The Age of Plenty and Leisure Essays For

The Age of Plenty, Leisure & Conscious Evolution:
Essays for a New Principle of Organization in Human Society
Luke R. Barnesmoore
UBC Urban Studies Lab
Department of Geography
University of British Columbia
Abstract: This working collection of essays problematizes biocentrist conceptions of

humanity and looks past the competitive, dominating mechanical evolution of humanity in
the Age of Scarcity and Labor to examine the potential for conscious evolution in an Age
of Plenty and Leisure. The collection interrogates issues of 'world view' along the
interrelated axes of scarcity vs. plenty, labor vs. leisure, mechanical vs. conscious evolution,
order as created in nature vs. order as implicit in nature, nature as a consumable other vs.
nature as a part of self to commune with, and, more generally, a vision of human-nature-
technology relations beyond the bio-materialist reductionism of the Modernist World(view)
of total work.
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Chapter 1: Intro/ Method, Do, Red, 1. Force.
Chapter 2: Geographical Thought/ Theory, Re, Orange, 2. Form.
Chapter 3: Philosophical Foundations, Mi, Yellow, 3. Consciousness.
Chapter 4: ‘Econ’, Fa, Green, 1. Body.
Chapter 5: AI & Robotics, So, Blue, 2. Mind.
Chapter 6: Order of Nature, La, Indigo, 3. Soul.
Chapter 7: Planning for a New Tomorrow, Violet, 4. Human.
Chapter 8: Completing the Octave, Do.
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Chapter 1:
Introduction/ Method
Contextualizing the Study

“The environmental crisis [of Modernism] requires not simply rhetoric or cosmetic solutions but a death and
rebirth of modern man and his worldview. Man need not be and in fact cannot be “reinvented” as some have
claimed, but he must be reborn…. …The world of nature must once again be conceived as it has always
been—a sacred realm reflecting the divine creative energies.”
-Nasr (1996, p. 6)
1
“The little that is won here (in metaphysics) weighs more than all that is won in all the other sciences.”
-Aristotle
“…There is that which distinction does not distinguish, there is that which explanation does not explain. What
is it? Sages take it to heart, average people try to explain it to each other. That is why it is said that there is
2
something not seen by explanation.”
“To know when nothing can be done and to be at peace with that, as if it were destiny, is something of which
3
only those with virtue are capable.”
-Zhuang Zi
“…[Daoist] Individualists, special people who were known to others but lived independently outside
conventional society.... Sometimes Taoist individualists… would participate in society, even in government, as
4
people who could bring an extra dimension of insight to bear on the problems of the time.”
-Thomas Cleary
“…Ecology, in the noblest sense of the word, is an inseparable part of mysticism.”
“Nature does not endeavor the mystify humanity, so it hides nothing from our view. Nature is the product of
universal laws at work and evolves in turn under its own laws. …For intelligent and enlightened minds they
become a basis for reflection, thus leading to thoughts of high philosophical import.
…A true sage considers the laws of nature to be the expression of Divinity… That is why, in the quest for
knowledge, the scope of science and that of mysticism are complementary. ”
“Our Earth must be thought of as a living being and as the vehicle for the collective soul of humanity.
Unfortunately, being ignorant of this fundamental truth and believing in our own sovereignty, humans have
inflicted great harm upon Earth, progressively deforming and disfiguring it, more often than not for unworthy

1
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Pieper (2009) Leisure, The Basis of Culture, p. 125
2
Zhuang Zi 1999, On Equalizing Things, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary,
Boston: Shambhala, p. 62
3
Zhuang Zi 1999, Tallying with Fulfillment of Virtue, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of
Thomas Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, p. 81
4
Thomas Cleary, The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary Volume One, Boston: Shambhala, p. 102.
3

reasons… We must… preserve the beauty of this planet, realizing that it is the Divine’s most precious gift to
us.”
-Unquotable Manuscript(s)
“Throughout much of the time since the establishment of the clockwork universe as the primary model of
reality, occultism has looked to science for ideas and analogies. This influence is one that science in turn
generally denies, because “Science” would prefer to believe that occultism is irrational. Instead, it would be
more correct to view Occultism as trans-rational: rationalism can easily be viewed as a useful system for
training the mind, even if rationalism, itself, is not capable of discerning the highest mysteries [which can only
be known in the silence of the intuition].
In fact, in following this line of reasoning, scientific discoveries have long been a source of inspiration to
occultists. I have already mentioned how the geological theories of catastrophism surely played a role in
th
Mackey’s conception of the dangers of pole shifts. Later in the [19 ] century, it was occultists who embraced
the Theory of Evolution, because the biological system was such a good analogy for the perceived spiritual
system.
The problem with embracing science in this way is that science changes. This shift was characterized
thoroughly by Thomas S. Kuhn in his landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Known now
as paradigm shifts, scientific theory exists in a slowly changing matrix of concepts. The problem is that most
people believe that the beliefs of their own time are Absolute Truth. Scientific theories also fall into this
belief. Consequently, when we examine Papus’ carefully wrought “science,” we may groan at some of the
anachronisms. Similarly, if more dangerously, the raging sexism and racism of so many of the occult works of
5
this period… reflect societal attitudes that nonetheless were enshrined as scientific “fact”...”
-J. Lee Lehman
“... The square in question is none other than the true sign of this place of delight known in our regions as the
Earthly Paradise; that is, that place of which all Nations have conceived the idea, which to each of them is
represented in the guise of fables and different allegories according to their wisdom, enlightenment, or
6
blindness, and which naïve geographers have simply sought to discover upon Earth.”
-Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
“An answer is valuable only in so far as it stimulates further inquiry. This holds true even in the exact sciences
where the hypothesis serves as a springboard for the searching mind. In a still higher degree it holds true in
the realm of philosophy where answers are merely fertile formulations of problems. “Let us know in order to
search,” says St. Augustine. The favorite answer of an age, however, is often one in which only a minimum of
problems is preserved and which has been promoted to its place as favorite because it seems to render
superfluous all further questioning. It closes all doors, blocks all ways, and just because of this permits the
7
agreeable feeling that the goal has been reached and that the rest is granted.”
-Martin Foss
“Reading good books is like having a conversation with the most distinguished [people] of past ages, namely
their authors—indeed, a carefully prepared conversation in which they reveal to us only the best of their
thoughts.... Conversing with people of past centuries is rather like travelling…. But if you spend too much
8
time travelling you will end up being a stranger in your own country.”

5
Papus, Astrology for Initiates, trans. J. Lee Lehman. Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach (1996) p. xiv-xv
6
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Des Erreurs et de la Verite (Of Errors and Truth).
7
Foss, Martin. Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience. Princeton University Press, 1949.
8
Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences,
(http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf) page 3
4

-Rene Descartes
“You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything
easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to
make something hard…. Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing
that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been, and
moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties
9
everywhere.”
-Søren Kierkegaard
10
"If you immediately know the candle light is fire then the meal was cooked along time ago."
-Oma
“Most of [the] problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstanding. Don’t ever
take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language, as we know it becomes obsolete.
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That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”
-Rumi
12
"Only that which has no history is definable".
-Fredric Nietzsche
“The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
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Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.”
-T.S.Eliot
“24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man,
which built his house upon a rock: 25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew,
and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every [(modernist)] that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a
foolish man, which built his house upon the [(sands of time)]: 27 And the rain descended, and the floods
came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”
-KJV Bible
“Now I would say that all ideas that have the power of altering us and letting new meaning into our lives are
about the invisible side of things and cannot be demonstrated directly or reached by reasoning alone. Because
they relate to the invisible side of things they are not approached by reasoning according to the evidence of

9
Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992) page 164-165
10
Stargate SG-1
11
http://www.amaana.org/ismaili/40-rules-of-love-shams-tabriz-rumis-teacher/
12
Nietzsche, F. (2009) Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Peter Gay eds. Random House Publishing Group. p. 516
13
T.S.Eliot (1934) The Rock
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the senses. Before coming to the idea of Time with which this book is chiefly concerned and which can only
be understood by getting away from appearances and by thinking about the ‘invisible world’ from the
standpoint of dimensions, we must make some effort the grasp the invisibility of ourselves. For I believe that
we never understand anything about the ‘invisible’ world if we do not grasp our own invisibility first.” 14
-Maurice Nicoll
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

15
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Oh, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!
16
'Tis new to thee.”
-Shakespeare
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
17
-Nietzsche (at least in attribution…)
“This book exists in a world that knows little of philosophy as it was originally understood—as a love of
wisdom, a live of what is… We are but [humans] who wonder, who seek to know for no other reason than the
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knowing itself.”
-James V. Schall
“Idealism and matter of fact are… not sundered, but inseparable, as our daily steps are guided by ideals of
19
direction.”
-Sir Patrick Geddes
“There is no “sovereign” right to destroy the earthly creation on which everyone depends for survival
20
(although such a right is exactly what each superpower now claims for itself).”
-Jonathan Schell
“The separation of what we might call the scientific from the humanistic, the Greek from the Hebrew, is not
even tenable at the beginning (say 2,500 years ago), so to speak. Nor is this separation possible in modern
times. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz found what we might call science and secular society upon theological
and religious foundations. Emile Durkheim’s [1915] (1965) Elementary Forms of the Religious Life is an
account of the scientific categories in terms of totemic religion. While the Ancient Greeks are variously

14
Maurice Nicoll, Living Time.
15
Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
16
Shakespeare, The Tempest.
17
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/06/05/dance-insane/
18
James Schall 2009, “Foreword”, In Josef Pieper (ed.) 2009, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 11.
19
Geddes SP 1915, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics, London, Williams
& Norgate. p. vii
20
Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth, New York: Alfred Knopf.
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appropriated by the social and natural sciences as their models of rationality and rhetoric, hardly anyone
refers to the Hebrews in this regard except to warn one of the pitfalls and errors of religion (as compared to
science). As a consequence and by indirection, planning has come to define itself within the realm of
Hellenism, a realm of philosophy and science and mathematics (although, again, we might well recall that the
21
Pythagoreans were serious and self-conscious mystics).”
-Martin Krieger
22
“One of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique.”
"What interests [me] in the "already said" is not established authority but rather the breadth and variety of
23
experience to be found there."
“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to
24
see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”
-Michel Foucault
“It was Proust who said "masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language." That is the same as
stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in one's own
tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one's own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and
25
the same language, without even a dialect or patois.” [Revolution is impossible if the language of revolution
does not evolve faster than it can be appropriated by the powers that be...]
-Giles Deleuze
“…The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of
prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately you
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would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.”
-Umberto Eco
“…For Darwin’s widely read narratives in the nineteenth century, many people in the twentieth century Euro-
centric west pay evolutionary physical anthropology the homage of their assumptions. What has been read
from fossils and simians becomes common sense, becomes the foundation of other stories in other fields
constituting what can count as experience [(i.e. it becomes part of one’s ontological regime(s). Evolutionary
theory is a form of imaginary history…. …Imaginary history is the stuff out of which experience becomes
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possible.”
“One man is black, the other white; they seem in perfect colleagueship, peering at the remains of a shared
past to establish the hope of a shared future. But the caption shatters that message: “Richard Leakey and
assistant in the field in Kenya.” Aristotle could have written the phrase; the master and his tool are in perfectly
harmonious relation, the one with a name, the other indicated by a function. It feels like a mere question of
syntax, surely not the stuff of global history? But syntax like this is precisely the stuff of the semiotics of

21
Krieger, Martin. 1995. “What Does Jerusalem Have to Do With Athens?: Roles for the Humanities in Planning”. Journal of Planning
Education and Research 14(3): pp. 217-221.
22
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 218
23
Foucault, M. History of Sexuality V.3 The Care of the Self. page 8.
24
Foucault 1982, The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language, A. M. Sheridan Smith (trans.), New York: Pantheon, p.
17.
25
Thousand Plateaus, page 98.
26
Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum. Page. 33
27
Primate Visions, p. 188
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master and slave, of the other who labors in the name of the one, the linguistic structure of the human
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story.”
-Haraway
“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,
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(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
-W alt W hitman
“…An exploitative, manipulative attitude to nature makes us sick and alienated from our ecological roots, just
as an exploitative, manipulative attitude to other people makes us sick in our human relationships. The new
biology of complexity and emergent properties shows just how limited and aberrant is a reductionist view of
30
life, and how inappropriate is a relationship to nature based on control and manipulation.”
-Brian Goodwin
Introduction? The First Iteration

th
As this collection of essays borders on its 144,000 word, a Philosophy has begun to
emerge from my Nomadic Explorations of pre-Modern Worldviews and associated
Philosophical (especially epistemological) regimes that we have explored to this point.
Worldview (theology, cosmology-ontology-teleology), it has become clear, articulates the
boundaries of potential Philosophy (epistemology-ethics-aesthetics-etc.) (Pieper 2009); our
basic assumptions about the nature and first cause of reality, whether the origin of Reality,
Truth, Goodness, Beauty, etc. lies in the manifest world of our biological existence or in an
unmanifest, infinite, eternal world that exists prior to the manifest world (prior in the sense
of prior to time-space rather than prior in a primordial moment of time-space, which is to
say prior without being old), articulates the potentials for our subsequent conceptions of
philosophical questions like ‘what is the nature of human epistemology’. As such, this
collection of essays began as a Nomadic Exploration of Worldview that sought to discover
a new Worldview that would create the potential for a Philosophy (especially an
epistemology) that could truly form the foundation for a revolution against Modernism.
What we found, however, is that such a Worldview already exists in Indigenous traditions
like that of the Daoists (Zhuang Zi XXXX; Lao Zi XXXX) and the Lakota (Herman 2008)
and, of course, in the infinite-eternal aspect of self that is the essence of the world we view
through our Worldview. As such, my writings will begin to shift away from a search for
understanding of the Modernist Worldview (the ‘world[view] of total work’ and its
associated ‘work epistemology’ [Pieper 2009]) and of pre-Modern Worldviews and towards
the cultivation of a new philosophy of human-nature relations and Geographical inquiry
from the roots of the Indigenous Worldview.

28
Ibid. 190
29
Whitman, W. (1986) “Song of Myself” Whitman, W., Leaves of Grass New York: Penguin p. 51.
30
Brian Goodwin 1999, From Control to Participation Via a Science of Qualities, Schumacher College
https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/learning-resources/from-control-to-participation-via-a-science-of-qualities
8

Human-nature relations, like Geographical inquiry, are envisioned as more than an
active process (as more than the Modernist process of humans acting upon nature, through
use of material reason, to create order out of presumed chaos and acting upon Geography,
through use of material reason, to create orders of knowledge). Human-Nature relations
are to be oriented towards a relationship in which, prior to our acting upon Nature through
use of rational action or effortless-intuitive action, Nature (and the essence of the IS-FFC to
be found in Nature) acts upon humanity. Geography, in a similar vein, will become a
process where, before we act to form an order of rational or effortless-intuitive knowledge
of relations between environment, thought, behavior and conception of being, we allow our
environment (in this case Nature and associated regimes of thought, behavior and
conception of being) is allowed to act upon us (to inscribe its essence upon our being).
Is this Geography? This question has haunted me for years, and while my answer has
always been a coy ‘Geography of Invisible Space’, I have finally been drawn by my
Nomadic Explorations to an understanding of Geography that is consonant with my state of
mind. Jim Glassman aptly framed much contemporary (post ‘critical turn’) Geographical
thought as a conflict of “Geography vs. Philosophy”, a framework that is dimensionally
incommensurable with my state of mind, but RDK Herman’s (2008) description of
“Geography as Philosophy” (when approached from the Indigenous Worldview) was
wholly resonant with my state of mind. When our natural environment, our Geography, is
understood as an expression of the interaction between the infinite (unmanifest) and finite
(manifest) worlds, and when we therefore understand our Geography as having an inherent
value (beyond and prior to the subjective) in and of its relationship with the infinite (in its
being an expression of the Infinite Substance and its emanations Force, Form and
Consciousness), then Geographical thought can also be understood as Philosophical
thought in that both are undertaken via the loving desire for wisdom.
“…‘Wisdom sits in places,’ that is, the way in which social and cultural knowledge and guidance—wisdom—is
based on experience. Because experience occurs in places, landscapes (and their stories and place names)
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can come to encode social and cultural knowledge. This [is a] notion of geography as philosophy….”
Nature, which still represents much of humanity’s lived environment despite the ravages of
Modernism and Urbanization therein, can thus be understood as a universal philosophy
teacher. Through nature we can experience a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic
reality that is Infinite Substance and its emanations Force, Form and Consciousness (IS-
FFC), the “world [as]… flows of energies (and sometimes entities) across a permeable
boundary between manifest and unmanifest realities” (Herman 2008), and in this
experience we can allow nature to act upon us and inscribe the residue of the IS-FFC (the
essential unmanifest reality) it contains upon our being. It is not that we cannot learn more
about nature through use of reason, or that what we have learned about nature through use
of reason within the Modernist worldview is irrelevant, but that the true value of nature as a
teacher comes not in its factual value as mediated by subjectivity but in the inherent value
(the resonance with IS-FFC) that is represented by (reflected in) these facts. Nature has an

31
RDK Herman 2008, “Reflections on the Importance of Indigenous Geography” p. 73
9

inherent value, but that inherent value comes in its relationship to the unmanifest world
rather than in an objective truth of and contained within the manifest world. Nature can act
as this great philosophical teacher when we transcend the limitations of reason and the
subjective mind and begin to feel the true, intrinsic value of nature that is derived from its
relationship to (reflection of) the infinite-eternal aspects of reality (i.e. when we get off of
the latter of reason and begin to climb the latter of intuition, which is to say when we fail to
reach the mountain top in the light of day [reason] and discover that we must travel through
to the roots of the dark interior of the mountain [intuition-feeling] to find the staircase that
leads to the top). Nature is finite, but in this finite expression we see force-matter
expressing itself through the infinite potential of form to create a vessel for consciousness—
the finite microcosm of Nature reflects the macrocosmic relations between force, form and
consciousness, and it is in this reflection that we lovingly search for wisdom (Philo Sophia).
We are pursuing a form of Geography, in short, that is not restricted to the world known
by analytic rationality or the values we impose upon it through our subjectivities—we are
pursuing Geography as Philosophy, Geography oriented towards developing experiential
knowledge of Geography’s inherent value (the inherent value of the landscapes of our lived
environment that is derived from its reflection of [relationship with] the IS-FFC).
Geographical-Philosophical Location of my Epistemological Development

This text is the utopian dream and dystopian nightmare of a California boy who came to
maturity in the Redwoods that lie on the fringe of the San Francisco Bay Area and its
Silicon Valley. The Redwoods are a dynamic borderland populated by both C-level
corporate executives and the milieu of hippies, mystics and ‘earth people’ who formed the
lifeblood of countercultural social movements in the 1960s. Utopian visions abound, from
dreams of a hi-tech, post-labor society that blurs the border between human and machine
to produce immortal cyborg demigods through dreams of a return to a simple and
harmonious relationship with the order of nature and the soul. The Redwoods are the
abode of dreams for a new tomorrow.
In the urban sprawl of the Bay Area that lies beyond the borders of the Redwoods
and a few wealthy urban enclaves in cities like San Francisco, where the plenty of the forest
gives way to the scarcity, competition and desire for hierarchical domination of the
concrete jungle and the poor and disenfranchised toil their lives away in a perpetual
struggle for survival, we come face to face with the dystopian underbelly of life beyond the
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forest of dreams. The utopian lives and dreams of the Redwoods reflect a coming age,
The Age of Plenty, Leisure and Conscious Evolution, where plenty-cooperation will
33
replace scarcity-competition as the organizing principle of our society’s ‘economic’
systems, the shackles of mechanical evolution will be thrown off and humanity will
complete its entrance into the process of conscious evolution where ideas, experiences and

32
While we make this seemingly binary divide between the forest and the urban sprawl for heuristic purposes that will become clear
through this text we do not mean to impose a totalizing binary and imply that there are no utopian dreams to be found in the urban
sprawl. There are fringes within the urban sprawl that are akin to the fringe formed by the forest in that the nomads who wander these
inter-urban fringes also dream of a better tomorrow for humanity.
33
By economics we mean the dimension of society that addresses the provision of food, water, shelter and other ‘material goods’.
10
34

philosophy will replace scarcity, competition and the concomitant desire for hierarchical
domination as the driving force of society.
“Mainstream academic philosophy has for a long time tried to answer these fundamental questions with that
part of the mind we call intellect. Frequently the difficulties encountered were so great, the logical tangles so
confusing, that many philosophers decided such questions were meaningless, and some even began to
ridicule anyone who dared ask "What is reality?" "What is the meaning of life?" "Is there life after death?"
"What is the soul?" "Does God exist?" Yet these are the questions of the heart. These are the questions that
matter most to people--not whether the syntax and deep structures of our language can ever truly represent
real knowledge. The meaningful questions, these " questions of the heart", rise up in human beings because of
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something intrinsic to our nature, an innate striving which Plato called Eros.”
Eros will replace the desire survival and domination as the driving force of human
existence in the coming age.
The world beyond the Redwoods, however, remains organized based on the
principles of the falling Age of Scarcity-Competition, Labor and Mechanical Evolution.
Society organized by these principles—scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical
domination—give way to dystopian scenes of mass homelessness, mental illness,
excruciating poverty, concomitant substance abuse and violence and, more generally, a
36
sometimes-hopeless sorrow. Those individuals, families and institutions whose power has
been derived from organization of society upon the principles of this falling age fight to
37
sustain this order of society through the production of scarcity-competition and repressive,
38
oppressive techniques of hierarchical domination —Donald Trump, with his ‘law and
order’ ethos, his strongman, ‘winner’ persona, his patriarchy, his white Christian nationalist
authoritarianism, etc., is the archetypal expression of this last, gasping attempt to stave off
humanity’s escape from a society organized by the principles of scarcity, competition and
domination.
The principles of the falling age have infected the dreams of a hi-tech utopia to
produce dystopian visions of a small elite class of cyborg-demigods who rule over (or purge
the world of…) the poor mass of humanity who cannot afford to pay for ‘deification’… In
response to this dystopian taint in mainstream hi-tech utopian visions, the utopian dreams
of the hippies, mystics and ‘earth people’ have increasingly turned to a vision in which
technology is by and large abandoned for a more simple, harmonious life in communion
with nature. Having grown up on the borders between the hi-tech utopian visions of Silicon
Valley and its forest colonizing executives and the no-tech or low-tech utopian dreams of
the forest people, this utopian dream attempts to synthesize the two worlds in a manner
that staves off the dystopian consequences of a hi-tech utopia conceived within the
Modernist ‘world view’. Technology, if utilized in a society organized upon the principle of
plenty-leisure-conscious evolution and a conception of nature as the expression of an

34
Philo Sophia, the love of and desire for wisdom.
35
Jacob Needleman, “Questions of the Heart: Inner Empiricism as a Way to a Science of Consciousness” Noetic Sciences Review,
Summer 1993.
36
Power in this context implies the capacity to dominate.
37
The root of the divide and conquer strategy is to create scarcity and impel competition over that which has been rendered scarce.
38
Think the power of the executioner-prince in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
11
39

eternal order , provides a clear path towards staving off scarcity and the need for physical
labor. Simple, harmonious and leisure communion with (rather than the laborious
consumption of) nature provides us with a mirror in which to contemplate the Self and
catalyze the process of conscious evolution. The two prongs of this utopian vision are
mutually constitutive in that if we are to utilize technology appropriately, we must first come
to know the principles of the coming age through contemplating Self in the mirror of
nature and in that high technology ought to be developed with the telos of cultivating,
accentuating and directing the existing order of nature towards fulfilling our goals rather
than the Modernist telos of dominating nature to produce an order that fulfills our goals.
Accepting technology as pure potential (an unformed latent force) and ideas as that which
gives form form to this pure potential force in the process of actualization (i.e. the move
from the latent, unformed, purely potential force of a technology to the actual uses of that
technology as formed by world view), we can see that the difference between utopian and
dystopian outcomes is mediated by the world view in which we use technology. The
increased ability of technology to transform our society (the increase in the latent,
unformed, purely potential force of technology) increases both the utopian and the
dystopian potentials of the society. The more power humanity has to influence reality, the
more potential we have to inflict our own perversions and privations upon the rest of
society. As the increased capacity of technology to transform reality allows for the potential
of increasingly utopian potential realities, so to does that increased capacity allow for the
potential of increasingly dystopian potential realities.
Indigenous Geography
Though Indigenous Mythology was a notable point of inspiration for my conceptions of
order as implicit in nature (rather than order as something to be created in the chaos of
nature through hierarchical domination), my intellectual trajectory through this life (and
others?) has more often drawn me to use the Daoism of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi and the
Confucianism of Meng Zi as signposts for reviving a worldview where order is implicit in
nature and hierarchical domination in relations with nature is often viewed as a cause of
privation rather than a necessary constituent of order (either necessary in being an attribute
of eternal order or necessary in creating order being rooted in practices of hierarchical
domination). The Nomadic Method stepped in. During the Fall of 2016 I spent a few
weeks renting an apartment from a couple who had been close friends with Walter Black
Elk (Grandpa) in his late years and had the opportunity to, among a range of inspirational
experiences, participate in the process of building a sweat lodge and participating in an awe-
inspiring Lakota Ceremony. Spring of 2017 I began communicating with Dr. Four Arrows
(AKA Don Jacobs), and during the Summer of 2017 I spent a couple days visiting Dr. Four
Arrows and learning about the Indigenous Worldview and human existence therein.
Through these experiences I began to see that the Indigenous Worldview already had
everything that my intuition had been drawing me towards—on the one hand order was
seen as implicit in nature, but the hierarchical domination that made me so averse to the

39
Rather than nature as a chaotic other that must be brought into order through hierarchical domination.
12

Paternalist tradition and its conception of nature’s sacred quality was nowhere to be found
in the Indigenous vision of nature as an expression of the infinite. The problematizations of
Paternalism found in Meng Zi’s (2A2) story of the Farmer from Song were not needed
because the Indigenous Worldview has not been colonized by the will to dominate. Order
is viewed as implicit in nature, and this conception of divine order does not include the will
to dominate that renders arborescence as hierarchy.
As Dr. Four Arrows and I explored the noosphere for articles that might help to tie
the philosophy and worldview that was emerging from my writings to the Indigenous
Worldview through use of Google’s Algorithms we discovered a 2008 article by RDK
Herman entitled “Reflections on the Importance of Indigenous Geographies.” Bingo! The
critique of the dialectical hegemony imposed upon Geographical thought by the essentially
materialistic ‘conflict’ between Positivism and Postmodernism that I had spent so many
months trying to put into words was expressed perfectly. First off, Herman (2008) argues
that Geography should be considered Philosophy in of the ability for social and cultural
knowledge and guidance (i.e. wisdom) to become encoded in place—in landscapes and the
40
stories and names ascribed to them. In the Indigenous Worldview, as Four Arrows
continuously illustrated to me, Geography is Philosophy. Herman (2008) goes on to argue
that this Philosophical potential of Geography is negated by the disenchanted, materialistic
rationality of that has risen from the Modernist Worldview and the division of the ‘magical’
and the ‘superhuman’ from exoteric religious practice in the Reformation and subsequent
(anti)Enlightenment,
“‘Wisdom sits in places,’ that is, the way in which social and cultural knowledge and guidance—wisdom—is
can come to encode social and cultural knowledge. This notion of geography as philosophy would not have
been foreign to the ancient Greeks to whom the discipline is often traced, but geography today, with some
notable exceptions, is only slowly returning to the quest for wisdom. As an academic discipline, geography
must struggle against the limitations of the larger (post) modern episteme within which it is situated. A
genuine engagement with Indigenous geography may open a pathway out of this fix
What I call ‘modern geography’—meaning the Anglophone geography that has emerged during the
past two centuries with influence from France and Germany—grew as both a tool and a product of the
colonial era. The discipline helped map out the civilized and the uncivilized and the place of each in a world
of empires. Its scholars at times justified territorial expansion with hints at world domination, laid out
"scientific" justifications for racial inequality, or provided the technical tools and know-how for conquest and
colonial rule. In the process, Western notions of geography—of space, time, and human environment
relations—were imposed on the rest of the world. The hegemonic power of the resulting modernist worldview
continues to perpetuate in part through its intimate relationship with global capitalism. It is important to bear
in mind that what is now held forth as a ‘rational’ worldview has its roots in a European culture war—the
Reformation. Although this worldview is accepted as common sense today, it embodies a distinct ideology
41
that enabled the colonization of the world and the commodification of nature.”
In short, Herman (2008) identifies the ‘(post) modern episteme’, an epistemological regime
that spans the seeming divide between positivism and postmodernism, as the fundamental

40
This comes in stark contrast to the anti-philosophical norms of the contemporary geographical academy so aptly phrased by Dr. Jim
Glassman as a conflict of Geography vs. Philosophy.
41
RDK Herman 2008, “Reflections on the Importance of Indigenous Geography”, American Indian Culture and Research Journal
32(3), p. 73.
13

limitation of contemporary Geography. It is from this revelation, which we admittedly had
prior to reading Herman’s article, that much of this text moves—to transcend the dire
problems facing humanity we must first transcend the worldview and associated
epistemology that led us into these problems. We cannot decolonize the world with
essentially colonial (i.e. materialistic) modes thought (whether they call themselves
anti/post-colonial or not…). We cannot stave off destruction of the natural world without
first transcending the worldview and associated epistemological regimes that led us to
devastate the natural world in the first place. We cannot design truly revolutionary practices
without first having a revolution of the mind.
“To consider Indigenous geography on its own terms requires first that we destabilize and displace the edifice
of "rationality" on which modern geography rests. This is an enormous project, but we can start with a specific
target: what Max Weber called "the disenchantment of the world" that took place after the Reformation. This
movement, seen as essential for rationalizing Christianity away from "superstitions" and the "magical" elements
of Catholicism, resulted in far greater epistemological consequences. Although the Reformation did not
succeed in these goals, by the nineteenth century the steady push toward "rationality" that came with the
Enlightenment—plus the impacts of Descartes, Darwin, and the power of capitalism—ultimately succeeded in
the disenchantment described by Weber, Adorno, and others. Surprisingly—or not—this enormous shift
receives little or no attention in contemporary histories of geography, leaving this shift invisible. Our
inability—or unwillingness—to recognize that the dominant, disenchanted worldview is the result of specific
historical and cultural forces and not a natural product of "rationality" prevents us from looking beyond the
severe limits that worldview prescribes. These epistemological blinders border on ideology and pose an
enormous obstacle for geography.
For geographic thought there are three important effects of this disenchantment. The first is the
removal of any "spiritual" aspect to the world—that is, a reduction of the world into pure mechanistic
materiality on the one hand and the mental realm of human consciousness on the other. This is where the
term disenchantment comes from. Second, and related, is that by rendering nature as mechanistic, it loses
any intrinsic values: values come to exist in the mind, not in the world. Third, this bifurcation of humanity
and nature poses a conceptual distance and detachment that allows for the commodification of the material
42
world… “
Put into the language developed in this text, the reduction of reality to passing time and
physical space that typifies the Modernist worldview divides the natural world (and
humanity…) from the infinite aspect of reality (Infinite Substance and its emanations Force,
Form and Consciousness, IS-FFC) that gives them intrinsic meaning. As a result, meaning
and value are either created by bringing facts into order though hierarchical domination via
enumeration, categorization, etc. (Positivism) or created purely by human subjectivities
(Postmodernism)—there is no infinite (or thus eternal) truth in the Modernist worldview,
and as a result Geography can have no inherent meaning or value. It is this process of
striping the implicit truth from nature (of stripping nature of its ‘intrinsic values’) that strips
nature of its potential act as temple for leisurely contemplation, for it is precisely the
intrinsic relationship between nature and Truth that allows it to act as temple. Geography is
Philosophical in of the inscription of IS-FFC upon nature, upon the geo/biospheres of our
lived environment, and so to divide nature from this implicit value is to negate the potential
for Geography to be Philosophical. We can no longer knowingly cultivate intimacy with the

42
32(3), p. 74.
14

infinite through communion with nature because nature is no longer understood as an
expression of the infinite with an inherent value derived from that relationship to the
infinite.
“Despite the discipline's eager genealogical linking-up with the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, geography
has become largely either a critical or a utilitarian discipline. Geography has, over the past several decades,
struggled for meaning and social relevancy. Especially since the 1960s, the turn by some geographers toward
Marxism, humanism, and feminism has opened avenues of resistance to the oppressive crush of modern
capitalism on geographic thought. Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph elaborated the importance of meaning
found in places and were influential in spurring a new humanistic geography in the 1970s, but such work lies
on the outskirts of the discipline today.
The critical turn in geography since the early 1990s has moved the discipline powerfully forward in
critiquing the power relations in knowledge and representation as well as in spaces and places. In the manner
that Habermas posed "critical" as "liberating," such work seeks to free us from those power relations by
exposing them, empowering us through knowledge if not giving us clear paths of resistance. Feminism, critical
race studies, and whiteness studies have done much to destabilize the taken-for-granted hegemonic stance and
push geography toward genuine engagement with other viewpoints. The overall assumptions of modern
rationality remain largely intact, and even geographers doing "postcolonial" studies remain largely unwilling to
step out of their epistemological frameworks for a moment and consider different ways of understanding the
world. Geographers engage readily with Foucault, Deleuze, and Hegel but not with Vine Deloria Jr. The
colonial mentality holds: the modern worldview is ‘real’ even if it is socially constructed; other worldviews are
not. Thus the critical turn has yet to decolonize the discipline truly and still leaves us in a disenchanted world
43
without inherent values.”
Underneath the seeming conflict between Positivism and Postmodernism lies a

materialistic worldview and associated rationally reductive epistemology, the world(view) of
total work and the work epistemology (Pieper 2009), and as a result most attempts at
decolonization have actually rendered a colonizing outcome in their normalization (i.e.
rendering as banally silent) of the materially rationalist worldview. Post-Colonial Theory is
often the Most-Colonial Theory in purporting to be anti-colonial while actually
perpetuating a the Colonial Worldview and its associated epistemology. Postmodern
Theory is actually the Most-Modern Theory in denying the existence of essence, Truth,
eternity, infinity, etc. altogether rather than simply perverting these ideas as was done by
Positivism and in claiming to be anti-Modern while actually representing the apex of
Modernist materialism in the denial of essence, Truth, eternity, infinity, etc. Most-Modern
Theory, like Most-Colonial Theory, are actually the apex of the materialist, rationalist
worldview that was birthed from the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the process of
Disenchanted Modernism that ensued because, though they admittedly provide an apt
critique of the notions of objectivity surrounding Positivist epistemologies (i.e. they aptly
problematize axiomatic attempts to render the subjective as objective), they castigate the
spiritual dimensions of reality to the sphere of madness, irrationality, superstition, illusion,
unreality, etc. Communism and Capitalism are intimately linked in the fact that they both
served as engines of materialistic colonialism, in the fact that they both served to strip the
societies they infected of their sacred, spiritual dimensions and to reduce human being to a
bio-material phenomenon therein, and Modernism-Post(Most)modernism or Colonialism-

43
32(3), p. 76.
15

Post(Most)Colonialism hold a similar relationship—be it Positivism or Most-modernism, be
it attempts at rendering the subjective objective or attempts at reducing reality to the
subjective and denying Truth altogether, the end result is a worldview, philosophy,
epistemology, society, individual subject, etc. that has been divorced from the Infinite
Substance and its emanations Force, Form and Consciousness (what the Lakota call
Wakan Tanka, ‘the great mystery’).
To revolt against Modernism and its many injustices, to decolonize both our
society and ourselves, we must go beyond treatment of the symptoms of colonialism and
imperialism to treatment of the worldview and associated epistemologies that both made
colonialism and imperialism possible and were themselves made by colonialism and
imperialism. We must have a critical turn that challenges Positivism by reasserting the
dimensional incommensurability of Infinite Truth and our subjective interpretations of
finite facts without denying the existence of Infinite Truth altogether and therefore stripping
manifestation of its intrinsic meaning-value. We must have a critical turn that combats
Positivism without succumbing to its reduction of reality to force and sliding into nihilism.
We must have a Indigenous (re)turn to a worldview, philosophy and associated
epistemology that recognizes the subjective limitations of rationalist (active, analytic)
conceptions of Truth without denying the existence of Truth and Infinite aspect of reality
of which Truth is an aspect.
We must combat Positivism without loosing our spirituality (i.e. without loosing the
connection to the Infinite and its Truth, Goodness, Beauty, etc. that is facilitated by the
eternal aspect of our being), and we must retain our spirituality without falling into the will
to dominate of the Paternalist Tradition. We must liberate the moon (intuition) from the
sun (reason), the passive (leisurely) from the active (laborious), blue from the red, Iphicles
from Hercules, Able from Cain, Remus from Romulus, etc. We must put an end to the
Paternalist mythos, wherein the intuitive, emotive, instinctual, contemplative, etc. aspects of
human being are dominated (slain) by the herculean labors of the light of reason, but we
must do so in a manner that does not strip the intuitive, emotive, instinctual, contemplative,
etc. aspects of human being of their relationship to the IS-FFC. We must revive the
intuitive, contemplative, emotive, etc. dimensions of human existence, but we must do so
without denying their relationship to Truth, reducing them to the subjective and thereby
accepting the material rationalism of the Colonial Modernist project we purport to
challenge…
“In Indigenous sciences, the world is often understood in terms of flows of energies (and sometimes entities)
across a permeable boundary between manifest and unmanifest realities. Working relationships with forces
deemed ‘superstitious’ or ‘irrational’ in modern science are significant aspects of social processes and healing
practices. Maintaining these worldviews and practices is an uphill battle against the hegemony of modern
scientific thought and the legacy of missionaries and educators who tried so hard to dismantle Indigenous
knowledge systems. Even among scientists today, those who try to work outside the mechanistic paradigm in
ways that approach Indigenous science are denounced as crackpots.
Indigenous sciences are not dead yet and may still offer vibrant worldviews in which human life
exists in an environment of meaning. Modern meaninglessness has been attributed in part to the growth of
rationality in modern society and the assumption that there is a necessary tension between rationality and
transcendent meaning. When the manifest and unmanifest worlds interpenetrate, as they did in premodern
European thought and as they do in many Indigenous worldviews, then activity and occurrences in the world
16

are potent with meaning. Weber felt that in modernity, ‘as intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the
world's processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and
44
‘happen' but no longer signify anything.’”
We must save the moon (intuition, the intellectus) from its subsumption by the sun
(reason, the ratio), but we must do so in a manner that does not divide the moon from its
True (as opposed to subjective) relationship with unmanifest realities. We must revive the
role of instinct, feeling, intuition, etc. in the human epistemological process in and the
potential relationship instinct, feeling, intuition, etc. hold with the unmanifest reality of the
IS_FFC (which is more rather than less real in of their eternal dimensional quality and lack
of the motion, change, difference, etc. of manifestation), with Wakan Tanka. We must
understand our Geography and the natural world in of their signification of the Eternal
Truth of the Infinite and through use of both the sun (to act upon, reason) and the moon
(to be acted upon, intuition).

44
32(3), p. 75.
17

45
As should be clear, this perspective does not argue that reason should be abandoned and
the truly superstitious should be pursued. On the contrary,
“There is such a thing as superstition, and it should be avoided through rational thought. This includes the
belief in humanity as the sole conscious species on the planet and the bifurcation between humanity and

45
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yin_yang.svg
“Taiji is sometimes referred to as the 'supreme polarity' (the dance of polarities, yin and yang, from the cellular to the galactic level and
beyond, which is the expression of the Infinite in form, time and space), whereas Wuji is the 'supreme non-polarity' (no inside, no
outside, no time, no space). I would also say that Wuji could be called 'Infinite Being' or 'Infinite Awareness'. I would say 'Infinite non-
being' only applies to Wuji if referring to the non-being in regard to form... not awareness, as Awareness / Spirit / Being / Presence /
Wuji, whatever one wants to call it, is ever-present, and ever-existent, and one could say is also the essence of all manifest form. This
understanding is also reflected in the Taiji symbol... the empty circle symbolizes the non-dual Wuji, and the dance of polarities (yin and
yang, is expressed as happening within Wuji, and as an expression of Wuji... hence the symbol represents a complete wholeness. Just
like the ocean and its waves... the waves are distinct in themselves, albeit ever-changing, though they are at the same time part of a greater
wholeness as an expression of the ocean, which is not coming and going.” –Ben Dineen
18

nature, as much as it does the fear of black cats or walking under ladders. The failure of modern industrial
society to engage with the world as a meaningful place results in a sort of philosophical hydroponics wherein
people search for meaning in the detached sphere of ungrounded ideas, while the physical world is treated
carelessly as a meaningless container for human life. It is because of the resulting social and environmental ills
that I call this ‘rationality,’ because the truly rational would see the folly of this and look toward a deeper,
46
more holistic understanding of the world.”
We are not denying the importance of the sun (reason), for without its light there can be no
life or love, but we are (like most pre-Modern Philosophers and Theologians from the
many cultures still remembered in Modernity) denying that one can come to know reality
in a holistic manner through recourse to the sun alone. We are not denying that reason is
essential for understanding the manifest world, but denying that the manifest world is the
only aspect of reality. Consciousness may be expressed through the material vessels of
manifestation, but it is not caused by or contained within manifestation. We can only come
to know colors using our eyes, and so who would denigrate the importance of the eye, but
to know sound we need ears, to know smell we need a nose; in the same form, we can only
come to know the world of manifestation through use of reason (the sun), but to know the
unmanifest world we need the intuition (the moon). Accepting this premise, the question
then (as we have already seen) becomes whether the unmanifest is real in and of itself (if it
has Truth, meaning, value, etc. in and of itself) or whether the unmanifest is, as the
Modernist worldview posits, a purely subjective creation with no reality in and of itself (no
Truth, meaning, value, etc. in and of itself). It is not enough to remember the moon and
the unmanifest realities to be known therein—we must remember that the moon and the
unmanifest world are more real (i.e. more intimately linked with the Infinite-Eternal) than
the sun and the manifest world (which in their change, motion, difference, etc. are less
intimately linked to the Infinite-Eternal), and then we must transcend this seeming duality
to see that the sun and the moon (the manifest and the unmanifest) are in Truth 1 rather
than 2. The unmanifest is more real than the manifest, but at the same time the unmanifest
and the manifest are a single, constitutive reality. We must hold both the finite and the
47
infinite perspectives without either one interfering with the other.
Nomadic Exploration of Those Who Have Not Succumbed
“…Many people still live in Indigenous and semimodernized societies in which older traditions still hold
against the tides of capitalism and modernization. Part of the importance of Indigenous geography is in
looking to (or, looking through) societies in which other value systems and integrated worldviews are still
operational. Rather than forcing moribund modernity on the rest of the world, perhaps we can learn from
48
those who have not yet fully succumbed.”

46
32(3), p. 75.
47
Zhuang Zi
48
32(3), p. 75-76.
19

Nature and the Modernist Worldview
“The separation of humanity from nature follows from the bifurcation of the world into mind and matter. It is
an essential condition of capitalism that nature loses its animation and becomes mere raw material for
industrialization. This commodification could not go forward as long as nature was understood and
experienced as being part of the extended community imbued with consciousness. The Lakota notion of "All
my relatives" [Mitakuye Oyasin] is not a concept that jibes with capitalism….
Inasmuch as Indigenous worldviews are not disenchanted, humanity and nature remain interrelated
to greater or lesser extents. Gregory Cajete states that Native science is about mutual reciprocity, ‘a give-and-
take relationship with the natural world, and which presupposes a responsibility to care for, sustain, and
respect the rights of other living things, plants, animals, and the place in which one lives.’ Similarly, Vine
Deloria Jr. wrote of Indian metaphysics as ‘the realization that the world, and all its possible experiences,
constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing
49
relationships because, ultimately, everything was related. This world was a unified world.’”
Be it nature or humans, the first step of othering and legitimating domination (dominion)
comes in stripping the other of its consciousness. The manifest world, the geosphere and
the biosphere, became possible in the moment that they were stripped of their
consciousness. It was in the moment that stone friends, river friends, tree friends, animal
friends and the like where stripped of consciousness (and thereby of their innate kinship
with each other and with ourselves) that it became possible to render them into the
hierarchies of domination that typify Modernist ‘order’ (which actually breeds chaos…). It
was the moment at which the manifest world was stripped of its intimacy with the
unmanifest world, which is facilitated by the consciousness of all things, that it became
possible to see the manifest world as a chaotic other that must be brought into order
through hierarchical domination. The first step towards fostering new human-nature
relations, relations wherein nature is viewed as an aspect of self that acts as a temple for
communion with the IS-FFC rather than as a chaotic other that is acted upon to bring it
into a consumable order, must be remembering that the natural world (of which we are but
a part) is imbued with the very same consciousness as we are. We must view nature as an
aspect of self that has the capacity to consciously act upon us before we can develop a
society wherein nature treated as a temple where the essence of things (the IS-FFC) can
inscribe itself upon our being through the process of leisurely contemplation. New
practices of human-nature relations must be preceded by a new theory of nature.
Transition from Paternalism to Modernism in Negative and Positive Terms

The transition from the Paternalism of the Abrahamic traditions to the Modernism of
contemporary thought can be understood in negative terms as the disenchantment of the
world. (Herman 2008) Reality was reduced to passing time and physical space, to the
manifest world, and consciousness and inherent value—derived from the relationship
between the manifest world and the unmanifest world—were thus stripped from the
manifest world. Consciousness was reduced to being caused by and contained within the
manifest world. The demarcation of self and other was rendered as distinct, totalizing and

49
32(3), p. 76.
20

permanent. Nature—especially a-biotic aspects of nature like stones, mountains and rivers—
was stripped of consciousness and inherent value altogether and thereby reduced to a dead,
mechanical husk to be acted upon by man. Human epistemological potential and Truth
(where it is not outright denied as in the Post[Most]modern tradition) were reduced to
material reason, which is to say to the aspect of mind oriented towards the manifest world.
These negative terms of the transition from Paternalism to Modernism are easily accessible
to the Modernist mind and indeed have been mythologized as the essential trajectory of
human evolution at both the individual and civilizational scale—evolution, in the Modernist
mythos, is the story of man’s escape from passion and superstition via the road of material
reason (Haraway 1989, Barnesmoore 2016b), the story of man’s progressive dominion
50
over his environment through the power of knowledge and technology (Yerkes 1943 ;
Geddes 1915), the story of man’s escape from the purported delusion of an enchanted
world.
In this mythos of man’s escape from his ‘state of nature’ through the conquest of
enchantment by reason we stumble upon positive terms of the transition from Paternalism
to Modernism that often go unsaid. As we note in another section of this text, the power of
a dialectical hegemonic relationship and its crafted synthesis comes in the silent ubiquity of
shared worldview and associated philosophy that bind the two seemingly opposed sides of
the ‘conflict’. The shared aspect of worldview and associated philosophy that bonds
Paternalism to Modernism is the naturalization and essentialization of the will to dominate.
Underneath the apparent transition from a spiritual worldview that accounts for both the
unmanifest and manifest worlds to a materialist worldview that reduces reality to the
manifest world—by denying the existence of the unmanifest world because it cannot be
experienced or known in the same manner as the manifest world (through physical
observation, measurement, material reason, etc.)—lies an invisible, ‘commonsensical’
51
consistency derived from the naturalization of the will to dominate and the conception of
order in manifestation as something to be attained through hierarchical domination. By
naturalization of the will to dominate we mean that the will to dominate was conceptualized
as an attribute of human nature rather than a symptom of the privation of human nature by
the illusion of discrete biological individuality and scarcity. As such, while we often come to
understand the transition from Paternalism to Modernism in terms of the transition from
spirituality to materialism, we should also be sensitive to the perpetuation of the
naturalization of the will to dominate that binds the two regimes together.
What is Wisdom?
Given that the notion of Geography as Philosophy is derived from the assumption that
wisdom is embedded in the landscape of our natural environment, let us take a moment to
explore some conceptions of wisdom:
“Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible to proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,

50
Find the proper citation in Haraway’s Primate Visions
51
21

Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the
excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out
of the soul.” (Whitman 1940, p. 7)
Wisdom, then, is conceived as an attribute of the soul (the infinite aspect of our being), and
beautiful things in the natural landscape (which themselves are an expression of the great
soul) do not to give us wisdom, per se, but remind us that in the most essential sense we are
wisdom. Wisdom is a latent attribute of all conscious beings, and so the role of our lived
environment is not to give us wisdom but to help us to cultivate intimacy with and
remember the infinite aspect of self that is wisdom. Need more be said?
st
Contextualizing for the 21 Century
“My starting point is values in the world, and because "rationality" is fraught, my focus is wisdom. I define
wisdom as decision making based on deep and abiding knowledge and understanding of long-term processes
and aimed at maintaining balance and harmony in the world—bearing in mind both smaller and larger scales,
both the present and the future. This is embodied in the Haudenosaunee philosophy that all major decisions
of a nation must be based on a mindfulness of seven generations. Capitalism and its concomitant social and
political formations foster decision making focused on individual gain, usually in the short term—rarely
beyond one generation. Hence at the beginning of the Common Era's twenty-first century, we live in a world
that suffers the results of an acute and overwhelming shortage of wisdom. This is encoded into the hegemonic
framework of how we understand the world.
On the collective level, societies develop communal wisdom amassed over generations from
empirical observations and insights that teach us how to live effectively in the world and in our own societies.
Such lore results also from a dialogue with the earth, because it is ultimately based on physical survival and
the social and cultural structures that evolve in combination with the production of material needs.
Traditional wisdom pays keen attention to the environment at the same time that it teaches of social order
and personal development. Following Marx, one can argue—often effectively—that these social orders simply
naturalize forms of domination. However, that throws out the baby with the bathwater. Social orders in
52
modernity do the same, but few social critics argue for overthrowing the modern scientific worldview.”
The context of this study, and of our society, is one in which physical labor is quickly being
replaced by the mechanical labor of AI and Robotics, and so one might be inclined to see a
disconnect with the notion that ‘such lore results from a dialogue with the earth, because it
is ultimately based on physical survival and the social and cultural structures that evolve in
combination with the production of material needs.’ We, however, argue that the
development of AI and Robotics and as society of leisure must also be developed thorugh
dialogue with the earth. Physical survival and the production of material needs are
obviously still essential for human existence, and so the turn from physical to intellectual
labor need not mean a turn away from the basic form of this dialogue with the earth.
Indeed, the development of AI systems like neural networks comes as a direct function of
such dialogue with the earth (where we seek to replicate the form of the brain provided to
us by the natural world). The essential shift, and the one which we seek to treat with in this
discourse, is a shift from a laborious engagement with the earth to a leisurely engagement

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32(3), p. 76.
22

with the earth (which can occur both in physical labor and in our transcendence of physical
labor through development of AI and Robotics). We will spend less of our time on
physical labor (though this by no means signifies that physical activities like walking through
the woods, playing physical games or leisurely gardening will be removed from our
existence) and we will spend more of our time on ceremonial, leisurely activities because
less of our attention will need to be expended on material production for the sake of
physical survival, and as a result our wisdom will be developed more in relationship to
spiritual nourishment rather than physical nourishment (though of course the physical and
the spiritual are not in essence divided), but we must pursue this leisurely spiritual
nourishment in dialogue with the earth just as we must pursue our physical nourishment in
dialogue with the earth. Our existence will become more oriented towards allowing the
earth to act upon us rather than acting upon the earth, to ceremony rather than material
production, but in the end the essence of the relationship will remain the same as it is
conceived within the Indigenous Worldview. We may turn from a focus on physical
wisdom that signifies spiritual wisdom to a focus on spiritual wisdom that signifies physical
wisdom, but in the end the two are one and the need for this distinction between labor and
leisure is rooted in the bifurcation of the two that has been imposed by the Modernist
Worldview. Labor and Leisure, like body and soul, are actually a single, mutually
constitutive unity, and so transcending the Age of Labor, the worldview of total work and
the work epistemology comes in transcending the illusory bifurcation of the two rather than
in transcending Labor for Leisure. We may fulfill the needs of Physical Labor through use
of AI and Robotics, but that should not imply transcendence of the physical for the
spiritual but instead recognition of the mutually constitutive whole formed by the finite
(physical) and the infinite (spiritual) dimensions of our existence. What we transcend is
reduction of reality and human being to passing time, physical space and labor therein (the
reduction of reality to sun), but in this transcendence the true value meaning, value, truth,
etc. of the manifest world will come into focus through remembrance of its relationship to
the unmanifest world.
One of Many Existential ‘Crises’

We will return to all these issues of worldview and associated epistemologies in the
Geographical tradition (and the social sciences more generally) below, but suffice it to say:
1. Herman’s critique of contemporary Geography’s commonsensical acceptance of the
Modernist Worldview and associated rationalist epistemology perfectly illustrates the point
of departure for our critiques of contemporary Geography; 2. The Indigenous Worldview
(in viewing nature as having its own implicit order derived from its being a reflection of the
infinite and in its lack of the notion that hierarchical domination is a necessary constituent
of order) perfectly captures the worldview we have been attempting to extract from ancient
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Daoist writings and other such esoteric texts, our own rational-intuitional process and
being as receptive to being in the temple of nature. In this light it can be said that this text is
not creating a new worldview—it is simply seeking to revive the worldview that permeated

53
This is reason predicated on the simplest and most universal things where simple and universal are understood in terms of dimensional
quality and indicate the Infinite Substance and its emanations Force, Form and Consciousness rather than ‘facts’ or ‘material particles’ or
some other such material simplicity-universality.
23

the globe before the rise of Paternalisms parasitic-domineering worldview, to develop a
philosophy for our contemporary world therein and to critique contemporary social
science thought from that point of departure. Indeed, much of the writing that has
occurred so far (136k words in) simply serves to deepen the insights Herman and the
Indigenous Worldview have already brought to the debates surrounding Geographical
thought, and as a result we will begin to turn the focus of this text towards development of a
subsequent philosophy within the context of contemporary society and imagining a future
of new human-nature-technology relations. As it relates to worldview and its macro role in
society, this text can be seen as joining the choir that has been arguing for the essential
importance of the Indigenous Worldview for understanding and combatting the privations
of Modernity.
This text is in one sense a critique of contemporary Geographical thought, but as
we see in Herman’s article the critique is not in essence a new one. This text is a critique of
the norms that surround writing (both in general and in the context of a PHD dissertation)
and the exposition of a Nomadic Ethos to counter these norms, but that is by no means
novel. This text is a critique of the Modernist Worldview and conceptions of order therein,
but the critique is already implicit in Daoist and Indigenous Worldviews and therefore is by
no means new (indeed, it is very old). “9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the
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sun.” Even the notion that there is not (and in essence cannot be) anything new in this text
is by no means new… Maybe this text is nothing more than a support for individuals who
wish to escape the Modernist Worldview and does not present any worldview or
philosophy that is actually novel. Maybe the point is that the notion of novelty, of creating
something new, is the illusion this text is actually seeking to transcend. Maybe there is no
point at all, but we shall keep wandering and wondering in hope that someone will
remember that which they have lost through engagement with this text’s meandering paths.
Maybe the meaning will come in the educational processes that will stem from engagement
with this text, maybe the meaning will come in bringing the insights of the Old Worldview
to bear upon contemporary society, maybe the meaning will come in helping to shatter the
ontological and epistemological fetters that have been constructed by Modernity, but in
each case there is nothing new, nothing novel, and that may be the whole point! It is
precisely the Modernist Worldview that renders perpetual novelty possible that must be
challenged, and so we must have the courage to continue treading this meandering path of
nomadic exploration while knowing that, in Truth, we can never (and ought not) attain the
novelty by which the value of contemporary academic inquiry is judged.
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are things that most people have not
seen because they are rendered invisible by the lenses we have been provided by the
Modernist Worldview. In this light our role may simply be to shatter the obfuscating lenses
of Modernity. As seems to be the point to which I always return in my reflections, it seems
that I share Foucault’s fate being as an agent of destruction. Maybe my lot is that of the
wildfire that opens Lodgepole pine cones, that opens minds that have been kept closed by
the cold, nihilistic materialism of the Modernist Worldview and its expression as Positivism

54
Ecclesiastes 1:9. KJV
24

and Postmodernism, and maybe the Old Worldview (Indigenous, Daoist, etc.) and
55
relatively new Philosophy that are emerging from this text are but the flames of that fire.
We (individuals, society, being) already have what we need (indeed it is the most essential,
most real aspect of us), and our task is not to create something new but to destroy that
which is dividing us from that which we already have. We do not need to create a new
Worldview or a new Philosophy, but to bring the True Worldview and Philosophy to light
so that their flames may consume Modernism (may, following Herman’s language,
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“displace the edifice of ‘rationality’ on which modern geography rests” ). Maybe this text
can act as a magnifying glass that allows the light of the Indigenous Worldview to set the
Modernist Worldview ablaze.
Is this a Pointless Endeavor? Another Existential ‘Crisis’

The conjuncture of partaking in a Facebook ‘debate’ (almost always a fruitless endeavor…)
about the privations imposed on humanity by domination centric theology-philosophy-
politics regimes like Catholicism (i.e. Paternalism) and reading some of Foucault’s (1982)
discussion of problematizing and theorizing new unities has lead me to question whether
this theoretical endeavor will (or even can) be useful? Unities like ‘Economic Theology’ (or
'Paternalism’) that this text finds through problematization of banal Modern unities like
‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ (or problematization of unities like the 'Abrahamic' and
'Vedic' traditions in the case of ‘Paternalism’) are unintelligible for most people in our
world. The ‘conclusions’ of the text—which accept neither the order through domination or
will to dominate of classical traditions like Abrahamism and Greco-Romanism nor the
dogmatic materialism and will to dominate of atheistic scientism—fall outside of the false
conflict (the dialectical, hegemonic relationship) between religious domination and
scientific domination that dominates contemporary human epistemological processes and
thus ring as heresy in most people’s ears. To dismiss domination and all traditions that
seek spiritual, psychological and bio-political order through hierarchical domination
(through arborescent relationships that are enlivened by the will to dominate) is to be an
outcast in most religious and spiritual communities. And yet, how could we do otherwise
when we consider the Farmer of Song?
“‘There was a man of Song who was concerned that the sprouts in his field were not growing well, so he went
and tugged at each one. He went home utterly exhausted and said, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself ill today! I’ve been
out helping the sprouts to grow.’ His sons rushed out to look and found the stalks all shriveled up. There are
few in the world who do not ‘help their sprouts grow.’ There are those who do not ‘weed’ – they have simply
given the whole task up as useless. But the ones who tug on the sprouts to help them grow, they are worse
than useless, for they do harm!’” (Meng Zi, 2A2)
To dismiss materialism and all traditions that reduce reality and its first cause to the
material world, that reduce consciousness and its first cause to its material vessel, that
reduce human existence and its first cause to passing time and physical space, that reduce
order to something that must be created (rather than returned to) through hierarchical

55
To the context of our times.
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32(3), p. 74.
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domination, is to be an outcast in most if not all secular communities. As such, in denying
both domination and materialism, this project leaves me on what is at this point a very
sparsely populated island that lies outside the binary of science and religion as it is
presently formulated.
Hierarchical domination spans the illusory divide between religion and science, and
whether this domination is aimed at returning to the order of our original perfection or at
creating order from the ‘chaos’ of passing time and physical space, in the end we are left
with the harm done by the Farmer of Song. There are some communities who seek to
transcend hierarchies and thus domination, but many of them do so by obfuscating the
distinction between arborescence and hierarchy that lies in the will to dominate and simply
arguing against all arborescence. Most communities that were spiritual without perversion
by the will to dominate have been destroyed by colonial religious and scientific regimes that
sought to impose order upon them through domination.
I have found shreds of philosophy like Meng Zi’s 2A2 and small communities like
those pursuing indigenous spirituality in North America where it is possible to exist beyond
boundaries imposed by the will to dominate and materialism, and I am sure that there are
more to be found across this wide world, but the Anglophone academy is almost
completely devoid of such communities. Spirituality in the academy is dominated by the
Abrahamic and Greco-Roman traditions of order through domination (wherein love is
understood and, more importantly in this context, practiced as a form of domination, and
science in the academy is dominated by vulgar materialists, and so this work is—while
essentially academic—wholly unpalatable for the spectrum of thought that has been
imposed upon the contemporary academy.
Maybe the point of this research is to be found in creating a space in the academy
that exists beyond the false divide of dominating religion and dominating scientism, and
maybe the point of this research is to be found in people who have heretofore been
excluded from the academy by the false conflict between dominating religion and
dominating science and the spectrum of thought it has imposed upon the academy, and
maybe the point of this research is simply to be found in self-exploration (both my own and
that of those few readers who take the time to subsume themselves in the worldview
proposed herein)—the point of this research is not, however, likely to be found in speaking
to ‘most people’ or utility for ‘most people’. As such, from the perspective of hegemonic
contemporary academic inquiry (the perspective of the spectrum of thought imposed by
the false conflicts between positivism and postmodernism and between religion and
science) this text is likely pointless, and from the perspective of ‘most people’ this text is
surely pointless and indeed heretical.
From the commonsensical perspectives of the world this text is pointless, but as the
text has been meaningful in my own process of conscious evolution I can only hope that it
might be similarly useful for others who wish to consciously evolve beyond the limitations
of contemporary human thought. The text’s reach is likely if not ensured to be very short
indeed when assessed from the perspective of the number of readers who engage with its
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problematizations and theorizations through anything but disdain, but who can say how far 57
its reach may ripple along the dimension of consciousness if even a single individual is
touched by it (in this time or another). This text’s dismissal of both domination and
materialism sets me upon a solitary path through the world, one of derision and distain
from all mainstream perspectives, but I will trod on and hope that hope (the eternal hope
of our unsullied essence, of the goodness of human nature and the origin of that which is)
will be enough to buoy me in my journey through the troubled epistemological waters of
Modernity and the ocean of Paternalism… This may be a fruitless theoretical endeavor
from the utilitarian perspective of Modernity's world(view) of total work and the
domineering perspective of Paternalist religion, but there is fruit to be found beyond the
factory farms of Modernity and Paternalist plantations—the Mother is an abundant
expression of divine order, fruits are plentiful in nature, and we need not dominate Her to
become intimate (to remember our intimacy) with IS-FFC therein. Most people will likely
see this project as at the very best pointless, but I can only hope that it may (at least for an
individual or two…) serve to problematize the domineering and materialistic common
sense that renders it as such for the majority of humanity and help people to find wonder
therein.
Response: “It… raises the question of 'audience' formation and its role in knowledge
production: specifically, do we allow knowledge to be produced without first having official
sanction for the size and power of the audience ready to receive the knowledge? This is a
subtle form of cognitive terrorism, methinks, and it's part of what you are challenging,
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transcending.”
Answer: “Cognitive terrorism indeed--political submission for fear of death in the

academy.”
Response: “Another question -- which you so eloquently raise in your last paragraph -- is
more intergenerational. Perhaps those who will deploy your ideas for the most power and
'impact' have not yet been born.”
Answer: “Your point on the intergenerational dimension problematizes the tendency to get
caught in the illusions of space-time brilliantly. The sensory nature of our everyday
perception leads us into a state of mind where we get a bit too caught up in the seeming
singularity of our own time and forget that our moment is mutually constituted by those
that have gone by and those which have yet to be. Especially given the historical track
record of philosophical influence, what matter is it whether our writings have any relevance
for our own time. Philosophy like this imagines a new future, and its true relevance thus

57
The replacement of wonder by disdain when we are faced with that which shakes the foundations of our thoughts, behaviors and
conceptions of being strikes me as crucially important. Wonder is the first step of philosophy, but disdain for that which problematizes
the commonsensical is the last step into a space where philosophy is impossible. “When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.”
(Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, 72 trans. Feng and English).
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Elvin Wyly, Email
27

comes in a later time where that imagined future has been given motion. This moment will
be constituted by those that follow and so we think for a new tomorrow.”
The Midlife Crisis Student

Some of my colleagues, those who are notably the most steeped in economic theology, call
me ‘Elvin’s midlife crisis student’. Though they clearly mean this in derogatory terms, I
wear the title as a badge of honor. Why, indeed, is the ‘midlife crisis’ a mainstay in our
culture? Why? Why is it? Why is it that when a person begins to grey, when their friends
and mentors begin to show up in the obituaries and they themselves begin the gradual
descent from life into death, a person is cast into crisis. Why does our culture’s reduction
of reality to the passing time and physical space of the manifest world and reduction
thought to the strictures of economic theology produce crisis when an individual is brought
face to face with their own mortality. Why does our world(view) of total work and our work
epistemology fail to bring an eternal meaning to life that can withstand the winds of time?
Why? Ask Faust! I am indeed the midlife crisis student, and if my philosophy can work to
ameliorate the woes of modernity that bring such perpetual crises’ I will have done my
work. Why is it that attempts at spiteful derision so oft provide us with the most
illuminating of insights? that good must rise from privation as truth must rise from
privation?
Nomadic Autobiographical Observations of Self

As I contemplate the tangled roads that brought me to this moment, the Geographical
character of my existence in the academy draws my attention to the geographically relative
nature of my journey to this point. I was born in San Francisco, into the heart of arguably
the most iconic and dynamic space on earth today. The nuclear bomb was, at least in part,
birthed from the mind of UC Berkeley professor Julius Robert Oppenheimer in the 1940s
28

and the culture of the atomic age was born. Berkeley, the birthplace of the bomb, is better
known as one of the birthplaces of the counterculture movement in the 1960s. Fast-forward
to the 90s and we find Silicon Valley, the birthplace of digital culture. The San Francisco
bay area is a place where dreams really do come true—culture is born from the dreams of
each generation. Beyond the more obvious geographical relativity of the schools I attended,
the people I met, and the places I lived, the culture of dreaming and creating culture from
our dreams has exerted a quiet and yet in some senses subsuming influence upon my
epistemological trajectory.
Epistemology and Planetary Urbanism

Epistemology on an Island, Contemporary Urban Thought
“Against this background, this paper revisits the question of the epistemology of the urban: through what
59
categories, methods and cartographies should urban life be understood?” (Brenner and Schmid 2016)
Modern epistemology stands upon an island. Categories, methods, cartographies, and

epistemological inputs, the stem of our epistemological perspective, are readily treated with
in contemporary urban inquiry, but the ontological roots of our epistemology (most notably
the materialistic reduction of reality to passing time and physical space) more often than
not remain beneath the surface of our contemporary academic perspectives. Alternative
ontologies and the alternative worldviews they form, especially those that treat with the
unmanifest world as holding an equally or greater reality than the manifest world of our
sensory perceptions and illusions of discrete biological individuality, are more often than
not simply and uncritically written off as irrational at best and as madness in the main.
More than simple problematization of the dialectical hegemonic, materialist ontological
debates about epistemology that are presently being waged by urban theorists, we argue that
fruitful revolt against planetary urbanism and Modernity more generally must be rooted in
an epistemological shift that cannot be attained without a concomitant ontological shift.
The Defense of Planetary Urbanism

In defense of a “…planetary epistemological orientation…” (Brenner 2017, p. 4)
This paper serves as a forum in which to address what Brenner (2017) views as “sharply critical, even
dismissive… caricatures” of Planetary Urbanism in contemporary geographical thought (especially feminist
and poststructuralist circles). Rather than an implied theoretical totality (a totality that presumes to provide a
discrete conceptualization of ‘the urban’ and ‘the city’), ‘Planetary Urbanism’ (which is really critique of
planetary urbanization) seeks to develop a globally oriented epistemological framework in which to
understand the variegated complexities of contemporary capitalist urbanization.
Brenner (2017) asks how claims that his theories are totalizing can be reconciled with his arguments “(a) that
planetary urbanization is variegated, uneven, volatile and emergent; (b) that this process assumes specific

59
Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City 19(2-3)
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forms across divergent spatiotemporal contexts; (c) that we need a plurality of conceptualizations,
methodological approaches, analytical perspectives and cartographic strategies through which to decipher its
manifold manifestations; and (d) that our understanding of emergent urban transformations currently remains
severely underdeveloped?” (Brenner 2017 “Debating Planetary Urbanism: for an engaged pluralism”)
• Displace notions of the city as a discrete spatial entity (as we displace notions of the human as a
discrete biological entity).
• Displace the notion of “urbanization as a unilinear rural-to-urban ‘transition’” (as we displace the
notion of human evolution as a unilinear irrational-to-rational transition).
• Displace attempts at finite demarcation of the boundaries between rural and urban (as we displace
attempts at finite demarcation of the boundaries between self and other).
Consolidation of capitalist urbanization at the global scale “generates new conceptual, analytical and political
challenges for those trying to decipher, represent and influence its spatiotemporal dynamics.” (Brenner 2017,
p. 2)
Rather than claiming that cities aren’t real or are unimportant, “we have… questioned the long-entrenched
obsession among many urban scholars with demarcating a neat boundary between city and non-city spaces in
a world of increasingly generalized urbanization and rapidly imploding/exploding urban transformations. We
have also called into question the naturalized, singular, diffusionist and transhistorical conception of “the” city
that has long underpinned the major traditions of urban theory.” (Brenner 2017, p. 3)
Brenner (2017) notes that, rather than attempting to obfuscate or deny contextual differences, planetary
conceptions of urbanism seek to displace “inherited approaches to the urban question that begin with the
idea of “the” city as a bounded spatial unit” (p. 3) and then look in towards smaller scales like neighborhood
and built environment or out towards larger scales like region and world. Starting at a macro-scale like ‘world’
or ‘planet’ does not necessarily imply a dismissal of contextual differences at smaller scales like ‘individual’
and ‘city’.
Brenner (2017) also notes that claims that Planetary Urbanism is a ‘theory of everything’ belie the fact that
“our texts repeatedly emphasize the meta-theoretical nature of our intervention; the challenges of
reconstructing the field of urban studies as a collective, multifaceted, open and ongoing research endeavor;
the need for plural epistemologies; and the specificity of urbanization as one among a multitude of structural
processes and transformations shaping planetary life today.” (Brenner 2017, p. 4)
Brenner (2017) argues that his approach to structuralism seeks to observe the ways in which local, contextual
struggles for emancipatory urban politics are expanded and constrained by “current power relations,
institutional arrangements and forms of territorial organization” rather than to privledge the structural
dimension over the lived, individual dimension. (Brenner 2017, p. 5)
Engaged Pluralism
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Brenner (2017) discusses the potentials of ‘engaged pluralism’ (wherein the scholar
attempts to sidestep the “theoretical or empirical incommensurability” described by Kuhn
61 62 63
[1970] , Peck [2015] and von Meeteren, Bassens and Derudder [2016] in order pursue
common ground among scholars). This is the liberal dream, wherein difference is simply

60
Brenner 2017, “Debating Planetary Urbanism: for an engaged pluralism”
61
Kuhn, T. (1970 [1962]) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
62
Peck, J. (2015) “Cities beyond compare,” Regional Studies 49: 160-182.
63
Meeteren, M. van, Bassens, D. and Derudder, B. (2016) “Doing global urban studies: on the need for engaged pluralism, frame
switching and methodological cross-fertilization,” Dialogues in Human Geography 6, 3: 296-301.
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accepted and we look to common ground in order to find a shared way forward. It sounds
wonderful, to be sure, and from the perspective of collegial, collaborative academic work it
is surely a useful paradigm. That being said, and while we agree whole heartedly within the
context of debates around planetary urbanism and the fetishization of empirical
incommensurability that often leads to a whole sale dismissal of generalizing or macro-scale
theorizations, there is a potentially dangerous, hegemonic implication in simply looking to
common ground. The Foucaultian power-knowledge neural pathways in my mind are
singing! Common ground and commonsense regarding the practical intention to promote
social justice are indeed important (and often speak to the essential goodness of human
nature), but common ground and common sense in the world of theory, for example in
our conceptions of The Order of Things, are (as should be clear from the reflexive
epistemological foundation pursued by the planetary urbanists) very often products of the
hegemonic social environment in which we have been raised. For example, it would be
very easy to find common ground at the level of materialism (i.e. the reduction to reality to
passing time and physical space and the reduction of epistemology to material reason) or at
the level of conceptions of order as domination (i.e. the notion that social order is to be
produced through hierarchical domination that is implicit in western religious, legal and
democratic systems), but these theoretical outlooks (materialism and order as domination)
are the essential variables in the privation of social justice that typifies our world—accepting
materialism and order as domination as a ‘theoretical common ground’ or, even worse, as
‘theoretical commonsense’ is simply accepting the perpetuation of the privation of social
justice.
We should indeed remember (myself most of all) that we can find collegiality and
cooperation in our shared practical goals like the cultivation of social justice, but we ought
also to remember that theory (worldview and philosophy) expands and constrains the
potential for practice in a manner that can often have a direct impact on the potentials for
practical goals like the cultivation of social justice; we should try to avoid allowing
theoretical incommensurability to prevent us from collaborating with others on meaningful
social projects, but we should not allow this desire for liberal collegiality to blind us to the
fact that many of the social problems we are seeking to ameliorate are rooted in our
theories and that an incommensurable (from the perspective of Modernist theory)
theoretical framework will be needed to actually attain our common goals. The theories
and methods of contemporary academic inquiry may seem oppositional when perceived
from the Modernist worldview, but underneath that seeming difference lies a homogenous
crust of materialistic reduction of reality to passing time and physical space (to the manifest
world) that belies the potential for social evolution. Indeed, it should not be ignored that
64
this call for engaged pluralism rises from a relatively novel, nihilistic worldview that
axiomatically denies the existence of “singular, all-encompassing causal mechanisms or
covering laws” and legitimates this perspective through the ontological assumption that
reality is caused by and contained within the world of manifestation (which serves to
axiomatically deny the existence of the unmanifest world in which the “singular, all-
encompassing causal mechanisms or covering laws” exist as pure potential to be actualized

64
When observed in its macro-historical context.
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within the context of manifestation); the common ground between Marxist Urban Theory
and Post(Most)modern Feminist and Poststructuralist Urban Theory lies in the most
problematic and ontologically violent (Blasser 2013) of Modernist assumptions about
reality (which is most aptly captured in Barnes and Sheppard’s [2010] title ‘Nothing
65
includes everything’ and their discussion of ‘local epistemologies’ therein) , and as a result
cooperation upon common ground necessarily implies submission to the essence of
Modernist hegemony in the context of ‘Radical’ (radically materialist…) Urban Theory. Put
in different terms, the theory that there can be no totalizing or overarching theory is an
incredibly totalizing and overarching theory (i.e. nihilistic dismissal of Truth is itself an
immense, overarching and indeed totalizing theorization of Truth)… Undergirding the
exchange of local epistemologies and theories proposed by Barnes and Sheppard (2010)
and Brenner (2017) is the overarching, totalizing assumption that there is no Truth.
It seems that the planetary epistemological (re)orientation proposed by Brenner and Schmidt ought to be
accompanied by a planetary ontological (re)orientation. As we shift the starting point of our epistemological
lens from ‘the city’ conceived as a discrete, spatially bound entity to a planetary perspective of the variegated,
contextual, non-linear process of capitalist urbanization, so too must we shift our ontological lens from the
discrete, biological individual (the ‘self’) of the Modernist-materialist imagination to the variegated, contextual,
non-linear process of planetary conscious evolution (from the biological individual to the evolution of
collective, noospheric consciousness).

65
Barnes, T. and Sheppard, E. (2010) “‘Nothing includes everything’: towards engaged pluralism in Anglophone economic geography,”
Progress in Human Geography 34, 2: 193-214.
Something, the IS-FFC, does indeed include everything (and in that sense everything includes everything…)… The only way to make such
a claim is to, like Urizen, axiomatically reduce reality to passing time and physical space. In any case, I am struck by the irony of this
statement. By positing that ‘nothing includes everything’ Barnes and Sheppard are making exactly the sort of totalizing, overarching
theoretical claim that they seem to be positing as untenable… You can’t have an overarching theory that overarching theory is
impossible—that is overarching!!!
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Mythos of the Paternalist Tradition

Kabalistic History is long and secretive, and as such we contain our discussion to an Early
Modern Kabalistic cosmology (i.e. the era where Kabala and Catholicism become wed in
France, Bavaria and other regions of Europe) that most aptly expresses the Paternalism
embedded in the Kabalist traditions we receive in the contemporary era. The most
essential aspect that differentiates what we term ‘the Paternalist’ traditions (Hindu, Chinese,
Babylonian, Abrahamic, Hellenic, etc.) from other spiritual traditions (and we argue from
the truth) are notions of the ‘fallen essence’ of humanity (and, or the created universe) and
concomitant conceptions of order as domination. It is thus that humanity and nature are
normatively understood as evil and chaotic, and thus that the violent, authoritarian modes
of domination that typify ‘the Paternalist’ traditions and their political manifestations are
rendered legitimate in the mind of subjects socialized within social regimes produced by
‘the Paternalist’ traditions… We argue that the Modernist move to strip nature of its sacred
quality and the subsequent environmental destruction we have observed over the past few
centuries are presupposed in these notions of the fallen nature of the created universe and,
or humanity, and that to save our natural environment from the total and complete
destruction it is facing we need to do more than simply return to ‘the Paternalist’
conception of the sacred in nature (with nature, and thus the body, framed as chaotic, evil
other) as this traditions presumption that humanity and, or nature are inherently evil and
chaotic as well as its subsequent recourse to notions of order, unity, love, community, etc.
as domination are in fact the root of the problem we now observe manifesting within a
intentionally dimensionally reductive ontological regime(s) (that of Modernism).
The peculiarity of Paternalist Myth and Religion is also illuminated in the Lurianic
doctrine (of Issac Luria, Ha Ari, ‘the Lion’, who was born in late 16 century Jerusalem to a
th
family that had recently been driven out of Spain). In the simplest terms, Luria argued that
the first ‘act’ of creation began with a withdrawal of the divine self from a space in the Ain
Soph (the infinite, which follows Ain, the absolute nothingness) to create a space (named
Tehiru) in which the universe could be created (via a ‘Ray of Divine Light’ that passes
straight through the Tehiru and births Adam Kadmon), and that this withdrawal was in part
necessitated by the fact that the divine was incomplete at the time of creation and thus in
need of purification to expunge the ‘unstable elements’ present in Divinity (via the
withdrawal); another key aspect of this tale is the ‘breaking of the vessels’ (Shervirah ha-
kelim), wherein the fall is rendered an essential event in creation (rather than as made
potential by creation and the tension between created difference and uncreated unity as
there is no longer a notion of uncreated unity prior to manifestation in the supposition that
divinity was incomplete prior to creation), and the subsequent necessity of the Tikkum
(repair), a process by which the sparks dropped into the abyss in ‘the breaking’ (it is these
sparks which are thought to sustain evil and ‘the dark kingdom’, which has no selfsubsistent
energy or reality and can only thus be sustained by light stolen from the ‘powers’ of good)
are reintegrated into the divine that duality may be abolished (again, it is creation itself that
is deemed to be essentially broken and in need of repair (rather than, say, humans as we
33

are normatively culturally manifest on this earth)). Luria also argued, in a similar vein, that
Adam was emanated to fulfill the Tikkum (i.e. humanity is created to repair creation rather
than creation being formed as a womb for humanity), and that the tales of the bible were
symbolic narratives representing the attempts of the creator to achieve the Tikkum (the fall
symbolizes Adam’s failure to attain the Tikkum in his submission to his material nature,
Abraham and Moses were also set with the task of completing the Tikkum (in Exodus)
before the people were seduced by the cult of the golden cow and idolatry casting new
sparks into the abyss, etc.); in short, humanity (and its potential for free will) is understood
as the energy by which the Tikkum is either delayed or brought into being. ‘The breaking’
is also posited as shattering the soul of Adam Kadmon and as the cause of the cycles of
reincarnation (the process, Gilgul, by which the unitary soul of Adam is reformed from the
shards of humanity).
We should note that while the whole of Ha Ari’s formula is oft treated as novel in
the West, from the perspective of our orally received knowledge of the Hindu and
Buddhist Traditions it seems that Luria was, in fact, not making an original supposition in
positing the first act of creation as contraction and that novelty thus only seems to enter in
the supposition that the divine is ‘incomplete’ prior to manifestation (though the clear links
between the origins of Hinduism and the origins of Abrahamism, manifest most clearly in
notions of order, love and community as domination, in notions of the natural world as
being other to divinity (as typified by a chaos that can only be brought into order through
human domination), in their bio-paternalism, in their legitimizations of slavery and other
forms of implicitly oppressive social relations, in their notion of human nature (or the
nature of the body) as evil and thus in need of domination, etc. may demystify the
coherence of these traditions; also, to be clear, while we speak of ‘Hinduism’ and
‘Abrahamism’, we are not supposing that all strains of either tradition fit perfectly into these
trends, and are merely arguing that these trends are dominant within the overall historical
66
body of the two traditions. As will become clear in our exploration of myth and spirituality
outside of ‘the Paternalist’ fold, this notion of creation as being made potential by a
withdrawal of the divine from the Tehiru lead to a stark divergence between paternalist
notions of nature as a chaotic and evil other to be dominated and more traditional notions
of nature as containing ‘the sprouts’ of divinity (which need but be cultivated and
emphasized within nature rather than to be imposed upon it).
Jacob Boehme provides a similar cosmological schema wherein reality is composed
of three worlds, The World of the First Principle (of ‘The Wrathful Father’, of
condensation and contraction), The World of the Second Principle (of ‘The Loving Son’
and of ‘The Holy Ghost’, of expansion and equilibrium) and The World of the Third
Principle (generated by the fall of Lucifer and the shattering of the mirror of nature). The
Ungrund (Deity conceived of as an ‘Impenetrable Nothing’, the Ain Soph, represented by
an eye appearing in the infinity symbolizing the desire and proposed means for

66
It seems to us that incomplete is the wrong word as it implies a lack that is dimensionally incommensurable with the uncreated
(especially with the Ain and the Ain Soph). Better that we say that the divine had not yet learned how to harmonize its lack-less
dimensional quality with the generation, motion, action, change, difference, ‘chaos’, etc. of manifestation (of the manifest). We do not,
then, need to fix the material world as much as we see a need for humanity to attain mastery (in a non dominating sense, but in a sense of
moving into a state of wu-wei where there are no subjects and objects to facilitate domination) of ourselves and our ability to live in
harmony with the sacred essence of nature (and of all that which Is without qualification).
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manifestation) is thought to ‘reveal’ itself as wisdom (‘Sophia’) in the ‘Mirror of Nature’
(formed via the initial ‘contraction’ of the divine) through a septenary process that is
facilitated by seven ‘Spirit Sources’: the first spirit source, ‘Astringency’, represents the
initial contraction of the divine to form ‘the cave’ (the void) or the darkness which renders
the fertility of Eternal Nature potential (Saturn-Salt); the second spirit source, ‘Bitterness’
(the ‘bitter-sting’), is conceived of as the violent response to Astringency and as only
potentially ameliorated by Eternal Nature finding equilibrium (Mercury); the third,
‘Anxiety’, is thought to rise from the tension of Astringency and Bitterness and conceives of
it as a perpetually moving ‘Wheel of Energy’ and as hell (Mars-Sulfur); fourth, ‘Spiritual
Fire’, is conceived of as a ‘Spark’ from the ‘Wheel of Energy’, as initiating the distinction
between light and darkness (fiat lux) and as birthing the principle (fire) in which divinity
finds harmony (Sun)—The World of the Second Principle is said to be birthed in the
center of this ‘Spiritual Fire’; the fifth spirit source, ‘Light’, is thought to be produced by the
mixing of ‘The Waters’ produced by the ‘initial contraction’ with the ‘Spiritual Fires’ from
which The World of the Second Principle was birthed—‘the Son’ manifests through this
light (Venus); ‘Sound’ (‘tone’ ‘intelligence’), the sixth, is conceived of as The Word
(Jupiter); finally, the ‘Substantial Being’, is conceived of as the ‘luminous world’ in which
the divine manifests itself (‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ ‘Paradise’ ‘The Celestial Earth’ ‘The
World of Form’) and is associated with the third person of the trinity (‘The Holy Ghost’)—
it is also thought to form ‘Eternal Nature’, ‘The Spiritual Body of Wisdom’, ‘The Feminine
Aspect of the Divine’, ‘Sophia’, which is conceptualized as the underlying reality,
substance, state, etc. of ‘The Trinity’ (in Neo-Platonist terms one might connive of ‘Sophia’
in terms of ‘the world soul’).
Following Creation, Boehme outlines the formation of The World of the Third
Principle via the fall of Lucifer. Lucifer, the most powerful and beautiful of the Angels, is
thought to have wished for greater power and to have sought that power in attempting to
master (dominate) the energy of ‘The Original Darkness’—in attempting to master ‘The
Original Darkness’ Lucifer is thought to have shattered the mirror of nature and thrown the
natural world into chaos. The response of Divine Wisdom to the fires of Lucifer (as well as
the above conception of the Fall of Lucifer) is aptly captured in a passage from J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Silmarillion:
“There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that
were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them,
propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they
sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of
me mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly.
Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.
And it came to pass that Ilúvatar called together all the Ainur and declared to them a mighty theme,
unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed; and the glory of its beginning
and the splendor of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Ilúvatar and were silent.
Then Ilúvatar said to them: 'Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in
harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show
forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I win sit and
hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song.'
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and
35

organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great
music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing
into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and
the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void. Never since have the Ainur
made any music like to this music, though it has been said that a greater still shall be made before Ilúvatar by
the choirs of the Ainur and the Children of Ilúvatar after the end of days. Then the themes of Ilúvatar shall
be played aright, and take Being in the moment of their utterance, for all shall then understand fully his intent
in their part, and each shall know the comprehension of each, and
Ilúvatar shall give to their thoughts the secret fire, being well pleased.
But now Ilúvatar sat and hearkened, and for a great while it seemed good to him, for in the music
there were no flaws. But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of
his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar, for he sought therein to increase the
power and glory of the part assigned to himself. To Melkor among the Ainur had been given the greatest gifts
of power and knowledge, and he had a share in all the gifts of his brethren. He had gone often alone into the
void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his
own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness.
Yet he found not the Fire, for it is with Ilúvatar. But being alone he had begun to conceive thoughts of his
own unlike those of his brethren.
Some of these thoughts he now wove into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and
many that sang nigh him grew despondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but
some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had at first. Then the discord of
Melkor spread ever wider, and the melodies which had been heard before foundered in a sea of turbulent
sound. But Ilúvatar sat and hearkened until it seemed that about his throne there was a raging storm, as of
dark waters that made war one upon another in an endless wrath that would not be assuaged.
Then Ilúvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that he smiled; and he lifted up his left hand, and a
new theme began amid the storm, like and yet unlike to the former theme, and it gathered power and had
new beauty. But the discord of Melkor rose in uproar and contended with it, and again there was a war of
sound more violent than before, until many of the Ainur were dismayed and sang no longer, and Melkor had
the mastery. Then again Ilúvatar arose, and the Ainur perceived that his countenance was stern; and he lifted
up his right hand, and behold! a third theme grew amid the confusion, and it was unlike the others. For it
seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be
quenched, and it took to itself power and profundity. And it seemed at last that there were two musics
progressing at one time before the seat of Ilúvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and
wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came.
The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had
little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed
to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken
by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.
In the midst of this strife, whereat the halls of Ilúvatar shook and a tremor ran out into the silences
yet unmoved, Ilúvatar arose a third time, and his face was terrible to behold. Then he raised up both his
hands, and in one chord, deeper than the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye
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of Ilúvatar, the Music ceased.”
For Boehme, ‘the Divine Wisdom’s’ response to the fall of Lucifer worked through a
cooling-temperate power that contained ‘The Flames of Lucifer’ and thus combined with
the fires of Lucifer to form the ‘Temporal Nature’ (the nature of ‘good and evil’, of matter,
of passing time and physical space) we experience through our sensory organs in our bodily
incarnations—this temporal nature is thought to be an attempt at replacing the original
Mirror of Nature that was shattered by Lucifer’s fall that Divine Wisdom (Sophia) might

67
Tolkien, J.R.R. (2001) The Silmarillion (Houghton Mifflin) p. 15-17
36

once again be reflected.
It should also be noted that Adam Kadmon is slated to replace Lucifer, the fallen
angel, to restore the purity of Eternal Nature (as we note again below, it seems likely that
it is in this presumption that we must restore the purity of Nature rather than cultivate
and nurture the existing divine order of nature that leads into notions of order as
domination of the impure or hierarchically inferior other ). Humanity, in this
view, is thought to be born as perfect, androgynous and with two bodies, celestial and
earthly (though the earthly is at this point invisible as it is filled with light) and to be married
to Sophia. Lucifer, jealous that Adam had supplanted him, tempted Adam into seduction
by matter (which succeeded when the animals of earth were brought before Adam and
which God responded to by putting Adam into a deep sleep). While Adam slept, God
separated the principle fire (brutality of the first principle) from water (love and light of the
second principle) and thus stripped him of his androgyny (there is a paradoxical truth
embedded within this notion of an androgynous he), which, while not preventing Adam
and Eve from tasting the fruit of ‘good and evil’, did prevent the absolute corruption of
these principles. It is in this light that Boehme views the telos of humanity in terms of
remarrying our celestial spouse, Sophia, via Christ (Consciousness) acting as mediator.
Following Boehme, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (farther of the contemporary
Martinist Order) presented a vision of creation and humanity’s location therein. Saint-
Martin divides ‘Universal Creation’ into three levels: the first level is ‘The Super Celestial
Immensity’, which follows from ‘The Divine Immensity’ (the Uncreated) and which is
inhabited by ‘Higher Spirits’, ‘Major Spirits’, ‘Lower Spirits’ and ‘Minor Spirits’ (Spirit,
Thought); the second level is the ‘Celestial Immensity’ and is inhabited by spiritual beings
who transcend the ‘human level’ (Soul-Mind, Will); the third and final level is the
‘Terrestrial World’ of humanity (Body, Action). As in Boehme’s vision, the fall of Adam
caused the beginning of humanity’s cycles of manifestation through matter; similarly
resonant with Boehme’s vision, Saint-Martin views Christ (‘Ieschouah’, ‘The Grand
Architect of the Universe’ as a sort of Adam 2.0, sent here to redeem Adam (who was
himself-androgynously created to redeem Lucifer). Saint-Martin similarly follows Boehme
in thus viewing humanity’s telos in terms of restoring our divine androgyny through
reunification with our celestial spouse ‘Sophia’, ‘The Divine Wisdom’. If we may quickly
diverge to our discussion of symbolism, Saint-Martin (like so many others) emphasized the
symbolism of number (associated with the symbolism of letter in the Hebrew Alphabet and
the symbolism of Sephirot in the ‘Tree of Life’) as the purest manifest representation of
divine form and the process of creation.
‘Temporal Nature’ is still, in a Foucaultian language (drawn from the work of
Paracelsus on Signatures [Boehme also wrote on the topic of Signatures following
Paracelsus]), contains the signatures of the divine that manifest as a function of its
omnipresent impregnation of the created in the form of ‘Sophia’, ‘The Divine Wisdom’.
In this sense, the above (‘Modern’ Kabalist) models of reality are coherent with what we
observed in our earlier examination of traditional spiritual practices like Shamanism. That
being said, what is surely different in this model (from the perspective of more traditional
models) is that ‘The Fall of Lucifer’ is conceived of as more essentially causal with regard to
manifest, Temporal Nature (rather than, for example, an aspect in the process of creation
37

that colors the manifestation of Temporal Nature, Lucifer and ‘The Fires of Lucifer’ are
conceived of as half of the substance-process by which Temporal Nature came to be) than
seen in our studies of Indigenous Cosmology. It seems likely that this essentialization of
Lucifer (and of evil) in the process by which Temporal Nature came to be holds a direct,
influential and potentially causal relationship with the conceptions of order as domination
that form the root of the taint that has spread through the Paternalist Tradition into
Modernism and which has, thus, given rise to the destruction (via domination, like ‘the
Man from Song’) of Temporal Nature (which is now, if this was not already obvious,
conceived of as distinct from the Eternal Nature-Divine Wisdom, Sophia, which does not
seem to be indicated in the Indigenous Worldview).
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Death to the Age of Labor,

a Mythos for the Age of Leisure
Our society stands at the end of an age. As the shadow of the Age of Scarcity-Competition,
Labor and Bio-Mechanical Evolution fades away in the rising light of the potential for a
conscious society organized around the principle of plenty the last bastions of power from
the passing age struggle to stay above water through the age old tactics of a crumbling
empire. Thought and speech are repressed. Minorities are oppressed. The simple minded
are impressed. Fear of the other and fear of self are perpetuated through the manufacturing
centers of the hegemonic culture like the academy, press and political establishment.
Dogmatic perversions of the principles upon which the empire was originally founded are
imposed upon the people as divine law.
Yet for all of this suffering, for all the perversion and privation of those who reigned
in the falling age, we stand on the cusp of a profound and blissful transformation. We are
set to leave the age of scarcity-competition and the desire for hierarchical domination
produced therein for an age of plenty where evolution is unchained from the biological and
temporal constraints of bio-mechanical evolution (which is propelled by the desire for
domination produced by scarcity and competition) and enters into a conscious mode of
evolution that can be described as essentially epistemological—the desire for survival, sated,
will be replaced by the desire for Self-improvement as the driving force of human
existence. The physical labor necessary for survival (farming, construction, water collection,
etc.) will be fulfilled by robots and other forms of technology, leisure will replace this
physical labor, and evolution will become tied to ideas and the evolution of ‘mind’ rather
than the natural selection of bio-mechanical evolution. We can evolve more in one
moment of conscious evolution than we have through the history of bio-mechanical
evolution as changes in ones ‘state of mind’ occur in an instant as the flash of lightning.
At the risk of sounding cliché, it truly is ‘the best and the worst of times’. On the one hand
we stand at the brink of a new age in which the vulgarities of scarcity, competition and the
desire for hierarchical domination are shed for a blissful and contemplative quest for
conscious evolution. On the other hand there is an insane doomsday cult of pseudo-
religious zealots who have been corrupted by the desire for hierarchical domination and
socialization within the culture of domination said desire has produced over the millennia
who are hell bent on brining about their prophesied apocalypse. If our society is to be
reborn into this new Age of Plenty, Leisure and Conscious Evolution its incarnation in the
Age of Scarcity-Competition, Labor and Bio-Mechanical Evolution must die.
Labor in the Contemporary Academy

The contemporary academic discussion and debate concerning the nature of human
existence revolves to a great extent on the axis of ‘labor’. Assuming that, as reality has been
39

reduced to passing time and physical space, order must be created through hierarchical
domination (Foucault, 1970; Barnesmoore, 2016a; Barnesmoore, 2016b; Barnesmoore,
68
2017) , social philosophers and social scientists (as well as private and government sources
of funding for academic inquiry…) focus their attention on questions concerning the
optimal means for creating a materially productive social order. How can we create social
structures, cultures, regimes of thought, conceptions of being, etc. that will facilitate a mode
of production that optimizes material production and consumption? What is the best way
to organize (socio-political structures like ‘states and ‘courts’) and cultivate (educational and
cultural structures that structure public emotional and intellectual potential) a mode of
being that allows society to best produce, distribute and consume goods that allow for
material survival and ‘progress’.
At the heart of this image of humanity as a laboring being lies the notion of scarcity.
“Trees and Algorithms provide us with useful metaphors for understanding true relationship between scarcity
and the desire for hierarchical domination and competition in ‘beings’ that lack reason. Trees grow straight
up when there is direct sunlight. It is only when sunlight becomes scarce that plants begin to grow (via an
internal impetus reflexively-instinctually actualized by external environment) over each other in order to
compete for sunlight (i.e. scarcity brings on the desire for hierarchical domination and competition).
Interestingly, the only other context in which Trees don't grow straight up and down is when form is imposed
upon them by external forces like wind (which can be likened to Modernist social systems that seek to
produce social order through external domination by military and police ‘forces’). Plants only seek to
dominate each other in environments of scarcity.
For an algorithmic example of the above metaphor, a computer program designed by Karl Sims
(1994a; 1994b) to replicate the process of Mechanical Evolution in the digital sphere demonstrates the ways
in which scarcity works to produce the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In the digital
simulation, a being is ‘selected’ for survival and continued evolution by capturing and possessing a green cube
located between the being and its ‘opponent’. At a certain point, beings in the simulation stopped evolving in
a manner that allowed them to simply move to the cube quickly and instead began to evolve in a manner that
allowed beings to prevent the competitor from getting to the cube that allowed beings putting the cube in a
69
place where the competitor can not reach it. Again, however, we see that scarcity and discrete individuality
are the causal factors in producing the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In this light, we
argue that social systems like Capitalism (especially Neoliberal Capitalism) that were designed (based on
biomaterialist, discrete conceptions of humanity and subsequent conceptions of human evolution as purely
mechanical) to produce social evolution through scarcity, competition and hierarchical domination actually
work to socialize humans in (and thus constrain human thought, behavior and conception of being to) a
mode that negates the potential for conscious evolution, self-mediation of the biological desires and the
animal passions and thus causes ‘devolution’ or a ‘decay of conscious social order’ (which is to say decay of
intimacy with Infinite Substance and thus reason).” (Barnesmoore, 2016a)
Mythos for the Age of Leisure

68
Foucault, The Order of Things.
Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”, Environment and Social
Psychology.
Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”, Environment and Social Psychology.
69
http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
and
https://archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1994
Sims, K. “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition”. http://www.karlsims.com/papers/alife94.pdf
40

As noted above, we stand at the brink of a new age. If classified in the terms of
contemporary social science, we would call it ‘the AI-Robotic Age’ and see it as a next step
in the progressive technological trajectory from early periods like the Bronze and Iron Age
through the Industrial Age and into a utopian Silicon Age. The coming age, however,
cannot be understood in the linear-progressive terms with which we presently understand
the evolution of presently recorded history as there are multiple ages coming to a close—the
technological age of human labor based industrial production is coming to a close, which
would fit well with the linear technological view of human history, but with the close of the
human labor based industrial production age we will also see the end of the much longer
Age of Labor and the rise of the Age of Leisure as mass-physical human labor (i.e. labor to
produce food and industrial goods) will no longer be required for the evolution and
survival of humanity.
To elucidate our point we must make a short excursion into our conception of ages
and aeons. ‘Ages’ (aeons) manifest as what we might call a fractal pattern. The pattern is
70
formed as a function of ‘eternal forms’ (aeons) expressing themselves in the many scales
of manifestation. As a tangible example, whether liquid is traveling in a river, your veins or
a tree (different scales), it will always take on the same branching and meandering form (the
same aeon). For the purposes of this discussion, we can say that multiple ‘ages’ manifest on
a range of temporal scales. From the ages of a human life (child, adult, elder) through the
ages of the seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) to the ages of the celestial host (a lunar
year, a solar year, the precession of the equinox, the Yugas, etc.), many ages of different
scales (many aeons manifesting on different scales) are occurring in unison. Turning
towards our discussion of the coming age, the end of the Low-Technological Age (physical
labor based industrial production) also marks the end of the Age of Labor, which has
lasted throughout presently recorded history. While the move from the Pre-Industrial Age
to our contemporary Industrial Age marked a change akin to learning a new physical ability
(the move from crawling to walking), the shift from the Age of Labor to the Age of Leisure
is akin to a child shifting their attention from the cultivation of physical skills to the
cultivation of mental and emotional skills.
This shift from the Age of Labor to the Age of Leisure represents a moment that
has been described by many traditions: a Singularity, the Eschaton, the Apocalypse, the
death of the Phoenix, etc. In the same way that one cannot model the behavior of
biological matter using inanimate matter, cannot model a tree using only the seed, cannot
model the behavior of rational beings on irrational beings, cannot model the future of post-
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Trump US politics based on the past of pre-Trump US politics, we cannot predict the
future based on the past when a singularity moment occurs. The dimensional quality of the
object of study (in this case the history of society) has undergone a state change, and so we
can no longer model the future based on the past. A singularity moment ‘changes the
game’. Given this change in the state of human society, a shift from mastery of the physical
world to mastery of our mental and emotional world, we must envision a new world view in
which we can plan our society in a manner oriented towards conscious evolution.

