide to work towards eliminating it. Let’s take for an example
homicide.

Homicide causes a maximum amount of pain to another human being, who through death
loses the greatest gift of all, the gift of life.

But a homicide can also produce an enormous amount of pain in the killer who becomes
aware of what they have done.

In such cases, when a killer faces his own pain for the pain he has caused someone else, he
can discover the deeply ugly part of himself that must die, as well as the new part that must
emerge (see the movie “Mission”).

History is full of examples of incredible evolutionary pathways opened up by those who

were previously very destructive towards themselves and towards others. And without having to
look very far, when we see the suffering we provoke in our partners, or our friends, or our
neighbors, how deeply we can come into contact with our own hearts!

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Pain and death.

Exactly because pain brings along with it an end to what was before, it is also a death of a
previous identity.

For this reason, those who know how to go through pain with art and wisdom are those
who also know how to die (to many previous identifications).

And since biological death is an end, it is also painful: for this reason pain is a death and
death is pain.

And those who know how to go through one will also know how to go through the other.

We can imagine that during biological death (or corporal, as Francis of Assisi called it)
many forms of pain converge. But if we have been able to partially die every time it was
necessary for us to do so, we can hypothesize that even corporeal death can be a positive
experience (to the point where the same Francis of Assisi called it sister): in fact, the quality of
pain that is experienced during death is the same of the various previous deaths, even if the
quantity can be much greater.

The thing that physical death allows for that is different and substantial is an act of total
abandon to the infinite vastness of Life, which is therefore experienced, declared and loved as
something that is greater than death.

This act of abandon is not faith, but rather is certainty, since if the being of Life exists, the
nothingness of death cannot exist.

It is that complete abandonment to Life that defeats death and lights up immortality,
making those who experience it in this way custodian angels for those who remain.

In such a death, in fact, Life doesn’t die, the mortality of Life does, and this, in other words,
means Life is made immortal.

This type of conception, highly emphasized in the Christian Gospels, was already
understood several millennia ago during the farming civilization, since it was observable in
plants: “If a grain of wheat does not die, it won’t produce its fruit”. The grain of wheat has to
face death, but it does not die completely: only a part of it dies, the part that offers the first
form of nourishment to the new plant’s seedling, already present within the grain itself. That
seedling not only does not die, but it multiplies and becomes a shaft of wheat. One grain dies
and an entire shaft of grains is born from it.

Are we talking about wheat, or about humanity?

Cosmoartistic Anthropology and Intrauterine Life.

Cosmoartistic Anthropology places great importance on intrauterine life, which is seen as a

bridge between ante-cosmic life (the life that was conceived before the Big Bang; see Gregg

  81
Braden and his concept of the “divine matrix”) and intracosmic life (life that unfurls from birth
until death), and from this to ultracosmic life, that begins after death.

Let’s try to imagine what happens during the nine months of prenatal life: at an
unimaginable speed, the whole path of 13 billion years of cosmic evolution, including
everything that preceded the Big Bang, unfolds in what becomes a human being.

In front of this immense time without time, the historical path of a single human existence
seems like the simple bat of an eye.

And yet normally we imagine our lives in a completely opposite manner, in the sense that it
is as if first there is the little point of conception, that grows during gestation, and then
expands at birth, through childhood, on to adult life etc. This view corresponds to an upside
down pyramid, a pyramid that stands on its upper most point. The Cosmoartistic viewpoint
attempts to put this pyramid back on its feet, through a revisitation of intrauterine life. The
Fetal I was in charge of the intrauterine experience, and it was not only a passive receptacle of
cosmic history. It also actively put it in order according to its own needs and desires.

This is because the Fetal I is not a thing but is an I Person. In our daily lives, how many of
our visions, our reactions, our convictions and decisions, our behaviours, attitudes, ways of
being and goals actually reflect the urgency and the narrow viewpoint of the Fetal I Person,
instead of being in line with with Adult I Person?

The backwards pathway that we bring our I along so we can see and reason using the
objectivity, the vastness and the precious contributions of cosmic life can be called a
cosmoartistic bridge. Through this journey we learn to understand our past by looking at our
present, and, by freeing up the energies that were blocked in the past, we can create our future.

Secondary Beauty

What Antonio Mercurio calls secondary beauty is a quality of immortal life that human
beings, acting as existential artists, manage to create every time they express themselves or
welcome others as a part of an organismic whole made up of truth, freedom and love, even
when faced with pain or death. It is also created every time they manage to create a synthesis of
opposites within themselves, as happens for example in the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast”,
between love as possession and love as a gift.

The greatest source of pain and conflict within a couple or in the relationship between
parents and children can be attributed to the lack of such a synthesis. Few understand that
love and truth, or love and freedom (that are precious values that we cannot live without) are
values that, when taken together, are irreconcilable opposites. The ability to make a synthesis
between them is a true work of art.

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 Secondary beauty cannot be perceived with the senses, as natural beauty or artistic beauty
can, but rather it must be perceived with the heart, and with all one’s internal senses.

Speaking of art (that is impossible to define even though many have tried to do so), we want
to affirm that:

An artist is someone who is capable of changing the essence and the existence of the
material he or she works with, and manages to impress on the material a form of life that did
not exist before. Once created, this life doesn’t die, although it does remain confined within the
space-time of this universe.