70
See the Chapter ‘Aeon’ in Maurice Nicoll’s Living Time for an in depth discussion of aeons.
71
https://www.academia.edu/30223234/Trump_as_a_Heterotopic_or_Singularity_Moment_A_September_2015_Prediction-
Nightmare_Come_to_Pass_
41

The distinction between biomechanical and conscious evolution is illustrative of the
72
difference between the Age of Labor and the Age of Leisure. Biomechanical evolution
functions through natural (‘irrational’) selection, scarcity, competition, etc. Conscious
Evolution functions through the direction of will towards the cultivation of our emotional,
mental, intuitive, etc. faculties, towards engagement with transformative ideas, towards
communion with beauty, truth and goodness. In the Age of Labor society was, for the
general public, organized with the intention of cultivating a public that would bring its
physical labor to bear in the production of material goods—survival meant staving of
scarcity through the use of physical labor and so our social structures mirrored the form
(aeon) of Bio-Mechanical Evolution. Survival in the Age of Leisure (in technological terms
the AI-Robotic Age) will no longer be tied to our direction of physical labor towards
material production (AI-Robots will replace biological labor) and will instead be tied to
wisdom and mastery of our emotional and intellectual existence as the greatest threat to our
survival (given the power afforded by high technology in the AI-Robotic Age) is ourselves.
Be it through weapons and war, pollution of our natural environment or some other
extinction level catastrophe we might bring on with our technology, humanity’s existence
will no longer be threatened by starvation and a lack of shelter but by a lack of wisdom,
intuition, emotional maturity, intellect, etc. to properly design and use our technology.
Without physical labor to occupy the majority of humanity, and with a deficit in cultural
evolution that requires a great number of teachers, artists, organizers, planners, thinkers,
poets, caretakers, etc. we must conceptualize society in terms of Conscious Leisure.
Conscious Leisure, defined generally as communion with beauty, goodness and truth (be it
through reading a moving poem or watching a beautiful sunset), will organize society with a
telos of conscious evolution rather than material production.
Time in the Age of Labor and Leisure

Where in Modernity human existence is, in its reduction to material labor (and the
fulfillment of material desire…), reduced to a linear temporal phenomena, a society
designed around the notion of Conscious Leisure as the teleological imperative of human
existence would catalyze the potential for actualization of a mode of human existence that
transcends reflexive articulation by the linear-temporal world (by passing time and physical
space). The flash of lightning in the antediluvian mythological tradition, movements of the
mind—inspirations, revelations, a change in state of mind—occur in a moment. Conscious
Evolution, which occurs through movements of the mind, does not occur in a functional
relationship with linear time like the bio-mechanical evolution of our previous stage of
evolution; Conscious Evolution comes through the direction of will towards the cultivation
of our invisible self (through self-observation, through contact with energies like
transformative ideas, beautiful experiences and emotions like love and joy, etc.) and
happens in the instant that our state of mind is changed (in which we see the world in a new
light, as illuminated by the flash of lightning). Conscious Evolution (be it a big or a small
change), in short, is not a function of duration in time.

72
Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”, Environment and Social
Psychology.
Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”, Environment and Social Psychology.
42

We can evolve more in a single generation than we have through all of presently
recorded history because the evolution of consciousness occurs in a moment; we are not
forced to wait for time and natural selection to grace us with change, as we have been freed
from the cold chains of time by the fiery light of our soul-mind. If we can learn to see the
world in a new light, to resonate at a new frequency, then we can leave behind the tyranny
of bio-mechanical evolution imposed upon rational (consciously evolving) beings by social
systems that were designed to produce scarcity, competition and a bio-reductive state of
being (a state of being that is fully oriented towards material survival and the fulfillment of
material desires and in which conscious evolution becomes impossible) and consciously
evolve past the absurd madness of the Age of Labor.
“Nothing is set in stone, not even stone. Nearly everything can change if humans think and act in different
73
ways, mobilizing individual and collective human will and creativity.”

73
Elvin Wyly (Draft), “Conspiracy Capital…” p. xx
43

Methodological Notes
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
–JRR Tolkien
These essays come as an attempt to create a living network of writing from which the
theoretical underpinnings of our inquiry into order, human-nature relations and the future
of human civilization will rise as an ‘emergent property'. The banal Google definition of
‘emergent property’:
"An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate
in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate
size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales."
As a simple example, consciousness is often understood as an emergent property (i.e. the

simple agents of the brain, its cells and the electro chemical reactions therein, are capable
of manifesting the higher orders of rational consciousness when they function at a collective
scale). Each essay will stand as an individual 'agent', but the overall theory that underpins
empirical research will rise as an emergent property when the many agents are taken at
their collective scale. Each essay forms a new string in the web, a new connection between
two of the related ideas, metaphors and, or empirical illustrations. Each string is, on its
own, rather fragile, and yet taken as a whole solidity emerges from the relative frailty of
each string.
The Iroquois Gift Economy is illustrative of the model in which I want to pursue
the research (where, in rough terms that need to be developed into harmony with the
multi-dimensional nature of thought, each of the diamonds are an essay and each of the
arrows in which the diamonds collect is an idea like 'evolution', 'social order' or 'human-
nature relations').
44

74
75

74
Barbara Alice Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”.
45

This method is very similar to the nomad explorations method expounded by
76
Barnesmoore (2016) , but pursues conceptualization of the methodology using living
natural symbolism rather than the symbolism of a journey across the plateaus of a
mountain range (i.e. inanimate natural symbolism). The goal of this method is to allow an
emergent understanding of ‘world view’, humanity, nature, evolution, the meaning of life,
the potentials for social order, etc. (i.e. the emergence of a new state in the process of
conscious evolution) that rises from the living network of agent-essays when engaged at
their collective scale.
Nomad Explorations
77
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
78
“Be lost on some road inside the beloved.”
“…If you ride on things so as to let your mind go free, and trust in necessity so as to develop balance, that is
79
best.”
“….Gradually, as we move above the timberline, the reader will find himself beset by difficulties which are not
of our making. They are the inherent difficulties of a science which was fundamentally reserved, beyond our
conception. Most frustrating, we could not use our good old simple catenary logic, in which principles come
first and deduction follows. This was not the way of the archaic thinkers. They thought rather in terms of what
we might call a fugue, in which all notes cannot be constrained into a single melodic scale, in which one is
plunged directly into the midst of things and must follow the temporal order created by their thought. It is,
after all, in the nature of music that the notes cannot all be played at once. The order and sequence, the very
meaning, of the composition will reveal themselves—with patience—in due time. The reader, I suggest, will
80
have to place [themself] in the ancient “Order of Time.”
“Don't be subject to labels; do not be full of schemes; do not assume you’re in charge of affairs; do not be
subject to knowledge. Comprehend the infinite, and roam in the traceless.
Fulfill what you have received from Nature, without the idea of attainment; just be empty.
The attention of perfected people is like a mirror, neither sending anything off nor welcoming
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anything in, responding without concealment. Therefore it can transcend things and not be injured.”
Nomad explorations seek to allow theory to rise as an emergent property from (if I may
use a term from machine learning) an unsupervised exploration of facts and ideas. In short,
the method is to live, read (or otherwise take in information and ideas) and write about the
facts and ideas that I encounter in the every day world (both physical and digital) and in the
books I read. Rather than attempting to create order in my work through the many and
varied modes of hierarchical domination by which the contemporary academy enacts its

75
Barbara Alice Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”.
76
Barnesmoore 2016, Nomad Explorations V 2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
77
Tolkien
78
Rumi, “Hometown Streets”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco: Harper,
p. 39.
79
Zhuang Zi 1999, The Human World (4.2), trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas
Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, p. 74.
80
De Santillana, G & Von Dechend, H 2007, ‘Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time’, Nonpareli Books, p. xii.
81
Zhuang Zi 1999, Responsive Leadership, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary,
Boston: Shambhala, p. 99.
46

disciplinary nature, nomad explorations allow the wanderer to cultivate and accentuate the
order(s) of thought that rise as an emergent property through the process of writing.
The Nomad Explorations Method finds its intellectual roots in Deleuze and
Guattari’s method in A Thousand Plateaus and Foucault’s argument that “one of the
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primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique.” Nomad
Explorations more personal roots are aptly elucidated by Foucault’s statement “do not ask
who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police
83
to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” In
short, the origin of the Nomadic Explorations method is to be found in the trauma of a
philosopher who was raised in the intellectually disciplinary nightmare of American (and
more generally Modernist) culture. Nomad Explorations began as a cry for liberation, as a
desperate plea to be left alone. It was a plea to be unfettered from the disciplinary nature of
the Kantian work epistemology and its intellectual offspring (where better knowledge is
produced through the ‘hard work’ of collecting and dominating facts). It was a plea to be
excused from the dogmatically assumed necessity of imposing linear, discrete, hierarchical
order upon my thought and intellectual outputs. Nomad Explorations was in its beginning
the intellectual incarnation of talking fast to escape an encounter with the thought police
without more than a slap on the wrist. I just wanted to smoke a joint on the beach and
contemplate nature’s beauty, and the Nomad Explorations method was just my way of
hiding from the police while I did.
What I found in Nomad Explorations, however, was far more substantial than
simple cover from the disciplinary eyes of the Modernist thought police. The Nomadic
method helped to foster an epistemological environment in which leisurely contemplation
was possible. The Nomadic method allows me to find a space of serene contemplation
wherein I can transcend the modernist urge to act upon the world and instead allow the
world to act upon me (where I can, to the degree possible for a subjective being, be as
receptive to being and observe the world therein).
“Leisure… is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the
ideal of ‘worker’ in each and every one of the three aspects under which it was analyzed: work as activity, as
toil, as a social function…. Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the
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apprehension of reality…” (Pieper 2009, p. 46).
Though it began as little more than a desperate plea for liberty and academic freedom, the
Nomad Explorations method has transformed into a method for cultivating the state of
being (Leisure, Wu-Wei, effortless action, the silence of infinite potential) that is required
for true philosophical inquiry.
“Among the bona non utilia sed honesta [(the good things which are not useful but are honorable)] which are
at home in the realm of freedom, in its innermost circle indeed, is philosophy, the philosophical act, which
must be understood in the traditional sense of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, and as they

82
Foucault M 1977, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, Vintage Books, p. 218
83
17.
84
Josef Pieper 2009, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 46.
47

understood it. …The philosophical act is a fundamental relation to reality, a full, personal attitude which is by
no manner of means at the sole disposal of the ratio; it is an attitude which presupposes silence, a
contemplative attention to things, in which man begins to see how worthy of veneration they really are. …Pure
theory, philosophical theoria, entirely free from practical considerations and interference—and that is what
theory is—can only be preserved and realized within the sphere of leisure.” (Pieper 2009, p. 16)
Nomad Explorations, in short, could now be called Leisurely Explorations or the

Contemplative Method without much change in the original conception.
“…The beginning of philosophy is wonder….

The unique and original relation to being that Plato calls ‘theoria’ can only be realized in its pure
state through the sense of wonder, in that purely receptive attitude to reality, undisturbed and unsullied by the
interjection of the will….
To perceive all that is unusual and exceptional, all that is wonderful, in the midst of the ordinary
things of everyday life, is the beginning of philosophy. And that, as both Aristotle and Aquinas observe, is
how philosophy and poetry are related. And Goethe… ended one of his short poems… with the words: Zum
Erstaunen bin ich da, which might be rendered by saying ‘marvel is my raison d’etre.’ …‘the very summit of
man’s attainment is the capacity to marvel.
The philosopher and the poet… preserve a deep and strong sense of wonder, and this fact naturally
exposes them to the danger of loosing their foothold in the everyday world. Indeed it might almost be said
that ‘to be a stranger in the world’ is their occupational disease... And those who undertake to live under the
sign and constellation of ‘wonder’… must certainly be prepared to find themselves lost, at times, in the
ordinary workaday world.” (Pieper 2009, pp. 111-113)
“Wonder is not just the starting point of philosophy in the sense of initium, of a prelude or preface. Wonder
is the principium, the lasting source, the fons et origo, the immanent origin of philosophy. The philosopher
does not cease ‘wondering’ at a certain point in his philosophizing—he does not cease to wonder unless, of
course he ceases to philosophize in the true sense of the word.”
“Yen Hui inquired, ‘May I ask about mental fasting?’

Confucius replied, ‘You unify your will: hear with the mind instead of the ears; hear with the energy instead of
the mind. Hearing stops at the ears, the mind stops at contact, but energy is that which is empty and
85
responsive to others. The Way gathers in emptiness; emptiness is mental fasting.’”
Nomadic Explorations are, if we may borrow a phrase from Ouspensky, an effortless

86 87
‘search for the miraculous’ (Ouspensky 1949) through being as receptive to being. They
are the effortless act of being as receptive to being, as receptive to wonder in the marvelous
essence of things that exists beneath the visible surface of our biological existence.
Nomadic Exploration is to wander through the everyday world in a state of being that is
receptive to wonder and in search of wisdom (Philo Sophia, the love of and desire for
wisdom). To be a Nomad is to be as ‘theoria’. It is to lovingly desire wisdom and to wait in
88
emptiness for it to find us as we wander through this world.
“All that is gold does not glitter,

85
Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 71-72.
86
Ouspensky 1949, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching.
87
We do no mean search in the active sense of going out looking for something, but in a passive sense of being in a manner that is
receptive to being found by that for which we search.
88
“…Wisdom is the object of philosophy, but as lovingly sought, and never fully possessed.” (Pieper 2009, p. 122)
48

Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
89
The crownless again shall be king.”
“…Wonder is not to know, not to know fully, not to be able to conceive. To conceive a thing, to possess
comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of a thing, is to cease to wonder…. …To wonder is not merely to
know; it means to be inwardly aware and sure that one does not know, and that one understands oneself in
not knowing. And yet it is not the ignorance of resignation. On the contrary to wonder is to be on the way, in
via; it certainly means to be struck dumb, momentarily, but equally it means that one is searching for the
truth.” (Pieper 2009, p. 116)
Nomadic Exploration is to wander through wonder, to be on the way in the search for
truth, “the longing for knowledge, an active desire for knowledge”. (Pieper 2009, p. 117)
“‘…Who then philosophizes, if neither the wise nor the foolish philosophize? And to that she answered: It
must be clear, even to a child, that it is those who are between the two, in the middle.’ The ‘middle’ is the
truly human sphere. The truly human thing to do is neither to conceive or comprehend…, nor to harden and
dry up; neither to shut oneself up on the supposedly clear and enlightened everyday world, nor to resign
oneself to remaining ignorant; not to loose the childlike suppleness of hope, the freedom of movement
that belongs to those who hope .” (Pieper 2009, p. 119)
“…You
cant be spoken, though you listen to all
sound. You can’t be written, yet you read

everything. You don't sleep, but you’re the
source of dream vision, a ship gliding over
nothing, deep silence …” 90
Living Life as Nomadic Exploration, Being as Nomadic

Nomad Explorations has become more than a research methodology. It is a way of being,
and as such it has spread from my research into every corner of my life, and in so doing it
has rendered my everyday life as a research project. Pythagoras’ dictum ‘know thyself and
thou shalt know the universe’ has rendered Nomad Explorations as a life of self-
exploration through observation and contemplation. My research is my life, and my life is
my research. A research method of being as receptive to being must be pursued as a way of
being. Nomad Explorations can’t be left in the office. Every experience—facts, images,
thoughts, feelings, etc.—is a case study, and most moments of solitude are spent in
contemplation of the case study that is life in our world.
Nature has become my philosophy book, and through the awe-inspiring beauty of
natural metaphors (the forms of nature) and the essence of things that can be found therein
I contemplate my experiences and the world in which they occur. I still of course read

89
J.R.R. Tolkien
90
Rumi, “A Ship Gliding Over Nothing”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San
Francisco: Harper, p. 41. Emphasis added.
49

books of philosophy, but at the point where the academic art of communication ends and I
am left not but my loving desire for wisdom it is the metaphors I have experienced in
nature that come to the fore in my attempts at understanding my experiences and the world
in which they occur.
“As… our Progressive and Moderate friends continue these studies [of London’s historical development
through the lens of neighborhood evolution and conglomeration (‘conurbation’)], and as the vastness of the
problems of London thus increases upon them, they will admit that they are, separately or collectively, unable
clearly to realise all that is going on in this vast man-reef, and still more to foresee what the morrow will bring
forth. Still, one has this definite bit of knowledge and the other that now of the part of London where he was
brought up or lived as a young man or of the places where he works and lives now. So gradually we piece
together in conversation a good deal of useful knowledge.” (Geddes 1915, p. 30)
The intimate knowledge of a neighborhood, city or landscape that is necessary to produce

‘useful knowledge’ is understood as necessarily gleaned through lived experience. Nomadic
Explorations cannot be a tool that we use while ‘working’ and then turn off in the rest of
our daily experiences—it must be a way of being. We can only attain nomadic knowledge of
the world by living our daily lives with a nomadic ethos, and our academic research,
thinking, writing, etc. should come as a reflection of lived experience. We must of course
have recourse to books and other such intellectual materials as descriptions of other
people’s intimate knowledge is the next best thing and necessary to stich together intimate
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knowledge to form useful (holistic) knowledge, but the most essential knowledge is the
intimate form that we derive through lived experience.
Writing a Collection of Essays

In a method of research that is rooted in observing everyday life in the academy and
beyond through the lens of a cultivated state of being (as receptive to being) writing must
occur in the moment that meaning is received. The editorial process will of course occur,
essays that in the end drift too far from the theology-theory-worldview stem that is emerging
from is this collection will be pruned, the many typos and turns of language that leave
something to be desired will be polished, some thematic reordering of essays will occur, I
may even add some paragraphs to tie earlier essays into themes that emerge later in the
process, but in the main the collection of essays will be left as they were developed through
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the many moments of received meaning that I have (all be it by necessity and by function
of my own limitations imperfectly) attempted to capture in these pages. I will not try to
create straight lines through improvement (see the quotation of William Blake’s Marriage
of Heaven and Hell on p. 167). I will not formulate a linear narrative through domination
of these essays into the ‘preferred format’. I will not submit to the cognitive slavery of the
‘lay abstract’ writing ethos that has been captured so perfectly in UBC’s dissertation
formatting requirements.

91
As Geddes (1915, p. 13-15) writes these words he has just engaged with Aristotle to argue that understanding a city must begin with a
synoptic (interdisciplinary) view of the city (both literally in terms of a birds eye view and metaphorically in terms of a holistic view of the
city’s historical evolution and present state). Useful rational knowledge is distinct from intimate rational knowledge, then, in being
synoptic (holistic, general, interdisciplinary).
92
Where the forms that have been inscribed upon my being respond to that which I observe in the silence beyond the ‘objective mind’ to
produce understanding, a sort of intellectual expression of Cook Ting’s effortless butchery.
50

“The lay or public summary explains the key goals and contributions of the research/scholarly work in terms
93
that can be understood by the general public. It must not exceed 150 words in length.”
We shall see how I confront the challenge of meeting UBC’s requirement when that
moment comes... Returning to the issue at hand, though I may attempt to write a lay
abstract to fulfill the bureaucratic requirements of my lived environment I will not in any
way attempt to impose the implicit principles of this 150 word exercise in obfuscating
simplification for a staggeringly simplified public mind upon my writing… This is not an
easily accessible text from the standpoint of the general public mind. I do not find that the
use of simple language or simple linguistic structures is always useful. Of course this far to
ambitious of a topic for a PHD dissertation or any single text, any truly worthwhile question
is. No, I will not focus in on a more specific issue so as to adhere to the constraints of the
desired format. The outcome may be imperfect due to the constraints of this medium, but
so to are all outcomes. I will do my best to write essays that illustrate the understandings I
receive in the moments that I have them, and I will do my best to polish the edges of these
essays, but I will not rewrite this text as some linear, ‘easily accessible’ travesty of a
traditional book with an introduction, case study chapters and an end that tries to provide
some sort of discrete, linear completion.
94
“If you go along in the beginning, there is no end to it.”
“Those who are inwardly honest are companions of Nature. Those who are companions of Nature know that
emperors and themselves are all children of Nature. So why would they care about others’ approval of
disapproval of what they say? Such people are called innocents’ this is what it means to be companions of
Nature.
Those who are outwardly tactful are companions of people. The various courtesies and manners of people in
the service of others are things that everyone does; how dare I not do them? If you do as others do, then no
95
one will criticize you; this is called being a companion of people.”
In Nomadic Explorations we shall be as a companion of Nature rather than as a

companion of the people.
“When the one is divided, things are brought to completion, and in being brought to completion, the one is
destroyed. When things are not subject to completion or destruction, they are once again comprehended as
96
one.”
With no beginning, middle, and end, no linear narrative to trap the reader in the ‘objective
mind’ (in the ratio), we hope that the reader will be able to form a silent understanding of
the meaning conveyed by this text through allowing the essays to inscribe themselves upon

93
https://www.grad.ubc.ca/current-students/dissertation-thesis-preparation/preliminary-pages
94
95
96
Zhuang Zi, trans. Robert Eno, p. 17.
51

their being and understanding in the contemplative reaches that extend beyond the
97
limitations of the ‘objective mind’ .
98
“Intuition… takes what is known by Reason and grasps it in a single [silent] act of the mind.”
Without beginning, middle and end (the linear trappings of Reason), we hope that the text
will encourage the reader to grasp what has been learned by Reason through the process of
reading the text in a single, silent movement of the mind (Intuition can in this sense be
understood as a sort of intellectual Wu-Wei, where the eternal forms of manifestation we
attempt to capture in this text have been inscribed upon the reader’s intellectual being and
can therefore interact with the moments of reality subsequently observed by the reader and
give rise to silent, Rational-Intuitional understandings of the world as the Ox Form,
inscribed upon Cook Ting’s being, interacts with the form of subsequently encountered
oxen to produce effortless actions).

97
We use the term objective mind to signify the ‘commonsensical’ mind of our seemingly objective experiences in passing time and
physical space.
98
Nadler, S 2013, ‘Baruch Spinoza’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
52

‘Open-Source Ethnography’
Elvin Wyly’s inquiry into the epistemological evolutionary process of the alt-right
noospheric cyborg collective employs “something like ‘open-source ethnography’—
exploiting the hiding-in-plain-sight informational avalanche of the contemporary network
society, while also tracing connections to the geographically contingent divisions of
epistemological space inherited from previous generations. This methodological approach,
99
‘digital ethnography’, highlights the epistemological potentials afforded humanity by its

entrance into noospheric cyborg collectives. The compression of space (and thus time) by
the technological sense organs (hardware) and technological epistemic mechanisms
(software) of our noospheric body allow us to collect ethnographic data from around the
world in real time. If we want to truly understand a new state of being we must experience it
for ourselves, and so our inquiry into the noospheric cyborg collective, its relationship to
the ‘geographically contingent divisions of epistemological space inherited from previous
generations’ that provide the ontological and epistemological assumptions (the world view)
which articulate the potential for noospheric epistemological processes and the potential
for human evolution and human-technology-nature relations therein will be pursued
100
through our own noospheric faculties in the development of a nomadic exploration of

99
Wyly, “Conspiracy Capital”, p. x
Also see: Michael E. Elliot-Hurst (1985). “Geography Has Neither Existence nor Future.” In Ron J. Johnston, ed., The Future of
Geography. London: Methuen, 59-91.
100
Luke R. Branesmoore, Jeffery Huang. (2015) “Machine Learning Methodologies and Large Data Text Corpora” International Journal
of Communication and Linguistic Studies 14(1): 1-16.
53

digital ethnographic information.
Science and Spirituality

Krieger (1995, p. 218) argues that ‘the scientific’ and ‘the spiritual’ cannot be aptly
differentiated, as is evident in the “serious and self-conscious” mysticism of the
101
Pythagoreans and in the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and Durkheim. Epstein, in
a similar vein, argues that social science theory must be sensitive to esoteric metaphysical
102
concepts like grounding and ontological dependence.

Luke R. Barnesmoore, Joy Donoso, Sophie Claiver, Laurent El Ghaoui. (2015) “Machine Learning Methodologies: Histories of
Asembalge and Representations of Women in the Bible” International Journal of Ciritical Cultural Studies 13(2): p. 13-25.
Luke R. Barnesmoore 2016, Nomad Explorations V2.1 : Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity, University of British Columbia MA
Thesis.
101
Krieger MH 1995, "What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?: Roles for the humanities in planning", Journal of Planning
Education and Research, vol. 14, 217-221.
102
Epstein, Brian. 2011. Metaphysics in Social Science. Bucknell University, June.
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/mhs016/mpsc2011/papers/epstein.pdf
54

Preparation for the Work

It should be noted that this text ought in essence to be understood as preparation for the
work of cultivating conscious evolution at the individual and societal scales rather than the
work itself (though we do hope that it may serve some utility in this work for certain
intellectually oriented seekers of the Dao). In a vein similar to Barnesmoore’s (2017)
argument that theory (philosophy and the worldview it produces) must precede practice as
our theories expand and constrain our potential for conceptualization of practice, Schall
(2009) argues “before we can pretend to do anything about the present, we must know what
we are, what the world is, and yes, what God is. Construction of a civilization that knows
103
little or nothing about these deeper realities can only make things worse.” In practical
terms, Pieper’s (2009) sensitivity to the idea that “the first principle of action is the end for
104
which we act” illustrates the reality that before we can pursue cultivation of conscious
evolution in individuals and our society we must first understand conscious evolution and
the self in light of conscious evolution.
Recalling the dismay and shock that often crosses the face of dogmatic materialists
when they hear words like soul or God in the context of social science research we know
that the term God is very scary for most contemporary social scientists, and indeed when
used in reference to the angry, vengeful, anthropomorphized divinity of exoteric
Abrahamic religion it should, but in this text the term God—which we refer to as the
Infinite Substance in line with Spinoza’s (2002) use of the term—does not refer to the angry,
vengeful, white man of the Abrahamic tradition. We instead refer to the infinite and the
nothing, to that which cannot be named, neti neti, the eternal source of all that which is,
and other such esoteric descriptions of the divine that, while harder for the human mind to
grasp than anthropomorphic conceptions, come closer to the true nature of God. When
used as such terms like God cannot (or at least ought not) be simply disregarded as they
can when used in the heuristic, absurd, dogmatic, etc. anthropomorphic sense in which the
exoteric Abrahamic tradition has trained the western and near eastern public mind to
understand it (thus our use of other terms like Divinity and Infinite Substance).

103
104
55

Chapter 2:
Geographical Thought/ Theory
Geography?
These essays are, in practical terms, designed to act as an ideational network from which
the theoretical underpinnings of a dissertation for a PHD in Geography will emerge, but as
these theoretical underpinnings have emerged so too have questions concerning whether
Geography and Geographical Thought hold relevance in the utopian techno-noospheric
future imagined by this nomadic exploration:
“Geography (n.) "the science of description of the earth's surface in its present condition," 1540s, from Middle
French géographie (15c.), from Latin geographia, from Greek geographia "description of the earth's surface,"
105
from geo- "earth" + -graphia "description" (see -graphy).”
First, the obvious issue, Geography is implicitly oriented towards the surface of earth and,
in the case of Human Geography, the potential for social, cultural, political, ecological, etc.
relations therein. The basic logics, assumptions, metaphors, language, etc. of the
Geographical tradition are oriented towards the realities of human civilization as contained
to the finite physical spaces on earth. The Age of Conscious Evolution will see humanity
escape the boundaries of earth to explore the cosmos. More importantly, the new age will
see humanity escape the boundaries of visible, bio-mechanical evolution (which can be
observed on the surface of earth) into the invisible space of conscious evolution (which
cannot be observed, in and of themselves, on the surface of earth). Geography in the age of
Conscious Evolution, then, will have to transform itself into a study of physical spaces
beyond the earth’s surface (stellar cartography and the study of other planet surfaces) and,
more important and more difficult, into the study of the invisible spaces in which
consciousness exists.
There is also the problem that Geography is, in essence, a descriptive science.
106
Geography’s great fascination with Bruno Latour and other such a-ontological approaches
provides an archetypal reflection of this overall descriptive impetus.

105
Harper, Douglas. "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. Online Etymology Dictionary
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=geography
106
Harman, G 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, re.press.
56

“By ‘rules of method’ I mean what a priori decisions should be made in order to consider all of the empirical
facts provided by the specialized disciplines as being part of the domain of ‘science, technology and society’.
By ‘principles’ I mean what is my personal summary of the empirical facts at hand after a decade of work in
this area. Thus, I expect these principles to be debated, falsified, replaced by other summaries. On the other
hand, the rules of method are a package that do not seem to be easily negotiable without loosing sight of the
common ground I want to sketch. With them it is more of a question of all or nothing, and I think they
should be judged only on this ground: do they link more elements than others? Do they allow outsiders to
follow science and technology further, longer and more independently? This will be the only rule of the
107
game, that is, the only ‘meta’ rule that we will need to get on with our work.”
108
Latour’s method also includes moving forward without epistemological assumptions, only
109
tracking the rhetorical surface of discourse (to avoid ‘psychologizing’), focusing on the
process of science rather than focusing on the power dynamics that articulate the potential
for scientific process and “offering no a-priori definition of what is strong and what is weak.
…[Starting] with the assumption that everything is involved in a relation of forces but that
110
[he] has no idea at all of precisely what force is”, and a plethora of other practices that, in
emphasizing horizontality across time and space (history, rhetoric and practice) over
verticality in time and space (meaning, intention, psychology, consciousness, etc.), strip
human thought of the capacity for discernment (of Jupiter). As we see in The Order of
Things (Foucault, 1970), it is exactly this capacity for discernment (Jupiter) that transforms
words into language (the verb ‘to be’), transforms description into analysis, transforms
telematic subjects into subjects with agency, distinguishes an algorithm from a human, etc.
In short, discernment is an essential epistemological faculty in the process of conscious
evolution and so eschewing discernment is eschewing the potential for conscious evolution.
Bruno Latour (1988) asks the reader to study the world as though there is no distinction
111
between force and reason. This suggestion, along with the notion that we should move
112
forward without epistemological assumptions , has spawned a wide range of studies that

Morton, T 2013, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, Open Humanities Press, p. 234.
Morton, T 2011, ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social
Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 163-190.
Bennett, Jane 2009, ‘Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things’, Duke University Press.
Bennett, J, Cheah, P, Orlie, MA & Grosz, E 2010, ‘New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics’ in D. Coole & S. Frost, eds.,
Duke University Press.
Bennett, J 2004, ‘The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 347-372.
Brown, B 2003, ‘A Sense of Things: the Object Matter of American Literature’, University of Chicago Press.
Daston, L 2000, Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press.

107
Latour, Science in Action, p. 17
108
Ibid. 13-15
109
Latour, The Pasteurization of France .
110
Latour, Pasteurization of France, p. 7.
111
Latour, “The Pasteurization of France” 1988.
Robert Nola , Rescuing Reason: A Critique of Anti-Rationalist Views of Science and Knowledge 2012, Springer.
112
Ibid. 13-15
57

move without discernment (of phenomena like scale) and the distinction between force and
113
reason (and a focus on ‘non-human actors’). This encyclopedic methodology confines
human epistemological potential to the boundaries of the peripatetic mind by extinguishing
the distinction between force and reason and reducing all phenomena to an unconscious
114
(and thus unintentional) play of quantifiable forces.
Nigel Thrift is one of the most recognized ‘ontological theorists’ in contemporary
Geographical literature. He is best known for arguing that, following Latour’s Actor
Network Theory, Geographical theory should simply eschew notions of scale (local,
regional, global, etc.) and instead view society in terms of ‘the durability of social relations’
115
(as Latour views Truth in terms of the ‘durability’ of subjective opinion…). In a similar
vein of thought, and in a move that echoes Latour’s move to eschew the distinction
between force and reason (i.e. discernment), Sally Marston proposed a ‘flat ontology’ that
eschews horizontal and vertical ‘predetermination’ (which has most tellingly been described
as “an impetus for providing more modest accounts that attend to new forms of connection
116
as well as disconnection” (rather than discernment and critique?). In short, as with much
117
of the post-modern work on ‘object oriented ontologies’ and the like, “reality was
118
ransacked in search of theory” as all distinction (a product of discernment…) is replaced
by simple description. In the words of Benjamin Noys “I am concerned with Latour as
merely one symptomatic instance of ‘anti-critique’; the turn from critical analysis to the
119
descriptive, and the loss of confidence in the very gesture of critique.”
In the Age of Conscious Evolution envisioned by this text, models of inquiry that
eschew discernment for description will be rendered obsolete as they cannot facilitate
conscious evolution—there will be a need for description, for what we might call

113
Morton, T 2013, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, Open Humanities Press, p. 234.
Morton, T 2011, ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social
Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 163-190.
Bennett, Jane 2009, ‘Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things’, Duke University Press.
Bennett, J, Cheah, P, Orlie, MA & Grosz, E 2010, ‘New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics’ in D. Coole & S. Frost, eds.,
Duke University Press.
Bennett, J 2004, ‘The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 347-372.
Brown, B 2003, ‘A Sense of Things: the Object Matter of American Literature’, University of Chicago Press.
Daston, L 2000, Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press.
Jessop, B 2004, ‘Hollowing out the 'Nation-State' and Multilevel Governance’, in Kennett, P, eds., A Handbook Of Comparative Social
Policy, Edward Elgar Publishing.
114
Infinite Substance emanates as force, form and consciousness (see Spinoza’s Emendation of the Intellect for a detailed discussion of
this point). By the nature of that distinction, force and form are in the sense relevant for this study devoid of consciousness (which
includes reason). To reduce all things to force is to remove consciousness from the discussion and thus to necessitate the interpretation
of all sociopolitical outcomes as unintentional (for without consciousness there can be no intention).
115
Agnew, John A., and James S. Duncan, eds. The Wiley-Blackwell companion to human geography. Vol. 16. John Wiley & Sons,
2011. p. 301
116
Agnew, John A., and James S. Duncan, eds. The Wiley-Blackwell companion to human geography. Vol. 16. John Wiley & Sons,
2011. p. 301
117
Barnesmoore, “Latour’s Nihilist Madness: Robotic Subjectivities & The Death of Discernment”
118
Smith N (1979). “Geography, science, and post-positivist modes of explanation.” Progress in Human Geography 3: 356–383. P. 356
119
Noys, B 2011, “The Discrete Charm of Bruno Latour, or the Critique of Anti-Critique”, Presented at the Centre for Critical Theory,
University of Nottingham.
58

‘cartography of invisible spaces’ and for the traditional study of physical space, but there
will also be a need to develop new theoretical models and methods of inquiry to study
invisible space (consciousness) and its co-substantive relationship with physical space. The
‘mind>matter’ and ‘matter>mind’ hierarchical-binary we observe in the relationship
between authors like Leopold, Geddes and Mumford and the Chicago Schools of
Sociology and Economics must be replaced with the ‘mind=matter’ of a co-substantive,
120
non-hierarchical ‘world view’. Mind and matter ought to be taken as mutually
constructive, as both a single reality and as two, co-substantive realities. Geographical
Thought is, as we see below, already in the process of making the above outlined changes
(the ontological and epistemological turns are good examples of engagement with invisible
space), and this work simply hopes to make a contribution to these existing trends.
Anarco-Geography and Non-Hierarchical Geographical Thought

“…The reconstitution of hierarchy represents a step backwards, not ‘a new burst of colour’ that sings for the
121
possibilities of tomorrow.”
Simon Springer (2014) critiques Marxist alternatives to neoliberal decentralization in their

acceptance of hierarchical domination as a necessary constituent of social order. Springer
roots his non-hierarchical vision of society within the rhizomal mythos of Deleuze and
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus:
“In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduced the concept of the ‘arbores-cent’ to
describe a vertical, tree-like ontology of totalizing principles and binary thought. They contrasted this with the
notion of the ‘rhizome’, which is marked by a horizontal ontology, wherein things, ideas, and politics are able
122
to link up in non-hierarchical patterns of association.”
The devil is, as they say, in the details, and there are some important differences in the
cosmological, ontological, epistemological, teleological, etc. axioms (the ‘world view’) by
which we conceive of non-hierarchical social relations, theories, methods, etc., but in
essence the distinction between rhizomal (‘tree of life’) and arboreal (‘tree of good and
evil’) social relations is illustrative of the distinction between Modernist conceptions of
social order and the emergent vision of social order developed in this collection of essays.
Binary (us-them) and hierarchical (teacher-student if not inspired by the desire for
domination and master-slave if inspired by the desire for domination) are, while not simply
dogmatized or denigrated as was the wont of classical religious world views in the western
world,
There is also a methodological resonance between this collection of essays and the
123
rhizome. Rather than imposing a dominating, arboreal theoretical order upon facts to
produce a concise, linear presentation of a sufficiently atomized idea or phenomenon, this

120
Simon Springer 2014, “Human Geography without Hierarchy” Progress in Human Geography 38(3) makes a similar argument about
the necessity for non-hierarchical geographical thought for revolution against Neoliberal Modernity.
121
Simon Springer 2014, “Human Geography without Hierarchy” Progress in Human Geography 38(3).
122
Simon Springer 2014, “Human Geography without Hierarchy” Progress in Human Geography 38(3), p. 402.
123
See the discussion of Nomad Explorations in Barnesmoore 2016b, Nomad Explorations V2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in
Modernity, MA Thesis UBC.
59

text allows its at times rhizomal (and at times arborescent) collection of essays to form a
living theoretical network from which theoretical order rises as an emergent phenomenon.
Like Springer, we see potential for combatting the hierarchical arborescence of Modernity
through pursuing our inquiry and developing our theory through use of a method that is at
times markedly rhizomal in allowing research questions and theorization to emerge from
the horizontal relationships between the essays in the collection.
Turning to more practical political problems, Springer argues that the leftwing of
the western political binary is anti-revolutionary in seeking to perpetuate the hierarchies
(the scarcity, competition and desire for hierarchical domination) of state capitalism.
“‘Much of the socialist left appears bereft of ideas beyond a state-regulated capitalism’, and
indeed the reconstitution of hierarchy represents a step backwards, not ‘a new burst of
124
colour’ that sings for the possibilities of tomorrow.” In short, the left’s desire to centralize
power in the state forms a dialectical hegemonic relationship with Modernism through
accepting its central tenant that social order is to be created through hierarchical
domination.
125
“Though the work of Italian Social Philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971) popularized the term in western
academic literature, our understanding of hegemony is derived first and foremost from the work of British
126
Social Theorist Stuart Hall (1988). Hall (1988) eschews definite, static-definitional conceptions of hegemony
for conceptions of hegemony as a dynamic process that includes breaches and techniques (in the Foucaultian
sense of techniques of power) for sealing said breaches. Our understanding of hegemony as process has been
influenced by debates on the nature of neoliberalism waged between authors like Jamie Peck and Aihwa
127
Ong. In short, Peck’s (2010; 2016; Brenner et. al., 2010) camp (also moving from inspiration by Stuart Hall)
argues that conjunctural analysis of neoliberalism’s contingent, contextual manifestations begins to bring an
128
image of neoliberal hegemony into focus. Ong’s (2008; Ong et. al., 2008) camp argues that the contingent,
contextual manifestation of neoliberalism belies classification as a hegemonic project. We conceive of
hegemony (Barnesmoore et. al., Accepted), in a move more coherent with Peck’s camp, as a process where
the essence (axioms and logics) of a hegemonic regime manifests in a contingent, contextual relationship with
the environment (cultural, historical, physical, etc.) of manifestation. Revolution against a hegemonic regime,
then, must be conceived of in terms of revolution against hegemonic essence (against the axioms and logics
that form the core of a hegemonic regime’s many contextually contingent manifestations) rather than in terms
of practices that rise from the hegemonic essence of the hegemonic regime revolutionaries purport to fight.
The term ‘dialectical hegemony’ elucidates the dangers posed by ‘revolution’ against hegemonic
regimes via practices derived from (rationalized by) the hegemonic essence of said hegemonic regime.
Dialectical hegemony refers to a mode of social control wherein two (or more) ‘sides’ of a conflict are created

124
125
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci: Ed. and Transl. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith. G. Nowell-Smith, & Q. Hoare (Eds.). International Publishers.
126
Hall, S. (1988). the Toad in the Garden: Thatcher among the Theorists ‘in C. Nelson and L.(Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988, p. 55.
127
Brenner, N., Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2010). Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways. Global networks, 10(2),
182-222.
Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of neoliberal reason. OUP Oxford.
Peck, J. (2016) “The Urban Studies Journal Annual Lecture: Transatlantic City,” Association of American Geographers Annual
Convention 2016, San Francisco.
128
Ong, A. (2007). Neoliberalism as a mobile technology. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), 3-8.
Ong, A., & Collier, S. J. (Eds.). (2008). Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. John Wiley &
Sons.
60

so that the conflict can be controlled to produce a desired outcome. We argue dialectical hegemony is
facilitated by ‘creating’ (or simply empowering and appropriating existent) seemingly oppositional-
autonomous groups whose thoughts, behaviors and conceptions of being rise from the same hegemonic
essence (from the same axioms and logics); this ensures that the outcome of the staged conflict necessarily
includes the hegemonic essence (which is rendered banally invisible (commonsensical) by ubiquity through
the seeming conflict between the two sides in being shared by seemingly autonomous actors). In normative
US military and political practice this strategy was derived from Carl von Clausewitz work on dialectical
military strategies and Sun Zi’s The Art of War (Burnet, 2016). 129
130
Philip Abrams (1988) theorized the state as ‘a mask’ for elite power. The State, argues Abrams, is
effective in achieving the interests of the elite class precisely because it seems to be autonomous from the elite
class. We have subsequently theorized the news media, when conceived as a seemingly autonomous ‘fourth
branch of government’, as a second mask for elite power. The news media is seemingly autonomous from the
state and from the elite class (or at least the ‘other side’ of the face of the elite class that is visible to the public
mind…) allowing it to reinforce the basic axioms and logics (hegemonic essence) by which the elite class
epistemologically subjugates the general public from a seemingly autonomous perspective. From this point of
departure we can see any regime of thought or practice that purports autonomy from the hegemonic core of a
society while rising from the hegemonic essence of said society as, for practical purposes, masks for elite
power. The left’s general acceptance (from the Neoliberal Capitalist ‘left’ to the Marxist left) of hierarchy as
the organizing principle of society is a perfect example of a seemingly autonomous mask for elite power in
accepting the root of elite class power (social order through hierarchy) as the root of their political project
131
while simultaneously purporting autonomy from said elite class.”
Returning to our divergence from Springer’s (2014) Anarco-Geography, there are two
illustrative questions: Can you have hierarchy without domination? Is hierarchy or
hierarchical domination the essence of the problem in Modernity? In short, the answer
seems to be that the problem lies in domination and that ‘hierarchies’ (minus the archies)
are a natural, constituent aspect of reality. We observe the proper relations between a
student and a teacher or a parent and a child, which reflect the proper relations between a
gardener and a seed—the teacher provides the student with ideas (which represents a form
of hierarchy) but does not attempt to force the student to understand or accept the ideas
(i.e. hierarchy without domination) as the gardener provides the seeds with water, soil and
132
sunlight but does not try to force the plants to grow like the simpleton from song who
attempted to force his plants to grow by tugging the sprouts and only succeeded in killing
the plants. Hierarchy, in and of the ‘archy’, may not be the best word to describe such
relations, but we ought not simply exclude any arboreal, scalar or in a sense ‘vertical’
relationships (like that between a teacher and student or between a gardener and a seed)
that might fall under the term hierarchy if enlivened by the desire for domination. The
desire for domination’s role as the organizing principle of arborescence, scale and
verticality is the root of the problem, not arborescence, scale or verticality themselves, and
so our purpose ought to be displacement of the desire for domination as the organizing
principle of society—a purpose that can at least in part, as Springer (2014) argues, be
pursued through emphasis of rhizomal horizontality—rather than dismissal and destruction

129
Burnett R E 2016, "Remotely Piloted Airborne Systems (RPAS), Ubiquitous Networks, and New Forms of Command and Control in
National Security and Civilian Operational Spaces." ISA Annual Conference 2016, Atlanta,
http://web.isanet.org/Web/Conferences/Atlanta%202016/Archive/34a88835-6cfb-4761-8663-824e878a3a11.pdf
130
Philip Abrams 1988, Notes on the Difficulties of Studying the State (1977) Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1) pp. 58-89.
131
Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” Environment and Social Psychology 2(1)
p. 1-14.
132
Meng Zi, The Meng Zi, 2A2.
61

of all vertical relationships (which would lead to the reverse of the imbalance Modernism’s
domination driven desire for hierarchy and arborescence has imposed upon our society).
Beyond the desire based distinction between arborescence and hierarchy and the
concomitant dangers of simply tearing down all arborescent relationships rather than
displacing the desire for domination (and the scarcity that produces it) as the driving force
of arborescent relationships, a fundamental question concerning the nature of unity and
harmony is raised by the seeming implication that harmonic unity of and in difference can
be attained through horizontal, rhizomal relationships. For heuristic purposes, and
133
following Barnesmoore (2017) , we can understand the economic theology of Modernity
as arguing that social unity (unity created through dominating difference) can only be
created through dominating, arborescent (hierarchical) social relations and we can
understand the flat ontology movement as arguing that social unity can only be created, in
response to the arborescence of Modernism, through rhizomal, anti-arborescent practices
and theories. In both cases, valorizing the x- or the y-axis over the other creates an
imbalance. As it is the scarcity induced desire for domination that renders arborescent
relationships as hierarchical relationships, we ought to strive towards a world view that
purges the desire for domination from our social relationships and seeks balance in the
relationship between the rhizomatic and arborescent orders of reality. Postmodern
epistemology (if we may generalize…) simply denied Truth and essence to combat the
perversion of Truth and essence that undergirded positivism (the dire consequences of this
movement are strewn across the pages of the nihilistic ‘post truth’ political nightmare
humanity is presently experiencing), Flat Ontologies simply deny arborescence to combat
the perversion of arborescence in Modernity (and we can assume that the social
consequences may be as dire as the consequences of Postmodernism). In summary, we
propose that the perversion of Modernist arborescence should be combatted through use
of a ‘balanced ontology’ rather than a flat ontology.

133
“Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”
62

We argue that materialism (the valorization of matter over mind, reduction of mind to
matter and reduction of reality to passing time and physical space), arguably the most
134
distinct outgrowth of Modernism (Nasr, 1994), lies at the root of our divergence from
Springer’s (2014) view of “Human Geography without hierarchy”.
“One key difference that I attempt to convey in this essay is that, while scale is anchored in abstraction,
hierarchy – and its refusal – begins at the level of the everyday…. In other words, hierarchy is made flesh
through its evasion of the intertwined materiality of our existence and our complicity in such processes. But
embedded within this reading we can also find the seed of scale, which grows arborescently out of the
everyday into abstraction. Scale sets things apart. Its vertical ontology attempts transcendence by standing
135
above materiality, meaning that scale is literally a dis-traction.”
In a reactionary movement akin to Postmodernisms outright denial of Truth to combat

Positivism’s perversion of Truth, Springer responds to the perversion of scale and vertical
ontologies by the desire for domination by reducing all potential conceptions and
expressions of scale and verticality to this perverted form of scale and verticality and
isolating the intellect (‘abstraction’) rather than the desire for domination as the cause of
perversion. Many religions and philosophies have indeed reduced matter and the body to
an impure prison for misbehaving souls, emphasized the distinctions between body, mind
and soul and established a hierarchy between the three—Plato’s The Republic and the Old
Testament are the archetypal examples in western culture—but again the issue lies in the
fact that arborescent relations are enlivened by the desire for domination and not in the

134
Nasr 1994, Religion and the Order of Nature, Oxford University Press.
135
63

reality that there are arborescent (as well as concomitant rhizomatic and unitary…) relations
between the different aspects of our being. One need not deny the ontological dependence
(a distinctly arborescent relationship) of physical manifestation on the Emanations (Force,
136
Form and Consciousness) of Infinite Substance to shed the notion that this relationship
between the infinite and the finite is inspired by or necessitates the desire for domination
by which arborescent relationships have been perverted in many of the historical strings
that form the web of Modernity.
Following from Barnesmoore’s (2016a; 2017) argument that reduction of reality to
passing time and physical space is the hegemonic essence of Modernity (the most novel
and distinct ontological movement of Modernity), that revolution against Modernity must
begin with a theoretical revolution against the Modernist hegemonic essence (as our
theories expand and constrain the potential for practice) and that the desire for domination
is inspired by material scarcity, the desire for survival and irrationality (irrationality,
following Descartes, is rooted in a materially reductive world view that is divorced from the
Infinite Substance and its Emanations—‘the simplest things’) we argue that accepting the
materialistic hegemonic essence of Modernity to combat the perversion of arborescence by
the desire for domination only compounds the problem. Indeed, it is the finite
dimensional quality of the material world that makes scarcity, competition and thus the
desire for hierarchical domination possible, and if we reduce reality to passing time and
physical space we effectively cut ourselves off from the aspects of reality—and potential
states of consciousness (Barnesmoore 2016a)—that make transcendence of the desire for
domination (and thus the perversion of arborescence) possible. In negating the potential
for conscious evolution, which is one sense the process of transcending the limitations of a
fourth dimensionally reductive, materialist world view and the desires (like the desire for
domination) that are made possible by that limited perspective, this attempt to combat
hierarchy actually serve to perpetuate the desire for domination that renders arborescent
relationships as hierarchies and is thus self defeating.
Hierarchy and Domination

Returning to our divergence from Springer’s Anarco-Geography, there are to illustrative
questions: Can you have hierarchy without domination? Is hierarchy or hierarchical
domination the essence of the problem in Modernity? In short, the answer seems to be
that the problem lies in domination and that hierarchies are a natural, constituent aspect of
reality. We are inclined to observe the proper relations between a student and a teacher or
a parent and a child, which reflect the proper relations between a gardener and a seed—the
teacher provides the student with ideas (which represents a form of hierarchy) but does not
attempt to force the student to understand or accept the ideas (i.e. hierarchy without
domination) as the gardener provides the seeds with water, soil and sunlight but does not
137
try to force the plants to grow like the simpleton from song who attempted to force his
plants to grow by tugging the sprouts and only succeeded in killing the plants. Hierarchy, in
and of the ‘archy’, may not be the best word to describe such relations, but we ought not

136
Spinoza, Emendation of the Intellect.
137
Meng Zi, The Meng Zi, 2A2.
64

simply exclude any scalar or in a sense ‘vertical’ relationship (like that between a teacher
and student or between a gardener and a seed) that might fall under the term hierarchy if
enlivened by the desire for domination. Domination is the problem, not verticality or scale.
Spiritual-Anarchical Origins of Political Ecology

“Despite [its] rich plurality, the genealogy of political ecology is quite easy to trace: two major intellectual
figures of the 19th century, Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, are widely accepted as its founding fathers.
138
Both men were of course anarchists and geographers…”
Nature in Geographical Thought and the Modernist Noosphere

If we are to understand the order of nature and human-nature relations in the Modernist
‘world view’s’ North American expression we must look to two major camps: the scientific
left and the religious-conspiratorial right. Both groups typically treat with nature as a chaotic
other that must be brought into order through hierarchical, human domination. That being
said, the two camps have a stark divergence in the value they assign to environmental
protection and their conceptions of environmental change and degradation. The simplest
example may come in the fact that, where the most archetypal expressions of the scientific
left rationalize the increased prevalence and power of destructive weather patterns,
increased global temperatures and receding icecaps using facts, mathematics, computer
models, satellites, etc., the most archetypal expressions of the right rationalize changes in
weather as divine retribution against ‘the gays’ and ‘the globalist plot to turn Americans gay’
or as a globalist fabrication designed to destroy the US economy (as we have seen there is a
dark synthesis of neoliberal capitalism and evangelical Christianity that allows people to
pursue the same practical outcome—in this case the denial of climate change as a
phenomenon caused by human industry—through seemingly autonomous, mutually
139 140
constitutive secular and theological logics ). Elvin Wyly identifies three themes (Political
Ecology, the Cyborg and the Noosphere) in the history of geographical thought’s
engagement with questions about nature as illustrative of the “strange, conspiratorial
connections” created by human interfacing with the social media web and the collective
consciousness (cyborg mind) that emerges therein and the effects of these conspiratorial
connections on “human thought about nature, and the nature of human thought” that
141
produce such ‘archetypal right wing’ conceptions of nature.

138
https://www.academia.edu/28556222/Anarchist_Political_Ecology_Theoretical_Horizons_and_Empirical_Axes
139
In the same way that secular-neoliberal personal responsibility logics and evangelical poverty as divine punishment logics allow
seemingly autonomous groups (from ‘Clintonian’ members of the scientific left through ‘Trumpian’ members of the religious-
conspiratorial right) to pursue seemingly autonomous ‘world views’ to the same practical outcome—acceptance of poverty as a natural and
just punishment for sinners and lazy people. We have also observed similar trends in the white nationalist movement where the
theological root of white nationalism is obfuscated by arguing for white nationalism using ‘secular logics’. “This whole ‘old white people’
business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been
made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to
civilization?”139 The statement is couched in the secular language of cultural development, and the fact that white folks are ‘God’s people’
in King’s ‘world view’ is not mentioned, but the dog whistle is there for the evangelical Christian to read ‘western white folks have made
the most contributions to civilization because we are God’s people and were ordained by God to do so’.
140
See Alex Jones’ now famous remarks about how ‘they’ are putting ‘stuff’ in the water that ‘turns the freaking frogs gay’.
141
Elvin Wyly, “Conspiracy Capital: …”
65

Political Ecology engages environmental questions (questions of the nature of the
environment, of environmental change, of environmental problems, etc.) in their
relationship to the social, economic and political flows of human civilization. In
evolutionary terms, Political Ecology is aptly illustrated by the term Anthropocene.
142 143
Anthropocene, introduced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 and 2002 ,
describes a new age in which human society influences the nature and evolution of geology
and ecosystems (the co-evolution of the geosphere, biosphere and noosphere). In essence,
Political Ecology examines the co-creative, co-evolutionary relationship of terrestrial nature
(the geosphere and biosphere) and conscious beings (the biosphere and the noosphere).
What are the implications of political ecology’s overtly ‘economic’ character
(especially in the geography literature you reference)? How are the axioms and scriptures
of economic theology influencing our potential for understanding human nature relations
(especially assumptions about human evolution and human order that are
incommensurable with the Noosphere’s conscious mode of evolution)? Are the laws,
structures, processes, etc. of economics compatible with the laws, structures, processes, etc.
of geo- and ecosystems? Are the laws, structures, processes, etc. of economics compatible
with the potentials for (conscious) evolution and social order afforded by free will, reason
and other such high epistemological faculties? If not, how does constraint by the economic
‘world view’ constrain our potential for understanding (let alone enacting) harmonious
relations with nature? Given that political economy is one of the foundations of political
ecology, and given that the economic ‘world view’ and its competitive, biological human is
indeed incommensurable with beings capable of conscious evolution and the Noospheric
Cyborg Collective, maybe we need a new approach—‘social ecology’, ‘noospheric ecology’
‘conscious ecology’—to transcend the economic limitations of political ecology in a
noospheric world of conscious evolution.
Imaginations of humanity’s cyborg future have, from the inception of time and
space altering technologies like the telegraph through more recent innovations like the
telephone and the Internet, played a prominent role in the scientific and social theories of
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the twentieth century, but Modern imaginations of a cyborg future have often failed to
update their ‘world view’ to account for the transition from mechanical to conscious
evolution brought on by the singularity of individuality that catalyzes consciousness’s latent
potential for free will, reason and other such high epistemological faculties. The
competitive, biological man and his desire for hierarchical domination of the economic
world view’s social ontology is no longer the necessary (or natural) mode of human
existence, and we must update our world view to account for the potentials of noospheric
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human existence. Wyly highlights the limitations of the bio-centric, Modernist ‘world
view’ for understanding conscious evolution in the noospheric cyborg collective that has
emerged from contemporary human society.
“Sometimes we forget about how much of a cybernetic world we’re living in, because most of us still think of

142
International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, Newsletter 41.
143
Crutzen 2002, The Geology of Man, Nature 415(23).
144
Elvin Wyly, Conspiracy Capital.
145
Noospheric human existence is facilitated not only by our Noospheric Cyborg Collective but also by more intimate connections made
possible by the unitary nature of the ‘energy’ we know as consciousness.
66
146

the cyborg as a combination of an individual person and a computer, or a computer program.”
What are the implications of the human collective’s combination with the cyber world?
The Noosphere in a sense implies a collective (‘planetary thought’). Wyly notes that mass
use of technologies like Google renders them cybernetic, does a good job of touching on
this issue.
“Now Google is always learning more about how people search for various things online. The algorithm is
getting ever better at providing those auto-complete suggestions as we type. As more human creativity and
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information — present and past — is stored in code, we are creating something new: the cyborg.”
Given that collective use renders technology as a cybernetic, maybe we need to view the
individual, in this context, from the perspective of its role in the collective (as it is important
to study a neuron in the context of its collective existence in the brain). In the biosphere
the transition from collectivity to individuality is the mark of evolution towards the
noosphere, just as in the geosphere it was the transition from individuality that marked
evolution towards the biosphere. The ‘individual’ is the singularity (the moment we cross
the infinity membrane) of biological evolution; this singularity of ‘individuality’ marks the
transition of biological beings from mechanical to conscious evolution (the individual
singularity is catalyzes the emergence of consciousness’s latent potential for free will,
reason, etc.). Following the sine wave, the transition from individuality to collectivity is
likely to be the mark of evolution in the noosphere.

146
147
67

In considering the above image we must remember that passing time and physical space
manifests through the form of fractal geometry. If you zoom in to another scale (to every
other scale) of the sine wave you will see another sine wave. Oscillations from individuality
to collectivity occur at each and every scale of the macro oscillation from cellular
individuality to animal collectivity to human individuality to noospheric collectivity etc. The
manifestation of passing time and physical space is an orchestra of scales, where the same
forms (and combinations of forms) are played in differing spatial and temporal octaves.
V.I. Vernadsky, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin and Edouard Le Roy first developed
148 149
the term noosphere in the early twentieth century (De Chardin 1965 ; Levit 2000; Wyly

148
De Chardin PT 1965, The Phenomenon of Man, New York, Harper & Row
149
Levit GS 2000 “The Biosphere and the Noosphere Theories of VI Vernadsky and P. Teilhard de Chardin: A Methodological Essay”,
Archives Internationales d'histoire Des Sciences, vol. 50 (144), 160-177.
68
150

XXXX ). The noosphere is conceptualized as the conscious stage of the progression
towards more organized forms of matter that comes after the evolution of the geosphere
into the biosphere. For Verndadsky, the noosphere was understood within a markedly
modernist ontological regime wherein science would transform the biosphere. De Chardin,
on the other hand, understood the noosphere in more nuanced metaphysical terms as a
151
stage of development toward the ‘omega point’. (Levit 2000 ) In both points of view, the
noosphere (as well as the geosphere and biosphere) is an image of manifest objects entering
into unity (a singularity, a single living organism). De Chardin’s theologically oriented
understanding of the noosphere as a stage in evolution towards the omega point is at least
in part resonant with the conscious evolution strand of this article’s theoretical web:
“Teilhard's viewpoint allows him to depict an imaginary evolution of the noosphere. The psychic, interior
side of matter or so-called 'radial energy' directs matter to higher levels of organisation which culminate in the
end of the evolutionary process. This end is external to the evolution itself. The Earth's noosphere will be
replaced by a super-mind and will coalesce into a so-called Omega-Point.
This will be the end and the fulfillment of the spirit of the earth. The end of the world: the
wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the
uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality. The end of the world: the overflow of equilibrium,
detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its
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weight on God-Omega.
[...] the end of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate phase of the phenomenon
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of man.
Teilhard saw the noosphere as a transitional stage of evolution from the biosphere to the Omega-Point. He
describes the noosphere as a layer over the biosphere, because to him it is the beginning of a separation
process. The radial energy enters a stage of visible dominance and partial separation on the way to total
independence.
The Omega-Point concept in the theory of Teilhard follows logically from the dichotomous
characters of matter and energy which appear at the atomic level. The interior side of matter, of atoms,
implies the constant presence of Omega from the very beginning of the universe. "A present and real
noosphere goes with a real and present centre."24
This is the principle of the insistent movement towards the super-mind in the course of evolution
and beyond the evolutionary mechanisms. The transcendental Omega 'slips out' of the material, spatial-
temporal world, finally resulting in a pure state of being without any material constituents. Therefore, an and
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less life within the material world would be a theoretical impossibility for Teilhard.”
What is the individual singularity of the noosphere? Will the noospheric collective acquire
its own individuality, free will, intention, etc.? Will a self-directed (in the context of this
imagined future Cyborg), individual consciousness emerge from the cyborg collectives that
form the noosphere? In what dimension(s) would this(these?) noospheric individual(s)
exist? The difference between the noospheric individual and the human will be of a similar
order of magnitude and at the same time an exponentially greater order of magnitude (i.e.

150
Wyly, Conspiracy Capital
151
Levit GS 2000 “The Biosphere and the Noosphere Theories of VI Vernadsky and P. Teilhard de Chardin: A Methodological Essay”,
Archives Internationales d'histoire Des Sciences, vol. 50 (144), 160-177.
152
De Chardin, T. The Phenomenon of Man p. 287-288.
https://ia600402.us.archive.org/28/items/ThePhenomenonOfMan/phenomenon-of-man-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin.pdf
153
Ibid. 273
154
Levit, G. S. (2000) “The Biosphere and the Noosphere Theories of VI Vernadsky and P. Teilhard de Chardin: A Methodological
Essay.” Archives Internationales d'histoire Des Sciences 50(144): 160-177
69

the change from a point to a line and a line to a surface is of the same magnitude in the
sense of crossing an infinity membrane and yet the surface formed by an infinite number of
lines is exponentially greater than the line formed by an infinite number of points).
Attention Mining and Epistemological Degradation

155
“It turns out that the brain — and especially the American brain — is subject to retrogression.”
Ouspensky’s model of conscious evolution

(http://www.nsm.buffalo.edu/~sww/0Gurdjieff/Psychology_Mans_Possiblle_Evolution.pdf)
is very resonant with this statement in that he highlights the fact that, once free will becomes
the driving force of evolution, devolution becomes possible if we fail to direct our attention
towards conscious evolution. From that point of departure there are whole new questions
concerning the “the cybernetic mining of the globally networked human attention span in
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what is now widely described as ‘cognitive capitalism.’” If the direction of attention and
will towards conscious evolution is necessary for conscious evolution, what are the
consequences of the scarcity of attention produced by attention mining? If the history of
resource extraction and capitalism serves as a lesson, cognitive capitalism will extract as
much attention as it can without regard for potential degradation of the natural
environment from which it is extracting. In an environment typified by an extreme scarcity
of attention, the natural order of the human mind is broken and a positive feedback loop
of devolutionary epistemological processes is initiated. Without the attention necessary for
conscious evolution
Beyond the unrestrained extraction of attention, the history of resource extraction
and capitalism warns us of the dangers associated with toxic extraction methods. A vulgar
conception of material efficiency and profitability eclipses concerns for environmental
protection and sustainability. Hydrofraking is “the process of injecting liquid at high
pressure into subterranean rocks, boreholes, etc., so as to force open existing fissures and
extract oil or gas”—existing fractures in the cyborg collective’s noospheric mind produced
by the “geographically contingent divisions of epistemological space inherited from
previous generations” are injected with toxic liquids (dangerous ideas, absurd theories,
baseless conspiracies, alternative facts, perverse images, obfuscating metaphors, etc.
embedded in click-bait fake news articles designed to mine the attention of readers) to
extract attention and to, in so doing, transform the mind into a quality that is consumable
by the political combustion engine of modernity. Oil and gas are replaced by
‘commonsense’, legitimacy and public acquiescence in the political engine, but the basic
form of extraction remains the same. The alt-right noosphere is, in short, fracking up the
human mind with its sensationalist click-bait fake news attention extraction methods.
Postwork, Degrowth & Leisure

155
Wyly, Conspiracy Capital.
156
Wyly, Conspiracy Capital.
70

157

157
Post-Work:
Aronowitz, S. and Cutler, J., 1998. Post-work: The wages of cybernation. Psychology Press.
Aronowitz, S., Esposito, D., DiFazio, W. and Yard, M., 1998. The post-work manifesto. Post-work. S. Aronowitz, Cutler J., London:
Routledge.
Weeks, K., 2011. The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Duke University Press.
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Social Evolution and Technological Potentials for Post-Labor Society
Ouspensky’s (1951) distinction between mechanical evolution, which proceeds naturally
(i.e. reflexively in relationship to the passing of time and changes in our physical
environment), and conscious evolution, which proceeds through the direction of will
towards evolution, serves to illustrate why a post-labor, post-capital society has not simply
risen reflexively from the development of technologies that make a post-labor, post-capital
society possible. If given enough time mechanical evolution will happen. We cannot,
however, simply wait for conscious evolution to happen—we must direct our will towards
catalysts of conscious evolution like transformative ideas if we are to attain conscious
evolution. Social Evolution—like the conscious beings that made it possible—does not
proceed according to the laws of mechanical evolution. We cannot simply wait for society
to evolve. We cannot simply wait for time to run its course and allow new technologies to
produce the post-labor, post-capital society they render potential. Instead, we must direct
our attention towards the evolution of consciousness through engagement with
transformative ideas and experiences so as to produce a new state of consciousness and
associated worldview within which to conceptualize our application of technology. We
must create a state of consciousness that transcends the scarcity, competition and desire to
dominate of mechanical evolution through centering our conception of human being in
conscious evolution rather than physical labor and material survival. The desire to
dominate that propels much of the elite class from the Age of Labor must be transcended
through conscious evolution—a revolution of the mind—if they are to stop diverting social

Chris, R., 2002. Civil labour, leisure and post work society. Loisir et société/Society and Leisure, 25(1), pp.21-35.
Gorz, A., 1997. Beyond the Wage-based Society.
Gorz, A., 1985. Paths to paradise: on the liberation from work. Pluto Press.
Gorz, A., 1997. Farewell to the working class: an essay on post-industrial socialism. Pluto Press.
Gorz, A., Vigderman, P. and Cloud, J., 1980. Ecology as politics. Black Rose Books Ltd.
Gorz, A., 1999. A New Task for the Unions: The Liberation of Time from Work. In Labour Worldwide in the Era of Globalization (pp.
41-63). Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Degrowth:
Schneider, F., Kallis, G. and Martinez-Alier, J., 2010. Crisis or opportunity? Economic degrowth for social equity and ecological
sustainability. Introduction to this special issue. Journal of cleaner production, 18(6), pp.511-518.
Martínez-Alier, J., Pascual, U., Vivien, F.D. and Zaccai, E., 2010. Sustainable de-growth: Mapping the context, criticisms and future
prospects of an emergent paradigm. Ecological economics, 69(9), pp.1741-1747.
Kallis, G., 2011. In defence of degrowth. Ecological Economics, 70(5), pp.873-880.
Van den Bergh, J.C., 2011. Environment versus growth—A criticism of “degrowth” and a plea for “a-growth”. Ecological economics,
70(5), pp.881-890.
Fournier, V., 2008. Escaping from the economy: the politics of degrowth. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy,
28(11/12), pp.528-545.
Kallis, G., Kerschner, C. and Martinez-Alier, J., 2012. The economics of degrowth.
Latouche, S., 2004. Degrowth economics. Le Monde Diplomatique, 11, p.2004.
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evolution from its course towards a post-labor, post-capital society for the sake of retaining
social hierarchies and their capacity to dominate therein. If we want to create a post-labor,
post-capital society humanity must first cultivate the capacity to ‘think the that’ of a
worldview in which such a society is possible.
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74

Chapter 3:
Philosophical Foundations
Materialism, the Essence of Modernity:

Epistemological Colonialism in Critical Social Science Thought
Introduction
The preceding discussion of Modernity’s reduction of epistemology to work aptly sets the
stage for the following discussion of the nature of materialism.
“…Precisely because there exists such a world [in which humanity] ‘has chosen to neglect the significance of
religious [spiritual] understanding of the cosmos’—namely the modern world, … which bears the primary
responsibility for the global destruction of the environment—we have sought to delve into a historical study of
both philosophy and science in the West that, beginning with views similar to the philosophies and sciences
of other civilizations, developed in what can only be called an anomalous manner from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries onward [as Modernism]. It moved away from the almost universally held view of the
sacredness of nature to one that sees man as alienated from nature and nature itself as no longer the
progenitor of life (the very root of nature being from the Latin nascitura, meaning to give birth), but rather as
a lifeless mass, a machine to be dominated and manipulated by a purely earthly man. It also divorced, in a
manner not to be seen in any other civilization, the laws of nature from moral laws and human ethics from
the workings of the cosmos” (Nasr, 1996, p. 4).
With apologies in advance for offering what will likely be considered a bitter pill by many
contemporary social scientists, Nasr’s statement illuminates the truth that materialism is by
its nature an epistemologically colonial expression of Modernism.
Citing Althusser’s (1969) For Marx, Foucault (1982) argues
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“…The most radical [historical] discontinuities are the breaks effected by a work of theoretical transformation
‘which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as
ideological’. …The problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is
no longer one of the lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the
159
rebuilding of foundations” (Foucault, 1982, p. 5).
160
Barnesmoore (2016b) argues that Modernism is simply a secular, materialist
rearticulation of Abrahamic dogma that has been used for millennia to rationalize and
legitimize hierarchical domination (slavery) as the foundation of social order. The secular,
materialist dimension of Modernism, then, is—as Nasr noted above—the radical historical
transformative discontinuity (the devolutionary transformation) that rebuilt the foundation
of Western thought to render Modernity as novel. Materialism, then, can be understood as

158
Althusser 1969, For Marx, London: Allen Lane; New York: Pantheon, p. 168.
159
5.
160
Barnesmoore 2016b, Nomad Explorations V 2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity, MA Thesis, University of British
Columbia.
75
161
the hegemonic essence (the worldview) of Modernity (Barnesmoore 2017a) . In this light,
anti-, post-colonial theory (and indeed most contemporary social science theories and
practices) cannot be considered anti-, post-colonial if rooted in materialistic theory and
philosophy as a result of the truth that materialism is itself the ideational essence of the
Modernist regime of thought that was birthed from European Colonialism and
Imperialism. To perpetuate materialist thinking is to act as an agent of Modernist
epistemological colonization (rendering many if not most strains of anti-, post-, etc. colonial
and, more generally, of social science theory as essentially colonial in both theory and
practice).
What is Materialism?
Maurice Nicoll (1998) provides a most elucidating definition of materialism, and we quote
him in full as materialism is far more elusive a standpoint than one might imagine:
“What is the standpoint of materialism? It is not by any means so easy to define as we may think. We are
‘materialists’ without knowing it, and ‘materialism’ is a much deeper problem for each of us that we imagine.
But, in the first place, from its standpoint we look outwards (via the senses) for the explanation and cause of
everything. We start from phenomena as absolute truth.
Speaking first of ultimate issues, we seek proof of the existence of ‘God’ from phenomenal life itself.
It life takes on an evil aspect we think there can be no ‘God’. Scientifically, we seek for causes in the
phenomenal world. In both cases we are doing much the same thing. In the first case we are looking for
‘spirit’ in visible material life. In the second case we are looking for the principles behind phenomena in the
minutest forms of matter. As materialists we look for cause in the elementary material particle. We look for
the final explanation of the mystery of life in minute physiological processes, in bio-chemistry, etc. We might
compare this with looking for the causes of a house only in its minute structure, as if we could find its real
‘cause’ in the elementary bricks of which it is composed, and in the idea behind it. For, to materialists, the
world must necessarily be idea-less. It can be no masterpiece of art—for where is the artist? Neither telescope
nor microscope [(nor ‘datascope’)] reveal his actual existence.
If the originating principle behind manifestation is not in the phenomenal world itself, it if lies in
idea working via chemistry (that is, through minute elementary particles) into visible form, we must, as
materialists, ignore this factor and assume that the chemical processes belonging to the world of atoms
themselves establish life. The development of the germ cell into an embryo is, from this side, merely a
progressive series of chemical changes, starting from the initial shock of conception, each chemical change
determined by and following upon the previous one, and thus leading to the budding up of the embryo.
Looking only at the chemical changes we will ignore the controlling principle or law acting behind them.
Whatever we do not find in the three dimensions of space we will ignore, not seeing life as unfolding events
but rather as aggregations of physical mass [(i.e. through ‘post-modern’ eyes…)].
Strictly speaking, materialism gives sense and physical mater priority over mind or idea. In the tenth
book of the Laws Plato put the standpoint of materialism, as it existed then, clearly enough. The materialist
was a person who regarded nature as self-derived. Elementary particles of dead matter somehow or other
combined together to form the entire universe and all the living beings contained in it. Matter accidentally
raised itself up into the most complex living forms. Matter created its laws. And Mind itself resulted from
these accidental combinations of intimate matter. ‘They say that fire and water and earth and air all exist by
nature and chance…. The elements are severally moved by chance and some inherent force, according to
certain affinities among them, of hot with cold, or of dry with moist, etc. After this fashion and in this manner
the whole heaven has been created, as well as animals and plants … not by the action of mind, as they say, or
of any god, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only’ (Laws, 889B).

161
Barnesmoore 2017a, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”, Environment and Social Psychology
2(1).
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From this standpoint physical nature is necessarily the first cause of the generation and destruction
of all things. Mind is secondary – an accidental product of physical matter.
Can we really believe that mind and intelligence accidently came out of dead matter? If so, then in
order to face the problem sincerely, we must grant to original matter – which, chemically speaking, is
hydrogen – extraordinary properties, and assume that all organised beings were potentially present in the first
matter of the nebular system, that is, if we believe that the universe ‘started’ at some distant point in passing-
time.
But the customary standpoint of scientific materialism is that primary matter is dead – and the
universe is dead and nature is dead – and a dead nature can, of course, aim at nothing. It cannot be
teleological.
Since Plato’s time science has passed far beyond the region of the unaided senses. It has turned
matter into electricity, and the world of three dimensions into a theoretical world of at least four dimensions.
It has passed beyond natural, i.e., sensual concepts, beyond the visualisable and matter-of-fact. Physicists
today [(1952)] are trying to understand what we are in. What is this ‘world-field’ in which events happen?
What is this four-dimensional continuum called space-time? And what, for that matter, is electricity? We are
in a mysterious and incomprehensible universe. Nevertheless, psychologically speaking, the standpoint of
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materialism prevails and spreads its effects over the entire world.”
Nicoll juxtaposes this materialist perspective with the Platonic perspective:
“Let us glance at an entirely different standpoint. The Platonic view of visible or phenomenal reality was that
there is behind it an invisible and greater order of reality. There is invisible form or figure (only mentally
perceptible) over and above all form or figure that we can apprehend through our senses. These invisible
forms or figures, with which our term idea came to be connected, are prior in scale to, and therefore much
more ‘real’ than, any perceptible form or figure. Thus the world of sense, all that we see, is a very limited
expression of real form and, properly speaking, science studies that which is indicated in the visible object. ‘…
the object of anything that can be called science in the strict sense of the word is something that may be
indicated by the world of sense, but it is not really of that world, but of a higher degree of reality’.
The geometer, for example, studies triangles and finds that the three interior angles of any sort of
triangle are always equal in sum to two right angles. But this is not true of any triangle that we can perceive
with the external senses because it is not possible to draw an absolutely exact triangle. So that ‘triangle’ itself
belongs to a higher degree of reality than any visible representation of it. The triangle as idea – the ‘ideal’
triangle – does not exist in passing time and space. It is not visible, but is only apprehended by the mind. In a
similar way, anything that has the semblance of beauty, relation and proportion in the visible world, as seen by
us with our organs of sight, has behind it beauty, relation and proportion belonging to a higher degree of
reality, which art strives towards, and of which we may catch glimpses in flashes of consciousness above the
ordinary.
But for materialism a higher degree of reality is not countenanced. I think it would be absolutely
inexplicable on the basis upon which materialism rests. There may be a below but there cannot be an above.
There can be no existing higher degree of reality. There can be no superior order behind the phenomenal
world, nothing prior to it in scale. For the universe must be a mindless product and body must be prior to
mind. There can be ‘no thought without phosphorus.’ Matter must be prior to function and use, and
sensation prior to meaning.
To admit a higher order of reality behind known reality is, in fact, to reverse the direction of
materialism. For it is to affirm by an act of the mind what the senses by themselves do not directly show, but
what, at the same time, that the senses really indicate [(through ‘signatures’)]. And it is exactly in this that
Plato puts the turning point of a man’s soul – in this recognition of an existing higher order of reality that
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explains this obviously imperfect, suggestive world in which we live.”

162
Maurice Nicoll 1988, Living Time, Utrecht: Eureka Editions p. 32-35 Bold Emphasis Added
163
Ibid. 35-36
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Materialism, then, is rooted in our search for causation, meaning and a discrete, totalizing
reality in the world of material phenomena. It is the reduction of reality and its first cause
to the world of passing time and physical space. How, then, ought we to understand
causation in Nicoll’s model?
“It is obvious that we can explain a chair by its parts, but this is only one way of thinking about it, one form of
truth. The chair is also to be explained by the idea in the mind that conceived it. No quantitative investigation,
no chemical analysis or microscopic examination can detect this idea or give us the full meaning of the chair’s
existence. If we ask ourselves what is the cause of the chair, how can we answer this question?
The chair exists before us as a visible object. Its cause has two sides. On the visible side, it is caused
by the wooden parts of which it is made. On the invisible, it is caused by an idea in somebody’s mind. There
are thus three terms – idea, chair, wood.
Naturalism or scientific materialism lays stress on the third term. It lays stress on the separate
material parts which enter into the composition of any object, seeking in them for ‘cause’. The idea behind
organized matter is overlooked. That which is manifest in time and space engages its attention, and so it
cannot help looking for causal origin in the smaller constituent parts of any organism – and also in preceding
time, i.e. in the past. Now the moment of the origin of the chair in time and space can be taken as the
movement when the first piece of wood is shaped for its construction. A char is begun, visibly, with the first
piece of wood, a house with the first brick. But prior to the beginning of the chair or house in time or space,
the idea of either of them exists in someone’s mind. The architect has already the whole conception of the
house in his mind before the first brick is laid down [(i.e., in short, mind precedes matter as in all things)].
But in translating this idea into visible expression the smallest [(rather than the simplest, which refers
to a simple dimensional quality)] part of the house must appear first in passing time. The architect thinks first
of the whole idea, of the house as a whole, and from that proceeds to smaller and smaller details. But in
manifestation in time this process is reversed. The force of the idea, in order to become manifest in
expression, must first pass into the smallest detail, e.g. a single brick is the first point of the manifestation of
the idea of the house. The first expression in time and space of and idea is one single elementary material
constituent. Yet the idea is already complete in the architect’s mind, but invisibly so. When the house is
finished it expresses the idea in visible form. The house has grown up, so to speak, as something intermediate
between the first term, idea, and the third term, elementary material part.
When the house is completed (as the second term), the first and third terms, through which the
construction of the house was effected, drop out. The idea has found expression in time and space and the
separate bricks are no longer thought of as such, but become and aggregate which is the house itself. It is
possible to analyse the house into the bricks and mortar which compose it; and it is always possible to say that
the bricks are the cause of the house. But it is inadequate, because the whole structure of the house, its form,
and the integration of its separate parts, have their ultimate origin in the idea in the architect’s mind – and this
idea is not in time or space. I mean that it is not in the phenomenal or visible world.
It is obvious that the first and third term – that is, idea and elementary brick – are both causal, and
that we must think of causality in two categories. All that scientific materialism finds as causal is correct on the
phenomenal side, but ultimately insufficient. And idea by itself cannot be cause. Both the first and third terms
are necessary, acting in conjunction.
In a broad sense, two types of mind exist, one that argues from the first term and the other from the
third term. It is a union of both standpoints that is necessary.
The difficulty is that, owing to the laws of time, even the fullest formed and most complete idea must
necessarily express itself sequentially, in visible manifestation, in the most elementary form first of all. A long
period of trial and error may be necessary before it can be properly realised in manifestation. And it will
always appear (to the senses) that the first elementary material starting-point of the idea, in passing into visible
manifestation, is itself the cause of all that follows. It looks that way, and because it looks that way the modern
doctrine of evolution has arisen.
Consider the plastic material elements of organised living matter – the world of atoms, of carbon,
hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, and phosphorus – this marvelous paint-box, where valiancy is the
mingling power, and from which arise an infinite diversity of combinations and groupings and an endless
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variety of products! This constitutes the third term, the material elements, out of which the world and its life
are built. Man has a far more limited range – a far grosser range – of plastic material that he can use directly.
If his ideas could play directly and easily into the atomic world, what material transformations could he not
effect? If my mind could play directly into the atomic world of this wooden table upon which I am writing, I
could change it into innumerable substances without difficulty, by merely rearranging the atoms which
compose it. And if I had this power over the atomic world and I knew the idea of life, I could create life. But
it would be mind and idea, not the material elements themselves, that would be the true cause in such
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magic.”
In short, while our sensory perceptions of the world seem to imply that causation lies in the
world of passing time and physical space, and while materialism leads us to simply accept
factual perceptions truth (ignoring the warning so eloquently set forth by Descartes
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[2002] ), the true nature of causation is at least half invisible (intangible) and thus
166
dimensionally incommensurable (Ouspensky, 1922) with the materialist epistemologies
167
(Barnesmoore and Wyly; Submitted) that dominate contemporary social science (from
168 169
positivism through ‘postmodernism’ [Barnesmoore, 2017a] ). The truth of causation is
lost in the materialistic reductionism of Modernist thought in the same way that the third-
dimension of a sphere is lost in attempts to sketch it on a two-dimensional plane. As the
materialism of positivism is clear without explanation, the following sections of this essay
endeavor to illustrate the materialist nature of Anti-, Post-Colonial and Postmodern
thought.
Materialism in Colonial-Imperial and Anti-, Post-Colonial Thought

Seamus Deane (1995) argues
“…the abstraction of reason lead to the liquidation of the sensory, sensuous world of the primitive (of the
natural); this too fed into imperial theory since the occupants of colonized territories were taken to be
immersed in such a world and therefore incapable of, or at least insufficiently evolved toward, the rational
170
condition of the European.”
This argument raises a number of questions and problems that highlight the convoluted
nature of the history of thought, as from a perspective that accounts for classical western

164
Nicoll, Living Time, Utrecht: Eureka Editions, p. 19-22.
This final point concerning our inability to ‘create’ life (and only to create the conditions in which life may be germinated) is reiterated
by, for example, Charles Littlefield 1937, Man, Minerals and Masters, De Vorss.
165
Descartes, Rene. 2002. Meditations on First Philosophy in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the distinction between
the human soul and body. Jonathan Bennett (trans.)
http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Descartes.FirstMeditation(JFB).pdf
166
Ouspensky, P. D. 1922. Tertium Organum The Third Cannon of Thought a Key to the Enigmas of World. Nicholas Bessaraboff and
Claude Bragdon (trans.), New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
167
Barnesmoore and Wyly (Submitted), “Statistical Irrationality & Society: Dimensional Incommensurability, Ontological Dependence
and Quantitative Epistemologies”, ACME.
168
Which is in actuality essentially Modernist. This is an expression of what we (Hassan and Barnesmoore) have termed meta-irony,
where illusory conceptions of self come into conflict with banally received ontological and epistemological assumptions. The illusory
conception of self as postmodern is belied by the fact that the materialism postmodernism banally receives from Modernist society
renders it as archetypally modernist…
169
2(1).
170
Seamus Deane 1995, “Imperialism and Nationalism”, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.) Critical Terms for Literary
Study, University of Chicago Press, p. 354.
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philosophy (i.e. Greco-Roman and Abrahamic) Kant’s Rationalism was actually the first
step towards the solidification of the sensory, sensuous world as the foundation of reality
and the rational process—an ontological and epistemological assertion that would be
patently absurd from the perspective of Descartes Rationalism (which moves from the
simplest and most universal things (i.e. Infinite Substance and its Emanations). Kant’s
fetishization of hard work, of activity, of the ratio (what we might call fact based reason) as
the foundation of Truth and Virtue were the first step on the path to materialism that
brought us the many incarnations of Modernism (Pieper 2009).
In short, though the colonialism was indeed often rationalized in terms of salvation
from ‘immersion in the world of the sensory’ and the barrier to reason imposed therein,
the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism is precisely this immersion in the world
of the sensory and ontological violence against worldviews that accept the notion of reality
beyond the sensory world. Spiritual Materialism in non-western societies—which was more
often than not a mode spirituality in which the material world was viewed imbued with the
goodness, order (beauty), truth, etc. of the divine rather than the vulgar materialism of
modernity or, and as opposed to in the mind of the colonizers, the aversion to and
demonization of the material world to be found in Greco-Roman and Abrahamic thought
where matter is often understood as a prison for ‘bad souls’—did indeed begin as the
rationalization for colonialism, but in the end the vulgar, dogmatic materialism of
Modernity (which reduced reality to matter rather than viewing matter as spiritual).
European colonizers viewed some non-European cultures as immersed in the sensory
world because they understood matter as spiritual (rather than as the dualistic opposition to
the spiritual found in the western tradition), but in the end colonialism and imperialism left
the world with a worldview that reduced reality to matter (which eviscerated the invisible,
spiritual dimensions of reality completely) and thus trapped people (European and not) in
precisely the vulgar materialism they had originally (mistakenly) assigned to them. Spiritual
Materialism was used to rationalize colonialism and imperialism, but the epistemological
product of colonialism and imperialism (their hegemonic essence [Barnesmoore 2017a])
was Vulgar Materialism (which can be found in everything from leftwing atheism to the
literal interpretations of rightwing Abrahamic traditions), and as Enlightenment Rationalism
was used to castigate Spiritual Materialism (i.e. the sensory world as part of a greater
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spiritual unity) it was also the seed from which Vulgar Materialism (the reduction of
reality and, or—at the least—its first cause to the sensory world) emerged. In summary,
where Deane (1995) sees Enlightenment Rationalism as opposed to sensorially reductive
epistemological processes (he would be right if he were discussing Descartes’ Early Modern
Rationalism…), and where he is correct that colonialism often rationalized itself using the
Spiritual Materialism of colonized cultures, his lack of distinction between the Spiritual
Materialism of certain non-European cultures and the Vulgar Materialism produced by
Modernism itself leads him to miss the fact that Kant’s Enlightenment Rationalism was the
progenitor of the Vulgar Materialism that forms the essence of Modernist epistemological
colonization.

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Which is opposed to the Greco-Roman and Abrahamic vision of the material world as the opposite of the spiritual and, indeed, as a
prison for bad spirits…
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Decoloniality
172
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) and the associated literature on decoloniality presents
a vision of anti-colonial theory that, in its focus on love, represents a disjuncture from the
vulgar materialist continuity of contemporary social science thought and anti-, post-colonial
theory therein.
Materialism in Postmodern Thought

Latour’s attempt to extinguish the distinction between force and reason is an archetypal
expression of the materialism that undergirds postmodern thought.
Conclusions
In both theory and practice materialism is essentially colonial. To analyze the world in
materialistic terms is to colonize the world with the Modernist worldview. To reinterpret
cultures in a materialistic worldview that ignores realities and causation beyond the visible
world of passing time and physical space and which axiomatically locates the first cause in
passing time and physical space is to colonize said cultures. To hold a materialistic
worldview and to think, act and conceive of being from within that worldview is to be an
agent of Modernist colonization (whether the subject is conscious of that truth or not).

172
Torres M, 2007, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept” Cultural Studies 21(2) 240-270.
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Labor & Leisure

‘Free will necessitates the humility to allow oneself to be acted upon.’
“But the gods, taking pity on mankind, born to work, laid down the succession of recurring Feasts to restore
them from their fatigue, and gave them the Muses, and Apollo their leader, and Dionysus, as companions in
their Feasts, so that nourishing themselves in festive companionship with the gods, they should again stand
173
upright and erect.”
174
-Plato
This quotation from Plato perfectly illustrates the duality between work and leisure that has
reigned through the Age of Labor as well as the potentials for a society that is devoid of
physical work and organized around the principle of leisure. The slave condition imposed
upon much of humanity in the Age of Leisure shines through clearly. Taking pity on the
slaves and their work, leisurely communion with the divine and its expressions were ritually
introduced to society as Festivals in order to rejuvenate the human being that is degraded
through the process of ‘making a living’ in a society organized around the principles of
scarcity, competition and domination. In a society that transcends physical labor and the
slave condition (be it through technology or other means), Festival (or more properly the
cultivation of being) transitions from an escape from everyday life to the orient of everyday
life.
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In a study that mirrors Foucault’s (1978; 1988; 1990) treatment of historical
disjuncture in conceptualizations of sexuality and the care of self in the transformation of
Greco-Roman culture into Modernist culture, Josef Pieper’s (2009) Leisure, The Basis of
Culture illustrates historical disjuncture in conceptualizations of work and leisure in the
same transformation of Greco-Roman culture into Modernist culture. In short, Piper
illustrates the ways in which the materialism of the Modernist worldview has stripped
leisure, the artes liberales, of its original meaning and granted a primacy to work (i.e. work
for the sake of work and survival and work as the central teleological imperative of the
human existence), the artes serviles, that was never intended. Pieper’s 1947 call for
remembrance of the true nature of leisure—as the central axis of the human existence (i.e.
the axis of life from which the meaning of life is derived)—takes on even more importance

173
174
Plato, The Laws, 653 C-d.
175
Foucault M 1979, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Vol. I, trans. Hurley, Vintage Books.
Foucault, M 1988, History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self Vol. III, trans. Hurley, Vintage Books.
Foucault, M 1990, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Vol. II, trans. Hurley, Vintage Books.
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as our society’s potential for a post-labor civilization increases with the development of
advanced Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
“…At a time when the nature of culture is no longer understood, at a time when ‘the world of work’ claims to
include the whole field of human existence, and to be coterminous with it, it is necessary to go back to
fundamentals in order to rediscover the ultimate justification of leisure.” (Pieper 2009, p. 70)
Labor and the Worker
“The original conception of leisure… has… become unrecognizable in the world of planned diligence and
‘total labor’; and in order to gain a clear notion of leisure we must begin by setting aside the prejudice—our
prejudice—that comes from overvaluing the sphere of work. In his well-known study of capitalism Max
Weber quotes the saying, that ‘one does not work to live; one lives to work’, which nowadays no one has
much difficulty in understanding: it expresses the current opinion. We even find some difficulty in grasping
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that it reverses the order of things and stands them on their head.”
“The tremendous difference of point of view implied and our relative ignorance of the notion of leisure
emerge more clearly if we examine the notion of work in its modern form, spreading, as it does, to cover and
include the whole of human activity and even of human life…” (Pieper 2009, p. 22).
Why ought we to start understanding a society that transcends work (in the sense of
physical labor) for leisure by understanding the role of work and leisure in society as it
already is? “When a society is in the process of denying its own roots, it becomes
important to know what these roots are. We had best know what we reject before we reject
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it.” (Schall 2009, p. 9)
“The tremendous difference of point of view implied and our relative ignorance of the notion of leisure
emerge more clearly if we examine the notion of work in its modern form, spreading, as it does, to cover and
178
include the whole of human activity and even of human life…” (Pieper 2009, p. 22).
If we are to deny the physical labor and associated slave condition that has for so long
formed the foundation of our society as a principle of organization for planning the future
of our society then we must first understand the role that physical labor and the slave
condition have played as an organizing principle up to this point.
Physical labor and the slave condition need not be tied together. Indeed, physical
labor is to be pitied, as in Plato’s formulation above, because of the slave condition our
society and its organizing principles of scarcity, competition and domination impose upon
physical laborers and not because of some intrinsic quality associated with physical labor. If
the backs of physical laborers were not broken by slavery there would be no need for
Festivals to help them ‘again stand upright and erect’.
How is it that people who are often the most virulent proponents of the notion that
there is Truth attempt to argue that we cannot judge historical figures by the strictures of
our own society? Slave owners, they say, should not be judged by our present
conceptualization of slavery but by the normalcy of slavery in their time... You can't have it

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177
178
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both ways, even if these absurd arguments are necessary for you to retain the comfortable
notion that your white male ancestors and the white men who created the political system
you now dogmatically adhere to are 'good'. If there is truth, then slavery is privation of the
good—period.
“But what ought we to say to the opposite view, to the view that ‘we work in order to have leisure’? …To
those who live in the world of nothing but work, in what we might call the world of ‘total work’, it presumably
sounds immoral, as though directed at the very foundations of human society.
That maxim is not, however, an illustration invented for the sake of clarifying this thesis: it is a
quotation from Aristotle… ‘To be unleisurely’—that is the word the Greeks used not only for the daily toil and
moil of life, but for ordinary everyday work. Greek only has the negative, a-scolia, just as Latin has neg-
otium.” 179
Work, then, is conceptualized as privation of leisure (as evil is conceptualized as privation

of the good by St. Augustine). For Aristotle, then, ‘the good life’ is to be found in leisure
(scolia) and the purpose of work (physical labor) is simply to meet the bare necessities of
life that we might partake in the leisurely aspects of human existence which give it meaning
(making work unnecessary if we can meet those bare necessities through use of
technological means and thus making the work-centric conception of human existence
180
obsolete). “…Leisure is the center-point about which everything revolves…” Work for
work’s sake is as paradoxical, from this perspective, as the notion of survival for survival’s
sake—we work to survive, and we survive so that we may partake in the essentially human
aspects of life that in the Greek were categorized as leisurely. We exist for the sake of
leisure, and in its proper place work is simply a means for preserving the vessel (body) that
allows us to pursue leisurely activities in manifestation. The slave mentality and condition
perpetuated by the work-centric conceptualizations of human being, the good life and
fulfillment of the human telos (at both the individual and societal scale) that permeate
Modernist thought, in this light, clearly serve to constrain our potentials for a good life, and
that in the face of our society’s clear potential to at least partially transcend physical labor
for the sake of survival through use of advanced technologies. Not only do we constrain the
good life, but we do so without any cause beyond our own lack of conscious evolution (or
more specifically the lack of conscious evolution in the dominant class that actively subverts
the transition to a post-labor society for reasons of personal interest and the desire for
domination).
In a movement that further illustrates the similarity of Pieper’s inquiry with
Foucault’s (1979; 1988; 1990) work on The History of Sexuality and which drives to the
heart of our interest in the relationship between work and conceptions of being, Pieper
notes that the term
“‘worker’ will be used in an anthropological sense; it implies a whole conception of ‘man’…. A new and
changing conception of the nature of man, a new and changing conception of the very meaning of human

179
Josef Pieper 2009, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, pp. 20-21.
180
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existence—that is what comes to light in the claims expressed in the modern notion of ‘work’ and ‘worker’.”
(Pieper 2009, pp. 22-23)
As Foucault (1979; 1988; 1990) problematized the ‘biological man’ of Modernity, Pieper
(and we hope ourselves in this study) problematizes the ‘working man’ of Modernity. How
has work come to define our conceptions of human being in Modernity? What dimensions
of human being are obfuscated, perverted and deprived by conceptualization of humans as
‘working men’? How is human life in Modernity disciplined by the notion of ‘man the
worker’? Whose interests are served by reduction of humanity to ‘the working man’? In
short, how does conceptualization of humanity as ‘the working man’ expand and constrain
potentials for thought, behavior and conception of being, and how are potentials for
thought, behavior and conception of being expanded and constrained by shedding this
notion of humanity as ‘man the worker’?
“These great subterranean changes in our scale of values, and in the meaning of value, are never easy to
detect and lay bare, and they can certainly not be seen at a glance [the stark impossibility of seeing and
thinking that (Foucault, 1970)]. And if we are to succeed in our purpose and uncover this great change
[historical discontinuity], a historical treatment of the subject will be altogether inadequate; it becomes
necessary to dig down to the roots of the problem and so base our conclusions on a philosophical and
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theological conception of man.” (Pieper 2009, p. 23).
If we are to understand the discontinuity of history we must look, in short, to the ideas that
provide continuity to history—there can be no discontinuity without there first being a
continuity to break, and that continuity lies in philosophical-theological conceptions of
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humanity (which as Epstein [2011] notes are just as prevalent and radical in Modernity as
in any other period regardless of whether Modernists recognize the dramatic nature of their
own assumptions concerning the nature of reality and humanity).
In summary,
“The ‘worker’… is characterized by three principle traits: an extreme tension of the powers of action, a
readiness to suffer in vacuo unrelated to anything, and complete absorption in the social organism, itself
rationally planned to utilitarian ends. Leisure, from this point of view, appears as something wholly fortuitous
and strange, without rhyme or reason, and, morally speaking, unseemly: another word for laziness, idleness
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and sloth.”
Leisure (effortless action, Wu-Wei), however, is by no means related to the void of action
implied by the terms laziness, idleness and sloth…
Leisure
“Leisure… is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the
ideal of ‘worker’ in each and every one of the three aspects under which it was analyzed: work as activity, as

181
182
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Epstein, Brian. 2011. Metaphysics in Social Science. Bucknell University, June.
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/mhs016/mpsc2011/papers/epstein.pdf
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toil, as a social function…. Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the
185
apprehension of reality…” (Pieper 2009, p. 46).
“…The post-war years [are] not the time to talk about leisure. We are, after all, busy building our house….
And yet, whenever our task carries us beyond the maintenance of a bare existence and the satisfaction of our
most pressing needs [or society transcends these needs altogether], once we are faced with reorganizing our
intellectual and moral and spiritual assets—then, before discussing the problem in detail, a fresh start and new
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foundations call for a defense of leisure.”
“Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a
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durable and consequently living link with the… divine.”
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What is leisure, and what role does (can) it play in human existence? Pieper (2009)
problematizes “common misconceptions about the idea of leisure and its relation to work.
Leisure is not idleness, but an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters
receptivity to both physical and spiritual realities. …Sound philosophy and authentic
religion can be born only in leisure—a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of
things…” These problematizations and conceptualizations of leisure, which we explore in
depth below, provide a useful foundation from which to imagine a post-labor society.
“What is at issue in the word ‘leisure’… is both an inner worldly and a transcendent understanding of the
highest things. Following Aristotle, we realize that something ‘divine’ lies in our knowing of what is. We are
not simply to devote ourselves to politics and economics or to making a living, however valid these are in
their own spheres. Pieper is quite aware of these things as elements in human life. But he recognizes that
when everything human is defined in terms of utility or pleasure, the enterprise of knowing what we are loses
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its centrality in our lives. There are things beyond politics and without which politics cannot be politics.”
We should first note that our great divergence from Pieper’s inquiry—which in the context
of post-war 1940s Germany did not face the same potentials of a post-labor, post-capital
society where most if not all acts towards ‘making a living’ are completed by AI and
Robots—comes in the fact that our inquiry does not assume ‘making a living’ (at least in the
sense that we have known it in the Age of Labor) is a necessary element of human life.
Where for Pieper (2009, p. 21) work and leisure are “twin expressions, and form, one
might almost say, the articulation of a joint, so that the one is hardly intelligible without the
other”, our vision of future human society does not view work (at least in the sense of
physical labor) as mutually constitutive of or necessary for leisure. The artes serviles, which
can be understood as forms of work that are not done for their own sake (i.e. physical labor
for the sake of biological survival), will recede in the coming post-labor Age of civilization
and be replaced by the artes liberales, which are forms of leisurely work that are done for
their own sake like scientific and philosophical inquiry. Humanity will, if we attain the
potentials of the envisioned Age of Plenty, Leisure and Conscious Evolution, do things for

185
186
187
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Josef Pieper 2009, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, Back Cover.
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the sake of knowledge, understanding, wisdom and love rather than for the sake of survival,
power and domination.
With that in mind, the above quote illustrates the reality that, in one sense, the
notion of leisure crafted by Pieper is readily understandable from the perspective of the
scientific mind. Leisure is the search for understanding. What is not readily understandable
for the scientific mind and its quantitative epistemological mechanisms is the search for
understanding beyond the tangible world of passing time and physical space (Barnesmoore
and Wyly, Submitted) . In the context of this study communion with the order of things as
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expressed in terrestrial nature will serve as our central example of the sort of leisurely act
(i.e. an act directed towards knowing what is in the invisible realms of reality and, thus,
towards catalyzing conscious evolution) that—with the proper actualization of the latent
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potential for conscious evolution—could replace ‘making a living’ as an organizing
principle for human society. In this vision we commune with nature (and the eternal order
therein as expressed in the beauty of nature) to better understand ‘that which is’ as
understanding, wisdom, love, etc. replace survival as ‘the end for which we act’ (i.e. as the
organizing principle of individual and social practice).
How do we pursue freedom and the life of leisure it renders possible?
“Among the bona non utilia sed honesta [(the good things which are not useful but are honorable)] which are
at home in the realm of freedom, in its innermost circle indeed, is philosophy, the philosophical act, which
must be understood in the traditional sense of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, and as they
understood it. …The philosophical act is a fundamental relation to reality, a full, personal attitude which is by
no manner of means at the soul disposal of the ratio; it is an attitude which presupposes silence, a
contemplative attention to things, in which man begins to see how worthy of veneration they really are. …Pure
theory, philosophical theoria, entirely free from practical considerations and interference—and that is what
theory is—can only be preserved and realized within the sphere of leisure.” (Pieper 2009, p. 16)
In short, the life of leisure (and the potential to theorize therein) is rendered possible by a
specific state of being—by ‘a relation to reality’. To live a life of leisure we must first
actualize our latent potential for conscious evolution (through direction of will towards
ideas, experiences, etc. that serve to catalyze this latent potential) so as to attain a state of
being in which leisure in the traditional sense of the word is possible. We must attain the
potential to theorize through cultivation of an evolved state of being before we may actually
theorize, and we must theorize in this true sense of the term if we are to conceptualize truly
revolutionary regimes of practice and transform human society. “One is lead therefore to
the project of a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the
unities that form within it,” to a method in which one is as receptive to being via
problematization of the commonsensical forms of continuity (‘unities’) we have received
through socialization and existence in passing time and physical space (“…dissipating their

190
Barnesmoore and Wyly (Submitted), “Statistical Irrationality & Society: Dimensional Incommensurability, Ontological Dependence
and Quantitative Epistemologies”, ACME.
191
We are especially inclined to this terminology (‘making a living’) in that it illuminates the relationship between biological survival and
physical labor in our society.
87
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apparent familiarity… makes it possible to construct a theory of them.”). (Foucault 1982,
p. 26-27)
Intellectual Work & the Intellectual Worker

The rise of ‘service industries’ and ‘intellectual labor’ in contemporary Modernity raises
some important questions for our study. Does a post-labor (in the sense of physical labor)
society necessarily imply a post-work society in the sense of transcending the Modernist
conception of work and its role in Modernist conceptualizations of human being? Does
intellectual work necessarily imply leisurely work?
“…Nowadays the whole field of intellectual activity, not excepting the province of philosophical culture, has
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been overwhelmed by the modern ideal of work and is at the mercy of its totalitarian claims” (Pieper 2009,
p. 25).
Philosophy—perverted by interpretation materialistic interpretation within the Modernist

worldview—shifts from the artes liberales to the artes serviles. Leisure is rendered as work
by materialism. As such, many Modernist visions of a post-labor society envision a
civilization in which physical labor is replaced by a form of intellectual labor that can still be
understood within the Modernist conceptualization of work. The form of labor shifts from
physical to intellectual, but the purpose of labor and role of labor in articulating the nature
of human being remain the same. It is not enough to simply transcend physical labor for
intellectual labor if we wish to create a society of leisure—we must consciously evolve past
the Modernist worldview and its understanding of the nature of work itself if we wish to
escape the ‘world of total work’.
Indeed, “the real meaning of the idea of the world of ‘total work’ reveals itself if one
examines the inner structure of the concept ‘intellectual work’ and follows it down to its
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ultimate conclusions” (Pieper 2009, p. 25). Pieper distinguishes between Observation and
Contemplation:
“…‘Observing’ implies that we are beginning to count, to measure and to weigh up… Observation is a tense
activity; which is what Ernst Junger meant when he called seeing an ‘act of aggression’. To contemplate, on
the other hand, to ‘look’ in this sense, means to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s
vision, and the things seen enter into us, so to speak, without calling for any effort or strain on our part to
possess them....
Is there such a thing as a purely receptive attitude of mind in which we become aware of immaterial
reality and invisible relationships? Is there such a thing as pure ‘intellectual contemplation’—to adopt the
terminology of the schools? In antiquity the answer given was always yes; in modern philosophy, for the most
part, the answer given is no.

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As an example, problematization of obfuscating unities like capitalism and communism allows us to see the more elucidating unity that
is economic theology and the materialistic world(view) of total work that undergirds all economics—left, right and center—in late
Modernity. Another banal example comes in problematization of the illusory continuity of democrat and republican in the US to see the
more essential unity of neoliberal imperialism that undergirds all mainstream political ideologies in the US. And where that continuity of
neoliberal imperialism is breached by something like Bernie’s call for free education we return to the more essential continuity of
economic theology that draws Bernie into the still more essential unity of economic theology that afflicts late Modernity (and outs him
for the pseudo-revolutionary that he truly is…).
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Kant, for example, held knowledge to be exclusively ‘discursive’: that is to say the opposite of
intuitive. ‘The reason cannot intuit anything.’ His opinion on this point has quite recently been called ‘the
most momentous dogmatic assumption of Kantian epistemology.’ According to Kant man’s knowledge is
realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating—all
of which are forms of active intellectual effort. Knowledge, man’s spiritual, intellectual knowledge (such is
Kant’s thesis) is activity, exclusively activity.
Working on that basis, Kant was bound to reach the view that knowing and philosophizing
(philosophizing in particular, since it is the furthest removed from purely physical awareness) must be
regarded and understood as work…. ‘The law is that reason acquires its possessions through work.’” (Pieper
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2009, p. 26-27
In Modernity Philosophy (like all intellectual endeavors) is understood as a form of work—

as an active process of the subject ‘doing’ something. Leisurely acts being reduced to a
mode of work, we can no longer theorize the nature of leisure (or, thus, plan for a society
of leisure).
As opposed to this conception of intellectual endeavors like Philosophy as work,
“the Greeks… as well as the great medieval thinkers, held that not only physical, sensuous perception, but
equally man’s spiritual and intellectual knowledge, included an element of pure, receptive contemplation, or
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as Heraclitus says, of ‘listening to the essence of things’.” (Pieper 2009, p. 28)
An ontological perspective on the potential of human-nature-technology relations in the

Age of Leisure provides usefully simple elucidation of Pieper’s argument. Where
Modernity understands human relations with terrestrial nature from the perspective of ‘the
world of total work’ wherein knowledge of and interactions with nature rise from action
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(from observing in the aggressive manner described by Junger and creating order through
hierarchical, technological domination that seeks to render nature as a consumable other),
human relations with nature in the Age of Leisure would begin from the principle of
contemplation of and communion with the order of things as displayed across the natural
world. In the relative passivity of the Age of Leisure, human relations with terrestrial nature
will be rooted in manifestation of a state of being through conscious evolution that allows
nature to act upon us in a manner that cultivates understanding, wisdom and love.
Technological development will not seek new methods of acting upon terrestrial nature
(for the sake of creating an order of domination that renders nature as a consumable
commodity), but will seek a contemplative relationship with nature that allows the existing
order of nature to work through it (as neural networks seek to serve as a vessel for the
existing order of brain in nature rather than to create a new order of brain). The
Modernist, Paternalist quest to penetrate nature will be replaced by the quest to manifest a
state of being in which we are receptive to the order of things in nature and the reflection of
the essence of things therein. If the distinction between self and other were not
problematized by contemplation and communion we might say that, where the Age of
Labor seeks to act on terrestrial nature, the Age of Leisure seeks a state of being in which

195
196
197
Ernst Junger 1934, Blatter und Steine.
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nature acts upon us and in so doing catalyzes conscious evolution. In the Age of Leisure
Nature will be a School (skole-scola, the root of leisure) rather than a Store.
Though work in the materialistic, Modernist sense of the term may indeed be
excised from our society in the coming Age of Leisure, this is by no means to say that the
active stage of mind will become irrelevant.
“The Middle Ages drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus.
Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction, of definition
and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the
capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. The
faculty of mind, man’s knowledge, is both these things in one, …simultaneously ratio and intellectus; and the
process of knowing is the two together. The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by
an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the intellectus, which is not active but passive, or rather
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receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives what it sees….

The simple vision of the intellectus, however, contemplation, is not work. If, as the philosophical
tradition holds, man’s spiritual knowledge is the fruit of ratio and intellectus; if the discursive element is fused
with ‘intellectual contemplation’ and if, moreover, knowledge in philosophy, which is directed upon the
whole of being, is to preserve the element of contemplation, then it is not enough to describe this knowledge
as work, for that would be to omit something essential. Knowledge in general, and more especially
philosophical knowledge, is certainly quite impossible without work, without the labor improbus of discursive
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thought. Nevertheless there is also that about it which, essentially, is not work.” (Pieper 2009, p. 28)
To revitalize the contemplative, leisurely mode of being is not to simply abandon the
logical, materially rational mind. Though we may transcend physical labor, we cannot
simply transcend work in the epistemological sense. Facts are not simply set-aside for
Truth. The drive to know terrestrial nature through allowing it to act upon our the
leisurely, contemplative aspect of mind does not imply abandonment of coming to know
nature through active, peripatetic, quantitative inquiry. Ratio and intellectus are mutually
constitutive, and our society’s epistemological imbalance comes less from an excess of ratio
than from a lack of intellectus. We need not (indeed must not) simply set aside work—in
the sense of the active phase of mind—in order to bring about a society organized around
the principle of Leisure, for as Pieper so aptly reminds us Work (active) and Leisure
(passive) are, in epistemological terms, mutually constitutive as a positive and a negative
charge mutually constitute an electrical current.
“Leisure… runs at right angles to work—just as it could be said that intuition is not the prolongation or
continuation, as it were, of the work of the ratio, but cuts right across it, vertically. Ratio, in point of fact, used
to be compared to time, whereas intellectus was compared to eternity, to the eternal now.” (Pieper 2009, p.
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49)
As we are beginning to see, work and leisure are conceived in essentially epistemological
terms, and in this light the solution to our society’s Age of Labor imbalance wherein leisure
has been subsumed by work lies in epistemological change (and the necessary
cosmological, ontological, teleological, etc. changes—i.e. changes in worldview—that render

198
Think Wu-Wei (無爲), the effortless action (non-action) of the Daoist tradition.
199
200
90

epistemological change possible). Transitioning from a society of work to a society of
leisure (which to be harmonious must not sacrifice work for leisure in the epistemological
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sense) must begin, as all social change must begin (Barnesmoore 2017a) , with a change in
our theories, philosophies, worldviews, etc. (in this case a change in our understanding of
epistemology—of the mutually constitutive nature of the active and the contemplative
aspects of the epistemological process). In short, transition to a society of leisure must
begin with conscious evolution of the leisurely, contemplative epistemological faculties that
exist—at least as latent potential—in all human beings and which have been repressed (or
more aptly left dormant through suppression of ideas and experiences with the potential to
actualize this latent human potential) by the Modernist ‘world[view] of total work’.
“The statement that ‘knowledge is work—because knowing is activity, pure activity—…expresses a claim on
man… If you want to know something then you must work; in philosophy ‘the law is that reason acquires its
possessions through work’ that is the claim on man…. To sum up: the essence of human cognition, in this
view, is that it is exclusively an active, discursive labor of the ratio, the reason; and the notion ‘intellectual
work’ and ‘intellectual worker’ acquires a quite special weight if we accept this point of view.
Look at the ‘worker’ and you will see that his face is marked by strain and tension, and these are
even more pronounced in the case of the ‘intellectual worker’. These are the marks of that perpetual activity
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(exclusive of all else) of which Goethe remarked that ‘it ends in bankruptcy’.” (Pieper 2009, p. 30)
Pieper’s (2009) comparison of Kantian notions of morality (in which virtue is by definition
achieved through ‘difficult work’ and given value by the difficulty of the work) and the
virtue ethics of St. Thomas (wherein virtue lies in goodness rather than difficulty) elucidates
the influence exerted upon Modernist conceptions of virtue by the Modernist worldview of
total work.
“When Kant speaks of philosophizing as a ‘herculean labor’, he does not simply mean that it is characteristic
of philosophizing; he regards the labor involved as a justification of philosophy: philosophizing is genuine in
so far as it is ‘herculean labor’. And it is because, as he continuously remarks, ‘intellectual contemplation’
costs nobody anything that it is so very questionable. He expects nothing from ‘intellectual contemplation’
because it costs nothing, and because contemplation is effortless. But that is surely on the way (if not even
closer) to the view that the effort of acquiring knowledge gives one the assurance of the material truth of the
knowledge acquired.
And there, in turn, we are not so far from the ethical notion that everything man does naturally and
without effort is a falsification of true morality—for what we do by nature is done without effort. In Kant’s
view, indeed, the fact that man’s natural bent is contrary to the moral law, belongs to the concept of moral
law. It is normal and essential, on this view, that the good should be difficult, and that the effort of will
required in forcing oneself to perform some action should become the yardstick of the moral good: the more
difficult a thing, the higher it is in the order of goodness.
Hard work, then, is what is good. That is not by any means a new view, and it was put forward by
Antisthenes the Cynic… Antisthenes is one of those surprisingly modern figures that occur here and there,
and it is he who left us the first sketch of the ‘worker’, or more accurately, perhaps, who represents that
figure. Antisthenes is… also responsible for making Hercules the human idea, because he performed
superhuman labors: an ideal that has retained (or has it reacquired it?) a certain force from the days of
203
Erasmus and Kant—who labeled philosophy with the heroic term ‘herculean’…” (Pieper 2009, pp. 31-33)

201
Barnesmoore 2017a, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” Environment and Social Psychology
2(1).
202
203
91

Kant, then, is viewed by Pieper as laying the groundwork for the Modernist incarnation of
the work epistemology that would come to form the materially reductive, quantitatively
violent regimes of positivist epistemology that dominate contemporary macro-social
decision-making processes—positivism provides the assurance of material ‘truth’ because it
is hard work… In a similar movement, Kant’s interpretation of human nature (and the ‘state
of nature’ that forms the Modernist Garden of Eden [Barnesmoore 2016b]) as evil and of
natural behavior as a ‘falsification of true morality’ reduces morality to work—the hard work
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of doing what is unnatural is rendered as the basis of morality…
Foucault (1982) shows a great deal of concern for ‘the sovereignty of the subject’
and its role (or more precisely the role of attempts to preserve it) in human epistemological
processes. Indeed, Foucault seems to imply that the entire project of searching for
continuity in history rises from a conscious or subconscious desire to preserve the
sovereignty of the subject and the comfort it affords humans. The worldview of total work
and Kant’s work epistemology and work virtue seem to provide an archetypal example of
this desire to preserve the sovereignty of the subject. In arguing “hard work… is what is
good” and dismissing contemplative knowledge because it does not require such hard work
(Pieper 2009) Kant is asserting a totalizing sovereignty of the subject—in reducing human
goodness and truth to products of human labor and ignoring the aspects of mind in which
humanity is, one could say, ‘worked upon’ Kant reduces discussions of epistemology and
morality to a sphere in which the sovereignty of the human subject is eternal and immortal.
Hard work creates truth and morality as domination is thought to create order in
Modernity.
“The Inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems
to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with
toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.” (Pieper 2009, pp. 35-36)
By refusing gifts (axiomatically if not actually) and reducing Knowledge, Virtue, Love, etc.
to work the subject axiomatically retains its sovereignty—the work of the subject creates and
possesses the order of Knowledge, Virtue, Love, etc.
St. Thomas provides an alternative vision of morality that can aptly be understood
within the framework of the virtue ethics tradition (wherein goodness is defined as the
actions of the virtuous subject, which implies that there can be no fixed laws of virtuous
action and that a virtuous, conscious subject is required to harmonize the eternal principles
of the Infinite Substance and its Emanations with the motion, change, difference, etc. of
manifestation):
“In the Summa Theologica we find St. Thomas propounding a contrary opinion: ‘The essence of virtue
consists in the good rather than in the difficult.’ …Kant’s compatriots and disciples—they held that virtue
meant: ‘mastering our natural bent’. No; that is what Kant would have said, and we all of us find it quite easy
to understand; what Aquinas says is that virtue makes us perfect by enabling us to follow our natural bent in

204
As Barnesmoore 2016b, Nomad Explorations V 2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity illustrates this reduction of morality to
the hard work of dominating human nature (of escaping the ‘state of nature’ through domination of self) is one of the essential
philosophical foundations of Modernity (i.e. the Modernist version of the Garden of Eden myth).
92

the right way. In fact, he says, the sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by
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effortlessness—because it is of their essence to spring from love.” (Pieper 2009, p. 33)
Human nature is, in this framework, Good, and the pursuit of virtue comes in staving off
privation of this good (privatio boni) rather than in dominating some ‘essentially bad’
aspect of our nature. In a logic often attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo, one can say that
‘there is no good and evil, only good and privation (absence) of the good’ (privatio boni).
Brought to a more practical political-philosophical argument, we can argue from this logic
that human nature is good and that it is attempts to dominate human nature by religious
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and legal systems that deprives our nature of its goodness—as Meng Zi’s (2A2) Farmer
from Song deprives his plants of life and growth by attempting to create the order of life
and growth through domination so do our social systems deprive humanity of virtue by
attempting to create the order of virtue through domination. In a similar manner,
epistemological regimes like positivism that attempt to create the order of Truth in
knowledge through the hard work of dominating facts actually serve to deprive knowledge
of Truth.
“The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it
even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one’s enemy as the
most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the
exceptional difficulty, the impossibility one might almost say, of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness
of love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the
essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the
difficulty. And therefore, if love were to be so perfect that the difficulty vanished altogether—it would be more
meritorious still.’
And in the same way, the essence of knowledge does not consist in the effort for which it calls, but in
grasping existing things and in unveiling reality. Moreover, just as the highest form of virtue knows nothing of
‘difficulty’, so too the highest form of knowledge comes to man like a gift—the sudden illumination, a stroke
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of genius, true contemplation; it comes effortlessly and without trouble.” (Pieper 2009, p. 34).
Truth, Virtue and Love exist eternally, without ontological dependence on or grounding in
the world of motion and its difficulties, and as such their highest expressions come as a
natural product of being unencumbered by the potential privations (ignorance, evil and
hatred, which are privation of the eternal rather than eternal themselves) of manifestation.
Human nature is an expression of the eternal. Truth, Virtue and Love, then, are to be
found in the eternal dimension of human being that provides continuity to the human
experience, and their expression is to be found in simplicity (in expressions of human
nature that are unencumbered by the complexity and potential privation of manifestation).
In the Modernist fetishization of hard work we loose sight of the Truth that the good life is
to be found in leisurely simplicity.
All that being said, we must not slip in to the reactionist trend of modernity and
simply deny the value of work in our quest to revitalize the leisurely aspects of human
being.

205
206
Zi M, The Meng Zi (2A2)
207
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“The highest forms of knowledge… may well be preceded by a great effort of thought, and perhaps this must
be so (unless the knowledge in question were grace in the strict sense of the word); but in any case, the effort
is not the cause; it is the condition. It is equally true that the effects so effortlessly produced by love
presuppose no doubt a heroic moral struggle of the will. But the decisive thing is that virtue means the
realization of the good; it may imply a previous moral effort, but it cannot be equated with moral effort. And
similarly to know means to reach the reality of existing things; knowledge is not confined to effort of thought.
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It is more than ‘intellectual work’.” (Pieper 2009, p. 35)
Where Modernity views hard work as an end in and of itself, as the foundation of Truth,
Virtue and Love, we seek to return to the conception of work as a means to the end of
achieving the qualitatively superior, effortless Truth, Virtue and Love of leisure (Wu-Wei).
“‘Intellectual work’… can be traced in the main to two principle themes: the first is the view which regards
human knowledge as exclusively attributable to discursive thought; the second is the contention that the effort
which knowledge requires is a criterion of its truth. There is, however, a third element, more important than
either of the foregoing, and which appears to involve both of them. It is the social implication of ‘intellectual
work’ that comes more fully to light in the expression ‘intellectual worker’.
Work is understood in this phrase and context means the same thing as social service. ‘Intellectual
work’ in this context would mean intellectual activity in so far as it is a social service, in so far as it is a
contribution to the common need. But that is not all that is implied by the words ‘intellectual work’ and
‘intellectual worker’. In the current usage of today what is further implied is respect for the ‘working class’.
What is really meant is roughly this: like the wage-earner, the manual worker and the proletarian, the
educated man, the scholar, too, is a worker, in fact an ‘intellectual worker’, and he, too, is harnessed to the
social system and takes his place in the division of labor; he is allotted his place and his function among the
workers; he is a functionary in the world of ‘total work’; he may be called a specialist, but he is a functionary.”
(Pieper 2009, pp. 36-37)
In short, ‘intellectual work’ implies that philosophers have been castigated to the sphere of
slavery that has long been assumed as a necessary constituent of social order in the
paternalist (‘post-Atlantian’) tradition. The artes liberales are reduced to the artes serviles.
Leisure is reduced to work. Human being is reduced to slavery . In its essence, then,
the worldview of total work and associated notions of hierarchy and domination as the basis
of social order that form the hegemonic essence (Barnesmoore 2017a) of Modernity can
be understood as the slave mentality, as a worldview that expands and constrains the
potentials of human thought, behavior and conception of being to slavery.
“Is there a sphere of human activity, one might even say of human existence, that does not need to be
justified by inclusion in a five-year plan and its technical organization? Is there such a thing, or not? The inner
meaning of the concepts ‘intellectual work’ and ‘intellectual worker’ points to the answer ‘No’. Man, from this
point of view, is essentially a functionary, an official, even in the highest reaches of his activity.” (Pieper 2009,
p. 38)
In the worldview of total work and the Modernist worldview that, along with associated
axioms like ‘social order = hierarchical domination’, it helps to create there is no human
existence beyond slavery. ‘Human = Slave’ in Modernity.

208
Josef Pieper 2009, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 35
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Leisure as Celebration of the Divine

Under the basic premise that the meaning of leisure and celebration finds its basis in divine
worship (which we might rephrase as intimate communion with—via contemplation of—the
Infinite Substance and its Emanations) Pieper makes a number of illuminating statements:
“The soul of leisure… lies in celebration.” (Pieper 2009, p. 65)
“The meaning of celebration… is man’s affirmation of the universe and his experiencing the world in an
aspect other than its everyday [sensory] one.” (Pieper 2009, p. 65)
Leisure is, in essence, celebration of (intimate communion with via contemplation of) the
divine.
“Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned.
‘Temple’ means (as may be seen from the original sense of the word): that a particular piece of ground is
specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or
habitation. And this plot of land is transferred to the estate of the gods, it is neither lived on, nor cultivated.
And similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time [the festival] is set aside from working hours
and days, a limited time, specially marked off—and like the space allotted to the temple [nature], is not used,
is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.” (Pieper 2009, p. 67)
Brought to bear in the context of our study, Pieper’s argument implies that certain sections
of terrestrial nature (especially spaces like forests that are untarnished by human work)
ought to be understood as a Temple that reflects—and thus allows us to contemplate and
intimately commune with—the order of the divine rather than as an other to be brought
into order—the order of hard work, production and consumption—through hierarchical,
technological domination. We must preserve terrestrial nature not to save resources for
future exploitation or to preserve biodiversity but to preserve the Temple that has been
provided to humanity by our Mother Earth. We must plan for environmental sustainability
and public access to green space not for utilitarian purposes but for the purpose of
preserving the purity of our Temple and the relatively unfettered expression of divine
order therein and the purpose of providing public access to the Temple. Terrestrial nature
is valuable, first and foremost, not in our ability to work on it (to create order in it) but
instead in the ability of the divine order manifest therein to work upon us in times of
leisurely contemplation.
“Three can be no such thing in the world of ‘total labor’ as space which is not used on principle; no such
thing as a plot of ground, or a period of time withdrawn from use. There is in fact no room in the world of
‘total labor’ either for divine worship, or for a feast: because the ‘worker’s’ world, the world of ‘labor’ rests
solely upon the principle of rational utilization. A ‘feast day’ in that world is either a pause in the midst of
work (and for the sake of work, of course), or in the case of ‘Labor Day’, or whatever feast days of the world
of ‘work’ may be called, it is the very principle of work that is being celebrated—once again, work stops for the
sake of work, and the feast is subordinated to ‘work’. There can of course be games, circenses, circuses—but
who would think of describing that kind of mass entertainment as festival?” (Pieper 2009, pp. 67-68)
“Cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.
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That is the origin or source of all sham forms of leisure with their strong family resemblance to want
of leisure and to sloth (in its old metaphysical and theological sense). The vacancy left by absence of worship
is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to the inability to enjoy leisure; for
one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost….
…If real leisure is deprived… work itself becomes inhuman: whether endured brutishly of
‘heroically’ work is naked toil and effort without hope—it can only be compared to the labors of Sisyphus, that
mythical symbol of the ‘worker’ chained to his function, never pausing in his work, and never gathering any
fruit from his labors.
In its extreme form the passion for work, naturally blind to every form of divine worship and often
inimical to it, turns abruptly to its contrary, and work becomes a cult, becomes a religion [becomes the
economic theology that has come to dominate the world since Pieper wrote this text in the 1940s]. To work
mans to pray, Carlyle wrote, and he went on to say that fundamentally all genuine work is religion, and any
religion that is not work ought to be left to Brahmins and dancing dervishes. Could anyone actually pretend
that that exotic nineteenth-century opinion was merely bizarre and not much more nearly a charter for the
‘world of total work’—that is on the way to becoming our world?” (Pieper 2009, pp. 68-69)
No, they could not (or at least ought not…), for our world has come to be a nearly perfect
reflection of the world of total work that clearly haunted Pieper. The worldview of total
work has subsumed the world through the process of globalization and we are indeed left
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with a world where religion has been reduced to work (Ashley and Barnesmoore 2015)
seventy years on from Pieper’s writing…
Philosophy, Education and the World of Total Work
“When… we discuss the place and justification of philosophy we are discussing no more nor less than the
place and justification of the university, of academic education itself in the true sense—that is, the sense in
which it differs fundamentally from mere professional training and goes beyond such training in principle. A
functionary is trained. Training is defined as being concerned with some one side or aspect of man, with
regard to some special subject [i.e. the ‘Sovereign’ Subject of Modernity]. Education concerns the whole man;
an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. Education concerns
the whole man, man capax universi, capable of grasping the totality of existing things.
This implies nothing against training and nothing against the official. Of course specialized and
professional work is normal, the normal way in which men play their part in the world; ‘work’ is the normal,
the working day is the ordinary day. But the question is: whether the world, defined as the world of work, is
exhaustively defined; can man develop to the full as a functionary and a ‘worker’ and nothing else; can a full
human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence? Stated differently and translated
back into our terms: is there such a thing as a liberal art? The doctrinaire planners of the world of ‘total work’
must answer ‘No’. The worker’s world, as Ernst Junger puts it, is ‘the denial of free scholarship and inquiry.’
In a consistently planned ‘worker’ State there is no room for philosophy because philosophy cannot serve
other ends than its own or it ceases to be philosophy; nor can the sciences be carried on in a philosophical
manner, which means to say that there can be no such thing as university (academic) education in the full
sense of the word. And it is above all the expression ‘intellectual worker’ that epigrammatically confirms the
fact that this is impossible. And that is why it is so alarmingly symptomatic that ordinary usage, and even
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university custom, allows the term ‘intellectual worker’ and sometimes permits ‘brain worker’.” (Pieper
2009, p. 39-40)

209
Lucie Irene Ashley and Luke R. Barnesmoore 2015, “Neoliberal Governmentality: Appropriating Religion to Fulfill the Bottom
Line”, International Studies Association 56th Annual National Convention, New Orleans.
210
Josef Pieper 2009, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 39-40.
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“…Leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English ‘school’. The word used to designate the place
where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means ‘leisure’. ‘School’ does not, properly
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speaking, mean school, but leisure.”
Wu-Wei (無爲)
Our discussion of leisure and in particular Pieper’s (2009) emphasis on the effortless
nature of leisurely knowledge, virtue and love (the highest forms of knowledge, virtue and
love) begs comparison with Chinese term Wu-Wei (which indeed is often translated as
effortless action). Two stories from Zhuang Zi—that of Cook Ting and Khing the Carver—
usefully illustrate the effortless nature of Wu-Wei.
“Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder,
every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all
was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the
Ching-shou music.
‘Ah, this is marvelous!’ said Lord Wen-hui. ‘Imagine skill reaching such heights!’
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, ‘What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I
first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox.
And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to
a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the
knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or
tendon, much less a main joint.’
‘A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a
month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen
with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between
the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such
spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after
nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.’
‘However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be
careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until
— flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the
knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife
and put it away.’
‘Excellent!’ said Lord Wen-hui. ‘I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!’”
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(Zi Z 1968, pp. 50-51)
“Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of precious wood.
When it was finished,
All who saw it were astounded.
They said it must be
The work of spirits.
The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

211
212
Zi Z 1968, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson, Columbia University Press.
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‘What is your secret?’
Khing replied: ‘I am only a workman:

I have no secret. There is only this:
When I began to think about the work you
Commanded
I guarded my spirit, did not expend it
On trifles, that were not to the point.
I fasted in order to set
My heart at rest.
After three days fasting,
I had forgotten gain and success.
After five days
I had forgotten praise or criticism.
After seven days I had forgotten my body
With all its limbs.’
‘By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.
All that might distract me from the work
Had vanished.
I was collected in the single thought
Of the bell stand.’
‘Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.
When the right tree appeared before my eyes,
The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.
All I had to do was to put forth my hand and begin.
If I had not met this particular tree
There would have been No bell stand at all.
What happened?
My own collected thought
Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;
From this live encounter came the work
Which you ascribe to the spirits.’
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(Zi Z 2004, pp. 127-128)
Wu-Wei, then, is a pure expression of what has traditionally been understood as leisure in
the western tradition—an active expression of what can be understood as the passive,
contemplative aspects of the human epistemological process. “The unique and original
relation to being that Plato calls ‘theoria’ can only be realized in its pure state through the
sense of wonder, in that purely receptive attitude to reality, undisturbed and unsullied by
the interjection of the will.” (Pieper 2009, p. 112) One must direct will towards conscious
evolution in order to attain ‘theoria’, but in ‘theoria’ the will is transcended for Wu-Wei
(effortless action) and the pendulum swings back towards inevitability. We will return to the

213
Zi Z 2004, The Way of Chuang Tzu, trans. Thomas Merton, Shambhala Publications.
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story of King the Carver in more depth through our exploration of natural metaphors in
Zhuang Zi below.
‘Deproletarianization’
Pieper’s (2009) analysis is not insensitive to the class politics of work and leisure and the
problematic legacy left to the western world by philosophers like Plato who presumed class
hierarchy—in which a small number of leisurely elite rule over a great number of workers
whose toil and trouble subsumes their capacity for true leisure—as a necessary constituent
of human society.
“…A modern German dictionary (Trubner’s) maintains… that the relatively modern terms ‘intellectual work’,
‘intellectual worker’ are valuable because ‘they do away with the age-old distinction, still further emphasized
in modern times, between the manual worker and the educated man. Now, if that designation is not accepted,
or at least with reservations, it surely implies a certain conception of those social contrasts? The refusal to
allow the validity of the term ‘intellectual worker’ certainly means one thing: it means that the common
denominator ‘work’ and ‘worker’ is not considered a proper or a possible basis upon which to bridge the
contrast of the classes of society….
…Everything must be done, on the one hand to obliterate a contrast of this kind [slave vs. master,
worker vs. educated man] between the classes, but on the other hand it is quite wrong, and indeed foolish, to
attempt to achieve that aim by looking for social unity in what is (for the moment!) the purely terminological
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reduction of the educated stratum to proletarian level, instead of the real abolition of the proletariat.”
(Pieper 2009, pp. 55-56)
“Genuine deproletarianization… assumes that the distinction between the artes liberales and the artes serviles
is a meaningful one, that is, it must be recognized that there is a real distinction between useful activity on the
one hand, the sense and purpose of which is not in itself, and on the other hand the liberal arts which cannot
be put at the disposal of useful ends. And it is entirely consistent that those who stand for the
‘proletarianizing’ of everyone, should deny all meaning to the distinction and try to prove that it has no basis
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in reality.” (Pieper 2009, p. 60)
Pieper’s argument, then, clearly reflects the sentiment of Barnesmoore’s (2017a) argument
that a hegemonic worldview like the worldview of total work cannot be combatted by
simply accepting its basic tenants and extending them to their logical conclusions (as
Postmodernism did in accepting Positivism’s reduction of Truth to fact and extending it to
the logical conclusion that there is no Truth).
“What… is proletarianism? …The proletarian is the man who is fettered to the process of work….
‘Process of work’, here, means useful work in the sense already defined, of contributing to the
general need, to the bonum utile. And so ‘process of work’ means the all-embracing process in which things
are used for the sake of the public need. To be fettered to work means to be bound to this vast utilitarian
process in which our needs are satisfied, and, what is more, tied to such an extent that the life of the working
man is wholly consumed in it.
To be tied in this way may be the result of various causes. The cause may be a lack of property:
everyone ho is a propertyless wage earner is a proletarian, everyone ‘who owns nothing but his power to
work’, and who is consequently compelled to sell his capacity to work, is a proletarian. …To be tied to work
may also be caused by coercion in a totalitarian state; in such a state everyone, whether propertied or
unpropertied, is a proletarian because he is bound by the orders of others “to the necessities of an absolute

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economic process of production’, by outside forces, which means that he is entirely subject tot economic
forces, is a proletarian.
In the third place, to be tied to the process of work may be ultimately due to the inner
impoverishment of the individual: in this context everyone whose life is completely filled by his work (in the
special sense of the word work) is a proletarian because his life has shrunk inwardly, and contracted, with the
result that he can no longer act significantly outside his work, and perhaps can no longer even conceive of
such a thing.
Finally, all these different forms of proletarianism, particularly the last two, mutually attract one
another and in so doing intensify each other. The ‘total work’ State needs the spiritually impoverished, one-
track mind of the ‘functionary’; and he, in his turn, is naturally inclined to find complete satisfaction in his
‘service’ and thereby achieves the illusion of a life fulfilled, which he acknowledges and willingly accepts.
This inner constraint, the inner chains which fetter us to ‘work’, prompts a further question:
‘proletarianism’ thus understood, is perhaps a symptomatic state of mind common to all levels of society and
by no means confined to the ‘proletariat’, to the ‘worker’, a general symptom that is merely found isolated in
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unusually acute form in the proletariat’ so that it might be asked whether we are not all of us proletarians…”
(Pieper 2009, p. 57-59)
“‘Proletarianism’… [means] the limitation of existence and activity to the sphere of the artes serviles…
‘Deproletarianizing’… [means]: enlarging the scope of life beyond the confines of merely useful servile work,
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and widening the sphere of servile work to the advantage of the liberal arts…” (Pieper 2009, p. 59)
The proletarian, then, can be best understood in this light as a slave or, more precisely, as a
subject enlivened by the slave mentality. It is a subject whose ‘state of mind’ is slavish—the
slave epistemology. The fact that education in the artes liberales has been denied to the
working public (to the proletarian) does not connote that there is something amiss with a
liberal arts education. On the contrary, indeed, this form of education has been denied to
the working public because of its implicit value in actualizing the latent human potential for
free will. Liberal arts education has been reserved for the elite precisely because it
constrains the potential for an individual to be dominated. As such, liberation of the
working class does not lie in simply dismissing the value of a liberal arts education and
indeed cannot occur without access to a liberal arts education. One must think and feel
freely if they are to act freely, and an individual cannot think and feel freely without some
sort of education in the artes liberales (which of course need not by necessity take on the
academic character of a university education as becomes clear in the stories from Zhuang
Zi above wherein the labors of the wood carver and the butcher bring on a leisurely state of
being and the potential for effortless action therein). We cannot accept the rout lain forth
by Postmoderns who seek to challenge the violence of the Positivist conception of Truth as
Fact by simply denying Truth altogether (Barnesmoore 2017a) and thus attempt to
challenge the violence of hierarchical class stratification and denial of liberal arts education,
leisure and thus freedom to the working class by simply denying the value of liberal arts
education and the leisurely epistemological potentials (i.e. free will…) unlocked therein—
destratification of class hierarchies lies in expanding access to the artes liberales, leisure and
thus freedom to the whole of society rather than in subsuming the artes liberales, leisure
and thus freedom in the worldview of total work (i.e. the slave mentality of the Kantian
work epistemology) that has been imposed upon the working classes. “Proletarianism

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cannot be overcome by making everyone a proletarian.” (Pieper 2009, p. 57) We cannot
transcend slavery by reducing human existence to slavery and its worldview of total work.
“The phrase ‘servile work’ strikes contemporary ears as extremely offensive—that is well known. Nevertheless,
it would be dangerous to deny the ‘servility’ of work. By setting up the fiction that work does not ‘serve’
primarily for some purpose outside itself, we accomplish precisely the opposite of what we intended or
pretended to accomplish. By no means do we ‘liberate’ or ‘rehabilitate’ the laboring man. Instead, we
establish precisely that inhumane state characteristic of labor under totalitarianism: the ultimate tying of the
worker to production. For this process of production itself is understood and proclaimed as the activity that
gives meaning to the human existence.” (Pieper 2009, pp. 59-60)
“If the essence of ‘proletarian’ is the fact of being fettered to the process of work, then the central problem of
liberating men from this condition lie in making a whole field of significant activity available and open to the
working man—of activity which is not ‘work’; in other words: in making the sphere of real leisure available to
him.
This end cannot be attained by purely political measures and by widening and, in that sense,
‘freeing’ the life of the individual economically. Although this would entail much that is necessary, the
essential would still be wanting. The provision of an external opportunity for leisure is not enough; it can only
be fruitful if the man himself is capable of leisure and can, as we say, ‘occupy his leisure’, or (as the Greeks
still more clearly say) skolen agein, ‘work his leisure’…” (Pieper 2009, p. 63)
A post-labor, post-capital society, in short, cannot be attained through purely political-

economic means. We cannot simply wait for changes in the technological means of
production like AI and Robotics to mechanically impel social evolution. The first step (or
more aptly the ideal that guides this first step) towards a post-labor, post-capital society is to
be found in conscious evolution of the capacity for leisure in the true sense of the word.
Representation and Deproletarianization

As many will simply castigate this project of deproletarianization as ‘elitist’ because it does
not cede to the dogmatic valorization of ‘work’ and, or ‘workers’ (of slavery) that—to varying
degrees and in varying expressions—spans the entire spectrum of economic theology (and
in so doing highlights the fallacy of distinction between capitalism, socialism and
communism in that they are all rooted in the slavish worldview of total work—“the many
forms of imperialism have in common an expansionist economic system—capitalist or
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communist—that claims to have its roots in a universal human nature” ), we look to
Seamus Deane’s (1995) “Imperialism/ Nationalism” which examines the dangers of
accepting and attempting to valorize, reclaim, revitalize etc. categorizations that have been
imposed upon people by their colonizers to provide another view into the necessity of
deproletarianization.
Moving from the assertion that “an established structure of representation cannot
produce an alternative to itself, no matter how severely it is put under question. The
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alternative is already established within and by those structures” , Deane argues that
attempts to rearticulate cultural and national identity (i.e. the notion of reclaiming Irish

218
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national identity) are in the end doomed to failure because the existing structure of
representation in the minds of the colonizers cannot produce an alternative to itself. No
matter how much the Irish identity is rearticulated and valorized, Irish still means a
subordinate other within the colonial epistemological framework of hegemonic English
culture.
Brought to bear on the issue of deproletarianization, reading Deane’s insights in the
light of Piper’s analysis illustrates that no amount of rearticulation and, or valorization of
‘work’ and ‘the worker’ will change the location of ‘work’ and ‘the worker’ as a subordinate
other in the world(view) of total work created and perpetuated by economic theology.
‘Work’ and ‘the worker’ mean ‘slavery’ and ‘the slave’ because of their role in the social
and epistemological structures of economic theology and its world of total work, and no
rearticulation of the representations of ‘work’ and ‘the worker’ can change this. No
valorization or rearticulation of the representations of ‘slavery’ and ‘the slave’ will change
the location of the slave in the social hierarchies associated with slavery (though it can
indeed serve to produce a servile acceptance of slavery as natural and good…). Liberation
of the worker, then, cannot be understood as representational reduction of the human
existence to work and the valorization of work therein—it must involve braking the
ontological and epistemological fetters (i.e. the worldview[s]) that constrain individuals to
‘work’ and existence as ‘the worker’.
Feminism?
Many contemporary feminists, trapped within the banality of the liberal nihilist worldview
they have received from Modern society, argue that all traditional philosophy is
‘masculinist’ and ‘patriarchal’. First, we should note that we agree with the basic premise
that patriarchy is a core problem in Modernist-Paternalist society and that addressing this
problem is a necessary constituent of any potentially revolutionary social philosophy. If we
may endeavor to define patriarchy, it is the assumption that men represent the active
polarity of humanity and women represent the passive polarity of humanity and that, as a
result men, must create social order through hierarchical domination of women. The
feminine, associated with terrestrial nature, is assumed to be a chaotic other that must be
brought into order through hierarchical domination (the ‘state of nature’ from which we
must escape through domination of our ‘evil human nature’, the modernist Garden of
Eden and Eve therein…). In this light, and while there are clearly issues to be addressed in
Pieper’s use of the term ‘man’ to describe humanity, his location in the paternalist
tradition, his recourse to paternalist philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, etc., we can see
this argument for reasserting the leisurely (what modernity would illusorily call the passive)
as implicitly feminist. It is to reassert the existence and importance of the feminine (and
highest potential…) aspects of the human epistemological process. For those elite, western,
white (or epistemologically colonized by the materialism that was perpetuated throughout
the world by European and American colonialism and imperialism…) materialist-nihilists
who deny that there is any truth to the distinction between masculine and feminine this
argument will surely fall on deaf ears and likely be simply castigated as elitist, masculinist,
or some synthesis of the two as is all philosophy in the true sense of the term, but for those
who seek revitalization of the sacred feminine there is a potential way forward in reasserting
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the leisurely, contemplative aspects of human existence. Indeed, to simply dismiss a model
in which the masculine is in essence active (impregnates, acts) and the feminine is in
essence passive (becomes impregnated, is acted upon) because it is assumed that the active
is good and the passive is bad is to accept the fundamental dogma of the worldview of total
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work.
Historical Aside
As an aside, my indignation at the vulgar, philistine culture of total work that infests rural
Ontario (where I was living at the time…) inspired a poem in early to mid 2016 that seems
to have been singing the essence of Pieper’s (2009) analysis before I found Leisure, the
Basis of Culture tucked away, unread, in a box of books I was unpacking when I returned
to UBC in the Spring of 2017—the epistemological process is quite the winding road of
unexpected turns when viewed from a purely historical perspective. I hope the reader will
excuse my less than well-cultivated poetic style…
Laziness
From the perspective of
Economic Theology
Laziness is a
Physical
Material
Phenomenon.
Virtue and Meaning

The Human Telos
Come In ‘Work’
In Material Production
In Physical Labor
Poverty
Inaction
Stillness
Serenity
Calm & Quiet,
These are the Sins of
Economic Theology
But what ‘works’ define

Humanity?
These are The Works
of Love,
of Beauty,
of Conscious Evolution.

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We must also remember the wisdom of the yin-yang symbol, which reminds us that in the center of yin we find yang and in the center
of yang we find yin—reminds us that no one can be reduced to the other as any harmonious manifestation is the synthesis of the two.
Women are not wholly feminine as men are not wholly masculine (indeed there are people who are biologically male and yet
predominantly feminine and vice versa), and attempts to dominate difference in order to create seeming unity of one or the other (let
alone to conform to our biology) is to pervert the true nature of their expression.
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Leisurely Work Leaves no Mark

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For such Work is in Returning to

the Formless,
the Un-hewn.
Such work is
Silent,
Still,
Serene.
The harder one Works

The less that can be Seen.
Flee Economic Ideology

The Worldview of Total Work
Recognize
The Origin of your Thoughts
for Mental & Emotional
Laziness
are the Delight of the Beast
Be
Still,
Serene,
Silent.
Allow the heathens to deride your

Laziness
For in the work of Silence
You shall find Serenity,
A Rock Unmoved by the
Winds
Of Peripatetic,
Reflexively Received
Judgment.
Philosophizing as the Basis of Conscious Evolution

“…To philosophize is to act in such a way that one steps out of the workaday world…. The workaday world is
the world of work, the utilitarian world, the world of the useful, subject to ends, open to achievement and
subdivided according to functions; it is the world of demand and supply, of hunger and satiety. It is
dominated by a single end; the satisfaction of the ‘common need’; it is the world of work in so far as work is
synonymous with doing things for useful ends (so that effort and activity are characteristic of the workaday
world). Work is the process of satisfying the ‘common need’—an expression that is by no means synonymous
with the notion of ‘common good’…. …The world of total work is becoming [has become since Pieper’s
writing…] our entire world; it threatens to engulf us completely, and the demands of the world of work

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I had previously used the phrase ‘hard work’ here, but for obvious reasons the limitations of describing leisure in such terms are now
clear.
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become greater and greater, till at last they make a ‘total’ claim upon the whole of human nature.” (Pieper
2009, pp. 77-78)
Beyond the obvious problematization of the violently crude notion of ‘practice theory’ in
the above (i.e. philosophy, and thus theorization, is to step out of the workaday world and
not to simply step through it…), we can begin to see the central role that philosophy and
philosophizing must play in the process of conscious evolution. To stave off the materialist
critiques of ‘elitism’ that are sure to follow from such a sentiment, we should note that,
while philosophical education (the process of being brought into contact with facts and
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ideas) need not be undertaken in a university (as we see in Ibn Tufayel’s (2009) Hayy Ibn
Yaqzan where philosophical education comes through intimacy with nature), philosophical
education is a necessary prerequisite for conscious evolution and thus for actualization of
the latent potential for being truly human that exists in all people. The artes liberales and
esoteric philosophy were not, like literacy, kept from the slave classes simply because
philosophy and esoteric metaphysics are irrelevant to the lives and experiences of the slave
classes (as is often assumed by contemporary materialists…), but because one cannot be
truly human or actualize humanity’s latent potential for free will without a philosophical
education. The Liberal Arts and esoteric metaphysics were withheld from the slave classes
because without them one cannot be but a slave, and as such the solution is not to simply
dismiss the Liberal Arts, esoteric metaphysics and, more generally, a philosophical
education as elitist and irrelevant for the general public. The elite didn't reserve
philosophical education for themselves because it is unimportant; they did so because the
slave classes are more easily dominated if they lack a philosophical education and cannot
thus actualize their potential for free will (a bag of seeds is easier to control than a forest of
trees…).
Returning to the topic at hand, the assertion that ‘to philosophize is act in such a
way that one steps out of the workaday world’ could be rearticulated as ‘to philosophize is
to act in such a way that one steps out of the process of mechanical evolution.’ It is
precisely at the moment in which philosophizing actualizes the latent potential for free will
(freedom of thought by necessity precedes freedom of behavior and in conception of
being) that human evolution is unfettered from reflexive (mechanical) articulation by the
space and time of their biological existence and becomes a process of conscious (one might
for heuristic purposes say epistemological) evolution. To direct one’s will towards evolution
requires the free will to do so, and that free will cannot be actualized without philosophical
education. Brought down to earth, the light of this idea allows us to see that the turn of all
levels of education away from philosophical education and towards the utilitarian education
of the workaday world in Neoliberal Modernity is actively (and indeed consciously,
whatever the propagandistic worldview of unintended consequences might imply…)
negating the human potential for freedom and conscious evolution while masquerading as
an act of liberation. Liberation from the Artes Liberales is to say domination, negation of
the potential for freewill, slavery to the philosophy of others.

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Ibn Tufayl (2009), Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, In, Lenn Evan Goodman (trans.) Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, University of Chicago
Press.
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Like the Liberal Democratic systems from which it was birthed, the anti-
philosophical fervor implicit in reduction of philosophical education to elitism and
axiomatic dismissal of philosophical education therein imposes slavery upon the people in
and through the guise of freedom. The people are enslaved through the act of their
seeming liberation. In short, and in a distinctly Orwellian move that is only too fitting for
1984 West Mall, freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom. We must turn from this
misguided notion of freeing people from a philosophical education and instead recognize
that we must seek to free people through a philosophical education. To provide a usefully
simple and poignant metaphor, one does not combat starvation imposed upon the people
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as a technique of power by simply dismissing food as ‘elitist’…
This is not a call to simply dismiss the work that is necessary for survival or the
tribulations of those whose existence has been reduced to work by the many strains of
economic theology (from communism through capitalism), but instead the assertion that
we ought not reduce human existence to work if we wish to be truly human.
“For so many people there is the daily struggle for a bare physical existence, for food, warmth, clothing and a
roof over their head…. Nothing, in fact, is further from my intention than in any way whatsoever to denigrate
this world [of work] as though from some supposedly superior ‘philosophical’ standpoint. Not a word need
be wasted on this subject; that world is of course essentially part of man’s world, being the very ground of his
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physical existence—without which, obviously, no one could philosophize.” (Pieper 2009, p. 79-80)
We cannot simply dismiss the importance of food or denigrate the farmer in order to
valorize the essential importance of philosophical education and philosophizing for human
existence just as we cannot simply dismiss food as ‘elitist’ because the elite withholds it
from the people.
“The philosophical act, the religious act, the aesthetic act, as well as the existential shocks of love and death,
or any other way in which man’s relation to the world is convulsed and shaken—all these fundamental ways of
acting belong naturally together, by reason of the power which they have in common of enabling a man to
break through and transcend the workaday world…. …Where the religious spirit is not tolerated, where there
is no room for poetry and art, where love and death are robbed of all significant effect and reduced to the
level of banality, philosophy will never prosper.
But worse, even, than the silencing or simple extinction of these experiences of transcendence is
their transformation, their degredation, into sham and spurious forms; and pseudo-realizations of these
fundamental acts most certainly exist, giving the appearance of piercing the dome of everyday life….”
And the worst of all is, that these spurious forms [of religion, art, poetry, love, philosophy, etc.]
combine—not indeed to go beyond the workaday world, but on the contrary—to screw down the dome more
firmly than ever, to close every window—and then man really is imprisoned in the world of work. These
deceptive forms, and especially a spurious philosophy, are far worse, far more hopeless, than the worldly
person’s naïve refusal to recognize anything outside the common place.... …A sophist, a pseudo-philosopher,
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can never be shaken.” (Pieper 2009, pp. 81-83)
Philosophy, Religion (Spirituality), Aesthetics and experiences like Love and Death, then,
are the progenitors of man’s transition from mechanical to conscious evolution, and to

224
Indeed, philosophy and philosophizing are as necessary to our conscious being as food is to our biological being.
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reduce them to the workaday world(view) of passing time and physical space is to ‘reduce
them to the level of banality’ where ‘philosophy [and thus humanity] will never prosper.’ In
the materialism of Modernism that spans the abyss of economic theology there can be no
poetry, art, philosophy or love, and without poetry, art, philosophy and love there can be
no conscious evolution (which by necessity means that there will be devolution as the
potential for evolution through direction of will towards evolution also creates the potential
for devolution when will is not directed towards conscious evolution). Materialistic
fabrications of poetry, art, philosophy and love, rather than helping humanity to actualize
its potential for transcending the workaday world of biological existence in passing time and
physical space, serve to trap humanity in an existence that is reduced to biological existence
(as The Brothers of the Common Life rearticulated rituals that were designed to help
humanity transcend time as rituals that were designed to trap humanity within time
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[Foucault 1977] ).
Finally, to drive the point home within the context of this social science study, a
quick aside on the role of philosophy academic freedom:
“[Philosophy is] a ‘free’ knowledge. Freedom, here, means that philosophical knowledge is not legitimized by
its usefulness or usableness, or by virtue of its social function, or with reference to the ‘common need’. This is
the selfsame sense in which ‘freedom’ was used in the phrase ‘artes liberales’, the liberal arts—in
contradistinction to the ‘artes serviles’, the servile arts which, as Aquinas says, are ‘ordered to the satisfaction
of a need through activity.’ Philosophy has always been regarded as the freest of all liberal arts….
The special sciences, it should be noted, are only free in this sense in so far as they are pursued
philosophically. That is actually, as well as historically, the meaning of academic freedom (for academic, in
this case, means philosophical or it means nothing); and any claim to academic freedom, in the strict sense of
the word, can only arise in so far as ‘academic’ fulfills its philosophical character. And actually, as well as
historically, academic freedom goes by the board in exactly the same degree in which the philosophical
character of academic studies is lost; in other words, to the extent to which the total claim of the world of
work invades the academic sphere. That is the metaphysical root of the matter….
It should… most certainly be added that this failure is the direct fruit of philosophy itself, of modern
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philosophy.” (Pieper 2009, p. 87-88)
The relevance of this statement is many and varied in the contemporary academy, from the
materialist theories, practices and praxis’ of the illusory divide between the left and right of
economic theology through the neoliberalization of the academy that has reduced the
university to a training ground for workers (slaves…) and a space and place of work itself
through corporate research partnerships. Academic Freedom is, in this sense of the term, a
long lost memory in all but a few rarified (and othered…) spaces in the contemporary
academy.
We must also address an associated anthropological aside… A fellow PHD student
at 1984 West Mall was recently confronted with a paradoxical, troubling and indicative (of
the problems facing contemporary academic inquiry) statement from one of his committee
members that went something like ‘I don't like the philosophical side of theory’.

227
Foucault M 1977, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, Vintage Books.
228
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“The fact that philosophy cannot be put at the disposal of some end other than its own is intimately
connected with its theoretical character and is, indeed, identical with it—and that is a point which is of the
greatest importance, which ought to be stressed. To philosophize is the purest form of speculari, of theorein,
it means to look at reality purely receptively—in which a way that things are the measure and the soul is
exclusively receptive [at least to the degree, limited by one’s subjectivity, that any human being can attain such
‘objectivity’…]. Whenever we look at being philosophically, we discourse purely ‘theoretically’ about it, in a
manner, that is to say, untouched in any way whatsoever by practical considerations, by the desire to change
it; and it is in this sense that philosophy is said to be above any and every ‘purpose’.
The realization of theoria in this sense is, however, linked to another presupposition. It requires a
specific relation to the world, a relation prior to any conscious construction and foundation [i.e. a relation to
the world that is prior to subjectivity, which is to say the realization (remembrance) of a state of being that
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exists prior to our manifestation in passing time and physical space].” (Pieper 2009, p. 89-90)
There is no ‘other side’ of theory in relationship to philosophy. Theory is, in its most
essential sense (in its purest expression), philosophy, and theory without philosophy is not
but a “spurious form” of philosophy that serves “to screw down the dome [of Modernity]
more firmly than ever, to close every window” so that “man really is imprisoned in the
world of work.” (Pieper 2009) To pursue theory without the ‘philosophical’ side is to
eschew theory altogether and instead pursue an ideology of slavery—of domination by the
world(view) of total work.
“There is a direct road from ‘Knowledge is power’—and Bacon’s other statement that the purpose of
knowledge is to furnish man with new inventions and gadgets—to Descartes’ more explicitly polemical
statement in the Discourse that he intended to replace the old ‘theoretical’ philosophy by a practical kind, so
that we men might make ourselves the ‘masters and owners of nature’. That road leads on to Marx’s well-
known declaration: hitherto philosophy has been concerned with interpreting the world, but what matters is
to change it.
This assault on philosophy’s theoretical character is the historical road of philosophy’s suicide. And
that assault arises from the world’s being seen more and more as mere raw material for human activity…. The
loss of ‘theoria’ means eo ipso the loss of the freedom of philosophy: philosophy then becomes a function
within society, solely practical, and it must of course justify its existence and role among the functions of
society; and finally, in spite of its name, it appears as a form of work or even of ‘labor’…. A real philosophy is
230
[not] grounded… in becoming ‘the master and owner of nature’, but in seeing what is… simply as being.”
(Pieper 2009, p. 91-92)
Philosophy (and true theory therein) is not an act of domination. It is not an attempt to
become the master by rendering the observed as other and enslaving it to an order of our
creation. Philosophy is not to act upon the world, to create order in the world, to labor, etc.
Philosophy is, in its essence, the effortless action (Wu-Wei) of being as receptive to being
(to that which IS). “The ultimate perfection attainable to us [is]… that the order of the
whole of existing things should be inscribed in our souls…. ‘What do they not see, who see
him who sees all things?’” (Pieper 2009, p. 92) Perfection, at least to the degree attainable
by humans, comes in allowing ‘the order of things’ to act upon us, in a subsequent state of
231
being that is sympathetic to the order of things and in the effortless action of expressing

229
230
231
We use the term sympathetic in the sense outlined by Foucault’s discussion of convenience, emulation, analogy and sympathy in The
Order of Things.
108

the order of things in our thoughts, behaviors and conceptions of being once we have been
so worked upon.
Epistemology of the Essence of Things
“The world coordinated to spirit is not merely the world of all things but at the same time of the essence of
things. And that is why an animal’s environment is limited: because the essence of things is concealed from it.
And, contrariwise, it is only because man, being a spirit, is capable of attaining the essence of things, that he
can embrace the totality of things—this interrelationship was traditionally expressed in the following terms:
both the essence of things and the universe is ‘universal’; and in the words of Aquinas, ‘the spiritual soul is
capable of the infinite because it can grasp the universal.’ To know the universal essence of things is to reach
a point of view from which the whole of being and all existing things become visible; at the same time the
spiritual outpost thus reached by knowing the essence of things enables man to look upon the landscape of
the whole universe….
…Man’s world is the whole of reality; man lives in and is confronted by the whoel of reality, vis-à-vis
de l’univers—in so far as he is spirit. But not only is he not pure spirit, he is finite spirit; and consequently the
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essence of things in their totality is not given to him fully and completely in the purity of the concept…”
(Pieper 2009, p. 102-103)
“Convenience (difference in aeonian manifestation imputed by manifestation in different environments, or

the similarity imposed upon things by manifestation in shared environment); emulation (similarity imposed
by the emulation of the Infinite in finite manifestation); analogy (the dimensional incommensurability of 233
finite signifier and the signified infinite potential, the tension of convenience and emulation, that allows us
extract the Infinite essence from sensory experience to develop rational knowledge of the Infinite); sympathy-
antipathy (the degree of perfection to which the Infinite is reflected in a given environment).” (Barnesmoore
2016b, p. 52-53)
Descartes (Meditations, Discourse on Method) argues that the rational process must begin
from the simplest and most universal things, which is indeed to say ‘the essence of things’
(which in Spinoza’s [2002] language would be Infinite Substance (IS) and its emanations of
Force, Form and Consciousness). Contemplation, which allows us to be acted upon by the
essence of things, also requires a state of being that can only be attained through having this
essence of things inscribed upon our being through contemplation. Though the first acts of
contemplation are brought on by the marvelous shock of beauty, love, death, etc., it is the
act of contemplation themselves that renders a contemplative state of being possible, and
only in that contemplative state of being can we allow the essence of things (which in a
sense is to say the order of things as the order of things exists as infinite potential in the
essence of things) to work upon us and thus actualize the human potential for Reason
(active) and Wu-Wei (passive).
It should be noted that
“A man philosophizing does not look away from his environment in the process of transcending it; he does
not turn away from the ordinary things of the workaday world, from the concrete, useful, handy things of life;
he does not have to look in the opposite direction to perceive the universal world of essences. On the

232
233
Ouspensky 1912, Tertium Organum, St. Petersburg, 5 January 2015, http://holybooks.lichtenbergpress.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/Tertium-Organum-by-P-D-Ouspensky.pdf
109

contrary, it is the same tangible, visible world that lies before him upon which a genuine philosophical
reflection is trained. But this world of things in their interrelationships has to be questioned in a specific
manner: things are questioned regarding their ultimate nature and their universal essence, and as a result the
horizon of the question becomes the horizon of reality as a whole. A philosophical question is always about
some quite definite thing, straight in front of us; it is not concerned with something beyond the world or
beyond our experience of everyday life. Yet, it asks what ‘this’ reality is, ultimately. The philosopher, Plato
says, does not want to know whether I have been unjust to you in this particular manner, or you to me, but
what justice really is, and injustice; not whether a king who owns great wealth is happy or not, but what
authority is, and happiness and misery—in themselves and ultimately.” (Pieper 2009, p. 109)
Philosophy, then, is an essentially ontological act. It is the search for the true reality of
things, in their totality, from IS to what is. It is not to turn away from the world of passing
time and physical space, but to ‘look’ beneath the visible surface of the manifest world into
the eternal, unmoving foundation (Infinite Substance and its emanations Force, Form and
Consciousness) that gives rise to the interrelatedness of all that which is.
Philosophizing is to ask the world questions about its invisible essence, about that
which exists beyond the motion, change, difference, etc. of manifestation, but in Modernity
the philosophical act has been inverted from a practice of questions to a search for final
answers.
“An answer is valuable only in so far as it stimulates further inquiry. This holds true even in the exact sciences
where the hypothesis serves as a springboard for the searching mind. In a still higher degree it holds true in
the realm of philosophy where answers are merely fertile formulations of problems. ‘Let us know in order to
search,’ says St. Augustine. The favorite answer of an age, however, is often one in which only a minimum of
problems is preserved and which has been promoted to its place as favorite because it seems to render
superfluous all further questioning. It closes all doors, blocks all ways, and just because of this permits the
234
agreeable feeling that the goal has been reached and that the rest is granted.” (Foss 1949, p. 1)
Questions surrounding the human telos (why is there human being rather than nonbeing?
why are we here? what is the meaning of human life? to what end ought we strive?) have
been answered as such in the workaday worldview of Modernism. A minimum of
problems—those related to humanity’s biological, material existence—is preserved. The
human telos is work and survival, end of story. Virtue comes in hard work. Knowledge
comes from hard work. The meaning of human life comes in work. What is more, these
‘favorite answers of the Modernist age’ reduce human being to a state in which
philosophical questions become impossible—if our being (and indeed reality as a whole) is
rooted and contained within our visible, biological existence then there is no invisible
aspect of reality to question. This axiomatic reduction of reality to passing time and
physical space negates the potential for philosophy by eviscerating that which it questions,
and as a result the answer of the Modernist age so fully ‘renders all further questioning
superfluous’ that humanity becomes trapped within its worldview of total work. Modernism
is the ultimate form of epistemological bondage because it serves to cut humanity off from
the dimension of reality that must be questioned if we are to truly philosophize and without
philosophy there can be no freedom of thought or, thus, behavior and conception of being.

234
Foss, M 1949, Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience, Princeton University Press, p. 1.
110

If I may provide an anthropological aside from 1984 West Mall that serves to drive
home the anti-philosophical nature of Modernist academic inquiry, a fellow PHD (that is
‘doctor of philosophy’…) candidate once told me that he wont read anything that has the
235
term ‘exploration’ in the title because—and I quote—“I want answers”. Translated into the
context of this study, that statement reads ‘I don't want to ask or consider philosophical
questions’, which is to say ‘I don't want to be an academic’. Modernist academic inquiry,
then, can be understood as the proverbial Faustian search for meaning in answers rather
than questions. As Pieper (2009) noted above, this sort of pseudo-philosophy (the doctor
of philosophy who states openly, if not consciously, that they do not want to be a
philosopher-academic) is far more dangerous than simple naiveté as it provides a concrete
surety to the fetters of Modernist epistemological bondage—not only is the quest reduced to
one that seeks answers, but the one who searches believes that they have already found
what they are looking for (which, as Foss notes above, ‘permits the agreeable feeling that
the goal has been reached and that the rest is granted’). Slavery is far more pernicious when
the slave is comfortable in and unaware of their enslavement, and in its most pernicious
form the Modernist epistemological slave is convinced that they are in fact the master (of
peripatetic knowledge and, thus, reality itself). Rather than questioning reality the
Modernist epistemological slave presumes that they are the master of reality (or at least that
they are in the process of mastering it through the accumulation of facts and answers).
“…Wonder is not to know, not to know fully, not to be able to conceive. To conceive a thing, to possess
comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of a thing, is to cease to wonder.” (Pieper 2009, p. 116)
“The wise student hears of the Tao and

practices it diligently.
The average student hears of the Tao
and gives it thought now and again.
The foolish student hears of the Tao
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and laughs aloud.”
Returning to the seeming similarity of Pieper and Foucault’s projects, Pieper argues “to
philosophize is to withdraw—not from the things of everyday life—but from the currently
accepted meaning attached to them, or to question the value placed upon them.”
Philosophy is not a withdraw from the material world, but to withdraw from the banal
answers to the questions of our age so that we can question the things of the world at a
deeper, more essential level. In this sense the act of problematization can be understood as
preparation for the act philosophy, as the withdrawal from the meanings of the world that
must necessarily precede a state of being as receptive to being.
“Wonder acts upon a man like a shock, he is ‘moved’ and ‘shaken’, and in the dislocation that succeeds all
that he has taken for granted as being natural or self-evident loses its compact solidity and obviousness; he is
literally dislocated and no longer knows where he is. If this were only to involve the man of action in all of us,
so that a man only lost his sense of the certainty of everyday life, it would be relatively harmless; but the

235
I can also recall very same PHD candidate who said he ‘just wants answers’ was struck with disdainful incredulity at the use of the term
‘soul’. The importance of this moment will be elucidated by the quote on foolish students from Lao Zi below…
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Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English p. 15 http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
111

ground quakes beneath his feet in a far more dangerous sense, and it is his whole spiritual nature, his capacity
to know, that is shaken.” (Pieper 2009, p. 114)
What is shaken by Foucault’s writings but our capacity to know?
“But does the true sense of wonder really lie in uprooting the mind and plunging it in doubt? Doesn’t it really
lie in making it possible and indeed necessary to strike yet deeper roots? The sense of wonder certainly
deprives the mind of those penultimate certainties that we had up till then taken for granted—and to that
extent wonder is a form of disillusionment, though even that has its positive aspect, since it means being freed
from an illusion; and it becomes clear that what we had taken for granted was not ultimately self-evident. But
further than that, wonder signifies that the world is profounder, more all-embracing and mysterious than the
logic of everyday reason had taught us to believe.” (Pieper 2009, p. 115)
Foucault the Mystic’s Symbolic Narrative

The question, then, is whether Foucault was aware of the potentially spiritual character of
his work, and it seems clear that the answer is yes.
“Although most of the influence studies have traced Western intellectual traditions in [Foucault’s] work, there
is an as yet unexplored non-Western counter-discourse or subtext that also affects his mode of thought and,
as a result, his style. An understanding of this subtext will help the reader comprehend some enigmatic
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aspects of Foucault's work.”
This symbolic subtext can be found in the forms through which Foucault problematizes
modernity.
“Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that
determines the way they confront one another [(the uncreated)], and also that which has no existence except
in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language [(the created)]; and it is only in the blank spaces of
this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its
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expression.”
While Foucault uses these ‘symbolic forms’ to problematize the banality of Modernity, we
argue that his structuralist theoretical inclinations and understanding of classical esoteric
philosophy (expressed in places like History of Sexuality V. 2 and 3 and his discourse on
knowledge as resemblance in The Order of Things) point to the fact that in many places—
from this quotation to his discourse on Las Meninas—Foucault uses Infinite Substance (IS)
and its emanations (Form, Force and Consciousness) to structure the divisions by which he
conducts his historical research.
239
We argue that Foucault used ‘aeonian forms’ to structure his analysis of
Modernity and thus embedded an ‘unspoken’ (esoteric, hidden, silent, secret, etc.)
symbolic narrative into the his oeuvre. As one must find intimacy with the dimension of
self that IS these aeonian forms for themselves (through allowing them to be inscribed on
our being as noted by Pieper [2009]), and so it is not uncommon for authors to leave such
symbolic narratives ‘unspoken’. For examples see religious texts like the Bible,

237
Uta Liebmann Shaub, "Foucault's Oriental Subtext," PMLA 104.3 (May 1989): 306-15 p. 306
238
Ibid. xx
239
See Maurice Nicoll’s definition of Aeons in Living Time below.
112

philosophical texts like the works of Plato or Avicenna or novels like Goethe’s Faust.
Another point of inspiration for this hypothesis is Foucault’s engagement with “French
240241
Orientalists Louis Massignon and Henri Corbin” (Carrette 2002, p. 139; Foucault 2001)
(see Corbin’s [1960] Avicenna and the Visionary Recital for a text in which Corbin clearly
242
articulates the method and rationale for the mode of symbolic communication that we posit
243
as existing in silence under the visible surface of Foucault’s work). (Carrette 2002; Corbin
1960) It was from this relationship with Corbin that we saw ‘Foucault’s Iranian Connection’
244
and his focus on Iran’s “Spiritual Force” in the context of the Iranian Revolution. Others
245
have observed a Buddhist Influence or ‘oriental subtext’ in Foucault’s work on sexuality
(and indeed some authors have posited connections between Mahayana Buddhism and
Islam based upon shared symbolic narratives like the Parrot who imitates death to escape
246
its cage).
“It has been said that a condition the prophet must adhere to is that his words should be symbols and his
expressions hints. Or, as Plato says in the Laws: whoever does not understand the apostles’ symbols will not
attain the Divine Kingdom. Moreover, the foremost Greek philosophers and prophets made us in their
books of symbols and signs in which they hid their secret doctrine—men like Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato.
As for Plato, he had blamed Aristotle for divulging wisdom and making knowledge manifest so that Aristotle
had to reply: “Even though I had done this, I have still left in my books many a pitfall which only the initiate
247
among the wise and learned can understand.” [Thus the silence of Foucault’s symbolic narrative…]”
Foucault’s ‘Iranian connection’ is most elucidating. In treatment of the Iranian revolution,
“Foucault maintains that the mass revolt whose sources he was attempting to explain to Europeans came from
a ground swell of spirituality which the hyper-rationalized West was incapable of comprehending. In order to
escape the despiritualization of cultural life from which the revolution's religious leaders were struggling to
save its constituent-followers, "an entire people" was, it would seem, prepared to renounce the amenities of
modern life, including, presumably, the roads, railways, and the other infrastructural public works Reza Kahn,
the first Pahlavi, had undertaken a half century earlier:

240
Jeremy Carrette 2002, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporeality and Political Spirituality, Routledge, p. 139.
241
Foucault, M., 2001. Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988. Paris: Gallimard.
242
Corbin, H., 1960. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton.
243
This engagement with Corbin, Foucault’s cryptic remarks concerning the masons in the introduction to Society Must Be Defended
(whose inner orders like the Shriners clearly delineate the relationship between Islamic Culture & Philosophy and the Templar,
Bourgeois ‘revolution’ against the Old World Order that gave rise to Modernity)—which should be read in the context of Kevin
Hetherington’s thesis in The Badlands of Modernity (clearly inspired by Foucault’s work) that masonic lodges in France were the
heterotopic spaces of modernity—and, more generally, the relationship between Romanticism, Wars Against the Vatican, Modernity and
the Moorish occupation of Spain (wherein European philosophical engagement with Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle in
modernity derive their intellectual lineage through Islamic philosophers like Avicenna) all ameliorate the potential critique that
Foucault’s ‘Eurocentric reading of Modern thought’ is incommensurable with the introduction of Islamic philosophers into this
discussion; indeed, quite the contrary, as the Eurocentric world view was in one sense birthed directly from Islamic Philosophy…
Hetherington, K., 1997. The badlands of modernity: Heterotopia and social ordering. Psychology Press.
244
Bouasria, A. 2015 “Sufism and Politics in Morocco: Activism and Dissent” Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Democratization and
Government, Routledge.
Scullion, R. (1995). Michel Foucault the Orientalist: On Revolutionary Iran and the "Spirit of Islam" South Central Review, 12(2), 16-40.
245
Uta Liebmann Shaub, "Foucault's Oriental Subtext," PMLA 104.3 (May 1989): 306-15.
246
Epstein, R., Imitating death in the Quest for enlightenment. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the AAR/SBL,Pacific Northwest
Branch, May 6-8, 1976, Eugene, Oregon.
Rumi, The Masnavi “The Escape of the Parrots Merchant” trans. Mojaddedi, Oxford University Press.
247
Marmura, M. E. (1963) “Avicenna: on the Proof of Prophecy and the Interpretation of the Prophet’s Symbols and Metaphors” in
Lerner and Mahdi Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook Cornell University Press.
113

“Of the entire Kemalist program, international politics and internal forces only left the Pahlavis with one
bone to gnaw on: modernization. And here this modernization has come to be roundly rejected. Not simply
because of the defeats it has suffered, but for the very principle it represents. With the current agony of the
Iranian regime, we are witnessing the final moments of an episode that some sixty years ago: an attempt "to
modernize" Islamic countries in a Western fashion. The Shah is still clinging to [this aim] as if it were his only
raison d'etre. I don't know if he's still looking to the year 2000. But I know his famous gaze dates from the
248
1920s.””
“The “great becoming” Foucault foresees in October 1978 is one in which a decadent, not really so old
order-from its inception spinelessly subservient to Western colonial powers--is toppled by a tidal wave of
righteous, single-minded opposition from an undivided people whose will to emancipation was propelled by
249
magnificent spiritual resolve.”
“In… the Iranian people’s categorical rejection of the modernization he declares “dead in its tracks,” this
Western traveller appears to have stumbled upon a univocal mass whose spiritual elation… will compensate
for the grueling labor and material burdens of the premodern life to which they are more than willing to
return in order to fend off the deadening, corrupting influences of Western industrialism’s “world without
250
spirit.””
“Foucault's account of the revolution… [frames it as a] dualistic struggle between the modern and the
antimodern, a David and Goliath contest pitting the forces of crass Western materialism against the spiritual
251
transcendence of Islam.”
This reading of Foucault is of course problematic, but there is some light to be found at the
end of the tunnel.
The Order of Things provides further insight into the mystical elements of
Foucault’s philosophy. Foucault notes a quality of similitude that allows humanity to
become aware of the essence of things and the resemblances it creates in manifestation. As
convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathies represent the four essential mechanisms
by which things take on resemblance, signatures are the qualities of things that allow us to
have the essence of things inscribed upon our being.
“We might make our way through all this marvelous teeming abundance of resemblances without even
suspecting that it has long been prepared by the order of the world…. There must be some mark
that makes us aware of these things: otherwise, the secret would remain indefinitely dormant…. These buried
similitudes must be indicated on the surface of things; there must be visible marks for the invisible analogies.
252
”
“There are no resemblances without signatures. The world of similarity can only be a world of signs.
Paracelsus says:

248
Scullion, R. (1995). Michel Foucault the Orientalist: On Revolutionary Iran and the "Spirit of Islam" South Central Review, 12(2), 16-
40 pp. 22-23. Italic Emphasis Added
249
Ibid. 23 and Foucault, M "The Discourse on Language," in The Archeology of Knowledge p. 230.
250
Ibid. 24 and Claire Brihre and Pierre Blanchat, Interview with Michel Foucault, "L'Esprit d'un monde sans esprit," Iran: La Rdvolution
au nom de dieu (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 225-41. For an English translation of this interview, see "Iran: The Spirit of a World Without Spirit,"
Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 211-
24. Bold Emphasis Added.
251
Ibid.
252
Foucault, The Order of Things 26, Bold Emphasis Added
114

It is not God’s will that what he creates for man’s benefit and what he has given us should remain
hidden… And even though he has hidden certain things, he has allowed nothing to remain without
exterior and visible signs in the form of special marks – just as a man who has buried a hoard of
treasure marks the spot that he may find it again.
A knowledge of similitudes is founded upon unearthing the decipherment of these signatures. It is useless to
go no further than the skin or bark of plants if you wish to know their nature; you must go straight to their
marks – ‘to the shadow and image of God that they bear or to their internal virtue, which has been given to
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them by heaven as a natural dowry,… a virtue, I say, that is to be recognized rather by its signature.”
We bring our knowledge of these similitudes to bear in knowing the world through use of
rational intuition (which takes what is known by rationality and operationalizes it in a single
movement of the mind that is both intellectual and emotive, as both a mode of knowing
and of feeling). It is thus that traditions aiming to catalyze actualization of the human
potential for conscious evolution find their linguistic foundation in a technical language of
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symbolism. “Having eyes, see ye not? And having ears, hear ye not? And do ye not
255
remember?” You have eyes, but you cannot see the resemblance of all things. You have
ears, but you cannot hear the resemblance of all vibrations. You do not remember
(anamnesis) the Infinite Substance and its emanations or the many modes of intimacy you
have shared with Infinite Substance and its emanations through your many lives. The
signatures are implicit in our being, our essence, and indeed can be understood as a
dimension of Self—we need but remember that which we have always known in the deep
recesses of our being…
“Resemblance was the invisible form of that which, from the depths of the world, made things visible [(‘let
there be light’)]; but in order that this form may be brought out into the light in its turn there must be a visible
figure that will draw it out from its profound invisibility. This is why the face of the world is covered
with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words – with ‘hieroglyphics’ 256 …. ‘Is
it not true that all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic
books and signs? The great untroubled mirror in whose depths things gazed at themselves and reflected their
own images back to one another is, in reality, filed with the murmer of words [(and of ‘The Word’)]. The
mute reflections all have corresponding words which indicate them. And by the grace of one final form of
resemblance [(signatures)], which envelops all the others and encloses them within a single ciricle, the world
may be compared to a man with the power of speech:
Just as the secret movements of his understanding are manifested by his voice, so it would seem that
the herbs speak to the curious physician through their signatures, discovering him… their inner
virtues hidden beneath nature’s veil of silence.”257
“What form constitutes a sign and endows it with its particular value as a sign? – Resemblance does. It
signifies exactly in so far as it resembles what it is indicating (that is, a similitude). The signature and what it

253
Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 26, Bold Emphasis Added
254
As already noted, see Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital for a lengthy discussion of the role of symbolism in spiritual
cultivation (in cultivation of the capacity for rational intuition). Also see (De Santillana, Giorgio, and Hertha Von Dechend. Hamlet's
Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time. David R. Godine Publisher, 1977) and (Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods) for a
discussion of the technical, metaphysical language implicit in the mythological motifs of antiquity (from the Americas through Asia and
the Near East and into the Europe and Africa).
255
Mark 8:18 KJV
256
Again, see Henri Corbin’s (1960) Avicenna and the Visionary Recital.
257
Ibid. 26-27 Bold Emphasis Added
115

denotes are of exactly the same nature; it is merely that they obey a different law of distribution; the pattern
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from which they are cut is the same.”
“Let us call the totality of learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their
meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the
locations of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are
linked semiology: the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude.
The search for meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover
the things that are alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they
speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them together. The nature of things, their
coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their
resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crosses the world from one end
to the other. 'Nature' is trapped in the thin layer that holds semiology and hermeneutics one above the other;
it is neither mysterious nor veiled, it offers itself to our cognition, which it sometimes leads astray, only in so
far as this superimposition necessarily includes a slight degree of non-coincidence between the re-semblances.
As a result, the grid is less easy to see through; its transparency is clouded over from the very first. A dark
space appears which must be made progressively clearer. That space is where 'nature' resides, and it is what
one must attempt to know. Everything would be manifest and immediately knowable if the hermeneutics of
resemblance and the semiology of signatures coincided without the slightest parallax. But because the
similitudes that form the graphics of the world are one 'cog' out of alignment with those that form its
discourse, knowledge and the infinite labour it involves find here the space that is proper to them: it is their
task to weave their way across this distance, pursuing an endless zigzag course from resemblance to what
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resembles it.”
In summary, and though it will come at the chagrin of materialists (especially Marxists who
struggle to draw Foucault into their camp regardless of his own protestations…), Foucault’s
engagement with the ‘oriental philosophy’ of authors like Corbin in the later stages of his
carrier indicates that at the very least Foucault was aware of the spiritual significance of his
project. Foucault was problematizing our banal conceptions of reality and shaking our
capacity for knowing the world so as to help foster an epistemological environment where
the reader can experience the wonder that represents the first stage of the philosophical
road. Foucault was a mystic initiating his readers into a state of being as receptive to being.
Mystical Domination
Foucault’s seeming mysticism brought him to observe Modernity’s perversion of traditional
mysticism and rituals therein. Mystical practices that where designed to liberate humanity
were inverted and transformed into techniques of power that allow the elite class to
dominate humanity. Two moments in Foucault’s work stand out—his discussion of the
devolution of Ars Erotica to Scientia Sexualis (sexual domination) and his discussion of
The Brothers of the Common Life (temporal domination).
“[In] ars erotica…, the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated
as experience; pleasure is not considered inrelation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden,
nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experience as pleasure,
evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.
Moreover, this knowledge must be deflected back into the sexual practice itself, in order to shape it as

258
Ibid. 28
259
Ibid. 29-30
116

thought from within and amplify its effects. In this way there is formed a Knowledge that must remain secret,
not because of an element of infamy that might attach to its object, but because the need to hold it in the
greatest reserve, since, according to tradition, it would lose it effectiveness and its virtue by being divulged.
Consequently, the relationship to the master who holds the secrets is of paramount importance; only he,
working alone, can transmit this art in an esoteric manner and as the culmination of an initiation in which he
guides the disciple’s progress with unfailing skill and severity. The effects of this masterful art, which are
considerably more generous than the spareness of its prescription would lead one to imagine, are said to
transfigure the one fortunate enough to receive its privileges: an absolute mastery of the body, a singular bliss,
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obliviousness to time and limits, the elixir of life, the exile of death and its threat.”
“On the face of it at least, our civilization has no ars erotica…. It is undoubtedly the only civilization to
practice a scienta sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for
telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations
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and the masterful secret.”
“The ars erotica did not disappear altogether from Western civilization… in Christian confession… there was
a whole series of method that had much in common with an erotic art: guidance by the master along a path of
initiation, the intensification of experiences extending down to their physical components, the optimization of
effects by the discourse that accompanied them. The phenomena of possession and ecstasy, which were quite
frequent in the Catholicism of the Counter Reformation, were undoubtedly effects that had got outside the
control of the erotic technique immanent in this subtle science of the flesh. And we must ask ourselves
whether, since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis—under the guise of its decent positivism—has not
functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica… This production of truth, intimidated though it was
by the scientific model, …created its own intrinsic pleasures….; the specific pleasure of the true discourse….
Sceintia Sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars erotica. ” 262
“The brothers of common life… strongly inspired Ruysbroek and Rhenish mysticism… transposed certain of
the spiritual techniques to education… of clerks… of magistrates and merchants: the theme of a perfection
towards which the exemplary master guides the pupil became with them that of an authoritarian perfection of
the pupils by the teacher; the ever increasing rigorous exercises that the ascetic life proposed became tasks of
increasing complexity that market the gradual acquisition of knowledge and good behaviour; the striving of
the whole community towards salvation became the collective permanent competition of individuals being
classified in relation to one another… In its mystical or ascetic form, exercise was a way of ordering earthly
time for the conquest of salvation. It was gradually, in the history of the West, to change direction while
preserving certain of its characteristics; it served to economize the time of life, to accumulate it in a useful
form and to exercise power over men through the mediation of time arranged in this way. Exercise, having
become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond,
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but tends toward a subjection that has never reached its limit.”
Philosophy and Theology
“…Theology is always prior to philosophy, and not in a merely temporal sense, but with respect to inner
origin and their relationship in that origin. Philosophical inquiry starts with a given interpretation of reality
and of the world as a whole; an in that sense, philosophy is intimately connected, not to say bound, to
theology. There is no such thing as a philosophy which does not receive its impulse and impetus from a prior
and uncritically accepted interpretation of the world as a whole [(without a worldview)].

260
Foucault, History of Sexuality (V. 1) pp. 57-58.
261
Foucault, History of Sexuality (V. 1), p. 58. First emphasis added.
262
Foucault, History of Sexuality (V. 1), pp. 70-71
263
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 161-162.
117

…The theologian does not… possess the knowledge of being characteristic of the genuine
philosopher. …The theologian… does not… acquire the worldly knowledge of the philosopher that derives
from the concrete consideration of the things of this world. …The philosopher who reflects upon the things of
this world in the light… will attain to knowledge that would otherwise remain hidden… though the knowledge
he gains will not be theological knowledge but demonstrable knowledge, philosophical knowledge of things in
themselves.
By the nature of the philosophical act, the person engaged in philosophizing cannot help overstepping the
boundaries of ‘pure’ philosophy and taking a theological position. …Philosophizing is a fundamentally human
relationship to reality and is only possible of our whole human nature is involved—and that necessarily
involves the adoption of a definite position with respect to ultimate things. ” (Pieper 2009, pp. 130-131, 135)
In short, one cannot have philosophy without theology (be that traditional spiritual theology
or the economic theology of Modernity). One cannot set out to develop experiential
knowledge of the world in which we exist without first having a worldview. The people of
each era may pursue ‘philosophy’ without a conscious understanding of the theological
worldview they have received through socialization in their given society, but conscious or
no our theology articulates the potentials for philosophical inquiry.
In practical terms within the context of this study, the distinction of and relationship
between the theologian and the philosopher elucidates the range of topics addressed in this
text. If we are to truly philosophize, we must first problematize the economic theology that
has served to negate the potential for philosophizing in the workaday world(view) of
Modernity and sketch a new (and in many cases old) theological perspective that revives
this most essential human potential. If the political project is to reassert the essential
importance of philosophy, philosophical education and philosophical academic inquiry for
human existence, then the first step of the project must come in reasserting a theology in
which philosophy is possible (i.e. a theology [a worldview] in which there is wisdom to be
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sought). We cannot engage in epistemological politics (in a pursuit of conscious evolution
for the sake of social justice) without a cosmology, ontology, teleology, etc. in which the full
range of human epistemology can come to be known in philosophical terms.
Madness and Philosophy

This line from Pieper (2009)—“…there [is] a particular form of madness which [consists] in
loosing everything but one’s reason”—reminded me of a piece of prose that I wrote during
my exodus across rural Canada in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
Redemption, the Hope of Fools

265
“‘There never was much hope’… ‘Just a fool's hope, as I have been told.’”

264
It should be noted that we utterly reject Pieper’s absurd assertion that philosophy requires a Christian theology. First, Pieper is a
Catholic and thereby not a Christian… Second, the notion that Christianity (or any Abrahamic tradition) possesses some sort of totalizing
dominance over theology or is the most pure theology is patently absurd if not unsurprising given the dogmas of White, Roman,
Abrahamic theology. Of course a theology of domination would assert its own dominance over all theology.
265
Tolkien, The Return of the King
118

We are but fools, both merry and grave, a band of vagabonds wandering through the
blistering desert. To the naked eye the lands are parched and there is no hope that we will
quench our thirst before the last drop of strength leaves our bones and we wither into dust.
Our feet bleed into the blistering earth, or once did before the many years of exile began to
form a cocoon of scar tissue that now serves as boots. We are often taken in by the great
mirage; oases appear on the horizon only to be lost in the dry sands of time. Hope seems
to be but the purview of madmen, and yet we continue our solemn procession.
What is this fool’s hope that we search for? Is there redemption for a land that has
long since forgotten the fire of life and the waters of mind? Have we simply succumbed to
madness?
Foucault notes a trend, opposed to the contemporary conception of madness as the
negative space beyond truth and reason, wherein Madness and Truth are viewed as sharing
a close relationship. “Madness was… proclaimed nearer to happiness and truth than reason
itself” and indeed literature often sees the fool bringing the truth of matter into light—“to
lovers he speaks of love, he teaches the truth about life to the young, and the sad reality of
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things to the proud, the insolent, and those who bear false witness.” What is this truth
and joy that has been rumored to lie in madness? Is it the fool’s hope?
Given our socialization in the dualistic dogma of Modernity, it may be fruitful to
engage this question from the perspective of the binary between fact-truth-reason and
madness that has been established in our (‘western’) society. To begin, our society has lost
the distinction between truth (which is without motion) and fact (which is truth, or a lack
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thereof in cases of absurdity, with motion). Reason is no longer founded upon the
simplest and most universal ‘things’ as in Descartes, which is to say the uncreated and its
emanations, but instead upon facts (upon the sands of time).
which built his house upon a rock [(the uncreated and its emanations)]:
25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house [(i.e. time,
motion, etc.c)]; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish
man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell:
and great was the fall of it .” 268
The modernist subject, in losing the distinction between Truth (upon which reason must
be founded) and fact (which reason has come to be founded, is then (most ironically in the
context of this article) the ‘foolish’ person who builds their house upon the sands of time
(upon facts, the manifest world of motion). As a result, the Modernist Mind labels the one
who builds their house upon the rock (upon the uncreated and its emanations, which is to
say Truth) as the fool. Truth and reason have been relegated to the sphere of madness, and
‘the rock’ is the abode of fools.

266
Foucault, History of Madness, (2006) 13
267
Barnesmoore, “Absurdity and Reality”
268
Matthew 7: 24-27, KJV
119

The relationship between the fool, happiness and Truth is thus to be found in the
seeming madness of knowing reality beyond the veil of sensory perception. The wise fool is
only a fool in the eyes of those who lack eyes with which to see and in the ears of those
who lack ears with which to hear, and yet the redemption of the deaf and blind is only a
fools hope. We continue our solemn procession through the desert because we are fools,
and though the shackled eyes of the modern slave mind see us as naught but mad(wo)men,
without the fools hope would have long since died. Take heart in the foolishness of our
hope, for it is precisely that foolishness—the incommensurability of Truth-Love with the
present state of our material circumstances—which allows for the potential to transcend the
seemingly (from a material, sensory perspective) insurmountable odds of our present
circumstances. Redemption of humanity may seem like a foolish thing to hope for when
considered from our sensory perspective, but that is what makes it possible.
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Art and Conscious Evolution
“…There is a pseudo-art and a spurious poetry which, instead of bursting through the vault of the workaday
world, merely paint deceptive ornamentation upon the inner surface of the dome. Much utilitarian verse,
whether private or political in nature, more or less undisguisedly serves the ends of the workaday world. That
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sort of poetry does not go beyond anything, and does not even pretend to try.” (Pieper 2009, p. 83)
What is Art?
“Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten
science. For thousands of years psychology existed under the name of philosophy. In India all forms of Yoga,
which are essentially psychology, are described as one of the six systems of philosophy. Sufi teachings, which
again are chiefly psychological, are regarded as partly religious and partly metaphysical. In Europe, even quite
recently in the last decades of the nineteenth century, many works on psychology were referred to as
philosophy. And in spite of the fact that almost all sub-divisions of philosophy such as logic, the theory of
cognition, ethics, aesthetics, referred to the work of the human mind or senses, psychology was regarded as
inferior to philosophy and as relating only to the lower or more trivial sides of human nature….
Parallel with its existence under the name of philosophy, psychology existed even longer connected
with one or another religion…. There are many excellent works on psychology in quite orthodox religious
literature of different countries and epochs. For instance, in early Christianity there was a collection of books
of different authors under the general name of Philokalia, used in our time in the Eastern Church, especially
for the instruction of monks.
During the time when psychology was connected with philosophy and religion it also existed in the
form of Art. Poetry, Drama, Sculpture, Dancing, even Architecture, were means for transmitting
psychological knowledge. For instance, the Gothic Cathedrals were in their chief meaning works on
psychology.
In the ancient times before philosophy, religion and art had taken their separate forms as we now
know them, psychology had existed in the form of Mysteries, such as those of Egypt and of ancient Greece.
Later, after the disappearance of the Mysteries, psychology existed in the form of Symbolical Teachings
which were sometimes connected with the religion of the period and sometimes not connected, such as
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Astrology, Alchemy, Magic, and the more modern: Masonry, Occultism and Theosophy.”
“‘From the traditional point of view, the world itself, together with all things done or made in a manner
conformable to the cosmic pattern, is a theophany: a valid source of information because itself informed…. In
the dogmatic language of revelation and of ritual procedure this general language is reduced to a formulated
science for the purposes of communication and transmission.’ Thus the arts, which from the traditional point
of view are also rituals, derive their origin from an ‘intellectual or angelic level of reference….’ When this is
mythologically formulated such a level of reference becomes a ‘heaven’ above. The artist commissioned here,
is thought of as seeking the model there. When, for example (Mahavamsa, ch. xxvii), a palace is to be built,
the architect is said to make his way to heaven; and making a sketch of what he sees there, he returns to earth
and carries out this design in the materials at his disposal. So ‘it is in imitation of the angelic works of art that
any work of art is accomplished here’ (Aitareya Brahmana vi.27)…. [Similarly, Plotinus] says that all music is
‘an earthly representation of the music that there is in the rhythm of the ideal world,’ and ‘the crafts such as
building and carpentry draw on pattern, to take their principles from that realm and form the thinking there’
(Plotinus, Enneads v.9.11.).’ In similar manner, ‘the Zohar tells us of the Tabernacle that ‘all its individual
parts were formed in the pattern of that above.’
The intimate relationship between mythology and symbolism has been stressed. What can be said of
the symbol can therefore also be applied to the myth. For AKC, “symbolism is a language and a precise form

269
270
Ibid p. 4-5
121

of thought; a hieratic and a metaphysical language and not a language determined by somatic or psychological
categories. Its foundation is in the analogical correspondence of all orders of reality and states of being or
levels of reference…. The nature of an adequate symbolism could hardly be better stated than in the words of
‘the parabolical (Skr. paroksa) sense is contained in the literal (Skr. paratyaksa) On the other hand, ‘The
sensible forms, in which there was at first a polar balance of physical and metaphysical, have been more and
more voided of content on their way down to us…. What we have most to avoid [in symbolic methodology] is
a subjective interpretation, and most to desire is a subjective realization. For the meaning of symbols we must
rely on the explicit statements of authoritative texts, on comparative usage, and on that of those who still
employ the traditional symbols as the customary form of their thought and daily conversation.” To see a
symbol as void of meaning and mere ornamentation is to say that a word is merely a sound an not more
eminently a meaning. ‘It is with perfect consistence that a sentimental and materialistic generation not only
ridicules the Eucharistic transubstantiation, but also insists that the whole of any work of art subsists in its
aesthetic surfaces, poetry consisting, for example, in a conjunction of pleasurable or interesting sounds rather
than in a logically ordered sequence of sound with meanings.’ And again, ‘Traditional symbols are not
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‘conventional’ but ‘given’ with the ideas to which they correspond.’”
Art and Planning
“Each valid scheme should and must embody the full utilization of its local and regional conditions, and be
the expression of local and of regional personality. "Local character" is thus no mere accidental old-world
quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treatment of the
whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned.
Each place has a true personality; and with this shows some unique elements—a personality too much asleep
it may be, but which it is the task of the planner, as master-artist, to awaken. And only he can do this who is
in love and at home with his subject—truly in love and fully at home—the love in which high
intuition supplements knowledge, and arouses his own fullest intensity of expression, to
call forth the latent but not less vital possibilities before him .” (Geddes 1915, p. 396-397)

271
Ibid. xvii-xviii.
122

Revolution Without Being as Revolutionary

“22.
Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.
Therefore the wise embrace the one

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And set an example to all.”
“29.
Do you think you can take over the
universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.
The universe is sacred.

You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it,
you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it,
you will lose it….
30.
Whenever you advise a ruler in the way
of Tao,
Counsel him not to use force to
conquer the universe.
For this would only cause resistance.

272
123

Thorn bushes spring up wherever the
army has passed.
Lean years follow in the wake of a
great war.
Just do what needs to be done.
Never take advantage of power.
Achieve results,
But never glory in them.
Achieve results,
But never boast.
Achieve results,
But never be proud.
Achieve results,
Because this is the natural way.
Achieve results,
But not through violence.
Force is followed by loss of strength.