A Cosmoartist is someone who, by following the path opened up by artists and by

artistically operating following the indications of Cosmo-Art, changes the essence and the
existence within him or herself and within others, and gives rise to a form of life, to an energy
field, that we call secondary beauty. Once created, it does not die because it is not subject
either to the laws of entropy or to universal gravity, and can thus leave this universe and travel
forever from one universe to another.

In this new form of art, called Cosmo-Art, artistic action is the ability to fuse together
cosmic and human forces. By cosmic forces we mean pain, wisdom and art. By human forces we
mean the forces and the decisions that the I activates so as to express itself as an artist of life
and not as a victim of it, an artist that is capable of creating within him or herself and within
others continual syntheses of opposites.

By human forces we also mean the constant will to search for truth, love, freedom and
personal and cosmic purpose. In any event in life it is not always easy to place oneself in a
cosmic perspective and be capable of looking beyond our own noses.

Truth, freedom and love must fuse within an organismic whole and not within a narcissistic
individuality.

• Expressing oneself as a part of life means affirming both the unique and
irreplaceable value of “oneself” and the more promising and enriching value of the “whole”.

Considering oneself a part also means, as said before, stopping considering oneself as all or
nothing, where renouncing feeling that we are all means breaking down every form of
absolutism and of theomanic pride, while renouncing feeling that we are nothing means
breaking down every form of self-depreciation and destructiveness.

• Considering the other as a part means humbly and gratefully recognizing the
specific importance of the other and their necessary contribution, with which reciprocal
friendship can be expressed because both co-creative parts are indispensible to the same
organismic purpose.

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 • The term other means anything that is “other than self”, and it refers to other
human beings, to all the other creatures on the earth as well as all the elements that make up
our universe.

• By organismic whole we mean a common organismic unit, made up of a plurality

of elements that are different or opposing that actively and receptively cooperate within a single
whole, having the same goals and also the same amplified power.

For this reason secondary beauty is a field of energy that is unified and that unifies, and
can only exist as an expression of an I that knows how to be plural and choral.

The smallest organismic unit is the couple formed by an I and a You; then there is the
choral group; finally there is cosmic chorality.

• Secondary beauty can be created a bit at a time, in quantums that are not
quantities external to the I , but are a quantity and a quality in the way the I itself exists. This
is why if that beauty is immortal, the I that produces it also becomes immortal.

• No work of art can be immortal if it does not first encounter death and transform
it into life. In the same manner, no secondary beauty can be considered immortal if it does not
do the same thing.

• By operating in this manner human beings can discover that pain can be the cry
of the effort we must make when giving birth, and that corporeal death can be an abandoning
of elements of the placenta that must be abandoned.

By transforming even pain and death into life, human beings create a beauty of life that will
never die: pain experienced in this manner ceases its reason for existing, or rather its being the
effort we make in birthing new creations, and death, as an end to Life’s mortality, becomes a
“door towards life” (A. Mercurio).

By affirming that secondary beauty is created by human beings, what we mean is: it is not
brought by someone outside of us; that it can be realized by an I while it is facing pain and
death, not beforehand or afterwards or without such an experience; and finally, that it can
blossom exactly because it grows from the terrain prepared by pain and especially by death.

Regarding this last point, when one affirms that life is greater than pain and death when
one is in good health, it is a thought; when, instead, those who are suffering or dying can
declare life is greater than pain and death, it is a creative act.

_________________________________________________________

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 OTHER BOOKS BY ANTONIO MERCURIO
 

AMORE E PERSONA {Love and the Person} * 

3° ed. Costellazione d’Arianna, Rome 1993 

TEORIA DELLA PERSONA {The Theory of the Person} 

2° ed. Costellazione di Arianna, Rome 1992 

AMORE LIBERTA’ E COLPA {Love, Freedom and Guilt} * 

2° ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2000 

LA VIE COMME OEUVRE D’ART {Life as a Work of Art} 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1988 

ANTROPOLOGIA ESISTENZIALE E METAPSICOLOGIA PERSONALISTICA ** 

{Theory of the Person and Existential Personalistic Anthropology }** 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1991 

TEORIA DELL’INCONSCIO ESISTENZIALE {The Theory of the Existential Unconscious} 

Ed. Costellazione d’Arianna Rome 1995 

LE LEGGI DELLA VITA {The Laws of Life} 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1995 

LA VITA COME OPERA D’ARTE   
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E LA VITA COME DONO SPIEGATA IN 41 FILM 

{Life as a Work of Art and Life as a Gift Explained in 41 films} 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1995 

GLI ULISSIDI – Il teorema e il mito per navigare da un universo all’altro        

{The Ulysseans – the theorem and the myth for navigating from one universe to another} **     

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1997 

LA SOPHIA‐ANALISI E L’EDIPO {Sophia‐Analysis and the Oedipal Phase} 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2000 

LA NASCITA DELLA COSMO‐ART {The Birth of Cosmo Art}  

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2000 

TEOREMI E ASSIOMI DELLA COSMO‐ART  {Theorems and Axioms of Cosmo‐Art}** 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2004 

IL MITO DI ULISSE    

E LA BELLEZZA SECONDA 

{The Myth of Ulysses and Secondary Beauty}** 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2005 

I LABORATORI CORALI DELLA COSMO‐ART {The Cosmo‐Art Group Laboratories} 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2006 

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La Vie Comme Oeuvre d’Art {Life as a Work of Art} 

Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1988 

* The books that have one asterisk are in the process of being translated into English.  

** Those with two asterisks have already been translated.  

     

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