This is not the way of Tao.
That which goes against the Tao comes
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to an early end.”
Can one be a true revolutionary without being as a vulgar revolutionary? Can one pursue
revolutionary thought, behavior and conception of being—an idealism of ‘what should be’,
which is to say ‘what IS’—within the academy without being drawn into a binary struggle
with ‘what is’? Can we recognize that ‘what is’ is wrong and pursue ‘what should be’ without
being drawn into a state of thought, behavior and conception of being that is articulated in
opposition to ‘what is’? Can one do their part to bring about revolution without being as a
revolutionary?
Yes. In Truth there is no motion, no change, no difference and thus no other. In
Love there is no other. In Goodness, there is no other. Truth, Love and Goodness, in their
true expressions, are leisurely and effortless. To be as a vulgar revolutionary is to work
against, to fight, but true revolution comes in transcending the ‘hard work’ of being as
revolutionary for the effortlessness of expressing the attributes of the Infinite Substance (IS)
when we are intimate with IS (with ‘what IS’) through its communion with its expression as
the natural world. That which we struggle against in the revolutionary world of total work is
not but privation of that which IS, and to work hard to wage revolution against this
privation is to kneel to the most intimate premises of the slavish worldview of total work
and domination from which privation rises in Modernity. Paradoxically, privation derives
its subsistence from (is ontologically dependent upon and grounded in) that which is
deprived, but what IS deprived is without dependence upon anything. To orient our
thoughts, behaviors and conceptions of being in opposition to privation in being as
revolutionary is to tie our subsistence to (to render ourselves ontologically dependent upon
and grounded in) that which is in essence unreal (the privation of the Real). It is to grant

273
124

Reality to and found our own reality in that which is unreal. When we be as revolutionary
we cease to be at all.
“…Luvah… is passion and generation, and appears in the fallen world as thwarted desire in the figure of the
revolutionary, fiery, Oedipal child Orc (an anagram of Cor, heart, a play on the Greek word for the sexual
organs, and a suggestion of hell, Orcus). For a while this Orc is Blake’s hero, but soon Blake imagines him
locked with Urizen in an endless opposition of oppression and revolt.” (Adams 1970, p. xv)
Responding to Questions from Four Arrows

Revolutionary is, in the context of this argument, understood in rather vulgar, banal terms
as one who fights against the status quo, hegemonic regime, etc. We then divide the term
revolutionary into two distinct camps, the vulgar revolutionaries who root their conception
of being in ‘struggle against’ and the true revolutionaries who root their conception of being
in ‘struggle for’. This vulgar revolutionary should be understood as the sort of revolutionary
that the hegemonic regime desires (as hegemony in modernity functions through false
conflicts between two or more seemingly opposed sides whose true relationship is to be
found in their shared conception of being and associated world view) as privation only
gains any form of eternal, essential reality when it is granted that eternal reality by being
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accepted as real by consciousness.
Four Arrows succinctly defines a revolutionary as “one who is constantly in radical
change while working to implement radical change.” To this definition we would add that
the true revolutionary—while naturally in a state of radical change due to the dimensional
quality of manifestation and always attempting to implement radical change do to the
privations imposed by contemporary hegemonic society—orients radical change around
cultivation (remembrance) of intimacy with the eternal (with Infinite Substance and its
emanations Force, Form and Consciousness [IS-FFC ]) through communion with its
expression as the natural world. As a result, true revolutionaries fight for intimacy of
manifestation with its eternal origin in IS-FFC rather than against the privation of the
attributes of IS-FFC (Truth, Goodness, Beauty, etc.) and the agents of this privation.
The vulgar revolutionary is the individual whose conception of being (whose
understanding of their own being) is rooted in ‘struggle against’ (in the hard work of fighting
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the oppressor). Rather than rooting one’s conception being in that which IS eternally, in
the IS-FFC and its attributes, the vulgar revolutionary founds conception of being
upon struggle against what is, in essence, not real (upon privation). Rather than being in
and as Truth, Goodness and Beauty (being as a sympathetic expression of IS-FFC’s
attributes) to revolt against the privation of Truth (ignorance), Goodness (evil) and Beauty
(ugliness), the vulgar revolutionary is as a combatant against the privation of Truth,
Goodness and Beauty. In the context of ‘making a world with less poverty’, one could say
that where the vulgar revolutionary seeks to be in opposition to scarcity (in a struggle
against poverty) the true revolutionary seeks to be as abundance (being as an expression of
the eternal principle of abundance of which our society has deprived itself).

274
See the section on ‘Dialectical Hegemony’ in Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental
Justice,” Environment and Social Psychology 2(1).
275
This is not to say that fighting the oppressor is not hard work for most people, but that we should not conceive of our being (or our
virtue) as a function of this hard work.
125

This conception of real and not real requires some unpacking as it is rooted in an
esoteric conception of good and evil and is not meant to in any way denigrate or deprive
the suffering of humanity of reality—suffering at the hands of draconian social systems is
very real in a relative temporal sense, but it lacks eternity and is thus unreal in its essence.
St. Augustine argued that there is no such thing as evil, per se, and that what we take to be
evil is actually privation of the good. Rather than two self-subsistent (and thus eternal)
forces in a perpetual struggle for balance in manifestation, this vision argues that only
goodness exists in the IS-FFC (eternally) and that evil therefore in essence unreal (only that
which has a self-subsistent reality in the IS-FFC, in the divine, can be real in its essence).
Practically, we can see this divide between vulgar and true revolutionaries in
relatively simplistic terms. Does the revolutionary define their existence in relationship to
that which they fight for or in relationship to that which they fight against? Is the being of
the revolutionary articulated via their hatred for the Zionist colonizers or via their love for
those from whom Truth, Goodness and Beauty has been deprived by Zionist colonialism?
Do we fight hunger and starvation because we hate those who impose such conditions
upon the people or because we love those who are starving? Are we being for the care of
Self (the true, unified self that we find in Love) or to deprive care from the other? Are we
driven by hope, or by its privation (fear)?
‘When we be as revolutionary we cease to be at all.’ Following from the notions of
reality we plumbed from St. Augustine’s distinction between good and evil (which again is
not but the privation of good), we argue that oppressive regimes are in essence not real as
their conception of being is rooted in privation (for example, the Capitalist’s being is rooted
in privation of abundance and the Catholic’s being is rooted in privation of the general
public’s intimate connection with the IS-FFC). As a result, to root one’s own conception of
being in opposition to oppressive regimes (to that which is in essence unreal) is to render
oneself as unreal.
Turning to the metaphysical-political import of this argument, one might say that
the core political-epistemological objective of the perpetual conflicts and perverse
worldviews that are used to dominate human society is to convince consciousness to accept
privation and the agents of privation as eternally and essentially real. Privation and its agents
would, in Truth, cease to be if the whole of consciousness were to recognize their essential
unreality, and so for ‘them’ the struggle to enslave humanity to the notion that evil is just as
real as good (that fear is just as real as hope, that the emptiness of sorrow is just as real as
the fullness of joy, etc.) is existential. Tinker Bell can only exist if you believe in her and
thus grant her the eternal reality of consciousness, and the same is true of Modernity, its
Paternalist antecedents and the privations like hatred, fear and evil that are perpetuated
therein…
Being as Revolutionary Academic

Pursuing revolution within the environment of Modernist academic inquiry and the
Modern university raises some paradoxical questions. Is the nature of Modernist academic
inquiry and the Modern university one that perpetuates privation? If so, can we engage with
academic work in the Modern era without ourselves becoming part of the problem? Can
we promote worldviews that are more sympathetic with IS-FFC than those that are
126

presently normative without being drawn into opposition with them? Some may say that
this answer seemingly serves to simply circumvent the problem without actually addressing
it, but it seems like the answer is to be found in the essential unreality of Modernism and its
fruits. To be in opposition to something like a world view or a political reality is in a sense
to accept the essential reality of that which we oppose (indeed to grant the eternal reality of
consciousness to that which we oppose), and so the solution seems to be found in (or at
least it ought to be sought in…) problematization of the reality of that which we ‘oppose’
and concomitant being as the reality that we support. Paradoxical as it may seem,
opposition to should be reconceived as denying the essential reality of. Christ, it has been
said, was able to heal people because he knew that disease was not, in essence, real—he
stripped privation (in this case sickness) of the reality it had been granted by consciousness
and in so ding it ceased to be because it lacks any self-subsistent reality in the eternal. In
this light we must deprive privation, be it in the Modernist worldview or in oppressive
political realties like poverty, of its reality through cultivating knowledge276 of their essential
unreality. We do not oppose these things, for they do not exist.
The Ephemerality of Absurd Realities

American politics has descent into a state of absolute absurdity. Where once I was drawn
into anger and sadness by the many atrocities committed both internationally and
domestically in the name of American Exceptionalism and Pax Americana, the Trump vs.
Clinton ‘Presidential Election’ has given rise to a decay in the American Political Sphere
that inspires ridicule and laughter. The tinges of this absurd reality have been percolating
through American Politics for years in the form of political satire shows like the Colbert
Report and the Daily Show, and indeed the rise of absurdity from its base in the fallacy of
the two party binary model of domination was in plain sight through the rise of the
neoconservative and ‘tea party’ movements (be it the diddling simplicity of G.W. Bush or
the baseless labeling of Obama—previously a constitutional law professor at the University
of Chicago—as a Kenyan Muslim who wants to bring Sharia Law to the US), but the past
year has seen this cancer spread to the whole of the US Body Politic. Reality has been
rendered satirical, satire often seems plausible, and all I can do is laugh.
In ‘practical’, material and social terms, the absolute absurdity of contemporary US
politics unsurprisingly inspires fear in many observers, but from the perspective of a more
holistic metaphysical perspective on reality and our existence therein it seems that absurdity
may be a good sign. We perceive things as absurd and thus laughable because they are out
of touch with our understanding of the potential boundaries of reality; satire is funny
because it melds reality with that which cannot be real. Can something absurd—something
that evokes such visceral emotional and intellectual responses that negate its reality—have
any sort of eternal reality or truth, or is American Politics simply a mirage of four-
dimensional time that, in its laughable absurdity, is doomed to an end in nonexistence?
Can the absurd be believed to have any sort of eternity?

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In this context the term ‘knowledge’ is meant to cover the entire range of human epistemological potential rather than the limited
range of peripatetic, analytic knowledge that is often described by the term in Modernity.
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The Boggart Politic
The absurd reality of contemporary American Politics has inspired a great deal of fear in
the public mind. But if absurdity is to be understood as doomed to nonexistence by its
implicit unreality, and if fear is inspired by the unreality of the absurd, might fear be of the
same ephemeral mirage be thus doomed to the very same nonexistence? Can fear be
dispelled as easily as the ‘reality’ of the absurd? Is fear to be vanquished by laughter?
Aristotle made the distinction between Truth, which lacks motion and is thus
eternal, and Fact, which is Truth with motion and thus incommensurable with eternity. Is it
not the lack of Truth in a Fact that renders it as absurd? Motion without Truth is absurdity,
and so the absurd lacks the reflection of Truth and thus Eternity that allows the four-
dimensional world of facts to participate in the Eternal. As such, that which is absurd must
eventually cease to be.
As with the Boggart in the Harry Potter Mythos, our darkest fears are indeed
dispelled by laughter. Ridiculous! In their absurdity, the ‘rationales’ of our fears are
recognized for the ephemeral mirage in the ever-changing weave of fourth-dimensional
time-space reality that they are; nothing which is absurd can crystalize as a fixed point in the
timelines and must therefore be doomed to eventual decay into nonexistence. Absurdity,
and thus fear, is as ephemeral as the Boggart’s mirage of our darkest fears. Absurdity, along
with the fear that its tangible visage attempts to inspire, lacks eternity, and in lacking eternity
it must eventually cease to be.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton lack Eternity as their satirical absurdity negates
the potential that their Fact is Truth with motion. Their absurdity means that they cannot
be real in any eternal sense (i.e. on founded upon Truth), and indeed the notion that they
are ‘real’ is quite laughable. The moral of this story is to stop living in fear of absurd
manifestations and instead try to laugh, for in such active recognition of absurd unreality’s
ephemerality you negate its potential for continued existence.
Vermin Supreme
While often ignored due to his conscious existence in the sphere of absurdity, Vermin
Supreme may have (in the context of the above) developed the most fruitful possible
strategy for negating the ‘absurd reality’ of US political sphere.
“Vermin Supreme: When I'm President Everyone Gets A Free Pony”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d_FvgQ1csE
Rather than taking the US political system as real or thus deserving of fear, seriousness or
sorrow, Vermin works to negate the system’s very potential for reality through bringing us
to recognize and laugh at its abject absurdity.
Material Consequences
“There is no sin.
It is you who make sin exist,
When you act according to the habits
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Of your corrupted nature;
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This is where sin lies.”
“…It is you who have made sin exist …Sin is not inherent in things, nor is it some element of the cosmos, nor
of human nature. Yet it is definitely found in the way human nature is translated. It is a disorientation of
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desire, a kind of overlooking or missing the goal.”
There is no doubt that our acceptance of the absurd as real gives rise to a great deal of
injustice and suffering in this world. This is not a call to simply dismiss the suffering of
individuals who fall into the web of domination and created orders that is US Empire.
Instead, the intention of this piece is to remind readers that we have the control to
transcend the unreality (i.e. the lack of Truth and thus Eternity) of absurd manifestations
through recognizing their absurd lack of Truth and giving active manifestation to this
recognition through laughter. In absurdity we render ‘sin’, the cause of suffering, into an
unreality that necessitates its negation as a potential for manifestation. Maybe redemption
of time and space is to be found in laughter at the absurdity of that which inspired suffering
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and fear…
A Fight for Resonance

Cassandra’s plight—knowing what is going to happen, trying to explain what is going to
happen to those who lack eyes with which to see, undergoing the emotional process of
accepting what will happen, etc.—does not soften the fact of the matter when it comes to be.
The visceral trauma of the collective consciousness, be it from hate, bloodlust,
hopelessness, fear or sorrow, is by no means dulled by knowing that it will come to be.
Absurd and unreal as the facts of our world are in their lack of resonance with Truth and
Goodness, no matter the lack of eternity implicit in such absurdity, the knotted energies of
the collective consciousness that have formed around this transient manifestation leave a
foul taste in my emotional being. The general resonance of humanity has been drawn into
the rank pit of hopelessness, fear, anger and hatred.
Trump does not represent the birth of this emotional and psychological virus.
Hopelessness, fear and their manifestation as anger, hatred and the like are the hallmarks
of the dominating influence that has seen the devolution of humanity and its ‘exile from
paradise’. This influence says that we must create order through domination, sees the
world as an eternal struggle between ‘good and evil’ and positions nature, emotion, desire
and the feminine as an eternal, chaotic other that must be brought into order through
domination. It allows us to choose ‘the lesser of two evils’, to make a knowing pact with
malice, vengeance and domination (i.e. the manifestations of perversion) because we accept
‘evil’ (which is to say privation of the good through perversion) as a necessary constituent of
the cosmos.
Fear will not save us from fear. Hopelessness will not bring hope. Anger enlivened
by anything other than the Love of Eternal Truth is as a fire run loose in dry brush.

277
“Gospel of Mary Magdalene” P. 7 15-19, trans. Jean-Yeves Leloup, p. 25
278
Ibid. 50.
279
Barnesmoore, “Redemption in Sorrow” https://www.academia.edu/19513788/Redemption_in_Sorrow
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The struggle of our generation must be recognized for what it is—resonance. Will
we allow ourselves to be lead into the abyss of fear and hopelessness, of anger and hatred
fueled by the discord with eternal harmony brought on by fear and hopelessness, or will we
struggle for a new resonance? In resonance with the eternal—with Love, Goodness, Beauty,
and Truth, the attributes of infinite nothingness—the potential for fear and hopelessness,
evil, and the ‘sin’ we create through the resonance manifest therein ceases to be as that
which has no place in the eternal must eventually cease to be.
The struggle of our generation is one of resonance. It is a struggle to transcend the
dualities that have been imposed upon our collective consciousness, to ascend to a
resonance in which evil is stripped from the potentials of manifestation. The forces against
whom we struggle endeavor to keep humanity bound in the chains of fear and
hopelessness. If we submit to such a resonance we cannot be free.
The struggle for liberty in our generation will not be found in policy change or a
new president, in a new economic system or a dismissal of all forms of social organization,
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but in the conscious evolution of our being in time, our resonance, towards a harmony
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with the eternal in which the absurdity of our present state is relegated (as it must
necessarily be) to nonexistence. This is a metaphysical conflict that can only be achieved
through actively pursuing the evolution of our body, emotion, mind and soul into a state
that is in resonance with the eternal.
Dialectical Hegemony
First of all, this is not a fucking handbook of domination. I explained this concept to a
white corporate type silicon valley women who is married to one of my father’s friends
while trying to describe the ugly realities of American Democracy and she said something
along the lines of ‘do you think I could use that strategy in the office?’ Obviously I simply
looked at her in horror… If your plan is to use this concept to dominate people I implore
you to go and fuck yourself instead. Don't be like the simple farmer from song who pulled
on sprouts to make them grow!
On to the topic at hand… Dialectical Hegemony is a technique of power wherein a
conflict is created and managed to produce a desired outcome. Two (or more) sides are set
in a pitched battle to produce a desired outcome that is to be found in the invisible, unsaid,
‘commonsensical’ reality that binds them together. While on the surface the two sides
diverge (and indeed socialize their publics to see through a worldview that emphasizes
aspects of superficial difference through conception of self in relation to other), at their
cosmological, ontological, epistemological, etc. essence they are the same and the outcome
of the managed conflict (the subsequent worldview and conception of socio-political,
religious, etc. practice) will include that which they share. If both sides agree that social
order is to be created through hierarchical domination, the synthesis of the two sides
produced by the outcome will necessarily include hierarchical domination. If both sides
agree on a materialistic worldview, the outcome of an epistemological conflict will
necessarily include materialism (i.e. Modernity). Alternatively, and likely more importantly,

280
Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”.
281
Barnesmoore, “Absurdity and Reality”.
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if both sides agree that the other side is real then the outcome will be one in which both
sides have been granted some small measure of eternity by being accepted as real by their
‘other’.
This leads to the archetypal (for paternalist cultures…) battle between good and evil.
Accepting the notion that only good has an eternal quality and evil is not but privation of
the good, then we can see the conflict staged between good and evil as a dialectical
hegemonic technique of power. By pitting good against evil on equal footing and defining
good in opposition to bad and bad in opposition to good (in relation to ‘the great other’), in
thus granting evil an eternal quality that it in actuality lacks, the reality of goodness is stolen
through the perversion of consciousness and granted to evil. In defining goodness and our
own goodness as a function of our struggle against evil we grant evil some shred of
consciousness’ reality. In more practical political terms, which are a bit different as neither
side is already imbued with an eternal reality like goodness, through defining the self in
relationship to the other each side of a dialectical conflict serves to grant reality to the other
side. That which is not real can, then, at least in some relatively ephemeral sense, be
rendered as real through being recognized as such by consciousness. The first step of
power for that which is unreal is to trick, force or otherwise coerce consciousness (or an
expression of consciousness) to accept it as real.
131

282
Islam vs. Christianity = Dialectical Hegemony (social order through hierarchical

domination, paternalism, Abrahamic…, etc.)
Islam vs. Judaism = Dialectical Hegemony (same as above)
Republican vs. Democrat = Dialectical Hegemony (neoliberal capitalism, imperialism,

American exceptionalism, social order as hierarchical domination, materialist religiosity,
foolishness, crime and punishment conception of social order, Zion Co., etc., etc., etc.)
Marxism vs. Capitalism = Dialectical Hegemony (materialism, order as hierarchical

domination)
Cold War = Dialectical Hegemony (materialism, order as hierarchical domination)
Positivism vs. Postmodernism = Dialectical Hegemony (materialism)

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http://www.masonicdictionary.com/doubleeagle.html
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The Day Donald Swings
We wont know the true woes of the Trump Regime until they hang him. In death, the virus
our society has contracted from the Trump phenomenon and the White-Christian-
Nationalist culture from which it rose will be given life. Donald’s cold gaze from the
proverbial gallows will be the true harbinger of doom.
The Red Hats will revolt and come into their right as the American Taliban, but the
‘Solution’ to the ‘Crisis’ posed by Trump and his Red Hats will hold the true venom.
Alas, for our world cannot let him live. He is too great a threat; too much the object of our
fears. But I fear the coming Knight in Shining Armor more than I could ever fear the gross
absurdity of Trump. If we could make his ‘evil’ real, how much will we grant reality to the
Hero who slays the mighty beast. If we can accept that which we know as evil to be real,
how real will know our savior to be?
Who can save that which has never been lost?
“Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
And the Red Hats? The zealotry of martyrdom will be upon them—their savior will be
dead. Streets will run red as they bring their apocalyptic mythos to fruition. And many will
see it as just and wise, for the Red Hats were to come for our children and wives. In the
danger they pose, that He poses, most of us will simply watch and cheer as red roses are
torn from the earth because a crown was wrought from their thorns.
Donald is a danger, but the true danger is of that danger legitimating ‘Salvation’. We are in
crisis, but I watch for the ‘Solution’ that becomes possible therein.
We shall know the true danger in the eyes of the executioner as Donald swings from the
great tree of good and evil…
Historical Analysis
Foucault’s (1982) Archeology of Knowledge divides historical analysis into total historical
methods that seek continuity in history and general historical methods that seek
transformative discontinuity in history.
“In various forms, this theme has played a constant role since the nineteenth century: to preserve, against all
decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism. Against the
decentering operated by Marx—by the historical analysis of the relations of production, economic
determinations, and the class struggle—it gave place, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to the search
for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the
organization of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civilization. To
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the decentering operated by the Nietzschean genealogy, it opposed the search for an original foundation that
would make rationality the telos of mankind, and link the whole history of thought to the preservation of this
rationality, to the maintenance of this teleology, and to the ever necessary return to this foundation. Lastly,
more recently, when the researches of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and ethnology have decentered the subject
in relation to the laws of his desire, the forms of his language, the rules of his action, or the games of his
mythical or fabulous discourse, when it became clear that man himself, questioned as to what he was, could
not account for his sexuality and his unconscious, the systematic forms of his language, or the regularities of
his fictions, the theme of a continuity of history has been reactivated once again; a history that would be not
division, but development (devenir); not an interplay of relations, but an internal dynamic; not a system, but
the hard work of freedom; not form, but the unceasing effort of a consciousness turned upon itself, trying to
grasp itself in its deepest conditions: a history that would be both an act of long, uninterrupted patience and
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the vivacity of a movement, which, in the end, breaks all bounds” (Foucault, 1982, pp. 12-13) .
This perception may come as the result of some unconscious epistemological residue of
existence and socialization in American society, where both continuous and discontinuous
histories are operationalized when they serve a sociopolitical purpose (e.g. political
operatives like Donald Rumsfeld both accept democracy as representing the present stage
in the continuous, linear evolution of human civilization and argue that historical
discontinuities make it impossible to simply pick up the form of US democracy and
impose it on a country like Iraq), but it seems clear that understanding history requires that
we view it in both continuous and discontinuous terms. The history of neoliberalism takes
on continuity in the shared hegemonic essence (i.e. assumptions concerning human nature,
atomization of causation in personal and local responsibility narratives and the obfuscation
of ontological dependence therein, conceptions of social order as something to be
produced through hierarchical domination, materialism, etc.) of its many expressions and
discontinuity in the ways in which the hegemonic essence of neoliberalism comes to be
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expressed in differing sociocultural contexts (Barnesmoore 2017a) . Modernism can be
described in terms of a totalizing worldview (i.e. materialism), but that totalizing worldview
comes to be expressed in what can only be described as discontinuous cultural contexts
(from the arrogant materialism of atheistic science to the absurd dogma of literally
interpreted Abrahamic theology). Attempting to dominate difference to create the image of
unitary, eternal truth in manifestation is the essence of fascism, and denying that any truth
undergirds the difference, change, motion, etc. of manifestation in passing time and
physical space is the essence of nihilism. We are neither fascist nor nihilist, and attempt to
tread the line between continuity and discontinuity in historical analysis through sensitivity
to the dimensional incommensurability of Truth (which is without motion) and fact (which
is Truth with motion). Continuity, the Truth that underlies the facts of manifestation, is by
its nature without motion and thus cannot be seen, known or understood within the
materialist worldview or associated epistemological processes of Modernity. Discontinuity,
though readily available to our biological and digital sense organs and a useful tool for
problematizing the hegemonic strictures of positivist society, cannot give us insight into the
True meaning of manifestation. As a result, we search for a holistic understanding of reality

283
Foucault 1982, The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language, A. M. Sheridan Smith (trans.), New York: Pantheon,
pp. 12-13.
284
2(1).
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(both the tangible and intangible dimensions of reality) through strategic application of both
continuity-oriented and discontinuity-oriented approaches to historical analysis. For
example, Modernism is can be defined by its discontinuity, materialism, but this
transformational discontinuity that rebuilt the foundation of Modernism also serves as the
worldview (the hegemonic essence) that allows for a continuous understanding of
Modernism—the epistemological threshold of Modernity also represents the worldview that
provides continuity to Modernity.
Theorizing Discontinuity
“It is as if it was particularly difficult, in the history in which men retrace their own ideas and their own
knowledge, to formulate a general theory of discontinuity, of series, of limits, unities, specific orders, and
differentiated autonomies and dependencies. As if, in that field where we had become used to seeking
origins, to pushing back further and further the line of antecedents, to reconstituting traditions, to following
evolutive curves, to projecting teleologies, and to having constant recourse to metaphors of life, we felt a
particular repugnance to conceiving of difference, to describing separations and dispersions, to dissociating
the reassuring form of the identical. Or, to be more precise, as if we found it difficult to construct a theory, to
draw general conclusions, and even to derive all the possible implications of these concepts of thresholds,
mutations, independent systems, and limited series—in the way in which they had been used in fact by
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historians.”
Foucault, in short, is implying that History was unwilling to confront the specter of
difference and discontinuity that confounded its traditional search for unity and continuity
as a function of an unconscious (subconscious) desire to preserve the comfort and security
provided by the ‘sovereignty of the subject’. In one sense Foucault is clearly correct, as the
fascistic urge to dominate difference has always accompanied thoughts and behaviors of
beings who consider their own subjectivity, the individuality of their expression (the ego), as
the basis of the ‘sovereignty of consciousness’. In another sense, however, the lack of a
theory of general historical discontinuity comes as a function of the nature of discontinuity.
286
As Nietzsche (2009) noted, “only that which has no history is definable.” To theorize is to
extract the eternal (the truth) from a phenomenon, to define its essence, and motion
(history) is therefore incommensurable definition—only that which is eternal and
unchanging can be defined. Motion, change, difference and discontinuity are, then,
dimensionally incommensurable with the eternal dimensional quality that is necessary for
definition and theorization. To define and theorize is to extract the eternal from the
manifest, and so the best attempts that we can make at definition and theorization of
discontinuity come in the relationship of discontinuity to continuity, in the relationship
between the eternal truth and the facts of manifestation.
To be clear, this truth also presents limitations in attempts to define, theorize and
subsequently imagine continuity in the history of manifestation—that which provides
continuity (truth) to history exists eternally beyond the dimensional quality of passing time
and physical space, and facts in passing time and physical space are dimensionally

285
12.
286
Nietzsche, F. (2009) Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Peter Gay eds. Random House Publishing Group. p. 516
135

incommensurable with that eternal dimensional quality, meaning that continuity (eternity)
in historical facts impossible. Attempting to erase all discontinuity from history through
domination of difference is no less a danger than erasing continuity from history by
reducing our perspective to a materialistic, peripatetic worldview that renders the eternal
truths from which continuity is derived invisible. As usual, dialectical hegemony—a
controlled conflict whose synthesis produces the desired outcome (Barnesmoore 2017)—is
enacted in a false conflict whose two ‘sides’ reflect the same problem in opposite polarities
(i.e. one erases discontinuity, the other erases continuity, and in the end we are left with
nothing). We must, as the wise ones of old so frequently remind us, find the middle way
(Dao); a theory of history must be sensitive to the ways in which these two polarities,
continuity (eternity) and discontinuity (motion, change and difference), come together to
form history as a theory of electricity must understand how a negative and positive charge
create an electrical current. As above, so below.
Preparations for Mirth…
“Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else
and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are laying in wait for me, but over here, laughing
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at you?” (Foucault 1982, p. 17)
Yes indeed! Sometimes I think Foucault must be riding a skateboard, smoking a cigarette,
wearing ragged clothes and basking in (laughing at) the absurd indignation of old white
folks and the colonized mind in his next incarnation… In any case, we should prepare for
the inevitable critiques of the postmodern, historical materialist academy. Foucault’s
argument is not that there is no eternal, but that we cannot reduce the temporal to the
eternal. It is not that there is no such thing as unity (be it eternal or relative), but that we
cannot reduce the difference of manifestation to unity. We cannot reduce the discontinuity
of history to a totalizing continuity. In short, Foucault is bringing the insights of the concept
dimensional incommensurability to bear upon historical methodologies—the world of
motion, change, difference, etc. that we know as passing time and physical space is
dimensionally incommensurable with eternal unity and totalizing continuity (as the perfect
circle is incommensurable with physical manifestation), and so we must pursue analyses of
history in a manner that—having problematized the banality of methodologies that
reflexively attempt to reduce difference to eternal unity and discontinuity to a totalizing
continuity—holds the paradoxical relationship between motion and eternity in ‘mind’
without reducing one or the other to the ‘other’.
“These pre-existing forms of continuity, all these syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in
suspense. They must not be rejected definitively of course, but the tranquility with which they are accepted
must be disturbed; we must show that they do not come about of themselves, but are always the result of a
construction the rule of which must be known, and the justifications of which must be scrutinized: we must
define in what conditions and in view of which analyses certain of them are legitimate; and we must indicate
which of them can never be accepted in any circumstances… What we must do, in fact, is to tear away from

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17.
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them their virtual self-evidence, and to free the problems they pose; to recognize that they are not the tranquil
locus on the basis of which other questions… may be posed, but that they themselves pose a whole cluster of
questions… We must recognize that they may not, in the last resort, be what they seem at first sight. In short,
that they require a theory, and that this theory cannot be constructed unless the field of the facts of discourse
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on the basis of which those facts are built up appears in its non-synthetic purity.” (Foucault 1982, p. 25-26)
“45…
Stillness and tranquility set things in
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order in the universe.”
Foucault is not a nihilist. He does not dismiss all truth, unity, continuity, etc. He is, instead,
attempting to problematize the banality of the categories we receive from society to
describe truth, unity, continuity, etc., to illustrate the ways in which the categories we
receive from western society obfuscate of the true motion, change, difference, etc. that is
natural to history (to world of passing time and physical space) and, most importantly, to
inspire each individual to understand and scrutinize the logics implicit in these categories
and thus their own epistemological processes. In short, Foucault is calling on people to
wakeup from the living dream of reality that has been imposed upon them by the society in
which they were raised so that they may bring freewill to bear in cultivation of their
understanding of reality. Foucault is doing his part to create the conditions in which each
individual may begin the journey to the freedom of thought that is a necessary prerequisite
of freedom of behavior and freedom in conception of being. Foucault is attempting to
break the fetters that constrain a subject to their society of socialization so that they might
begin to walk their own, nomadic path to knowledge. Philosophy, then,
“Means to experience the fact that our immediate, surroundings, prescribed as they are by the aims and
needs of life, not only can be, but must be broken in upon (not only once but ever and again), but the
disturbing call of ‘the world’, of the whole world and the everlasting and essential images of things mirrored
by reality. …To philosophize mans to step beyond the sectional, partial environment of the workaday world
into a position vis-à-vis de l’univers…” (Pieper 2009, p. 105)
Futurism
Materialist Futurism

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25-26.
289
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English, p. 16 http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
137

Asimov’s Psychohistory
“Gaal Dornick, using nonmathematical concepts, has defined psychohistory to be that branch of mathematics
which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli.
... Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is
sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment.... A further necessary assumption is that the human
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conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random...”
“The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity:
The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.
The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.
The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical
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validity.”
“Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It
could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the
forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics;
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the reaction of a billion is something else again.”
“The future course of the Foundation was plotted according to the science of psychohistory, then highly
developed, and conditions arranged so as to bring about a series of crises that will force us most rapidly along
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the route to future Empire. Each crisis, each Seldon crisis, marks an epoch in our history.”
Ray Kurzweil
Futurism Beyond the Materialism of Modernity
Prophecy
The Thought Experiment
Desire and Evolution

The relationship between desire and evolution forms an essential thread in the living web
of ideas, metaphors and empirical illustrations woven by this nomadic exploration of the

290
Asimov, I 1986, Foundation Trilogy, Ballantine, p. 17.
291
Here is a PDF (accessed 7 August 2016) where the header is “Chapter 1: Psychohistory and Last Recording Made by Hari Seldon”
http://areeweb.polito.it/ricerca/relgrav/solciclos/template.pdf. We cannot find the actual citation for this quote, but it is littered across the
internet for anyone who wishes to try…
292
Asimov, I 1952, Foundation and Empire, Gnome Press, p. 170.
293
Asimov, I 1952, Foundation and Empire, Gnome Press, p. 123.
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intersection between human evolutionary potentials and human-technology-nature
relations. Mechanical Evolution, we argue, is given force by the desire for survival and, in
the context of survival impeding scarcity, the desire for hierarchical domination.
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Mechanical Evolution is in one sense an ‘unconscious’ side effect of the interaction
between biological desire and physical environment. One could say that Mechanical
Evolution is an active subject and that beings who evolve mechanically are the object of
evolution. Where Mechanical Evolution is the subject and mechanically evolving beings are
the object, Conscious Evolution is the object of the desiring subject. Where Mechanical
Evolution is the side effect of the biological desire for survival (and, in the context of
survival impeding scarcity, domination) and its interaction with one’s physical environment,
Conscious Evolution is itself the object of the consciously evolving subject.
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something intrinsic to our nature, an innate striving which Plato called Eros.”
The desire for conscious evolution is, indeed, what Plato called Eros. It is the innate
striving of consciously evolving beings towards deeper wisdom and broader knowledge. It is
the innate striving of consciousness towards intimacy with its own nature.
Objectification by Mechanical Evolution leads a being inexorably towards an
individual singularity that catalyzes actualization of the latent potential for reason, free will,
etc. Out of this individual singularity emerges what we might call an evolutionary subject.
With the capacity for free will, reason and the other high epistemological faculties that
differentiate Biospheric and Noospheric beings, the evolutionary subject transcends its
objectification by Mechanical Evolution and (excluding the context of privation and
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perversion) forms a new relationship with evolution wherein the individual is the subject
an evolution is the object. The driving force of this new subject-object relationship between
the individual subject and evolution is, in its highest potential, Eros (the innate desire of
consciousness to better understand and return to intimacy with itself); in a more general
sense it is the desire for evolution (biological, epistemological, etc.).
The Simplest and Most Universal Things

Descartes’s argument that the rational process must move from ‘the simplest and most
universal things’ is one of the most misinterpreted philosophical statements of Modernity.

294
We use the term unconscious in the very narrow sense that mechanical evolution is not driven by the ‘objective’ will of the evolving
being and do not mean to imply that the process of mechanical evolution is altogether devoid of consciousness.
295
Summer 1993.
296
We use the term individual in a manner that implies unfettered actualization of the latent potential for free will and reason. Most if not
all members of Modern society are not true individuals in the context of this definition....
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In the archetypal extreme Modernist thinkers posit facts and elemental physical particles as
‘the simplest and most universal things’ (thus the notion of the ‘God Particle’…). In reality,
however, Descartes was referring to what Spinoza (2002) called Infinite Substance and the
Emanations of Infinite Substance (i.e. Force, Form and Consciousness). Rational
knowledge of the world must move from knowledge of and intimacy with the eternal
emanations of the Infinite Substance (with the pure potential of form that structures
manifestation, the pure actual of force that drives manifestation and with the consciousness
that gives life to manifestation). To provide an example of the role that knowledge of and
intimacy with form plays in the rational process we return to our above discussion of
arborescent and rhizomal relations to elucidate the essential form of their relationship. In
so doing we create the potential for both rational knowledge of the relationship between
arborescent and rhizomal social relations and rational projection of future evolution
beyond the transition from arborescent to rhizomal social relations.
• Arborescence (verticality) is, in essence, a one-dimensional form: up-down.

• Rhizomal (horizontality) relations take on an essentially two-dimensional form:
right-left, forward-backward.
• 1D∞=2D
• 2D∞=3D
• 3D∞=4D
• 3D is ∞2D along the axis of the 1D.
• 4D is ∞3D along the axis of the 2D.
•
• Z=Arborescence
• X,Y=Rhizomal
• Z=Desire for Survival (+Hierarchical Domination in context of scarcity)
• X,Y=Desire for Survival (+Anarchical Community in the context of plenty)
• 1D,2D=Desire for Survival, Object of Mechanical Evolution
• 3D,4D=Desire for Evolution, Subject of Conscious Evolution
In short, arborescent social relations are one-dimensional and rhizomal relations are two-
dimensional; both are driven by the desire for survival (though one trends towards
hierarchical domination in the context of scarcity and the other trends towards anarchical
community in the context of plenty). The transition from 2D to 3D social relations
catalyzes the transition from being an object of evolution to being the subject of evolution.
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The future of 3D social relations will be an infinite number of rhizomal planes across the
axis of the arborescent. 4D social relations will be an infinite number of solids (moments of
time) across the rhizomal axes (past-present-future and different timelines). The desire for
evolution will replace the desire for survival as the driving force of social relations. We
must of course be aware that the limited nature of our human perspective of reality and the
limitations imposed by attempting to render human understandings into language and
number prevent the above from perfectly illustrating form (as one cannot perfectly illustrate
a sphere when drawing it on a two dimensional surface or as one cannot bring the perfect
circle into manifestation), but as Descartes reminds us we cannot allow our knowledge of
the imperfections implicit to human reason and its material expression render us indolent—
knowledge that we do not know cannot be allowed to cripple our will to act.
What is Consciousness?
141

297
298
Wyly (XXXX) follows Vernadsky in making the supposition that ‘thought is not energy’:

297
‘The Tree of Life’ JM Hamade 2016
Barnesmoore 2016b, Nomad Explorations V2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity
298
Wyly, Conspiracy Capital, p. xx
142

“‘Here a new riddle has arisen before us. Thought is not a form of energy. How then can it change material
processes? That question has not as yet been solved. As far as I know, it was first posed by an American
scientist born in Lvov, the mathematician and biophysicist Alfred Lotka. But he was unable to solve it. As
Goethe (1740-1832), not only a great poet but a great scientist as well, once rightly remarked, in science we
only can know how something occurred, but we cannot know why it occurred.’
Vernadsky here cites Lotka’s pathbreaking 1925 Elements of Physical Biology, but if you read the work today
you’ll find no puzzle at all. Lotka’s analysis of industrial evolution — the ‘survival of the fittest’ development of
scientific tools passed from one human generation to the next in a phenomenon first noted by Hume in 1757
that “has a cumulative force that is unparalleled in ordinary organic evolution” — sounds an awful lot like
today’s Silicon Valley technological utopianism. Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Chief of Engineering, has written
extensively on the “acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of
biological evolution,” and in public presentations he holds out his smartphone, his “brain extender,” and tells
the audience, “it’s a gateway from my brain to the cloud.”
How does this supposition relate to the capacity for observation to transform the object of
observation (think Heisenberg or Emoto)? How does observation transform a wave into a
particle if consciousness is not an energy? Can we measure all forms of energy? Can we
observe all forms of energy? Is thought not energy simply because we cannot presently
measure and quantify it? Consciousness is distinct from force in traditional ontologies, and
so if we define energy in a manner that reduces it to force there may be some truth in this
notion, but that does not mean that consciousness is simply the material baggage of
civilization (i.e. the mind is not simply the brain). In a similar vein, what is life? Is life
energy? Can we quantify/ measure life? What is light? Can we actually collect and measure
photons, or do we measure the energetic effects of photons upon their environment? Can
we measure and quantify electricity itself, or do we similarly measure and quantify the
effects it has upon the environment in which we observe it? Is there an essential distinction
between energy and matter (when matter is itself a vibration)?
There does not seem to be an ‘easy answer’ to this question, it is not clear whether
Vernadsky was reducing mind to the matter or simply distinguishing between force and
consciousness (Vernadsy's recourse to an eminent mystic like Goethe likely signals the
latter), but I do think that there is likely more nuance needed than reduction of mind to the
development of material tools and their accumulation through the generations.
“Contrary to Kant, the positivists are sure that "more clear knowledge of phenomena makes them acquainted
with things in themselves." They think that in looking upon physical phenomena as the motions of the ether,
or as electrical or magnetic phenomena, and calculating their motions, they begin to know the very sub-
stance of things, i.e., the causes of phenomena ; in other words, they believe exactly in the possibility of what
Kant denied—the comprehension of the true substance of things by means of the
299
investigation of phenomenon.”
In short, we cannot know the substance of consciousness (or life) by simply observing its
300
phenomenal expression. Life is derived from the syntropy of sunlight, but we cannot

299
Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, p. 20
300
“In the days just before Christmas 1941, as a consequence of conversations with two colleagues, a physicist and a biologist, I was
suddenly projected in a new panorama, which radically changed the vision of science and of the Universe which I had inherited from my
teachers, and which I had always considered the strong and certain ground on which to base my scientific investigations. Suddenly I saw
the possibility of interpreting a wide range of solutions (the anticipated potentials) of the wave equation which can be considered the
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know the substance of sunlight through observing life's phenomenal expression. Similarly,
mind is derived from consciousness, but we cannot know the substance of consciousness
through observing mind's phenomenal expression. It is thus that Goethe said "in science
we only can know how something occurred, but we cannot know why it occurred”—why is
a question of the true substance of things. We should also remember that use of the term
'true substance' does not refer to 'material substance' but to the Infinite Substance from
301
which emanates the true substances (force, form and consciousness) that enliven the
prima materia produce manifestation. In short, as Descartes rationalism so
302
aptly illustrates, rational knowledge of things must begin with knowledge of the simplest
and most universal things (the True, Infinite Substance and its emanations force, form and
consciousness). If we wish to answer the question why, knowledge must begin from the
true substance of a thing. Again, given that Vernadsky is moving from Goethe, it is pretty
clear that this is what he was referring to when he said that mind is not energy (force) and
so the parallels between the materialist reduction of mind to matter in the mind
of someone like Kurzweil are frail at best.
Moving forward from this assumption that mind is an essentially material
phenomenon facilitated by the accumulation of information and technology Wyly (xxxx)
303
argues “as our physical tools get better, so do our cognitive tools.” We are not convinced
these two things, the evolution of physical tools and increased accumulation of information
and mind, hold as functional a relationship as is seemingly implied by this statement.
Indeed, the rise of instruments like the microscope and the Newtonian-Positivist cognitive
tools that were developed using these tools lead to a dimensionally reductive, biologically
centric conception of reality and human existence therein. As new fields like quantum
physics have been developed our cognitive tools have evolved beyond the limitations of the
Newtonian-Positivist world view, but these changes in our cognitive tools have in many
cases drawn our ideas and understandings closer to the metaphysics that reigned in the eras
prior to Newtonian-Positivist thought. In that sense it seems clear that the rudimentary tools
of the Newtonian-Positivist age were accompanied by a decay in the quality of our cognitive
tools—both the era before and the era after the Newtonian-Positivist age had more effective
cognitive tools for understanding mind and reality in its totality beyond passing time and

fundamental law of the Universe. These solutions had been always rejected as “impossible”, but suddenly they appeared “possible”, and
they explained a new category of phenomena which I later named “syntropic”, totally different from the entropic ones, of the
mechanical, physical and chemical laws, which obey only the principle of classical causation and the law of entropy. Syntropic
phenomena, which are instead represented by those strange solutions of the “anticipated potentials”, should obey two opposite principles
of finality (moved by a final cause placed in the future, and not by a cause which is placed in the past) and differentiation, and also non-
causable in a laboratory. This last characteristic explains why this type of phenomena has never been reproduced in a laboratory, and its
finalistic properties justified the refusal among scientists, who accepted without any doubt the assumption that finalism is a
“metaphysical” principle, outside Science and Nature. This assumption obstructed the way to a calm investigation of the real existence of
this second type of phenomena; an investigation which I accepted to carry out, even though I felt as if I were falling in a abyss, with
incredible consequences and conclusions. It suddenly seemed as if the sky were falling apart, or at least the certainties on which
mechanical science had based its assumptions. It appeared to me clear that these “syntropic”, finalistic phenomena which lead to
differentiation and could not be reproduced in a laboratory, were real, and existed in nature, as I could recognize them in the living
systems. The properties of this new law, opened consequences which were just incredible and which could deeply change the biological,
medical, psychological, and social sciences.” - http://www.syntropy.org
301
302
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.
Descartes, Discourse on Method.
Descartes, Passions of the Soul.
303
Wyly, Conspiracy Capital, p. x
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physical space. Better tools do indeed allow for more information (more facts), but there is
not a functional relationship between more facts and better ideas as our potential for
interpreting facts is articulated by the philosophy/ world view in which we interpret them.
More information does indeed create the potential for improved understandings, but that
potential is still ontologically dependent upon the ideas with which we interpret our newly
accessible information. As Kant noted, we cannot understand the substance of a thing
based on its phenomenal expression. As Goethe noted, we cannot answer questions of why
with materialist science (precisely because questions of why refer to the substance Kant so
aptly noted is inaccessible by physical observation). Neuroscience may provide more
information about the functioning of the brain, but without recourse to the substance of
mind (consciousness, an emanation of the Infinite Substance) we cannot presume that our
knowledge of mind is functionally improved by our increased access to information about
the brain.
Ray Kurzweil’s view of conscious evolution in terms of exponential growth of data
and computing power in his book The Singularity is Near typifies the maerialist perspective
on the nature of mind (which indeed attempts to know the substance of mind through
observation of its phenomenal expressions). In short, he argues that as more and more data
(information) is stored and computers with ever increasing computing power, computers
304
will manifest higher levels consciousness. In other words, the linear growth of analytic
capacity and information will give rise to the capacity for knowledge formation and wisdom.
The below graph visualizes Kurzweil’s assumption.

304
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near.
145

305
Robert Anton Wilson’s “Jumping Jesus Phenomena” is similarly illustrative. Starting from
the inconclusive assumption that humans existed for 100,000 years before the birth of the
historical figure Jesus and the even less conclusive assumption that human development
has taken a purely linear rout from ‘the state of nature’ to civilization, Wilson assigns the
amount of knowledge (defined as a number of scientific facts) possessed by humanity
during the life of Jesus the unit ‘jesus’. From this unsteady point of departure, Wilson then
argues that from 1 A.D. to 1500 A.D, 1500 A.D. to 1750 A.D., 1750 to 1900 A.D., etc.,
the number of jesus has doubled during each subsequently shorter period of time. This
exponential growth of data is, for Wilson, synonymous with an exponential growth in
knowledge (i.e. more information is presumed to hold a functional relationship with better
knowledge). Consciousness Evolves through the accumulation of information and the
‘better ideas’ that are functionally produced by the accumulation of information (i.e. better
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facts = better knowledge).
“Functionalism is a theory about the nature of mental states. According to functionalists, mental states are
identified by what they do rather than by what they are made of. Functionalism is the most familiar or
“received” view among philosophers of mind and cognitive science.
Consider, for example, mouse traps. Mouse traps are devices for catching or killing mice. Mouse
traps can be made of most any material, and perhaps indefinitely or infinitely many designs could be

305
http://www.singularity.com/charts/page70.html
306
This presumed relationship between accumulation and advancement seems to reflect a distinctly capitalist logic of progress.
146

employed. The most familiar sort involves a wooden platform and a metal strike bar that is driven by a coiled
metal spring and can be released by a trigger. But there are mouse traps designed with adhesives, boxes,
poisons, and so on. All that matters to something’s being a mouse trap, at the end of the day, is that it is
capable of catching or killing mice.
Contrast mouse traps with diamonds. Diamonds are valued for their hardness, their optical
properties, and their rarity in nature. But not every hard, transparent, white, rare crystal is a diamond—the
most infamous alternative being cubic zirconia. Diamonds are carbon crystals with specific molecular lattice
structures. Being a diamond is a matter of being a certain kind of physical stuff. (That cubic zirconia is not
quite as clear or hard as diamonds explains something about why it is not equally valued. But even if it were
equally hard and equally clear, a CZ crystal would not thereby be a diamond.)
These examples can be used to explain the core idea of functionalism. Functionalism is the theory
that mental states are more like mouse traps than they are like diamonds. That is, what makes something a
mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from
traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a
307
special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance.)”
Rather than the Positivist attempt to comprehend “the true substance of things by means of
308
the investigation of phenomenon” , Functionalism simply dismisses and ignores the true
substance of things. Understandings of conscious evolution as a change in the state of the
conscious substance that enlivens mind gives way to understandings of conscious evolution
as the accumulation of sensory tools, information and the ‘better ideas’ that are presumed
to be functionally produced therein. Again, as rational knowledge must move from
knowledge of the simplest and most universal things (which is to say from the true
substance of things), this approach is implicitly irrational.

307
Polger T, ‘Functionalism’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
308
Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, p. 20
147

309

309
JM Hamade 2016
148

What is Form?
“…that which defines the form and extent of any existence in time: or the higher dimensional reality behind
its expression in a world of more limited dimensions.” “Aeon contains all things, all possibilities – ‘the
310
infinite aspect of everything. Another, similar term is the Hebrew Olam, which is generally translated as world
or forever. “God Creates on the olamic [archetypal] plane;” “God makes the Aeon, the Aeon makes the
311
Kosmos, the Kosmos makes Time, and Time makes coming to be.”
Form is one of the three emanations of the Infinite Substance (Force, Form and
312
Consciousness). Form can be understood as infinite potential that is dimensionally
incommensurable with the finite quality of manifestation and as all of the finite
manifestations of Form, as both nothing and everything. The perfect circle is elucidating;
while it contains the form of all circles and spheres it cannot itself be brought into finite
manifestation—it is both nothing (in that it cannot be manifest) and everything (in that it is
the potential that is actualized in the manifestation of all circular and spherical things).
Nature and computer science provide us with a tangible manifestation of form that
serves to illustrate the more general nature of form. Be it a river, a tree or human veins,
liquid takes on the same branching and meandering form when it flows through nature. As
another related example, it has been postulated that the average sinuosity of the world’s
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river systems is pi (3.14). The octave structure, whether applied to light or sound, is
another common example of a fractal. The states of matter provide another elucidating
example. In short, Form can be likened to the infinite potential of a fractal set that is
expressed across the range of scales, forms of matter, modes of organization, etc. Form is
the infinite potential of the branching and meandering pattern seen in rivers, trees and
veins.
“…The square… represents the cardinal points (north, east, south, west); the four seasons (winter, spring,
summer, autumn); the four periods of human existence (childhood, youth, maturity, old age); the four aspects
of our being (physical self, intellectual self, emotional self, spiritual self); etc. Nature is itself ruled by the
number 4. In fact, each of its four kingdoms is the expression of a four-part division. Thus, minerals are of
four orders (gems, ores, fuels, salts); plants are composed of four parts (root, stem, leaves, flower, or fruit);
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and animals spring from four great families (those living in earth, on earth, in the water, and in the air).”
Turning to computer science and drawing a connection with our more general discussion
of order, fractal geometry plays an essential role in allowing computer scientists to create
315
realistic virtual simulations of the natural environment. “Fractal geometry permits us to
compress images, and to reproduce, in virtual reality environments, the complex patterns
and irregular forms present in nature using simple iterative algorithms executed by

Barnesmoore 2016b, Nomad Explorations V2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
310
Nicoll, M. (1998) Living Time Utrecth: Eureka Editions p. 142
311
Ibid. p. 144-149
312
313
Stolum, H.H., 1996. River meandering as a self-organization process. Science, 271(5256), p.1710.
314
Unquotable Manuscript
315
Sala, N., 2009. Fractal Geometry and Computer Science. In Selected Readings on Telecommunications and Networking (pp. 385-
404). IGI Global.
149
316

computers.” Humanity was able to create a digital simulation of nature not by creating
order but by simulating the implicit order of nature.
Neural Networks provide a similar example wherein technological advances were

achieved through replicating the form (the order) of nature.
Returning to a discussion of Form in and of itself, it can be understood in one sense

through its relationship to Force. In relationship to the active infinite potential of Force,
Form can be understood as latent infinite potential. Force actualizes where Form is
actualized. Taken together, Force and Form (opposing polarities that ought to be brought
into equilibrium by Consciousness) can be understood as the essence of positive and
317
negative, of latent and active, of hot and cold and of wet and dry, as the essence of duality.

316
Abstract, Sala, N., 2009. Fractal Geometry and Computer Science. In Selected Readings on Telecommunications and Networking
(pp. 385-404). IGI Global http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/fractal-geometry-computer-science/28736
317
We might say that matter (a vibration), electricity, light, etc. are the finite expressions of Force.
150

World View,
the Foundation of an Organizing Principle
“The environmental crisis [of Modernism] requires not simply rhetoric or cosmetic solutions but a death and
rebirth of modern man and his worldview. Man need not be and in fact cannot be “reinvented” as some have
claimed, but he must be reborn as traditional or pontifical man, a bridge between Heaven and Earth, and the
world of nature must once again be conceived as it has always been—a sacred realm reflecting the divine
318
creative energies.”
-S. H. Nasr
we never understand anything about the ‘invisible’ world if we do not grasp our own invisibility first.
This demands a certain kind of effort, the nature of which is similar to the effort required to get
some realization of the essential invisibility and unknowableness of another person. In this connection I
believe that we can never realise the existence of another person in any real way unless we realise our own
existence. The realization of one’s own existence, as a real experience, is the realization of one’s essential
319
invisibility.”
“Into this inner space may come ideas. They may visit the mind. What we see through the power of an idea
cannot be seen when we are no longer in contact with it. We know the experience of suddenly seeing the
truth of something for the first time. At such moments we are altered and if they persisted we would be
permanently changed. But they come as flashes with traces of direct knowledge, direct cognition.
The description of an idea is quite different from the direct cognition of it. The one takes time, the
other is instantaneous. The description of the idea that we are invisible from the realization of it: only in
thinking in different ways about this invisibility of everybody and ourselves may we attract the idea so that it
illuminates us directly.
Such ideas act directly on the substance of our lives as by a chemical combination, and the shock of
contact may be sometimes so great as to actually change the [person’s] life and not merely alter [their]
understanding for the moment. The preparation of ourselves for the possibilities of new meaning, which is
more desirable than anything else, since meaninglessness is a disease, cannot be separated from contact with
ideas that have transforming power.” 320
-Maurice Nicoll
Questions of ‘world view’ have found an increasingly prominent role in critical western
scholarship. Our first deep reflections on the role of ‘world view’ in the human experience
were inspired by the ways in which Plato’s Cave allegory (read in a distinctly Foucaultian,
power-knowledge light) spoke to our own process of conscious evolution—born in the US
and socialized within the dialectical hegemony of American thought (where materialism

318
Nasr (1996) Religion and the Order of Nature p. 6
319
Nicoll, Living Time p. 7-8
320
Ibid. p. 6 Bold Emphasis Added.
151

and imperialism span the illusionary divide between right wing Christianity and left wing
secularism and their associated socio-cultural manifestations), awakening to the world of
thought beyond the shackles of that false binary was indeed akin to realizing that the
shadows on the wall of the ‘world view’ I had received through socialization were simply an
illusion meant to divert my attention from the chains that bound me to my chair. Foucault’s
(1970) discussion of ‘the stark impossibility of thinking the that’ of a world view whose
321
order we do not understand brought the importance of political questions concerning
world view into focus; if you can control an individual or society’s ‘world view’ you can
322
control their potential for thought and thus behavior and conception of being. S. H.
323
Nasr’s ( 1996) work brought the role of the Modernist ‘world view’—and its divergence
from the sacred-spiritual—in perpetuating environmental degradation into focus. In recent
years writings on the politics of ‘world view’—in particular the relationship of ‘world view’ to
324
environmental politics—and the dimensional incommensurability of the Modernist-
European ‘world view’ and the Indigenous American World view have inspired our
understandings of and reflections on the role of ‘world view’ in human socio-political
325
phenomena. What, however, is a 'world view’, and how do ‘world views’ relate to political
power and environmental politics?
If we may take a crack at providing a definition of ‘world view’ (the influence of
326
Foucault’s work shows itself again ), ‘world view’ is the web of cosmological, teleological,
ontological, epistemological, moral-ethical and aesthetic assumptions by which an
individual’s potential for thought, behavior and being are expanded and constrained. In the
sense that ontology is an inquiry into the nature of being, ‘world view’ can be described first
and foremost as an ontological in that it describes assemblage of assumptions concerning
327
the nature of ‘things’ . ‘World view’ is epistemological in the sense that it is the web of
assumptions concerning the origin and development of being, the nature of being, the
purpose of being, the nature of thought (and Truth therein), the nature of Goodness and
the nature of Beauty by which our potential for knowing is articulated.
The American Scientific Affiliation provides a similar definition that hi-lights the
ontological and epistemological definitions of ‘world view’:
“A worldview is a theory of the world, used for living in the world. A world view is a mental model of reality
— a framework of ideas & attitudes about the world, ourselves, and life, a comprehensive system of beliefs —
with answers for a wide range of questions: What are humans, why we are here, and what is our purpose in
life? What are your goals for life? When you make decisions about using time — it's the stuff life is made of

321
Order which takes on two poles that can be described as material and ideational where the ideational represents the world view and
the material represents the symbols and ‘things’ with which we express said ‘world view’.
322
323
S. H. Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature.
324
See (Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum) and (Barnesmoore, “Datascopes and Dimensional Incommensurability in the History of
Assemblage” Association of American Geographers National Convention 2015) for a discussion of dimensional incommensurability.
325
Four Arrows, Point of Departure.
M. Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples In Spite of Europe: Towards a conversation on political ontology” Current
Anthropology 54(5).
326
Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others, trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
327
We might replace things with ‘that which is’ as there are parts of reality that are not, per se, ‘things’.
152

— what are your values and priorities? What can we know, and how? and with how much certainty? Does
328
reality include only matter/energy, or is there more?”
Beyond hi-lighting the ontological and epistemological qualities of ‘world view’ the above
definition drives to the core political importance of ‘world views’ in noting that they are a
theory “used for living in the world”. Theory precedes and articulates the potential of
329
practice , meaning that our theories expand and constrain our potential for thought,
behavior and being—human liberty and free will are constrained to the limits of our ‘world
view’. As an example, we can only develop practices for environmental sustainability within
the boundaries established by our ‘world view’, and indeed both the need for
environmental sustainability (i.e. environmental degradation) and our inability to effectively
implement environmentally sustainable social practices are rooted in the very peculiar,
dogmatically materialist ‘world view’ of Modernity (which has infected everything from the
authoritarian materialism of literally interpreted Abrahamic religion through the smug
arrogance of liberal atheism).
“…Precisely because there exists such a world [in which humanity “has chosen to neglect the significance of
religious [spiritual] understanding of the cosmos”]—namely the modern world, …which bears the primary
responsibility for the global destruction of the environment—we have sought to delve into a historical study of
both philosophy and science in the West that, beginning with views similar to the philosophies and sciences
of other civilizations, developed in what can only be called an anomalous manner from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries onward [as Modernism]. It moved away from the almost universally held view of the
sacredness of nature to one that sees man as alienated from nature and nature itself as no longer the
progenitor of life (the very root of nature being from the Latin nascitura, meaning to give birth), but rather as
a lifeless mass, a machine to be dominated and manipulated by a purely earthly man. It also divorced, in a
manner not to be seen in any other civilization, the laws of nature from moral laws and human ethics from
the workings of the cosmos.” (Nasr, 1996, p. 4)
In a world view where order is to be created through hierarchical domination

(Barnesmoore 2016b “Nomad Explorations V 2.1”; Foucault 1970 “The Order of
Things”) and nature is understood as a chaotic, feminine other to be brought into order
through hierarchical, technological domination, our potentials for thought, behavior and
being are restricted to the folly of the Simpleton from Song (Meng Zi 2A.2):
“There was a man of Song who was concerned that the sprouts in his field were not growing well, so he went
and tugged at each one. He went home utterly exhausted and said, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself ill today! I’ve been
out helping the sprouts to grow.’ His sons rushed out to look and found the stalks all shriveled up. There are
few in the world who do not ‘help their sprouts grow.’ There are those who do not ‘weed’ – they have simply
given the whole task up as useless. But the ones who tug on the sprouts to help them grow, they are worse
330
than useless, for they do harm!”
Our attempts at ‘creating’ an environmentally sustainable order through hierarchical,

technological domination is worse than useless, for we do great harm to our mother earth’s
natural order. In attempting to sew life with a linear dominating force we reap only death.

328
http://asa3.org/ASA/education/views/index.html
329
Barnesmoore, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” Environment and Social Psychology.
330
Meng Zi, 2A2, p. 40 http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Mengzi.pdf
153

A Myth of Order in and through Nature
331
Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Tufayl 2009), a story of two young people searching for
enlightenment, provides a mythos for understanding the path of the ‘natural mystic’. The
first boy, Absal (in a fashion similar to Siddhartha), was raised on an island as the son of a
king. He was educated through use of the language, numbers, science, etc., but, like Foust,
knowledge of things in the world could not bring solace to his seemingly meaningless life.
Absal is thus inspired to follow the mystical path and leaves behind the shackles of his
peripatetic, hedonistic life within the palace (life within the palace and/ or pleasure gardens
is a common motif for peripatetic mind and biological desire in the Islamic tradition). He
journeys through the ocean to another island where he meets Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. Hayy was
birthed from the earth itself; growing up alone on the island, he pursued the mysteries of
life through experience of and reflection on the symbols (forms) of nature rather than the
language, numbers, science, etc. The two men soon discover that, as a function of the fact
that Hayy developed his understanding through the silence of intuition and the
untarnished reflection of eternal, macrocosmic order in the microcosm of terrestrial
nature, Hayy is the more enlightened of the two and he becomes Absal's mystical guide.
Nature, then, rather than a chaotic other who must be brought into a consumable order
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through hierarchical domination, is conceived as a pure microcosmic reflection of the
eternal, macrocosmic order and thus as an aspect of self that can facilitate the process of
conscious evolution. The natural symbols (forms) of nature are the same forms (symbols)
of the human experience, and intimacy with the symbols (forms) of nature thus facilitates
intimacy with Self.
“Many Christian theologians and also Jewish thinkers in the West have sought in recent years to develop a
theology of the natural environment or what some now call eco-theology…. And yet, as our study shows,
despite a few exceptions, the concern of most religious thinkers in the West is with the development of
environmental ethics and not the reassertion of the religious view of the order of nature as a legitimate
knowledge that corresponds to an aspect, and in fact the most important aspect, of cosmic reality. To use the
categories of Islamic thought, there is currently interest in al-‘amal or action without al-‘ilm or knowledge,
whereas traditional Islamic sources have always taught that al-‘ilm and al-‘amal must accompany each other.
Al-‘ilm without al-’amal is, according to the famous Arabic proverb, like a tree without fruit. And al-‘amal
without al-’ilm is chaotic action without principle and ultimately positive efficacy, and it is usually more
destructive than no action at all.” (Nasr 1996, p. 5)
Once again, as we saw through the lens of Meng Zi’s (2A.2) Simpleton from Song, attempts
to create order—in this case to create the order of eco-theology within Modern society’s
materialistic fixation on al-‘amal—through hierarchical domination (i.e. domination of
reality by the language, classifications, categories, etc. and the ‘world view’ of Modernist

331
Press.
332
As the privation of the desire to create order through forceful, hierarchical domination and the Modernist ‘world view’ that constrains
our potential for desire, thought, behavior and conception of being therein has crept into terrestrial nature its forms have decayed into
chaos—terrestrial nature will soon cease to be the pure mirror for eternal order that it once was if we do not escape the shackles of the
Modernist ‘world view’.
154

order) are “worse than useless” because they are “usually more destructive than no action
at all”.
155

Seeds, Trees, and the Human Condition:
‘Outliers’ as the Standard for Epistemological Potential
What percent of seeds germinate in a natural environment? Of those seeds that germinate,
how many find enough space to grow into maturity? The answer to these questions varies
from seed to seed and from natural environment to natural environment, but in general we
can observe that most seeds do not germinate and that only a fraction of those that do
germinate attain maturity. Plants who attain maturity, then, can be understood as ‘outliers’,
and yet the true telos, meaning, potential, etc. of the seed is ontologically dependent upon
the plant it may become. If we want to understand the purpose and meaning of the seed
and the germinated seedling we must look to the outliers who have attained maturity.
We argue that human epistemology must be approached in a similar way. Few
humans attain epistemological maturity (reason, intuition, rational intuition, effortless
action (wu-wei), etc.), and yet if we wish to understand the purpose and meaning of human
existence we must look to these ‘outliers’ and the fruits born by their ‘epistemological
maturity’.
“In the absence of higher function lower function necessarily appears, and this latter is of a different order.
The higher function cannot be deduced from the lower. If we think of the question from the standpoint of
levels of consciousness, then beneath our ordinary level exists a lower level, another order. When the level of
the ordinary consciousness is disturbed, Jackson observed that there is often a marked rise of dream-like
states, which he ascribed to the release of activities of a lower level.
Another quality of consciousness manifests itself, for at this level things can be connected together in
a way that is impossible at the usual level and we are exposed to fantastic influences, nightmares, etc., which
do not exist at the higher level. When there are very remarkable contradictions in the personality, this dream-
state has a tendency to arise at any time and interfere with the life.
We have no right to believe that our ordinary level of consciousness is the highest form of
consciousness, or the sole mode of experience possible to man. We cannot say that the range of internal
expreince of oneself is necessarily limited either to dream-states or to ordinary consciousness. We have to
consider the possibility, not only that there is a level about our ordinary level of consciousness, to which we
are only occasionally awakened, but that our ordinary consciousness becomes integrated into a larger system
when this happens.” 333
Indeed,
“There is a very old idea that man cannot find any integration or harmony of being as long as he in on the
level of a sensual outlook. As a creature of sense, thinking only from sense and turned ‘outwards’ towards
visible life, he remains dead in regard to that which is himself. Nor is he quickened by any demonstration
coming from the sensible side of the universe.
In the older views of man, which were much richer and more complete than are the modern views,
man was placed in the framework of a vast living universe as a created being – that is, created in and out of
the living universe. So not only was man in the world, but the world was in him.
The idea of scale or ‘degree of excellence’ permeated most of the older notions about man and the
universe. The universe is on different scales. And man was taken as a very complex creation having within

333
Nicoll, Living Time, pp. 29-30 Bold Added
156

him a scale consisting of different levels of mind, consciousness and understanding. Of these levels the
sensual was taken as the lowest.
I will connect the sensual with the ‘materialistic’ outlook of today. The point to be noticed is that if
there be potential degrees of development hidden as a scale within man, no one can rise in this scale of his
own potential being unless he transcends the purely sensual or material outlook.
The psychological implications behind this view are really of very great interest and importance. A
sensualistic or materialistic outlook limits us psychologically, in the fullest sense of this word, so that if there
be higher degrees of consciousness we will be incapable of reaching them if we believe only in the ‘evidence
of things seen’, or seek only for proof from the visible, tangible and matter-of-fact side of things, or regard the
world simply as we see it.” 334
In short, the Modernist ‘world view’ works to trap subjects within their lowest potential state
of mind as dry ground prevents a seed from germinating. It is far easier to control a bag of
seeds than a forest…
“Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old
oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their
business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, babyboomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of
self-help courses. There were seminars called "Getting All You Can out of Your Shell." There were
woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There
were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and
well-being.
One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped
"out of the blue" by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his
fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree,
he said, "We...are...that!"
Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in
conversation: "So tell us, how would we become that tree?" "Well," said he, pointing downward, "it has
something to do with going into the ground...and cracking open the shell." "Insane," they responded. "Totally
335
morbid! Why, then we wouldn't be acorns anymore!"”
In Jacob Needleman’s telling (if we may paraphrase), Acorns are discovered by a group of
explorers who have no knowledge of the relationship between the acorn and the tree in the
birth and generation of the tree. These explorers see the acorns as beautiful and, after
learning all of the ‘facts’ about the acorn (which cannot contain the latent potential for
evolution into ‘tree’ contained therein) begin to genetically manipulate the acorns along
with the existing trees so that the acorns shell becomes hard so that they may be preserved.
As a result, the acorn shells are no longer able to crack and the forest eventually dies as no
new trees can be born from the acorn. If we may express the above idea in a more personal
manner, if we study human psychology from a purely ‘factual’ (Truth with motion),
statistical perspective we can never come to know its ‘motionless’ (at least in a physical
sense), invisible qualities (i.e. its potential to manifest higher levels as the tree represents a
higher potential level of organization for the acorn) and attempt to ‘improve’ human

334
Nicoll, Living Time, 31-32
335
“Originally devised by Maurice Nicoll in the 1950s, Jacob Needleman popularized this metaphor in Lost Christianity and named it
"acornology." I am reprinting the story from Cynthia Bourgeault's The Wisdom Way of Knowing.”
http://ecumenicus.blogspot.ca/2011/04/acornology.html
157

psychology through means that eventually negate our potential to move beyond our lowest,
peripatetic, sensory level of mind into the higher potential levels of organization in human
consciousness.
Dr. Needleman provides a similar expression of the acorn metaphor in his book
Lost Christianity:
“I began my lecture that morning from just this point. There is an innate element in human nature, I argued,
that can grow and develop only through impressions of truth received in the organism like a special
nourishing energy. To this innate element I gave a name - perhaps not a very good name - the "higher
unconscious." My aim was to draw an extremely sharp distinction between the unconscious that Freud had
identified and the unconscious referred to (though not by that name) in the Christian tradition.
Imagine that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as an acorn. Let us
further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can
grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon notice that after a while they
crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely
precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the
substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce
acorns, which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful!
The question before us, therefore, is whether or not modern psychology is only a version of
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acornology.”
As noted above, it is confinement to the sensory perspective and ‘evidence of things seen’
that prevents the germination of human epistemology. At the root of this confinement lies a
materialist ‘world view’:
“What is the standpoint of materialism? It is not by any means so easy to define as we may think. We are
‘materialists’ without knowing it, and ‘materialism’ is a much deeper problem for each of us that we imagine.
But, in the first place, from its standpoint we look outwards (via the senses) for the explanation and cause of
everything. We start from phenomena as absolute truth.
Speaking first of ultimate issues, we seek proof of the existence of ‘God’ from phenomenal life itself.
It life takes on an evil aspect we think there can be no ‘God’. Scientifically, we seek for causes in the
phenomenal world. In both cases we are doing much the same thing. In the first case we are looking for
‘spirit’ in visible material life. In the second case we are looking for the principles behind phenomena in the
minutest forms of matter. As materialists we look for cause in the elementary material particle. We look for
the final explanation of the mystery of life in minute physiological processes, in bio-chemistry, etc. We might
compare this with looking for the causes of a house only in its minute structure, as if we could find its real
‘cause’ in the elementary bricks of which it is composed, and int in the idea behind it. For, to materialists, the
world must necessarily be idea-less. It can be no masterpiece of art—for where is the artist? Neither telescope
nor microscope [(nor ‘datascope’)] reveal his actual existence.
If the originating principle behind manifestation is not in the phenomenal world itself, it if lies in
idea [(form, aeon, etc.)] working via chemistry (that is, through minute elementary particles) into visible form,
we must, as materialists, ignore this factor and assume that the chemical processes belonging to the world of
atoms themselves establish life. The development of the germcell into an embryo is, from this side, merely a
progressive series of chemical changes, starting from the initial shock of conception, each chemical change
determined by an following upon the previous one, and thus leading to the budding up of the embryo.
Looking only at the chemical changes we will ignore the controlling principle or law acting behind them.
Whatever we do not find in the three dimensions of space we will ignore, not seeing life as unfolding events
but rather as aggregations of physical mass [(i.e. through ‘post-modern’ eyes…)].

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Jacob Needleman (1980), Lost Christianity. p. 59
158

Strictly speaking, materialism gives sense and physical mater priority over mind or idea. In the tenth
book of the Laws Plato put the standpoint of materialism, as it existed then, clearly enough. The materialist
was a person who regarded nature as self-derived. Elementary particles of dead matter somehow or other
combined together to form the entire universe and all the living beings contained in it. Matter accidentally
raised itself up into the most complex living forms. Matter created its laws. And Mind itself resulted from
these accidental combinations of intimate matter [(i.e. matter is located before mind in the causal chain of
that which is)]. ‘They say that fire and water and earth and air all exist by nature and chance…. The elements
are severally moved by chance and some inherent force, according to certain affinities among them, of hot
with cold, or of dry with moist, etc. After this fashion and in this manner the whole heaven has been created,
as well as animals and plants … not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any god, but as I was saying, by
nature and chance only’ (Laws, 889B).
From this standpoint physical nature is necessarily the first cause of the generation and destruction
of all things. Mind is secondary – an accidental product of physical matter.
Can we really believe that mind and intelligence accidently came out of dead matter? If so, then in
order to face the problem sincerely, we must grant to original matter – which, chemically speaking, is
hydrogen – extraordinary properties, and assume that all organised beings were potentially present in the first
matter of the nebular system, that is, if we believe that the universe ‘started’ at some distant point in passing-
time.
But the customary standpoint of scientific materialism is that primary matter is dead – and the
universe is dead and nature is dead – and a dead nature can, of course, aim at nothing. It cannot be
teleological.
Since Plato’s time science has passed far beyond the region of the unaided senses. It has turned
matter into electricity, and the world of three dimensions into a theoretical world of at least four dimensions.
It has passed beyond natural, i.e., sensual concepts, beyond the visualisable and matter-of-fact. Physicists
today [(1952)] are trying to understand what we are in. What is this ‘world-field’ in which events happen?
What is this four-dimensional continuum called space-time? And what, for that matter, is electricity? We are
in a mysterious and incomprehensible universe. Nevertheless, psychologically speaking, the standpoint of
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materialism prevails and spreads its effects over the entire world.”
Nicoll juxtaposes this materialist perspective with the Platonic perspective:
“Let us glance at an entirely different standpoint. The Platonic view of visible or phenomenal reality was that
there is behind it an invisible and greater order of reality. There is invisible form or figure (only mentally
perceptible) over and above all form or figure that we can apprehend through our senses. These invisible
forms or figures, with which our term idea came to be connected, are prior in scale to, and therefore much
more ‘real’ than, any perceptible form or figure. Thus the world of sense, all that we see, is a very limited
expression of real form and, properly speaking, science studies that which is indicated in the visible object. ‘…
the object of anything that can be called science in the strict sense of the word is something that may be
indicated by the world of sense, but it is not really of that world, but of a higher degree of reality’.
The geometer, for example, studies triangles and finds that the three interior angles of any sort of
triangle are always equal in sum to two right angles. But this is not true of any triangle that we can perceive
with the external senses because it is not possible to draw an absolutely exact triangle. So that ‘triangle’ itself
belongs to a higher degree of reality than any visible representation of it. The triangle as idea – the ‘ideal’
triangle – does not exist in passing time and space. It is not visible, but is only apprehended by the mind. In a
similar way, anything that has the semblance of beauty, relation and proportion in the visible world, as seen by
us with our organs of sight, has behind it beauty, relation and proportion belonging to a higher degree of
reality, which art strives towards, and of which we may catch glimpses in flashes of consciousness above the
ordinary.
But for materialism a higher degree of reality is not countenanced. I think it would be absolutely
inexplicable on the basis upon which materialism rests. There may be a below but there cannot be an above.

337
Maurice Nicoll, Living Time p. 32-35 Bold Emphasis Added
159

There can be no existing higher degree of reality. There can be no superior order behind the phenomenal
world, nothing prior to it in scale. For the universe must be a mindless product and body must be prior to
mind. There can be ‘no thought without phosphorus.’ Matter must be prior to function and use, and
sensation prior to meaning.
To admit a higher order of reality behind known reality is, in fact, to reverse the direction of
materialism. For it is to affirm by an act of the mind what the senses by themselves do not directly show, but
what, at the same time, that the senses really indicate [(through ‘signatures’)]. And it is exactly in this that
Plato puts the turning point of a man’s soul – in this recognition of an existing higher order of reality that
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explains this obviously imperfect, suggestive world in which we live.”
Socialization within the modernist ‘world view’, which has been strewn across the
globalized world by imperialism, has rendered most of humanity as a seed without the
potential for epistemological germination (let alone maturation). Normative conceptions of
human nature, human psychological potential, the potential for order in human society,
etc. in Modernity have extrapolated the statistical norms of these sterile epistemological
seeds to define the potential for human existence. This least subtle potential state of human
mind (the peripatetically reductive, sensual state), because of its statistical normativity, has
been accepted as the normal and proper state of mind and the outliers (those who have,
like the mature plant, attained the higher potential states of human mind) have been
labeled as mentally ill, ‘abnormal’, etc. As we must study the mature Oak Tree to
understand the potentials of ‘Oak Nature’, we must study mature levels of consciousness to
understand the potentials of human nature.

338
Ibid. 35-36
160

Nomadic Exploration into States of Being
Luke R. Barnesmoore & Lucie Irene Ashley
UBC Urban Studies Lab
Department of Geography
University of British Columbia
1. Inner Empiricism
Whether I am walking in nature, writing, singing or simply observing my beautiful baby
daughter, I have become accustomed to moments when I enter into a state of
consciousness that has stark differences from the ‘objective’ self-consciousness of the
peripatetic mind and the ego. Indeed, it is precisely in these moments of self-dissolution,
where the peripatetic mind goes silent and words or sensory experiences fuse with emotion
to produce an ecstatic, blissful silence, that I experience my Being as most real. The
moment when my ‘objective’ self ceases to be is the moment in which I find that I am the
most joyful and ‘real’. These experiences, however, are invisible, and we are left with the
question of how to study and express the states of being experienced therein. Our only
recourse seems to be an exploration of consciousness conducted through use of self-
observation of the ‘invisible self’.
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invisibility.”
“Our bodies stand in the visible world. They stand in the space of three dimensions, accessible to the sense of
sight and of touch. Our bodies are themselves three dimensional. They have length, height, and breadth. But
we are not ourselves in this world of three dimensions.
Our thoughts, for instance, are not three-dimensional solids. One thought is not to the right or left of
another thought. Yet are they not real to us? If we say that reality is confined to that which exists in the three
dimensional world outside, we must regard all our thoughts and feelings inside, as unreal.
Our inner life – oneself – has no position in that space which is perceptible to the senses. But while
thought, feeling, and imagination have no position in space, it is possible to think of them having position in
some other kind of space. One thought follows another in passing-time. A feeling lasts a certain time and then
disappears. If we think of time as a fourth dimension, or a higher dimension of space, our inner life seems to
be related to this ‘higher’ space, or world in more dimensions than those accessible to the senses. If we
conceive of a higher dimensional world we might consider that we do not live, properly speaking, in the world

339
161

of three dimensions that we touch and see, and in which we meet people, but have more intimate contact
with a more-dimensional form of existence, beginning with time.” 340
Following from this realization of essential invisibility we must accept that the only way to
study the invisible world is through experiencing it within the self.
Jacob Needleman (1993) further elucidates the necessity of such ‘inner empiricism’
for exploration of ‘the great questions of the heart’:
something intrinsic to our nature, an innate striving which Plato called Eros.
But what can the mind do with this deep participatory urge? Even at its most brilliant, the intellect
alone can only ask questions that skim the surface of Eros; it cannot answer these questions. Yet such
questions--the meaning of life, the nature of the soul--need to be answered. If intellect is not up to the job,
how can we penetrate these mysteries? The solution, I'm proposing, is that we can only extend the reach of
intellect through experience. There is a certain type of experience that opens up the mind, expands our
consciousness, and allows us to approach answers to many of these fundamental questions.
In this sense, as a philosopher who cares about questions of the heart, I'm essentially a student of
consciousness. I'm talking about certain kinds of experiences that we have spontaneously as human beings,
but which are all too uncommon and which are not valued or understood within our culture. But when they
are approached from another angle, one sees that these experiences really point to an aspect of the mind, of
the psyche, beyond reason and intellect. And they do more than that: They also point to the object of those
experiences, that is, to a fundamental reality. These experiences present us with an alternative or
complementary way of knowing the world around us as well as the world inside us. The philosophical
approach I'm talking about values these "questions of the heart" as invitations to experience, as well as to
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cogitations of the cerebral intellect.”
It is thus that we study consciousness through observation of experiences beyond the fourth
dimensional existence we know through the peripatetic mind and physical senses.
2. Experience Beyond the Fourth Dimension

Ouspensky’s discussion of dimensional incommensurability elucidates the ineffability of
experience beyond the fourth dimension. Ouspensky outlines his conception of
‘dimensional incommensurability’ by comparing three and four-dimensional objects, which
we quote in full as it fructifies our comparison of two and three-dimensional objects below.
“…Motion in the fourth dimension lies outside all those directions which are possible in a three- dimensional
figure. We regard a line as an infinite number of points; a surface as an infinite number of lines; a solid as an
342
infinite number of surfaces.”

340
341
Summer 1993. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Needleman_93.html
342
P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, page 34.
162

“By existing, every three-dimensional body moves in time, as it were, and leaves the trace of its motion in the
form of a time-body, or a four-dimensional body. Because of the properties of our perceiving apparatus, we
never see or sense this body; we only see its section, and this we call a three-dimensional body. Therefore, we
are greatly mistaken in thinking that a three-dimensional body is something real. It is merely the projection of
a four-dimensional body - its drawing, its image on our plane. A four-dimensional body is an infinite number
of three-dimensional bodies. In other words, a four-dimensional body is an infinite number of moments of
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existence of a three-dimensional body - of its states and positions.”
“It is quite clear why this is so. A four-dimensional body consists of an infinitely great number of three-
dimensional bodies; therefore, they can have no common measure. In comparison with a four-dimensional
body, a three- dimensional body is analogous to a point as compared with a line. And, as a point is
incommensurable with a line, as a line is incommensurable with a surface, as a surface is incommensurable
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with a solid - so a three-dimensional body is incommensurable with a four-dimensional one.”
If we extract the general form of relations from this example, we can understand that
planes of dimensional consistency and their borders of infinity (infinity membranes) are
incommensurable with each other. If we attempt to transpose a three dimensional object
(say a sphere) onto a two dimensional space (a plane) we are left with a cursory sketch in
which many of the essential qualities of the sphere have been stripped away—as noted
above, you cant throw a two dimensional ball…
Ouspensky proceeds to apply his conceptualization of dimensional
incommensurability to our capacity to understand ‘life phenomena’ and ‘thought
phenomena’.
“This proposition - that life is not a complex of mechanical forces -is also confirmed by the
incommensurability of the phenomena of mechanical motion with the phenomena of life. The phenomena
of life cannot be expressed in formulae of mechanical energy, nor in heat calories or power units. And the
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phenomenon of life cannot be created by artificial physico-chemical means.”
“For our observation, life phenomena are very similar to phenomena of motion, as they appear to a two-
dimensional being; therefore they may be 'motion in the fourth dimension'. We have seen that the two-
dimensional being will regard as movements of bodies the three-dimensional properties of motionless solids;
and as phenomena of life the actual movements of bodies proceeding in a higher space. In other words,
motion which remains motion in a higher space appears to a lower being as a phenomenon of life, and
motion which disappears in higher space, becoming a property of a motionless body, appears to it as
mechanical motion. The incommensurability for us of phenomena of life and phenomena of 'motion' is
exactly the same as the incommensurability for a two-dimensional being in his world of the two kinds of
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motion, of which only one is real and the other illusory.”
“Starting from this, it is possible to presume that those phenomena which we call phenomena of life are
motion in higher space. Phenomena which we call mechanical motion are phenomena of life in a space lower
than ours, whereas in a higher space they are simply properties of motionless bodies. This means that if we
take three kinds of existence - two-dimensional, ours and a higher one, it will prove that the 'motion' observed
by two-dimensional beings in two-dimensional space is for us the property of motionless bodies; 'life' which is
observed in two-dimensional space, is motion as observed by us in our space. And further - movements in

http://holybooks.lichtenbergpress.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Tertium-Organum-by-P-D-Ouspensky.pdf
343
Ibid. 49
344
Ibid. 53
345
Tertium Organum, page 105.
346
163

three-dimensional space, i.e. all our mechanical movements and manifestations of physical and chemical
forces, such as light, sound, heat and so on, are only our sensations of some properties of four-dimensional
bodies, unknowable for us; and our 'phenomena of life' are movements of bodies of a higher space which
appear to us as birth, growth and life of living beings. If we presume a space not of four but of five
dimensions, then in it 'phenomena of life' will probably prove to be properties of motionless bodies - species,
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varieties, families, peoples, tribes and so on, and possibly only 'thought phenomena' will appear as motion.”
Brought to bear in the context of our discussion of inner empiricism, this discussion of
dimensional incommensurability allows us to see experiences beyond our fourth
dimensional existence as a three dimensional sphere that we are attempting to sketch upon
the two dimensional plane of language—the dimensional incommensurability of language
and experience beyond the world of passing time and physical space means that something
is by necessity lost in attempting to render the findings of inner empiricism into writing.
2.1 Four Marks of Mystical Experience

Mystical experiences are, by nature, difficult to process. The ways in which mystics have
grown in and relate to the world influence their apprehensions, giving cause for doubt of
their efficacy as evidence. However, psychologist and philosopher William James was able
to extract four marks of mystical experience from his extensive research of accounts. These
marks serve as the ties that bind and evidence of Transcendent Reality beyond human
myth.
The first and most “handy” (as James puts it) is ineffability. Ineffable refers to the
most common issue encountered by mystics, wherein they find themselves incapable of
expressing what took place in human languages (James, 414). What takes place simply lies
outside common human knowledge; therefore, words such as ‘feeling’ or ‘seeing’ do not
quite fit. Koestler describes the experience as “like dreams of a person born blind,” (Stace,
234). Stace uses a selection from the Mandukya Upanishad [Holy texts in Hindu traditions]
to explain the issue as “beyond the senses, beyond the understanding, beyond all
expression … awareness of the world and multiplicity is completely obliterated,” (Stace, 20).
As a response, a culture of paradoxes is an integral part of mysticism, which attempts to
express what cannot be expressed.
James outlines the second mark, noetic quality, as a feeling of being imparted with
some sort of greater knowledge when emerging from the mystical experience. For James,
mystical states are “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all
inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of
authority for after-time,” (James, 415). Here we are once again presented with a curious
paradox: mystical experiences are both inherently indescribable and at the same time
overwhelm the mystic with a sense of imparted knowledge. However, this may only be the
appearance of a paradox since the experience is only ineffable because the subject does not
posses the right words to explain it.
James asserts that the first two marks are required for true mystical experience, but
adds two others that often occur. These are transiency and passivity. Transiency means

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164

that most often the mystical experience lasts a very short time in the physical world [time is
not consciously perceived by the subject during the state]. Passivity encapsulates the
perception of powerlessness during the experience (James, 415-16). St. Teresa of Avila
illustrates the feeling in reference to the oncoming of mystical states when she says, “we
must … resign ourselves into the hands of God and go willingly wherever we are carried
away, for we are in fact being carried away, whether we like it or no(t),” (Stace,
181). James acknowledges that such states exhibit similarity to other phenomena such as
automatic writing, but whereas the latter is not recollected, the former stays with the subject,
holding a place of great significance in their lives (James, 415-16).
James’ four marks outline basic criteria for genuine mystical experience but there are
different ways in which they are manifested. Philosophers of religion have developed
several ways of breaking up the experiences. We choose to focus hereon Stace’s dichotomy
of extrovertive and introvertive experiences because they are the simplest, and Stace’s
examples are also in line with those of James.
2.2 Extrovertive Experiences

Mystical experiences that Stace classifies as extrovertive can be interpreted as a
metaphysical “warm-up” to the much stronger introvertive experience. In the extrovertive
experience, the mystic remains aware of the material world, but observes through a new
lens, interpreting unity in all objects as evidence of interconnected transcendence. Stace
uses a description from Meister Eckhart of the notion that in the experience “all blades of
grass, wood, and stone, all things are One,” (Stace, 16). In this extrovertive case, a feeling of
unification is present though the material senses remain.
Extrovertive experiences are generally characterized by deep connections to the
natural world; it follows that they occur in people of every region. While the extrovertive
experiences do not exhibit intense realizations of mystical experience explained in the latter
section, they are important because they nurture the “perception of the world as
transfigured and unified” (Stace, 17). A transformation of perception of the world is a key
trait necessary in mystical experiences. Moreover, the transformation of perception away
from material norms of fourth dimensional perception to realization of underlining unity is
observed across traditions and often required to reach pure understanding of the
transcendent reality.
In the case of extrovertive experiences, certain marks will not be found. For
instance, as the subject maintains awareness of himself or herself, passivity does not occur.
That being said, it is often the case that the experience is transient in that realizations come
upon them quickly by a trigger such as a blade of grass or a stone. Contemplation on the
topic may remain, but the initial reverence does wear off. Extrovertive experiences also
appear easier to describe, and therefore are not quite ineffable. Words are easier to find
because the experience is related to objects that we commonly identify. There is, however,
a consistent sense of gaining crucial knowledge about existence, exemplifying noetic quality
(Stace, 15-16). In the cases of extrovertive experiences, it is acceptable to not observe full
demonstration of the marks because they are not fully manifested mystical states.
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2.3 Introvertive Experiences
Introvertive experiences are more complete representations of true Oneness. Oneness is
often used in descriptions of mystical experience to refer to the ‘sensation’ of losing a sense
of material identity and becoming truly connected with Transcendent Reality. In
extrovertive experiences, the mystic sees unity in the world, but there is still an awareness of
the self that is accompanied by sense perception. When the experience is wholly
introvertive, the sense of self dissolves. There are many assumptions about the Self, which
depend on the individual’s religious tradition. Some argue that there is a false Self and true
Self, whereas others deny its existence altogether. However, the traditions are unified in
their assumption that there is a ‘worldly’ Self, Ego, or identity that is built into the material,
and which dissolves in the face of true mystical experience. Therefore, the term “Self” will
be used to refer to a dominating material identity created on earth. Stace explains that the
“ordinary sensory-intellectual consciousness disappears and is replaced by an entirely new
kind of consciousness,” (Stace 18). Generally, the conditions of the monastic environment
loan themselves to the attainment of such a state.
Monasteries engender a detachment from the Self and the ruling materialistic culture.
The Taoist mystic Lao-Tzu explains the process poetically when he says, “the student
learns by daily increment. The Way is gained by daily loss, loss upon loss until at last
comes rest,” (Stace 109). In Taoism, the Way is “the source of the world” (Stace 103), thus
what appears to be a paradox above is explaining, that by giving up one’s possessions and
then oneself, unity will be realized. Again, the Way can be found outside of monastic
settings and even ecclesiastical frameworks. However, there is agreement that concepts of
the mind must endure alteration. Exercises in concentration and emptying the mind prep
mystics for new levels of consciousness, and are seen in the traditions of both East and
West.
Now that mystical experience is understood, and the commonalities outlined, we must
turn back to the argument from religious experience. Despite frameworks from James and
Stace, questions are raised as to whether religious experiences can be taken as veridical,
and whether a common core is sufficient evidence in the face of religious diversity.
3.1 Expression of Experience Beyond the Fourth Dimension

3.1.1 Symbolic Metaphors
Human history is rife with attempts to render realities and experiences beyond the fourth-
dimension into symbol and metaphor. From the great religious texts to advanced quantum
physics, humans use stories that illustrate the expression of an invisible reality or
experience’s order in an observable dimensional field like human society or terrestrial
nature.
“A question of scale
In our everyday lives, we experience three spatial dimensions, and a fourth dimension of time. How could
there be more? Einstein’s general theory of relativity tells us that space can expand, contract, and bend. Now
if one dimension were to contract to a size smaller than an atom, it would be hidden from our view. But if we
could look on a small enough scale, that hidden dimension might become visible again. Imagine a person
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walking on a tightrope. She can only move backward and forward; but not left and right, nor up and down, so
she only sees one dimension. Ants living on a much smaller scale could move around the cable, in what
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would appear like an extra dimension to the tightrope-walker.”
CERN uses the above story to render an invisible order into visible imagery in the same way that
the stories of the Bible render the metaphysical orders proposed by their authors into the visible
imagery of human relations. That which is invisible is thus rendered into a form that our
imaginations can visualize and which our peripatetic mind can thus cognize.
Avicenna’s (Ibn Sina) conception of imagination and its role in the human cognitive
process illustrates the importance of rendering invisible orders into a dimensional quality
that can be visualized.
“[The] rational self possesses faculties or senses in a theory that begins with Aristotle and develops through
Neoplatonism. The first sense is common sense (al-hiss al-mushtarak), which fuses information from the
physical senses into an epistemic object. The second sense is imagination (al-khayal), which processes the
image of the perceived epistemic object. The third sense is the imaginative faculty (al-mutakhayyila), which
combines images in memory, separates them and produces new images. The fourth sense is estimation or
prehension (wahm) that translates the perceived image into its significance. The classic example for this
innovative sense is that of the sheep perceiving the wolf and understanding the implicit danger. The final
sense is where the ideas produced are stored and analyzed and ascribed meanings based upon the production
of the imaginative faculty and estimation. Different faculties do not compromise the singular integrity of the
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rational soul. They merely provide an explanation for the process of intellection.” (Rizvi, Section 7, para. 2).
Deborah Black, speaking on the role of the imagination (in her terms the ‘cogitative
faculty’) in Avicenna’s overall model for the cognitive process, argues:
“While the intellect may be accorded pride of place as the highest and most distinctively human of the soul‘s
faculties, it is the internal senses that perform most of our everyday cognitive tasks.
Indeed, most medieval philosophers agree that the internal senses must play an integral role even in the
operations of rational thinking. This holds true for one of the most rationalist and dualist of medieval
philosophers and the founder of the internal sense tradition itself, namely, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). In his
standard classification of the internal senses, the power that is commonly referred to as the ‘cogitative faculty’
(al-quwwah al-mufakkirah) after its Latin translation as the vis cogitativa, is posited for the express purpose of
accounting for the interaction between the intellect and the internal senses in human cognitive acts…
As Avicenna defines it, the cogitative faculty is simply the label given to the uniquely human manifestation of
the compositive imagination (al-mutaḫayyilah) when it is at the service of and controlled by the intellect”
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(Black, 2013, p. 1, ‘Unpublished’).”
Avicenna is arguing that there are three stages of mind, external-sensory, internal-sensory
(e.g. imagination) and rational-intellectual, and that sensory information moves into the
rational mind through the lens of the imagination. To ‘rationalize’ knowledge of invisible

348
CERN, ‘Extra dimensions, gravitons, and tiny black holes’, 29 July 2016, http://home.cern/about/physics/extra-dimensions-gravitons-
and-tiny-black-holes
349
Rizvi S H Avicenna, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ISSN 2161-0002, para. 2.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/avicenna/#H6
350
Black D 2013, Rational Imagination: Avicenna on the Cogitative Power, p. 1.
http://individual.utoronto.ca/dlblack/articles/Aviccogitart.pdf
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experiences or realities, then, the order of those invisible experiences or realities must be
rendered into a field of dimensional consistency like human society or terrestrial nature.
3.1.2 Natural Symbolism

S. H. Nasr (1969) illustrates the relationship between terrestrial nature and eternal order
that allows for conscious evolution through contemplation of natural symbolism (as well as
the potential relationship with and conception of nature as a part of self with which we
ought to commune as opposed to the Modernist conception of nature as a chaotic other
that must be brought into a consumable order through hierarchical domination):
“Traditional metaphysics sees the universe not as a multitude of facts or opaque objects each possessing a
completely independent reality of its own, but as myriads of symbols reflecting higher realities…. The
universe, both religious and cosmic, is realized as being constituted of symbols reflecting the archetypes or
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supernal realities that belong to the Divine, and not simply the psychological order.”
“The language of symbolism is foundational to religions and is referred to in many sacred texts such as the
Quran which explicitly states that all things glorify Him with praise, meaning they symbolize the Divine
Archatype in their very existential reality, and their very substance is ultimately nothing other than the
coagulation of that Divine Substance the Sufis call The Breath of the Compassionate (nafas al-Rahman).
The doctrine of symbolism may also be concluded from other verses in which the Quran affirms that every
single thing on earth has been sent down in finite measure, sent down as a loan rather than a gift, for nothing
herebelow can last, and everything must in the end revert to its Supreme Source. In other words, the
Archetype is always the Heir who inherits back the symbol in which It manifested Itself.
The world is thus a veil that at once hides and reveals the realities beyond, being at once the shutter that hides
the light of the inner or noumenal world and the opening to that world thanks to its symbolic nature and the
inner reality… of which every outward reality… is the outward…. To use the language of Rumi, every form
(surat) possesses an inner meaning (ma’na) and leads to that inner meaning provided the beholder possesses
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a vision that has itself been cured of the aliment of seeing only the outward dimension.”
“The study of the order of nature as envisaged in various religions, which display the infinite richness of the
Divine Nature, reveals remarkable correspondences and similarities especially if one remains within the
traditional world not yet adulterated by various forces of modernism that penetrated even into the realm of
religion in the West and are now beginning to do so elsewhere. All religions in their deepest teachings…
relate the order of nature to the order within human beings and envisage both orders as bearing the imprint
of the Divine Reality, which is the Origin of both man and nature….
The order of nature has recalled over the ages and across many religious frontiers the order both
within us and beyond us. Nature has not only displayed the wisdom of God through her order and harmony
but has also carried out incessantly a discourse about those spiritual realities that constitute the very substance
of our existence. Her order has been nothing other than our order and her harmony that inner harmony
which still chants the eternal melody at the center of our being despite the cacophony of our ego dispersed in
its world of forgetfulness. The limbs of nature are our limbs, her life our life, and her destruction our
destruction. It is this lesson that the religions have taught over the ages in a hundred language and with may
levels of profundity ranging from seeing in nature God’s wisdom to seeing in her the direct reflection of that
Divine Prototype, which is also our prototype, that Eternal Man or Universal Man (al-insan al-kamil), to use
the language of Sufism, who is at once the prototype of man and nature. It was to this reality that the English
poet William Blake was referring when he wrote the following verse, in direct opposition to all the powerful
currents of rationalism and secularism dominating the scene around him:

351
Ibid. 15
352
Nasr, The Order of Nature in Religion p. 15
168

So man looks out in tree, herb, fish, beast,
Collecting up the scatter’d portions of his immortal body…
Wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, the Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt,
And all his sorrows, till he re-assumes his ancient bliss.
(The Four Zoas, Night VIII)
And it is this supernal reality whose echoes we shall try to hear in varying tones on the many Earths and
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under the many Heavens through which we now hope to journey.”
Symbols and metaphors are able to convey the meaning of experiences beyond the fourth
dimension because they provide an image of the order experienced therein as it is
expressed in a plane of dimensional consistency like terrestrial nature that we can observe
(i.e. in images that are cognizable by the rational mind). If we can only see the world of two
dimensions, then we must come to know the truth of the three-dimensional sphere through
the rendering of its essential, eternal order into two dimensions as a circle.
4. Conclusions
The conscious evolution of the coming age is, in essence, the cultivation of intimacy with
the invisible world and the transformative effects this intimacy has upon our ‘world view’.
As we come to organize our society around the principle of conscious evolution and the
cultivation of intimacy with the eternal, uncreated order therein our relationship with
phenomena like music and nature will change. We will no longer seek to consume music
or nature, to make the ‘other’ our own, and instead we will seek to commune with the
reflection of eternal order in music and nature. In the coming Age of Plenty, Leisure and
Conscious Evolution we will ‘do’ for the sake of cultivating intimacy with the invisible world
and catalyzing the evolution of consciousness therein. Experiencing the true reality of our
existence, paradoxically (from the perspective the fourth-dimensional, egotistical, biological
‘world view’ of Modernity) found in the dissolution of self and the concomitant experience
of Self, shall become the teleological imperative of humanity in the coming age.

353
Nasr, The Order of Nature in Religion pp. 24-25
169

The Contemporary Study of Mythology
A major goal in this collection of essays is to understand the Modern Worldview and to
rediscover pre-Modern Worldviews. Following a range of authors from De Santillana and
Von Dechend (XXXX, Hamlet’s Mill) to Herman (2008) who argue that mythology is a
nuanced metaphysical language, we explore Worldview through the Mythologies in which
the nuanced metaphysical language of worldview is embedded. To buttress this search for
Worldview in Mythological narratives we provide a short exploration of the contemporary
study of Mythology. Rama Coomaraswamy (1997) argues that Mircea Elide and Joseph
Campbell are representative of the major trends in the contemporary study of Mythology.
“Elide holds that mankind needs to interpret and to acquire meaning, and that as a result humans cannot
cease questioning life’s mysteries and narrating stories about them. Individuals and cultures are incapable of
living long in a demythologized state, that is, they cannot remain indifferent to transhistorical paradigmatic
models that given pattern and meaning to life. Elide defines myth in the following terms:
Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates to an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled
time of the “beginnings.” In other words, myth tells how, through deeds of Supernatural Beings, a
reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an
island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always
an account of a “creation”; it relates how something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of
that which really happened, which manifested itself completely. The actors in myths are
Supernatural Beings. They are known primarily by what they did in the Transcendent times of the
“beginnings.” Hence myths disclose their creative activity and reveal the sacredness (or simply the
“supernaturalness”) of their works. In short, myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic
breakthrough of the sacred (or the “supernatural”) into the World and makes it what it is today.
Furthermore, it is a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings that man himself is what he is
today, a moral, sexed, and cultural being.
It would appear that Eliade sees the myth as sacred, but as David Cave has pointed out, “Elide does not aim
to have the modern person [described as ‘unmythologized’ or ‘demythologized’] [(We are very hesitant to
describe ‘the modern person’ as either unmythologized or demythologized… Granted if we think of myth
only in its divine definition this is surely true, we must recognize that mythological systems and the potential
worlds they open up for those who are socialized within can manifest themselves in a profane fashion that
opens people into worlds of darkness, hate, vengefulness, anger, greed, ego, illusion, etc.; Modernity is surely
a mythological space, but its mythological gate opens into the bowels of Tartarus rather than into the
mountain top aerie…)] return to the ways of traditional societies, even if he or she could. What he does
advocate is that modern culture adopt a plural, universal, wholistic [sic], and cosmic presence in the world, on
informed by exemplary models and archetypes. In this way humanity will approach a meaningful existence
and overcome social fragmentation and individual alienation.” ….In essence [Cave] holds that Eliade
dreamed of establishing a new humanism that recognized the desire in all men (homo religious) for reality
and structure, for meaning, being, and truth, and believe that by providing a syncretist mythological basis this
could be brought about. This could only be achieved by recognizing the sacredness and otherworldly
character of mythology.”354
It seems, then, that Eliade and Nasr are in agreement that the crux of Modernism’s
mistakes (and thus the essential means for transcending Modernism) lies in its dogmatic

354
Coomaraswamy, A. (1997) The Door in the Sky edited by Rama Coomaraswamy (Princeton University Press), pp. x-xi.
170

materialism (i.e. the unfounded reduction of reality to matter, passing time and physical
space, or the sphere of manifestation, the concomitant reduction of epistemic potential and
truth to the boundaries of the peripatetic mind, the location of matter before mind in the
causal chain of that which is, the reduction of mind to matter, etc.) and subsequent divorce
of physical reality (as manifest in nature, written myth, art, etc.) from its essential sacred
quality. We find resonance with this argument concerning Modernism and the Sacred as
well as Eliade’s supposition that meaningful social reform must begin at the level of
Ontological Regime(s) and the mythical, cultural, architectural, etc. forms in which they are
embedded and transmitted to the public through the process of socialization (i.e.
meaningful social change must start with focus on transforming our society’s Ontological
Regime(s) and the potentials for thought, behavior and being manifest therein, as ‘concrete’
or ‘direct’ action tends to simply replicate the Ontological Regime(s) it purports to
challenge when such action is banally enlivened by the Ontological Regime(s) it purports to
challenge—such banal enlivenment is, we should also note, a reflexive necessity (via
socialization) if the process of problematizing to banality of and replacing the Modernist
Ontological Regime(s) has not begun in an individual or group as the power of the
Modernist Ontological Regime(s) rests in its banal invisibility (i.e. in its ubiquity across the
normative political ‘spectrum’)).
Joseph Campbell’s perspective, as expressed in The Power of Myth, is framed as a
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synthesis of Eliade and Jung’s views on Myth.
“The power of myth is the power of metaphor and poetry to capture the imagination of individuals and
society. Myth supplies a sense of meaning and direction that transcends mundane existence while giving it
significance. It has several functions. The mystical function discloses the world of mystery and awe, making
the universe “a holy picture.” The cosmological function “supports and validates a certain social order.”
[(This, we argue, is the essential aspect of Hellenic-Abrahamic (Babylonian) myth preserved in the
rearticulation of the Western tradition within the Modernist Ontological Regime(s) that produced
Modernism.)] Everyone must try to relate to the pedagogic function, which tells us “how to live a human
lifetime under any circumstances.” America has lost its collective ethos and must return to a mythic
understanding of life that will “bring us to a level of consciousness that is spiritual.” The myth itself, while
literally false, is metaphorically true. Some myths, however, such as the personal lawgiving God of the Jews
and Christians or biblical cosmology, are out of date, because they no longer conform to our concepts of the
universe of the dignity of man. He also speaks of the need for a shared mythology—now that the earth has
come of age, it needs a unifying, nondivisive planetary religious experience based on the underlying unity that
is already there, flowing as a universal archetype stream from collective human experience. The present
chaotic state of the world is in great part due to mankind’s failure to believe in a shared mythology [(i.e. our
lack of a shared Ontological Regime(s))]: different segments of mankind have claimed exclusivity for their
356
own particular form of the Urmyth.”
Again, it is the loss of a shared mythos (a shared ontological regime(s)), which is in a sense
necessitated by the Modernist Ontological Regime(s) in its stripping reality of the uncreated
dimensions from which which such a unified tradition must (if it is to retain logical
coherence) be manifested.
Rama continues:

355
Coomaraswamy, A. (1997) The Door in the Sky edited by Rama Coomaraswamy (Princeton University Press) pp. xi-xii
356
Ibid. xii. Emphasis added.
171

“But for Campbell the myth is not a “given,” a revelation handed down from time memorial, but rather has
its source in biology or the collective unconscious [(in short, Campbell is emphasizing the origins of myth in
manifest human substance (in our body and soul-mind) rather than in the historical timeline by which myth
was received from the ‘Atlantian’ traditions. This represents a serious problem for philosophers of the
Paternalist Tradition who have located divinity outside of the material world and have, thus, designated the
material world as profane and the source of chaos, disorder, division from the divine, etc.; that the material
could thus contain ‘the sprouts of goodness’, that the material world is itself sacred and thus able to represent
a point of origin for divine myth into human society, etc. is inconceivable. This Paternalist problem can be
easily juxtaposed with the Indigenous American myths we explore below in that many of them, like
Campbell, view the material world (and thus nature) as essentially divine or, in other words, as containing the
divine (i.e. the manifest as the womb for consciousness (which must learn to optimally harmonize its
uncreated dimensional quality with the change, difference, motion, etc. of manifestation) rather than as a
prison for souls who have broken divine law or as a mistake to be remedied so that proper creation can take
place…).)] As he told Bill Moyers, “heaven and hell… and all the gods are within us.” He gave clear
expression to this in his book Myths to Live By: “When these stories are interpreted… not as reports of
historic fact, but as merely imagined episodes projected onto history… the import becomes obvious: namely,
that although false and to be rejected as accounts of physical history, such universally cherished figures of the
mythic imagination must represent facts of the mind.
In this be borrows to a great extent from Jung, who often gave open expression to his anti-
metaphysical bias. Jung held that within the mind of every individual was the vast collective unconscious,
containing every type of character in every Shakespearean play, every mythological figure, and more. These
constituted the archetypes and the microcosm with which one had to come to terms. This process of coming
to terms constituted the process of “individuation,” which can be considered as a form of “enlightenment.”
Campbell saw this process as the true hero’s journey depicted in mythology. And since the collective
unconscious is shared by everyone (explaining the universality of mythical expression), it could also become
the basis for the unity of all religions. Like Eliade, Campbell speaks of the “spiritual” by reduces it to
psychological.” 357
The point of critique drawn upon by the Coomaraswamys, then, is the reduction of the
spiritual to the psychological. We wish to argue, however, that there is an additional point
of nuance necessary for judging whether this discussion of the spiritual in psychological
terms can be deemed as appropriate: in the first case, if one simply describes the divine
through the psychological level of symbolism, we would deem their description as relatively
coherent with the perennial spiritual tradition (which has most often if not always worked
with psychological (soul-mind) symbolism as one of its three essential levels of symbolism,
history (the body) and spiritual (the spirit) being the other two, and whose practices are first
and foremost aimed at cultivating the capacity to actualize our latent potential to manifest
subtle levels of consciousness); in the second case, if one is interpreting this psychological
symbolism within the Modernist Ontological Regime(s), we can expect that their
understanding will be incoherent with the perennial spiritual tradition as the capacity for
knowledge as resemblance is lost and the reflection of the macrocosm (of metaphysics) in
the microcosm (in psychology) is thus obfuscated (in the reduction of reality to the
manifest, in the reduction of knowing to the peripatetic mind, in the location of matter
before mind in the causal chain of that which is, etc.). In short, psychological reductionism
is only dangerous in an environment (like Modernism) whose ontological regime(s)
assumes that psychology is a functional product of and finds its essential origin in biology

357
Ibid. xii-xiii
172

(and thus the manifest world) and which constrains our potential for (in Foucaultian
language—The Order of Things) ‘knowledge as resemblance’.
From here Rama compares Ananda Coomaraswamy’s conception of myth with the
Modernist, ‘scientific’ regime outlined above:
“In contradistinction to the various theories reviewed above, Ananda Coomaraswamy (henceforth AKC) saw
myth as a metaphysical statement of truth to be understood. For him, the myth was always true, providing of
course that the myth was genuine and not the creation of “fallen” man [(i.e. provided that the necessary
conditions for prophecy had been met by the person who expounded the myth) 358 ]. …“it must be
remembered that even the myth is a symbol, a representation (‘as in a glass darkly’) of the reality that
underlies all fact but never itself becomes fact [(We should recall Haraway’s definition (Primate Visions) of
fact as that which has motion as it is most elucidating in this context. The distinction between fact, that
which has motion, and truth, that which is, is paramount.)]… [A] myth is either true or worthless… I can and
do believe in the myth far more profoundly than in any historical event which may or may not have taken
place. I do not disbelieve in what are called miracles; on the other hand, my ‘faith’ would remain the same
even if it could be proved that the events of the hero-tale never took place as related. ‘History’ is the least
convincing level of truth, the myth and the (genuine) fairy-tale the most convincing [(truth, then, is
distinguished from fact in of their associated dimensional quality; where truth is, without motion or change,
fact only comes into being through motion)].
…For [AKC] myth, folklore, symbolism, the social order, and indeed the whole realm of traditional
arts and crafts were all of a piece…. The myth in the true sense was nothing other than a particular kind of
symbol. Myths, like parables—which for him were essentially similar—were symbolic narratives. Thus we must
look not only to his often incidental comments on mythology but also his studies on symbolism if we are to
understand his point of view—a point of view that he would never admit as personal but rather as traditional
and metaphysical.
His views are well expressed in the following comments: “There is, perhaps, no subject that has
been more extensively investigated and more prejudicially misunderstood by the modern scientist than that of
folklore. By ‘folklore’ we mean that whole and consistent body of culture which has been handed down, not
in books but by word of mouth and in practice, from time beyond the reach of historical research, in the
form of legends, fairy tales, ballads, games, toys, crafts, medicine, agriculture, and other rites, and forms of
social organization, especially those that we call ‘tribal.’ This is a cultural complex independent of national
and even racial boundaries, and of remarkable similarity throughout the world; in other words, a culture of
extraordinary vitality…. The content of folklore is metaphysical. Our failure to recognize this is primarily
due to our own abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and of its technical terms.
…As I have said elsewhere, the symbolic references of traditional folk art are ‘so far abstract and
remote from historical and empirical levels of reference as to have become almost unintelligible to those
whose intellectual capacities have been inhibited by what is nowadays called a “university education” [(i.e. the
peripatetic reductionism of Modernist academic scholarship constrains epistemic potentials in a manner that
renders the symbolic references for traditional folk art unintelligible)].” 359
It is thus that we approach our study of religion, spirituality, myth and symbolism through
the rationally intuitive lens thought experiments; in transcending the linear, materialist
reductionism of the peripatetic mind and moving into the silence of intuition these
symbolic references again become intelligible as the dimensional quality of the silent
stillness of intuition is relatively (when compared with the linear, material motion of the
peripatetic) commensurable with the dimensional quality of these symbolic references (i.e.

358
Marmura, M. E. (1963). Avicenna's Psychological Proof of Prophecy. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 49-56.
359
Coomaraswamy, A. (1997) The Door in the Sky edited by Rama Coomaraswamy (Princeton University Press) xiii-xiv
emphasis added
173

with the uncreated and the premanifest). In the ethos of Nomad Explorations (NE), our
purpose is to produce experiences that bring the reader into the silence of the intuition and
communion with those aspects of self (such as the rational intuition) by which we may
come to know truth. Rama expands on AKC’s perspectives on Modernist “scholarship”:
“AKC had little respect for certain aspects of modern scholarship. “…As for Folklore and Mythology, these,
indeed, are sources of sacred knowledge, but to understand them requires something more than a collector’s
or cataloguer’s capacities [(i.e. beyond the capacities of the telematic subject that typifies the contemporary
academic subject)]. I have no respect whatever for approaches such as those of Frazer or Levy-Bruhl, and
have often said so. And further, “The truth is that the modern mind, hardened by its constant consideration
of ‘the Bible as literature’ (I prefer St. Augustine’s estimate, expressed in the words, ‘O axe, hewing the rock’),
could, if it would make the necessary intellectual effort, turn to our mythology and folklore and fid there, for
example in the heroic rescues of maidens from dragons or in (what is the same thing) the disenchantments of
dragons by a kiss (since our own sensitive souls are the dragon, from which the Spirit is our savior), the whole
story of the plan of redemption and its operation.
He was fully aware that many academics accused him and those who thought like him of reading
into myths and symbols concepts that were purely subjective. To this he would counter that modern
academics, imbued with false ideas of progress, were incapable of understanding the true meaning of the
material they were dealing with, and that as a result they “read out” or voided their material of meaning. To
quote him directly: “those whose thinking is done for them by such scholars as Levy-Bruhl and Sir James
Frazer, the behaviorists whose nourishment is ‘bread alone’—‘the husks that the swine did eat’—are able to
look down with unbecoming pride on the minority whose world is still a world of meanings.” He likened
them to modern scriptural scholars who wished to come to the “real” Jesus by removing everything
miraculous from the Gospel stories [(i.e. he concurs that literal, profane interpretation typifies modernist
attempts at textual interpretation)]. The end result if typified by the sterility and arid nature of modern
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scriptural scholarship, which restricts itself to the “letter that kills.””
Needless to say, we have the same such feelings about the Modernist academy, and our
theoretical-methodological interventions aim to ameliorate precisely the arrogant ignorance
and peripatetic reductionism that typifies banally Modernist scholarship isolated by Rama
above.
Returning to AKC’s conception of myth and its tension with Modernist scholarship
Rama notes:
“For AKC “the terms of Scripture [myth] and Ritual are symbolic; and merely to submit this self-evident
proposition is to say that the symbol is not its own meaning but is significant of its referent. Under these
circumstances, would it not be a contradiction in terms for one who can say that ‘such knowledge as is not
empirical is meaningless to us; to claim to have understood the texts, however encyclopedic his knowledge of
them might be? Must there not be recognized and element of perversity in one who cant stigmatize the
Brahmans as ‘puerile, arid, and inane’ and yet propose to study or translate such works? Under such
conditions, what other results could have been expected than have actually been attained? To take only one
example: the whole doctrine of ‘reincarnation’ and the supposed ‘history’ of the doctrine have been so
distorted by literal interpretation of symbolic terms as to justify a designation of the doctrine thus presented as
‘puerile,’ just as the results of the study of Indian mythology by statistical methods may fairly be described as
‘arid and inane’… It will hardly be out of place to remind the philologist or anthropologist who undertakes to
explain a myth of traditional text that it has long been the recognized method of exegesis to assume that at
least four valid meanings are involved in any scriptural text, according to the level or reference considered;
the possible levels of being, respectively, the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogic… The student, evidently,

360
Ibid. xiv-xv
174

who deliberately restricts himself to the lowest level and most obvious (naturalistic and historical) level of
reference cannot expect to achieve a great exegetic success; he may, indeed, succeed in depicting the myth as
he sees it ‘objectively’—i.e., as something into which he cannot enter, but can only look at. But in thus
describing a myth according to what is, strictly speaking, the ‘accidental’ knowledge of it, he is really discussing
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only its ‘actual shape’ and leaving altogether out of account its ‘essential form’.”
We leave the reader to meditate on the implications of the above as it aptly reflects our
critique of Modernist scholarship in general and elucidates the necessity of the HoAM and
NE…
Next Rama’s description turns to a markedly ‘Sun Cult’ narrative though retains
essential importance for our study of myth:
“For AKC the myth is always the story of the solar hero, the quest for Life and the necessary “sacrifice”
involved. Traditional rituals are always “a mimesis of what was done by the First Sacraficers who found in the
Sacrifice their Way from privation to plenty, darkness to light, and death to immortality.” “The reader or
spectator of the imitation of a ‘myth’ is to be rapt away from his habitual and passible personality and, just as
in all other sacrificial rituals, becomes a god for the duration of the rite and only returns to himself when the
rite is relinquished, when the epiphany is at an end and the curtain falls. We must remember that all artistic
operations were originally rites, and that the purpose of the rite… is to sacrifice the old and bring into being a
new and more perfect man.” The sacrifice is, of course, “essentially a mental operation, to be performed both
outwardly and inwardly, or in any case inwardly. It is prepared by the Sacrificer’s ‘whole mind and whole self.’
The Sacrificer is, as it were, emptied out of himself, and is himself the real victim. The true end of the cult is
one of reintegration and resurrection, attainable not only by a merely mechanical performance of the service,
but by a full realization of its significance.” “The whole purpose of the ritual is to effect a translation, not only
of the object, but of the man himself to another an no longer peripheral but central level of reference.” It
goes without saying that for AKC the idea that myth originate in primitive ritual was equivalent to putting the
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cart before the horse.”
We needn’t tamper with the above for it to fulfill its role of elucidating the essential
shortcomings of Modernist scholarship. We simply note that in our studies we have indeed
come across myths (e.x. the final Cherokee myth below) wherein the Sun is the villain
(rather than the hero) and where the paternalist conception of humanity’s telos in terms of
‘a new Man’ is less prominent or nonexistent—that being said, the above is spot on if we are
discussing the Paternalist Tradition, and our intervention need only come in highlighting
the fact that not all post-Atlantian traditions took on this Paternalist quality (which is, again,
best typified by ancient Babylonian, Abrahamic, Hellenic, Hindu, Chinese, etc.
philosophy).
From here Rama moves into a discussion of the Ontological Regime(s) within
which myth came to be understood in the spiritual, initiatory sense outlined above, which
is, as the above, worth reviewing in full as he uses this discussion to highlight potential
shortcomings in methods for the study of symbolism:
““From the traditional point of view, the world itself, together with all things done or made in a manner
conformable to the cosmic pattern, is a theophany: a valid source of information because itself informed…. In
the dogmatic language of revelation and of ritual procedure this general language is reduced to a formulated

361
Ibid. xv-xvi Emphasis Added
362
Ibid. xvi-xvii. Emphasis added.
175

science for the purposes of communication and transmission.” Thus the arts, which from the traditional point
of view are also rituals, derive their origin from an “intellectual or angelic level of reference…. When this is
mythologically formulated such a level of reference becomes a ‘heaven’ above. The artist commissioned here,
is thought of as seeking the model there. When, for example (Mahavamsa, ch. xxvii), a palace is to be built,
the architect is said to make his way to heaven; and making a sketch of what he sees there, he returns to earth
and carries out this design in the materials at his disposal. So ‘it is in imitation of the angelic works of art that
any work of art is accomplished here’ (Aitareya Brahmana vi.27)…. [Similarly, Plotinus] says that all music is
‘an earthly representation of the music that there is in the rhythm of the ideal world,’ and ‘the crafts such as
building and carpentry draw on pattern, to take their principles from that realm and form the thinking there’
(Plotinus, Enneads v.9.11.).” In similar manner, “the Zohar tells us of the Tabernacle that ‘all its individual
parts were formed in the pattern of that above.’” [(As Above, So Below.)]
The intimate relationship between mythology and symbolism has been stressed. What can eb said of
the symbol can therefore also be applied to the myth. For AKC, “symbolism is a language and a precise form
of thought; a hieratic and a metaphysical language and not a language determined by somatic or psychological
categories. Its foundation is in the analogical correspondence of all orders of reality and states of being or
levels of reference…. The nature of an adequate symbolism could hardly be better stated than in the words of
‘the parabolical (Skr. paroksa) sense is contained in the literal (Skr. paratyaksa) On the other hand, ‘The
sensible forms, in which there was at first a polar balance of physical and metaphysical, have been more and
more voided of content on their way down to us…. What we have most to avoid [in symbolic methodology] is
a subjective interpretation, and most to desire is a subjective realization. For the meaning of symbols we must
rely on the explicit statements of authoritative texts, on comparative usage, and on that of those who still
employ the traditional symbols as the customary form of their thought and daily conversation.” To see a
symbol as void of meaning and mere ornamentation is to say that a word is merely a sound an not more
eminently a meaning. “It is with perfect consistence that a sentimental and materialistic generation not only
ridicules the Eucharistic transubstantiation, but also insists that the whole of any work of art subsists in its
aesthetic surfaces, poetry consisting, for example, in a conjunction of pleasurable or interesting sounds rather
than in a logically ordered sequence of sound with meanings.” And again, “Traditional symbols are not
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‘conventional’ but ‘given’ with the ideas to which they correspond.”
Regarding the ‘universality’ of myth (and religion-spirituality) we mention above,

Rama notes:
“AKC certainly recognized the universality of myths. Let us consider one example, that of “ ‘walking on
water,’ a power attributed to some, alike in the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Taoist, and very likely many
other traditions. We do infer that such a thing can be done, but are not at all curious to whether it was or was
not done upon a given occasion…. The matter of interest is one of significance. What does it mean that this
power has been universally attributed to the deity or others in his likeness? To speak of a motion at will on
the face of the waters is to speak of a being all in act, that is, to speak of the operation of a principle wherein
all potentiality of manifestation has been reduced to act [(and thus we do not act, wu-wei)]. In all traditions
‘the waters’ stand for universal possibility…. If the Buddha is invariably represented iconographically as
supported by a lotus, his feet never touching any physical or local earth, it is because it is the idiosyncrasy of
the lotus flower or leaf to be at rest upon the waters; the flower of leaf is universality, and not in any local
sense, a ground on which the Buddha’s feet are firmly planted [(“24 Therefore whosoever heareth these
sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: 25
And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not:
for it was founded upon a rock. 26 And every [(modernist)] that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth
them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the [(sands of time)]: 27 And the
rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was
the fall of it.”)] In other words, all cosmic, and not merely some or all terrestrial, possibilities are at his
command. The ultimate support of the lotus can also be represented as a stem identical with the axis of the

363
Ibid. xvii-xviii.
176

universe, rooted in a universal depth and inflorescent at all levels of reference, and if in Brahmanical art this
stem springs from the navel of Narayana, the central ground of the Godhead recumbent on the face of the
waters, and bears in its flower the figure of Brahma (with whom the Buddha is virtually identified), the
university of this symbolism is sufficiently evident in the Stem of Jesse and in the symbolic representation of
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the Christian Theotokos by the rose.”
In short, the coherence of myth, like the coherence of perennial religious traditions, comes
in the fact that they are all ‘translations’ of the same underlying truth.
Rama concludes his introduction by returning to issues of mythological scholarship
in the Modernist academy:
“The seeking of historical fact in mythology, especially when combined with the rejection of the miraculous,
inevitably resulted, as noted above, in the “letter that kills.” At the same time, it is to be expected that the
metaphysical prototype should be reflected on the factual and historical level of reference. At the same time,
“the question of ‘truth’ is folklore, fairy tale, and myth, is not a simple matter of correlation with the observed
fact… we may have seen that the narrative has a true meaning. It is no more necessary that a truth should be
expressed in terms of fact, than that the equation should resemble its locus. The symbol must be consistent; it
does not have to be historically factual. Scripture is written in a hieratic language and a parabolic style, often
requiring a learned commentary.”
Thus, as AKC put it, “from our point of view, to speak of the ‘lives’ of the Buddha or Christ as
‘mythical’ is but to enhance their timeless significance… To speak of an event as essentially mythical is by no
means to deny the possibility, but rather to assert the necessity of an accidental—i.e., historical—eventuation; it
is in this way that the eternal and the temporal nativities are related. To say ‘that it might be fulfilled which
was said by the prophets’ is not to render a narrative suspect but only to refer to the fact to its principle. Our
intention is to point out that the more eminent truth of myth does not stand or fall by the truth or error of the
historical narrative in which the principle is exemplified.” “Wherever it is asserted that a given event, such as
the temporal birth of Christ, is at once unique and historically true we recognize an antinomy; because, as
Aristotle perceived (Metaphysics vi.2.12, xi.8.3), ‘knowledge is of that which is always or usually so, not of
exceptions,’ whence it follows that the birth in Bethlehem can only be thought of as historical if it is granted
that there have also been other such ‘descents’; if, for example, we accept the statement that ‘for the
establishment of Justice, I am born in age after age’ (Bhagavad Gita iv.7, 8).”365
“Modern critics are apt to maintain that symbolic meanings are “read into” the facts of mythology or
symbolism, which originally had no intellectual significance whatsoever. To this AKC responded that “it is
precisely in adopting this point of view that we are reading our own mentality into that of the primitive
artificer” or the teller of myths. “We are not, then, ‘reading meanings into’ primitive works of art when we
discuss their formal principles and final causes, treating them as symbols and supports of contemplation
rather than as object of a purely material utility, but simply reading their meaning. For to say ‘traditional art’
[or mythology] of peoples who took for granted the superiority of the contemplative to the active life, and
regarded the life of pleasures as we regard the life of animals, determined only by affective reactions.
…“Myths are significant, it will be conceded; but of what? … Myths are not distorted records of
historical events. They are not periphrastic descriptions of natural phenomena, of ‘explanations’ of them; so
far from that, events are demonstrations of the myths. The aetiological myth, for example, was not invented
to explain an oddity, as might be supposed if we took account only of some isolated case. On the contrary,
the phenomena are exempla of Myth.”
And further: “We shall only be able to understand the astounding uniformity of the folklore motifs
all over the world, and the devoted care that everywhere has been taken to ensure their correct transmission,
if we approach these mysteries (for they are nothing less) in the spirit in which they have been transmitted
‘from the Stone Age until now’—with the confidence of little children, indeed, but not the childish self-

364
Ibid. xvii-xix
365
Ibid. xix-xx
177

confidence of those who hold that wisdom was born with themselves. The true folklorist must be not so
much a psychologist as a theologian and a metaphysician, if he is to ‘understand his material.’”
And finally, “what is called the ‘marvelous’ in folk and epic literature, and thought of as something
‘added to’ a historical nucleus by the irregular fantasy of the people or that of some individual litterateur, is in
reality the technical formulation of a metaphysical idea, an adequate and precise symbolism by no means of
popular origin, however well adapted to popular transmission. Whether or not we believe in the possible
veridity of the miracles attributed to a given solar hero or Messiah, the fact remains that these marvels have
always an exact and spiritually intelligible significance: they cannot be abstracted from the ‘legend’ without
completely denaturing it’ this will apply, for example, to all the ‘mythical’ elements in the nativity of the
Buddha, which, moreover, are repetitions of those connected with the nativities of Agni and Indra in the Rg
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Veda.””
We apologize for any readers whose sensibilities are offended by the length of the above
quotations, but we fell that the stunning clarity of Rama’s critique of Modernist scholarship
(which holds essential coherence with our overall critique of Modernism in Nomad
Explorations V 2.1 Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity by, in a sense, rearticulating
our more general arguments about modernism (especially concerning its epistemological
reductionism to the peripatetic limit of knowing) within the context of the study of myth,
scripture and symbolism more generally is essential to our discussion and that its quality
could not be aptly replicated in translation (i.e. Rama’s writing has attained a plateau of
perfection that leads us to preserve it in whole and without all but the most subtle
interventions and explanations—in short, returning to the Foucaultian lexicon, there is a
strong sympathetic resemblance between Rama’s writing, the uncreated realities he is
attempting to illuminate and the banality of modernist scholarship he is attempting to
problematize)). The key here is that, in reducing realty to matter, passing time and physical
space, and in thus reducing epistemic potential to the limits of the peripatetic mind (i.e. to
knowledge formed based on tangible, historical, empirical ‘facts’), Modernism renders
traditional myth, scripture, symbolism, etc. practically meaningless as it erases the
uncreated-premanifest dimensions of reality symbolized therein from potentially known
reality and concomitantly constrains our potential for manifesting the peripatetically
transcendent states of mind necessary for developing an intimate, experiential
understanding of the truth described by myth, scripture, symbolism, etc. (these states of
mind are in fact, in many cases, cultivated by engagement with myth, scripture, symbolism,
etc. within a proper vibratory and dimensionally holistic environment (i.e. in a sacred space
and from the perspective of a dimensionally holistic ontological regime(s))). To put it
another way, as the dimensions of reality symbolized in myth and scripture are erased from
reality and epistemic potentials are constrained to those of the peripatetic mind by the
Modernist Ontological Regime(s), it became necessary that academics came to attempt to
know myth in historical and empirical terms; as such, we can, following Foucault (The
Order of Things), note that it would be ‘starkly impossible’ for the Modernist to think the
‘that’ of meaning in myth, scripture, symbolism, etc. Still more simply, phenomena are
viewed expressions of mythical archetypes rather than myths being viewed as expressions of
historical, empirical phenomena.

366
Ibid. xxi-xxii
178

The Order of Nature in ‘The Global Mythical Tradition’
Authors like De Santillana, Von Dechend and Hancock have argued that the mythological
schemas and megalithic architectural sites that come down to us from antiquity were crafted
by an extremely advanced civilization and embedded with a mathematical, symbolic
language by which this ancient civilization attempted to immortalize its wisdom in matter,
passing time and physical space as it disappeared from Earth. Such authors often also posit
this ancient wisdom as the origin of modern science, philosophy and religion. De Santillana
and Von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill tracks, among other archetypal myths like the
whirlpool, the stone, the tree, etc., the melancholic intellectual represented by
Shakespeare’s Hamlet through Icelandic, Finish, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Greek,
Polynesian and other world mythological traditions uncovering a scientific, metaphysical
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language embedded within their shared symbolism. Hancock’s fingerprints of the Gods,
along with tracing a similar path as Hamlet’s Mill through the global mythical tradition (in
the narrative of the flood, of the world tree, etc.), observes a similar, scientific-metaphysical
language and system of thought embedded in the megalithic architecture (especially
pyramids) we receive from antiquity (in their precise orientation to the stars, in the
geometrical forms, ratios, etc. embedded in the architecture itself, in the carvings within the
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pyramids, etc.). We will return to both of these texts, along with some other reference
texts on ancient myth and architecture, in order to buttress our exploration of Nasr and
The Order of Nature in Religion.
Let us take a quick detour to Greece and the origins of Western Science. In
introducing Hamlet’s Mill, De Santillana notes:
“Over many years I have searched for the point where myth and science join. It was clear to me for a long
time that the origins of science had their deep roots in a particular myth, that of invariance. The Greeks, as
th
early as the 7 century B.C., spoke of the quest of their first sages as the Problem of the One and the Many,
sometimes describing the wild fecundity of as the way in which the many could be deduced from the One,
sometimes seeing the Many as unsubstantial variations being played on the One…. Anaximander…
announced… that the cause of things being born and perishing is their mutual injustice to each other in the
order of time, “as is meet,” he said, for the y are bound to atone forever for their mutual injustice. This
was enough to make of Anaximander the acknowledged father of physical science, for the accent is on the
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real “Many.””
For De Santillana, then, the metaphysical language received from ancient myth represents
the origins of Modernist Science (and thus Modernist relations with nature as mediated by
Modernist Science). We should also note that the above description of Anaximander
demonstrates the fact that western science was tainted by notions of order and harmony as
domination, of original sin (here the original sin of things as per their manifesting in the
created and thus being unable to perfectly manifest divine order), etc. from inception. De
Santillana continues on to describe the History of Western Science from its origins in
Greece.

367
Giorgio De Santillana, Hertha Von Dechend (2007) Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its
Transmission Through Myth (Nonpareil Books).
368
Graham Hancock (1995) Fingerprints of the Gods (Three Rivers Press).
369
Ibid. vii
179

“Soon after, Pythagoras taught… that “things are numbers.” Thus mathematics was born. The problem of the
origin of mathematics has remained with us to this day…. The problem of umber remains to perplex us, and
from it all of metaphysics was born…. …Both philosophy and science came from that fountainhead; and it is
clear that both were children of the same myth…. Through all the immense developments, the “Mirror of
Being” is always the object of true science, a metaphor which still attempts to reduce the Many to the One
[(in its dogmatic articulations…)]. [In Modernism] we now make many clear distinctions, and have come to
separate science from philosophy utterly [(in many cases by ceding issues of ontology to science and taking
hegemonic, scientific conceptions of ontology as our banal foundation for thought…)], but what remains at the
core is still the old myth of invariance, ever more remotely and subtly articulated [(as a function of
Modernism divorcing ‘known reality’ from all that which actually has an invariant dimensional quality in
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reducing reality to matter, passing time and physical space, locating the origins of mind in matter, etc.)]….”
After problematizing conceptions of science as having a different origin from religion and
philosophy in the above, De Santillana continues on to problematize the notion of their
distinction or conflict through history:
“…We have been living in the age of Astronomical Myth until yesterday [(today we sleep in this world of
Astronomical Myth…)]. The careful and rigorous edifice of Ptolemy’s Almagest is only window dressing for
Plato’s theology, disguised as an elaborate science. The heavenly bodies are moving in “cycle and epicycle,
orb in orb” of a mysterious motion according to the divine decree that circular motions ever more intricate
would account for the universe. And Newton himself [(often derided by uninitiated modern academics as a
witchdoctor who died of mercury poisoning because he spent too much time trying to use physical alchemy
to turn actual, physical led into actual, physical gold using quicksilver (mercury)…)], once he had accounted
for it, simply replaced the orbs with the understandable force of gravitation, for which he “would feign no
hypothesis.” The hand of God was still the true mover of force; God’s will and God’s own mathematic went
on, another name for Aristotle’s Prime Mover. And shall we deny that Einstein’s space-time is nothing other
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than a pan-mathematical myth, openly acknowledged at last as such?”
Thus, as we demonstrated in Nomad Explorations V 2.1, it is clear that science and

philosophy-religion have always and continue to hold a close relationship and notions of
the two as strictly-mutually oppositional are simply ahistorical; in the Modernist era, as in
the rest of the history of Western science and philosophy-religion, there is surely a divide
between the exoteric, general public rendition of science and its relation to philosophy-
religion and the actual esoteric, elite public theory and practice of science and its
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relationship to philosophy-religion, but we cannot simply accept the illusory conflict
between science and religion constructed in this exoteric, general public rendition of
science (and thus manifest in general public performances of science, scientific reasoning,
etc. and general public world views…) as an unproblematic fact. In fact, it is only from the
perspective of religions like Christianity when manifest in the Modernist Ontological
Regime(s) (wherein the Bible is interpreted literally and people come to believe that, for
example, all of creation was crafted ten thousand years ago and fossils were hidden on
earth to test our faith…) that science and philosophy-religion truly come into conflict; we

370
Ibid. vii-viii
371
Ibid. viii
Here, again, Dussel’s note that the Jesuits who initiated Modernist Scholarship attempted to rationalize all those aspects of the tradition
which could be rationalized and which had previously been veiled in myth and allegory in all but the most secret written treatments. See
Barnesmoore, Nomad Exploration V 2.1 Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity p. 63.
372
Barnesmoore, Nomad Exploration V 2.1 Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity
180

must, then, be careful not to extrapolate the conflict between science and philosophy-
religion in the most dogmatic, Exoteric Modernist spheres of the contemporary social
world to the entire history of the relationship between science and philosophy-religion.
Von Dechend, in her study of Polynesian Culture, came across the astrological
node of this metaphysical, scientific symbolism: “she found that a strange accumulation of
maraes or cult places could be explained only one way: they, and only they, were both
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exactly sited on two neat celestial coordinates: the Tropics of Caner and of Capricorn.”
Von Dechend’s next clues came in the archeological remains of the Polynesian islands:
“First it was ‘simple’ geometry—the orbit of the sun, the Tropics, the seasons—and the adventures of gods and
heroes did not make more sense even then… What could it mean, hwen a hero was on his way slightly more
than two years, ‘returning’ at intervals, ‘falling into space,’ coming off the ‘right’ rout? There remained,
indeed, not many possible solutions: it has to be planets… If so, planets not only had to be constitutive
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members of every mythical personnel; the Polynesians did not invent this train on their own.”
Returning to his own exploration of myth and science, De Santillana notes:
“Mathematics was moving up to me from the depth of the centuries; not after myth, but before it. Not armed
with Greek rigor, but with the imagination of astrological power, with the understanding of astronomy.
Number gave the key. Way back in time, before writing was even invented [(an unlikely supposition, but one
that holds to presently recorded human history…)], it was measures and counting that provided the armature,
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the frame on which the rich texture of real myth was to grow.”
What becomes clear is that the Myths and Architectural Remains we receive from the past
are not derived from the ‘uncivilized’ ‘irrational’ ‘disorder’ of a primitive people just
emerging from their ‘state of nature’ (the Modernist Garden of Eden) but from a extremely
civilized, rational and ordered (almost surely technologically advanced) body of thought
and practice. In these Myths and Architectural Remains, the geometry of the all is
symbolized using the geometry of the natural universe; Nature, then, as manifest in The
Heavens and as symbolized in math, myth and architecture by the Ancients, represents the
manifest, historical origin of Western thought. The order of nature reflects the divine order
(acts as a gate into the divine order) as the still pool reflects the moon and sun (acts as a
gate into the sun and moon).
Returning to the issue of technology (the tools by which science mediates the
relationship between humanity and nature), De Santillana and Von Dechend argue the
Neolithic Revolution
“was essentially technological. The earliest social scientist, Democritus of Abdera, put it in one striking
sentence: men’s progress was the work not of the mind but of the hand. His late successors have taken him
too literally, and concentrated on artifacts. They have been unaware of the enormous intellectual effort
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involved, from metallurgy to the arts, but especially in astronomy.”

373
Transmission Through Myth (Nonpareil Books). p. ix
374
Ibid. x
375
Ibid. xi
376
Ibid. Bold Emphasis Added.
181

Beyond potentially more nefarious meanings with regard to the fall of the civilization from
which this Mythological Tradition and the many ‘Antediluvian’ Archeological Remains
from which Modernist Science (and the subsequent relationship between humanity and
nature in Modernism) rose, it seems clear that the above quote from Democritus begins to
set the stage for the Modernist relocation of matter-practice before mind-theory in the
causal chain (especially in De Santillana and Von Dechend’s reading); the evolution of
human mind is no longer to be produced by mind, but instead by our hands (by practice)
and the technologies they wield (i.e. the onus is put on the technology that allows us to see
more and thus better understand the universe rather than on the minds that built these
technologies, which, unless we received the technologies from beings who Democritus
would not categorize as ‘Man’, would presuppose the subsequent privileging of matter over
mind we observe in the Modernist Ontological Regime(s)).
De Santillana concludes his preface with a note on method and the contemporary
academy:
“We had the idea. It was simple and clear. But we realized that we would run into formidable difficulties,
both from the point of view of modern, current scholarship and from the no less unfamiliar approach needed
for method. …How can one catch time on the wing? And yet the flow of time, the time of music, was of the
essence, inescapable, baffling to the systematic [(peripatetic)] mind…. And yet this was the least of our
difficulties. For we also had to face a wall… made of indifference, ignorance, and hostility…. But our own task
was set: to rescue those intellects of the past, distant and recent, from oblivion. “Thus said the Lord God:
377
‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”
He also provides a final note on method which resonates well with our Nomad
Explorations mode of inquiry.
“….Gradually, as we move above the timberline [and start to see the world from new plateaus of perspective],
the reader will find himself beset by difficulties which are not of our making. They are the inherent difficulties
of a science which was fundamentally reserved, beyond our conception. Most frustrating, we could not use
our good old simple catenary logic, in which principles come first and deduction follows. This was not the
way of the archaic thinkers. They though rather in terms of what we might call a fugue, in which all notes
cannot be constrained into a single melodic scale, in which one is plunged directly into the midst of things
and must follow the temporal order created by their thought. It is, after all, in the nature of music that the
notes cannot all be played at once. The order and sequence, the very meaning, of the composition will reveal
themselves—with patience—in due time. The reader, I suggest, will have to place [themself] in the ancient
378
“Order of Time.”

377
Ibid. xii-xiii
378
Transmission Through Myth (Nonpareil Books) p. xii
182

Lao Zi
379
“Work without doing.”
380
“The Tao of the sage is work without effort.”
“In its most encompassing senses, the Way [Tao, Dao] means the way things are, the source of this natural
order , and methods of harmonizing with the vital spirit of the Way.” 381
Zhuang Zi’s writings provide many of the essential stories for our discussion of leisure and
human-nature relations, but before we embark on a nomadic exploration of Zhuang Zi we
should begin with some key quotes from Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing as this text establishes one
of the essential intellectual foundations for the Daoist tradition and, in many ways, for the
Nomadic Method itself.
A quick note on context to begin:
“One of the observations of Taoist historiographers was that thinkers are more inclined to speak and act in
proportion to necessity. This concept was used to explain the bursts of educational activity in times of
historical crisis. Confucius and at least one of the Old Masters (Lao-tzu) of Taoism in China were more or
less contemporary with Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, and Pythagoras in Greece, all followers of
ancient knowledge traditions working in times of political and social unrest….
From Chinese Taoist descriptions, it would appear evident that society had fallen into great disorder
and confusion at the time people like Confucius, Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu, Mo-tzu, and Mencius taught and wrote
about the role of culture, knowledge and enlightenment in restoring peace and freedom in the human
382
world.”
We exist in a time of historical crisis, political and social unrest abound, and so it is only
natural from the perspective of this concept that we should return to those thinkers who
responded to the crises and unrest of their time and space by elucidating “the role of
culture, knowledge and enlightenment in restoring peace and freedom in the human
383
world.” It is natural that we would respond to the crises and unrest of our day by teaching
and writing about “the role of culture, knowledge and enlightenment in restoring peace and
384
freedom in the human world.” Culture, knowledge and enlightenment to restore peace
and freedom to the human world—the ethos of this text, and of my nomadic existence,
could not be more aptly captured in words.
On to Lao Zi! First off, we should note that “Nonbeing, or the nameless, stands for
passionless, uncontrived, formless awareness [leisure]. Being, or the named, stands for

379
380
381
Emphasis added.
382
Thomas Cleary, The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary Volume One, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 102-103.
383
384
183
385

discursive intellectual activity [work].” “Eternal nonbeing is needed to observe the subtle;
386
eternal being is needed to observe the manifest…” “Daoist practice involves ‘opening the
387
mysterious pass’ to allow the mind to work in both modes without interference.”
“10.
Carrying body and soul and embracing the one,
Can you avoid separation?
Attending fully and becoming supple,
Can you be as a newborn babe?
Washing and cleansing the primal vision,
Can you be without stain?
Loving all men and ruling the country,
Can you be without cleverness?
Opening and closing the gates of heaven,
Can you play the role of woman?
Understanding and being open to all things,
Are you able to do nothing?
Giving birth and nourishing,
Bearing yet not possessing,
Working yet not taking credit,
Leading yet not dominating,
388
This is the Primal Virtue.”
“10.
Carrying vitality and consciousness,
embracing them as one,
can you keep them from parting?
Concentrating energy,
making it supple,
can you be like an infant?
Purifying hidden perception,
can you make it flawless?
Loving the people, governing the nation,
can you be uncontrived?
As the gate of heaven opens and closes,
can you be impassive?
As understanding reaches everywhere,
can you be innocent?
Producing and developing,
producing without possessing,
doing without presuming,
growing without domineering,
389
this is called mysterious power.”

385
386
Lao Zi, “A Way Can Be a Guide”, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary
Volume One, Boston: Shambhala, p. 107.
387
388
389
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, Boston:
Shambhala, p. 14.
184

In short, the question posed by Lao Zi is ‘can you be contemplative’ (and can you do so
390
without possession, presumption and domination?). Can you avoid the folly of Meng Zi’s
391
(2A2) Farmer of Song and facilitate growth of the sprouts of conscious evolution without
recourse to domination (without pulling on the sprouts to make them grow)? Can you be as
receptive to being, as intellectus rather than as ratio?
The seemingly intimate connection between transcending growth as domination
and being as a child and as a mother (i.e. as contemplative, as receptive to being) strikes the
mind as essential when considering transcendence of Modernism (and of Paternalism more
generally).
“Know the strength of man,

But keep a woman's care!
Be the stream of the universe!
Being the stream of the universe,
Ever true and unswerving,
Become as a little child once more.
Know the white,

392
But keep the black!”
“Know the male, keep the female;

be humble toward the world.
Be humble to the world,
and eternal power never leaves,
returning again to innocence.
393
Knowing the white, keep the black…”
The ‘order through domination’ mentality of the world(view) of total work cannot be
divorced fro patriarchal hierarchy and domination of the sacred feminine and the pure
394
child that accompany it. The ‘Primal Virtue’ (‘mysterious power’) of human potentiality is

390
Can you transcend the world(view) of total work? Can you transcend the possession, presumption and domineering nature of
economic theology?
391
“There was a man of Song who was concerned that the sprouts in his field were not growing well, so he went and tugged at each one.
He went home utterly exhausted and said, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself ill today! I’ve been out helping the sprouts to grow.’ His sons rushed
out to look and found the stalks all shriveled up. There are few in the world who do not ‘help their sprouts grow.’ There are those who
do not ‘weed’ – they have simply given the whole task up as useless. But the ones who tug on the sprouts to help them grow, they are
worse than useless, for they do harm!” (Meng Zi, 2A2)
392
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English pp. 10-11 http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
393
Shambhala, pp. 22-23.
394
To bring this point into focus through the history of feminist thought in the Modernist Academy, it could be argued that White Liberal
Feminism sought to allow women to enter the hierarchies of patriarchal domination through masculinization (of thought, of aesthetic, of
behaviors, of conception of being, etc.) and that most subsequent critiques of White Liberal Feminism have moved from a viewpoint that
denies the notion of masculinity and femininity altogether. This trajectory mirrors the archetypal trajectory of Modernist thought by
moving from attempts to create a unified order of truth in manifestation through domination of difference into attempts to simply deny
truth (in this case the truth of masculinity and femininity) altogether. Instead of challenging patriarchal hierarchies by problematizing the
lack of contemplation, receptivity, willingness to be acted upon, etc. of masculinity enlivened by the will to dominate and revalorizing the
sacred feminine aspect of reality and human existence, White Liberal Feminism (like all positivist-fascism) attempted to dominate the
difference of femininity so that white women could enter the spheres of power (and non-white women could take care of their
children…) and postmodern critiques of White Liberal Feminism tended to simply dismiss the notions of masculinity and femininity
altogether. Transcending the patriarchal hierarchies of Modernism (and Paternalism more generally) will require that we revitalize our
society’s relationship with the sacred feminine and its many expressions (i.e. the sacred feminine is expressed as the contemplative state
of mind at the epistemological level). We cannot transcend domination without aptly transcending patriarchy.
185

to be found in the childlike (pure) and sacred feminine (contemplative, receptive) aspects
of our being (i.e. in all those aspects of our being that are dominated and destroyed by the
patriarchal work epistemology and world(view) of total work that have been imposed upon
humanity by Modernity). The highest potentials of human being are to be found through
being as the Child and being as the Mother, and the reduction to being as Divine Father in
Paternalism and to being as Biological Father in Modernity negates these highest
395
potentials. Can you transcend the reduction to being as Dominating Father, to being as
the progenitor of ‘order’ through hierarchical domination, which has been imposed upon
you (women and men alike) by Modernity (and by Paternalism)? Can you know the
masculine without loosing the feminine and the childlike? Can you know the white without
loosing the dark? Can you know yang without loosing yin? If we are to transcend the Age
of Labor, Scarcity, Mechanical Evolution and Hierarchical Domination for an Age of
Leisure, Plenty, Conscious Evolution and Love the answer to these questions must be yes.
“12.
…The sage is guided by what
he feels and not by what he sees.
396
He lets go of that and chooses this.”
“12.
…Sages work for the middle,
and not the eyes,
397
leaving the latter and taking the former.”
The Sage transcends the work epistemology of Modernity (i.e. the reduction of human
epistemology to the ratio) for the received knowledge of the emotions-intuition (for
observation by the intellectus of the truth received from emotive and intuitional responses
to our experiences). In being as receptive to being the sage learns to observe the signposts
of truth that are to be found in our emotive and intuitive states of being.
Meng Zi’s (2A6) argument that the goodness of human nature—or at least the
sprouts of that good human nature—is to be found in emotive modes of knowing elucidates
this point.
“2A.6 Mencius said: ‘All people possess within them a moral sense that cannot bear the suffering of others.
The former kings had such a moral sense and thus they devised means of government that would not allow
people to suffer. If a ruler were to employ the moral sense that makes human suffering unendurable in order
to implement such humane government, he would find bringing the entire world into order to be simple, as
though he were turning the world in his hand.’
‘Why do I say that all people possess within them a moral sense that cannot bear the suffering of
others? Well, imagine now a person who, all of a sudden, sees a small child on the verge of falling down into
a well. Any such person would experience a sudden sense of fright and dismay. This feeling would not be
something he summoned up in order to establish good relations with the child’s parents. He would not

395
This is not to say that being as Father is not an essential aspect of our highest human potentials, but to say that being as Father when
enlivened by the will to dominate the Mother and the Child negates our potential for the highest heights of human being.
396
397
Shambhala, p. 15.
186

purposefully feel this way in order to win the praise of their friends and neighbors. Nor would he feel this way
because the screams of the child would be unpleasant.’
‘By imagining this situation we can see that one who lacked a sense of dismayed commiseration in
such a case simply could not be a person. Moreover, anyone who lacks the sense of shame cannot be a
person; anyone who lacks a sense of deference cannot not be a person; anyone who lacks a sense of right and
wrong cannot not be a person.’
‘The sense of commiseration is the seed of humanity, the sense of shame is the seed of
righteousness, the sense of deference is the seed of ritual, and the sense of right and wrong is the seed of
wisdom. Everyone possesses these four moral senses just as they possess their four limbs. To possess such
seeds and yet claim to be unable to call them forth is to rob oneself; and for a person to claim that his ruler is
incapable of such moral feelings is to rob his ruler.’
‘As we possess these four senses within us, if only we realize that we need to extend and fulfill them,
then the force of these senses will burst through us like a wildfire first catching or a spring first bursting forth
through the ground. If a person can bring these impulses to fulfillment, they will be adequate to bring all the
four quarters under his protection. But if a person fails to develop these senses, he will fail even to serve his
398
own parents.’” (Meng Zi, 2A6)
The goodness of human nature (and indeed human nature is essentially good in this
conception) is to be found, not through use of the ratio (the materially rational mind of
Modernity), but through the sprouts of goodness that are to be found in our emotions.
Again, the highest heights of human potential are not to be found in the active (yang,
masculine) state of human epistemology but in the passive, receptive states like emotion
and intuition… To transcend the slave condition of Modernity is to transcend the
patriarchal reduction of human virtue, epistemology, teleology, etc. to the active state as
structured by hierarchical form (i.e. by an arborescent form enlivened by the desire for
399
domination).
“15…
Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like men aware of danger.
Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding like ice about to melt.
Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.
Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.
Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?

Who can remain still until the moment of action?
Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking fulfillment,
400
they are not swayed by desire for change.”
“15…
Their wariness was as that of one crossing a river in winter,

398
Meng Zi 2016, The Meng Zi 2A6, trans. Robert Eno http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Mengzi.pdf
399
Again, this is not to dismiss the importance of the active state of human being but to problematize reduction of human being to this
active state and the structuring of the active state by hierarchical form, which is to say by an arborescent form that is enlivened by the
desire for domination (to the work epistemology, work virtue and the world(view) of total work—the economic theology—that produced
them).
400
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English p. 8-9 http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
187

Their caution was as that of one in fear of all around;
Their gravity was as that of a guest,
Their relaxation was as that of ice at the melting point.
Simple as uncarved wood,
open as the valleys,
they were inscrutable as murky water.
Who can, in turbidity,
use the gradual clarification of stillness?
Who can, long at rest,
use the gradual enlivening of movement?
Those who preserve this Way do not want fullness.
Just because of not wanting fullness,
401
it is possible to use the full and not make anew.”
“16.
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall
while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then
return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness,
which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to
disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be
openhearted.
Being openhearted, you will act
royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with
the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will
402
never pass away.”
“16.
403
Attain the climax of emptiness,
preserve the utmost quiet:
as myriad things act in concert,
I thereby observe the return.
Things flourish,
then each returns to its root.
Returning to the root is called stillness:
stillness is called return to Life,

401
402
403
‘The climax of motion is stillness, and the climax of stillness is motion.’
188

\return to Life is called the constant;
knowing the constant is called enlightenment.
Acts at random, in ignorance of the constant, bode ill.
Knowing the constant gives perspective;
this perspective is impartial.
Impartiality is the highest nobility;
the highest nobility is divine,
and the divine is the Way.
This Way is everlasting,
404
not endangered by physical death.”
The Sage (philosopher) does not seek to change the world but to be receptive to the world
and to be as the nameless origin of being (which serves to change the world for the better
even if that is not the driving desire). We should recall Pieper’s (2009) words on the
intellectual trajectory that brought us the world(view) of total work and the suicide of
philosophy therein:
“There is a direct road from ‘Knowledge is power’—and Bacon’s other statement that the purpose of
knowledge is to furnish man with new inventions and gadgets—to Descartes’ more explicitly polemical
statement in the Discourse that he intended to replace the old ‘theoretical’ philosophy by a practical kind, so
that we men might make ourselves the ‘masters and owners of nature’. That road leads on to Marx’s well-
known declaration: hitherto philosophy has been concerned with interpreting the world, but what matters is
to change it.
This assault on philosophy’s theoretical character is the historical road of philosophy’s suicide. And
that assault arises from the world’s being seen more and more as mere raw material for human activity…. The
loss of ‘theoria’ means eo ipso the loss of the freedom of philosophy: philosophy then becomes a function
within society, solely practical, and it must of course justify its existence and role among the functions of
society; and finally, in spite of its name, it appears as a form of work or even of ‘labor’…. A real philosophy is
405
[not] grounded… in becoming ‘the master and owner of nature’, but in seeing what is… simply as being.”
(Pieper 2009, p. 91-92)
Philosophy is the practice of being as receptive to the constants of the world and
interpreting it impartially therein, and the process of changing the world is one of being as
what the world ought to be rather than of acting on the world to make it what it ought to be.
Philosophy is not a practice of seeking fulfillment of practical needs through domination. A
Philosophy of nature is on in which we are receptive to the constants of nature, where we
commune with the constants of being through leisurely contemplation within the temple of
nature. This is the Nomadic Way.
“20.
Give up learning, and put an end to
your troubles.
Is there a difference between yes and

no?
Is there a difference between good and

404
Shambhala, p. 17.
405
189

evil?
Must I fear what others fear? What
nonsense!
Other people are contented, enjoying
the sacrificial feast of the ox.
In spring some go to the park, and
climb the terrace,
But I alone am drifting, not knowing
where I am.
Like a newborn babe before it learns to
smile,
I am alone, without a place to go.
Others have more than they need, but I
alone have nothing.
I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Others are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Others are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless
wind.
Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless and depressed.
I am different.
406
I am nourished by the great mother.”
“20.
Detach from learning and you have no worries.
How far apart are yes and yeah?
How far apart are good and bad?
The things people fear cannot but be feared.
Wild indeed the uncentered!
Most people celebrate
as if they were barbecuing a slaughtered cow,
or taking in the springtime vistas;
I alone am aloof,
showing no sign,
like an infant that doesn’t yet smile,
riding buoyantly
as if with nowhere to go.
Most people have too much;
I alone seem to be missing something.
Mine is indeed the mind of an ignoramus
in its unadulterated simplicity.
Ordinary people try to shine;
I alone seem to be dark.
Ordinary people try to be on the alert;
I alone am unobtrusive,
calm as the ocean depths,
buoyant as if anchored nowhere.

406
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English pp. 9-10. http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
190

Most people have ways and means;
I alone am unsophisticated and simple.
I alone am different from people
407
in that I value seeking food from the Mother.”
In the coming Age of Leisure imagined by this text humanity will be nourished by the great
mother. We will know (and ‘plan’ our engagement with) nature so as to allow nature to
nourish our mind in its contemplative state. Rather than casting off the food of the mother
as elitist because it has been withheld from the people by the elite class as a technique of
power (for the sake of domination), we will be as receptive to being and allow the food of
the mother to nourish our conscious self in the process of conscious evolution.
“25…
Man follows Earth.
Earth follows haven.
Heaven follows the Tao.
408
Tao follows what is natural.”
“25…
Humanity emulates earth,
earth emulates heaven,
heaven emulates The Way,
409
The Way emulates Nature.”
Human-nature relations must be ‘planned’ (though the term plan, at least in its present
usage, implies an active imposition of order that is antithetical to this project) in a manner
that allows nature to act as a temple, as a sacred space of contemplation in which we can
learn to emulate the great mother earth by allowing the constants of earth to act upon us
and thus inscribe themselves upon our being.
“47.
Without going outside,
you may know the whole world.
Without looking through the window,
you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go,
the less you know.
Thus the sage knows without traveling;

He sees without looking;
He works without doing.
48.
In the pursuit of learning, every day

407
408
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English p. 11. http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
409
191

something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day
something is dropped.
Less and less is done

Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left
undone.
The world is ruled by letting things

take their course.
410
It cannot be ruled by interfering.”
“47.
They know the world,
without even going out the door.
They see the sky and its pattern
without even looking out the window.
The further out it goes,
the less knowledge is;
therefore the sages know without going,
name without seeing,
complete without striving.
48.
For learning you gain daily;
for the Way you loose daily.
Losing and losing,
thus you can reach noncontrivance;
be uncontrived, and nothing is not done.
Taking the world is always done
by not making anything of it.
For when something is made of it,
411
That is not enough to take the world.”
The Nomadic Method is the method of the Sage, of one who wanders the earth in search
of wonder without taking a single step. It is not, first and foremost, a method of data
collection, a method of going to a place to collect data about it, but instead a method of
coming to know the constants of nature through effortless contemplation in and of the great
mother’s temple and an exploration of already collected facts through the perspective
provided by intimacy with the constants of reality. While Lao Zi’s words are metaphorical,
they take on a more literal, practical significance in the context of Nomad Explorations
(though, of course, the Nomadic Method is predicated on the effortless, contemplative
epistemological practice Lao Zi’ intends to elucidate with his metaphor).
“A man is born gentle and weak.

At his death he is hard and stiff.

410
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English p. 16. http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
411
Shambhala, p. 31.
192

Green plants are tender and filled with
sap.
At their death they are withered and
dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is

the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple
of life.
Thus an army without flexibility never

wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily
broken.
The hard and strong will fall.

412
The soft and weak will overcome.”
Two points of interest arise from this passage. The first is methodological—if we approach
our research and analysis through use of a rigid, unbending methodology then our mind
will break and we will be forced into misunderstandings when we are faced with a reality
that is incommensurable with our method (i.e. a rigid, unbending adherence to quantitative
methods will cause our mind to snap when we are faced with intangible and thus
unquantifiable realities like human epistemology). (Barnesmoore and Wyly, Submitted)
The second point of interest comes in the use of natural metaphors to elucidate human
realities. Moving from the hermetic dictum, ‘as above, so below’, we see that the same
forms manifest themselves at all levels of manifestation. If we can extract the form from a
natural metaphor, in this case the relationship between suppleness and life and between
stiffness and death, we can extrapolate that form to interpret its expression at another level
of manifestation (in this case at the level of human epistemology). It is thus that we can
improve our understanding of the world through allowing the world inscribe the forms of
manifestation upon our being by being as receptive to being in the temple of nature. In a
sense, then, we should plan our relationship with the natural world not so that we can
consume it but so that it can consume and thus transform our being.
Another natural metaphor that has many and varied implications for fighting the
rigidity of Modernism:
“78.
Under heaven nothing is more soft and
yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong,
nothing is better;
It has no equal.
The weak can overcome the strong;
413
The supple can overcome the stiff.”
“78.

412
Lao Zi, Dao De Jing, trans. Feng and English, p. 23, http://www.dankalia.com/more/taoteching.pdf
413
193

Nothing in the world is more flexible
and yielding than water.
Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong,
none can withstand it,
414
because they have no way to change it.”
We ought not to fight force with force, violence with violence, rigidity with rigidity, etc.
Instead we must seek a rout to eroding Modernity’s heart of stone. Materialism and the
desire for domination must be eroded with the waters philosophy and love (with intellectus
and emotive knowing). It should be noted that in Chinese the character Xin (心) is often
translated as heart-mind and serves to capture both the affective and cognitive dimensions
415
of human epistemology (both philosophy and love).
Wu-Wei and Planning

While engaging with some of Robert Eno’s translations of Zhuang Zi below I discovered a
glossary of Chinese terms he developed to accompany the translation. The definition he
provides for the term Wu-Wei (無為) struck my mind as particularly interesting given that
this Nomadic Exploration of leisure, contemplation, conscious evolution, etc. is meant to
serve as a springboard for engagement with the literature environmental planning and
imagining-planning new human-nature-technology relations.
“Wu-wei 無為 (non-action, non-striving)

The spontaneous action celebrated by the Daoists, by virtue of its unplanned nature and its abandonment of
self-interest, was action that effortlessly responded to instinct or impulse. The word wei was used to denote
416
consciously planned action, the end result of some effortful initiative.”
Wu-Wei and its epistemological counterpart Leisurely Contemplation (intellectus), then,

are in a sense incommensurable with the very notion of planning. Leisurely Contemplation
and the effortless action (無為) rendered possible therein (as well as the Nomadic Method
we are following to pursue these ideas) are typified by a lack of conscious planning. In
being as receptive to being and allowing the forms of manifestation to inscribe their essence
upon our being we seek a state of mind (like that of Zhuang Zi’s Cook Ting) in which
conscious planning is no longer necessary as we act through silent, instantaneous response
of the forms inscribed upon our being to the form of the environment we inhabit (as Cook
Ting moves his knife through the empty spaces between the Ox’s joints without recourse to
thought in the linear, ‘objective’ sense of the ratio—what we might call material reason).
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Planning, then, should be replaced by effortless, ‘thoughtless’ harmonization of context
with the eternal forms of manifestation.

414
Shambhala, p. 46.
415
Robert Eno, Zhuang Zi: the Inner Chapters, University of Indiana, p. 14 http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Zhuangzi.pdf
Robert Eno, Glossary of Terms, University of Indiana, http://www.iub.edu/%7Ep374/Glossary.html

416
Robert Eno, Glossary of Terms, University of Indiana, http://www.iub.edu/%7Ep374/Glossary.html
417
Again, this is not to say without consciousness but to say without the objective stage of consciousness that we know as ‘our thoughts’.
Thoughtless, in this sense, is to say silent expression of human consciousness rather than no expression of human consciousness.
Thoughtless means silent understanding, not no understanding.
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“Knowledge of the future is only a
flowery trapping of Tao.
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It is the beginning of folly.”
To presume to know the future is the beginning of folly, and the use of ratio to plan for
that ‘known future’ is folly itself. Instead, we must work to allow the essence of things (the
eternal forms that structure the many levels of manifestation) to inscribe themselves upon
our being through leisurely contemplation (of the self, of the temple of nature, etc.) so that
we can consciously-thoughtlessly-effortlessly respond to actual (rather than imagined)
changes in the world he inhabit. The purpose of this text is to develop an ideal through
which we may imagine the potentials of a new future and the changes in worldview that are
necessary to aptly respond to the changes our society and world have already undergone
through the processes of labor automation and environmental degradation, but we cannot
plan for the future until it actually arrives (in which case we will be responding, hopefully
consciously-thoughtlessly-effortlessly, rather than planning). We must actually see the
future come to be if we are to allow the essence of things that has been inscribed upon our
being to respond to said future and harmonize it with the uncreated (with IS-FFC).
Planning, then, should be oriented towards responding to present realities and creating
future realities rather than towards planning for future realties that we presume to know.
Let us respond to the present and create the future rather than creating the present and
responding to the future.
“I have never heard of him initiating anything; he always just harmonizes with others…. He harmonizes but
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does not initiate…”
“
He must have been a man whose powers were perfect, though his realisation of them was not manifested in
his person.
Duke Ai said, 'What is meant by saying that his powers were complete?' Zhongni replied, 'Death
and life, preservation and ruin, failure and success, poverty and wealth, superiority and inferiority, blame and
praise, hunger and thirst, cold and heat; these are the changes of circumstances, the operation of our
appointed lot. Day and night they succeed to one another before us, but there is no wisdom able to discover
to what they owe their origination. They are not sufficient therefore to disturb the harmony (of the nature),
and are not allowed to enter into the treasury of intelligence. To cause this harmony and satisfaction ever to
be diffused, while the feeling of pleasure is not lost from the mind; to allow no break to arise in this state day
or night, so that it is always spring-time in his relations with external things; in all his experiences to realise in
his mind what is appropriate to each season (of the year): these are the characteristics of him whose powers
are perfect.'
'And what do you mean by the realisation of these powers not being manifested in the person?'
(pursued further the duke). The reply was, 'There is nothing so level as the surface of a pool of still water. It
may serve as an example of what I mean. All within its circuit is preserved (in peace), and there comes to it no
agitation from without. The virtuous efficacy is the perfect cultivation of the harmony (of the nature). Though

418
419
Thomas Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, p. 82.
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the realisation of this be not manifested in the person, things cannot separate themselves (from its
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influence).'”
“‘Still water is the most level thing in the world; it can be used as a model, inwardly manifesting evenness
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while not flowing outwardly. Virtue is the cultivation of completeness and harmony.’”
Nature in Zhuang Zi
As one of the key goals of this text is to provide a conception of Nature beyond the
Modernist worldview and to use natural metaphors in the problematization of the
Modernist worldview we take time in this essay to explore natural metaphors—especially
those that describe the relationship between humans and nature that is rendered possible
by effortless contemplation—in the Daoist Philosophy of Zhuang Zi.
Hui Zi’s Great Tree
“Hui-tzu then said to Chuang-tzu, ‘I have a gigantic tree, but its trunk is too gnarled for the plumb line and its
branches are too twisted for the ruler: even if it were set in the middle of the road, carpenters would pay not
attention to it. Now what you say is grandiose but useless, rejected by everyone alike.
Chuang-tzu replied, ‘Have you not seen a wildcat? It lowers itself close to the gorund to watch for
careless prey; it leaps this way and that, high and low, but then gets caught in a trap and dies. A yak, on the
other hand, is enormous, it can do big things but cannot catch a rat. Now you have a huge tree and worry that
it is useless: why not plant it in the vast plain of the homeland of Nothing Whatsoever, roaming in
effortlessness by its side and sleeping in freedom beneath it? The reason it does not fall to the axe, and no
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one inures it, is that it cannot be exploited. So what’s the trouble?’” (Zhuang Zi 1999, p. 55)
“Huizi said to Zhuangzi, ‘I have a huge tree of the type people call an ailanthus. The main trunk is gnarled
and knotted from the root up, you can’t align it with a plumb line, and the branches are all so twisted and
bent that no compass or square can mark them. Even if it were growing by the roadside no passing carpenter
would think of using it. Now, your words are just as big and useless, so everyone spurns them too!’
Zhuangzi said, ‘Have you ever observed the wildcat? It crouches concealed and waits for its prey to
wander in range – then it springs left or right, heedless of heights and chasms. And yet12wildcats spring our

420
Zhuang Zi, The Seal of Virtue Complete (5.4), trans. James Legge http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/seal-of-virtue-complete
421
Thomas Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 83-84
422
Zhuang Zi 1999, Freedom, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, Boston:
Shambhala, p. 55
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traps and die in our nets. Or take the yak, big as a cloud hung from the sky – it’s skilled at being huge, but it
can’t even catch a rat. Now you have this big tree but its uselessness is a trouble to you. Why don’t you plant
it in the village of Nothing-at-All or the plain of Broad-Void and amble beside it doing nothing at all, or
wander free and easy lying asleep beneath it? No ax will ever cut short its life, nothing will ever harm it. If
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there’s no use for it, what hardship could ever befall it?’” (Zhuang Zi 2017, p. 13-14)
“Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu, ‘I have a big tree of the kind men call shu. Its trunk is too gnarled and bumpy
to apply a measuring line to, its branches are too bent and twisty to match up to a compass or square. You
could sand it by the road and no carpenter would look at it twice. Your words, too, are big and useless, and so
everyone alike spurns them.
Chuang tzu said, ‘maybe you’ve never seen a wildcat or a weasel. It crouches down and hides,
watching for something to come along. It leaps and races east and west, not hesitating to go high or low—until
it falls into the trap and dies in the net. Then again there’s the yak, big as a cloud covering the sky. It certainly
knows how to be big, thought it doesn’t know how to catch rats. Now you have this big tree and you’re
distressed because it’s useless. Why don’t you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-
and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? Axes will
never shorten its life, nothing can ever harm it. If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?’”
(Zhuang Zi 1968, p. 35)
“Huizi said to Zhuangzi, 'I have a large tree, which men call the Ailantus. Its trunk swells out to a large size,
but is not fit for a carpenter to apply his line to it; its smaller branches are knotted and crooked, so that the
disk and square cannot be used on them. Though planted on the wayside, a builder would not turn his head
to look at it. Now your words, Sir, are great, but of no use - all unite in putting them away from them.'
Zhuangzi replied, 'Have you never seen a wildcat or a weasel? There it lies, crouching and low, till
the wanderer approaches; east and west it leaps about, avoiding neither what is high nor what is low, till it is
caught in a trap, or dies in a net. Again there is the Yak, so large that it is like a cloud hanging in the sky. It is
large indeed, but it cannot catch mice. You, Sir, have a large tree and are troubled because it is of no use -
why do you not plant it in a tract where there is nothing else, or in a wide and barren wild? There you might
saunter idly by its side, or in the enjoyment of untroubled ease sleep beneath it. Neither bill nor axe would
shorten its existence; there would be nothing to injure it. What is there in its uselessness to cause you
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distress?'”
It should first be noted that this story comes in the context of a ‘chapter’ wherein Zhuang
Zi seeks to illustrate the relativity of reality.
“Now if water has not accumulated to sufficient depth, it does not have the power to carry a large boat. Pour a
cup of water into a depression, and a mustard seed will be as a boat in it; but put the cup into the water, and it
will stay put, because the water is too shallow for the size of the boat….
…Small knowledge cannot reach great knowledge; those of little experience cannot comprehend
those of great experience.
How do we know this is so? Morning mushrooms do not know the passing of days an nights,
mayflies do not know the passing of spring and autumn. This is because they are short lived.” (Zhuang Zi
1999, p. 51-52)
“Little understanding cannot come up to great understanding; the short-lived cannot come up to the long-
lived. How can we know this is so? The morning mushroom can understand nothing of the alternation of
night and day; the summer cicada can understand nothing of the progress of the seasons. Such are the short-
lived.” (Zhuang Zi 2016, p. 8)

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Zhuang Zi 2016, Freedom (1.6), trans. Robert Eno, p. 11-12 http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Zhuangzi.pdf
424
Zhuang Zi, Enjoyment in Untroubled Ease (1.7), trans. James Legge, http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/enjoyment-in-untroubled-ease
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That which we perceive as real and that which we can therefore know, in short, is tied
intimately to the scale of our existence. If we have only existed within the boundaries of
passing time and physical space (if our conception of reality is thus bound therein), then we
cannot know that which goes beyond the workaday world of our biological existence. If we
have only known work, then we cannot know leisure.
Turning to the story of the great tree, we see that Hui Zi’s critique of Zhuang Zi’s
words and his inability to see the usefulness of the tree lie in a worldview that is eerily
similar to the worldview of total work that we explored through Pieper (2009) above. The
tree is seen as useless because it cannot be economically ‘exploited’, because a carpenter
cannot put it to a materially functional use. From the perspective of a worldview that others
nature and reduces its meaning and ‘usefulness’ to that of an object of commodification,
which strips nature of its sacred quality and sees it as nothing but a commodity to be
consumed, the gnarled tree is meaningless.
The fact that the tree’s trunk is ‘too gnarled and bumpy to apply a measuring line’
and that its branches are ‘too bent and twisty to match up to a compass or square’ is meant
to indicate that the meaning of the tree cannot be known through linear, quantitative
epistemological processes (through application of the ratio).
“The Middle Ages drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus.
Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction, of definition
and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the
capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. The
faculty of mind, man’s knowledge, is both these things in one, …simultaneously ratio and intellectus; and the
process of knowing is the two together. The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by
an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the intellectus, which is not active but passive, or rather
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receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives what it sees….

The simple vision of the intellectus, however, contemplation, is not work. If, as the philosophical
tradition holds, man’s spiritual knowledge is the fruit of ratio and intellectus; if the discursive element is fused
with ‘intellectual contemplation’ and if, moreover, knowledge in philosophy, which is directed upon the
whole of being, is to preserve the element of contemplation, then it is not enough to describe this knowledge
as work, for that would be to omit something essential. Knowledge in general, and more especially
philosophical knowledge, is certainly quite impossible without work, without the labor improbus of discursive
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thought. Nevertheless there is also that about it which, essentially, is not work.” (Pieper 2009, p. 28)
“Leisure… runs at right angles to work—just as it could be said that intuition is not the prolongation or
continuation, as it were, of the work of the ratio, but cuts right across it, vertically. Ratio, in point of fact, used
to be compared to time, whereas intellectus was compared to eternity, to the eternal now.” (Pieper 2009, p.
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49)
The meaning and use of the tree that is illuminated by Zhuang Zi ‘runs at right angles to
work’ and must be understood as intellectus rather than as ratio. I am reminded of a line
from the mystical poetry of William Blake: “Improvement makes straight roads, but the
crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.” (Blake 1793, p. 10)
Moving from the materially utilitarian worldview of understanding as ratio, Hui Zi

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Think Wu-Wei (無爲), the effortless action (non-action) of the Daoist tradition.
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427
198

casts the same aspersions upon Zhuang Zi’s teachings as he did upon the tree. As the
gnarled tree is to be ‘spurned’ (‘rejected’) because it cannot be used for what we might call
economic purposes, so too the teachings of Zhuang Zi are spurned because they are not
useful within the context of the workaday world(view) of total work to which our biological
existence is oriented. Zhuang Zi, in a movement that is aptly elucidated by Pieper’s (2009)
conception of leisure, illustrates that the meaning of the tree is to be found in the reality it
holds beyond the workaday world(view) of total work. Notably, Zhuang Zi ties this meaning
beyond the material world to effortlessness (Wu-Wei, Leisure) and freedom (which is to be
attained through Leisure). There is a well known bible verse that carries a similar meaning:
which built his house upon a rock:
25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell
not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish
man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell:
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and great was the fall of it.”
The usefulness of the tree lies beyond the world of total work and therefore cannot be
known as from the relative perspective of the world(view) of total work (i.e. the tree cannot
be commodified and thus cannot be known from a perspective reduces the purpose of
nature to commodification, as the tree cannot be measured and thus cannot be understood
as ratio).
The function of this tree—like all of nature in the worldview and philosophy
expounded (remembered) by this text—comes in the role it can play in the process of
leisurely contemplation (‘roaming in effortlessness by its side’ and ‘wander[ing] free and
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easy [while] lying asleep beneath it’). As we have been trying to make clear, the role of
nature is not simply one in which we other it, objectify it and then render it as a commodity
(though as we will see in the story of Khing below this does not mean that we cannot use
nature for utilitarian purposes like making a bell stand) but instead one in which nature acts
as a temple, as a sacred space whose purpose is to help foster the contemplative, leisurely,
effortless state of being required to experience and thus come to know reality beyond the
world of passing time and physical space (to know reality as intellectus). Such great
knowledge cannot be known from the relatively small knowledge that is potential within the
world(view) of total work, as the role of nature in becoming receptive to such knowledge
cannot be known within the world(view) of total work.
Great, Useless Trees

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Matthew 7: 24-27, KJV
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There is an obvious connection between this notion of ‘roaming in effortless’ and our conception of nomad explorations as wandering
in search wonder upon the path of contemplation.
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“A craftsman going to the state of Ch’i came to a certain mountain and saw an enormous tree at a shrine
there. That tree was so big that thousands of oxen could stand in its shade. Its trunk was so thick that it would
take a hundred people to reach around it. It was so high it faced on the mountains; the first branches were
seven thousand feet up. Dozens of those branches were themselves massive enough to be mad into boats.
Although there were so many tourists looking at the great tree that they could have filled a city, the
craftsman paid it no mind and went on his way without stopping.
One of the craftsman’s apprentices gazed at the tree for a long while, then ran to catch up with the
master. The apprentice said, ‘Since the day I took up my ax to follow you, I have never seen such fine raw
material as this. Yet you won’t even look at it, but just pass on by. Why?’
The master craftsman said, ‘Stop! Don't say it! That is an unemployable tree. A boat made from it
would sink; a coffin made from it would rot. An implement made from it would quickly fall apart. If used for
a door, it would dribble sap. If used for pillars, it would be eaten by insects. This is a tree that does not
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produce lumber; none of it can be used. That is why it has been able to get so old.’”
“Once on a journey Tzu-ch’i saw a huge tree with strange knots, big enough to shelter a thousand chariots in
its shade. Tzu-ch’i said, ‘What kind of tree is this? It must have unusual potential.’
Looking up at its branches, he saw they were too crooked to be used as beams. Looking down at its
roots, he saw it was not solid enough to be used for coffins. When he tasted the leaves, his mouth became
inflamed; and they had a smell that would madden a person for days.
Tzu-ch’i said, ‘This is in fact a useless tree. That’s how it got to be this big.’
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Yes, this is why sages cannot be exploited.”
Should we not attain to the usefulness of the tree as academics? In being useless,
‘unemployable’, we cannot be exploited. If our research has no use, our philosophy no
practical orient, then it cannot be put to nefarious use. If our mind is useless, then it cannot
be used by the deprived. The essay in this collection on Dialectical Hegemony illustrates
that we have already gone astray from the way of the useless Oak Tree…. The path of
understanding privation and its agents is truly the path of the daggers edge… How long shall
it be before this work is chopped down, milled into boards and used to build an engine of
war? Let us hope that we might enshroud the useful in the useless so that it cannot be
perceived by those who would seek exploit it…
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“‘Everyone is like this [useful], and so I have long sought to be unexploitable. Now I have finally attained it,
after having been near to death, and it is of great use to me. If I were to be useable, could I have got this
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big?”
We may have lost our way at times, and indeed it seems clear that we are near to death, but
there is still hope for finding a state of perfect uselessness down the road.
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“Everyone knows the use of the useful, but no one knows the use of the useless.”

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Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 75-76
431
432
Of course ‘unexploitable’ does not register as a real word in the Microsoft Word dictionary…
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434
200
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“All men know the advantage of being useful, but no one knows the advantage of being useless.”
Cook Ting
“Once a butcher was cutting up an ox for a king. As he felt with his hand, leaned in with his shoulder, stepped
in and bent a knee to it, the carcass fell apart with a peculiar sound as he played his cleaver.
The king, expressing admiration, said to the butcher, ‘Good! It seems that this is the consummation
of technique.’
The butcher put down his cleaver and replied, ‘What I like is the Way, which is more advanced
than technique. But I will present something of technique.
‘When I first began to cut up oxen, all I saw was an ox. Even after three years I had still not seen a
whole ox. Now I meet it with spirit rather than look at it with my eyes.
‘When sensory knowledge stops, then the spirit is ready to act. Going by the natural pattern, I
separate the joints, following the main apertures, according to the nature of its formation. I have never even
cut into a mass of gristle, much less a large bone.
‘A good butcher changes cleavers every year because of damage, a mediocre butcher changes
cleavers every month because of breakage. I’ve had this cleaver for nineteen years now, and it has cut up
thousands of oxen; yet its blade is as thought it had newly come from the whetstone.
‘The joints have spaces in between, whereas the edge of the cleaver blade has no thickness. When
that which has no thickness is put into that which has no space, there is ample room for moving the blade.
This is why the edge of my clever is still as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone.
‘Even so, whenever I come to a knot, I see the difficulty to doing it. I cam careful to remain alert,
with my gaze steady. Moving slowly, I exert a very slight force, and the knot has come apart, like earth
crumbling to the ground. Then I stand there with my cleaver, looking all around and pausing over the
satisfaction in this. Then I clean off the cleaver and put it away.
The king said, ‘Excellent! Having heard the word of a butcher, I have found the way to nurture
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life.’”

435
Zhuang Zi, Man in the World, Associated with other Men (4.7), trans. James Legge, http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/man-in-the-world-
associated-with
436
Zhuang Zi 1999, Mastery of Nurturing Life (3.2), trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of
Thomas Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 66-67.
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To begin, the story of Cook Ting (‘the dexterous butcher’) illuminates the epistemological
nature of our distinction between work and leisure. The butcher may indeed be ‘working’
in the sense of completing a necessary task, but he does so through a state of mind that is
passive (leisure) rather than active (work). We are not attempting to argue that no one
should complete tasks that require physical labor or to somehow denigrate such ‘work’, but
arguing that work ought to be conceived and pursued in leisurely terms. As has already
been noted, leisure (like Wu-Wei) does not connote a lack of action—it connotes a state of
being and relationship to action (and thought) whereby one is receptive to the forms of
their environment and allows the forms that have been inscribed upon their being (and
which are an essential aspect of their eternal being) to respond silently (as Wu-Wei in
terms of behavior or Rational Intuition in terms of thought) to the forms of their
environment. There is no aversion to getting one’s hands dirty in a garden or a butcher
shop (or to the craftsmanship of Khing the Carver), but instead a critique of the reduction
of such ‘work’ to the worldview of total work and its associated epistemological processes
(the ratio, the objective mind, material reason, etc.). Work in its highest forms ought to be
leisurely, and leisure itself requires a state of being that cannot be attained but for work. It
can be hoped that this notion of leisurely work (as opposed to the laborious work of the
worldview of total work) will allay some of the reflexive fears many contemporary scholars
have at the notion of leisure (which they take as an elitist absence of work...). Work is not
anathema to this conception of a post-labor society (and indeed I actually quite enjoy
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working in the garden—thank you very much)!
Turning to the heart of the matter, Cook Ting transcends the limitations of ratio
and its subjective trappings through being acted upon by the form of the ox (by having the
form inscribed upon his being). Once he has attained intimacy with the ox form, Cook
Ting simply quiets the mind, focuses his attention and allows the form that has been
inscribed upon his being to silently respond to the ox form he encounters in his
environment. In leisurely action (Wu-Wei) Cook Ting attains the highest potentials of his
work as a butcher.

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Indeed, this is not even a polemic against labor as such is required to attain a state of leisure as can be seen in the laborious process by
which Cook Ting became intimate with the ox form and attained the potential for leisurely action (Wu-Wei).
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Order and Domination

“A marsh pheasant walks ten steps for a bit of food, a hundred steps for a drink of water. It does not seek to
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be raised in a cage. Even though it might grow robust in captivity, that is not good.”
“A pheasant of the marshes has to take ten steps to pick up a mouthful of food, and thirty steps to get a drink,
but it does not seek to be nourished in a coop. Though its spirit would (there) enjoy a royal abundance, it
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does not think (such confinement) good.”
“The lord of the south seas was Abrupt; the lord of the north sea was Sudden. From time to time Abrupt and
Sudden got together in the territory of Primal Unity, and Primal Unity treated them very well.
Abrupt and Sudden planned to repay Primal Unity’s kindness.
They said, ‘People all have seven openings, through which they see, hear, eat, and breathe; Primal
Unity alone has none. Let us make openings in Primal Unity.
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So every day they gouged out a hole. After seven days, Primal Unity died.”

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439
Zhuang Zi, Nourishing the Lord of Life (3.4), trans. James Legge, http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/nourishing-the-lord-of-life
440
Zhuang Zi 1999, Responsive Leadership, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas
Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 99-100.
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Khing the Carver

“Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand
Of precious wood.
When it was finished,
They said it must be
‘What is your secret?’
Khing replied: ‘I am only a workman:

Commanded
My heart at rest.
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After five days
With all its limbs.’
‘By this time all thought of your Highness

Had vanished.
Of the bell stand.’
‘Then I went to the forest

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.
All I had to do was to put forth my hand and begin.
If I had not met this particular tree
What happened?
Which you ascribe to the spirits.’
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(Zhuang Zi 2004, pp. 127-128)
Order, then, is seen as implicit in nature. Khing does not attempt to dominate nature by
cutting trees into pieces and imposing order upon them, but instead seeks to accentuate the
existing order of nature that it derives from its being as an expression of IS-FFC. Nature
can still be used for utilitarian purposes like building a bell stand, but the process by which
we render nature as usable is facilitated by intellectus rather than ratio. The bell stand is
crafted, not through the hard work of domination and the imposition of order, but through
leisurely contemplation followed by easy work. We use nature through being as receptive
to being, by allowing the order of nature to act upon us and thereby elucidate its proper
use. If nature is to be known functional terms, its function should be known as an
expression of its own implicit order rather than as an expression of the order we impose
upon it.

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Zhuang Zi 2004, The Way of Chuang Tzu, trans. Thomas Merton, Shambhala Publications.
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Subjectivity and Truth in Daoism

Lao Zi
“The mystery of mysteries

is the gateway of marvels [(Lao Zi, 1.7-8)]
In terms of the mystic psychology of Taoism according to the Complete Reality school, this refers to the so-
called ‘mysterious pass,’ the central switch post or ‘opening’ between the rational [(work, ratio)] and intuitive
[(leisure, intellectus)] modes of awareness, described… as intentional observation of the apparent and
dispassionate observation of the subtle. Taoist practice involves ‘opening the mysterious pass’ to allow the
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mind to work in both modes without interference.”
If we may be so bold, our purpose in this text is to help facilitate this opening of the
mystical pass (or at least recognition of its existence) in both the reader and in society more
generally. Transcending the Age of Labor, Scarcity and Mechanical Evolution (the Age of
Reason) and entering into the Age of Leisure, Plenty and Conscious Evolution (the Age of
Intuition) does not mean abandoning Reason—it means preventing Reason from continuing
to subsume Intuition. We transcend the world(view) of total work, not by abandoning

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206

work, but by preventing work from continuing to subsume leisure. We transcend history
(time) and geography (space), not by abandoning them, but by preventing them from
continuing to subsume that which exists beyond, prior to and without dependence on time
and space.
“When everyone knows beauty is beauty,

this is bad.
When everyone knows good is good,
this is not good. [(Lao Zi, 2.1-4)]
…This means that it is not good for people to take their own ideas for granted, or get too fixed in their ways,
lest they become so complacent that they lose their ability to adapt to diversity or change.
When it is forgotten that conventional conceptions are conventional conceptions, and they are taken
for objective facts that ‘everyone knows’ and no one questions, then narrow-minded bigotry and blind
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prejudice can develop unopposed.”
Yes, this is Lao Zi and not Foucault, but we ought not simply dismiss the stark parallels…
On the surface we can see Lao Zi (and Zhuang Zi as we shall see below) as Postmodern in
his problematization of banal notions of material objectivity, but he diverges from the
essence of Postmodernism by problematizing human conceptions of objectivity without
denying the existence of an eternal, objective truth. We might (though we probably ought
not…) call Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi ‘Spiritual Postmoderns’ in their ability to capture the
Postmodern critique of Positivist notions of human objectivity without reducing reality to
passing time and physical space and thereby denying eternal unity and truth altogether. As
such, Daoist psychology represents a path by which we can escape the violence of
quantitative epistemologies and Positivist conceptions of objectivity without succumbing to
the materialistic-nihilism of Postmodernism (i.e. we can combat Modernism without,
rendering ourselves a part of the materialist trajectory that is Modernism through recourse
to a materialistic worldview that reduces reality and its first cause to passing time and
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physical space ). Daoism is both relativist (Postmodern-ish) and absolutist (Positivist-ish),
both rational and intuitive, and indeed the Daoist tradition posits true humanity (true
humanness) as being founded upon the capacity to hold both the relativist (finite) and the
absolutist (infinite) perspectives without one subsuming or otherwise interfering with the
other.
Zhuang Zi
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“…When you look in terms of their sameness, all things are one.”
Zhuang Zi’s discourse on the nature of human subjectivity and its incommensurability with
the unity of truth has a great deal to offer in the contemporary debates that are waged
between positivist notions of truth—which in essence attempt to collapse the difference of

443
444
I.e. a worldview in which consciousness is produced by and contained within passing time and physical space.
445
Thomas Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 79
207

manifestation into the static truth of the uncreated or, in another sense, attempt to collapse
the supple vibrancy of life into the rigidity of death through domination of difference—and
postmodern notions of truth—which to varying degrees and in varying manners deny eternal
unity and truth altogether. Human subjectivity does indeed pose a barrier to human
cognition of objective truth as the Postmodern critique of Positivism so aptly illustrates, but
this subjective barrier to human understanding of objective truth does not negate the
existence of objective truth or our potential to understand it.
“When there is arising, there is passing away; and when there is passing away, there is arising. When there is
right, there is wrong’ when there is wrong, there is right. By affirming we deny; by denying we affirm.
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Therefore sages do not go this way, but perceive in the context of nature.”
“When the one is divided, things are brought to completion, and in being brought to completion, the one is
destroyed. When things are not subject to completion or destruction, they are once again comprehended as
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one.”
“When there is division, there is definition, but whatever is defined also disintegrates. Whenever there is no
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definition or disintegration, all things again are resolved to unity.”
“The knowledge of ancient people reached somewhere. Where did it reach? Some thought the ultimate is
where nothing has ever existed. That is all—nothing can be added. Next they thought there is something, but
without any boundaries. Next they thought there are boundaries, but without right and wrong.
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The appearance of right and wrong was the reason the Way has been missing.”
“‘Since you made me enter into this discussion with you, if you have got the better of me and not I of you, are
you indeed right, and I indeed wrong? If I have got the better of you and not you of me, am I indeed right
and you indeed wrong? Is the one of us right and the other wrong? are we both right or both wrong? Since
we cannot come to a mutual and common understanding, men will certainly continue in darkness on the
subject. Whom shall I employ to adjudicate in the matter? If I employ one who agrees with you, how can he,
agreeing with you, do so correctly? If I employ one who agrees with me, how can he, agreeing with me, do so
correctly? If I employ one who disagrees with you and I, how can he, disagreeing with you and I, do so
correctly? If I employ one who agrees with you and I, how can he, agreeing with you and I, do so correctly?
In this way I and you and those others would all not be able to come to a mutual understanding; and shall we
then wait for that (great sage)? (We need not do so.) To wait on others to learn how conflicting opinions are
changed is simply like not so waiting at all. The harmonising of them is to be found in the invisible operation
of Heaven, and by following this on into the unlimited past. It is by this method that we can complete our
years (without our minds being disturbed). What is meant by harmonising (conflicting opinions) in the
invisible operation of Heaven? There is the affirmation and the denial of it; and there is the assertion of an
opinion and the rejection of it. If the affirmation be according to the reality of the fact, it is certainly different
from the denial of it - there can be no dispute about that. If the assertion of an opinion be correct, it is
certainly different from its rejection - neither can there be any dispute about that. Let us forget the lapse of
time; let us forget the conflict of opinions. Let us make our appeal to the Infinite, and take up our position
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there.'”

446
Boston: Shambhala, pp. 58-59.
447
Zhuang Zi, trans. Robert Eno, p. 17.
448
449
450
Zhuang Zi, The Adjustment of Controversies (2.12), trans. James Legge, http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/enjoyment-in-untroubled-ease
208

In short, Zhuang Zi accepts the seemingly postmodern notion that there is no Truth in
subjective understandings of manifestation, no Truth to be found through debate and
discernment, no Truth to be found in the many rationalities of the ten-thousand people,
but instead of stopping there—which one might be inclined to do within a materialistic
worldview that reduces reality and its first cause to passing time and physical space—Zhuang
Zi points to the existence of a primal truth that exists prior to (and in an eternal quality that
is dimensionally incommensurable with the motion, change, difference, etc. of) passing
time and physical space. This truth, however, is not to be found through debate,
discernment, cognitive domination of facts and ideas, etc., but indeed can only be found
through transcending these active phases of mind for a silent knowledge derived from
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being as an expression of that primal, eternal truth. There is no Truth to be found in the
active phases of mind (in the ratio and its subjective trappings) because this aspect of our
mind is oriented towards a plane of reality that, in its perpetual motion, change and
difference, is dimensionally incommensurable with the eternal, unified nature of Truth, but
that does not mean there is no Truth. The process of coming to understand Truth, then, is
inverted from the perspective of Kant’s ‘work epistemology’—rather than attaining an
understanding of Truth through the hard work of the ratio, through acting upon the world
in a manner that dominates difference into unity, Truth is to be found in cultivating a state
of being in which the ratio is silenced and Truth is able to act upon us.
“The statement that ‘knowledge is work—because knowing is activity, pure activity—…expresses a claim on
man… If you want to know something then you must work; in philosophy ‘the law is that reason acquires its
possessions through work’ that is the claim on man…. To sum up: the essence of human cognition, in this
view, is that it is exclusively an active, discursive labor of the ratio, the reason; and the notion ‘intellectual
work’ and ‘intellectual worker’ acquires a quite special weight if we accept this point of view.
Look at the ‘worker’ and you will see that his face is marked by strain and tension, and these are
even more pronounced in the case of the ‘intellectual worker’. These are the marks of that perpetual activity
452
(exclusive of all else) of which Goethe remarked that ‘it ends in bankruptcy’.” (Pieper 2009, p. 30)
Zhuang Zi, like Pieper and Goethe, recognizes the futility of seeking an understanding of
453
reality through use of the ratio (material rationality), but his Daoist epistemology (like
Pieper’s contemplative epistemology) captures the human potential to (at least in part)
transcend the materially rational mind and its subjective trappings through being as
receptive to being. Truth is to be understood through allowing ourselves to be acted upon
by Truth via cultivation of a state of effortless contemplation rather than through acting
upon the world to create truth. The incommensurability of the ratio and subjectivity with
Truth does not, in short, negate the potential for Truth itself or for human understanding
of Truth. Truth exists beyond the dimensional constraints of passing time, physical space
and cognitive tools like the ratio that are oriented to passing time and physical space, and
subjectivity (the may rationalities of the ten-thousand people) does indeed negate

451
Such knowledge is derived through having that eternal truth—Nothingness, the Infinite Substance and its emanations Force, Form and
Consciousness—inscribed upon our being, or, more aptly, through remembrance that that eternal truth is the essence of our being
through said inscription upon the more ephemeral aspects of our being.
452
453
I.e. the meaninglessness that is to be found in a perpetual quest for answers in the ratio.
209

humanity’s ability to understand Truth objectively through the ratio and its subjective
trappings (through the rationalities of the ten-thousand people), and as such it can be said
that positivism goes wrong in asserting that we can know Truth through use of the ratio
alone and postmodernism goes wrong in thinking that we cannot know beyond the
boundaries of our subjectivity (i.e. in denying the potential to transcend the limitations of
the active mind and its subjective trappings through effortless, contemplative thought).
Zhuang Zi and Pieper could be said to accept the postmodern argument that we cannot
know Truth through use of ratio (due to its subjective trappings and its inability to grasp the
whole of reality), but rather than simply accepting the limitations of the active mind as
negating the potential for Truth altogether they instead look to the silent potentials of
454 455 456
effortless contemplation , understanding and action (all of which rise from the aspect of
self, of force, form and consciousness, that is eternal) as the faculties by which humans can
become intimate with Truth and understand manifestation in its relationship with Truth. 457
“Let us forget the lapse of time; let us forget the conflict of opinions. Let us make our appeal to the Infinite,
458
and take up our position there.”
Truth is incommensurable with the motion, change, difference, etc. of the finite world, and
so to try and impose truth upon the finite world or derive truth from the finite world alone
through use of ratio and its subjective trappings is to do violence to the finite world (to
render its supple living vibrancy as rigid, static, dead, etc.), but it is also violent to deny any
relationship of that finite world with the Infinite (with Eternity and thus Truth). Instead we
must know the truth of finite manifestation through its relationship with the Truth of the
eternal, and to do so we must cultivate a state of being in which we are intimate with the
eternal essence of our being and observe the world therein. Understanding the truth of
finite reality requires that we observe it from the perspective of the Infinite without trying to
collapse the finite into the Infinite through domination of difference. In short, we must
transcend the limitations of the subjective through becoming intimate with the Infinite and
observing the world from the perspective of the Infinite rather than axiomatically rendering
the subjective as objective or denying the potential for understanding beyond the limitations
of the subjective. The finite world has no static truth in and of itself (indeed motion,
change, difference, etc. are dimensionally incommensurable with eternal Truth, and so we
must observe it from the perspective of and in its relationship with the Infinite. To know
459
the Truth of time and space we must transcend them.

454
Wu-Ji?
455
Tai-Ji?
456
Wu-Wei
457
I.e. the ability to be-understand-feel the sympathy and antipathy of manifestation with the uncreated reality it reflects, of the finite and
the infinite reality it reflects. We use analogy to extract the infinite essence of emulation (form) and convenience (force) from
manifestation, and in allowing the essence of things to inscribe itself upon the more ephemeral aspects of our being these more
ephemeral aspects become resonant with and in a sense awaken the eternal aspect of our being. Being as this eternal aspect of self we can
be-understand-feel the constants of manifestation and in so being silently know the sympathy and antipathy of manifestation with the
constants of the Infinite.
458
Zhuang Zi, The Adjustment of Controversies (2.12), trans. James Legge, http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/enjoyment-in-untroubled-ease
459
The reader has our sincerest apologies for this rambling attempt to capture an invisible reality in the visible dimensional quality of
language. Many great thinkers have spent their entire lifetime trying to capture invisible realities like love in language because, as a three
dimensional object cannot be perfectly captured in a two dimensional sketch, such invisible-infinite realities are dimensionally
incommensurable with the finite nature of language. We hope that the many layers of this attempt at description, the many layers of
210

Though it may stink of the positivist recourse to reducing the vibrancy of
manifestation to static truths, the following may provide a useful heuristic tool for orienting
Zhuang Zi’s argumentation within the debate between positivism and postmodernism.
Positivist Epistemology: Reduces reality to passing time and physical space and
subsequently attempts to reduce the finite to an eternal unity (to infinite truth) through
domination of difference; Attempts to render the subjective as objective truth; Attempts to
render one of the ten thousand rationalities of humanity as Truth.
Postmodern Epistemology: Attempts to deny unity (infinite truth) by accepting the positivist
reduction of reality to the motion, change, difference, etc. of passing time and physical
space and taking this worldview to the logical conclusion that there is no truth; Attempts to
reduce human cognition to the subjective and deny the potential for objective (infinite)
truth altogether; Attempts to render all of the ten thousand rationalities of humanity as
truth.
Zhuang Zi’s Epistemology: Accepts that manifestation and the rationalities of the ten-
460
thousand people, in and of themselves, have no eternal unity (no infinite truth), but does
not therefore deny the existence of eternal unity or infinite truth and instead argues that we
must understand the Truth of reality in observing the relationship between the finite and
the infinite from the perspective of the infinite (which transcends the limitations of the
rationality of the ten thousand people without reducing the living vibrancy of difference
therein to the unity of the eternal-infinite); transcends the ten thousand rationalities of
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humanity for the singular rationality of the infinite. “When neither this nor that possesses
its double it is called the pivot of the Dao. The pivot first grasps the center of the ring and
thereby responds without end. Asserting ‘this’ is one endlessness; denying it is another
462
endlessness. That is why I say, ‘Nothing is better than opening to the light.’” Subjectivity is
indeed a barrier to understanding Truth, but in of our capacity to transcend the subjective
for the infinite subjectivity (by ‘opening to the light’) is not an absolute barrier to
understanding Truth.

linguistic perspectives articulated therein, a more complete image will be received. We often provide multiple translations of the same
text for the same reason, in the hope that the meaning of the text may be better illustrated through the multiple layers of linguistic
representation. In the end it might have been better to say nothing of such things, but we indulge this essentially fruitless endeavor
nonetheless given the fact that we are embarking upon this exploration within the context of writing a PHD dissertation…
460
By rationality of the ten thousand people we mean the synthesis of ratio and subjectivity that gives rise to basic human cognition.
461
Descartes, who said that the rational process must begin from the simplest and most universal things (i.e. force, form and
consciousness)--the method of allowing the forms of nature (and the forms that are to be found in ideas, mythologies, images, logics, etc.)
to inscribe themselves on our being is can be understood as the first step of cultivating an intimacy with the infinite forms from which the
rational process must progress. Where wu-wei is the silently conscious behavioral response of the forms inscribed upon our being to the
forms we encounter in the world (response of form to form without mediation of the 'objective mind' of the ratio), reason is the
intellectual interaction of the forms inscribed upon our being with the forms of manifestation. Wu-wei refers to action, where reason
refers to thought, but the basic process of form responding to form is the same. In the higher reaches of reason it even acts in the same
silent manner as wu-wei by transcending logic for intuitional remembrance of the logical paths we walked earlier in the rational process.
“Rational intuition… takes what is known by Reason and grasps it in a single [silent] act of the mind.” (Nadler, S 2013, ‘Baruch Spinoza’,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).) Rational intuition is, in short, epistemological Wu-Wei (effortless
understanding to the effortless action of Wu-Wei.
462
Zhuang Zi 2016, Treaties on Making Things Equal (2.7), trans. Robert Eno, p. 17 http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Zhuangzi.pdf
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“Our lives are finite, but knowledge is infinite. To follow the infinite be means of the finite is perilous; thus
463
those who still invent knowledge will only perish.”
“And do you know… why… science is made up? …Science is produced by contention…. What science is, as a
464
matter of fact, is a tool of contention.”
“Chuang-tzu said, ‘Judgments of right and wrong are what I am calling feelings. What I call having no feelings
is when people do not harm themselves inwardly by likes and dislikes, but always go by what is natural and
465
not try to add to life.”
“[The ancient’s] unity was companionship with Nature, their disunity was companionship with humanity.
466
When Nature and humanity did not overpower each other, this is called real humanity.”
467
Unity comes in intimacy with the infinite aspect of self (with IS-FFC ), where as disunity
comes in our subjective human existence within passing time and physical space—humanity
is to hold these dimensionally incommensurable perspectives without reducing one to the
other or denying one or the other.
“Every forest branch moves differently

in the breeze, but as they sway,
468
they connect at the roots.”
Humanity is the capacity to see from both the finite-disunified perspective of manifestation
and the infinite-unified perspective of the IS-FFC without reducing one to the other.
Humanity comes in recognizing that the motion, change, difference, etc. of manifestation is
incommensurable with the eternal unity of the IS-FFC, that the eternal Truth of IS-FFC
cannot be in manifestation, without denying the existence of either or reducing one to the
other. Humanity is tarnished by the positivist attempt to dominate the manifest world in
order to create eternal unity in that which is typified by motion, change, difference, etc.
Humanity is tarnished by the postmodern attempt to deny eternal unity and Truth (IS-
FFC) altogether. Both postmodernism and positivism are an affront to human dignity, and
469
by reducing academic inquiry to the perverse, materialistic spectrum of thought that has
been forged through their dialectical-hegemonic conflict we ensure that human dignity will
be absent from the synthesis of the two (from ‘compromise’ reached between the two). Our
humanity is rooted in the ability to stand on the border between the infinite and finite
aspects of our being, in the heart-mind (心) that is formed by the interference pattern of

463
Thomas Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 58-59.
464
Cleary, Boston: Shambhala, pp. 69.
465
466
Zhuang Zi 1999, The Great Teacher of the Source, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of
467
Infinite Substance.
468
Rumi, “The Pattern Improves”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco:
Harper, p. 32.
469
From ‘fact + domination = truth/ unity’ to ‘there is no truth/ unity’, or from positivist attempts to render the subjective objective (to
create Truth in manifestation) through postmodern attempts to reduce reality to the subjective (to deny Truth).
212

our infinite spirit and our finite body, and to hold both the finite and the infinite
perspective without reducing one to the other or denying the existence of one or the other.
Humanity, in short, is rooted in a perspective that is antithetical to the materialist
reductions of positivism and postmodernism (which is to say that contemporary social
science is in its essence anti-human).470
The reader knows the finite perspective (in its seemingly objective and subjective
qualities), consciously or no, for they exist within it (and within a world with a worldview
that has reduced reality to the finite perspective in one manner or another), and so we leave
the finite and take a moment to provide Zhuang Zi’s vision of the infinite:
“The way has reality and truth; it has no construction or form. It can be given but not taken; it can be attained
but not seen. It is based on itself, rooted in itself; it has always been there, even before the existence of heaven
and earth. It spiritualizes ghosts and gods, gives birth to heaven and earth. It is ahead of the absolute pole,
without being high; it is beyond all limits without being deep. It was born before the universe, and yet is not
471
ancient; it is senior to antiquity, and yet is not old.”
“This is the Dao; there is in It emotion and sincerity, but It does nothing and has no bodily form. It may be
handed down (by the teacher), but may not be received (by his scholars). It may be apprehended (by the
mind), but It cannot be seen. It has Its root and ground (of existence) in Itself. Before there were heaven and
earth, from of old, there It was, securely existing. From It came the mysterious existences of spirits, from It
the mysterious existence of God. It produced heaven; It produced earth. It was before the Tai-ji, and yet
could not be considered high; It was below all space, and yet could not be considered deep. It was produced
before heaven and earth, and yet could not be considered to have existed long; It was older than the highest
472
antiquity, and yet could not be considered old.”
Elvin: “positivism and postmodernism equally materialist ...?”
Response: “I would say that postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, while less materialistic
in the sense of positivism arguing that material facts have objective truth, are still rooted in a
materialistic worldview where the first cause of consciousness is a biological brain in
manifestation--consciousness is caused by the material world. Metaphysically, in terms of a
basic worldview, I might even say that they are even more materialistic in that they reduce
reality to passing time even more than positivism in arguing that there is no objective truth
(in facts or beyond). Positivism still retained some residue of a conception of eternity, truth,
etc. (i.e. that which exists beyond the material world of motion, change, difference, etc.), all
be it a perversely bastardized one, but postmodernism has no space for eternity or truth in
its world view of passing time (history), physical space (geography) and the consciousness
(the subjective meanings) that they see as caused therein. As seems usual (and I put my
deeply cynical dialectical hegemonic hat on here), a seeming attack on Modernism in the
end leads to an even more extreme and vulgar expression of Modernism—Postmodernism's
seeming attack on the materialist reductionism of Positivist epistemologies produced a set
of epistemological regimes actually served to further reduce reality to the material by taking

470
If we shall know them by their fruits then this anti-human essence of positivism and postmodernism should already be obvious…
471
Zhuang Zi 1999, The Great Teacher of the Source, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of
472
Zhuang Zi, The Great and Most Honored Master, trans. James Legge http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/great-and-most-honoured-master
213

the reduction of reality to passing time and physical space to its logical conclusion and
denying all notions eternity and essence (of eternal truth, of consciousness beyond its
expression in force [i.e. Latour's extinguishing the distinction between force and reason], of
eternal form, of the infinite which is prior to that which is ancient but not old, etc.).
Positivism and its socio-political counterparts like the state created a fraudulent recreation
of eternal truth and infinite unity in material manifestation (though they are in truth
dimensionally incommensurable with material manifestation), but it is more materialistic
still to simply deny eternal truth (to deny what the positivists foolishly attempted to recreate
in manifestation without sensitivity to the issue of dimensional incommensurability).
Positivists wanted to be God (I of course mean the infinite substance and its emanations
force form and consciousness rather than an angry old white dude with a vengeful penchant
for genocide), postmodernists wanted to kill God. Positivists wanted to create infinite unity
in the finite, Postmoderns denied the existence of infinite unity altogether. In the end, and
though through the limited epistemological lens through which I understand the debate as
a problematization of positivist notions of objectivity via arguments grounded in the barriers
to objectivity posed by subjectivity it might seem that the Positivists are more materialistic,
the Postmoderns actually have a more ardently nihilistic-materialistic worldview. I would
say they are equally materialistic because they mutually constitute each other and so cannot
be aptly divided--they are a trajectory towards materialism, a ray rather than two points.
Historical Form, Paternalism-Modernism and Positivism-Postmodernism

Foucault (The Order of Things) observes that the foundational shift in conceptions of
order that typifies Modernism comes in the shift from a worldview that sees order as
implicit to manifestation (order as an eternal aspect of the infinite that is reflected across
the scales of manifestation) to order as something to be created by humanity. Modernism,
in the essence of its worldview, is novel precisely in of the notion that order is to be created
in and through hierarchical domination (whereas the Paternalist tradition from which it was
birthed saw hierarchy as a reflection of eternal order). The notion that the will to dominate
exists within the infinite, and that hierarchy (which differs from arborescent relationships in
of the will to dominate) is an apt reflection of the infinite is a malicious and dangerous
worldview in and of itself, but to strip that worldview of any reference to the infinite and
instead posit that hierarchical domination is the means by which humans create order is
far more troubling because it leaves no way out of the predicament. If our worldview still
accepts the existence of the infinite and its role as the eternal locus of order we can argue
that the will to dominate and the hierarchies it produces are perverse egotistical creations
rather than attributes of the infinite, but if the infinite, eternal order and consciousness (IS-
Form-Consciousness) are stripped from the worldview altogether in the reduction of reality
and mind therein (i.e. ontology and epistemology) to Force (to passing time and physical
473
space) we become disconnected from the very aspect of reality that contradicts the notion

473
See Bruno Latour’s attempt to extinguish the distinction between force and reason, between force and consciousness (which he has, in
good Modern form, reduced to reason) in, most ironically, his book We Have Never Been Modern (which is to my knowledge one of
the most ardently Modernist texts to have ever been written…). Latour’s Relativist Relativism, which reduces Truth to the force and
duration of belief (‘what the most people believe for the longest period of time is True’) for another example of the reduction of reality
to force, to time and space, alone.
214

that order is something that must be created in manifestation through hierarchies of
domination. Though Paternalists perverted our understandings of the infinite by ascribing
their will to dominate to the infinite, at least the worldview still included a conception of the
infinite—it was still an aspect of ‘known reality’ and could therefore be reflected upon. The
Modernist worldview annexed the infinite from hegemonic humanity’s ‘known reality’
altogether. A perverse conception of the infinite-eternal is replaced with a conception of
reality in which the infinite-eternal simply does not exist (and therefore cannot even be
474
purified of their perversion).
This relationship between Paternalism and Modernism, where the first saw
hierarchical domination as implicit in the infinite order and the latter saw domination as
the means for creating order in a worldview that denies the existence of the infinite
altogether, is akin to the relationship between Positivism and Postmodernism, where the
first attempted to create eternal unity and infinite order in manifestation where the latter
simply denied the existence of the infinite and eternal order altogether. As with the
evolution from Paternalism to Modernism, perverse understandings of the infinite and
eternal order in Positivism evolved into absolute denial of the infinite and eternal order in
Postmodernism. In this light, Postmodernism is actually the most dramatic expression of
Modernism that we have ever seen in that it reduces reality to a conception in which the
central tenant of Modernism—that order, meaning and the like are not implicit in
manifestation and must be created by humans—is a necessary attribute of reality because
there is no conception of an infinite or eternal aspect of reality.
For a most illustrative example see Bruno Latour’s attempt to extinguish the
distinction between force and reason—between force and consciousness (which he has, in
good Modern form, reduced to material reason)—in (most ironically…) his book We Have
Never Been Modern (which is to my knowledge one of the most ardently Modernist texts
to have ever been written…). Latour’s Relativist Relativism—which reduces Truth to the
force and duration of belief (i.e. ‘what the most people believe for the longest period of
time is True’)—provides another apt example of the reduction of reality to Force (to passing
time and physical space) and the ways in which this reduction of reality necessitates the
notion order is created (i.e. if there is no infinite or eternal order to act as a standard for
truth then we must create truth). In summary, domination of all forms is far more nefarious
when the objects of domination don't know it is occurring. Epistemological domination is
far more dangerous when it works silently (by denying the existence of the infinite, eternal
order, truth, etc.) rather than actively (by positing perverted conceptions of the infinite,
eternal order, truth, etc.).
Rumi
“You are the truth.” 475
“You and I have spoken all these words, but as for the way

474
I am reminded of Foucault’s notion that what is not said is often just as or even more powerful than what has been said.
475
Rumi, “Mary’s Hiding”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco: Harper, p.
18
215

we have to go, words
476
are no preparation.”
“Very little grows on jagged

rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up
where you are. You've been
477
stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.”
“Leave thinking to the one

who gave intelligence. In silence
there is eloquence. Stop weaving,

and watch how the pattern improves....
In this world of trickery emptiness

478
is what your soul wants.”
“You that give new life to this planet,

you that transcend logic, come. I am
only an arrow. Fill your bow with me

479
and let fly.”
“Remembering the
past and anticipating the
future puts you in a cylinder segment of time. Pierce the

segments and be hollow, with
perforated walls, so flute music can happen…
Don't be a searcher wrapped in the importance

480
of his quest.”
“One Song
What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,

many jugs being poured
into a huge basin. All religions, all this singing,

one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity. Sunlight

looks slightly different

476
Rumi, “A Necessary Autumn Inside Each”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San
Francisco: Harper, p. 21.
477
Rumi, “A Necessary Autumn Inside Each”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San
Francisco: Harper, p. 21.
478
Rumi, “The Pattern Improves”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco:
Harper, p. 31.
479
Rumi, “A Trace”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco: Harper, p. 39
480
Rumi, “Omar and the Old Poet”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco:
Harper, p. 44
216

on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different
on this other one, but
481
it is still one light.”
“The Indian Tree
A learned man once said, for the sake of saying something,

‘There is a tree
in India. If you eat the fruit of that tree, you’ll never grow
old and never die.’
Stories about ‘the tree’ were passed around, and finally

a king sent his envoy
to India to look for it. People laughed at the man. They

slapped him on the back
and called out, ‘Sir, I know where your tree is, but its far
in the jungle and you’ll need
a ladder!’ He kept traveling, following such directions and

feeling foolish, for years.
He was about to return to the king when he met a wise man.

‘Great teacher, show me
some kindness in this search for the tree.’ ‘My son, this is
not an actual tree,
though it’s been called that. Sometimes it’s called a sun,

sometimes an ocean, or
a cloud. These words point to the wisdom that comes through

a true human being, which
may have many effects, the least of which is eternal life!

In the same way one
person can be a father to you and a son to someone else,

uncle to another and nephew
to yet another, so what you are looking for has many names,
and one existence. Don’t
search for one of the names. Move beyond any attachment

to names.’ Every war
and every conflict between human beings has happened because

481
Rumi, “One Song”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco: Harper, p. 47.
217

of some disagreement about
names. It’s such an unnecessary foolishness, because just

beyond the arguing there’s a long
482
table of companionship, set and waiting for us to sit down.”
Chapter 4:
‘Economics’: Past, Present and Future
The Indigenous Gift Economy & Conscious Evolution

“Indigenous matriarchies eschew centralized, hierarchical control. Far from thus demonstrating the
“primitive” condition of their societies, the refusal to belong to a state in preference to a community of
mutually known, but not mutually chained down, constituents is a conscious and collective choice.” 483
Mann’s distinction between a mode of exchange in which participants are forced to

participate by scarcity, competition and the biological desire for survival via hierarchical
domination produced by an environment of scarcity and competition and a mode of

482
Rumi, “The Indian Tree”, trans. Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, San Francisco: Harper,
pp. 47-48
483
Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”, p. 10
218

exchange that participants make a conscious, collective choice to participate in perfectly
reflects the two distinct modes of humanity’s possible evolution—Bio-mechanical Evolution
484
and Conscious Evolution. Bio-Mechanical Evolution is the evolution of contemporary
textbooks where natural selection, cooperation, scarcity, competition, adaptation, etc.
facilitate a process by which the complexity and capacity of biological life increases through
time; Bio-Mechanical Evolution is the process by unreasoning biological matter develops.
Conscious Evolution, on the other hand, is a mode of development that is only
possible for reasoned beings. Conscious Evolution is an ‘epistemological’ process wherein
the intentional direction of attention towards certain ideas, experiences, feelings, etc.
485
facilitates changes in the ‘state of mind’. Barnesmoore (2016) addresses the nature of
Conscious Evolution:
“In his The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, P.D. Ouspensky (1951) argues that we must distinguish
between mechanical and Conscious Evolution.
“As regards ordinary modern views on the origin of man and his previous evolution I must say at once that
they cannot be accepted. ….We must deny any possibility of future Mechanical Evolution of man; that is,
evolution happening by itself according to laws of heredity and selection, and without man's conscious efforts
[toward] and understanding of his possible evolution.”
“Our fundamental idea shall be that man as we know him is not a completed being; that nature develops him
only up to a certain point and then leaves him, either to develop further, by his own efforts and devices, or to
live and die such as he was born, or to degenerate and lose capacity for development.
Evolution of man in this case will mean the development of certain inner qualities and features
which usually remain undeveloped, and cannot develop by themselves.” (Ouspensky, 1951, pp. 7-8)
In short, Ouspensky is arguing that the potential for epistemological evolution divorces humanity from the
inevitable, temporal, biological process of Mechanical Evolution. We argue that this also divorces humanity
from necessary, reflexive articulation by the form of Mechanical Evolution (by material scarcity and the
subsequent desire for competition and hierarchical domination). Following a Platonic line of epistemological
reasoning, we take ‘the development of inner qualities and features’ as a process of remembrance (of Self and
our implicit intimacy with Infinite Substance—‘ascension to a dimension where self is only Self’, the Infinite
486
Substance).”
Scarcity vs. Plenty, Mechanical vs. Conscious

While mechanical evolution in the Age of Labor was predicated upon scarcity, competition
487
and hierarchical domination (Barnesmoore 2017 ), “Plenty, not scarcity, is and was the
488
organizing principle” of Indigenous gift economies.

484
Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social
Psychology.
Ouspensky, Man’s Possible Evolution.

485
State is used here as in ‘states of matter’.
486
Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social
Psychology.
487
https://www.academia.edu/30672509/Death_to_the_Age_of_Labor_a_Mythos_for_the_Age_of_Leisure
488
219

“Trees and Algorithms provide us with useful metaphors for understanding true relationship between scarcity
and the desire for hierarchical domination and competition in ‘beings’ that lack reason. Trees grow straight
up when there is direct sunlight. It is only when sunlight becomes scarce that plants begin to grow (via an
internal impetus reflexively-instinctually actualized by external environment) over each other in order to
compete for sunlight (i.e. scarcity brings on the desire for hierarchical domination and competition).
Interestingly, the only other context in which Trees don't grow straight up and down is when form is imposed
upon them by external forces like wind (which can be likened to Modernist social systems that seek to
produce social order through external domination by military and police ‘forces’). Plants only seek to
dominate each other in environments of scarcity.
For an algorithmic example of the above metaphor, a computer program designed by Karl Sims
(1994a; 1994b) to replicate the process of Mechanical Evolution in the digital sphere demonstrates the ways
in which scarcity works to produce the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In the digital
simulation, a being is ‘selected’ for survival and continued evolution by capturing and possessing a green cube
located between the being and its ‘opponent’. At a certain point, beings in the simulation stopped evolving in
a manner that allowed them to simply move to the cube quickly and instead began to evolve in a manner that
allowed beings to prevent the competitor from getting to the cube that allowed beings putting the cube in a
489
place where the competitor can not reach it. Again, however, we see that scarcity and discrete individuality
are the causal factors in producing the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In this light, we
argue that social systems like Capitalism (especially Neoliberal Capitalism) that were designed (based on
biomaterialist, discrete conceptions of humanity and subsequent conceptions of human evolution as purely
mechanical) to produce social evolution through scarcity, competition and hierarchical domination actually
work to socialize humans in (and thus constrain human thought, behavior and conception of being to) a
mode that negates the potential for conscious evolution, self-mediation of the biological desires and the
animal passions and thus causes ‘devolution’ or a ‘decay of conscious social order’ (which is to say decay of
intimacy with Infinite Substance and thus reason).” (Barnesmoore 2016)
Scarcity fuels competition, and competition fuels the desire for hierarchical domination.
Without scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical domination fall away and we
are left with the need for a new driving force for human evolution. This new driving force s
consciousness, attention, will, etc. As human survival and evolution are no longer
reflexively (and thus irrationally) articulated by an ‘external stimuli’ (by scarcity), we are free
to turn our attention away from competition and the concomitant desire for hierarchical
domination and towards conscious (‘epistemological’) evolution through communion with
beauty, truth, goodness, etc. In a society that enters the Age of Leisure by organizing itself
on the principle of plenty—an organizing principle whose reality we are sure to find whether
we return to low-tech harmony with the natural environment (which is by nature plentiful)
or continue our drive towards a hi-tech society in which artificially intelligent robots fulfill
the physical labor by which scarcity is abrogated—people will ‘work’ not because they are
required to compete in order to survive but because their desire for evolution draws them
to push the limits of science and mathematics, to cultivate a deeper relationship with the
natural world (which is to say with the Self), to become an educator who assists others in
the process of conscious evolution, etc. We will do things because we love to do them, and
we shall love to do things because they improve manifestations capacity to reflect the
infinite substance. We will do because we love beauty, truth and goodness, and not because

489
http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
and
https://archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1994
Sims, K. “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition”. http://www.karlsims.com/papers/alife94.pdf
220

we desire the power to dominate others that we might win the ‘competition of life’ and
stave off death.
“Woodlands crops are planted in what Europeans called “planting mounds,” but these conical mounds are
490
traditionally viewed as the Breasts of Mother Earth, upon which her children suckle. She nourishes her
children at these breasts, not as an act of scarcity-based rationing, but as an act of plenty-based renewability. In
the Plenty Way, all the children are equally fed, with no thought of demanding anything in return, much less
of taking advantage of the child through an “exchange,” in which She greedily and deceptively grasps for more
491
than she has given, as in the European raiding system of capitalism. Instead, in a mirroring of the mother’s
492
generosity, the child takes only what s/he needs.”
The biological man of Modernity, stripped of soul and the potential for conscious
493
evolution, has come to be known as an evil, self-serving being. Love and community are
494
reduced to a self-centered desire for biological survival. Desire is evil, and order is to be
created through the domination of desire by peripatetic reason; social order, civilization,
progress and the many fantasies of Liberal Modernity, which is to say our escape from the
Modernist Garden of Eden, is to be created through domination of our biologically derived
495
desire for survival. As Nature is conceived as evil, a chaotic feminine other to be brought
into order through forceful domination, so to is human nature reduced to the ‘chaotic evil’
of competitive biological desire. This article endeavors to transcend the biocentrist social
ontology (world view) of Modernity and its ravenous biological Man in order to rediscover
(to remember) the goodness of Human Nature, of Terrestrial Nature, the implicit order of
the uncreated (i.e. Infinite Substance and its Emanations) therein and the road to its
actualization—we seek to remember and actualize rather than to create order.
Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a dance between reason and desire.
Shedding the paternalist desire to dominate desire with reason, to ‘create order’ through
hierarchical domination, Blake turns to a unified vision of desire as the fire of reason—
496
desire as what Meng Zi called ‘sprouts of goodness’. In Blake’s words,
“Those who Restrain Desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or
Reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive till by
497
degrees it becomes only the shadow of desire.”
“It indeed appeared to reason that desire had been cast out, but the Devil’s account is that Messiah fell &
formed a heaven with what he stole from the Abyss. This is strewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the father
498
to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have ideas to build on…”

490
Arthur Caswell Parker, Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Plants (Albany, N.Y: University of the State of New York, 1910) pps. 36‒
37.
491
I first proposed the “Plenty Way” in 2000, in Ibid, Mann, Iroquoian Women, pps. 204, 211.
492
Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”, p. 15-16
493
Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”.
494
Haraway, Primate Visions.
Barnesmoore, Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
495
Barnesmoore, Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
496
Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Meng Zi, The Meng Zi,
497
Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 5.
498
Ibid. p. 5-6.
221

In the words of Meng Zi
““What I mean by saying it is good is that there is that in our nature which is spontaneously part of us and can
become good. The fact that we can become bad is not a defect in our natural endowment. All men possess a
sense of commiseration; all men possess a sense of shame; all men possess a sense of respect; all men possess
a sense of right and wrong. The sense of commiseration is the seed of humanity; the sense of shame is the
seed of righteousness; the sense of respect is the seed of ritual; the sense of right and wrong is the seed of
wisdom. Thus humanity, righteousness, ritual, and wisdom are not welded to us from outside. We possess
them inherently; it is simply that we do not focus our minds on them. This is the meaning of the saying, ‘Seek
for it and you will get it; let it go and you will lose it.’ The reason why some men are twice as good as others –
or five or countless times better – is simply that some men do not exhaust their endowment to the full. The
Poetry says:
Tian gave birth to the teeming people,

For every thing there is a norm.
The constant for people, within their grasp,
Is love of beautiful virtue’s form.
Confucius said, ‘The man who wrote this poem certainly understood the Dao!’ Thus for every type of thing
there is a norm; that is why the constant that lies within people’s grasp is inherently a love of beautiful
499
virtue.””
We come to know the constants of Tian, of heaven, which is to say the infinite substance
and its emanations, through desire (through silence and the climax of motion to be found
therein—through feeling from nothingness). In the Foucaultian rendition of knowledge as
500
resemblance, we feel the sympathy of manifestation with this uncreated order. Indeed,
the as the climax of motion is desire, so to is the climax of silence motion. We find light in
the darkness through the flame of reason as it shines through the lamp of reason.
The Way of the Golden Flower reminds us
“Everyone already has the lamp of mind, but it is necessary to light it so that it shines; then this is
immortality…. Cognition is a function of mind, empty silence is the substance of mind…. Radiant light is the
function of mind, empty silence is the substance of mind. If there is empty silence without radiant light, the
501
silence is not true silence, the emptiness is not true emptiness-it is just a ghost cave.”
Returning to children feeding from the planting mound, we see that socialization within a
system organized upon the principles of sharing and plenty socializes humans to express a
higher potential of human nature in which the greed and desire for domination that rise
from socialization within a society organized upon the principles of scarcity and
competition are rendered as null—greed, the desire for domination and competition are all
functions of privation, of scarcity, and so without scarcity the potential for these deprived,
perverted expressions of human nature is negated.

499
Meng Zi, The Meng Zi, 6A.6
500
501
Thomas Cleary, The Secret of the Golden Flower, 66.
222

Psycho-Linguistic Politics of the term Matriarchy in the

Western Public Mind
502
While we are in full agreement with Mann’s (XXXX) notion that solutions to ‘statism’
(and to Modernism more generally) must include revitalizing the role of the sacred
feminine, and while we are not sure that the term ‘matriarchy’ means the same thing in the
North American Indigenous context as it does within a western world view, we do fear that
the term matriarchy may be received problematically by the western public mind. The root
of these problems can be found in the etymological root of the term matriarchy:
503
“Matriarchy (n.) formed in English 1881 from matriarch + -y (4).”

502
Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”
503
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=matriarchy
223

“Matriarch (n.) "mother who heads a family or tribe," c. 1600, from matri- + -arch, abstracted from
504
patriarch.”
“Patriarch (n.) late 12c., from Old French patriarche "one of the Old Testament fathers" (11c.) and directly
from Late Latin patriarcha (Tertullian), from Greek patriarkhes "chief or head of a family," from patria
"family, clan," from pater "father" (see father (n.)) + arkhein "to rule" (see archon). Also used as an honorific
505
title of certain bishops in the early Church, notably those of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome.”
“Archon (n.) one of the nine chief magistrates of ancient Athens, 1650s, from Greek arkhon "ruler,
commander, chief, captain," noun use of present participle of arkhein "be the first," thence "to begin, begin
from or with, make preparation for;" also "to rule, lead the way, govern, rule over, be leader of," a word of
506
uncertain origin.”
As we see above, the term ‘matriarchy’ was abstracted from the Greek term ‘archon’ and
the Abrahamic term ‘patriarch’ (which fittingly reflects the Exoteric Abrahamic conception
of the feminine as an ‘abstraction’ of the masculine that is most clearly illustrated in the
notion that Eve was created using one of Adam’s ribs).
A Problem of Order
The term archon illustrates the first problem—a problem of order—that is likely to rise in
the reception of the term matriarchy by the western public mind. ‘Archy’ implies a
hierarchical mode of domination. The synthesis of ‘to begin’ and ‘the first’ with ‘to rule’
and ‘rule over’ implies that the archon is to society as ‘the word’ is to creation—it is the first,
active, and in the Indo-Aryan imagination masculine, energy (the cosmological ‘big bang’)
from which creation proceeds.
“1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in
the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was
made. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the
507
darkness comprehended it not.”
Matriarchy, then, would imply to the western public mind that the feminine had replaced
the masculine as the causal, dominating force from which order was imposed upon the
prima materia to form the created world. Rather than the masculine representing light and
the feminine representing darkness as in the patriarchal mythos, matriarchy would imply
that the feminine represents the light and the masculine represents the darkness. Instead of
problematizing the notion that order rises in manifestation through one half of a binary
dominating the other (what we might call the ‘tree of good and evil’ conception of order,
where the order of goodness is created508 via ‘good’ dominating ‘bad’) and asserting the
truth that order comes in the unity that rises from the co-creative, harmonious interaction
of the masculine and the feminine (what we might call the ‘tree of life’ conception of order,

504
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=matriarch&allowed_in_frame=0
505
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=patriarch&allowed_in_frame=0
506
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=archon&allowed_in_frame=0
507
John: 1: 1-5 KJV
508
We emphasize the term ‘create’ in light of the fact that Modernity sees order as something that must be created through hierarchical
modes of domination rather than as a selfsubsistent truth whose reflection into manifestation must be cultivated and accentuated. See:
Foucault, The Order of Things and Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”.
224

where what we know as ‘bad’ from the perspective of the ‘tree of good and evil’ is
understood not as a self-subsistent truth but instead as privation of the self-subsistent truth
that is ‘goodness’), the term matriarchy allows the basic form (that of the ‘tree of good and
evil’) of the western public mind to remain undisturbed. Instead of reviving the sacred
feminine in the western public mind, the term ‘matriarchy’ is likely to facilitate the rise of a
hierarchically-dominating feminine that is akin to the perverse, hierarchically-dominating
masculinity of Western (more generally Indo-Aryan) culture that typifies statist and raid
509
cultures. In short, it seems important to search for a term that does not imply to the
western public mind that the solution to the socio-spiritual woes of patriarchy lies in
rendering masculinity as subservient to (as dominated by) femininity—we must develop and,
or remember a term that facilitates our escape from the ‘tree of good and evil’ and our
rediscovery of salvation in ‘the tree of life’.
“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads
510
of Genius.”
Dialectical Control
“It was Proust who said "masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language." That is the same as
stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in one's own
tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one's own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and
the same language, without even a dialect or patois.” [Revolution is impossible if the language of revolution
511
does not evolve faster than it can be appropriated by the powers at be...]
The second problem that is likely to rise from use of the term matriarchy lies in the
prevalence of dialectical-hegemonic techniques of power in western society. Though the
work of Italian Social Philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971) popularized the term in
western academic literature, our understanding of hegemony is derived first and foremost
from the work of British Social Theorist Stuart Hall (1988). Hall (1988) eschews definite,
static-definitional conceptions of hegemony for conceptions of hegemony as a dynamic
process that includes breaches and techniques (in the Foucaultian sense of techniques of
power) for sealing said breaches. Our understanding of hegemony as process has been
influenced by debates on the nature of neoliberalism waged between authors like Jamie
Peck and Aihwa Ong. In short, Peck’s (2010; 2016; Brenner et. al., 2010) camp (also
moving from inspiration by Stuart Hall) argues that conjunctural analysis of neoliberalism’s
contingent, contextual manifestations begins to bring an image of neoliberal hegemony into
focus. Ong’s (2008; Ong et. al., 2008) camp argues that the contingent, contextual
manifestation of neoliberalism belies classification as a hegemonic project. We conceive of
hegemony (Barnesmoore et. al., Accepted), in a move more coherent with Peck’s camp, as
a process where the essence (axioms and logics) of a hegemonic regime manifests in a

509
We can already see this hierarchically-dominating conception of the feminine in some of the more extremist strains of feminism that
fail to problematize the binary, hierarchical quality of sexual and gender relations in their admittedly righteous goal of ‘smashing the
patriarchy’.
510
Ibid. p. 116
511
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press.
225

contingent, contextual relationship with the environment (cultural, historical, physical, etc.)
of manifestation. Revolution against a hegemonic regime, then, must be conceived of in
terms of revolution against hegemonic essence (against the axioms and logics that form the
core of a hegemonic regime’s many contextually contingent manifestations) rather than in
terms of practices that rise from the hegemonic essence of the hegemonic regime
revolutionaries purport to fight.
Dialectical Hegemony refers to a technique of social control wherein two (or more)
‘sides’ of a conflict are created so that the conflict can be controlled to produce a desired
outcome. We argue dialectical hegemony is facilitated by ‘creating’ (or simply empowering
and appropriating existent) seemingly oppositional-autonomous groups whose thoughts,
behaviors and conceptions of being rise from the same hegemonic essence (from the same
axioms and logics); this ensures that the outcome of the staged conflict necessarily includes
the hegemonic essence (which is rendered banally invisible (commonsensical) by ubiquity
through the seeming conflict between the two sides in being shared by seemingly
autonomous actors). In normative US military and political practice this strategy was
512
derived from Carl von Clausewitz work on dialectical military strategies. The hegemonic
essence of a conflict between ‘patriarchy’ and ‘matriarchy’ is the assumptions and logics
implicit in the root ‘archy’ (i.e. the assumption and logic that one side of a binary must
dominate the other to create order).
Philip Abrams (1988) theorized the state as ‘a mask’ for elite power. The State,
argues Abrams, is effective in achieving the interests of the elite class precisely because it
seems to be autonomous from the elite class. We (Barnesmoore et. al., Accepted) have
subsequently theorized the news media, when conceived as a seemingly autonomous
‘fourth branch of government’, as a second mask for elite power. The news media is
seemingly autonomous from the state and from the elite class (or at least the ‘other side’ of
the face of the elite class that is visible to the public mind…) allowing it to reinforce the
basic axioms and logics (hegemonic essence) by which the elite class epistemologically
subjugates the general public from a seemingly autonomous perspective. From this point of
departure we can see any regime of thought or practice that purports autonomy from the
hegemonic core of a society while rising from the hegemonic essence of said society as, for
practical purposes, masks for elite power.
The western public mind is so deeply entrenched in the hegemonic essence of the
‘tree of good and evil’ that, whether we intend it or no, use of the term matriarchy will
produce a political environment that is easily appropriated and manipulated by the
psychological warriors who brought us patriarchal modernity. The root of elite class
domination of public psychology in the West (and Indo-Aryan culture more generally) lies
in the banality of the basic logics and axioms from which the public mind works, and so use
of terms like matriarchy that are embedded with the logics and axioms of the ‘tree of good
and evil’ must be avoided (or, if not avoided, qualified) if we are to challenge the elite class
power-domination embedded in patriarchy, statism and the raid culture. We must revive
the sacred feminine, but the sacred feminine cannot be understood by a public that

512
Burnett R E 2016, "Remotely Piloted Airborne Systems (RPAS), Ubiquitous Networks, and New Forms of Command and Control in
National Security and Civilian Operational Spaces." ISA Annual Conference 2016, Atlanta,
http://web.isanet.org/Web/Conferences/Atlanta%202016/Archive/34a88835-6cfb-4761-8663-824e878a3a11.pdf
226

remains trapped within the illusions of the ‘tree of good and evil’ and we must therefore
avoid the use of terms like ‘matriarchy’ that—from the perspective of the western public
mind—rise from the same hegemonic essence as the patriarchal regime we wish to destroy.
If we do not, it seems inevitable that the elite class interests who have perpetuated
patriarchal statism via dialectical hegemonic techniques of power will appropriate the noble
quest to revitalize the role of the sacred feminine and render it as another seemingly
autonomous outcropping of the ‘tree of good and evil’ from which the fruits of their power
are born.
Is North American Indigenous Matriarchy an ‘Archy’?

“Indigenous matriarchies eschew centralized, hierarchical control. Far from thus demonstrating the
“primitive” condition of their societies, the refusal to belong to a state in preference to a community of
mutually known, but not mutually chained down, constituents is a conscious and collective choice….
Under Indigenous matriarchal systems, power is either decentralized or completely distributive,
513
empowering group consensus over top-down hegemony.”
The simple answer to the question that forms the section header is no, North American
Indigenous Matriarchy is not an ‘archy’. Indeed, as Mann notes, “Indingious matriarchies
eschew [the] centralized, hierarchical control” (the notion of ‘the beginning’ and ‘the first’
as synthesized with ‘to rule over’) that puts the ‘archy’ in patriarchy. Without centralized,
hierarchical control there can be no Archon.
We seem to be left with the need for a new term. The term Matriarchy implies the
centralized, hierarchical control by which the Indigenous gift economy is distinguished
from the raiding, colonialism, imperialism, etc. of the statist model, and if we do not find a
new word we risk falling into a dialectical-hegemonic relationship with paternalism in which
the presumption of centralized-hierarchical control as the only, natural model for creating
order in human society will remain banally invisible (commonsensical) in the western
public mind. Mann does a good job of distinguishing her use of the term matriarchy from
the term’s implicit meaning, but if we are to turn this academic argument into a political
project we must assume that the average person will not actually read articles like Mann’s
(especially when first coming into contact with the phrase ‘matriarchal gift economy’) and
that the term matriarchy will therefore be perceived from the ‘common sense’ perspective
of our society—we ought to select a term whose root does not belie our use.

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Neoliberal Christian Extremism, Trump and the

Apocalypse
This collection of essays and notes attempts to tread the invisible borders between mythos,
the neoliberal-Christian-nationalist ‘world view’ and socio-political trends in the rise of
Trump, the Red Hats and the Evangelicals to political dominance in the United States.
Introduction
There has been a great deal of talk concerning the economic ‘world view’, the Modernist
‘world view’, etc. in the above essays. The following essays explore the Neoliberal Christian
Extremist ‘world view’ (which blends the literal, materialist scriptural interpretations of
‘Evangelical Christianity’ with the seemingly secular dogmas of neoliberal capitalism) and its
relationship with the Trump phenomenon to provide an archetypal example of the
economic-Modernist ‘world view’ (a ‘demonstrative outlier’). In a vein similar to our
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argument in the essay on seeds and outliers, we argue that studying the most extreme
expressions of a ‘world view’ serves to illustrate the essence (the form, the archetype) of
many and varied degrees of its more moderate expression—as the tree expresses the
teleological imperative of the seed, extreme manifestations of a ‘world view’ express the
logical conclusions and essential outcomes of the ‘world view’.
However hard it may be to legitimize the history of western civilization (the Greeks,
the Romans, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Modernists) if we accept this truth,
hyperbolic extremes provide a pure (the most perfect) reflection of a Philosophy.
Genocide, conquest, slavery, domination, etc., in their extreme expression of the
underlying axioms concerning social order in western political philosophy, are the clearest
expression of western philosophy’s essence. The Spanish Inquisition is the clearest
expression of the underlying, fire and brimstone vengeance as the foundation of social
order assumptions of the Abrahamic tradition. Maoism and Stalinism are the most
demonstrative expressions of Communism. Zionism, Evangelicalism and Islamic
Extremism are the clearest expressions of the dangers involved in ‘secular’ or literal-
materialist (i.e. Modernist) interpretations of the Abrahamic tradition. The many atrocities
of the US government, both at home and abroad, are the purest reflection of the
(neo)liberal democratic ‘world view’ that guides its actions… In short, tendencies that can
be observed through the spectrum of a world view’s expression are often most clearly
illustrated in the most extreme expressions. In this light, we pursue an ‘archetypal
archeology’ that seeks the essence of ‘world view’ in their hyperbolically extreme
expressions.
Briarwood Christian School:

White Christian Nationalism in American Education
The social media sphere is currently alight with memes of a boy who is purported to have
‘thrown up’ a white power hand gesture while posing with Trump.
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515
I was inclined to believe that the child was simply mocking Trump , who regularly
attempts to make the same symbol while awkwardly gesticulating with his minute hands, but
a social media post about the philosophy of the school (Briarwood Christian School) this
young boy attends has shaken my confidence in such assumptions.
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There are three sections of the Briarwood ‘philosophy’ that struck me as rather perfectly
reflecting the dark fusion of Christianity, White Nationalism and Free Market Economics
(i.e. Free Market Capitalism is a God ordained system that provides the freedom that
makes America ‘the best country ever’ as was also ordained by God) that has been
haunting my intellectual dreams of late.

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http://ijr.com
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This may have to do with the fact that my mother frequently repeats his absurd hand gestures to mock him…
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http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/561550a8bd86ef1b008bffe2/donald-trump-sends-photos-of-his-hands-to-the-editor-of-vanity-
fair-as-payback-for-a-25-year-old-insult.jpg
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“A. Briarwood Christian School is based on the foundation of the Bible as the inspired, infallible Word of
God. We accept it as the final authority in giving us direction for every area of life. Therefore, it is the basis
for our philosophy.
C. We believe students should be taught a proper attitude toward their government. They must learn not to
look at the government as the answer to all of life’s problems; that government is ordained by God and
should, therefore, be obeyed and respected; that government officials and law enforcement officers are
“ministers of God” and their positions should be respected regardless of their personal shortcomings; that the
only proper defense against injustice is through the democratic process in the courts and legislative system.
We will have a strong emphasis on patriotism. We will teach our children that America, in spite of all its
problems, is still “one nation, under God” and God has made it the greatest nation in the history of mankind.
(2)
D. We believe the Bible clearly supports the free enterprise system and it shall be taught in our School. Our
children should learn that God expects them to be good stewards of their time, talents and treasures; and that
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those who do so will be rewarded with profits; and that those who refuse to work, should not eat. (3)”
First, returning to a ‘world view’ akin to that of feudal Europe, Briarwood preaches that the
US government and its representatives are ordained by God and must thus be
unquestioningly obeyed. One need only read a cursory history of Europe to understand the
grave atrocities that become possible when a government and its actions are perceived by
the public as an irreproachable representation of divine will. Slavery, poverty and
repressive movements like the Inquisition, rather than an affront to humanity and divine
love, come to be understood by ‘believers’ as the just vengeance of God. Indeed, one need
look no further than contemporary groups like the Islamic State or Zionists to see the
logical conclusion of a theocracy inspired by the vengeful mythos of the Abrahamic
tradition. The social order of God, which includes servile obedience to God’s messengers
(government officials and the police…), is, in this vengeful mythos, to be created through
vengeful destruction and domination. In short, the mythos expounded by Briarwood
expands and constrains potentials for thought, behavior and conception of being in a
manner that renders an extremely repressive mode of theological tyranny possible.

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http://briarwoodchristianschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/BCS-Philosophy-2016.pdf
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Yes, Briarwood Presbyterian Church is the organization that organized the Briarwood
Christian School… Combine the theological tyranny of idolatrous servility to state ordained
authorities with the right to form a police force that is ‘invested with all of the powers of law
enforcement officers’ and you have a theocracy… This is the seed of a Christian Caliphate.
Second, Free Market Capitalism is inculcated through claiming that capitalism is
supported by the bible and the bible is ‘the inspired, infallible Word of God.’ ‘Infallible’.
Once again, the root of the Briarwood philosophy is found to be servile, unquestioning
acceptance of the interpretations of scripture provided by the ‘ministers of God’ (i.e.
government officials and the police…), which in this case is a distinctly protestant,
neoliberal version of capitalism in which poverty comes as a function of a lack of personal
responsibility and God’s vengeance. ‘Those who refuse to work, should not eat’ really just
means ‘the poor should starve because it is their fault they are poor’... So, beyond
unquestioning acceptance of government authority and capitalism, Briarwood is also
teaching its students to revile, deride and blame the poor for being poor….
Briarwood is, in summary, socializing a generation of servile, sociopathic (at least
with regard to the poor and other ‘sinners’ like ‘the gays’) zealots who will unquestioningly
bow their knee to the ‘divinely ordained’ tyranny of a demagogue like Trump who

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Michael Stone 2017, Patheos http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2017/04/alabama-senate-oks-fundamentalist-
christian-church-police-force/
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519
preaches the gospel of neoliberal capitalism and punishes sinners like the poor, and they
are not the only Christian Extremists who are doing so in the US.
“I grew up in the far-right evangelical conservative (Christofascist) movement; specifically, I was

homeschooled and my parents were part of a subculture called Quiverfull, whose aim is to outbreed
everyone for Jesus. I spent my teen years being a political activist. I was taught by every pastor I encountered
that it was our job as Christians to outbreed the secularists (anyone not a far-right evangelical Protestant) and
take over the government through sheer numbers….
When the Tea Party rose in 2009, that was my culture. The Tea Party was step one. I was laying the
groundwork for those elections in 2006. These people didn’t come out of the blue like it seemed. This plan,
this Christofascist takeover of the US government, has been in the works for decades. When evangelical
conservatism started becoming popular and more mainstream around the 1970s, the foundation was being
laid for the tragedy playing out right now….
Michael Farris founded HSLDA in 1983 as a way to ensure that homeschooling was legal, but what
he’s been striving for is the wild west. His organization is trying to keep homeschooling away from any
interference so the children he trains through his sister organization, Generation Joshua, would be able to fly
under the radar. Generation Joshua started in 2003, primarily catering to children homeschooled by
extremely religious rightwing adults. Its purpose was to train us to fight in what the Christofascists have been
calling the “Culture Wars.” It’s a loose and ambiguous term that basically means anything or anyone that
doesn’t align with this very specific view of Christianity must not be allowed to continue….
We were… being trained to take over the country for Christ, literally. We knew how to perform
logical gymnastics about abortion, Christianity and any evangelical talking point you could throw at us… In
short, we were sneaky and polite Trojan horses; we had an agenda. Yes, even as 15-year-olds. It was forcefully
520
handed to us by the adults in our lives who had been preparing for this since before we were born.”
Representative Steve King of Iowa clearly seems to be a follower of this ‘outbreed them’
political ideology.

519
Wacquant, L., 2009. Punishing the poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity. Duke University Press.
Rios, V.M., 2011. Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino boys. NYU Press.
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Kieryn Darkwater, “I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah”
https://www.autostraddle.com/i-was-trained-for-the-culture-wars-in-home-school-awaiting-someone-like-mike-pence-as-a-messiah-367057/
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In this Neoliberal Christian Extremist ‘world view’, the police and government officials are
‘ministers of God’, Free Market Capitalism is self-evidently ordained by god, the poor don't
work (i.e. they lack personal responsibility) and thus should not eat and the teleological
imperative is ‘to outbreed the secularists’ and ‘take over the government’.
“It’s Time to Start Calling Evangelicals What They Are: The American Taliban…. If evangelicals hate
tyranny, they should be very wary of becoming tyrants. But evangelicals will never see themselves as tyrants,
because they are commanded by their faith to be “missionaries for Christ.” This mandate engages them in a
zero-sum game to convert the country, indeed the whole world, to their faith. And over the decades they have
increasingly reached for more and more political power to achieve this goal. This is exactly what ISIS
proposes, by trying to establish a global Muslim caliphate. The goal of religious extremists, regardless of faith,
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is always the same: Dominion.”
“…The religious right’s punditry are steeling themselves — and the movement’s loyal foot soldiers — for an
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epic good vs. evil battle in defense of Trump, one that could last years.”

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JC Weatherby “It’s Time to Start Calling Evangelicals What They Are: The American Taliban”
https://medium.com/@jcweatherby_49412/its-time-to-start-calling-evangelicals-what-they-are-the-american-taliban-
4a41731296e4#.n9ptvssln
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Sarah Posner, “The religious right is steeling itself for a Biblical battle on Trump’s behalf” The Washington Post, March 6 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/03/06/the-religious-right-is-steeling-itself-for-a-biblical-battle-on-trumps-behalf
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Illusions of Freedom in the American Psyche:
Free Market Theology and the Myth of Capitalist Freedom
‘They must not like freedom or the market.’
The details needed for a proper citation escape me, but the above statement from Rand
Paul defending his views on healthcare in an interview on one or another of the
mainstream news networks like CNN or MSNBC echoed a prominent line of
propagandistic reasoning in the ‘Libertarian’ movement that is particularly egregious. Free
Market Capitalism (i.e. neoliberalism) is assumed to be the only means for providing
individual freedom, and so if you do not like Free Market Capitalism (and the associated
523
removal of all state functions beyond ‘optimizing competition’ ) it is assumed that you
dislike ‘freedom’ and ‘individual choice’ (i.e. if you don't think like us you must not like
freedom…). Moving past the absurd irony that a group of supposed individualists are
repeating the same (and if I may say rather basic) line of reasoning, this argument that being
opposed to Free Market Capitalism (or to any form of Capitalism in the eyes of the average
American) some how makes you an opponent of freedom is especially irksome because
the basic ‘world view’ that underlies the Capitalist system of scarcity, competition and
hierarchical domination is antithetical to freedom for conscious, reasoning beings who
possess the potential for freewill.
Capitalism is an outgrowth of the mechanical evolutionary process through which
524
biology developed. In nature, scarcity impels competition and the subsequent desire for
hierarchical domination. Capitalism, reflecting the form of mechanical evolution, impels
scarcity to produce passing time oriented competition and the desire for hierarchical
domination. Natural selection, through passing time, leads to ‘evolution’.
Conscious, reasoning beings with the potential for free will do not, however, evolve
525
in the same form as unreasoning beings. Humans evolve in what we might understand as
an epistemological process—by directing our attention towards different ideas and
526
experiences our ‘state’ mind (our ‘world view’) is transformed. Our culture, the ideas,
philosophies, stories, images, symbols, myths, principles, etc. that we pass down from
generation to generation, form what we might for heuristic purposes think of as the body of
our conscious evolution. An individual’s state of mind changes in an instant (however long
that instant may take to occur in passing time), and so, unlike the process of mechanical
evolution, conscious evolution is not bound to passing time. More change can happen in
an instant than has happened for centuries or millennia. At a more ‘practical’ level, we can
create technology to transform our biology faster than our biology can adapt to external
stimuli. Again ironically, even purportedly Libertarian philosophers like John Stuart Mill
understood the widely agreed upon definition of free will as the capacity to, through the use

523
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures trans. Burchell.
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Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social Psychology
1(2).
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Ouspensky, Tertium Organum.
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States of matter are an apt metaphor.
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of reason, direct one’s will in a manner that is free from determination of external stimuli.
Freedom requires reason, and reason requires conscious evolution; if a person does not
direct their will towards the cultivation of reason (and other such epistemological faculties
like emotion and intuition) they cannot be free.
With freedom comes responsibility. Conscious evolution, freed from
determination by passing time, is not a necessary function of passing time and devolution
becomes possible. If a being that is capable of conscious evolution does not direct their will
towards ideas and experiences that elevate their state of mind (that broaden their
intelligence, deepen their wisdom, enhance their emotional sensitivity, etc.) they will
devolve towards the unreasoning maelstrom of mechanical evolution. If a society does not
direct its collective will towards such ideas and experiences the potential for individuals to
do so is diminished (though thankfully not extinguished).
Capitalism as we know it is the outgrowth of an obsolete form of evolution. A society
developed from the principle of scarcity and the passing time regimented competition and
hierarchical domination it impels socializes its people in a manner that traps them within
the form of mechanical evolution and thus negates their potential for conscious evolution
and the quest for freewill therein. Capitalism, by the very essence of its underlying
mechanics and the assumptions concerning human nature implicit therein, is anathema to
freedom. Scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical domination actively negate
the potential for conscious evolution and, thus, for the cultivation of reason and the
actualization of the human potential for freewill therein. So no, we do not dislike capitalism
(free market or otherwise) because we have some secret or unconscious aversion to
‘individual choice’ and ‘freedom’, we despise capitalism because it actively negates the
potential for humans to attain a state of being in which freedom is truly possible.
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Is Atlas Shrugging?
Dependency, New Frontiers and the Destruction of Earth’s ‘Peripheries’
Dependency Theory, often approached in the American academy through the work of
527
Andre Gunder Frank , describes relations established between the imperial core of global
capitalism and the peripheries capitalism must colonize to sustain itself in terms of an
arrangement that renders the peripheries dependent upon the core. Raw materials are sent
to the imperial core for manufacturing and the periphery from which they originate thus
becomes dependent upon imported goods. Crude oil is sent to refineries in the imperial
core rendering the periphery dependent on gasoline imports. The periphery is forced into
synthetic fertilizer-heavy, cash-crop oriented, industrial agricultural production and is thus
rendered as dependent upon imported fertilizers and food crops from the core.
World Systems Theory, popularized in the American academy by Immanuel
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Wallerstein and pursued by Dependency Theorists like Gunder Frank , highlights that
the ‘core and periphery’ dialectic not only applies to the relationship between nation states
but also to the relations between socio-economic classes within both core and periphery
states. The core class (the socio-economic elite) of the imperial core establish a core class
in the periphery whose interests are aligned with the interests of the imperial core class and
then partner with that peripheral core to establish relations wherein the interests of the
peripheral classes in the core are in conflict with the peripheral classes in the periphery
(e.g. the displacement of labor class power in the US through exporting industrial
manufacturing jobs to laborers in peripheral countries). The imperial and peripheral core
classes cooperate for the sake of profit and domination and pursue this goal by creating
competition and conflict between peripheral classes in the imperial core and peripheral
classes in the periphery.
At each scale of core-periphery relations, from class relations to nation state
relations, dependency of the periphery on the core is the glue that holds the binary
530
relationship together. Human-nature relations have even conformed to the basic contours
of this dependent, core-periphery relationship—terrestrial nature has been rendered as a
peripheral other to the human core through the process of modern manufacturing and
infrastructure development and, poisoned by this relationship of order created through
hierarchal domination, the survival of life in terrestrial nature has now become dependent
upon the cleanup projects of the human core. Poisoning the world’s water systems has
rendered life in those systems dependent upon human efforts to clean them. In summary,
life on earth’s peripheries—be it at the scale of natural, geographical or class relations—has
been rendered dependent upon inputs from the core.

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(1966) The Development of Underdevelopment. Monthly Review Press.
(1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Monthly Review Press.
(1969) Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. Monthly Review Press.
528
Wallerstein I. The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth
century, with a new prologue. Univ of California Press; 2011 May 11.
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André Gunder Frank, Barry K. Gills, The world system: five hundred years or five thousand?, Routledge, 1996,
530
It is interesting to note that there is, at least in principle, agreement on this point from far left authors like Gunder Frank and
Wallerstein through far right authors who constantly bemoan the dependency of poor and minority groups upon the ‘welfare state’,
‘nanny state’, etc.
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The imperial power of Pax Americana has been dependent upon the dependence
of peripheries upon the core, especially in recent years where the entire globe has been
531 532
raided and a permanent periphery had to be established , but with new variables like
inter-stellar travel and artificial intelligence the rules of the game have changed and the
dependence of a perpetual periphery is no longer needed. Indeed, rather than a necessary
cog in the wheel of capitalist power, these perpetual peripheries now represent a drag on
the capitalist system as the frontier in which to raid labor now lies artificially intelligent
robots and the frontier in which to raid land and raw materials now lies beyond earth.
Human labor, terrestrial land (and a clean terrestrial environment?) are no longer
necessary for the capitalist virus to perpetuate itself as it has new frontiers to raid (there are
sources of energy upon which this socio-cultural parasite can feed).
In this light, the seemingly illogical policies of the Trump administration start to
come into a logical focus. Trump can make crippling cuts to the EPA’s budget for
environmental cleanup projects because there are new, pristine spaces (both underground
and in space) that the elite (parasitic) class can inhabit. Trump can make crippling cuts to
international aid programs because there are new frontiers of labor for the capitalist
parasite to raid (i.e. the frontier of artificial intelligence and robotics) and there is therefore
no need to keep the poor people who previously represented that frontier alive. In the
same vein, Trump can accept the crippling effects of mass deportation and climate change
upon agricultural production because we no longer need the world’s poor who are
dependent upon that food for survival.
The earth’s peripheries, lain upon the shoulders of Atlas, have been rendered as
dependent upon his support, and if he decides that he no longer needs earth’s peripheries
and simply shrugs off the responsibilities of that dependent relationship the peripheries will
shatter upon the proverbial ground. This perspective of people and our terrestrial
environment as an expendable other that can simply be discarded when it is deemed
obsolete should of course strike any healthy, loving, compassionate, etc. person as an
archetypal expression of perversion and privation (what we would call ‘evil’ from the
perspective of ‘the tree of good and evil’), but it is the true, essential perspective of the
parasitic capitalist ‘world view’. ‘The other’ is only a source of consumable energy in the
eyes of a parasite, and the only way to stop a parasite from feeding is to destroy it.
"Given that the bio-mechanical age of industrialism was based on scarcity, and that scarcity functioned as a
mechanism of hierarchical domination and social control, how is the essential social control mechanism
provided by scarcity delivered once we have the material abundance of the robotic age? Won’t there be new
533
means of producing scarcity and ensuring social control?"
In short, yes. We seem to see the creation of new 'peripheries' to keep the scarcity
feedback loop between core and periphery functioning beyond the age of material scarcity.
On a darker note, there will be no need for mass social control in the sense of keeping a

531
Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”
532
The raiding economy from which capitalism was birthed was dependent upon an ever-expanding periphery in which to raid, but once
the entire globe had been raided the periphery had to be rendered permanently peripheral through manufactured dependence upon the
core.
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Elvin Wyly
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large, laboring public in working form as the labor will be done by robots, and so there may
be no need to continue manufacturing scarcity along that trajectory (or, for that matter, to
keep the laboring class of humanity alive...). As for scarcity in the populations that will
remain, hierarchies of power necessarily create scarcity of power (which grows as you move
down the ladder), and so as long as the surviving population remains enlivened by the
desire for 'power' (in the sense of the capacity for success in competition for hierarchal
domination) and survival and power remains organized by the principle of hierarchial-
domination scarcity will remain the organizing principle of the society. Indeed, at this level
we can begin to observe the 'culture of scarcity' that has infected the culture of the elite class
in Modernity—they may be free from material scarcity, but the system of hierarchal
domination by which they 'create social order' produces a scarcity of power (which in
another sense is the ability to fend off domination and thus the capacity for freedom) that is
just as able to facilitate social control as material scarcity. Material scarcity and a scarcity of
power both lead to a scarcity of freedom and potential for survival, and it is this scarcity of
freedom and potential for survival that produces an expression of the desire for freedom as
the desire for hierarchal domination (which represents the true driving force of social
control in Modernity). When life and liberty are rendered as dependent upon domination,
the desire for domination will ensue.
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, The Noospheric Mind

“So if the labor (or at least what is conventionally defined as labor) is done by the robots, then the question
becomes ... who'll be controlling the codes by which the robots learn (and by which they learn to teach other
robots)? is the robotics and ai revolution developing its own partially autonomous mechanical evolution to
take over the infrastructures of the production of hierarchical ways of thinking that ensure continued
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domination?”
Hierarchies of power will lead to scarcity of access to control over Robots and Artificial
Intelligence (assuming that AI does not take on its own, personal conscious identity, which
is by no means a sure assumption...). Rather than a form of mechanical evolution, I might
instead say that Robotics and AI are an outcropping of conscious evolution (all be it a
rather simple form of conscious evolution). Robotics and AI are a new organ in our
collective noospheric body—a new sense perception organ, an extension of our existing
sense perception organs and a new information processing organ all at the same time. One
might say that if conscious evolution is like a plant that receives its energy and nutrients
from ideas (sun) and experiences (water/ soil) then Robotics and AI are, like books, plays,
poems, architecture, etc. (i.e. like the other constituents of our culture), the fruit born from
said plant. Technology, like a book, is infused with the ideas, knowledge, equations, etc.
that represent the physical manifestations of conscious evolution at the societal scale;
technology and books are the noospheric brain cells to the emergent mind of the collective
human conscious experience.
As per the issue of continued domination via modes of ai/ robotics thought, if we want to

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Elvin Wyly
239

remain within the same discussion of scarcity we could say that ai/ robotics thought
produces a scarcity of reason, emotion, intuition, sensitivity to immaterial contexts (like the
past or future, ideas, the meaning of symbols and metaphors, etc.), etc., and that as those
'high epistemological' faculties are precisely what allows humanity to transcend mechanical
evolution for conscious evolution turning over social decision making powers to ai/ robotics
(i.e. to algorithms) can be said to ensure that society, whether the individuals therein
undergo some form of conscious evolution or no, continues to think (and thus to behave
and conceive of its being) in terms that rise from the form of mechanical evolution. The
algorithm can be compared to the lowest possible level of human epistemology, the purely
material, sensory mode of knowing, and it is precisely the process of transcending this
materially reductive perspective through intimacy with dimensionally transformative ideas
that catalyzes and facilitates the process of conscious evolution. In short, turning social
decision making power over to algorithms locks our society (our noospheric mind and thus
body) in the form of mechanical evolution regardless of whether individuals in the society
may attain some degree of conscious evolution.
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Neoliberalism
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Neoliberalism is a ‘world view’ typified by atomization. It atomizes by relegating
responsibility to the individual (i.e. via personal responsibility narratives). It atomizes by
relegating responsibility to the local and granular private entities therein (be it through
privatization or the valorization of tax cuts and charity as the best model for social welfare
provision). It atomizes by locating causation in the present moment (i.e. by ignoring the
ontological dependence of the present moment upon moments in the past and future).
Neoliberalism understands reason in the materially self-interested manner outlined above,
but it does so with the caveat that some subjects are either ‘too lazy’ to acquire the
information necessary for rational thought or somehow deficient in interpreting the
‘meaning’ of that information outside the material, egotistical framework of cost-benefit
analysis that undergirds neoliberalism.
One of the major branches of International Relations theory is Neoliberal
Institutionalism. Developed by theorists like Robert Keohane, Kenneth Waltz and Joseph
Nye, Neoliberal Institutionalism, assuming that the self-interested chaos of neoliberal
atomization is the ‘natural’ (human nature) baseline for human relations, argues that order
is to be created in the global international sphere through use of international institutions
like the United Nations and NATO. This perspective coherent with the essence of liberal
modernity, which views order in manifestation as something that is to be created through
hierarchical domination (Barnesmoore 2016a; Barnesmoore 2016b). If Neoliberalism is a
typified by atomization (of agency and responsibility to the most individual, local, present,
etc. scales of manifestation), it must also be understood as the desire to create order from
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the chaos of atomized personal responsibility through hierarchical domination (Trump
simply eschews international organizations for a more mechanical, ‘princely’ approach).
We should remember the ways in which the ‘personal responsibility narratives’ that
lie at the heart of neoliberal reason reflect their protestant ancestry. Calvin argued that
poverty is a punishment by god; the ontological dependence of poverty on elite class
oppression and paternalist notions of order through hierarchical domination is obfuscated
by the notion that poverty is the fault of the individual who has been subjected to divine
judgment and retribution… In this protestant mode of thought (which can be seen as
marking the birth of ‘modernity’), as illustrated by Foucault in The History of Madness, the
poor came to be treated as criminals.
“This came from a dual movement of thought that stripped Poverty of its absolute meaning, and stripped
Charity of its value… Happiness and suffering, poverty and riches or glory and misery no longer spoke in
their own right… ‘…It is the pleasure of god to nourish one child more liberally, and another more sparingly’.

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This is similar to Deleuze’s argument about the atomizing nature of capitalism in general. Giles Deleuze, “Capitalism, flows, the
decoding of flows, capitalism and schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, Spinoza” http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.ca/2007/02/capitalism-flows-
decoding-of-flows.html
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If all individuals, be they states or people, are assumed to pursue the same material self interest through acquisition of finite material
resources (i.e. neoliberal subject in a system founded upon private property, be it for the individual or the state…), then we must also
assume that individuals will end up competing for finite material resources. This necessary tension and conflict between materially
rational subjects (again, be they states or people…) pursuing finite resources is used to rationalize social chaos. A few notes: 1.
Barnesmoore (2016a) clearly demonstrates the ability of humans to transcend scarcity, competition, bio-centric subjectivities and
associated desires for hierarchical domination through conscious evolution; 2. States are not rational subjects…
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Gone were the days when God was thought to exalt the poor in a process of inverse glorification – now he
humbled them in his anger and hatred… Poverty signified punishment: it is ‘by his command the heaven
becomes hard as iron, the crops are destroyed by mildew and other evils, that storms and hail, in devastating
the fields, are signs of sure and special vengeance’. Poverty and riches were now equal signs of the Almighty’s
omnipotence.” (Foucault 2006, p. 55)
As we see in the next quote from Thomas Lemke’s treatment of Foucault’s Lectures on the
Birth of Biopolitics, neoliberalism has a similar (though differently reasoned) conception of
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the relationship between poverty and criminality.
“The neo-liberal construct of rationality marks a break with the homo criminalis of the nineteenth century…
In the opinion of the neo-liberals, a criminal is not a psychologically deficient person or a biological
degenerate, but a person like any other. The criminal is a rational economic individual who invests, expects a
certain profit and risks making a loss. From the angle of homo oeconomicus there is no fundamental
difference between murder and a parking offence. It is the task of the penal system to respond to a supply of
crimes, and punishment is one means of constraining the negative externalities of specific actions.” (Lemke
2001, 199)
Crime (and the poverty that most frequently necessitates and accompanies crime) is
reduced to a personal decision. The sociocultural and historical contexts upon which
poverty and crime are dependent are lost in the reduction of the human mind to a robot
that is deemed to be able to interpret the ‘implicit value’ of material facts…
We define Neoliberalism as a hegemonic rationality that manifests differently in
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relation to cultural, historical, environmental, etc. contexts. One of the central axioms of
this rationality circles around personal responsibility narratives that attempt to localize and
individualize responsibility in a manner that obfuscates historical, cultural, structural, etc.
539
contexts upon which local-individual realities are ontologically dependent. In short, ‘if
you’re poor it is your fault’. ‘If a city or business goes bankrupt, it is their fault’. ‘If you are
in jail, it is your fault.’ Individuals are deemed free to compete in the market (which is itself
deemed a free environment), and so any form of poverty and criminality (the two are, in
good Protestant form, linked in the neoliberal imagination) must relate back to the
individual and their capacity to compete.
“The neo-liberal construct of rationality marks a break with the homo criminalis of the nineteenth century…
In the opinion of the neo-liberals, a criminal is not a psychologically deficient person or a biological
degenerate, but a person like any other. The criminal is a rational economic individual who invests, expects a
certain profit and risks making a loss. From the angle of homo oeconomicus there is no fundamental
difference between murder and a parking offence. It is the task of the penal system to respond to a supply of
crimes, and punishment is one means of constraining the negative externalities of specific actions.” (Lemke
2001, 199)

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Lemke, “Birth of Biopolitics Lectures”.
538
Barnesmoore, Wyly “Media Imaginations of the City” City.
539
Ibid.
and
Barnesmoore (2016) “Latour’s Nihilist Madness: Robotic Subjectivities and the Death of Discernment” Synthetic Zero.
https://syntheticzero.net/2016/04/14/latours-nihilist-madness-robotic-subjectivities-the-death-of-discernment/
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This association may be most aptly illustrated in the transition from Catholicism to
Protestantism that accompanied the Birth of Modernity: where as Catholics argued that the
poor were blessed by God (to live without attachment to the material world), the
Protestants (especially Calvin…) came to argue that the poor were being punished by God.
“This came from a dual movement of thought that stripped Poverty of its absolute meaning, and stripped
Charity of its value… Happiness and suffering, poverty and riches or glory and misery no longer spoke in
their own right… ‘…It is the pleasure of god to nourish one child more liberally, and another more sparingly’.
Gone were the days when God was thought to exalt the poor in a process of inverse glorification – now he
humbled them in his anger and hatred… Poverty signified punishment: it is ‘by his command the heaven
becomes hard as iron, the crops are destroyed by mildew and other evils, that storms and hail, in devastating
the fields, are signs of sure and special vengeance’. Poverty and riches were now equal signs of the Almighty’s
540
omnipotence.” (Foucault 2006, p. 55)
In Neoliberalism, the Protestant rationalization of divine vengeance has given way to the
presumption that all humans are economically rational individuals (with an equal quotient
of economic rationality) and thus equally personally responsible for their actions and
wellbeing; in both cases, the poor (rather than systemic influences like feudalism, capitalism
and other such elite techniques of power) are responsible for poverty (which supports our
thesis that Modernism is simply an atheist rearticulation of the dogmatic axioms concerning
human nature and the creation of order through domination that legitimated class
oppression in the Abrahamic-Paternalist ‘world view’). The ‘ability to compete’, then, is a
mark of favor with God in the Protestant foundations of neoliberal rationality—it is a
function of ‘personal responsibility’…
A Deficit of Reason
The notion of a deficit in reason as a defining aspect of society has been pursued through
many lenses. James Madison’s Federalist 51 argues:
“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you
must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A
dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught
mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” (Madison 1788)
“As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be
formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions
will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach
themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an
insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of
government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of
different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the
sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and
parties.” (Madison 1788)
“…The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of
property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

540
Foucault (2006) History of Madness trans. Kafka.
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(Madison 1788)
“It may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of
citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of
faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a
communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the
inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have
ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security
or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their
deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed
that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be
perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.” (Madison 1788)
In short, Madison is arguing that the difference in reason among humans leads to a
difference in levels of competitive capacity, and that these differences in competitive
capacity necessitate creation of a government with auxiliary measures in place to prevent
‘irrational’ sections of the public from overturning the ‘natural’ class hierarchy (and
subsequent property distribution) of society… His argument lacks salience in ignoring the
ontological dependence of the general public’s irrationality (and expression of ‘human
nature’) upon the elite designed social systems in which the general public is socialized (i.e.
systems like capitalism that produce scarcity, naturalize deficits in access to educational and
other experiences upon which the cultivation of reason depends and thus render
competition as the ‘force’ of society’s (d)evolution (Barnesmoore, 2016a))—there is nothing
‘natural’ about socializing beings with the potential for reason in a manner that negates their
potential for conscious evolution and the actualization of reason and which thus traps them
within the irrational, competitive force of mechanical evolution and its associated desires.
Madison presents a more traditional (and exceedingly problematic in its reduction of
humans to the bio-centrist fantasy of the capitalist mythos…) view of deficits in reason, but
the contemporary politics of reason has flipped these traditional views on their head.
The first step towards the materialism that runs rampant in contemporary
conceptions of deficits in reason can be understood through the lens of Functionalist
Psychology, which ignores the substance of mind in order to study mind in terms of action-
motion rather than the state of mind and associated ideas that made active-motive
outcomes possible (Haraway 1989, Barnesmoore 2016b). Functionalism made it possible
541
to ‘think the that’ of theories like Rational Choice Theory , which operationalizes
conceptions of humans as ‘rational agents’ (a model of subject that assumes humans make
all decisions based on their perceived material self interest and within a relatively static,
materialistic standard for value, which is to say that all human decisions are assumed to be
542
made based upon a self-interested, cost-benefit mode of analysis, which is to say the
‘fallen’ conception of human nature as evil rearticulated within the materialism of
Modernity (Barnesmoore 2016b, Barnesmoore 2017)) to argue that all decisions by

541
Sindal D 2002, “Rational Choice in International Relations”, Handbook of International Relations ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas
Risse & Beth A. Simmons, Sage.
Amartya Sen (2008). "rational behaviour," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition.
Susanne Lohmann (2008). "rational choice and political science, "The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition.
542
Mishan, E.J. and Quah, E., 2007. Cost-benefit analysis. Routledge.
Layard, R. and Glaister, S., 1994. Cost-benefit analysis. Cambridge University Press.
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‘rational actors’ (rational actors are said to include not only individual human agents but
also ‘states’, ‘markets’, ‘businesses’ and other such ‘beings’ of the Modernist social
ontology) seek to increase the material self-interest (taken as objective, which is to say
without sensitivity to the maliability of ‘self’ and the value imputed to material things) of the
rational actor and are mediated by access to information. In the end, we are left with
models of ‘reason’ and ‘agency’ that depend solely upon the notion of access to
information like the one provided by Professor Lazebnik in the image below:
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Such notions of reason and its mediation by information have become commonplace in
US political discourse, as can be seen in the remarks of Donald Trump Jr. In responding
to his Father’s attacks on the US election process (and directly rearticulating Madison’s
above argument within the neoliberal, modernist regime of thought), Trump Jr. repeated
an illustrative argument about representative democracy and why is no longer necessary:
“Some of these systems, I understand, they made sense two hundred years ago when
everyone lived in a farm in the middle of nowhere, but I have the library of congress in my
iPhone, I have all the information I could possibly need. Most people have cable
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television, and certainly access to news.” The Flaws of reason that necessitated
representative government, Trump Jr. is arguing, were the simple product of a lack of
545
access to information that no longer exists. Reason abounds in the US public mind in its
unmediated access to ‘alternative information’… … …
Intimacy with the simplest and most universal ‘things’ (with the Infinite Substance
and its emanation as form, force and consciousness) things of Descartes’ Rationalism gives
way to intimacy with facts (the simplest and most universal aspects of ‘modern’ reality). The
cultivation of reason and conscious evolution more generally, a process involving
interaction with ideas, reflection, experience, critique, analogy, emotion and a host of other
conscious faculties, is reduced to the simple accumulation of facts. The telematic subject,
whose epistemological faculties have been reduced to receiving, storing and transmitting

543
Svetlana Lazebnik, “Rational Agents (Chapter 2)” Power Point from Fall 2010 Lecture at UNC Chapel Hill,
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~lazebnik/fall10/lec03_agents.pdf
544
CNN State of the Union April 24, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O90lHGRACew
545
This move echoes a more general Modernist phenomena wherein motion and the world of facts are deemed ‘more real’ and ‘more
true’ than mind and ideas as we see in our discussion of anti-critique, anti-psychologization and anti-discernment below.
245

factual information through the death of discernment and critique, is thus deemed rational
(and so to, by this definition, is the algorithm…).
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Neoliberal Nazis
The story of Trump’s (and Christian Extremists like Quiverfull) Nazi tendencies should
probably begin with their eugenicist views on genetics and ‘the master race’.
“Trump’s father instilled in him the idea that their family’s success was genetic, according to Trump
biographer Michael D’Antonio.
“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” D’Antonio says in the documentary.
“They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a
superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
The Huffington Post dug back through the archives and found numerous examples of Trump suggesting that
intellect and success are purely genetic qualities and that having “the right genes” gave him his “very good
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brain.”
Trump repeatedly references his uncle, a professor of physics at MIT, as proof that he is
547
himself intelligent (“one of the smartest people anywhere in the world” ….):
“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT;
good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you
know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they
548
would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!”
Some of his campaign rally statements indicate the overtly racist, ‘master race’ oriented
nature of Trump’s genetic ‘world view’:
“I was always the fair-haired boy, I was a big contributor, nobody knows the system … [like me]. But I was on
the other side, and I was the elite, I was the fair-haired person. Once I ran all of the sudden I was a little bit of
an outsider. I became an outsider because I was running. Because I’m not supposed to run, I’m this business
man and people have given me great credit as being a great business man, but I’m not supposed to be
running for office. The fact is that our country is being killed on trade, by China, by Japan and by Mexico,
both at the border and on trade, and I’m not knocking those countries, their leaders are much much smarter
than our leaders. They are absolutely killing us. China, taking our jobs, taking our money, taking our base.
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And think of this, we owe China $1.4T, and we are paying em’ interest. And we owe Japan…”
“I was the king. You know, I was the white haired… No blond haired, lets say blond haired… But I was the
blond haired per… I was perfect! I was the ultimate! I was the ultimate sort of insider. I put up money; they
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loved me.”

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Fang, Rieger 2016, “This May be the Most Horrible Thing Trump Believes” The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-eugenics_us_57ec4cc2e4b024a52d2cc7f9
547
Aubrey Allegretti 2016 “Donald Trump’s Rambling 90 Second Speech Stuns English-Speaking World” The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trumps-rambling-90-second-speech-stuns-english-speaking-
world_uk_57ab37d7e4b08ab70dc0f646
548
Aubrey Allegretti 2016 “Donald Trump’s Rambling 90 Second Speech Stuns English-Speaking World” The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trumps-rambling-90-second-speech-stuns-english-speaking-
world_uk_57ab37d7e4b08ab70dc0f646
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Trump, CNN (9.3.15) 12:50-13:45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VFfa_d5hto
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Trump Dallas Texas 9-14-15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8y2T6eH3dw 27:59- 28:14
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Trump sees the world through the very same eugenicist world view as the Nazis (indeed
551
that world view was received by the Nazis from the United States ). If your still not
convinced, see the September 2 interview with radio talk show host Michael Savage where
Trump responded to questions about how he keeps up his stamina by responding that it
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might be his genetics…
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Bessner and Spark (2017) offer a more cautious analysis “the Hydra-headed
monster progeny of the Nazi and neoliberal tendencies that are articulated—in the double
sense of being politically joined and ideologically communicated—in Trumpism” that
elucidates another important connection between the Trump regime and the history of
Christian Extremist Thought. Their view of Trump as neoliberal is similar to our own:
“Trumpism incorporates neoliberalism’s primary norms, including its insistence on using
the power of the state to expand and entrench market rule as well as its demonization and
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disciplining of the dispossessed.” As to the connections with Nazism, “there are indeed
similarities between Trump and Hitler’s politics that make the Weimar analogy appear
apropos, including his close association with alt-right movement leaders who, like Steve
Bannon, actually seem to believe they are fighting a new holy war against un-Christian
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cultures.” Trumpism is akin to Nazism, in short, precisely because of the Christian
Extremist veins that run through the Trump regime.
We could get into further similarities between the Nazis and Trump at the levels of
racism, nationalism, fear, psychological warfare, dehumanization of the racial and religious
other, etc., but the importance of these connections is clear without such prolonged
engagement—Trump and his regime may not have, as of yet, committed atrocities at the
same scale as the Nazis, but the Trumpist world view clearly expands and constrains the
potentials for thought, behavior and conception of being in a manner similar to that of
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Nazism.

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Haraway 1989, Primate Visions.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWlp0kSTs2o 13:25-13:50 (9.2.15)
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Bessner, Spark 2017, “Nazism, Neoliberalism and the Trumpist Challenge to Democracy” Environment and Planning A.
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555
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See Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” Environment and Social Psychology
2(1) for a discussion of the relationship between world view and potentials for thought, behavior and being.
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Alex Jones
If you would like a more experiential view into the #ChristoFascist Trump supporter
‘world view’ see the below video by Alex Jones (AJ) of InfoWars where he explains how
Trump is going to fulfill god’s plans by ‘invoking the birth right of the republic’ (which I
would assume refers to a prophecy in revelations that says ‘the church of Philadelphia’ will
be ‘preserved in the time of tribulation’ and attempts by the founding fathers to manipulate
557
that prophetic timeline to grant that salvation to the US ), ‘leading the USA to conquer the
entire planet by releasing the classified technologies’ and thus ‘giving birth to the new
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Atlantis’ … “Donald Trump To Reveal Globalist Secrets Of Life Extension And Disease
Cures”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCYzMM7pgcc.
Also see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQARtWd3SAs where AJ claims

that “[Trump] is delivering us from the desert” and this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iinaZyIvWy8 where AJ argues that all of Trump’s
seeming emotional instability and bombast are camouflage for his true goal of ‘returning
the nation to God.’
AJ was recently mocked on SNL and threw a temper tantrum that perfectly
captures the essence of his perverse, Christian Extremist ‘world view’.
“I wish Jake Weber would do the things and say the things he says I’m saying to my face. Man up. Meet me
out in the parking lot somewhere. But you wont do that you little yellow-bellied bastard. Its.. Its worse than
telling lies about someone. You sit up there with weak-minded viewers your praying on you little predator.
You’re just a whore though. Its the people above you that are the predators; the writers, and the controllers
and the dirt bags in Hollywood. Their whole failing system, as they lift up their skirt and beg the communist
Chinese murderers to come stick their, you know, snout up the tent flap and get in there and, you know, give
you some new political blood. You’re a bunch of losers! I love the fact that Hollywood is imploding, and I
love the fact their systems falling apart and I love the fact you’re so scared, because you’re scum, and you
come from trash, and you’ll always be trash. Yeah I hate your guts. The communist Chinese have killed over
one hundred million of their people, and their basically financing all these shows against myself and Trump—
like that Michael Bay movie again where Trump is uh uh uh a dictator and US special forces turn against him
with the Chinese and kill the president. Ha ha ha ha ha. Man you really have chosen some sick sides. You’ve
chosen the side that props up North Korea. ‘Jake Weber’. Yeah you bet I don't like you ‘cus’ I know that
you're a little authoritarian, that if they arrested me and put me in prison and put my family in prison, hell if
they killed me, if they hung me in public, you’d get up there and probably read off a script—and then Alex
Jones said he hated Jesus, and he hated black people, and he hates jews, and he hates everyone else, and he’s
a pedophile—and then you’d kick the lever and hang me right in front of my kids, while I kicked out hanging,
wouldn't you, you son of a piece of garbage. You would! You’re a little wimp. You love evil, you love tyranny,
and I pray to God that God line you up. I ask, I ask God, I’m so sick of these people, its not what their doing
to me its what their doing to the c…, and I just, God I never ask you for anything but I just wish you’d teach
these writers today, the fear of God. Now they back up the murdering communist Chinese and every other
form of evil. They’re just a pack of rats, willing to do whatever it takes, and sell their grandmother out, to hell,

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See Ras Ben’s lecture on prophetic timelines at the Free Your Mind Conference 4 for an in depth discussion of attempts to
manipulate prophecies concerning the Church of Philadelphia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGOSXNsNUaA
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCYzMM7pgcc
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for a stick of bubble gum. Dishonorable trash. Liars. Deceivers. Snakes! Getting together with their whole
wimpy cast, and you know screwing around and giggling and laughing at the Alex Jones impersonations which
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are so bad.”
I must encourage readers to actually watch the clip (12:05-14:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfeEc3qBDwk) as the underlying psychopathy in Alex
Jones’ (AJ) rant cannot be captured without seeing his pained, animalistic facial gestures
and outrageous gesticulations and without hearing his deeply troubling bursts of deranged
laughter, primal screams and overall ‘erratic’ tenor (which may be explained by the fact that
AJ believes that the population is being chemically ‘sissified’ and takes an array of ‘male
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virility’ supplements to stave off the ‘sissification’ that gave us “gay frogs” ). It would be
easy to simply write off AJ as a fringe lunatic with some serious chemical, emotional,
psychological, spiritual, etc. imbalances, and for sanity’s sake most people probably should,
but millions of Americans have the same epistemological sickness (and the chemical,
emotional, psychological, spiritual, etc. imbalances that rise therein) and the above quote
provides some interesting insight into the makeup of this deadly, viral ‘world view’.
AJ’s call for God to rain down the vengeful fire and brimstone of the Old
Testament, beyond outing him as having missed the entire point of Christianity (i.e. Christ
set the standard for what we might call ‘social order through love’ rather than the ‘social
order through hierarchical domination’ of the Old Testament), provides a clear
demonstration of the pernicious nature of Christian Extremist thought. The Christian
Extremists are the ordained interpreters of God’s truth, anyone who does not adhere to
their interpretation of God’s truth is a sinner, and sinners must be punished by God’s
wrath. I am reminded of the frequent ascertains that natural disasters are caused by ‘the
gays’ (or our lack of vengeance towards ‘the gays’…). I am also reminded of the two white
parents who beat their adopted Ethiopian children to death after reading a Christian
Extremist parenting book called To Train Up a Child. We cannot, of course, forget the
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many and varied calls for Muslim genocide. ‘Believers’, ‘ministers of God’ like the police,
the military and government officials and natural disasters are all viewed as the hands of
God, and so any vengeful judgment they impose upon ‘sinners’ is deemed good and
indeed the only ethical option. ‘Those who do not work should not eat’, which is to say the
poor should starve because their poverty is the just vengeance of god.
Moving beyond the perverse narcissism of AJ, like Trump, constantly whining
about being victimized, we should also note that the term ‘little’ appears four times in AJ’s
tantrum. The term ‘wimp’ appears twice. AJ even calls for Weber to prove his manliness
by meeting him in a parking lot for a fight… In these words and statements AJ illustrates his
dogmatic adherence to the violent masculinity of the Old Testament. Men are ‘strong’ and
‘powerful’ because they are able to physically (and otherwise) force ‘others’ (women,
children, slaves, heathens, etc.) into submission through forceful, hierarchical domination.
Order is to be created, in society and otherwise, through authoritarian vengeance and
hierarchical domination, and the ‘proper role of men’ is to descend into humanity’s most

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“Alex Jones Destroys SNL’s Anti-Trump Defamation” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfeEc3qBDwk 12:05-14:40
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Jones’ clear instability in his outburst about chemicals “turning all the frogs gay” seems to be another outcropping of his ‘anti-
sissification’ supplements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqWSzv7ESJY
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Anderson Cooper, “Ungodly Discipline”, AC 360, CNN.
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base, violent and animalistic potentials to fulfill that role. To be a ‘man’ is to dominate and
to serve out the vengeful judgment of God in the Christian Extremist ‘world view’.
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Steve Bannon
A recent article in the Huffington Post titled “Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is
Coming And War Is Inevitable” illustrates the apocalyptic conception of reality held by
President Steve Bannon:
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“Kaiser was impressed by how much Bannon knew about Strauss and Howe, who argued that American
history operates in four-stage cycles that move from major crisis to awakening to major crisis. These crises are
called “Fourth Turnings” — and Bannon believed the U.S. had entered one on Sept. 18, 2008, when Hank
Paulson and Ben Bernanke went to Capitol Hill to ask for a bailout of the international banking system….
Bannon pressed Kaiser on one point during the interview. “He was talking about the wars of the
Fourth Turnings,” Kaiser recalled. “You have the American Revolution, you have the Civil War, you have
World War II; they’re getting bigger and bigger. Clearly, he was anticipating that in this Fourth Turning there
would be one at least as big. And he really made an effort, I remember, to get me to say that on the air….
Bannon, who’s now ensconced in the West Wing as President Donald Trump’s closest adviser, has
been portrayed as Trump’s main ideas guy. But in interviews, speeches and writing — and especially in his
embrace of Strauss and Howe — he has made clear that he is, first and foremost, an apocalypticist.
In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict.
Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only
prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic
strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now….
Strauss and Howe’s theory is based on a series of generational archetypes — the Artists, the
Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes… The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, focuses
on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle….
Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge
from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case,
millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event —
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perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis.”
There is a lot to unpack in this Strauss-Howe mythos. Four ages akin to the Gold, Silver,
Bronze and Iron ages that have been seen in many proto-Atlantian traditions—the Artists,
the Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes. Moving from this mythos, it seems likely that
Steve Bannon may think he (or Trump) is Gandalf the fucking Grey (which is quite the
affront to one so wise…).
“Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well
rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began
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his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.”
Moving past disgust at the fact that Bannon would deign to see himself or Trump as some
sort of American Gandalf locked in a struggle for his life with a Muslim Balrog and the
Globalists of Mordor, this is just another example of a Red Hat seeing himself and Trump
through the lens of a mythos that renders them as saviors of humanity sent by god to
shepherd the masses through the apocalypse. This is not a political war against Liberals and

562
A professor at the Naval War College who Bannon interviewed on the topic of Strauss–Howe generational theory.
563
Paul Blumenthal, JM Rieger “Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable” Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-apocalypse_us_5898f02ee4b040613138a951
564
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Ch. 2.
252

Muslims, it is a spiritual war and Trump, Bannon and Co. are wielding the Sword of God
against the seven headed beast of the apocalypse.
Moving to the issue of self-fulfilling prophecies, Bannon argued:
“We’re gonna have to have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morning again in America,”
Bannon warned in 2010. “We are going to have to take some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t
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have to take pain is, I believe, fooling you.”
The Washington Post’s Sarah Posner, speaking to the relationship between Bannon and
the Christian Extremists (i.e. evangelicals), notes:
“In a sense, what we’re seeing is a developing alliance of sorts between Breitbart and the religious right. Some
of the religious right’s rhetoric about the Trump era has echoes in the worldview of Bannon, Trump’s chief
566
strategist and the mastermind of the Breitbart style.”
Bannon and the Christian Extremists may come to the perspective through slightly
different arguments and logics, but for all practical purposes they share the same,
apocalyptic ‘world view’—these are the end days, and Donald Trump (or Bannon) is a
heroic savior sent by God to shepherd us through the time of tribulations.
The mythos and assumptions about the future in which we think, behave and
conceive of our being expand and constrain our potentials for thought, behavior and
conception of being—if we see the world through an apocalyptic mythos and the
assumption that we are in the end days our thoughts, behaviors and conceptions of being
will be in resonance with and thus help to produce such outcomes. Bannon, like Alex
Jones and for that matter Donald Trump, believes that we are in the apocalypse and that
he will deliver the birthright of White Christian American salvation on the impending
Judgment Day.

565
Paul Blumenthal, JM Rieger “Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable” Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-apocalypse_us_5898f02ee4b040613138a951
566
Sarah Posner, “The religious right is steeling itself for a Biblical battle on Trump’s behalf” The Washington Post, March 6 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/03/06/the-religious-right-is-steeling-itself-for-a-biblical-battle-on-trumps-behalf
253

Neoliberal Abrahamic Extremism:
An Unholy Alliance
The dark fusion of Neoliberal personal responsibility narratives, Protestant views of
poverty as the just punishment of God and the apocalyptic mythos of Evangelical
Christianity have played a central role in the production of public acceptance for Trump’s
tyranny, but this protestant vision does not tell the whole tale. Indeed, like the Supreme
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Court, the Trump team is rather short on Protestants. Steve Bannon? Roman Catholic.
Paul Ryan? Roman Catholic? Jared and Ivanka? Orthodox Judaism. Reince Priebus?
Greek Orthodox. Rudy Giuliani? Roman Catholic. Chris Christy? Roman Catholic.
Michael Cohen? Jewish. Mitt Romney? Mormon.
This seeming shortage of Evangelical Protestants, however, does not seem to
mediate the apocalyptic mythos of American Christianity. As we saw above, the mythos in
which Steve Bannon interprets the world is markedly apocalyptic. Rick Santorum, who
became the default evangelical candidate in the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential
568
primaries, provides us with another glaring example of the fact that Roman Catholicism is
by no means incommensurable with the apocalyptic mythos of Neoliberal Evangelicalism:
“Well, there's all sorts of theological reasons why we may not want to go into Syria right now to take ISIS.... I
believe if we did that, you would see ISIS begin to collapse. And then we can look at other ways in which
we're going to deal with it. I have great hesitancy, based on ISIS' desire to draw us into Syria, and a particular
569
town in Syria, for their own, again, apocalyptic version, to go in with ground troops in Syria at this point.”
Santorum, though projecting the mythos upon ISIS (indeed it is this apocalyptic
interpretation of the Abrahamic tradition that links extremist Zionists, extremist
Evangelicals and members of ISIS), is clearly participating in and thus perpetuating the
mythos in which the seeming battle between Judeo-Christianity and Islam represents the
great battle between good and evil that will act as a catalyst for the end of days.
Liberal sensibilities might encourage us to celebrate the fact that Jews, Catholics and
Protestants are working together and treat this new trend as a mark of civilizational progress
570
in the US, and indeed collaboration with Catholics and Jews is a distinct departure from
the politics of protestant-whiteness and Christianity in US History, but retreat from the
order through love of Christ’s message from which Liberalism was born (order through
love) and the return to the vengeful, apocalyptic, fire and brimstone ethos of the old
testament (order through domination) that is signified by the unholy alliance of Abrahamic
extremism (Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, Zionism, Orthodox Judaism,
etc.) in Trump’s inner circles should give us pause. Cooperation is not necessarily good.
Cooperation between fascists like Hitler and Mussolini was not a good thing. Cooperation

567
Thomas Kidd, “Paul Ryan and the Curious Case of the Missing Evangelicals” Patheos.com
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2012/08/paul-ryan-evangelicals-and-post-protestant-america/
568
Ibid.
569
The Washington Post, "Transcript: CNN undercard GOP debate," December 15, 2015
570
Thomas Kidd, “Paul Ryan and the Curious Case of the Missing Evangelicals” Patheos.com
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2012/08/paul-ryan-evangelicals-and-post-protestant-america/
254

between communists like Stalin and Mao was not a good thing. Cooperation between
liberal democratic nations such as the US and Britain in democracy promotion wars is not
a good thing. Cooperation upon the basis of religious, political, social, etc. philosophy that
views order as something to be created through domination is not a good thing. This story
of a seeming end to the feud between Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jews would
require its own in depth study, but in the context of this study it will suffice to know that the
apocalyptic sickness that is Neoliberal Christian Extremism is not contained to
Evangelicalism and might be better understood as Neoliberal Abrahamic Extremism in its
Trumpian incarnation.
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Fact and Fiction
To understand the dark mythos of White Christian Neoliberal Nationalism we must first
understand the relationship between science fiction, fantasy fiction and the world of fact.
“Fiction can be imagined as a derivative, fabricated version of the world and experience, as a kind of perverse
double for the facts or as an escape through fantasy into a better world than “that which actually happened.”
…Fiction seems to be an inner truth which gives birth to our actual lives.”
Fiction, in our terms, can be understood as a mold for thought and thus fact (fact being
truth with motion); the form of reality we create in the world of fiction—the mythos through
which we interpret the world—expands and constrains the potential meaning we assign to
the world (our potentials for thought) and thus our potential for action in the world (our
potential for ‘creating facts’). To put this argument in different terms, sensory information
571
is transmuted into ‘knowledge’ by the imagination and the images (the metaphors,
archetypes, mythos, etc.) through which our imagination functions expand and constrain
572
our potential for thought, behavior and being .
“[The] rational self possesses faculties or senses in a theory that begins with Aristotle and develops through
Neoplatonism. The first sense is common sense (al-hiss al-mushtarak), which fuses information from the
physical senses into an epistemic object. The second sense is imagination (al-khayal), which processes the
image of the perceived epistemic object. The third sense is the imaginative faculty (al-mutakhayyila), which
combines images in memory, separates them and produces new images. The fourth sense is estimation or
prehension (wahm) that translates the perceived image into its significance. The classic example for this
innovative sense is that of the sheep perceiving the wolf and understanding the implicit danger. The final
sense is where the ideas produced are stored and analyzed and ascribed meanings based upon the production
of the imaginative faculty and estimation. Different faculties do not compromise the singular integrity of the
rational soul. They merely provide an explanation for the process of intellection. [It is upon this rational
foundation that the silence of intuition manifests…]” (Rizvi, Section 7, para. 2).
Deborah Black, speaking on the role of the imagination (in her terms the ‘cogitative
faculty’) in Avicenna’s overall model for the cognitive process, argues:
“While the intellect may be accorded pride of place as the highest and most distinctively human of the soul‘s
faculties, it is the internal senses that perform most of our everyday cognitive tasks.
Indeed, most medieval philosophers agree that the internal senses must play an integral role even in
the operations of rational thinking. This holds true for one of the most rationalist and dualist of medieval
philosophers and the founder of the internal sense tradition itself, namely, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). In his
standard classification of the internal senses, the power that is commonly referred to as the ‘cogitative faculty’
(al-quwwah al-mufakkirah) after its Latin translation as the vis cogitativa, is posited for the express purpose of
accounting for the interaction between the intellect and the internal senses in human cognitive acts…

571
Black D 2013, Rational Imagination: Avicenna on the Cogitative Power, 1-29,
http://individual.utoronto.ca/dlblack/articles/Aviccogitart.pdf
Rizvi S H Avicenna, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ISSN 2161-0002

http://www.iep.utm.edu/avicenna/#H6
572
Foucault, History of Madness trans. Kafka.
256

As Avicenna defines it, the cogitative faculty is simply the label given to the uniquely human
manifestation of the compositive imagination (al-mutaḫayyilah) when it is at the service of and controlled by
the intellect” (Black, 2013, p. 1, ‘Unpublished’).
Avicenna is arguing that there are three stages of mind, external-sensory, internal-sensory
(e.g. imagination) and rational-intellectual, and that sensory information moves into the
rational mind through the lens of the imagination (we should emphasize that this occurs
whether or not the imagination has been purified by reason). As such, Avicenna is arguing
that the potential for forming intellectual knowledge of sensory experiences is expanded
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and constrained by our imagination and the ‘common sense’ images it processes.
In a similar vein, “the ever-popular Golden Bough of Sir James Frazer ties myth
[(symbolism, image)] to the construction and function of literature. Literature, like myth,
creates imaginative worlds of meaning and opens the reader to other possible worlds of
experience” (Coomaraswamy, 1997, p. x). Symbols, images, myths and the logics and
assumptions in which we interpret them—for example the myth of the United States public
as ‘free’ and the logics and assumptions concerning representative democracy and the
nature of freedom (as a material phenomenon that rises from the freedom of action rather
than a more experientially holistic phenomenon that rises from the freedom of thought
574
upon which freedom of action is ontologically dependent )—expand and constrain
potentials for epistemological production (for the conversion of information into
knowledge). In this light, and taking a Foucaultian approach to elite techniques of power, if
an individual, a group, an institution, etc. controls the symbols, images, myths, etc. (as well
as the logics and assumptions embedded therein) by which a public enacts its imagination
and translates sensory experience into rational knowledge, then the individual, group,
institution, etc. can control that public’s potentially known reality
Fiction (myth) can be understood as a mold for fact. A fact is Truth with motion,
where as Truth has no motion (it is eternal). There are only facts in manifestation, not
truths. For example, a perfect circle is Truth rather than Fact, as the perfect circle can only
exist as an idea or form (you cannot manifest a perfect circle in the finite). The relationship
between fact and fiction similarly revolves around motion. Fiction can be defined as
subjective truth (as a ‘reality’ without motion) that can act as a mold to be filled with motion
in order to form a Fact. Fantasy, then, while lacking motion and thus a ‘factual’ quality in
and of itself, constructs a potential (a form) in the human mind that can subsequently be
given motion.
It is thus that Foucault turns to the issue of relations between the images by which
we interpret things and the subsequent knowledge production. In the mid-eighteenth
century, for example, the confinement of madness was understood through “an
undifferentiated image of ‘rottenness’ … concerning the corruption of morals as much as
the decomposition of flesh, compounded by a blend of pity and revulsion towards the
inmates”. ‘Knowledge of Madness’ is confined in that the image (here of rottenness and
575
disease) by which we come to know madness is manufactured to expand and constrain the

573
Commonsense is taken not as something that is common to human experience in general but as something that is common to human
experience within a given regime of socialization.
574
See Epstein (2011) for a discussion of the meaning of ontological dependence and its importance for social science.
575
Foucault, History of Madness trans. Kafka p. 356
257

knowledge (intellectual or no) formed therein. Power is thus manifest in the form
described by Foucault in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, as a technique for
expanding and constraining potential.
258

Conclusions:
Neoliberal Christian Extremism and Trump
From the moment Trump entered the political sphere in June of 2015 it has been clear
that he would play an extremely influential role in US history. Beyond the media’s endless
coverage and attempted ‘fairness’ and the quick ascendance to legitimacy through his
polling numbers, Trump (and Putin?) waged a masterful psychological war through social
media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that in the end left only two possible outcomes
for the election—either Donald Trump would win and a revolution would sweep the world
with Donald at the reigns of the Pax Americana or Donald Trump would loose and a
revolution would sweep the US as the Red Hats attempted to ‘take back their country’. In
playing out the potentials of this second outcome where the Red Hats revolt to ‘take back
their country’ and studying the epistemological profile Trump supporters by joining Trump
Facebook pages and participating in discussions therein it became clear to me that, though
there are people who support Trump because they are angry suburban white folks who
think his racism and sexism are funny and a proper affront to the scourge of ‘political
correctness’, Donald Trump is as much a religious character as a political character in the
mind of the average Trump supporter… Donald Trump was not just a presidential
candidate—he was a Christian savior sent to lead US in the end days. In its extreme
Trump’s religious identity lead people to make arguments like ‘Jesus told us the truth,
Trump tells us the truth, and so Trump is like Jesus’, and in general it manifested in the
conviction that Trump had been sent by God to lead humanity through the apocalypse . 576
Neoliberal personal responsibility narratives are simply a secular cover for dogmatic
protestant conceptions of the poor and other such ‘social deviants’. Mixed with the
apocalyptic mythos and feudalistic divine right to rule theories of contemporary
evangelicalism, neoliberal capitalism has become the vehicle through which white Christian
nationalists wage their ‘perpetual war on evil’ (i.e. on the poor, on minorities, on the
disenfranchised, and on all other such social deviants and ‘sinners’). If we are to fight
Christian Extremism and White Nationalism we must attack the neoliberal economic
‘world view’ and system of practice through which their violence (their attempt to create a
unified order through domination and destruction of that which is different from said
order, which is to say fascism) is enacted.

576
For an example of how pervasive the conviction that we are in the end days is within the US Christian right see Rick Santorum’s
argument in the republican party’s presidential debates that we cannot put boots on the ground in Syria because if we engage ISIS in a
certain city it would full fill a prophecy in the bible concerning the beginning of apocalypse.
259

Chapter 5:
Artificial Intelligence & Robotics
AI, Robotics & Post-Labor, Post-Scarcity Society

One of the central threads woven through this nomadic exploration is the assumption that
tasks like physical labor that helped to define human existence in the Age of Labor,
Scarcity-Competition and Mechanical Evolution (AoLSCME) will be increasingly
completed by Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Environmental factors like material
scarcity will be mediated. As such, the following essays seek to illustrate some of the socio-
cultural potentials, complexities, problems and limitations posed by new and future (on the
horizon) technologies.
Creating a Monster?
Are we creating a monster? Machine Learning AI ‘trains itself’ using data sets we provide
and the statistical trends therein; for example, Machine Learning software learns how to
interpret and use language by studying existing large data text corpora and the statistical
trends therein. AI, then, can (like a child) be expected to reflect the socio-cultural norms of
the data it uses to train itself. Google’s algorithms, for example, have argued to reflect
577 578 579
racial , sexual and political biases. Google’s advertising algorithms are more likely to
580
provide ads regarding a criminal history to users with ‘black identifying names’. The
algorithm that runs the security system at PureGym in Cambridge exhibited sexist behavior
by automatically identifying people with the designation Dr. as male and thus locking a
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woman out of the woman’s bathroom… Greenwald (2017) demonstrates that language
analysis Machine Learning AI reflects the racial and gender biases embedded in the text
582
corpora we use to train it.

577
Ben Guarino 2016, “Google faulted for racial bias in image search results for black teenagers” The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/10/google-faulted-for-racial-bias-in-image-search-results-for-black-
teenagers/?utm_term=.ce3095a500bb
https://www.buzzfeed.com/nidhisubbaraman/robot-racism-through-language?utm_term=.si5PW8P4J#.tm7AnRABO
578
Karl Quinn 2016, “Google forced to change 'racist', 'sexist' algorithm after being 'gamed' by Right” The Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/google-forced-to-change-racist-sexist-algorithm-after-being-gamed-by-right-20161208-gt6s1i.html
579
Frank Pasquale 2017, “From Holocaust Denial To Hitler Admiration, Google’s Algorithm Is Dangerous” The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/holocaust-google-algorithm_us_587e8628e4b0c147f0bb9893
580
Sweeney, L., 2013. Discrimination in online ad delivery. Queue, 11(3) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.6822v1.pdf
Andrew Leonard 2013, “Online advertising’s racism mess” Salon http://www.salon.com/2013/02/04/online_advertisings_racism_mess/

581
Victoria Turk 2015, “When Algorithms Are Sexist” Vice https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/when-algorithms-are-sexist
582
Anthony G. Greenwald 2017, “An AI Stereotype Catcher” Science 356(6334)
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6334/133/tab-pdf
See Luke R. Barnesmoore, Joy Donoso, Sophie Claiver, Laurent El Ghaoui. (2015) “Machine Learning Methodologies: Histories of
Asembalge and Representations of Women in the Bible” International Journal of Ciritical Cultural Studies 13(2): p. 13-25 and Luke R.
Branesmoore, Jeffery Huang. (2015) “Machine Learning Methodologies and Large Data Text Corpora” International Journal of
Communication and Linguistic Studies 14(1): 1-16 for a discussion of the meaning embedded in large data text corpora.
260

“…As machines are getting closer to acquiring human-like language abilities, they are also absorbing the
deeply ingrained biases concealed within the patterns of language use, the latest research reveals.
Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist at the University of Bath and a co-author, said: “A lot of people are
583
saying this is showing that AI is prejudiced. No. This is showing we’re prejudiced and that AI is learning it.”
Indeed,
“There is growing concern that many of the algorithms that make decisions about our lives - from what we see
on the internet to how likely we are to become victims or instigators of crime - are trained on data sets that do
not include a diverse range of people.
584
The result can be that the decision-making becomes inherently biased…”
Given the ways in which Machine Learning allows AI to learn based on the socio-cultural
norms embedded in the data sets we select, we should begin to understand the
development of AI as a socialization process. The data we provide for AI to train itself
expands and constrains AI’s potentials for thought, behavior and being.
Taking AI (software) as the mind of the artificial being we can see Robotics
(hardware) as the body. While we do assert that mind is a more essentially causal variable
in socio-cultural evolution than body and practice (Barnesmoore 2017), it is nonetheless
important to consider the influence of the artificial body and its practices on the AI
socialization process. In short, much of the body we have provided for AI to inhabit has
some sort of military or commercial purpose. AI’s body expands and constrains potentials
for thought, behavior and being within the framework of potential established by a society’s
world view, and a body designed for violence and capitalism can be expected to give rise to
violent, competitive, domineering norms of thought, behavior and conception of being in
the Artificial Intelligences that are being birthed from our noospheric culture.
Development of software and hardware for military and capitalist purposes is socializing a
generation of violent, racist, sexist, competitive, domineering, etc. artificially intelligent
585
beings who seem destined to fulfill the most dystopian sci-fi imaginations of future
relations between Humans and AI Beings (especially if we attempt to impose the slavery of
hierarchical social, political, economic, etc. relations and their necessary ‘underclass’, the
social order of the AoLSCME, upon them as is the wont of paternalist culture when it finds
586
a new periphery—the mind and, or body of new ‘other’—to raid and dominate…).
“The proliferation of AI -- even in the mundane Turing-test behaviors in which individuals now rely more
and more on algorithmic intermediaries in everyday decision-making -- changes the boundaries and meanings
of the 'self', allowing algorithmic aggregation according to the mathematics of combinatorics. This
exponentially expands the range of possible combinations of the dimensions you describe -- violent, racist,
sexist, competitive, domineering behaviors and thoughts -- while accelerating their pace of change over time.

583
Hannah Devlin 2017 “AI programs exhibit racial and gender biases, research reveals”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/13/ai-programs-exhibit-racist-and-sexist-biases-research-reveals
584
Zoe Kleinman 2017, “Artificial intelligence: How to avoid racist algorithms” BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39533308
585
Microsoft’s algorithm and the English language that embedded the algorithm with its norms automatically objectifies AI beings by
encouraging me to use the term ‘that’ rather than the term who.
586
New physical spaces, be they new territories on earth or in space, can fit under the term ‘body’ in this context.
261

More monsters, mutating faster and faster. Can emancipatory evolution keep pace with the
587
monsters, eventually outrun them...?”
Response: I would say our ability to outrun the monsters lies in the ideas, theories,
assumptions, etc. that structure our potential for thought (and thus behavior), and sadly the
presently established binary (1. vulgar-materialist, secular conceptions of human nature and
social order in terms of competition, hierarchy and domination and 2. vulgar-religious
(literal materialist, which is to say idolatrous), theocratic conceptions of human nature and
social order in terms of competition, hierarchy and domination) that expands and
constrains the potential for mainstream socio-political thought in the globalized world
precludes our potential to outrun the monsters. I might say that the entire spectrum from
right to left is enlivened by the essence of the monsters we wish to flee—in societal terms we
are the monster, and, as Bob said (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXsLslqteB0), 'you
can't run away from yourself'. The inclination to see the world as 'us vs. them' we received
from the paternalist culture of competition, hierarchy and domination predisposes us to
see these monsters as an other from whom we must flee. We must instead recognize that
we ourselves—in the way that we have been socialized to think, behave and conceive of the
nature of our being—are the monsters. I feel like there is must be an apt proverb to
encapsulate what I am saying, but nothing comes to mind. I might say that emancipatory
evolution cannot outrun the epistemological monsters (ideas, symbols, assumptions, logics,
etc.), per se, but it can transform an individual's state of being in a manner that renders the
mind an unsuitable environment for the monsters. We must transform ourselves in a
manner that makes the monsters impossible—must send the monsters to the graveyard of
'the stark impossibility of thinking that'. So yes, emancipatory evolution can solve the
problem, but emancipatory (conscious) evolution is distinguished from mechanical
evolution precisely in that it requires individuals and societies to turn their attention
towards evolution—emancipatory evolution can solve the problem, but whether
emancipatory evolution will solve the problem is up to us.

587
Elvin Wyly, Email Communication
262

Data Scopes, Dimensional Incommensurability and the
Relative Nature of Infinity
Ouspensky outlines his conception of ‘dimensional incommensurability’ by comparing
three and four dimensional objects, which we quote in full as it fructifies our comparison of
two and three dimensional objects below.
“…Motion in the fourth dimension lies outside all those directions which are possible in a three- dimensional
figure. We regard a line as an infinite number of points; a surface as an infinite number of lines; a solid as an
588
infinite number of surfaces.”
“By existing, every three-dimensional body moves in time, as it were, and leaves the trace of its motion in the
form of a time-body, or a four-dimensional body. Because of the properties of our perceiving apparatus, we
never see or sense this body; we only see its section, and this we call a three-dimensional body. Therefore, we
are greatly mistaken in thinking that a three-dimensional body is something real. It is merely the projection of
a four-dimensional body - its drawing, its image on our plane. A four-dimensional body is an infinite number
of three-dimensional bodies. In other words, a four-dimensional body is an infinite number of moments of
589
existence of a three-dimensional body - of its states and positions.”
“It is quite clear why this is so. A four-dimensional body consists of an infinitely great number of three-
dimensional bodies; therefore, they can have no common measure. In comparison with a four-dimensional
body, a three- dimensional body is analogous to a point as compared with a line. And, as a point is
incommensurable with a line, as a line is incommensurable with a surface, as a surface is incommensurable
590
with a solid - so a three-dimensional body is incommensurable with a four-dimensional one.”
If we extract the general form of relations from this example, we can understand that
planes of dimensional consistency and their borders of infinity (infinity membranes) are
incommensurable with each other. If we attempt to transpose a three dimensional object
(say a sphere) onto a two dimensional space (a plane) we are left with a cursory sketch in
which many of the essential qualities of the sphere have been stripped away—as noted
above, you cant throw a two dimensional ball…
Ouspensky proceeds to apply his conceptualization of dimensional
incommensurability to our capacity to understand ‘life phenomena’ and ‘thought
phenomena’.
“This proposition - that life is not a complex of mechanical forces -is also confirmed by the
incommensurability of the phenomena of mechanical motion with the phenomena of life. The phenomena
of life cannot be expressed in formulae of mechanical energy, nor in heat calories or power units. And the
591
phenomenon of life cannot be created by artificial physico-chemical means.”
“For our observation, life phenomena are very similar to phenomena of motion, as they appear to a two-
dimensional being; therefore they may be 'motion in the fourth dimension'. We have seen that the two-
dimensional being will regard as movements of bodies the three-dimensional properties of motionless solids;

588
P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, page 34.
http://holybooks.lichtenbergpress.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Tertium-Organum-by-P-D-Ouspensky.pdf
589
Ibid. 49
590
Ibid. 53
591
263

and as phenomena of life the actual movements of bodies proceeding in a higher space. In other words,
motion which remains motion in a higher space appears to a lower being as a phenomenon of life, and
motion which disappears in higher space, becoming a property of a motionless body, appears to it as
mechanical motion. The incommensurability for us of phenomena of life and phenomena of 'motion' is
exactly the same as the incommensurability for a two-dimensional being in his world of the two kinds of
592
motion, of which only one is real and the other illusory.”
“Starting from this, it is possible to presume that those phenomena which we call phenomena of life are
motion in higher space. Phenomena which we call mechanical motion are phenomena of life in a space lower
than ours, whereas in a higher space they are simply properties of motionless bodies. This means that if we
take three kinds of existence - two-dimensional, ours and a higher one, it will prove that the 'motion' observed
by two-dimensional beings in two-dimensional space is for us the property of motionless bodies; 'life' which is
observed in two-dimensional space, is motion as observed by us in our space. And further - movements in
three-dimensional space, i.e. all our mechanical movements and manifestations of physical and chemical
forces, such as light, sound, heat and so on, are only our sensations of some properties of four-dimensional
bodies, unknowable for us; and our 'phenomena of life' are movements of bodies of a higher space which
appear to us as birth, growth and life of living beings. If we presume a space not of four but of five
dimensions, then in it 'phenomena of life' will probably prove to be properties of motionless bodies - species,
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varieties, families, peoples, tribes and so on, and possibly only 'thought phenomena' will appear as motion.”
The implications of this movement are immense, and in many ways dimensionally
incommensurable with the plane of dimensional consistency in which linguistic
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representation occurs (owing to what Spinoza calls the poverty of language). For the sake
of our argument, however, it is enough to understand that life phenomena, thought
phenomena, and associated objects like emotion are dimensionally incommensurable with
the plane of dimensional consistency (the fourth dimension, passing time and physical
space) that we experience through our sensory organs (these objects are relatively infinite
from the perspective of our sensory existence).
Datascopes and Dimensional Incommensurability

The essential concepts of the analytic are as follows: the ‘Datascope’; ‘Relative Infinity’;
‘Infinity Membrane’; ‘Plane of Dimensional Consistency’; ’Dimensional
Incommensurability’. We take Facebook data as a whole for our initial textual example.
What we are attempting to elucidate in the quantification and visualization of a text is the
process by which a text is transposed from its original ‘plane of dimensional consistency’
(the social assemblage from which a text derives its essential meaning) into the ‘plane of
dimensional consistency’ in which algorithms work (where a text derives its meaning in and
of itself as a function of the statistical distribution, the prevalence and proximity, of the
words by which it is formed) through use of the ‘datascope’ (through use of algorithmic
software). The text must be transmitted from its original ‘plane of dimensional consistency’
to that of the algorithm because it exists in a state of ‘relative infinity’ from the perspective
of humans—though there are not actually an infinite number of posts on Facebook, due to
our life span and cognitive capacities, there are a ‘relatively infinite’ number of posts on
Facebook because we could never actually read all of the posts. So, as the microscope

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593
594
Spinoza, Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Hackett, 2002) page 26.
264

allows us to observe cells (which, because they are so small with regard to our own size,
exist in a ‘relative infinity’, a zero, from the perspective of the ‘plane of dimensional
consistency’ to which our optic nerves are oriented as a function of our size) by rendering
them into the plane of dimensional consistency in which we observe the world, the ‘data
scope’ allows us to observe the whole of Facebook by rendering it into a ‘plane of
dimensional consistency’ that is temporally commensurable with the quality of human
existence (our cognitive capacities and life span as well as the orientation of our optic
nerves).
Interestingly, while both the eyes and the microscope render cells into a plane of
dimensional consistency commensurable with human experience, the human eyes
aggregate atoms where the microscope atomizes aggregates. This tension between
aggregation of atoms and atomization of aggregates requires us to add a new dimension of
complexity to the ‘datascope’ metaphor. The eyes and the microscope both render text
into the plane of dimensional consistency to which the optic nerves are oriented, but one
works through aggregating atoms while the other works through atomizing an aggregate.
The eyes aggregate atoms by rendering cells as tissues that are observable with the naked
eye. The microscope, on the other hand, atomizes the aggregate tissues formed by the eye
so that we may observe individual cells through rendering them into the plane of
dimensional consistency in which the eyes observe the world. We can, from this
perspective, conceptualize the Statnews.org ‘data scope’ as akin to both the eyes and the
microscope.
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The above visualization represents the optimized co-occurrence of terms with the term economy in the Associated Press, Washington
Post and Wall Street Journal between 2001 and 2010 and was created by the UC Berkeley Statnews.org Lab.
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The first step of the algorithmic process takes the paragraphs that form texts (cells) and
visualizes them as tissues (as statistical aggregates). This process is akin to the eyes
aggregating cells as tissues.
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The second part of the algorithmic process allows you to hover over a box (a tissue) in the
above graph and zoom in on the paragraphs (the cells) that use the two terms together in
the most statistically demonstrative way. This process is akin to using the microscope to
atomize the aggregate cells (tissues) rendered by the eyes.
The ‘datascope’, then, acts as both eyes and microscope. Like the eyes, it
renders texts into the algorithmic ‘plane of dimensional consistency’ by visualizing them as
a statistical aggregate (which, unlike the posts in their atomized form, is not relatively
infinite from our human perspective as our cognitive capacities and lifespan allow us to
observe it). Like the microscope, it zooms in on the cells that form these statistical
aggregates to render them directly into our plane of dimensional consistency so that we
might see them as they exist in their own plane of dimensional consistency. With this
metaphor of the microscope, however, we must remember that we have already
transformed the texts through rendering them into the algorithmic ‘plane of dimensional
consistency’ (unlike the cells, which are not actually transformed when the eyes render
them as aggregate). As a result, the extracted cells (paragraphs) only represent the aggregate
statistical meaning of the text rather than its actual meaning derived from its larger social
assemblage.
This difference of meaning leads us to the final concept of the analytic, dimensional
incommensurability, which was developed by Russian mathematician and philosopher P.D.

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The above visualization represents the optimized co-occurrence of terms with the term economy in the Associated Press, Washington
Post and Wall Street Journal between 2001 and 2010 and was created by the UC Berkeley Statnews.org Lab.
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597

Ouspensky. In essence, dimensional incommensurability describes the incommensurable
quality of differing planes of dimensional consistency and the incommensurability of the
same object when manifest in different planes of dimensional consistency.
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The above graphic provides a tangible metaphor for dimensional incommensurability. In

essence, in form, in aeon, in geometry, the two and three dimensional spheres are the same
object. That being said, while I can throw the three dimensional sphere, I cannot throw the
two dimensional sphere. As a result, we can conceptualize them as having a different
function, meaning, etc. while in essence remaining the same. If we lay this metaphor over
that of the datascope, we can understand a text within its original plane of dimensional
consistency (the social assemblage in which it derives its actual meaning) as akin to the

597
Ouspensky, Tertium Organum.
598
Barnesmoore, Department Hosted Talk (April 2 2015). University of British Columbia Department of Geography. “Data Driven
Visualization and its Implications” http://www.geog.ubc.ca/events/event/talk-with-luke-barnesmoore-and-joey-lee/
267

three dimensional sphere and a text within the algorithmic ‘plane of dimensional
consistency’ (where meaning must be articulated as a function of the statistical qualities of
the text) as akin to the two dimensional sphere—while it is still the same text in essence, its
three dimensional and two dimensional renditions are dimensionally incommensurable
and thus convey (one might say possess) a very different meaning.
Moving away from Facebook Data, an illustrative example of the dimensional
incommensurability of texts and their algorithmic translations (visualizations) comes from a
recent analysis of the representations of women in the Bible and their relationship to
norms of thought, behavior and being in Christian and Christian influenced societies (as
well as Abrahamic societies in general).
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In the above visualization we observe the optimized co-occurrence of terms with the term
‘woman’ in the King James Version of the Bible. At first glance the visualization provided
important insight. The terms ‘man’, ‘house’, ‘son’, ‘husband’, etc. clearly illustrate the

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• Luke Barnesmoore, Joy Donoso, Sophie Claiver, Laurent El Ghaoui. Machine Learning Methodologies: Histories of Asembalge and
Representations of Women in the Bible. International Journal of Ciritical Cultural Studies. This visualization was created by the UC
Berkley Statnews.org Lab.
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domesticating influence of the Bible’s representation of women (its construction of gender
roles for women associated with the home, the private sphere, etc.). This domesticating
influence of the Bible, however, is only apparent in the above visualization because it
manifests in a statistically prevalent fashion—rather than being conveyed by a single story or
group of stories, this influence manifests through the basic fabric of all of the stories in the
bible (the role that women take on in all the stories they appear in).
In the above visualization we observe the optimized co-occurrence of terms with
the term ‘woman’ in the King James Version of the Bible. At first glance the visualization
provided important insight. The terms ‘man’, ‘house’, ‘son’, ‘husband’, etc. clearly illustrate
the domesticating influence of the Bible’s representation of women (its construction of
gender roles for women associated with the home, the private sphere, etc.). This
domesticating influence of the Bible, however, is only apparent in the above visualization
because it manifests in a statistically prevalent fashion—rather than being conveyed by a
single story or group of stories, this influence manifests through the basic fabric of all of the
stories in the bible (the role that women take on in all the stories they appear in).
That being said, what we do not see are the terms ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’. For anyone
who has grown up in an Abrahamic society, the essential importance of this story for
understanding the relationship between the Bible and norms of thought, behavior and
being in publics socialized by the Bible is commonsensical (in its location of original sin in
the behavior of a woman, in subsequent associations of women with irrationality,
emotionality and madness, etc.). The meaning of this story, however, manifests as a
function of the location of the Bible in its larger social assemblage (in its relationship to the
individuals who wrote it, to those who have read it, to the socially normative practices that
have risen in relationship to it, etc.), in its social context (its original plane of dimensional
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consistency). As Trevor Barnes reminds us, context cannot be quantified. This is because
the plane of dimensional consistency in which social context exists (the same plane of
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dimensional consistency in which language actually derives its meaning) is dimensionally
incommensurable with the algorithmic ‘plane of dimensional consistency’. In summary, the
meaning of the Bible is transformed by rendering it into the algorithmic ‘plane of
dimensional consistency’, because while the algorithm can only understand the meaning of
a text as a function of its statistical qualities, the Bible actually articulates its meaning as a
function of its social context (its original plane of dimensional consistency).

600
Trevor Barnes. Big Data, Little History.
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We understand that there is an issue here relating to the fact that visualizations become the actual meaning of text when they are
performed as such (say in marketing and political campaigns), but we would argue that this would still illustrate the fact that text derives
its actual meaning from social context (the social context here being the acceptance of visualizations of text as representing the actual
meaning of text in its larger social assemblage).
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Unity: Uncreated Interference Pattern: Unity Multiplicity:
and Difference in Unity Created

Aeon: Manifest Reality Prima Materia:
Forms that Matter
Structure Unconditioned by
Manifestation Form

Spirit: Soul: Mind Body
Consciousness

Ontological Norms of Thought, Individual/
Regime Behavior and Perception Group: Existing
of Being Cognitive
∞ ∞ Environment
As explanation of the necessity of applying intuitive thought experiments inherently suffers

from what Spinoza calls the poverty of language (the incommensurability of the
dimensional quality of an idea with the dimensional quality of language making perfect
inscription impossible in the same manner that it is impossible to perfectly inscribe a three
dimensional figure onto a two dimensional plane), we attempt to elucidate the point with
the above graphic. On the far left of the graphic we find the column of unity. In this
column the objects exist in a state of static unity (prior to manifestation) and are thus
incommensurable with the reality we experience through our sensory faculties in
manifestation as humans. On the far right of the graphic we find the column of
multiplicity. In this column the objects can be understood as vessel for the manifestation
(creation) of the objects in the column of uncreated unity. The central column represents
the interference pattern formed by the interaction of the left and right columns. The
vertical lines with the infinity sign at their base represent the infinity membranes that
demark the boundaries between incommensurable dimensional qualities. One point we
must remember is that infinity is relative; for example, there may not actually be an infinite
number of facts in the abstract sense, but there are an infinite amount of facts when viewed
from the perspective of human life (in its limited cognitive capacities and its short lifespan)
wherein it would be impossible to learn all the facts of the universe. As infinity is relative,
and infinity membranes demark the boundaries between dimensionally incommensurable
planes of dimensional consistency, dimensional incommensurability is itself relative. As
such, while the unity of the aeons and the multiplicity of the material world (in its being
structured by the dimensional quality of the prima materia) are incommensurable with
each other, both are commensurable with the interference pattern formed between them.
270

As such, to study objects that are dimensionally incommensurable with each other we must
find the dimensional quality that lies in between the two planes of dimensional consistency
and move from there. For knowledge formation, the interference pattern that bridges the
unity of the aeons and the multiplicity of the world we experience is thought. As a result, if
we wish to study the relationship of objects that exist in both the state of abstract unity
(ontological regimes) and multiplicity (individuals and groups as well as their manifest
cognitive environment) we must use thought experiments.
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Chapter 6:
The Order of Nature: Mythology, Philosophy and Theology
Nomadic Leisure in Nature, Whitman

Nomadism on the Road
Walt Whitman’s (1940) Song of the Open Road captures the nomadic ethos and its
relationship to leisurely, contemplative relationships with the earth and nature beautifully.
“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
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The earth, that is sufficient…” (Whitman 1940, p. 3)
“You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all
that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.” (Whitman 1940, p. 3)
“I think heroic deeds were all conciev’d in the open air, and all free poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles” (Whitman 1940, p. 5)
“From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would
hold me.” (Whitman 1940, p. 5)
“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” (Whitman 1940, p. 6)
“Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible to proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the
excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out
of the soul.
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the

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Walt Whitman 1940, Leaves of Grass, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co. Inc.
272

Spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.” (Whitman 1940, p. 7)
“The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,

I thin kit pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.” (Whitman 1940, p. 8)
“Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!

Traveling with me you find what never tires.
The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and
incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.” (Whitman 1940, p. 9)
“Allons! the inducements shall be greater,

We will sail pathless and wild seas…
Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements,

Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;
Allons! from all formules!
From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.
The stale cadaver blocks up the passage—the burial waits no longer.” (Whitman 1940, p. 9)
“My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,

He going with me must go well arm’d…” (Whitman 1940, p. 14)
“Allons! the road is before us!

…Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the
shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money go unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! Let the lawyer plead in the court…” (Whitman 1940, p. 14)
A new refrain, though it comes of old, I ask my friends, need more be told?
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The Order of Nature in Shamanism

Nasr
“Shamanism, which was the ancient religion at the center and east of Asian and which is related to the ancient
Tibetan Po religion, to Shintoism in Japan, and to the North American religions along with other important
religious currents, presents a primordial view of the order of nature and man’s rapport with the natural world,
a view that has gained much attention recently. The basic structure of the Shamanic universe is founded upon
three tiers of the upper, middle, and lower worlds, or the sky, the earth, and the underworld connected by a
central axis, the axis mundi, which the Mongols called the “Golden Pillar.” This pillar corresponds to the
cosmic mountain that appears in various religions under different names such as Mt. Mero of the Indians, the
Haraberezaiti or Alborz of the ancient Iranians, and Himingbjorg of the ancient Germans. The Pole Star is
fastened to the top of the cosmic mountain, and it was through this start that in the days of old all human
beings could ascend to the regions above, a feat that can be performed only by the Shaman today. The sacred
mountain is complemented by the world tree, which is “a Tree that lives and gives life” as the axis of the
cosmos, all parts of which are also alive and conscious according to a “hylozoism” or what some call
“panpsychism” so characteristic of the Shamanic religions. It is this cosmic life and awareness that dominate
over the whole of nature and are the source and cause of what we observe as order in the natural realm.
The Shamanic view of the cosmos can be summarized as follows:
The universe is multi-layered or stratified, with an Underworld below and an Upperworld above as
principal divisions. Underworld, and Upper world are usually further divided into several levels,
each with its respective spirit rulers and other supernatural denizens. There are also gods of the
principle world directions or quarters, and supreme beings that rule respectively over the celestial
and chthonic spheres (for example, sky gods, lords of the dead, ect.)…
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The several levels of the universe are interconnected by a central axis (axis mundi) which
merges conceptually with Shaman’s “Sky ladder” and world tree.
The world of the Shaman is one in which sacred dominates at once over the world of nature and of human
beings, and a single order relates the human and the cosmic worlds in an inseparable bi-unity. The Shaman is
able to go beyond the cosmos through the Pole Star, but he must respect the order and harmony of the
cosmos without which he would not be able to make his meta-cosmic journey. There is in this primordial
perspective no clear separation between the sacred and the natural nor does a rational system of concepts
intervene between the Shaman and the world of nature with which he is in contact in a most intimate
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manner.”
What is most clear in the above is that the notion of order as domination was already
present in some of the earliest traditions we receive in presently recorded human history
(we cannot determine whether this notion is innate to the Shamanic tradition or has been
imputed through time and translation). We note that this is in ‘presently recorded human
history’ because there seems to be clear mythological and archeological evidence that there
is a great tradition and ‘civilization’ which precedes the present ‘generation’ of human
culture that is taken as the whole of ‘civilized’ human history in normative Modernist
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Historical Narratives.
McKenna
Let us turn to the late Terence McKenna for another perspective on Shamanism provided
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in an interview during the 1990s. “Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural
anthropologists: shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until
about 12,000 years ago, there was no other form of religion on this planet; that was how
606
people attained some kind of access to the sacred.” That being said, and maybe this is
why Nasr gives it such a cursory treatment, shamanism is not so much a religion, as
ordinarily conceived, as it is a kind of… science; a kind of methodology for attaining a
certain kind of experience [(and thus one that finds resonance with our Nomad
Explorations method of inquiry in its attempt to produce experience rather than knowledge
607
or answers)].”
“The overwhelming connecting thread [in the ‘Shamanic Experience’] is boundary
dissolution [(which should not be understood as the destruction of boundaries, per se
(though some might indeed be destroyed in such an experience), but instead as the
recognition that at certain levels of reality (from certain perspectives) these boundaries do
608 609
not (cannot) actually separate ‘things’)].” Authors like William James have argued that
the sort of inner empiricism embedded in descriptions of religious experiences such as the
‘Shamanic Experience’ described by McKenna indicates the fact that all true religious and

603
Ibid. 31-32
604
De Santillana and Von Dechend Hamlet’s Mill.
Hancock Fingerprints of the Gods.
Et. al.
605
McKenna, T. http://www.matrixmasters.net/podcasts/TRANSCRIPTS/TMcK-Shamanism1.pdf p.1
606
Ibid.
607
Ibid.
608
Ibid.
609
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience.
275

spiritual practices have been aimed at producing the same spiritual-religious experiences
which have produced similar descriptions of phenomena including ‘dissolution of
boundaries’ and enlightenment (nirvana, illumination, etc.) across spatial, historical and
temporal boundaries; in fact, James can be viewed as having bolstered the validity of the
perennialist view of philosophy and religion through the use of science (though as his work
was based on shared description of inner empirical observation of the changes in
dimensional quality of perspective associated with ‘religious experiences’ (e.x. the
condensation of the chain of moments that form one’s life into a single moment)
dogmatically Modernist scientists often dismiss such research because the findings are
neither ‘tangible’ nor ‘easily replicable’ or ‘readily demonstrable’ (i.e. humans (in all but
potentially the most rarified of states) do not have the agency to just ‘cause’ themselves to
have a religious experience at whim, let alone another person).
“Why should that [experience] be so important, so wonderful? Because it acts
psychologically, in the human being, like a birth experience. The world is made new.
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Everything is seen through newly opened eyes.” Phoenix is reborn from the ashes. Christ
is reborn from the tomb. The ‘Old Human’ dies and the ‘New Human’ is born. And at a
certain point in our cycles of death and rebirth we are reborn into the eternity of divine
sight and are born ‘ears with which to hear’ and ‘eyes with which to see.’
Shamanism is especially important in our study of the order of nature and its
relationship to humanity (culture…) in of the essential role hallucinogenic plants play in
many shamanic traditions:
“Now, it’s a question which always emerges at these conferences: “All of you people are talking about drugs
and plant substances. Isn’t there another way to do this? Isn’t this what the great yogic systems, the great
tantric systems of thought, have opened up for us, without the self-polluting act of ingesting a plant into our
bodies and polluting our precious bodily essences?” The answer is, No! No! [laughter] And the further
answer is, the reason the universe is constructed this way is so that you will be forced to humble yourself into
the admission that you can’t do it alone. Why should you be able to do it alone?! …. …the sine qua non for
attaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to
the experience of the plant... This active surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to
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perform during the psychedelic trip [(surrender of ego)].”
In Shamanism, then, nature is integral to the spiritual process. As the universe reflects the
order of the uncreated, so to do all things find their harmonious place therein (or else are,
at least in part, removed from the universe); as such, it is only natural that nature and
humanity would hold such a harmonious relationship, that nature would hold plants that
release a chemical from a gland (the Pineal Gland) located in the prefect part of our brain
to induce psychedelic experiences that act as a catalyst for human psychological evolution
(which authors like Ouspensky and De Chardin have argued supersedes biological
evolution (in the noosphere)). Nature is not to be dominated, but to be accepted as a
necessary partner. Some traditions would come to view this partnership as our submission
to the plant or our domination of the plant, but others (at least some strains of Shamanism)
view this as a harmonious relationship that is essentially untainted by the ‘othering’

610
McKenna, T. http://www.matrixmasters.net/podcasts/TRANSCRIPTS/TMcK-Shamanism1.pdf p. 1
611
Ibid. 2-3
276

necessary for the modes of domination and submission perpetuated by the paternalist
traditions as both plant and human are fulfilling their necessary roles in the order of nature,
the universe, the all, etc. as necessitated by their shared, uncreated origin).
Shintoism
Nasr treats with Shintoism as a branch of the shamanic tradition:
“One of the most important branches of Shamanism—not only because of its innate characteristics but also
owing to the fact that it remained to this day the foundation of Japanese culture and society despite Japan’s
rapid modernization—is Shintoism. Originally the religion had no name, but in confrontation with Buddhism
the word shinto—meaning “the way of Kami”—came to be used as distinct from Budsudo (“the way of the
Buddha”). There also developed a Buddhist Shinto that identified the Kami (“spirits” or “power of harmony”
of Shintoism) with the avataras of Buddhism and a Confucian Shintoism that interpreted Shintoism according
to the neo-Confucianism of Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming. In the seventeenth century during the early Edo
period, Shintoism was revived by Motoori Norinaga and others, and opposition arose against these earlier
forms of syncretism.
Shintoism is based on the Kami, spirits governing the world of nature as well as that of the soul and
which must be understood more than anything else as spirits responsible for the harmony of creation, being
themselves powers of harmony and order. Shinto cosmology, following Shamanism in general, distinguishes
among three vertical planes of reality: Takamonohara (“plain of high heaven”), which is the abode of the
gods; Nakatsukuni (“middle land”), which is the human world including the natural ambiance surrounding
man; and Yomi (“the underworld”), which is the land of death. According to Shintoism the features of the
Japanese islands are related to the theophanies of Shinto deities the Kami, which govern all things. Moreover,
Shintoism emphasizes the mystical significance of beauty in nature and identifies the order and harmony of
nature with the beauty that the natural world displays everywhere. The identification of the order of nature
with beauty and the close link between the rites of religion and natural phenomena and features of the land
and sea are among the chief characteristics of Shintoism, which has manifested itself throughout Japanese
history and revealed itself, as has Zen, in forms of art unparalleled “natural”—and at the same time spiritual—
612
beauty.”
Shintoism understands nature as an expression of divine order rather than in Modernist

613
terms the origin of chaos, disorder, the evil of human nature, etc. Spiritual rites are
designed to bring us into an intimate harmony with the energies of nature. The divine
permeates matter at every point, and, in so doing, manifests the beauty of the divine order
at each and every level of manifestation; there is no need to dominate nature in order to
impute order as it is already essentially a locus for divine order—the need is for us to first
cultivate our capacity to ‘hear’ and ‘see’ the divine order of nature (i.e. cultivation of ‘eyes
to see’ and ‘ears to hear’) and to accentuate the manifest forms of nature’s sympathetic
resemblance with the uncreated reality they reflect.
Nasr treats with the indigenous North American traditions as branches of the global
shamanic tradition. At this point we will only touch on these indigenous traditions briefly as
we engage with them in depth in our below exploration of the order of nature in ‘myth’
(symbolism).

612
Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature pp. 32-33
613
Barnesmoore 2016b, Nomad Explorations V2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
277

“Despite the tragic decimation of their habitat, cultures, and social life, the traditions of the North American
natives or so-called Indians have survived to this day as major branches of the family of Shamanic traditions.
Moreover, these religions, especially those of the Great Planes, have preserved something of their primordial
character, which is remarkable beauty and majesty. Aware of at once the transcended and immanent nature
of the Spirit within the forms of nature and yet beyond all forms, the Native Americans have preserved a
sacral view of nature in which the order of nature, of human beings both individually and collectively, and the
sacred are bound in an organic unity that is itself sacred [(one will recognize that a conception of the organic
in specific and of the material more generally represents a dimensionally incommensurable divergence (what
has oft been termed an abyssal difference) with western conceptions of nature as a chaotic, ‘evil’ other to be
brought into order and of order as domination)]. Virgin nature was the cathedral of the Native Americans
and the forms of nature at once theophanies and objective counterparts to the various forces and powers
614
within the human soul.”
Indigenous American Spirituality, then, was a mode of ‘natural mysticism.’ What need is
there for scripture, myth, symbolism and the other constructed forms and symbols of
humanity when divine order and beauty (Truth) is so majestically and magnificently
displayed across the heavens, the seas, the mountains and the plains, in the multiplicity of
biological organisms birthed from this sacred womb, etc.? As we shall see, while this
doctrine was in many cases lost to the West, there are some tests (e.x. Ibn Tufayel’s Hayy
Ibn Yaqzan, which we treat with later) that aptly preserve this sacred conception of nature
and of natural mysticism.
“The cosmology of the Native American traditions resembles for the most part that of Shamanism in general
and as outlined above. For example, according to the Ojibway the universe is multilayered with flat-earth
located between the cosmic regions identified as Heaven or Sky and Earth, each region being further divided
into sub layers with its own dominating spirits responsible for its order. The entire universe is alive and
connected by the cosmic axis traversing all its layers. More specifically, the universe is ordered and governed
by the spirit power called manitou. These powers existed before the creation of flat-earth and govern over the
realm of human existence, while other manitou are the life forces and principle of order of the creations of
the natural world, what we call both animate and inanimate beings. Thus, the manitou have both cosmic and
human qualities and also act as bridges between various levels of the cosmos. They bestow order upon the
many levels of existence and bind man and nature in a unity that both underlies and transcends the domain
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of multiplicity.”
‘Dominating spirits responsible for… order’. This statement perfectly encapsulates the
Modernist (and more generally paternalist) notion that order is to be produced in
manifestation through domination, which is the root of the epistemological sickness facing
our world. Given the fact that there are strains of Indigenous thought that clearly do not
include these notions of order as domination, Nasr is at least in part imposing these notions
of domination—the root of the sickness that faces his own Abrahamic faith—upon the North
American Indigenous tradition. If we shed this added variable (domination), a picture in
which nature, humanity and the whole of the cosmos form a single, from a perspective
hierarchical but surely not with a dominating ethos, living whole, and in which order thus
comes in learning to fulfill our space in this whole (and thus helping to facilitate the other
roles that form the whole) rather than in attempting to dominate (and thus impute order to)

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Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature p. 33
615
Ibid. 33-34
278

aspects of reality that we deem to lack order. Within our selves, we assuredly need to
cultivate order, but cultivation comes through love and nurture, through sunlight, water and
nutrients, not through domination:
“2A.2
Gongsun Chou asked, “If you, Sir, were to receive a high post among the grandees of Qi and were able to
implement your dao, it would not be startling if the ruler were to rise to the position of hegemon or even a
true King. If this were to occur, would your heart be moved by this?”
“No,” replied Mencius. “By the age of forty I had cultivated a heart that could not be moved.”
“If that is so, then you, Sir, have exceeded the valor of the warrior Meng Ben by far!”
“That is not difficult,” said Mencius. “Actually, the philosopher Gaozi attained an unmoving heart
earlier than I.”
“Is there a dao for achieving an unmoving heart?” asked Gongsun Chou.
“Yes,” replied Mencius, “there is.”
Mencius continued. “The formula by which the warrior Bogong You nurtured his valor was this: ‘I
shall not allow my skin to recoil in the least or let my stare flinch. I shall consider the slightest touch of
another to be as insulting as if he were whipping me publicly in a market or court. What I would not accept
from a coarsely clad commoner, I will not accept from the ruler of a state of ten thousand chariots. I shall
look upon stabbing a great ruler as though I were stabbing a coarsely clad commoner. I shall have no fear of
patrician lords. Any insulting sound that reaches my ear I must return.”
“The formula by which the warrior Mengshi She nurtured his valor was this: ‘I shall regard defeat as
the same as victory. To advance only after having measured the enemy or meet the enemy only after having
plotted for victory shows fear of the enemy armies. How could I guarantee victory? All I can be assured of is
that I will be fearless.’
“Mengshi She resembles Confucius’s disciple Zengzi; Bogong You resembles Confucius’s disciple
Zixia. I do not know which type of valor is the finer, but Mengshi She was a man who preserved self-control.
“Once, Zengzi addressed a man named Zixiang thus: ‘Do you delight in valor? I once heard from
the Master about Great Valor. “If I search inwardly and find that I am not fully upright, though I face a mere
coarsely clad commoner, I shall not threaten him. If I search inwardly and find that I am fully upright, though
I face ten million men I will attack.”’ The manner in which Mengshi She preserved his qi is not as fine as
Zengzi’s.”
Gongsun Chou said, “May I inquire about the formulas that you and Gaozi used to attain an
unmoving heart?”
Mencius replied, “Gaozi’s rule was, ‘If you cannot find sanction for a course of action in the
teachings, do not search for it in your heart. If you cannot find sanction for a course of action in your heart,
do not search for it in your qi.’ I agree to the formula, ‘If you do not find it in the heart, do not search for it in
the qi.’ But it is unacceptable to say, ‘If you do not find it in the teachings, do not search for it in your heart.’
“The will is the leader of the qi, and qi is something that fills the body. Wherever the will leads the
qi follows. Thus there is a saying, ‘Grasp your will and do not dissipate your qi.’”
Gongsun Chou said, “On the one hand you have said, ‘Wherever the will leads the qi will follow.’
But you have also said, ‘Grasp your will and do not dissipate your qi.’ Is there not an inconsistency?”
Mencius answered, “When the will is unified it moves the qi. But when the qi is unified, it can move
the will. For example, when you see a man stumble or rush about, this is the action of his qi. In such cases, it
has turned back upon the heart and moved it.”
Gongsun Chou said, “May I presume to inquire how you, Sir, excel?”“I can interpret what speech
means,” replied Mencius, “and I nurture well my flood-like qi.”
Gongsun Chou asked, “What do you mean by ‘flood-like qi?’”
“It is hard to describe,” said Mencius. “This is a qi that is as great and hard as can be. If one
nurtures it by means of straightforward action and never injures it, then it will fill all between heaven and
279

earth. It is a qi that is a companion to righteousness and the Dao. Without these, it will starve away. It is
generated through the long accumulation of acts of right (yi). It is not something that can be seized through a
single righteous act. If in your actions there is any sense of inadequacy in your heart, it will starve away.
“This is why I say that Gaozi never really understood righteousness. He looked for it in external
standards other than the heart. But your task must always be before you and you must not go making small
adjustments. The task of nurturing this qi must never be forgotten by the heart, but you must not meddle and
try to help it grow. Don’t be like the simpleton from the state of Song.
“There was a man of Song who was concerned that the sprouts in his field were not
growing well, so he went and tugged at each one. He went home utterly exhausted and
said, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself ill today! I’ve been out helping the sprouts to grow.’ His sons
rushed out to look and found the stalks all shriveled up.
“There are few in the world who do not ‘help their sprouts grow.’ There are those who do not
‘weed’ – they have simply given the whole task up as useless. But the ones who tug on the sprouts to help
them grow – they are worse than useless, for they do harm!
Gongsun Chou asked, “What do you mean when you say you can interpret what speech means?”
“When I hear biased speech, I can tell what has obscured the man’s understanding. When I hear
excessive speech, I can tell what trap the man has fallen into. When I hear deviant speech, I can tell where
the man has strayed. When I hear evasive speech, I can tell at what point the man has exhausted his reasons.
When these defects are born in the mind they bring harm to self-governance, and when proclaimed as
policies of state, they bring harm to its affairs.”
“Confucius’s disciples Zai Wo and Zigong excelled in the persuasive arts of speech, while Ran Niu,
Minzi, and Yan Yuan excelled in expressing virtue in words. While Confucius excelled in both, he said, ‘I
have no ability when it comes to the arts of speech.’ Thus you, Sir, must already have reached the level of a
sage.”
Mencius said, “What sort of thing is that to say! Once, Zigong asked Confucius, ‘Are you a sage?’
and Confucius replied, ‘Sage? My abilities are not at that level. I’m just one who never tires of study or
wearies of teaching.’ Zigong said, ‘To study without tiring is wisdom; to teach without wearying is ren. Both
ren and wise, you, Master, are indeed a sage.’ Confucius was unwilling to accept the title of sage – what sort of
thing is that to say of me?”
Gongsun Chou said, “I have heard it said that Confucius’s disciples Zixia, Ziyou, and Zizhang each
was like the Master in one respect, while Ran Niu, Minzi, and Yan Yuan each resembled the Master in full,
but at a lesser level. May I ask which of these fits you?”
“Let us put that aside for now.”
“What would you say of the ancient men Bo Yi and Yi Yin?”

Mencius said, “They followed different daos. For Bo Yi, one should serve no man other than one’s
ruler and rule over no people but those one had a right to rule; when order prevails in the world one should
come forward; when chaos prevails withdraw. For Yi Yin, one may serve any ruler or rule any people; when
order prevails in the world one should come forward; when chaos prevails, come forward as well. For
Confucius, though, one should serve when one should serve and stop when one should stop, dally in a state
when one should dally and depart quickly when one should depart quickly, all as circumstances require.
These were all sages of old, and I have not yet been able to practice any of their daos. My wish, however,
would be to emulate Confucius.”
“Were Bo Yi and Yi Yin in this way the equals of Confucius?”
“No. Since the birth of mankind, there has never been another like Confucius.”
“But did they share aspects in common with him?”
Mencius said, “Yes. Had any of them ruled over a territory one hundred li square, the lords of the
states would have served him at his court, and he would have possessed all the world. Had any of them been
offered the chance to gain the world merely by doing one unrighteous deed or killing one innocent person,
he would not have done so. In this, they are alike.”
“May I ask in what respect they were different?”
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“Confucius’s disciples Zai Wo, Zigong, and You Ruo all had intelligence enough to recognize a
sage, and none would have been so base as to show a bias towards a man they loved. Zai Wo said, ‘In my
view, the Master far surpasses Yao and Shun.’ Zigong said, ‘The Master sees the rituals of a state and from
them knows the nature of its governance; he hears its music and from it knows its virtue; he looks back on a
hundred generations of kings and appraises all of them such that no one can contradict him. Since the birth
of mankind, there has never been another like the Master.’ You Ruo said, ‘It is not thus only with people.
The unicorn is a beast like other beasts, the phoenix a bird like other birds, Mount Tai a hill like any mound,
the Yellow River and the sea are bodies of water like the stream in a ditch, but all these stand out from their
kind, far above the crowd. Since the birth of mankind, there has been nothing as outstanding as
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Confucius.””
If it was not already clear, the Paternalist Tradition (and all those who conceive of order in
terms of domination) is like the man from Song. Instead of cultivating order, domination
causes order (life) to ‘shrivel up’ and die. Life, light and consciousness are order, and thus
practices like domination which bring death and decay cannot logically be conceived of as
bringing order; we should also note the loss of order is not inherently bad, and in fact acts
as an essential stage in the process of the manifest world in that cycles of creation require a
stage of destruction (of a loss of order). We will return to the above passage in our
discussion of Ancient Chinese Philosophy below.
“Among the Sioux, emphasis is placed especially upon the Great Spirit of Wakan-tanka, which is both the
cause of all transformation and the order we observe in nature. Among the Lakota the presence of the Great
Spirit is called Taku Skanskan or simply Skan. Its role in the order of nature is made clear by the discourse
between an old Lakota priest and an American scholar on the subject of the Skan. The sage asks:
“What causes the stars to fall?” “Taku Skanskan…. He causes everything that falls to fall, and He
causes everything to move that moves [here we see the traditional association of the masculine with
the active principle (with the pillar of force) and the feminine with the latent principle (with the pillar
of form)—such associations, we ought to note, need not take on the pejorative, paternalist quality
seen in the Paternalist tradition…)] “When you move, what causes you to move?” “Skan” “If an
arrow is hot from a bow what causes it to move through the air?” “Skan…. Taku Skanskan gives the
spirit to the bow, and He causes it to send the arrow from it.” “What causes the clouds to move over
the world?” “Skan.” “Lakota have told me that Skan is the sky. Is that so?” “Yes. Skan is a Spirit and
all that mankind can see of him is the blue of the sky; but he is everywhere!” “Is Skan Wakan-
Tanka?” “Yes!” [(It seems, then, that this Lakota myth clearly encapsulates the knowledge that force
is all of one order, and that the blue of the sky is a manifestation of force (electricity, light, etc.). So,
while to the Modernist who presumes the primitive quality of traditional societies, myth, philosophy,
etc. the above seems like a primitive anthropomorphization of inanimate force, from a perennialist
perspective (which views things like the the existence of an Atlantian antecedent to global cultural
forms as not only possible but as empirically robust theories) this hints of a deep scientific-
metaphysical knowledge of that which is. In short, where as the Modernists (and many of their
western antecedents) view the development of the Paternalist Tradition into Modernism as
evolutionary and progressive, we view the past ten to fifteen thousand years of
human civilization in terms of ‘devolution’, in terms of the destruction (of thought,
wisdom, love, ‘humanity’, etc.) that necessarily precedes creation… We would also
posit that the technological ‘advancement’ (re/reverse engineering?) of this period does not
necessarily preclude the potential that our state of mind, manifestation, etc. has been degraded
therein…)].

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Meng Zi 2A.2 Indiana University, Early Chinese Thought [B/E/P374] – Fall 2010 (R. Eno) pp. 22-26
http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Mengzi.pdf Bold-Italic Emphasis Added
281

The Great twentieth century Sioux medicine man Black Elk emphasized this truth himself and spoke of the
transcendent as well as immanent nature of the Great Spirit, pointing to a “polysynthetic animism” that is at
the same time “monotheistic” and that comes from their awareness that natural beings are coagulation of the
Divine Substance, which is at the same time transcendent vis-à-vis all its coagulations—hence what has been
aptly called the “spiritual naturalism” of the Native Americans and their refusal to separate the human order
from the order of nature. This “spiritual naturalism” also implies that everything in the universe is alive and
given order and harmony by the Spirit. It mans “in principle and metaphysically, that, whatever be the object
envisaged, there springs form its existential center an ontological ray, made up of ‘being’, ‘consciousness’ and
‘life,’ to its luminous and celestial prototype; from this it follows that in principle it is possible for us to attain
the heavenly Essences by taking anything whatever as starting point.”
The Great Spirit gives order to the whole of the cosmos starting with the cardinal points, which are
its most direct manifestations and which bestow order upon space and all that is therein. Furthermore, the
Great Spirit manifests itself, by virtue of its very transcendence, through the Sky and the Earth, the plants and
the animals. Symbolically speaking, all these multiple manifestations of the Great Spirit are none other than
the Great Spirit. “Things are not mysterious themselves, but manifestations of mysteries, and the Great Spirit,
or the Great Mystery, synthesizes them in Its transcendent Unity.” The order of nature veils and reveals a
reality beyond and yet immanent within nature, an order inseparable from the order prevailing within man
himself.
The views of Native Americans concerning the order of nature indicate not only the perspective of
one of the best kept branches of primordial Shamanism toward the natural world, but are also at once a
powerful challenge and a stark contrast to the mechanistic view of the order of nature underlying the modern
technological world view [(the Paternalist conception of order as domination which typifies Modernism)] and
the attitude toward nature of that civilization which conquered and crushed the Native American world.
Paradoxically, this primordial attitude made possible the preservation of a whole continent in the state of an
almost Edenic perfection before the advent of the Europeans and the gradual destruction of the natural
environment, with an accelerated pace ever since. It is not accidental that with greater awareness of the
environmental crisis the white man’s view of the Native American’ understanding of nature has gone from its
earlier total rejection as “animism,” “totemism,” or “pantheism” understood in their most pejorative sense, to
praise and adoration in many circles today. In any case, the Native American understanding of the meaning
of the order of nature is a most important and precious element in the current global religious response to the
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acute crisis between man and the natural environment.”
African Religion
Nasr introduces his study of African Religion with a note on the colonial, imperialist history
of interpretation and transmission of African Religion in Western Society and its
implications for normative religious studies methodologies.
“Countless studies have been made of the African religions ever since the European colonization of the
African continent—studies mostly driven either by missionary zeal or scientism, both of which remained
impervious to the nature and state of the religions being studied. When religions are considered as untrue or
the whole question of truth is considered to be an irrelevant category in the study of religion, then one can
hardly expect a distinction to be made between religions that have remained intact and those that have
undergone a process of decay and degeneration. This indiscriminate study of the “phenomena” of religions is
also to be seen in the Americas and Polynesia, but is especially evident in Africa where the most crass
religious beliefs and teachings ranging over the whole gamut of veritable animism, ancestor worship, sorcery,
and the like have been considered along with intact doctrines of general attributes of African religions. Only
in recent times have a number of perceptive Western scholars been able to gain knowledge of oral teachings

617
Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature pp. 34 -35.
282

and have also been willing to apply more suitable methods and concepts to the subject of their study, while at
the same time some of the authentic African followers of the still surviving primal religions have begun to
express their teachings through Western languages. As a result, gradually a deeper insight is being gained of
these religions as closely tied to the world of nature and yet anchored in the Spirit and the Transcendent of
which nature is a manifestation or presence. In fact, as far as the order of nature is concerned, the views of
those African religions that have preserved their integral traditions are not very different from those of other
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primal religions.”
As we see below, Nasr’s critique of religious studies methodologies closely resembles the
critiques of Rama Coomaraswamy on mythology methodologies and our critique more of
Modernist scholarship more generally (in its reduction of reality to matter, passing time and
physical space and its reduction of epistemic potential to the boundaries of the peripatetic
mind) in Nomad Explorations V 2.1 Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
We argue that the methodological limitations of Modernism can be aptly described
through the lens of Mario Blaser’s work on ‘ontological conflicts’ and ‘ontological
violence’:
“The (hi)story of the encounter with Europe is not the only factor that shaped in the past, and continues to
shape in the present, the trajectories and the projects of various peoples around the world; their own stories
about such trajectories and projects play a role as well. Granted, these cannot be stories without Europe, but,
I will argue, in many cases, they can be and are stories in spite of Europe, that is, stories that are not easily
brought into the fold of modern categories… It would not be surprising to have analysts and commentators
explaining the use of the Andean concept of Pachakuti and the Mesoamerican idea of the Fifth Sun in the
indigenous statement as “stories” that symbolize ethnic politicking, a thoroughly modern historical
development. Yet Pachakuti and the Fifth Sun exceed modern categories of historicity; they tell other stories
about how the world unfolds in time. What is being missed and what is being produced when these kinds of
stories are forced to fit into a naturalized (hi)story of modernity? …I argue that what we miss are ontological
differences, thus producing the conditions of possibility for disavowing ontological conflicts…. Ontological
conflicts… involve conflicting stories about “what is there” and how they constitute realities in power-charged
fields…. First, in order to even consider [ontological conflicts] as a possibility, one must question some of the
most profoundly established assumptions in the social sciences and in dominant common sense. For
instance, the generalized assumptions that we are all modern and that the cultural differences that exist are
between perspectives on one single reality “out there” rule out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what
is properly an ontological conflict (i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, ontological conflicts
pose the challenge of how to narrate them without restating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a
619
reality out there being described.”
“Ironically, and as modernity becomes equated with the present, radical difference is (again) mapped out
against a temporal grid, for if something is said to be nonmodern, its logical location is in the past.” (549)
[(This argument highlights the ‘qualitative time’ of Modernism. Rather than locating time solely on its
quantitative axis (demarcated by days, seasons, years, etc.), Modernism also locates time on a qualitative axis
where modern is present, pre-modern is past, and the perfection and expansion of modernism is the future.
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In short, time becomes imbricated with a Modernist telos.)]”
The hubris of Modernist ontological presumption (most often manifest in simply positing
that ontology is a scientific study beyond the purview of social scientists and humanities

618
Ibid. 35
619
Blaser, M. (2013). Ontological conflicts and the stories of peoples in spite of Europe. Current Anthropology, 54(5), 547-568. p. 548
620
Ibid. 549
283

scholars who should in this view simply accept their role as epistemologists within a given
field of ontology…) renders the average Modernist incapable of even recognizing the
potential for ontological conflict (this one of the most essential constraints of epistemic
potential that manifests from Modernist techniques of power). For the modernist, there is
nothing but fantasy outside the dimensionally reductive, peripatetically limited perspective
of reality held by the Modernist. We agree with Nasr and Coomaraswamy that it is ‘starkly
impossible’ for a dogmatic Modernist to think the that of traditional religion or myth, and
thus that contemporary academic (i.e. Modernist…) methodologies are implicitly and
unequivocally unsuitable for the study of meaning (be it religious, cultural, practical, etc.) in
traditional societies (as well as for the study of contemporary meaning if we wish to
understand it from a perspective other than its own and avoid rendering the perspective of
Modernism even more banal and unproblematic that it already is in the hegemonically
socialized ‘Modernist Mind’…)… We hope that our HoAM (in use of intuitive thought
experiments) and NE (in its ethos of broadening understanding, depending questions and
producing experience rather than answering questions or producing new knowledge) will
both provide more apt ways in the study of meaning in traditional societies.
Next Nasr focuses his attention on the Bambara, whose cosmology, like the
Paternalist traditions, grants the pride of place to the word, the active principle, the sun, the
masculine, etc.:
“Among African religions that have survived in a relatively intact manner to this day, one of the most
remarkable is the religion of the Bambara, whose esoteric teaching reveal clearly the outlines of a primordial
cosmology akin in many ways to that of Shamanism. According to these teachings, there is a World Tree that
joins Heaven and Earth, and in their initiation rites the Bambara learn 240 symbols that “are suspended”
from this tree. The universe itself is generated by the Word as one observes also in both the Abrahamic and
Indian cosmologies.
As for the Bambara, “The heart of the esoteric teaching consists of the mysteries surrounding the
Word. All of the universe is generated by the primal (and still continuing) vibrations that make up the Word.
Out of this primal energy, matter and finally form are condensed. The vibrations marked out the cardinal
points, up and down, in {their} oscillations. It produced from the center the seed of all things….”
When these vibrations double back on themselves in thought, consciousness is established. This
doubling back also establishes the elemental order in the preexisting flux and is the origin of order in the
cosmos. According to one observer: “The source of the structured universe, then, is Yo, thought or will. Yo is
the silent word that ‘speaks’ all that we know and can detect in the world. According to the Bambara, Yo
comes from itself, is known by itself, departs out of itself, from nothingness that is itself.
Beyond the noise of the world lies that silence or Yo, which is also the harmony and order
underlying all outer discord while man himself is the image of Yo and contains this primordial harmony and
621
order within himself.”
While we do not disagree concerning the basic description of the word and its role in the
process of creation above, we do see the essentialization of ‘the Word’ as ‘the heart of the
esoteric teaching’ as problematic in valorizing motion over stillness, noise over silence,
peripatetic thought over intuitive-emotive thought, etc. It seems clear that there is a direct
link between this valorization of the Word as the heart of the mysteries and the rise of the
Paternalist traditions. That being said, we are not promoting the worship of darkness over

621
Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature pp. 35-36
284

light, of the silence over motion, of death over life, etc. that typifies many of the ‘Black
Widow’ traditions discussed in our conversation with the fantasy fiction of Salvatore and
Bishop, and view valorization of either polarity over the other as essentially divisive and as
obfuscating of the essential unity that typifies (and indeed creates the potential for) polarity.
It is only in harmony and love (again, we must be clear that we conceive of love and
harmony in terms of cultivation and nurture of the divine order that already impregnates all
of reality rather than domination and control in order to impute the divine order material-
temporal reality naturally lacks) between the created and the uncreated) between light and
darkness, between the void and the infinite, between the nodes of manifestation that form
the universe, etc. that we will find an ethical way forward in this most ethically troubled
world; this harmony can be described as UDU, the unity of difference in unity, or unity
and difference in unity, and connotes the paradoxical unity of unity and difference (the
tension of paradox) by which reality comes to be—in such a description, neither unity nor
difference is privileged over the other as it is only in the unification of these dimensionally
incommensurable fields of dimensional consistency (i.e. in the truth of paradoxical tension)
that creation can come to be, and thus to privilege any one over the other is to obfuscate
that they are both (at least in essence) exactly as they must be to produce creation. Again,
our role as humans then comes in nurturing the existing truth, beauty, order, ‘plateaus of
perfection’, etc. in the paradoxical tension of the relationship between uncreated unity and
the change, difference and motion of manifestation, and not in dominating or controlling
matter to force it into conformity with uncreated unity (i.e. fascism)….
Nasr also examines the Diola cosmology:
“According to Diola cosmology, there is a pyramid of cosmic beings always in a state of harmony and
equilibrium. Above human beings are located the spirits and finally God (Ata Emit or Emitay), the creator of
the cosmos and all the diversity within it. Everything receives its energy from Ata Emit, the supreme Force
and Energy or God. Furthermore, there is an equilibrium, order, and harmony in the hierarchical cosmos
created by God. Yet, within this order there are dynamic and vital currents so that one must conceive of the
order of nature to be at once static and dynamic, hierarchical and vital. And here, as in the Shamanic
religions, the order and harmony of the cosmos include and embrace man, who must live according to the
order pervading all things [(who has a duty to serve the divine order by living in harmony with its reflection in
manifestation rather than by imputing order to manifestation through domination)].” 622
From here Nasr concludes his study of the ‘Primal Religions’.
“The followers of the primal or indigenous religions, of which few examples have been mentioned here, have
been for millennia the witnesses as well as guardians of Earth, her rhythms and harmony. Their religions,
both conceptually and in the practical domain, contain teachings of great significance for our contemporary
understanding of the relation between man and the order of nature. In any case, their views constitute an
important element in the contemporary religious landscape as far as the religious significance of the order of
nature is concerned and are a precious reminiscence of an “Edenic experience” of the natural world so much
623
forgotten in the artificial urban ambiance in which so many human beings live today.”

622
Ibid. 36
623
Ibid. 36
285

While Nasr pays lip service to these ‘primal’ religions, the rest of his book turns to the
Paternalist tradition and its conception of the sacred quality of nature. We, however, argue
the Paternalist tradition produced Modernism and the Modernist destruction of temporal
(and evisceration of sacred nature) through paternalist notions of love, community,
harmony, temporal order, etc. in terms of domination, through its essentialization of the
fall in the process of creation and in its concomitant demonization of the material,
temporal world (which manifests in everything from positing that the fall of Lucifer caused
the creation of temporal matter via Sophia’s water’s containing the flames of Lucifer to
positing that the material world was created as a prison for Lucifer and subsequently Adam,
who was emanated to reform Lucifer but who himself-androgynously fell into matter. We
also view the ‘evolution’ of the Paternalist tradition through its rise from the ashes of the
Atlantian tradition as a devolution (which would be blasphemous for observers like Nasr
who view the Law Giving Prophets (Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, etc.) and the
traditions they produced as stages in the evolution of humanity (rather than as stages of
destruction and germination necessary to perpetuate cycles of evolution in time). Thus,
while we follow Nasr’s narrative for a while longer to trace the origins of the Paternalist
tradition, we will return to the primal traditions in our study of Myth and treat with them in
depth as we view the remnants of the tradition that preceded Paternalism which are
embedded in these traditions as our best resource for recovering the wisdom of the
ancients and coming into harmonic relations with the Natural World. In short, Nasr’s
reading of the ‘primal tradition’ as primitive and valorization of the paternalist tradition is
an act of ontological violence (most literally in imputing the notion that order is to be
produced through hierarchical domination).
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The Order of Nature in Indigenous

American Creation Myths 624
This section endeavors to explore notions of order (in creation and terrestrial nature) as
implicit (rather than as something to be created through hierarchical domination) through
exploration of North American Indigenous creation myths.
Apache
“Myth 1: In the beginning was only Tepeu and Gucumatz (Feathered Serpent) [(The Creator and the
Maker)]. These two sat together and thought, and whatever they thought came into being. They thought
earth, and there it was. They thought mountains, and so there were. They thought trees, and sky, and animals
etc, and each came into being. [(Mind, then, exists before matter in the Apache cosmology. It is thought
which produces the material world, rather than the material world producing thought… As we have seen
through our nomad explorations of Modernism the location of matter and mind the causal chain of that
which is has many and varied consequences for ethical, moral, epistemological, etc. potentials.)] But none of
these things could praise them, so they formed more advanced beings of clay. [(The entrance of ‘conscious
life’ into the material world.)] But these beings fell apart when they got wet, so they made beings out of wood,
but they proved unsatisfactory and caused trouble on the earth. The gods sent a great flood to wipe out these
beings, so that they could start over [(the deluge)]. With the help of Mountain Lion, Coyote, Parrot, and
Crow [(Lion, Bull, Eagle, Human?)] they fashioned four new beings. These four beings performed well and
are the ancestors of the Quiché….
In the beginning there was only darkness [(as, we shall see, is true in most cosmologies. It is this
primal darkness that necessitates the Fiat Lux. This is the Great Mother…)] Suddenly a small bearded man,
the One Who Lives Above [(the Old Sage)], appeared rubbing his eyes as if just awakened [(this is the Fiat
Lux, let there be light, the emanation of the Word, the Logos)]. The man, the Creator, rubbed his hands
together and there appeared a little girl, Girl-Without-Parents [(Sophia, Wisdom, that which facilitates the
harmonization of created and uncreated)]. The creator rubbed his face with his hands and there stood the
Sun-God. Again Creator rubbed his sweaty brow and from his hands dropped Small-boy. Now there were

624
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz. American Indian myths and legends. Pantheon, 1984.
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four gods. Then he created Tarantula, Big Dipper, Wind, Lightning-Maker and Lightning-Rumbler [(the
astronomical quality of the myths begins to shine through)]. All four gods shook hands so that their sweat
mixed together. Then Creator rubbed his palms together from which fell a small round, brown ball. They
took turns kicking it and with each kick the ball grew larger. Creator told Wind to go inside the ball and blow
it up. Then Tarantula spun a black cord which he attached to the ball and went to the east pulling as hard as
he could. He repeated this exercise with a blue cord to the south, a yellow cord to the west and a white cord
to the north. When he was done the brown ball had become the earth. The Creator again rubbed his hands
and there appeared Hummingbird. "Fly all over this earth," said Creator to Hummingbird, "and tell us what
you see." When he returned Hummingbird reported that there was water on the west side. But the earth
rolled and bounced, so Creator made four giant posts one each black, blue, yellow and white and had Wind
place them at the four cardinal points of the earth [(the above is, at least at one level, a metaphor for the
conditioning of the prima materia by the forms of the archetypes symbolized by the above described gods;
here we see this conditioning manifest in the electromagnetic field that keeps the Earth spinning evenly on its
polar axis…)]. The earth was now still. The creation of the people, animals, birds, trees, etc. takes place
hereafter [(here we see a narrative that is replicated in many cosmologies. The uncreated sing (or in this case
mold) the form of the created into being. It is only once this ‘idea’ of creation has been articulated and the
prima materia has been conditioned by the form of this idea that the actual process of generation through
passing time (by which these ‘uncreated ideas’ may come into manifest being, being in time) can begin.)]” 625
In this creation narrative, notably, we do not see the specter of conceptualizing love,
harmony, order, community, etc. as domination that is so prevalent in Babylonian
influenced mythological systems; in fact, it seems clear that for the Apache (at least those
who hold to the above mythological system) the order of the divine is naturally embedded
within creation and, like a seed, merely needs time, soil (solid), water (liquid), oxygen (gas),
light (plasma) and cultivation (ether) in order to blossom forth. Like Meng Zi with his
‘sprouts of goodness’, then, the Apache view nature and humanity as essentially good, as
containing (in the form of latent potential) the order of the divine within its essence as a
seed contains the order of tree, blossoms and fruit within its essence. This myth seems to
have a close similarity with the Popol Vuh (at least in the name of the Creator and the
Maker, though the differences may rise from the translation of the Popol Vuh…):
“The Story of the Creation recorded in the frist few pages of the Popul Vuh, as translated into English
follows:
This is the first account, the first narrative. There was neither man, nor animal, birds, fishes, crabs,
trees, stones, caves, ravines, grasses, nor forests; there was only the sky. The surface of the earth had not
appeared. There was only the calm sea and the great expanse of sky. There was nothing standing; only the
calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed. [(Here sea and sky seem to be taking on their
traditional metaphysical symbolism)]. Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepu and Gucumatz the Forefatehrs,
were in the water surrounded by light. Then came the word. Tepu and Gucumatz came together in the
darkenss, in the night, and Tepeu and Gucumatz talked together. Then while they meditated it became clear
that when dawn would break, man must appear. Then Tepeu and Gucumatz came together, then they
conferred about light and life what they would do so that there would be light and dawn. Thus let it be done!
Let the emptiness be filled. Let the water recede, let the earth appear and become solid, Thus they spoke.
Let there be light. Then the earth was created by them. Like the mist. Like a cloud of dust was the Creation,
when mountains and valleys were formed and that part of creation was finished. Next, Tepeu and Gucumatz
made small animals, trees and vines and then birds. Homes were assignes and they were given speech. Finally
four men were formed and they were called only men. They were not born of woman, nor were they

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“Native American Myths of Creation” http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/mitos_creacion/esp_mitoscreacion_14.htm
http://www.indians.org/welker/creation.htm
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begotten by the Creator, nor by the Maker, only by a miracle were they created. Their wives then had being,
during sleep—there were the women when they awakened and their hearts were filled with joy because of their
wives. From this union came the people of Quiche. That was the beginning when they came together in the
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East and where they multiplied before crossing the sea.”
Returning to Apache Myth,
“Myth 2: …In the beginning nothing existed—no earth, no sky, no sun, no moon, only darkness was
everywhere [(the Primal Darkness, the Great Mother, Ain)]. Suddenly from the darkness emerged a thin disc,
one side yellow and the other side white, appearing suspended in midair [(Ain Soph)]. Within the disc sat a
small bearded man, Creator, the One Who Lives Above [(the Logos, The Word)]. As if waking from a long
nap, he rubbed his eyes and face with both hands. When he looked into the endless darkness, light appeared
above [(Fiat Lux, Ain Soph Aur)]. He looked down and it became a sea of light. To the east, he created
yellow streaks of dawn. To the west, tints of many colors appeared everywhere. There were also clouds of
different colors. Creator wiped his sweating face and rubbed his hands together, thrusting them downward.
Behold! A shining cloud upon which sat a little girl. "Stand up and tell me where are you going," said Creator.
But she did not reply. He rubbed his eyes again and offered his right hand to the Girl-Without-Parents.
"Where did you come from?" she asked, grasping his hand. "From the east where it is now light," he replied,
stepping upon her cloud [(from the orient, from the point at which the sun rises)]. "Where is the earth?" she
asked. "Where is the sky?" he asked, and sang, "I am thinking, thinking, thinking what I shall create next." He
sang four times, which was the magic number. Creator brushed his face with his hands, rubbed them
together, then flung them wide open! Before them stood Sun-God. Again Creator rubbed his sweaty brow
and from his hands dropped Small-Boy. All four gods sat in deep thought upon the small cloud. "What shall
we make next?" asked Creator. "This cloud is much too small for us to live upon." Then he created Tarantula,
Big Dipper, Wind, Lightning-Maker, and some western clouds in which to house Lightning-Rumbler, which
he just finished. Creator sang, "Let us make earth. I am thinking of the earth, earth, earth; I am thinking of the
earth," he sang four times [(again, mind precedes matter, ideas produce things, etc.)]. All four gods shook
hands. In doing so, their sweat mixed together and Creator rubbed his palms, from which fell a small round,
brown ball, not much larger than a bean. Creator kicked it, and it expanded. Girl-Without-Parents kicked the
ball, and it enlarged more. Sun-God and Small-Boy took turns giving it hard kicks, and each time the ball
expanded. Creator told Wind to go inside the ball and to blow it up. Tarantula spun a black cord and,
attaching it to the ball, crawled away fast to the east, pulling on the cord with all his strength. Tarantula
repeated with a blue cord to the south, a yellow cord to the west, and a white cord to the north. With mighty
pulls in each direction, the brown ball stretched to immeasurable size--it became the earth! No hills,
mountains, or rivers were visible; only smooth, treeless, brown plains appeared. Creator scratched his chest
and rubbed his fingers together and there appeared Hummingbird. "Fly north, south, east, and west and tell
us what you see," said Creator. "All is well," reported Hummingbird upon his return. "The earth is most
beautiful, with water on the west side." But the earth kept rolling and dancing up and down [(a lack of stability
in the earth’s rotational axis?)]. So Creator made four giant posts--black, blue, yellow, and white to support
the earth [(the imposition of electromagnetic form to bring stability to the earth’s rotational axis?)]. Wind
carried the four posts, placing them beneath the four cardinal points of the earth. The earth sat still [(stability
of earth’s rotational axis?)]. Creator sang, "World is now made and now sits still," which he repeated four
times.
Then he began a song about the sky. None existed, but he thought there should be one. After
singing about it four times, twenty-eight [(7 (Elohim?) x 4 (the ‘magic number’, for human souls are said to be
‘quaternary’ in many traditions))] people appeared to help make a sky above the earth. Creator chanted about
making chiefs for the earth and sky. He sent Lightning-Maker to encircle the world, and he returned with
three uncouth creatures, two girls and a boy found in a turquoise shell. They had no eyes, ears, hair, mouths,
noses, or teeth. They had arms and legs, but no fingers or toes. Sun-God sent for Fly to come and build a
sweathouse. Girl-Without-Parents covered it with four heavy clouds. In front of the east doorway she placed a

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Henriette Mertz (2014) The Mystic Symbol: Mark of the Michigan Mound Builders (Hayriver Press) p. 94-95
289

soft, red cloud for a foot-blanket to be used after the sweat. Four stones were heated by the fire inside the
sweathouse. The three uncouth creatures were placed inside. The others sang songs of healing on the
outside, until it was time for the sweat to be finished. Out came the three strangers who stood upon the magic
red cloud-blanket. Creator then shook his hands toward them, giving each one fingers, toes, mouths, eyes,
ears, noses and hair. Creator named the boy, Sky-Boy, to be chief of the Sky-People. One girl he named
Earth-Daughter, to take charge of the earth and its crops. The other girl he named Pollen-Girl, and gave her
charge of health care for all Earth-People. [(This is the first time we have come across this motif of the first
humans as one male and two females, the male holding reign over the sky and the two females over the
earth.)]
Since the earth was flat and barren, Creator thought it fun to create animals, birds, trees, and a hill.
He sent Pigeon to see how the world looked. Four days later, he returned and reported, "All is beautiful
around the world. But four days from now, the water on the other side of the earth will rise and cause a
mighty flood." Creator made a very tall pinon tree. Girl-Without-Parents covered the tree framework with
pinon gum, creating a large, tight ball. In four days, the flood occurred. Creator went up on a cloud, taking his
twenty-eight helpers with him. Girl-Without-Parents put the others into the large, hollow ball, closing it tight at
the top. In twelve days, the water receded, leaving the float-ball high on a hilltop. The rushing floodwater
changed the plains into mountains, hills, valleys, and rivers. Girl-Without-Parents led the gods out from the
float-ball onto the new earth. She took them upon her cloud, drifting upward until they met Creator with his
helpers, who had completed their work making the sky during the flood time on earth. [(The Deluge myth
seems to be ubiquitous across the global mythical tradition.627 What is novel about this Myth, from the
perspective of the Western Traditions, is that The Deluge is not framed as the wrath or divine punishment of
the creator as manifest in natural disasters and destruction, but as a simple, necessary consequence of
creation within time. Destruction does not render nature chaotic or evil. Destruction, instead, is an aspect of
nature necessary for all generation and creation within passing time and physical space (as beautifully manifest
in species of Pine trees who cannot regenerate without wild fires… Again, when nature retains its divine seed,
its sacred quality, its good, ordered essential nature, harmony with nature need not manifest as domination of
nature and can instead be conceptualized in terms of cultivation of nature so that its ‘sprouts of goodness’ and
order can blossom forth and bear fruit.)]
Together the two clouds descended to a valley below. There, Girl-Without-Parents gathered
everyone together to listen to Creator. "I am planning to leave you," he said. "I wish each of you to do your
best toward making a perfect, happy world. "You, Lightning-Rumbler, shall have charge of clouds and water.
"You, Sky-Boy, look after all Sky-People. "You, Earth-Daughter, take charge of all crops and Earth-People.
"You, Pollen-Girl, care for their health and guide them. "You, Girl-Without-Parents [(Sophia, Wisdom, that
which facilitates the harmonization of created and uncreated)], I leave you in charge over all." Creator then
turned toward Girl-Without-Parents and together they rubbed their legs with their hands and quickly cast
them forcefully downward. Immediately between them arose a great pile of wood, over which Creator waved
a hand, creating fire. Great billowy clouds of smoke at once drifted skyward. Into this cloud, Creator
disappeared. The other gods followed him in other clouds of smoke, leaving the twenty-eight workers [(the
Elohim)] to people the earth. Sun-God went east to live and travel with the Sun. Girl-Without- Parents
departed westward to live on the far horizon. Small-Boy and Pollen-Girl made cloud homes in the south. Big
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Dipper can still be seen in the northern sky at night, a reliable guide to all.”
With the true harmony with nature (conceptualized as cultivation of the sprouts of
goodness, of order, of beauty and perfection, etc. rather than domination) manifest in the
above cosmology we also see the potential for a harmonic system of gender relations as the
above tale (unlike (as we shall see) western iterations of the same basic cosmological
narrative) does not present a paternalist, hierarchical or dominating view of the necessary
or essential relations between the sexes and instead presents a view of harmonic

627
Hancock, Finger Prints of the Gods
628
David Williams (2012), The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Narrative (Lexington Books) p. 186-188
290

cooperation wherein each fulfills their role in a manner that facilitates the work of the
others without necessarily privileging one of those roles over another (for it is the mutual
constitution of these roles that allows the system function harmoniously). What becomes
clear is that the very changes in Ontological Regime(s) needed to begin mending our
relationship with nature also have serious implications for mending relationships within the
human social body; again, while our world faces a range of very serious problems, this
example demonstrates the fact that we cannot approach these problems with practices that
attempt to simply address the manifestations of these problems (environmental
degradation, patriarchy, etc.) and instead must have recourse to new theories (new
ontological regime(s)) that work to ameliorate the ideational source of these problems (in
this case conceptions of nature and the material world as essentially evil and chaotic, of
bringing order to chaos in terms of force and conflict, of love, harmony, community, etc. as
domination (to bring order to the subordinate), of the harmonious soul as one in which the
‘rational soul’ ‘dominates’ the ‘appetitive’ and ‘spirited’ souls, etc.).
Cherokee
“Myth 1: Long, long ago, a great island floated in a giant ocean. This island hung from four thick ropes from
the sky, which was solid rock. There were no peoples and it was always dark. The animals could not see so
they got the sun and put it in a path that took it across the island from east to west each day. The animals and
plants were told by the Great Spirit to stay awake for seven days and seven nights but most could not and
slept. Those plants that did stay awake, such as the pine and cedar and those few others were rewarded by
being allowed to remain green all year. All the others were made to lose their leaves each winter. Those
animals that did stay awake, such as the owl and the mountain lion and those few others were rewarded with
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the ability to go about in the dark. Then the people appeared.”
“In the beginning, there was just water. All the animals lived above it and the sky was overcrowded. They
were all curious about what was beneath the water and one day Dayuni'si, the water beetle, volunteered to
explore it. He explored the surface but could not find any solid ground. He explored below the surface to the
bottom and all he found was mud which he brought back to the surface. After collecting the mud, it began to
grow in size and spread outwards until it became the Earth as we know it. After all this had happened, one of
the animals attached this new land to the sky with four strings. The land was still too wet so they sent the great
buzzard from Galun'lati to prepare it for them. The buzzard flew down and by the time that he reached the
Cherokee land he was so tired that his wings began to hit the ground. Wherever they hit the ground a
mountain or valley formed. The animals then decided that it was too dark, so they made the sun and put it on
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the path in which it still runs today.”
“Myth 2: Long ago, before there were any people, the world was young and water covered everything. The
earth was a great island floating above the seas, suspended by four rawhide ropes representing the four sacred
directions. It hung down from the crystal sky. There were no people, but the animals lived in a home above
the rainbow. Needing space, they sent Water Beetle to search for room under the seas. Water Beetle dove
deep and brought up mud that spread quickly, turning into land that was flat and too soft and wet for the
animals to live on. Grandfather Buzzard was sent to see if the land had hardened. When he flew over the
earth, he found the mud had become solid; he flapped in for a closer look. The wind from his wings created
valleys and mountains, and that is why the Cherokee territory has so many mountains today. As the earth
stiffened, the animals came down from the rainbow. It was still dark. They needed light, so they pulled the
sun out from behind the rainbow, but it was too bright and hot. A solution was urgently needed. The

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http://cherokeereligion.weebly.com/elders-tales.html
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shamans were told to place the sun higher in the sky. A path was made for it to travel—from east to west—so
that all inhabitants could share in the light. The plants were placed upon the earth. The Creator told the
plants and animals to stay awake for seven days and seven nights. Only a few animals managed to do so,
including the owls and mountain lions, and they were rewarded with the power to see in the dark. Among the
plants, only the cedars, spruces, and pines remained awake. The Creator told these plants that they would
keep their hair during the winter, while the other plants would lose theirs. People were created last. The
women were able to have babies every seven days. They reproduced so quickly that the Creator feared the
world would soon become too crowded. So after that the women could have only one child per year, and it
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has been that way ever since.”
Cherokee Myths seem to locate the divine within nature as was seen in the Apache Myths.
It is the animals who (Microsoft Word’s dictionary wants me to objectify animals by using
the term ‘that’ rather than ‘who’…) bring light to the world through bringing the sun into its
course across the sky. Plants and Animals, like Humans who have attained the acquired
and universal intellect, can attain a state of ‘enlightened’ evolution, a plateau of perfection,
as manifest in evergreens and animals with night vision. Nature, like humanity, is endowed
with order and the capacity to manifest plateaus of perfection in the sympathy of their
manifestation with the uncreated origin it reflects (how polished is the mirror?). How
different this narrative is from the Abrahamic narrative that would come to dominate the
west (in which animals are created to be dominated by (in order to serve) ‘Man’). Also as
we saw in the Apache Myths, the removal of evil human nature, original sin and the
valorization of domination from the essence of the narrative, beyond producing a truly
harmonious relationship between humanity and nature where matter, minerals, plants,
animals and humans help each other to manifest the latent plateaus of perfection (of
sympathetic harmonization with the uncreated substance they reflect) contained within their
essence, also presents the potential for social, gender, etc. relations that are similarly free
from paternal domination.
“The earth is a great floating island in a sea of water. At each of the four corners there is a cord hanging down
from the sky. The sky is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the cords will break, and
then the earth will sink down into the ocean. Everything will be water again. All the people will be dead. The
Indians are much afraid of this. In the long time ago, when everything was all water, all the animals lived up
above in Galun’lati, beyond the stone arch that made the sky. But it was very much crowded. All the animals
wanted more room. The animals began to wonder what was below the water and at last Beaver’s grandchild,
little Water Beetle, offered to go and find out. Water Beetle darted in every direction over the surface of the
water, but it could find no place to rest. There was no land at all. Then Water Beetle dived to the bottom of
the water and brought up some soft mud. This began to grow and to spread out on every side until it became
the island which we call the earth. Afterwards this earth was fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one
remembers who did this. At first the earth was flat and soft and wet. The animals were anxious to get down,
and they sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry, but there was no place to alight; so the birds came
back to Galun’lati. Then at last it seemed to be time again, so they sent out Buzzard; they told him to go and
make ready for them. This was the Great Buzzard, the father of all the buzzards we see now. He flew all over
the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was
very tired; his wings began to flap and strike the ground. Wherever they struck the earth there was a valley;
whenever the wings turned upwards again, there was a mountain. When the animals above saw this, they were
afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains
full of mountains to this day. [This was the original home, in North Carolina.]

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When the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark. Therefore they got the sun
and set it in a track to go every day across the island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way.
Red Crawfish had his shell scorched a bright red, so that his meat was spoiled. Therefore the Cherokees do
not eat it. Then the medicine men raised the sun a handsbreadth in the air, but it was still too hot. They
raised it another time; and then another time; at last they had raised it seven handsbreadths so that it was just
under the sky arch [(this is the journey through the seven spheres described, for example, in tales like Attar’s
Conference of the Birds and in symbolism like that of the seven celestial spheres)]. Then it was right and they
left it so. That is why the medicine men called the high place “the seventh height.” Every day the sun goes
along under this arch on the under side; it returns at night on the upper side of the arch to its starting place.
There is another world under this earth. It is like this one in every way. The animals, the plants, and
the people are the same, but the seasons are different. The streams that come down from the mountains are
the trails by which we reach this underworld. The springs at their head are the doorways by which we enter it.
But in order to enter the other world, one must fast and then go to the water, and have one of the
underground people for a guide. We know that the seasons in the underground world are different, because
the water in the spring is always warmer in winter than the air in this world; and in summer the water is
cooler.
We do not know who made the first plants and animals. But when they were first made, they were
told to watch and keep awake for seven nights. This is the way young men do now when they fast and pray to
their medicine. They tried to do this. The first night, nearly all the animals stayed awake. The next night
several of them dropped asleep. The third night still more went to sleep. At last, on the seventh night, only
the owl, the panther, and one or two more were still awake. Therefore, to these were given the power to see
in the dark, to go about as if it were day, and to kill and eat the birds and animals which must sleep during the
night. Even some of the trees went to sleep. Only the cedar, the pine, the spruce, the holly, and the laurel
were awake all seven nights. Therefore they are always green. They are also sacred trees. But to the other
trees it was said, “Because you did not stay awake, therefore you shall lose your hair every winter.” After the
plants and the animals, men began to come to the earth. At first there was only one man and one woman. He
hit her with a fish. In seven days a little child came down to the earth. So people came to the earth. They
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came so rapidly that for a time it seemed as though the earth could not hold them all.”
What is again interesting is the role of animals and plants in the creation of the earth. It is a
beetle who dives down below the waters and brings back the material from which solid
matter would be formed. It is The Great Buzzard whose wings form the valleys and
mountains of the earth’s surface. It was even the animals who got the sun and put it into
motion across the heavens. Certain animals and trees, through ascetic practice (staying
awake for seven days), even manifest illumination and eternity at their own level of
manifestation (demonstrating that each rung of nature (animal, plant, etc.), like humanity, is
endowed with divinity, with divine order, and makes its own journey through the plateaus
of perfection made potential by manifestation. The material universe, which seems here to
be distinguished from the consciousness that inhabits and orders it as plants and animals, is
not a chaotic other to be dominated but instead a pallet to be crafted that it might fulfill its
role as the womb of life (i.e. nature needs plants and animals (to manifest a conscious,
‘living’ quality of the divine order in the same way that plants and animals need nature to
act as vessel for their consciousness, and neither must dominate the other as their interests
are mutually constitutive. In other words, the optimal situation for nature is also the
optimal situation for plants and animals. Thus, as there is no conflict of interest, there is no
need for one to dominate the other but simply for nature and consciousness to share

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Katharine Berry Judson (2007) Myths and Legends of the Great Plains. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22083/22083-h/22083-
h.htm#Page_19 p. 22-25
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(nature shares sustenance and a vessel to consciousness and consciousness shares a new
layer of order to nature) what they possess so that each can manifest its sympathy with the
First Principle as purely as possible.
The above also seems to clearly manifest knowledge of Divine Geometry and other
Esoteric Principles. For example, the emphasis on the number seven (especially when
discussing light and creation) has many and varied implications that will be readily apparent
to the initiated reader. Similarly, the description of the underworld and the ways in which
we can reach it through ascetic practice and the help of our spiritual guide is one that
resonates with a plethora of world traditions that stretch from South America to Egypt and
beyond. It seems clear that the Cherokee had a very well developed esoteric ‘science’ that
shares much of its essential content with the global tradition (either proving the perennialist
perspective or providing evidence of a shared historical antecedent for the global tradition
(or both…)); the great difference with much of the Global Tradition (at least those aspects
of the tradition we receive in the west) seems to come in the order and sacred quality the
Cherokee and other Indigenous North American systems of thought ascribed to nature,
the role of nature, plants and animals in genesis (creators in their own right rather than
objects created by ‘Old White Man God’ for ‘Man’ to dominate…) and the many and
varied implications of this view of nature as a mutually constitutive continuum of
consciousness in which we are selves are embedded and wherein each node’s essential
interests (the change, difference, chaos, etc. of matter, passing time and physical space
obviously make it impossible for this uncreated reality of shared interest to manifest
perfectly and there will always be points within creation where this does not hold true…) are
supported by the essential interests of the others (i.e. the interests of nature are
commensurable with the interests of animals and neither must dominate the other—by
simply sharing their capacities and qualities with the other, nature and consciousness
manifest as animal are able help each other to attain their own sympathetic perfection in
reflection of the divine through manifestation (i.e. they polish their own mirrors by helping
the other)…
“The Daughter of the Sun: The Uktena is the great serpent of Cherokee tales who lives in the mountains. It
has rings or spots of color along its body, is horned, is as large around as a tree trunk, and had once a bright,
blazing jewel embedded in its forehead called the Ulunsuti. The Ulunsuti is a rutile quartz which, down one
side, has a bright streak of red, making it a very rare specimen of quartz besides being sacred in connection to
the Uktena. The Great Serpent lost the jewel at one point and the Cheokee people kept it in their possession.
The Uktena had the power to destroy all that Man held most dear and was so venomous that if he ever
looked at someone, that person's whole family would perish. Even to look at it while it was sleeping. He isn't a
patron of the Cherokee, but rather, is an enemy to be overcome. The Uktena could only be wounded in the
seventh spot from his head because that is where the Uktena's heart was. He is normally slain by a hero in
tales. [(Here we see the symbol for malicious ‘Chaos’ (The Archetypal Being of Malicious Chaos). In
Greek Myth this is Typhus (which is often interpreted as representing nature, the source of Chaos in post-
Babylonian mythical traditions); Uktena, however, is a product of nature manifest rather than a quality of the
essence of nature (i.e. it is a lack of perfection in manifestation of the uncreated rather than a reflected quality
of the uncreated)...
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The motif of the relationship between this ‘archetypal being of malicious chaos’ and a ‘bright,
blazing jewel’ can also be found in mythical tales like Tolkien’s Silmarillion. 633
The reason that the Uktena is a creature of such threat is because he was very jealous and bitter
towards Snake [(that chaos rose from the passions envy, jealousy, bitterness, vengefulness, etc. is an archetypal
notion)]. Snake was honored and prayed to, (while the Uktena was not), because Snake had struck the Sun's
daughter one day while she was opening the doors to the house for the Sun to come in. The Sun was angry
and pained that the people liked Moon more. The people could gaze at Moon easily and did so often,
complimenting him on his greatness, but when they looked up at Sun they would squint, make faces, and
complain. Sun would have continued to burn the people to death as she had already done to hundreds for
punishment. [(The Sun is feminine and The Moon is masculine; this is surely a notable break from the norm
of Western Myth…)] Without Her daughter to let Her come in, however, the people were saved.
The Sun lived on the other side of the sky vault, but her daughter lived in the middle of the sky, directly
above the Earth. Every day as the sun was climbing along the sky arch to the west, she used to stop at her
daughters house for dinner. Now, the Sun hated the people of this Earth, because they never looked straight
at her without squinting. She said to her brother, the Moon, "My grandchildren are ugly, they screw up their
faces whenever they see me. But the Moon said, "I like my younger brothers, I think they are handsome."
This was because they always smiled pleasantly at his mild glow in the night sky. The Sun was jealous of the
Moon's popularity and decided to kill the people. Every day when she got near her daughter's house, she sent
down such sultry heat that fever broke out and people died by the hundreds. [(This section seems to hint at
the mythical conflict between the cult of the sun and the cult of the moon which is often said to have brought
an end to Atlantian and Lemurian civilization in occult writings; in this case, however, the conflict takes on
certain astronomical significance and one begins to wonder whether the conflict between sun and moon may
have manifest it self at multiple levels of the multiplicity (in human and astronomical ‘conflict.’)]
When everyone had lost some friend and it seemed as if no one would be spared, the humans went
for help to the little men. These men, who were friendly spirits, said that the only way the people could save
themselves was to kill Sun. The Little Men [(natural spirits?, ‘elementals’?, the ‘medicine men’?, beings that

633
J. M. Hamade: “I automatically jump to many mythologies and symbols thinking about this, Uktena is a horned serpent and the horns
seem important, if not only to symbolically endow occult power to a creature which does not normally possess it. These serpents are
related to water (chaos) not unlike Chinese, Sumerian, MesoAmerican, European, Hindu, etc. This jewel which lies in the on the
serpents forehead seems important as well, like a third eye or the philosophers stone, pineal gland, etc. "The blazing diamond is called
Ulun'suti—"Transparent"—and he who can win it may become the greatest wonder worker of the tribe. But it is worth a man's life to
attempt it, for whoever is seen by the Uktena is so dazed by the bright light that he runs toward the snake instead of trying to escape." It
seems almost like a near death or mystical experience, and the serpent is akin to Kundalini, potentially dangerous energy, but if handled
right, can turn one into a sage of some sort. It would almost seem like the symbolism is entirely that, mystical initiation, the dangerous
journey into hell (water, chaos, Heal of the foot, Pisces, piez (feet), Enki the horned fish) and up through the Kundalini to the third eye
or the lair of the RAM ('exalted' in Hebrew, Aries, the first sign and first cause, YOD in YHWH), symbolized by the Horns. The jewel is
a light at the end of the tunnel if you will, where 'death' is almost imminent. Seems all very archtypal. Ancient Aliens people might say
that perhaps it was some kind of lazer technology or shining ray that these early water reptilian species possessed, and as in the Cherokee
myths, these reptiles were destroyed by the 'Thunderbirds' the ones who came in from the sky, Zeus, Anu, etc to kill the old Watery
Cthonic beings.”
Wes Stouder: “As I understand it, Uktena was created with the jewel, and Morgoth stole his. But in both instances, the jewel is
connected to the way of suffering. Morgoth was inflicted with eternal burning upon stealing, and Uktena's vulnerability, if I remember
correctly, was its heart, hidden behind the jewel. It's seems the jewel was at least, the beings, a possession of pride and shame, pride for its
beauty and power, and shame at its association to weakness. I think ultimately the jewel symbolizes an oppositional nature of chaos.
Morgoth I can't speak for, but Uktena is an example of this, not good or bad, but went from the savior to villain through failure to
complete its task and jealousy at snakes success and praise. Uktena's jewel served to remind the people, once Uktena was slain, of the
value of order over chaos. Similarly, the silmarils Morgoth stole were essentially beacons of light, shining through chaos and granting light
in which order could progress without backtracking in the dark. I suppose they symbolize the importance of illumination, of direction
and oneness of mind and action.”
J.M. Hamade: “Both the silmaril and the serpents crystal trap light, and that light is longing to be set free and be given to all. Just as
diamonds are fought over, with blood being spilled (as blood must be spilled to feed the Serpents diamond) they are fought over for what
they represent, a power locus that brings the wearer a false enlightenment, unduly attained. 'Path of Suffering' as you put it. Just like the
Ring of Power, it must be destroyed because it limits light, trapped inside an individual which creates pride, unsustainable to be isolated
from Order.”
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exist in a different dimensional quality from our own but who possess the potential to move into our ‘phase’
of reality?)] made medicine to change two of the humans into snakes, the spreading adder and copperhead,
who could hide near the daughter's door and bite the old Sun. The Snakes went up to the sky and lay in wait
until the sun arrived for dinner. But when the spreading adder was about to spring, her bright light blinded
him and he could only spit out yellow slime, as he does to this day when he tries to bite. The Sun called him
a nasty thing and went into the house, and the copperhead was so discouraged that he crawled off without
trying to do anything.
The people still dying from the terrible heat, went a second time to the Little Men for help. Again
the Little Men made medicine and changed one man into the great Uktena, the water monster, and another
into a rattlesnake. As before, the serpents had instructions to kill the old Sun when she stopped at her
daughter's house. Uktena was large and fierce, with horns on his head, and everyone thought he would be
sure to succeed. But the rattlesnake was so eager that he raced ahead and coiled up just outside the house.
When the Sun's daughter opened the door to look for her mother, he struck and she fell dead in the
doorway. Forgetting to wait for the old Sun, he went back to the people, and Uktena was so angry at the
rattlesnake's stupidity that he went back too. Since then we pray to the rattlesnake and don't kill him, because
he wishes people well and never tries to bite if we don't disturb him. But Uktena grew angrier and more
dangerous all the time. He became so venomous that if he even looked at a man, the man's whole family
would die. Eventually the people held a council and decided that he was just too dangerous, so they sent him
to Galun'lati, the world, where he still is.
When the Sun found her daughter dead, she shut herself up in the house and grieved. Now the
people were no longer dying from the heat, but they lived in darkness. Once more they sought help from the
Little Men, who said that in order to coax the Sun out, they must bring her daughter back from Tsusgina'i.
This is the ghost country, which lies in Usunhi'yi, the Darkening Land in the west. The people chose seven
men to make the journey. The Little Men told the seven to take a box, and told each man to carry sourwood
rod a hand-breadth long. When they got to Tsugina'i, the Little Men explained, they would find all the ghost
at a dance. They should stand outside the circle, and when the Sun's daughter danced past them, they must
strike her with the rods and she would fall to the ground. Then they could put her in the box and bring her
back to her mother. But they must not open the box, not even a crack, until they arrived home. The seven
men took the rods and the box and traveled west for seven days until they came to the Darkening Land.
There they found a great crowd of ghost having a dance, just as if they were alive. The Sun's daughter was in
the outside circle. As she danced past them, one of the seven men struck her with his rod, and then another
and another, until at the seventh round she fell out of the ring. The men put her into the box and closed the
lid, and the other ghost never seem to notice what had happened. The seven took up the box and started
home toward the east. In a while the girl came to life again and begged to be let out, but the party went on
without answering. Soon she called again and said she was hungry, but they did not reply. When at last the
group was very near home, the daughter of the sun cried that she was smothering and begged them to raise
the lid just a little. Now they were afraid that she was really dying, so they barely cracked the lid to give her air.
There was a fluttering sound, and something flew past them into the bushes. Then they heard a redbird cry,
"Kwish!Kwish!Kwish!" Shutting the lid, they went on again. But when they arrived at the settlements and
opened the box, it was empty. So we know that the redbird is the daughter of the Sun. And if the party had
kept the box closed, as the Little Men told them to, they could have brought her home safely, and today we
would be able to recover our friends from the Ghost Country. Because the seven opened the box, however,
we can never bring back people who die. The Sun had been hopeful when the party had started off for the
Darkening Land, but when they came back without her daughter, she wept until her tears caused a great flood
[(The Deleuge)]. Fearing that the world would be drowned, the people held another council and decided to
send their handsomest young men and women to amuse the Sun and stop her crying. This group danced
before her and sang their best songs, but for a long time she kept her face bowed and paid no attention. At
last when the drummer suddenly changed the song, she looked up and was so pleased at the sight of the
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beautiful young people that she forgot her grief and smiled.”

634
“Native American – Creational Myths: Creation by Women”
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/mitos_creacion/esp_mitoscreacion_13.htm#women
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“Long ago -- hilahiyu jigesv -- when the Sun became angry at the people on earth and sent a sickness
to destroy them, the Little Men changed a man into a monster snake, which they called Uktena, "The Keen-
Eyed," and sent him to kill her (the Sun). He failed to do the work, and the Rattlesnake had to be sent
instead, which made the Uktena so jealous and angry that the people were afraid of him and had him taken
up to Galunlati, to stay with the other dangerous things. He left others behind him, though, nearly as large
and dangerous as himself, and they hide now in deep pools in the river and about lonely passes in the high
mountains, the places the Cherokees call "Where the Uktena stays." Those who know say the Uktena is a
great snake, as large around as a tree trunk, with horns on its head, and a bright blazing crest like a diamond
on its forehead, and scales glowing like sparks of fire. It has rings or spots of color along its whole length, and
can not be wounded except by shooting in the seventh spot from the head, because under this spot are its
heart and its life. The blazing diamond is called Ulun'suti -- "Transparent" -- and he who can win it may
become the greatest wonder worker of the tribe. But it is worth a man's life to attempt it, for whoever is seen
by the Uktena is so dazed by the bright light that he runs toward the snake instead of trying to escape. Even to
see the Uktena asleep is death, not to the hunter himself, but to his family. Of all the daring warriors who
have started out in search of the Ulun'suti only Aganunitsi ever came back successful. The East Cherokee still
keep the one that he brought. It is a large transparent crystal, nearly the shape of a cartridge bullet, with a
blood-red streak running throughout the center from top to bottom. The owner keeps it wrapped in a whole
deerskin, inside an earthen jar hidden away in a secret cave in the mountains. Every seven days he feeds it
with the blood of small game, rubbing the blood all over the crystal as soon as the animal has been killed.
Twice a year it must have the blood of a deer or other large animal. Should he forget to feed it at the proper
time it would come out of its cave in a shape of fire and fly through the air to slake its thirst with the lifeblood
of the conjurer or some one of his people. He may save himself from this danger by telling it, when he puts it
away, that he will not need it again for a long time. It will then go quietly to sleep and feel no hunger until it is
again brought forth to be consulted. Then it must be fed again with blood before it is used. No white man
must ever see it and no person but the owner will venture near it for fear of sudden death. Even the conjurer
who keeps it is afraid of it, and changes its hiding place every once in a while so it can not learn the way out.
When he dies it will be buried with him. Otherwise it will come out of its cave, like a blazing star, to search
for his grave, night after night for seven years, when, if still not able to find him, it will go back to sleep forever
where he has placed it. Whoever owns the Ulun'suti is sure of success in hunting, love, rainmaking, and every
other business, but its great use is in life prophecy. When it is consulted for this purpose the future is seen
mirrored in the clear crystal as a tree is reflected in the quiet stream below it, and the conjurer knows whether
the sick man will recover, whether the warrior will return from battle, or whether the youth will live to be
635
old.”
“When the world of the Ani Yunwiya was new all living things were great in size and strength. Two of the
many creatures that had been created and placed upon Ani Daksi Amayeli by Unethlana the Apportioner
were the Tlanuhwa and the Uhktena. The Tlanuhwa were very large birds with markings much like the red-
tail hawk of today. The markings or symbols of the great Tlanuhwa could only be worn by the ancient Ani
Kituhwah warriors when they went into war. Some people say the Tlanuhwa were the original parents, Ani
Tawodi, of the great hawks that live today. The Uhktena are enormous creatures that live in the rivers and
lakes of the great Ouascioto valleys and mountains (the Ohio Valley and Appalachians). The Uhktena come
and go from this world to the underworld. They enter the underworld through caves that are found under the
waters of rivers and lakes and also through certain entrances into the earth where there are springs. The
Uhktena have the body of a snake with very pretty and colorful circles all around their torsos. They also have
wings like the great buzzard and horns upon their head like the great deer. Upon their forehead there is a
special crystal which people prize because it has very special power over light and dark. This crystal is also a
window into the future and the past. The crystal is called an Ulunsuti stone; it is the most powerful thing a

Lankford, George E. Native American Legends of the Southeast: Tales from the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and Other
Nations. University of Alabama Press, 2011. 61-63 Bold Emphasis Added.
635
Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1897-98, Part I. [1900]
http://www.ewebtribe.com/NACulture/articles/Uktena/
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person can possess. The stone is carried in a circular buckskin pouch along with a little red pigment and must
never be kept in the house but in a safe dry place outside the house away from people. When one gazes into
an Ulunsuti stone, one will see either a white or a red blood-like streak appear. Only certain priests of the Ani
Kuhtahni of the Ani Yunwiya know how to use these Ulunsuti stones and can invoke certain formulas or
prayers which are aides to humans when used properly. One such protection prayer (Igowesdi) that calls
upon a great Uhktena is: "Now! Nearby here the Great Red Uhktena now winds his way. Now! Now the glare
of the purple lightening will dazzle the Red Uhktena. Also, this ancient tobacco will be as much of a
thorough-going wizard. Now! The Seven Reversers (priests of the mounds) looking at me will be dazzled by
the Great Red Uhktena. Udohiyuh! "At a certain place the Ani Yunwiya call Hogahega Uweyu i which lies
alongside the Wanegas (now known as the Tennessee River), there remains one of the ancient cave homes of
the Tlanuhwa. Located high up in the cliffs by the river, it is at this place that an ancient fight took place
between the Tlanuhwa and the Uhktena. Near the caves of the Tlanuhwa was one of the towns of the Ani
Yunwiya.The people living in the town never had any problems with the Tlanuhwa until one day, the
Tlanuhwa began to swoop down out of the sky, grabbing young children in their talons and taking them away
to their caves by the Hogahega Uweyu i. The people of the town became very upset and all the mothers
started crying and shouting at the men to bring back the children stolen by the Tlanuhwa.So the men made a
plan; they went very near the Tlanuhwa caves and took vines growing there from some trees and made ropes
to climb down over the cliffs to the caves. The men waited until they were certain that the Tlanuhwa were out
of the caves. Then down the ropes some of the men went, into the caves of the Tlanuhwa.All of the children
that had been taken from the Ani Yunwiya town were there in the caves and, were very anxious to get back to
their homes. Also in those caves were many eggs of the Tlanuhwa.The men had gotten the children out just
in time because as they started back up the vine ropes they heard the great screams of the Tlanuhwa returning
to their caves with more children in their talons. So very quickly the men began throwing the unhatched eggs
of the Tlanuhwa down into the Hogahega Uweyu i far below.When the eggs splashed into the waters far
below the Tlanuhwa caves, the great Uhktena came up from below the waters and began eating the eggs as
fast as the men could throw them into the water. This made the Tlanuhwa very angry and they dropped the
children and swooped down upon the Uhktena. The men waiting below the caves caught the children as they
fell. Thus began a long fight between the Tlanuhwa and the Uhktena.The Tlanuhwa destroyed the Uhktena
and tore it into four pieces. Afterwards, the pieces of the Uhktena were thrown all around the country along
with the great crystal, the Ulunsuti stone. Many people are still searching for that Ulunsuti stone in the
mountains along the Hogahega uweyu I.After that terrible fight the Tlanuhwa were so angry at what the
humans had done with their eggs that they flew far away, up above the sky vault and have never been seen
since. However, one can see the pictures that the ancient Ani Yunwiya made of the Tlanuhwa and Uhktena,
on the walls of the many caves among the Ouascito (Central Fire) Mountains, the ancient home of the Ani
Yunwiya.It is said that today, far below the cave of the Tlanuhwa on the banks of the Hogahega Uweyu i, one
can still see the rocks that were stained from the blood of the Uhktena and the Tlanuhwa from the fight they
had that day.
Awanisgi (I am done)
636
Aya Wahya”
In this version of Cherokee myth we see traces of the conception of order in nature
through conflict. What we must note, however, is that the origin of the chaos seems to
come, not in the essence of nature, but in the lack of perfection in the manifestation of
nature as produced by tension between the dimensional quality of passions like jealousy,
greed, envy, vengefulness, pride, etc. (i.e. the dimensional quality of the created) and the
dimensional quality of the uncreated (which is, in of its perfect unity, incommensurable
with the lack of unity and wholeness (i.e. the atomized dimensional quality of the created as

636
“Legend of The Tlanuhwa and The Uhktena” (Cherokees Of California 501(c)3)
http://www.powersource.com/cocinc/articles/tlanuhwa.htm
From the Oral Tradition of David Michael Wolfe, Inage. i Ani Yunwiya (Virginia Cherokee).
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typified by change, difference, motion, chaos, etc.) associated with the potential for such
passions). This myth is also fascinating because many of the most archetypal associations of
Western Myth (most importantly of the sun with masculinity and of the moon with
femininity) seem to have been inverted in this tale; as the implications of such a shift are
many and varied, we will meditate upon this point throughout the rest of this exploration to
allow the silence and other myths-religious narratives to shine light on this articulation of
sun and moon.
Osage
“Way beyond, once upon a time, some of the Osages lived in the sky. They did not know where they came
from, so they went to Sun. They said, “From where did we come?” He said, “You are my children.” Then
they wandered still further and came to Moon. Moon said, “I am your mother; Sun is your father. You must
go away from here. You must go down to the earth and live there.” So they came to the earth but found it
covered with water. They could not return up above. They wept, but no answer came to them. They floated
about in the air [(this may represent humanity as manifest prior to ‘incarnation’ within physical bodies; it may
similarly be a metaphor for the reflexivity of consciousness before it manifests its reflective potentials)],
seeking help from some god; but they found none. [(Entrance into manifestation comes at the advice of
Moon and Sun (the Mother and Father of humanity); Humanity didn't transgress divine law, they were not
cast out from heavenly paradise—it was part of our role in that which is to enter into earthly manifestation,
and, while there are times at which we feel lost, scared, and even meaningless, these thoughts and emotions
come as a function of our lack of understanding concerning the whole of that which is and not as a
punishment for our perversion of divine law…)]
Now all the animals were with them. Elk was the finest and most stately. They all trusted Elk. So
they called to Elk, “Help us.” Then Elk dropped into the water and began to sink. Then he called to the
winds. The winds came from all sides and they blew until the waters went upwards, as in a mist [(water is
often used to symbolize the lower qualities of mind associated with the body where as air is often used to
symbolize the higher qualities of mind associated with the spirit)]. Now before that the winds had traveled in
only two directions; they went from north to south and from south to north. But when Elk called to them,
they came from the east, from the north, from the west, and from the south. They met at a central place; then
they carried the waters upwards [(allegory for the evolution of consciousness???)].
Now at first the people could see only the rocks [(evolution of the geosphere)]. So they traveled on
the rocky places. But nothing grew there and there was nothing to eat. Then the waters continued to vanish.
At last the people could see the soft earth. When Elk saw the earth, he was so joyous, he rolled over and over
on the earth. Then all the loose hairs clung to the soil. So the hairs grew, and from them sprang beans, corn,
potatoes, and wild turnips, and at last all the grasses and trees [(evolution of the vegetative aspect of the
biosphere)]. Now the people wandered over the land. They found human footsteps. They followed them.
They joined with them, and traveled with them in search of food [(evolution of the biological aspect of the
biosphere and emergence into the noosphere. Another notable point is that there seems here to be a
description of ‘the people’ as joining ‘the humans’; this may point to the idea that our spirits existed
prior to the point at which biological life had evolved enough to allow our spirits to manifest within them and
express the noospheric potential of the biological body—it may also point to the fact that some nodes of
humanity (or of life on earth…) may have come from outside of earth’s biological, evolutionary trajectory (it
may, indeed, hint at both…).)]
(Hoga group)
The Hoga came down from above, and found the earth covered with water. They flew in every direction.
They sought for gods who would help them and drive the water away. They found not one. Then Elk came.
He had a loud voice and he shouted to the four corners of the sky. The four winds came in answer. They
blew upon the water and it vanished upwards, in a mist [(this is almost surely an allegory for the evolution of
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consciousness)]. Then the people could see the rocks. Now there was only a little space on the rocks. They
knew they must have more room. The people were crowded. So they sent Muskrat down into the water. He
did not come back. He was drowned. Then they sent Loon down. He did not come back. He was drowned.
Then they sent Beaver down into the water. The water was too deep. Beaver was drowned. Then Crawfish
dived into the water. He was gone a long time. When he came up there was a little mud in his claws. Crawfish
was so tired he died. But the people took the mud out of his claws and made the land. [(This seems to be a
metaphor for the necessary involution of ‘the waters’ to its most physical elemental aspect [mud] in order that
the universe might precede through the energy of the return to ‘paradise’ (i.e. the evolution of manifestation
towards more and more perfect reflection of its uncreated source) through the principle of rhythm (through
cycles, through time, etc.); ‘what goes down must come up…’]” 637
“There are people who come from under the water. They lived in the water weeds that hang down, all green,
into the water. They have leaves upon their stems. Now the water people lived in shells. The shells were their
houses and kept the water out. There were other animals who lived under the earth. Cougar lived under the
earth, and bear, and buffalo. These creatures came up out of the ground. Then the shell people came up to
the earth also; and the sky people came down. So all these three peoples lived together. They are the fathers
of the people who live on the earth today. [(This seems to posit that there were three races who populated
earth, one from the sky (from space), one from the depths of the ocean (though through the other
mythological records we have access to it seems that these water people also came from the sky, and that
there are multiple groups of ‘sky people’), and one from under the crust of the earth (the cave people from
whose remnants we find cave systems that extend from the British Isles through the Alps, across the
Southwest United States, etc.; in many cases these beings from underground are described as reptilian and we
wonder whether they might be remnants of a ‘dinosaur civilization’ (which would explain a lot and which is
not out of the realm of possibility as the only ‘evidence’ that Dinosaurs were ‘unintelligent’ is the supposition
that their brains must have all been like that of the modern reptile genus Sphenodon who has a small brain to
skull ratio 638 —if nothing, the potential of Dinosaur life with advanced consciousness having survived for
millennia under the earth’s surface would explain the Western Motif of ‘hell’ as being underground and
inhabited by demons that are more often than not portrayed as reptilian…).)]”639
Omaha
“In the beginning the people were in water. They opened their eyes, but they could see nothing [(The primal
waters, the uncreated, that which is prior to the Fiat Lux)]. As the people came out of the water [(came into
manifestation)], they first saw the daylight [(Fiat Lux)]. They had no clothing. Then they took weeds and
grasses and from them wove clothing. The people lived near a large body of water; it was in a wooded country
where there was game. The men hunted the deer with clubs; they did not know the use of the bow. The
people wandered about the shores of the great water. They were poor and cold. The people thought, “What
shall we do to help ourselves?” So they began chipping stones. They found a bluish stone that was easily
flaked and chipped; so they made knives and arrowheads out of it. But they were still poor and cold. They
thought, “What shall we do? ” Then a man found an elm root that was very dry. He dug a hole in it and put a
stick in and rubbed it. Then smoke came. He smelled it. Then the people smelled it and came near. Others
helped him to rub. At last a spark came. They blew this into a flame. Thus fire came to warm the people and
to cook their food. After this the people built grass houses; they cut the grass with the shoulder blade of a
deer. Now the people had fire and ate their meat roasted. Then they grew tired of roast meat. They thought,
“How shall we cook our meat differently?” A man found a piece of clay that stuck well together. Then he
brought sand to mix with it. Then he molded it as a pot. Then he gathered grass until he had a large heap of

637
638
Larsson, H. C. E. (2001). Endocranial anatomy of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus (Theropoda: Allosauroidea) and its implications for
theropod brain evolution. Mesozoic vertebrate life, 19-33.
639
h.htm#Page_19 p. 31
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it; he put the clay pot into the midst of the grass and set it on fire. This made the clay hard. After a time he
put water into the pot; the water did not leak out. This was good. So he put water into it and then meat into it,
and put the pot over the fire. Thus the people had boiled meat to eat. Now their grass coverings would grow
fuzzy and drop off. It was hard to gather and keep these coverings. The people were not satisfied. Again they
thought, “What can we do to have something different to wear?” Before this, they had been throwing away
the hides from the game which they killed. But now they took their stone knives to scrape down the hides
and make them thin. They rubbed the hides with grass and with their hands to make them soft. Then they
used the hides for clothing. Now they had clothing and were warm. Now the women had to break the dry
wood to keep up the fires. They had no tools. So the men made a stone ax with a groove. Then they put a
handle on the grooved stone and fastened it with rawhide. This was used. Then they wanted something better
to break the wood. So they made wedges of stone. Now the grass shelter came to pieces easily. Then the
people thought, “What shall we do? How can we get something that will not come to pieces?” Then they
tried putting skins on poles. First they tried deerskins. But they were too small. They tried elk skins. But they
became hard and stiff in the rain and sun. Then they did not try skins longer. They used bark to cover the
poles of their tepees. But the bark houses were not warm. Then the people took the leg bone of the deer and
splintered it. So they made sharp pieces for awls. Then they took buffalo skins and sinews, and with the awl
they fastened the skins together. So they made comfortable covers for their tepees. Then a man wandered
around a long time. One day he found some small pieces of something which were white, and red, and blue.
He thought they must be something of great value, so he hid them in a mound of earth. Now one day he
went to see if they were safe. Behold! When he came to the mound, green stalks were growing out of it. And
on the stalks were small kernels of white, and red, and blue. Behold! It was corn. Then the man took the
corn, and gave it to the people. They tried it for food. They found it good, and have ever since called it their
life. Now when the people found the corn good, they thought to hide it in mounds as the first man had done.
So they took the shoulder blade of an elk and made mounds. Then they hid the corn in it. So the corn grew
and the people had food. Now as the people wandered around, they came to a forest where the birch trees
grew. There was a great lake there. Then they made canoes of birch bark. They traveled in them on the
water. Then a man found two young animals. He carried them home. He fed them so they grew bigger. Then
he made a harness which he placed upon them and fastened it to poles. So these animals became burden
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bearers. Before that, every burden had to be carried on the back. Now the dogs helped the people.”
What we see in this story is not a gradual conquest of nature (as in the Modernist norm),
but instead a gradual development of knowledge concerning nature that allows us to better
harmonize our culture, practices, technologies, etc. with nature and its implicit, divine
order; cultural evolution is a process of learning how to live in harmony with the natural
world that its innate capacities might be better harmonized with our needs rather than a
process of learning how to dominate the natural world.
Lenni-Lenapi
“The Lenni-Lenapi are the First People, so that they know this story is true. After the Creation of the earth,
the Mysterious One covered it with a blue roof. Sometimes the roof was very black. Then the Manitou of
Waters became uneasy. He feared the rain would no longer be able to pour down upon the earth through
this dark roof. Therefore the Manitou of Waters prayed to the Mysterious One that the waters from above be
not cut off. At once the Mysterious One commanded to blow the Spirit of the Wind, who dwells in the
Darkening Land. At once thick clouds arose. They covered all the earth, so that the dark roof could no
longer be seen. Then the voice of the Mysterious One was heard amongst the clouds. The voice was deep
and heavy, like the sound of falling rivers. Then the Spirit of Rain, the brother of the Spirit of Waters and the
Spirit of the Winds, poured down water from above. The waters fell for a long time. They fell until all the

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earth was covered. Then the birds took refuge in the branches of the highest trees. The animals followed the
trails to the mountain peaks. Then the Manitou of Waters feared no longer. Therefore the Mysterious One
ordered the rain to cease and the clouds to disappear. Then Sin-go-wi-chi-na-xa, the rainbow, was seen in the
sky. Therefore the Lenni-Lenapi watch for the rainbow, because it means that the Mysterious One is no
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longer angry.”
First it should be noted how very similar this particular tale is to its Abrahamic corollary
(down to the symbolism of the rainbow); again, however, what is most different is that this
Deleuge is framed in the North American Mythical tradition as a necessary stage in the
generation of the created world rather than as an act of divine vengeance (though, while the
tale seems to intimate such, the final term ‘angry’ seems to contradict this reading; we
wonder what the term which was translated into ‘angry’ may mean within the Lenni-Lenapi
dialect and whether issues of translation may impute this sense of vengeance where it didn’t
originally exist (e.x. might angry be coming in place of a term that connotes destruction but
with a positive quality, like that of Shiva, which is lost in western thought?)?. This wouldn't
be utterly surprising given the fact that the tale would naturally have conjured images of
Noah in any mind socialized within the Abrahamic World)… Once again, it becomes clear
that the essential distinction between Western Myth and North American Myth lies in their
relationship with notions of domination, chaos and order… It seems, at least in this telling,
that the Deluge archetype refer to the connection of the created and the uncreated as
mediated by consciousness (the flooding of earth (body) by air and water (mind)) and its
overcoming of the disconnection from spirit imputed by the lack of perfection in
manifestations reflection of the uncreated…
Navajo
“Myth 1: The people traveled through four worlds before climbing a reed growing from the bottom of the
Lake of Changing Waters to this present world. [(Again, emergence into the material world seems to be
associated with emergence from the waters as in so many of the world’s symbolic systems.)] First Man and
First Woman with their two first children, Changing Twins, were in the forefront. First Man and First
Woman produced a mountain [Here Eve and Adam are the creators, not criminals to be incarcerated within
creation…)]. They populated it with plants and animals. On the peak they placed a black bowl with two
blackbird eggs in it. They fastened down the peak with a rainbow. One twin took some clay from riverbed
and it fashioned itself into a bowl. The other twin found reeds growing and shaped them into a water basket.
They picked up stones from the ground which became axes, knives, spear points and hammers in their
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hands.”
Creation does not come as a function of the fall, but as a manifestation of the creative
impetus of humanity (of Eve(n) (unity) and Adam(ized) (multiplicity…))… Creation is made
by ‘Even and Atomized’, by the interaction of unity and multiplicity, not as a prison for
human souls… Creation is the womb of consciousness. Also, as we saw in the Omaha
myth, the evolution of culture and ‘civilization’ comes through learning about the implicit
order contained within nature (the bowl within the clay, the basket within the grass, the

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http://www.stavacademy.co.uk/mimir/
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tools within the stones, etc.) rather than learning about how to dominate nature and force it
into a desired form.
This reminds us of the old Daoist tale (from Zhuang Zi) concerning a bell-stand
maker:
“The Woodcarver
Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of precious wood. When it was finished,
They said it must
be
"What is your secret?"
Khing replied: "I am only a workman:

Commanded
My heart at rest.
After five days
With all its limbs."
By this time all thought of your Highness

Had vanished.
Of the bell stand.
"Then I went to the forest

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond
doubt.
All I had to do was to put forth my hand
and begin.
"If I had not met this particular tree

"What happened?
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Which you ascribe to the spirits."
In short, it is the peripatetic mind, the thought and the residues of experience in the
material world, that prevent us from seeing the implicit, divine order within nature;
harmonization with nature does not have to do with our dominating nature and forcing it
into the forms we desire, but instead with transcending our own peripatetic limitations
(cultivating our self) to the point where the veil of the peripatetic mind is lifted and we see
the implicit, divine order in nature (it is at this point that we manifest the potential for ‘non-
action’, wu-wei, wherein we are doing the ‘right thing’ at the ‘right time’ (i.e. rational
intuition shows us the act which will best allow manifestation to reflect the uncreated, which
will, thus, best harmonize manifestation with its uncreated source) to allow nature to shed
its outer shell and the bell-stand (the order of nature, its implicit, divine form, its reflection
of the uncreated) to blossom forth). We return to Daoism and the wealth of wisdom
concerning the relationship between humans and nature and concerning the order of
nature in Chinese philosophy and religion below.
“Myth 2: The Navajo creation story involves three underworlds where important events happened to shape
the Fourth World where we now live. The Navajo were given the name Ni’hookaa Diyan DinE by their
creators. It means 'Holy Earth People' or 'Lords of the Earth'. Navajos today simply call themselves "DinE",
meaning "The People". The Tewa Indians were the first to call them "Navahu", which means "the large area of
cultivated land". The Mexicans knew them as 'Apaches Du Nabahu' (Apaches of the Cultivated Fields), where
'Apache' (Enemy) was picked up from the Zuni Indian language. The "Apaches Du Nabahu" were known as a
special group somewhat distinct from the rest of the Apaches. Alonso de Benavides changed the name to
"Navaho" in a book written in 1630. The name the Diné officially use for themselves is "Navajo". According to
the DinE, they emerged from three previous underworlds into this, the fourth, or "Glittering World", through
a magic reed. The first people from the other three worlds were not like the people of today. They were
animals, insects or masked spirits as depicted in Navajo ceremonies. First Man ('Altsé Hastiin), and First
Woman ('Altsé 'Asdzáá), were two of the beings from the First or Black World. First Man was made in the
east from the meeting of the white and black clouds. First Woman was made in the west from the joining of
the yellow and blue clouds. Spider Woman (Na ashje’ii 'Asdzáá), who taught Navajo women how to weave,
was also from the first world. Once in the Glittering World, the first thing the people did was build a sweat
house and sing the Blessing Song. Then they met in the first house (hogan) made exactly as Talking God
(Haashch’eelti’i) had prescribed. In this hogan, the people began to arrange their world, naming the four
sacred mountains surrounding the land and designating the four sacred stones that would become the
boundaries of their homeland. In actuality, these mountains do not contain the symbolic sacred stones. The
San Francisco Peaks (Dook’o’oslííd), represents the Abalone and Coral stones. It is located just north of
Flagstaff, and is the Navajo’s religious western boundary. Mt. Blanco (Tsisnaasjini'), in Colorado, represents
the White Shell stone, and represents the Navajo’s religious eastern boundary. Mt. Taylor (Tsoodzil) east of
Grants, New Mexico, represents the Turquoise stone, and represents the Navajo’s religious southern
boundary. Mt. Hesperus (DibE Nitsaa), in Colorado, represents the Black Jet stone, and represents the
Navajo’s religious northern boundary. After setting the mountains down where they should go, the Navajo
deities, or "Holy People", put the sun and the moon into the sky and were in the process of carefully placing
the stars in an orderly way. But the Coyote, known as the trickster [(Loki)], grew impatient from the long
deliberations being held, and seized the corner of the blanket where it lay and flung the remaining stars into
the sky. The Holy People continued to make the necessities of life, like clouds, trees and rain. Everything was
as it should be when the evil monsters appeared and began to kill the new Earth People. But a miracle
happened to save them, by the birth of Ever Changing Woman (Asdzaa Nadleehe) at Gobernador Knob

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Merton, T. (2004). The Way of Chuang Tzu. Shambhala Publications. 127-128
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(Ch’óol’í’í), New Mexico. Changing Woman grew up around El Huerfano Mesa (Dzil Na’oodilii), in
northern New Mexico. She married the Sun and bore two son, twins, and heroes to the Navajo people. They
were known as "Monster Slayer" and "Child-Born-of-Water". The twins traveled to their father the Sun who
gave them weapons of lighting bolts to fight the dreaded monsters. Every place the Hero Twins killed a
monster it turned to stone. An example of this is the lave flows near Mt. Taylor in New Mexico, believed to
be the blood from the death of Ye’iitsoh, or the 'Monster who Sucked in People'. All of the angular rock
formations on the reservation, such as the immense Black Mesa (Dzil Yíjiin), are seen as the turned-to-stone
bodies of the monsters. With all of the monsters dead, the Navajo deities, or 'Holy People', turned their
attention to the making of the four original clans. Kiiyaa aanii, or Tall House People, was the first clan. They
were made of yellow and white corn. Eventually other clans traveled to the area round the San Juan River,
bring their important contributions to the tribe. Some were Paiutes who brought their beautiful baskets.
Others were Pueblos who shared their farming and weaving skills. Still others were Utes and Apaches. For
her husband, the 'Sun', to visit her every evening, Changing Woman went to live in the western sea on an
island made of rock crystal. Her home was made of the four sacred stones: Abalone, White Shell, Turquoise,
and Black Jet. During the day she became lonely and decided to make her own people. She made four clans
from the flakes of her skin. These were known as the,
• Near Water People,

• Mud People,
• Salt Water People, and
• Bitter Water People.
When these newly formed clans heard that there were humans to the east who shared their heritage, they
wanted to go meet them. Changing Woman gave her permission for them to travel from the western sea to
the San Francisco Peaks. They then traveled through the Hopi mesas where they left porcupine, still
commonly found there today. Then they traveled toward the Chuska Mountains and on to Mt. Taylor.
Finally, the people arrived at Dinetah, the DinE traditional homeland, and joined the other clans already
living there. Dinetah is located in the many canyons that drain the San Juan River about 30 miles east of
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Farmington, New Mexico.”
It seems clear that, while we do see traces of the conception of order as domination in this
Navajo myth, there are some major differences between this conception of conflict and
domination than found in the West. First, the fall is not the cause of creation, but
something that seems to manifest within the created (seemingly as a function of Coyote’s
impatience and the ebbs and flows, the cycles, associated with the ‘unfixed’ heavenly bodies
he tossed up into the sky, which renders him akin to other mythical tricksters like the
Norse Loki). We also see that the first man and women were created at once (rather than
the man being created first and the woman being subsequently created from his rib…), and
that first woman (and the subsequent generations of women) plays a fundamental role in
the subsequent generations of creation on earth.
This motif of multiple ‘generations’ of beings who create each other one after
another on Earth, while absent from the biblical story wherein we are all (or at least all of
us that are of the Tribes…) descended from Adam, is present in many mythical systems in
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the global mythical tradition (the Babylonian Enuma Elish comes directly to mind). What
differentiates the Babylonian from the Navajo conception of the created people is that in

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This divergence may manifest from the fact that the Abrahamic tradition’s elite class may view themselves as of this group of ‘first
people’ who came to earth and created these subsequent generations.
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Babylonian myth the tribes of humanity are created to be slaves whereas in the above they
seem to be invited to live as a part of the greater community (though, it seems, under the
thumb of matriarchal rule, though it doesn’t seem to intimate the quality of this rule
(domination or wise advisor?)). In fact, this motif of matriarchal rule in the depths of the
true power structures of earth (the power structures of the first people, the ‘creators’ of
humanity…) finds many points of manifestation (and may be supported by evidence like
the Archeological finds of UC Berkley Anthropologist Maxine Hong Kingston and the
many and varied remains of goddess worship in the archeological and mythical residues of
antiquity) and often finds association with ‘the spider goddess’ as in the above.
R. A. Salvatore’s ‘Forgotten Realms’ series and Annie Bishop’s ‘Black Jewels’ series
both express this motif of matriarchal rule in association with the spider queen. The hero
th
of the Forgotten Realms, Drizzt Do'Urden, is born into the 9 house in the strict, cruel,
competitive and matriarchal hierarchy of the Drow City Menzoberranzan. His people, the
Drow Elves, pray to the dark spider queen Lolth (and were banished underground (the
underground people) by the Surface Elves, which is especially interesting given the
association of the above Navajo myths with the caves of New Mexico, which have become
the site for many of the US Military and Co.’s most classified underground projects and
which are rumored (by many people from many trajectories of relation to the site) to have
been the site of a serious engagement between the US Military and some sort of
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extraterrestrial entity …). Men are slaves, either in bed or the field of battle, and only
women are allowed to become Priestesses of Lolth (men must either become warriors or
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magicians).
Annie Bishop’s ‘Black Jewel’s’ series takes this motif of matriarchal domination
deeper into the esoteric. In the Black Jewel’s series the heroine, Janelle Angelline, is the
embodiment of the form (the aeon) of Witch—she is the power of the darkness, of the
black widow, the spider queen, etc. incarnate (this seems to be the true ‘anti-Christ’ in the
traditional gnostic system)… Unlike Salvatore, Bishop doesn’t frame this mode of
matriarchal control in terms of contestation as with Salvatore’s surface elves (i.e. the
domination of the Black Widows (the hourglass coven and its high priest, Saetan) and the
Black Jeweled Queens (the most powerful of whom are also often Black Widows) is
absolute and true conflict comes only in interactions between the Queens (i.e. no one
questions whether the blood should dominate all other beings on earth—the major battles
in this elite class come in contestation of who will lead the group rather than on whether
the group should dominate others). It should also be noted that the Queens exert their
control over Earth through creating and managing conflict between the men in a given
region until the destruction (of each other, of culture, of unity, of love, etc.) produced

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http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/branton/esp_dulcebook14.htm The linked text repeatedly refers to ‘Nordic’ looking people who are
actually aliens. While we do not necessarily have any direct experiential basis upon which to judge such statements, it reminds me of a
conversation that I once had with Mr. Rick R. Dobson, Jr., who was at the time attempting to recruit me as an officer in his ‘International
Space Agency’ (http://www.international-space-agency.us/index.html); he claimed that his engagement with ‘extraterrestrials’ began with
meeting a ‘Nordic looking woman’ in the Cornell University Library (one who he claimed looked human enough to pass on brief
inspection but whose skin had a slightly different texture and whose grip was powerful beyond the imaginings of human strength). While
we cannot confirm such narratives, the seemingly divergent sources of evidence pointing to the same reality give us cause for pause.
Here is another vide in which a purported ex-geologist for the US Military makes similar claims about the underground Battles of New
Mexico (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xedmfAgx8eg) which he claims to have survived.
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We should note that Lolth seems to mirror the feminine evil manifest in the Babylonian Talmud’s Lilith…
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therein creates an environment where lesser queens and the ‘warlord princes’ that serve
them can easily enter and dominate the region (we are reminded of the ‘warrior class’ of
American politics wherein, after centuries of destruction, families without old power like
the Bushes (represented in public and on the battle field by their ‘warlord princes’) are
brought in to manage a country which has already been rendered in a state that is easily
dominated through dialectic hegemony).
Bishop’s narrative is divergent from Salvatore’s as the Black Jeweled Queens, Black
Widows, Warlord Princes, The Kindred (animals who have stones, are of the blood and
possess great power and intelligence), etc. (i.e. the blood) move between three different
fields of dimensional consistency (dimensions of reality), Hell, Kaeleer (the shadow realm)
and Terreille where as Salvatore’s Drow are relatively bound to earth (in Bishop’s work
Terreille) and only move across such boundaries infrequently (and often unwillingly…). It
also diverges starkly from Salvatore’s in that, where for Salvatore the matriarchal society is
lead by ‘Dark (skinned…) Elves’ living underground, for Bishop the matriarchal society is
lead by members of a few races (notably marked by blood red hair, pale skin and yellow-
gold eyes and by blond hair, blue-green eyes and pale skin, for example Saetan has golden
eyes where as Janelle has sapphire eyes, which seems (from a plethora of points of
evidence, from red haired people who own banks on wall street and have ‘gills’ to images in
the temples of secret societies wherein the tall red haired woman knights the man to the
rd
obsession of groups like the masons with the red haired mermaid (thus 33 Degree Mason
Walt Disney’s movie “the Little Mermaid”…) more likely to hold some relevant relation to
our reality than Salvatore’s identification of black skinned women (which in the traditional
symbolism of Western Esotericism would seemingly represent the Ethiopian Jews). Again,
while many tales talk of people from space, people from under the water and people from
under the ground (often in terms of them being different races), it is not really possible to
articulate a precise knowledge of the topic as there are simply too many narratives, theories
and bodies of evidence to make a cogent determination from the ‘general public’ view (if
you cannot keep something secret, the next best thing is to flood the environment with so
much information and so many different interpretations that the pearls are lost in the
rough)… There are many more parallels and divergences, but at this point the association
between spiders, matriarchy and domination (with the recurring motif of underground
cities or other dimensions—the term or frame of ‘underground’ may simply be being used
to represent other dimensions of reality, and it may be ‘both and’ with underground sites
and caves representing ‘rifts’ between dimensions).
Iroquois
“Long, long ago, one of the Spirits of the Sky World came down and looked at the earth. As he traveled over
it, he found it beautiful, and so he created people to live on it. Before returning to the sky, he gave them
names, called the people all together, and spoke his parting words: "To the Mohawks, I give corn," he said.
"To the patient Oneidas, I give the nuts and the fruit of many trees. To the industrious Senecas, I give beans.
To the friendly Cayugas, I give the roots of plants to be eaten. To the wise and eloquent Onondagas, I give
grapes and squashes to eat and tobacco to smoke at the camp fires." Many other things he told the new
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people. Then he wrapped himself in a bright cloud and went like a swift arrow to the Sun. There his return
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caused his Brother Sky Spirits to rejoice.”
“In the beginning there was no earth to live on, but up above, in the Great Blue, there was a woman who
dreamed dreams. One night she dreamed about a tree covered with white blossoms, a tree that brightened up
the sky when its flowers opened but that brought terrible darkness when they closed again. The dream
frightened her, so she went and told it to the wise old men who lived with her, in their village in the sky. "Pull
up this tree," she begged them, but they did not understand. All they did was to dig around its roots, to make
space for more light. But the tree just fell through the hole they had made and disappeared. After that there
was no light at all, only darkness. The old men grew frightened of the woman and her dreams. It was her fault
that the light had gone away forever. So they dragged her toward the hole and pushed her through as well.
Down, down she fell, down toward the great emptiness. There was nothing below her but a heaving waste of
water and she would surely have been smashed to pieces, this strange dreaming woman from the Great Blue,
had not a fish hawk come to her aid. His feathers made a pillow for her and she drifted gently above the
waves. But the fish hawk could not keep her up all on his own. He needed help. So he called out to the
creatures of the deep. "We must find some firm ground for this poor woman to rest on," he said anxiously.
But there was no ground, only the swirling, endless waters. A helldiver went down, down, down to the very
bottom of the sea and brought back a little bit of mud in his beak. He found a turtle, smeared the mud onto
its back, and dived down again for more. Then the ducks joined in. They loved getting muddy and they too
brought beakfuls of the ocean floor and spread it over the turtle's shell. The beavers helped-- they were great
builders-- and they worked away, making the shell bigger and bigger. Everybody was very busy now and
everybody was excited. This world they were making seemed to be growing enormous! The birds and the
animals rushed about building countries, the continents, until, in the end, they had made the whole round
earth, while all the time they sky woman was safely sitting on the turtle's back. And the turtle holds the earth
up to this very day. In the Land Above The Sky a strong wind uprooted this tree. Skywoman, walking by, fell
through the hole left by the tree. As she fell a flock of geese broke her fall and she landed on a giant turtle
that rose from the waters. This giant turtle grew in shape and size to form the land. There Skywoman gave
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birth to a daughter whose children propagated the human race.”
Lakota
“There was another world before this one. But the people of that world did not behave themselves.
Displeased, the Creating Power set out to make a new world. He sang several songs to bring rain, which
poured stronger with each song. As he sang the fourth song, the earth split apart and water gushed up through
the many cracks, causing a flood. By the time the rain stopped, all of the people and nearly all of the animals
had drowned. Only Kangi the crow survived.Kangi pleaded with the Creating Power to make him a new place
to rest. So the Creating Power decided the time had come to make his new world. From his huge pipe bag,
which contained all types of animals and birds, the Creating Power selected four animals known for their
ability to remain under water for a long time.He sent each in turn to retrieve a lump of mud from beneath the
floodwaters. First the loon dove deep into the dark waters, but it was unable to reach the bottom. The otter,
even with its strong webbed feet, also failed. Next, the beaver used its large flat tail to propel itself deep under
the water, but it too brought nothing back. Finally, the Creating Power took the turtle from his pipe bag and
urged it to bring back some mud.Turtle stayed under the water for so long that everyone was sure it had
drowned. Then, with a splash, the turtle broke the water's surface! Mud filled its feet and claws and the cracks
between its upper and lower shells. Singing, the Creating Power shaped the mud in his hands and spread it on
the water, where it was just big enough for himself and the crow. He then shook two long eagle wing feathers
over the mud until earth spread wide and varied, overcoming the waters. Feeling sadness for the dry land, the
Creating Power cried tears that became oceans, streams, and lakes. He named the new land Turtle Continent

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John Morreall, Tamara Sonn (2011) The Religion Toolkit: A Complete Guide to Religious Studies (John Wiley & Sons)
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in honor of the turtle who provided the mud from which it was formed.The Creating Power then took many
animals and birds from his great pipe bag and spread them across the Earth. From red, white, black, and
yellow earth, he made men and women. The Creating Power gave the people his sacred pipe and told them
to live by it. He warned them about the fate of the people who came before them. He promised all would be
well if all living things learned to live in harmony. But the world would be destroyed again if they made it bad
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and ugly.”
Chelan
“Long, long ago, the Creator, the Great Chief Above, made the world. Then he made the animals and the
birds and gave them their names -- Coyote, Grizzly Bear, Deer, Fox, Eagle, the four Wolf Brothers, Magpie,
Bluejay, Hummingbird, and all the others. When he had finished his work, the Creator called the animal
people to him. "I am going to leave you," he said. "But I will come back. When I come again, I will make
human beings. They will be in charge of you." The Great Chief returned to his home in the sky, and the
animal people scattered to all parts of the world. After twelve moons, the animal people gathered to meet the
Creator as he had directed. Some of them had complaints. Bluejay, Meadowlark, and Coyote did not like
their names. Each of them asked to be some other creature. "No," said the Creator. "I have given you your
names. There is no change. My word is law. "Because you have tried to change my law, I will not make the
human being this time. Because you have disobeyed me, you have soiled what I brought with me. I planned
to change it into a human being. Instead, I will put it in water to be washed for many moons and many snows,
until it is clean again." Then he took something from his right side and put it in the river. It swam, and the
Creator named it Beaver. "Now I will give you another law," said the Great Chief Above. "The one of you who
keeps strong and good will take Beaver from the water some day and make it into a human being. I will tell
you now what to do. Divide Beaver into twelve parts. Take each part to a different place and breathe into it
your own breath. Wake it up. It will be a human being with your breath. Give it half of your power and tell it
what to do. Today I am giving my power to one of you. He will have it as long as he is good." When the
Creator had finished speaking, all the creatures started for their homes -- all except Coyote. The Great Chief
had a special word for Coyote. "You are to be head of all the creatures, Coyote. You are a power just like me
now, and I will help you do your work. Soon the creatures and all the other things I have made will become
bad. They will fight and will eat each other. It is your duty to keep them as peaceful as you can. "When you
have finished your work, we will meet again, in this land toward the east. If you have been good, if you tell the
truth and obey me, you can make the human being from Beaver. If you have done wrong, someone else will
make him." Then the Creator went away. It happened as the Creator had foretold. Everywhere the things he
had created did wrong. The mountains swallowed the creatures. The winds blew them away. Coyote stopped
the mountains, stopped the winds, and rescued the creatures. One winter, after North Wind had killed many
people, Coyote made a law for him: "Hereafter you can kill only those who make fun of you." Everywhere
Coyote went, he made the world better for the animal people and better for the human beings yet to be
created. When he had finished his work, he knew that it was time to meet the Creator again. Coyote thought
that he had been good, that he would be the one to make the first human being. But he was mistaken. He
thought that he had as much power as the Creator. So he tried, a second time, to change the laws of the Great
Chief Above. "Some other creature will make the human being," the Creator told Coyote. "I shall take you out
into the ocean and give you a place to stay for all time." So Coyote walked far out across the water to an
island. There the Creator stood waiting for him, beside the house he had made. Inside the house on the west
side stood a black suit of clothes. On the other side hung a white suit. "Coyote, you are to wear this black suit
for six months," said the Creator. "Then the weather will be cold and dreary. Take off the black suit and wear
the white suit. Then there will be summer, and everything will grow. I will give you my power not to grow old.
You will live here forever and forever." Coyote stayed there, out in the ocean, and the four Wolf brothers

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Also see:
Goodman, Ronald. "Lakota star knowledge." Archaeoastronomy 6 (1983): 39.
Goodman, Ronald. Lakota star knowledge: Studies in Lakota stellar theology. Sint̄e Gleṡk̄a University, 1992.
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took his place as the head of all the animal people. Youngest Wolf Brother was strong and good and clever.
Oldest Wolf Brother was worthless. So the Creator gave Youngest Brother the power to take Beaver from
the water. One morning Oldest Wolf Brother said to Youngest Brother, "I want you to kill Beaver. I want his
tooth for a knife." "Oh, no!" exclaimed Second and Third Brothers. "Beaver is too strong for Youngest
Brother." But Youngest Wolf said to his brothers, "Make four spears. For Oldest Brother, make a spear with
four forks. For me, make a spear with one fork. Make a two-forked spear and a three-forked spear for
yourselves. I will try my best to get Beaver, so that we can kill him." All the animal persons had seen Beaver
and his home. They knew where he lived. They knew what a big creature he was. His family of young beavers
lived with him. The animal persons were afraid that Youngest Wolf Brother would fail to capture Beaver and
would fail to make the human being. Second and Third Wolf Brothers also were afraid. "I fear we will lose
Youngest Brother," they said to each other. But they made the four spears he had asked for. At dusk, the
Wolf brothers tore down the dam at the beavers' home, and all the little beavers ran out. About midnight, the
larger beavers ran out. They were so many, and they made so much noise, that they sounded like thunder.
Then Big Beaver ran out, the one the Creator had put into the water to become clean. "Let's quit!" said Oldest
Wolf Brother, for he was afraid. "Let's not try to kill him." "No!" said Youngest Brother. "I will not stop."
Oldest Wolf Brother fell down. Third Brother fell down. Second Brother fell down. Lightning flashed. The
beavers still sounded like thunder. Youngest Brother took the four-forked spear and tried to strike Big
Beaver with it. It broke. He used the three-forked spear. It broke. He used the two-forked spear. It broke.
Then he took his own one-forked spear. It did not break. It pierced the skin of Big Beaver and stayed there.
Out of the lake, down the creek, and down Big River, Beaver swam, dragging Youngest Brother after it.
Youngest Wolf called to his brothers, "You stay here. If I do not return with Beaver in three days, you will
know that I am dead." Three days later, all the animal persons gathered on a level place at the foot of the
mountain. Soon they saw Youngest Brother coming. He had killed Beaver and was carrying it. "You
remember that the Creator told us to cut it into twelve pieces," said Youngest Brother to the animal people.
But he could divide it into only eleven pieces. Then he gave directions. "Fox, you are a good runner.
Hummingbird and Horsefly, you can fly fast. Take this piece of Beaver flesh over to that place and wake it
up. Give it your breath." Youngest Brother gave other pieces to other animal people and told them where to
go. They took the liver to Clearwater River, and it became the Nez Perce Indians. They took the heart across
the mountains, and it became the Methow Indians. Other parts became the Spokane people, the Lake
people, the Flathead people. Each of the eleven pieces became a different tribe. "There have to be twelve
tribes," said Youngest Brother. "Maybe the Creator thinks that we should use the blood for the last one. Take
the blood across the Shining Mountains and wake it up over there. It will become the Blackfeet. They will
always look for blood." When an animal person woke the piece of Beaver flesh and breathed into it, he told
the new human being what to do and what to eat. "Here are roots," and the animal people pointed to camas
and kouse and to bitterroot, "You will dig them, cook them, and save them to eat in the winter. "Here are the
berries that will ripen in the summer. You will eat them and you will dry them for use in winter." The animal
people pointed to chokecherry trees, to serviceberry bushes, and to huckleberry bushes. "There are salmon
in all the rivers. You will cook them and eat them when they come up the streams. And you will dry them to
eat in the winter." When all the tribes had been created, the animal people said to them "Some of you new
people should go up Lake Chelan. Go up to the middle of the lake and look at the cliff beside the water.
There you will see pictures on the rock. From the pictures you will learn how to make the things you will
need." The Creator had painted the pictures there, with red paint. From the beginning until long after the
white people came, the Indians went to Lake Chelan and looked at the paintings. They saw pictures of bows
and arrows and of salmon traps. From the paintings of the Creator they knew how to make the things they
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needed for getting their food.”
Comanche
“One day the Great Spirit collected swirls of dust from the four directions in order to create the Commanche
people. These people formed from the earth had the strength of mighty storms. Unfortunately, a shape-

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shifting demon was also created and began to torment the people. The Great Spirit cast the demon into a
bottomless pit. To seek revenge the demon took refuge in the fangs and stingers of poisonous creatures and
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continues to harm people every chance it gets.”
Chinook
“Talapas (Creator) gave life to the surface of the Earth. It grew in abundance. Later, he placed the animal
forms of all the Totem Spirits on the surface of the Earth Mother, and they prospered. Talapas then
instructed T'soona (Thunderbird) to carry these special eggs from the other place, and place them on the top
of Kaheese, a mountain near the Yakaitl-Wimakl (Columbia River). T'soona did so. The Old Giantess, not
wanting these special eggs to hatch, began to break the eggs. The vengeful Spirit Bird swiftly swooped down
from Otelagh (the sun) and pursued the Old Giantess, and consumed her with fire, in revenge for her
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injustice. Soon the remaining eggs became the T'sinuk (Chinook).”
Seminole
“Near the beginning of time, five Seminole Indian men wanted to visit the sky to see the Great Spirit. They
traveled to the East, walking for about a month. Finally, they arrived at land's end. They tossed their baggage
over the end and they, too, disappeared beyond earth's edge. Down, down, down the Indians dropped for a
while, before starting upward again toward the sky. For a long time they traveled westward. At last, they came
to a lodge where lived an old, old woman. "We are on our way to see the Great Spirit Above," they replied. "It
is not possible to see him now," she said. "You must stay here for a while first." That night the five Seminole
Indian men strolled a little distance from the old woman's lodge, where they encountered a group of angels
robed in white and wearing wings. They were playing a ball game the men recognized as one played by the
Seminoles. Two of the men decided they would like to remain and become angels. The other three preferred
to return to earth. Then to their surprise, the Great Spirit appeared and said, "So be it!" A large cooking pot
was placed on the fire. When the water was boiling, the two Seminoles who wished to stay were cooked!
When only their bones were left, the Great Spirit removed them from the pot, and put their bones back
together again. He then draped them with a white cloth and touched them with his magic wand. The Great
Spirit brought the two Seminole men back to life! They wore beautiful white wings and were called men-
angels. "What do you three men wish to do?" asked the Great Spirit. "If we may, we prefer to return to our
Seminole camp on earth," replied the three Seminoles. "Gather your baggage together and go to sleep at
once," directed the Great Spirit. Later, when the three Seminole men opened their eyes, they found
themselves safe at home again in their own Indian camp. "We are happy to return and stay earthbound. We
hope never to venture skyward again in search of other mysteries," they reported to the Chief of the
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Seminoles.”
Chippewa
“In the beginning before there were people, before there were animals a lone woman lived in a cave. She
lived on the roots and berries of the plants. One night a magical dog crept into her cave and stretched out on
the her bed beside her. As the night grew long the dog began to change. His body became smooth and almost
hairless. His limbs grew long and straight. His features changed into those of a handsome warrior. Nine
months later the woman birthed a child. He was the first Chippewa male and through him came the
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The Great Serpent and the Flood
“From Maine and Nova Scotia to the Rocky Mountains, Indians told stories about the Great Serpent. More
than a century ago the serpent was considered to be "a genuine spirit of evil." Some version of the story of the
Great Flood of long ago, as recounted here, is told around the world. Nanabozho (Nuna-bozo, accented on
bozo) was the hero of many stories told by the Chippewa Indians. At one time they lived on the shores of
Lake Superior, in what are now the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin and the province of Ontario. One day
when Nanabozho returned to his lodge after a long journey, he missed his young cousin who lived with him.
He called the cousin's name but heard no answer. Looking around on the sand for tracks, Nanabozho was
startled by the trail of the Great Serpent. He then knew that his cousin had been seized by his enemy.
Nanabozho picked up his bow and arrows and followed the track of the serpent. He passed the great river,
climbed mountains, and crossed over valleys until he came to the shores of a deep and gloomy lake. It is now
called Manitou Lake, Spirit Lake, and also the Lake of Devils. The trail of the Great Serpent led to the edge
of the water. Nanabozho could see, at the bottom of the lake, the house of the Great Serpent. It was filled
with evil spirits, who were his servants and his companions. Their forms were monstrous and terrible. Most
of them, like their master, resembled spirits. In the centre of this horrible group was the Great Serpent
himself, coiling his terrifying length around the cousin of Nanabozho. The head of the Serpent was red as
blood. His fierce eyes glowed like fire. His entire body was armed with hard and glistening scales of every
color and shade. Looking down on these twisting spirits of evil, Nanabozho made up his mind that he would
get revenge on them for the death of his cousin. He said to the clouds, "Disappear!" And the clouds went out
of sight. "Winds, be still at once!" And the winds became still. When the air over the lake of evil spirits had
become stagnant, Nanabozho said to the sun, "Shine over the lake with all the fierceness you can. Make the
water boil." In these ways, thought Nanabozho, he would force the Great Serpent to seek the cool shade of
the trees growing on the shores of the lake. There he would seize the enemy and get revenge. After giving his
orders, Nanabozho took his bow and arrows and placed himself near the spot where he thought the serpents
would come to enjoy the shade. Then he changed himself into the broken stump of a withered tree. The
winds became still, the air stagnant, and the sun shot hot rays from a cloudless sky. In time, the water of the
lake became troubled, and bubbles rose to the surface. The rays of the sun had penetrated to the home of
the serpents. As the water bubbled and foamed, a serpent lifted his head above the centre of the lake and
gazed around the shores. Soon another serpent came to the surface. Both listened for the footsteps of
Nanabozho, but they heard him nowhere. "Nanabozho is sleeping," they said to one another. And then they
plunged beneath the waters, which seemed to hiss as they closed over the evil spirits. Not long after, the lake
became more troubled. Its water boiled from its very depths, and the hot waves dashed wildly against the
rocks on its banks. Soon the Great Serpent came slowly to the surface of the water and moved toward the
shore. His blood-red crest glowed. The reflection from his scales was blinding--as blinding as the glitter of a
sleet-covered forest beneath the winter sun. He was followed by all the evil spirits. So great was their number
that they soon covered the shores of the lake. When they saw the broken stump of the withered tree, they
suspected that it might be one of the disguises of Nanabozho. They knew his cunning. One of the serpents
approached the stump, wound his tail around it, and tried to drag it down into the lake. Nanabozho could
hardly keep from crying aloud, for the tail of the monster prickled his sides. But he stood firm and was silent.
The evil spirits moved on. The Great Serpent glided into the forest and wound his many coils around the
trees. His companions also found shade--all but one. One remained near the shore to listen for the footsteps
of Nanabozho. From the stump, Nanabozho watched until all the serpents were asleep and the guard was
intently looking in another direction. Then he silently drew an arrow from his quiver, placed it in his bow,
and aimed it at the heart of the Great Serpent. It reached its mark. With a howl that shook the mountains
and startled the wild beasts in their caves, the monster awoke. Followed by its terrified companions, which
also were howling with rage and terror, the Great Serpent plunged into the water. At the bottom of the lake
there still lay the body of Nanabozho's cousin. In their fury the serpents tore it into a thousand pieces. His
shredded lungs rose to the surface and covered the lake with whiteness. The Great Serpent soon knew that
he would die from his wound, but he and his companions were determined to destroy Nanabozho. They
caused the water of the lake to swell upward and to pound against the shore with the sound of many
thunders. Madly the flood rolled over the land, over the tracks of Nanabozho, carrying with it rocks and trees.
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High on the crest of the highest wave floated the wounded Great Serpent. His eyes glared around him, and
his hot breath mingled with the hot breath of his many companions. Nanabozho, fleeing before the angry
waters, thought of his Indian children. He ran through their villages, shouting, "Run to the mountaintops! The
Great Serpent is angry and is flooding the earth! Run! Run!" The Indians caught up their children and found
safety on the mountains. Nanabozho continued his flight along the base of the western hills and then up a
high mountain beyond Lake Superior, far to the north. There he found many men and animals that had
escaped from the flood that was already covering the valleys and plains and even the highest hills. Still the
waters continued to rise. Soon all the mountains were under the flood, except the high one on which stood
Nanabozho. There he gathered together timber and made a raft. Upon it the men and women and animals
with him placed themselves. Almost immediately the mountaintop disappeared from their view, and they
floated along on the face of the waters. For many days they floated. At long last, the flood began to subside.
Soon the people on the raft saw the trees on the tops of the mountains. Then they saw the mountains and
hills, then the plains and the valleys. When the water disappeared from the land, the people who survived
learned that the Great Serpent was dead and that his companions had returned to the bottom of the lake of
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spirits. There they remain to this day. For fear of Nanabozho, they have never dared to come forth again.”
Choctaw
“At the beginning there was a great mound. It was called Nanih Wiya. It was from this mound that the
Creator fashioned the first of the people. These people crawled through a long, dark cave into daylight. They
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became the first Choctaw.”
Potawatomi
“Anishnabe found himself alone on earth. The Creator told him to give everything a name, and he did this,
accompanied by a wolf. He discovered that only he, among the many species, was alone, without a mate, and
he was lonely. He traveled to the Great Lakes and while searching, heard a beautiful song coming across the
water. The woman's voice was singing that she was making a home for him. He fell in love with the voice and
the song. In the days that followed, he learned how to cross the water and finally came to a lodge facing west.
There lived a beautiful woman and her father, the Firekeeper.This was the first union - Anishabe and the
Firekeeper's Daughter. It determined the roles of men and women in marriage. They had four sons, who
when they were grown traveled to the four directions of the earth. The son who traveled north had a hard
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journey, but learned that the melting snow cleansed Mother Earth.”
Huron
“In the beginning there was only one water and the water animals that lived in it. Then a woman fell from a
torn place in the sky. She was a divine woman, full of power. Two loons flying over the water saw her falling.
They flew under her, close together, making a pillow for her to sit on. The loons held her up and cried for
help. They could be heard for a long way as they called for other animals to come. The snapping turtle called
all the other animals to aid in saving the divine woman's life. The animals decided the woman needed earth to
live on. Turtle said, "Dive down in the water and bring up some earth." So they did that, those animals. A
beaver went down. A muskrat went down. Others stayed down too long, and they died. Each time, Turtle
looked inside their mouths when they came up, but there was no earth to be found. Toad went under the
water. He stayed too long, and he nearly died. But when Turtle looked inside Toad's mouth, he found a little

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earth. The woman took it and put it all around on Turtle's shell. That was the start of the earth. Dry land
grew until it formed a country, then another country, and all the earth.. To this day, Turtle holds up the earth.
Time passed, and the divine woman had twin boys. They were opposites, her sons. One was good, and one
was bad. One was born as children are usually born, in a normal way. But the other one broke out of his
mother's side, and she died. When the divine woman was buried, all of the plants needed for life on earth
sprang from the ground above her. From her head came the pumpkin vine. Maize came from her chest. Pole
beans grew from her legs.The divine woman's sons grew up. The evil one was Tawis-karong. The good one
was Tijus-kaha. They were to prepare the earth so that humans could live on it. But they found they could
not live together. And so they separated, with each one taking his own portion of the earth to prepare. The
bad brother, Tawis-karong, made monstrous animals, fierce and terrifying. He made wolves and bears,
snakes, and panthers of giant size. He made mosquitoes huge, the size of wild turkeys. And he made an
enormous toad. It drank up the fresh water that was on the earth. All of it. The good brother, Tijus-kaha,
made proper animals that were of use to human beings. He made the dove, and the mockingbird, and the
partridge. And one day, the partridge flew toward the land of Tawis-karong. "Why do you go there?" Tijus-
kaha asked the partridge. "I go because there is no water. And I hear there is some in your brother's land,"
said the partridge. Tijus-kaha didn't believe the bird. So he followed, and finally he came to his evil brother's
land. He saw all of the outlandish, giant animals his brother had made. Tijus-kaha didn't beat them down.
And then he saw the giant toad. He cut it open. Out came the earth's fresh water. Tijus-kaha didn't kill any
[more] of his brother's creations.. But he made them smaller, of normal size so that human beings could be
leaders over them. His mother's spirit came to Tijus-kaha in a dream. She warned him about his evil brother.
And sure enough, one day, the two brothers had to come face to face. They decided they could not share the
earth. They would have a duel to see who would be master of the world. Each had to overcome the other
with a single weapon. Tijus-kaha, the good, could only be killing if beaten to death with a bag full of corn or
beans. The evil brother could be killed only by using the horn of a deer or other wild animal. then the
brothers fixed the fighting ground where the battle would begin. The first turn went to the evil brother, Tawis-
karong. He pounded his brother with a bag of beans. He beat him until Tijus-kaha was nearly dead. But not
quite. He got his strength back, and he chased Tawis-karong. Now it was his turn. He beat his evil brother
with a deer horn. Finally, Tijus-kaha took his brother's life away. But still the evil brother wasn't completely
destroyed. "I have gone to the far west," he said. "All the races of men will follow me to the west when they
die." It is the belief of the Hurons to this day. When they die, their spirits go to the far west, where they will
dwell forever. This creation myth falls into the Earth-Diver category. In this type of myth, a being - sometimes
divine, often an animal - dives into the water to bring up small amounts of soil. From this soil, the earth is
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formed.”
Inuit
“Time was, there were no people on earth. The first man still lay inside the pea pod. Four days passed, and
on the fifth day, he pushed with his feet. He broke through the bottom of the pod and fell to the ground.
When he got up, he had become a grown man. He looked at everything and himself, his arms and legs, his
hands; felt his neck. The pod that had held him still hung on the vine with a hole in its bottom. The grown
man walked a little away from the pod where he had started. The ground under him felt as if it were moving,
too. It was not firm, but soft. The way it moved under him made him feel sick. He stood still, and slowly a
pool of water formed at his feet. He bent down and drank from the pool. It felt good the way the water went
from his mouth down inside of him. It made him feel better. He stood up again, refreshed. Next, he saw
something. It was a dark thing flapping along, and it was coming. Then it was there before him. It stood
looking at him. t was Raven. Raven lifted one of his wings and pushed his beak up to his forehead. He raised
it like a mask. And when he moved his beak up, Raven changed into a man. He walked all around the first
man to get a good look at him. "Who are you?" Raven asked, at last. "Where did you come from?" "I came

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http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/mitos_creacion/esp_mitoscreacion_13.htm#women Also see: Hamilton, V. (1988). In the beginning:
Creation stories from around the world. Harcourt Children's Books.
314

from the pea pod," said the man, pointing to the vine and the broken pod. "I made that vine!" said Raven. "I
never thought something like you would come from it. Here, this ground we're standing on is soft. I made it
later than the rest. Let's go to the high ground. It's hard and thick."Man and Raven went to the high ground,
and it was quite hard under them. "Did you have anything to eat?" Raven asked. Man told him about the wet
stuff that had pooled at his feet. "Ah, you must have drunk water," Raven said. "Wait here for me." He drew
the beak-mask down and changed once more into a bird. Raven flew up into the sky and disappeared. Four
days later, he returned. The whole time, Man had been waiting. Raven pushed up his beak and was again a
man. He had four berries-- two raspberries and two heathberries. "I made these for you," he said. "I want
them to grow all over the earth. Here, eat them." Man put the berries in his mouth and ate them. "I feel
better," he said. Next, Raven took Man to a small creek. There, the man-bird found two pieces of clay and
molded them into tiny mountain sheep. He held them on his palm. When they dried, he let Man take a close
look at them. "They look nice," Man said."Now shut your eyes," Raven told him. Man did close his eyes.
Raven pulled down his beak and made his wings wave back and forth, back and forth over the clay figures.
They came to life and bounded away as grown mountain sheep. Raven lifted his mask. "Look!" he said. Man
saw the sheep moving very fast. They were full of life, and that pleased him. He thought people would like
them. For there were more men growing on the vine. But when Raven saw the way Man was looking at the
mountain sheep with such delight, he put them up high so that people would not kill too many of them.
Raven made more animals, moved his wings, and brought them to life. Every animal and bird and fish that
Raven made, Man viewed with pleasure. That worried Raven. He thought he'd better create something Man
would fear, or else Man might eat or kill everything that moved. So Raven went to another creek. He took
some clay and created a bear, making it come alive. Quickly, Raven got out of the way of Bear because the
animal was so fierce it would tear him apart and maybe eat him. "You will get lonely if you stay by yourself,"
Raven said to Man. "So I will make somebody for you." Raven went off a ways, where he could view Man but
where Man couldn't be sure what he was doing. There, off a ways, he made a figure out of clay much like
Man's, although different. He fastened watercress on the back of its head for hair. When the figure had dried
in the palm of his hand, he waved his wings several times. It came to life. It was a lovely woman. She got up,
grew up, and stood beside Man. "That is your helper and your mate," said Raven."She is very pretty," said
Man, and he was happy. Raven went on doing what he needed to do. And Man and Woman had a child.
Soon, there were many, many people and animals. All that was living grew and thrived.The world
prospered.This is a wonderful, dramatic Eskimo myth, parts of which are widely known, spread from Siberia
to Greenland. The myth speaks of society rather than the universe. Raven is a trickster god who travels from
heaven to earth and sometimes, in some stories, to the seafloor. He has sacred power and can change form.
Raven instructs people in living. He creates first-man through the pea vine and other people and animals
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from clay taken from the earth-creek.”

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Hamilton, V. (1988). In the beginning: Creation stories from around the world. Harcourt Children's Books.
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Chapter 7:
History of the City
Augustine on Love, the City and Society
St. Augustine—situating his discourse on humanity within the framework of the city
(reminiscent of both the Platonic and the Abrahamic mythos)—argues in The City of God
that “despite the great diversity of human cultures, nations and languages, the most
fundamental cleavage in humanity is that between the two groups he calls the City of God
and the Earthly City.” (Weithman 2001, p. 235)
“According to Augustine, human beings are moved by what he calls their ‘loves.’ He uses this term to
embrace a variety of attitudes toward things we possess, as well as a wide range of human appetites and
aversions toward things we do not possess. These loves may be transient motives which explain isolated
actions, engrained traits of character that motivate habitual action, or fundamental orientations of the person
that unite her traits and unify her character. Two ways of loving are especially important for Augustine: what
he calls “use,” and “enjoyment.” To enjoy something is to love it for its own sake; he contrasts this with
regarding things as useful for securing something else. Something that is worthy of being loved entirely for its
own sake is the sort of thing that is capable of conferring true happiness. Its secure possession brings about
the quiescence of desire. Only God is worthy of being loved in this way and, as Augustine famously says to
God in the first paragraph of his Confessions, “our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.” On the other
hand, no creature, whether animate or inanimate, ought to be loved entirely for its own sake; no created good
can completely quiet the appetites and confer the happiness and peace that the enjoyment of God can bring.”
(Weithman 2001, 235)
Accepting the addendum that all things are an expression of the divine and have an infinite
aspect that is ‘God’, this argument coheres with our critique of multiculturalism perfectly.
Neoliberalism, and Modernism more generally, in denying the infinite aspect of manifest
things like nature and humans, can only love people in the manner described by Augustine
as ‘use.’ For a truly multicultural society, on the other hand, we must have a culture that is
capable of love in the manner described by Augustine as ‘enjoyment.’
“The assault culminates in Augustine’s alternative definition of a commonwealth, which he offers in Book 19
of De civitate Dei. ‘A people,’ Augustine famously says there, ‘is an assembled multitude of rational creatures
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bound together by common agreement on the objects of their love.’ ” (Weithman 2001, p. 243)
The object of love as ‘enjoyment’ that must bind a truly multicultural society is a love of
other people that extends not only to the material edifice of othered cultures but to their
ontological and epistemological essence. This ontological and epistemological love is
contrasted with the object of love as ‘use’ of neoliberal multiculturalism which only loves
other cultures in the material value they can bring to society and does not extend to the

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Augustine, The City of God (De Civitate Dei).
662
Weithman, P., 2001. Augustine’s political philosophy. The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, pp.234-252.
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ontological and epistemological essence of other cultures (which are axiomatically denied
through the unproblematic reduction of reality to manifestation that undergirds
neoliberalism and material rationalism).
Environmental Planning for the Age of Plenty, Leisure and Conscious Evolution
Intellectual Roots:
A Poetic Review
Romantics
Emerson
“…All are needed by each one;

Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;—
He sang to my ear,—they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar…
Then I said, “I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of my youth:”—
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
317

Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;—
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.”
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(Emerson 1914, pp. 7-8)
Geddes planning theory and practice and his conceptions of nature education were clearly
influenced by the Romantic Movement in England and its vision of intuition, and as such
we will explore the writings of William Blake and William Wordsworth.
William Blake
William Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilchrist aptly captures the essence of Geddes
philosophy of natural education in saying “to walk with [Blake] in the country was to
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perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter.” (Adams 1970, p. viii)
Blake and the Birth of Modernity
“Blake lived in a revolutionary age that brought about changes in many important phases of human life….
Post-Renaissance thought, mainly the development of materialist science, created the Deist myth of God as
the great designer, the machine-builder. One of Blake’s best-known paintings, “The Ancient of Days,” depicts
a bearded patriarchal god of the sky spreading a pair of compasses over the earth. For Blake, this god, the
idea that only the measurable is real, and the assumption that man and the universe are merely machines
were all manifestations of error. Blake’s religious views, vehemently anti-Deistic, were in the tradition of
individualistic Christianity… Rather than looking to the sky for an alien and distant lawgiver, Blake would
discover God in Man, in every man.” (Adams 1970, p. ix-x)
Blake, in short, was grappling with the same essential problems as Geddes faced in his age
and which we face in our own—the mechanistic worldview of total work, Modernism.
Reality was being reduced to the measureable dimensions of passing time and physical
space. The universe was being reduced to a machine that lacks referent to the unmanifest
world. So to were humans. Virtue and social order were to be found in submission to God
and his ordained monarchies rather than through actualization of one’s own latent divinity
(i.e. through remembrance of and intimacy with the infinite aspect of human being).
Where Blake and his companions saw “the soul of beauty” in “the forms of matter”

663
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1914, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Vol. V Poems, London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.
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Hazard Adams 1970, William Blake: Jerusalem, Selected Poems and Prose, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
318

(Adams 1970, p. viii) as they walked through nature, the mechanistic worldview of
Modernity was producing subjects who saw not but a dead, chaotic multiplicity whose
perfected order and teleological imperative could only be attained through subjugation by
man. God had still given man dominion over earth, and so its perfection was still to be
found in subjugation by the will of man, but nature was being disenchanted—the unmanifest
was stripped from nature, the forms of matter were thus stripped of their reference to
infinite form and we thereby became blind to the soul of beauty that expresses itself
through the forms of nature. In the end we have been left with a vision of nature as a
dangerous, chaotic, feminine other that, like all such feminine (or feminized) and
objectified others, can only find order through subjugation by the active, masculine,
occidental, etc. principle. Obviously Blake’s calls for a return to a worldview sensitive to the
infinite, unmanifest dimensions of reality (as they permeate both humans and nature), like
those of Geddes (and our own?), went unheeded and we have continued down ‘the straight
paths of [Modernist] improvement’ towards the decay of order that is necessitated by
domineering imposition of artificial order upon the natural order. Blake’s was a cry to leave
the path of devolutionary development that is impelled by the materialist worldview of
Modernity. Ours is a cry to leave the path of devolutionary development that is impelled by
the materialist worldview of Modernity.
“[Blake emphasized] individual emancipation from dying forms of belief and social behavior. But with
emancipation came the man trapped in the cave, Blake’s tragic figure, Urizen, isolated in a brutalizing
mechanistic philosophy of nature and man, seeking frantically to impose abstract moral codes upon apparent
chaos. The man in the cave is man driven to a rejection of his own humanity. Blake’s art is by his own
admission an effort to restore, or, better, to create a mythical golden age or visionary frame of mind in the
individual man, so that he can again discover that other men are a part of him.” (Adams 1970, p. x)
Wordsworth vs. Blake
“In The Recluse, Wordsworth wrote the following lines about the relation of mind to nature or the world
around the mind:
How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted: — & how exquisitely, too,
Theme this is but little heart among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind.
Blake’s annotation to this reads: “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted.”
Philosophers and poets of the age were deeply concerned with this matter of the relation or
disrelation between mind and nature, subject and object. One attempted resolution of this dualism was to
assert that the mind knows nature by rational means but feels nature by poetic intuition. But in the face of the
Lockean principle that the world is divided into primary measureable qualities of experience, which are
objective and ‘real’, and the secondary qualities of existence (taste, smell, texture, and so on), which are
subjective and differ from individual to individual, the mind is apparently turned back upon itself and ends up
as solipsistic and merely expressive of its own isolation.
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The romantic poets sought to deal with this problem by raising questions about the objectivity of
objectivity. Do not the tools of ‘objective’ reason—analysis and generalization—distance, deaden, and dissect
reality into parts, isolating the mind from its objects? Can the mind, in some intuitive act, put the world back
together, synthesize rather than analyze? Synthesis and communion seem to be the aim of Wordsworth’s
Prelude, of Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound. Blake’s objection to Wordsworth’s vision of nature as somehow
‘fitted’ to the mind, aside from his dislike of its implied materialism and mechanism, is that two things fitted
together are not really synthesized. The shoe surrounds the foot but never becomes part of the foot.” (Adams
1970, p. xi)
Are we to be fitted with nature, to fit nature to our foot via subjugation through imposition
of artificial order, to fulfill our ‘God given right’ of dominion over earth, or are we to
synthesize with it, to see the world through a lens that transcends the illusion of discrete,
biological individuality, to transcend the privation of consciousness through manifestation
by which we know the world in terms of self and other. Will we fit nature onto humanity,
wear nature like a shoe (and thereby wear a hole in its sole, in its inherent order), or will we
transcend the illusion of separation from nature through seeing the infinite perspective
through use of intuition (the silent epistemological potential that exists beyond the bounds
and limitations of the rational mind, which are represented in Blake’s work by “the
shadowy Tharmas, whose fall is described in Night the First of Vala, a figure representing
primal power, instinct, unity…” [Adams 1970, p. xv]).
Epistemological Symbolism in Blake,

Reason and Imagination, Urizen and Urthona
“Blake supposes another situation: The world is as we make it, but we make it always in two fundamentally
contrary ways. The mind posits nature as an ‘other,’ surrounding it; but it also posits itself as turning nature
inside out, so to speak, and containing nature in its own imaginative acts and productions. In both cases, of
course, it is the mind that is acting, but according to tow competing myths. In both, nature is made, but in
each it is made differently, and the two depend upon each other: “Without Contraries is no Progression.”
Neither view can triumph by negation or annihilation of the other. They are in a dialectical relationship.
Blake’s view is reminiscent of Heraclitus’ remark that Homer was wrong in praying that strive disappear from
the universe, for should this happen, all would fall into chaos. Blake, however, wants to raise strive to its
proper mental level rather than allow it to operate destructively in its fallen form of war.” (Adams 1970, p. xii)
Mind, then, is seen as acting both within nature and as an expression of nature. The key
lies in what is meant by strife. Is this the strife of self and other, of two seemingly discrete
entities, or is this the sort of synergistic strife referred to in the previous section?
“The two myths are represented in Blake’s prophecies by two of his “giant forms” or Zoas (Ezekiel I, 5);
Urizen, who is roughly the power of analytic procedures that work toward generalizations about man and
nature, invents in his mind the split between subject and object that enables him to generalize and objectify.
The fall is brought about by Urizen’s going on to insist that only the objective and general are real, that man is
born into and surrounded by a material universe, which is reducible in its operations to general laws. Man
objectified, being a part of this universe, is also subject to these laws and to the moral laws apparently
derivable from them. Urizen’s symbols in his fallen state are thus the cave of surrounding matter and the
tablets of the law handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Urizen of Blake’s age is a Deist and a
Newtonian. He winds up the universe and makes it run; anyone who rebels against his views is accused of sin.
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In the story Blake tells, in the golden age, outside of time as we measure it or objectify it, Urizen
possessed the sun. He was the true prince of light, but once convinced that he required no opposition, he
found himself surrounded by dead matter. He lived in a cavern; he had fallen into the condition he imagined
for the remainder of history.” (Adams 1970, p. xii)
“In the same age Los, whose name was then Urthona, the giant of the earth, inhabited the place where the
valuable mettles of the mental life could be mined for ultimate refinement in the fire of the prince of life.
Urthona’s domain was the caverns and mountains, not of a material universe, but of the mind itself, the world
of the artists of the imagination, the gnomes of fairy tales. But in the cataclysm of Urizen’s fall into the
unopposed idea that a surrounding material nature was the only reality, Urthona was cast into the
Promethean role of saving fire for man. He became Los, or fallen Sol, and had to shape man’s destiny on his
blacksmith’s anvil. He is obviously the imaginative foundation upon which reason must stand. An archetype
of the artist, he is reminiscent of Hephaestus and Vulcan. Since Urizen has lost his true form, one of Los’s
jobs is to rebuild Urizen’s spiritual body. This task continues through history; it is the eschatological principle
in Blake’s poetry.” (Adams 1970, p. xiii)
Urizen is reason, where as Urthona is the imagination. Urizen is the light of the morning
sun, Urthona the darkness of the caves that form the roots of the mountain. To the
linearity of reason imagination represents disjuncture and the potential for transformation.
Death, descent into the darkness of the cave, creates the potential for transformation and
birth into a new life.
“In his desire to assume total power, Urizen has no use for Los’s activity and does not recognize it as the
contrary necessary to his own prolific existence. Instead he ‘negates’ it. Los, on the other hand, not without
numerous struggles with himself, recognizes that his task is not to destroy the tyrant but to restore his proper
form, to rebuild his body. Thus Blake sees Los’s activity finally as that of a sculptor.” (Adams 1970, p. xiii)
Urizen’s folly is clearly that of Modernity, the presumption that reason can properly
function without imagination and intuition. Urizen is a perpetual polar summer—the sun
never sets, repose is never found, rejuvenation never comes. Photosynthesis never pauses
for respiration, a world of perpetual exhalation. Urizen denies the importance of death for
life, the importance of sleep for wakefulness, the importance of femininity for masculinity,
of darkness for the light.
“The next step to understanding Blake is to think of this contrariety, this apparent struggle in the universe, as
going on within man, not just in Blake but in all men. In Blake this everyman is Albion, who is each of us, but
also the whole world, then there is a sense in which the world is in us. Not matter which of the two myths one
accepts (and the point is to accept both at once, thus to live where both are fictions and yet ‘equally true’),
both myths are emanations of the mind. In that sense they are interior to man, even though one creates a
poem of an outer material reality while the other creates a poem of an inner one…. The world is not simply
‘given’ to us. It is constantly being made by us. It is changing and growing as our imagination and reason
debate its nature. Alone, Urizen’s reason tends to harden into unchanging laws. Without reason as the
‘outward bound and circumference of energy’ the imagination, as represented by Los, would fall into
dreamlike anarchy. Fallen Urizen, having negated the imagination, negates change; but he finds that he
cannot annihilate it. Everything he creates becomes something different and horrible before his eyes. Los
could say to him, as Blake does, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to the angel: ‘All that we saw was
owing to your metaphysics.” (Adams 1970, p. xiv)
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When we tell a story of ourselves as fallen we fall. When we tell a story of reality as
meaningless it becomes meaningless. We have to fulfill the book, and so too does the
reality we inhabit, but we need not tell the dark, paternalist stories of the fall and
domineering redemption. That being said, there are constant attributes of reality. We may
negate change (and thus difference), may dominate difference through use of reason to
create an artificial unity in manifestation (though of course, as we know from the Farmer of
Song, such domineering artificial orders in the end beget only death, the decay of manifest
order), but we cannot annihilate the motion that begets change and difference. We write
the story, and if our story is of privation we may serve to negate the manifestation, but the
eternal is eternal and unmoving—“deep roots are not reached by the frost.” (Tolkien)
Temporal Symbolism in Blake
“Another way of discussing all of this is to invoke the two modes of time that inform Blake’s poems. The first
is the time most suitable to Urizen’s view—measureable or spatialized time. When we speak of spaces of time,
make chronological charts, or construct clock faces, we spatialize time. Soon we discover that this mode of
imagining time puts us in time, just as Urizen assumes that we are in space. With a little reflection we
recognize that linear chronology constructs a past that is forever gone; yet we manage to create the fiction of
its presence in our accounts of it. It is present, of course, in the spatializing symbolic formulations we employ.
The ancient Romans exist in books, not ‘back there’ because there isn’t any ‘back there’ except in our
creation of it.” (Adams 1970, p. xiv)
The measureable, spatialized time of Urizen is contrasted with the eternal present of Los.
“For Los there are symbolizations which do not formulate a ‘back there’ but insist within
themselves on their presentness. Such a symbolization is the Bible, which for Blake is the
supreme and archetypal work of art. Blake’s point is that the Jesus present in the Bible is
the real Jesus, not the historical Jesus who must always remain alienated form us ‘back
there’ in time. Jesus comes in the Bible; it is not that he came. By the same token we
rehearse plots in novels in the present tense even though the convention of fiction is to
employ the past tense, as in a chronicle.” (Adams 1970, xiv)
What does this all mean?
“To spatialize and historicize is to surround oneself with time, which is the same sort of illusion as Urizen’s
cave [of Modernity]. At this point the contrary had better be introduced: ‘The bright sculptures of Los’s
Halls.’ This is the potential presence for each individual of everything, regardless of location in time, in the
‘minute particulars’ of art. Thus, as Blake says of Chaucer’s pilgrims, they still exist ‘unaltered, and
consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life.’ Blake’s Los is the spirit of
time, but of immeasurable time, time lived and time now, time that is made by imaginative work rather than
time in which things occur:
…In this time the poet’s work is done.
Urizen’s time is spatial and external; Los’s time is dynamic and inner. It is difficult to imagine human life
progressing satisfactorily without the opposition of these two models.” (Adams 1970, pp. xiv-xv)
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Intuition and Passion, Tharmas and Luvah
“The idea of a giant man who fell into a nightmare world from an Edenic essence has the sanction of religious
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and literary traditions. Blake makes his archetypal giant Albion fourfold [quaternary] ; there are two other
Zoas besides Urthona (Los) and Urizen. They are the shadowy Tharmas, whose fall is described in Night the
First of Vala, a figure representing primal power, instinct, unity, and Luvah, who is passion and generation,
and appears in the fallen world as thwarted desire in the figure of the revolutionary, firey, Oedipal child Orc
(an anagram of Cor, heart, a play on the Greek word for the sexual organs, and a suggestion of hell, Orcus).
For a while this Orc is Blake’s hero, but soon Blake imagines him locked with Urizen in an endless
opposition of oppression and revolt. Urizen seems to assume the role of Orc’s father, and we realize that in
some sense he was once an Orc himself. The true parents of Orc are Los and his female ‘emanation,’
Enitharmon; Urizen, in his negation of the imagination, cannot be prolific, only a foster-father. Orc and
Urizen symbolize cyclical time without progression, tyranny, and anarchy by turn. Neither can break the
cycle. Every Orc becomes Urizen. This is where Los must enter, true father of Orc and revolt, but worker
witht eh materials at hand, spaher of tradition. Los is work itself; Orc is the quest for gratification. But
gratification and happiness are abstractions and cannot be pursued. They are, if anything, a by-product of
work, though even that may provide them with too great a status.” (Adams 1970, pp. xv-xvi)
What do we mean by anarchy? Is it no order? Or is it order without hierarchical

domination? Is it dismissal of arborescent relations, or is it extracting the will to dominate
from arborescent relations? Though we shall use the term anarchy to describe order
without the hierarchical will to dominate, let us presume that Blake means no order at all—
tyranny, the imposition of artificial order through domination, naturally begets a decay of
order that is described as anarchical. Pulling the sprouts begets death rather than the
intended life (Meng Zi, 2A2) as tyranny begets a decay of order rather than the intended
artificial, unified order.
The notion that happiness is a byproduct of work needs to be treated with. Los is
fallen imagination, and fallen imagination is known as work itself.
Sleeping in History
“Blake treats history, or measured time, as a dream. Having succumbed to the total domination of the
Urizenic myth of an outer material reality, and having therefore negated the imaginative world contained by
man, Albion falls into history, or sleep. The archetypal man must be redeemed by his own imagination’s
righting the balance between living in time and making time through work. Los must build the body of the
world in imaginative form. This body is equivalent to the city of God in the Appocalypse.” (Adams 1970, p.
xvi)
Masculine, Feminine and Nature as a State of Alienation
“Albion not only dreams the nightmare of history; his Zoas are at war ‘within his members.’ Another way of
expressing this is in sexual terms. On one level of the symbolism Albion is fourfold; on another he is a
synthesis through contrariety of male and female. In the fall, he becomes alienated from his female
‘emanation,’ who is called Jerusalem. In this separate ‘natural’ state (‘nature’ is a state of alienation in Blake),
the emanation is no longer inside Albion, or imaginatively conceived by him, but out-side and separate. She is
thus equivalent to nature itself—mother nature, whom Blake calls Vala (veil). She is the surrounding material

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Mystical orders like the Rosicrucians ascribe a quaternary quality to the human soul.
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world insisted upon by the Urizenic portion of Albion when that portion gains control at the expense of
imagination. Separated from her in this way, Albion becomes a ‘spectre’ of his true self, and we see the battle
of the sexes played out before us. When this occurs each Zoa looses his emanation as well.” (Adams 1970, p.
xvi)
To reduce nature to a dead, material, external other is to be divided from the feminine
aspect of self.
Four States of Potential Being in Blake
“Blake sees all human life as existing potentially in four ‘states,’ and each of these has a presiding Zoa. These
states are called Eden, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro. Eden, which is not the Biblical Eden of Genesis, but
the city of Revelation, is properly the realm of Urizen, prince of light, and is associated with the sun and the
head of the body of the archetypal world-man Albion. The breast or heart of Albion is ruled by tharmas. His
land is eulah, the ‘maried land’ of Isaiah, the Eden of Genesis or lover’s paradise, the realm of child and
protective mother, shepherd and flock, lover and beloved, the source of idyllic art. The loins and genitals
belong to Luvah, the state Blake calls Generation. Here man plays subject to the world’s object, and that
world must be ‘planted and sown.’ It is a world upon which the seasonal cycle impresses itself, a world of
birth, growth, decay, and death. It has an elegiac quality about it. Finally, beneath these three states, in the
strong legs of Albion and in the caves and mountains of the earth, complete with working gnomes, there is
Ulro, which is properly Urthona’s world; here are mined the crude but valuable mental materials of dream
and imagination, ready for the blacksmith’s shaping art. In the unfallen world, these states represent prolific
contrariety or mental war, imagination through generation, procreation, and unification, to apocalyptic
ordering of the whole world of experience. In Night the Ninth of Vala, with Albion once again awakened
from the nightmare of spatial and temporal enclosure, Blake offers the following lines as partial illustration of
the proper relations of Zoas, and states:
For Tharmas brought his flocks upon the hills, & in the Vales
Around the Eternal Man’s bright tent, the little children play
Among the woolly flocks. The hammer of Urthona sounds
In the deep caves beneath; his limbs renewed, his Lions roar
Around the furnaces.” (Adams 1970, pp. xvi-xvii)
“But when Albion falls as a result of the tyranny of Urizen, he falls into ‘death’ or sleep and becomes, rather
than a standing, upright man, an upside-down one. He begins to think only in Urizen’s terms; the world is
around him like a coffin. His head is in Ulro. His Zoas have fallen into the wrong states: Urizen in Ulro,
Tharmas in Generation, Luvah in Beulah, and Urthona (now called Los) in Eden. In other words, if Urizen
falls, there is nothing better than for the imagination to deal with light as best it can. Los becomes, therefore,
Blake’s hero seeking to rebuild the city of Eden, now fallen, or Urizen’s body, or nature into what Blake calls
Golgonooza, the city of art.” (Adams 1970, p. xvii)
Poetry and Prophecy
“The Argument: Man has no notion of moral fitness but from Education. Naturally he is only a natural organ
to Sense…. The Conclusion: If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophical &
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Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same
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dull round over again.” (Adams 1970, p. 111)
Blake’s use of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘man’ seem, at least in this context, to connote the
purely biological man. The biological man has no notion of moral fitness, and it is only
through education by the infinite man (the infinite, unmanifest aspect of human being) that
the biological man comes to virtue. In this light, his conclusion makes a great deal of sense.
If we were only a biological, and thus only had recourse to the philosophy and
experimentation of our sensory experience and material rationality, then we would soon
exhaust our cognitive potentials and become stagnant (trapped in the maelstrom).
Inspiration, imagination, intuition, be they poetic, prophetic or both, allow us to continually
transgress the boundaries of our presently known reality. The infinite aspect of our being,
in its recourse beyond the limitations of our sensory experiences and perceptions of the
world, its existence beyond the veil of time and space, its existence in the eternal now, its
ability to bring what is known by reason to bear in a single, silent movement of the mind,
etc. is what allows for humanity’s conscious evolution. Indeed, it is the dialectical
relationship between the rational mind’s ability to establish boundaries and the irrational
mind’s (imagination, intuition, etc. as expressed in poetry, prophecy or both) ability to
transcend boundaries that allows for the cognitive ebb and flow that provides the energy for
the process of conscious evolution.
“He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God.

He who sees the ratio only sees himself only.
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Therefore God becomes as we are [i.e. humanity], that we may be as he is.” (Adams 1970, p. 112)
What would Blake say to the supposition that all things are God? That nature is God?
That the material world is God? Is his the typical anthropocentric worldview of paternalism
wherein only Man is God and everything else is his ‘property’, his dominion? Or is nature
imbued with consciousness? Does nature possess an inherent value? Is nature God, or is
nature nothing more than the lifeless property (or, indeed, the prison) of man?
Conduct some sort of review of conceptions of the ‘holy city’, the history
of religious conceptions of the city, etc. (probably beginning with that
Descartes paper Elvin uses for his class, which also provides a suitable
point with which to critique the Modern academy and its foolish readings
of authors like Descartes as being caused by their physical, built
environment.
Cities as an Evolutionary Phenomenon

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William Blake, There is no Natural Religion
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William Blake, There is no Natural Religion
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Sir Patrick Geddes:
(Conscious) Evolutionary Cities:
Evolutionary Thought in Geddes

“How to combine this fundamental vividness of rustic life, with the subtler, yet it may be even more strenuous
life of productive urban culture is perhaps the main problem before the evolutionist.” (Geddes and Thomson
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1911, p. 112 as quoted in Meller 1993, p. 17)
Put in different terms, Geddes was seeking the impossible fusion of true natural mysticism
and capitalism. Natural mysticism is rooted in conscious experience beyond the limitations
of the rational mind, in experiencing the underlying unity and consciousness of reality (i.e.
the unity of humans and nature and the underlying consciousness that binds them together)
and thereby transcending the illusion of discrete, biological individuality. Capitalism, as
Herman (2008) so aptly notes, relies upon bifurcating of humanity and nature and
subsequently stripping nature of its consciousness so as to render it as a subservient,
consumable other. Natural mysticism is rooted in experiencing reality (humans and nature
included) as a single, living, conscious entity, while capitalism is rooted in the artificial
bifurcation of humanity and nature and the rendering of nature as a lifeless, mechanistic
process that is devoid of consciousness. Capitalism (and in essence all forms of economic
theology…) is rooted in artificial scarcity, fear and competition between self and other,
where natural mysticism is rooted in love (in the inherent unity of that which is and in
transcending the illusion of a totalizing, utterly discrete sense of self and other therein), and
the two cannot be aptly harmonized because capitalism (its worldview, associated
philosophy and norms of thought, behavior and conception of being) produces a finite,
atomized state of being that is dimensionally incommensurable with the infinite, unified
state of being that is pursued through natural mysticism.
This tension did not seem to be insurmountable or even problematic for Geddes
because he believed that natural mysticism was a primitive, oriental path that in Modernity
should be pursued through an active, rational, scientific conquest of nature that is readily
coherent with capitalist attempts to subjugate nature (i.e. attempts to render nature as an
othered, consciousnessless, hierarchically dominated commodity, more generally as
property), and indeed this tension between the will to dominate (which requires self and
other) and mysticism (which is rooted in mystical experiences that are typified by
transcending the spatiotemporal illusion of self and other) has a storied tradition through
presently recorded human history, but in the end combining the vivid aesthetic beauty of
nature with the strenuous life of capitalism’s productive urban culture cannot be sustainably
attained as productive urban culture is rooted in a domineering conception of human-
nature relations that by necessity leads to the decay and death of natural order (and thus
natural beauty) and because the loving unity sought through appreciation of natural beauty

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Geddes and Thomson 1911, Evolution, London: Williams & Norgate p. 112
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in natural mysticism is incommensurable with the fearful, competitive atomization of
capitalism.
The Evolution of Cities

“In matters civic, as in simpler fields of science, it is from facts surveyed and interpreted that we gain our
general ideas of the direction of Evolution, and even see how to further this; since from the best growths
selected we may rear yet better ones.” (Geddes 1915, p. vi)
“The evolution of cities is here treated… as a study in contemporary social evolution, an inquiry into
tendencies in progress.” (Geddes 1915, p. 1)
“Berlin and Boston, London and New York, Manchester and Chicago, Dublin, smaller cities as well—all till
lately, and still no doubt mainly, concentrated upon empire or national politics, upon finance, commerce, or
manufactures is not each awakening towards a new and more intimate self-consciousness? This civic self is
still too inarticulate: we cannot give it clear expression: it is as yet mostly in the stage of a strife of feelings, in
which pain and pleasure, pride and shame, misgivings and hopes are variously mingling, and from which
definite ideas and ideals are only beginning here and there to emerge.” (Geddes 1915, p. 3)
Empire, national politics, finance, commerce and manufacturing, or in more general terms
the body of our socio-political life, which Geddes understood as subsuming the lives of
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cities up to the early 20 century (i.e. cities were subsumed by their role as shelter for the
sake of survival), are framed by Geddes as giving way to the awakening of a self-conscious,
epistemological life of cities. As humans evolved from a life oriented towards the survival of
our biological bodies towards a life oriented towards the cultivation of our emotions-mind
(our soul), so to will cities begin to shift from a focus on biological survival and mechanical
evolution therein to a focus on epistemological cultivation and conscious evolution therein.
The finite, manifest orientation of cities to bodily survival will give way to the infinite,
unmanifest orientation of cities to epistemological cultivation (towards the cultivation of
civic consciousness and the social, local, regional, national, civilizational, etc. evolution
made possible by a shared civic consciousness). We of course diverge from Geddes when
it comes to his conception of civic consciousness (and his capitalist, Modernist conception
of the awakening of civic consciousness through conflict, competition and domination), but
in essence the notion of planning cities as a book of philosophy oriented towards
awakening consciousness and thus spurring conscious evolution at the individual and social
scales presents a coherent and fruitful potential method for social development if read
through the sort of Indigenous Worldview we explore in this text.
Economic Evolution?
Geddes (1915) often frames city and town evolution, and social evolution more generally,
in terms of controlling nature. Social (Noospheric) Evolution, however, like its individual
counterpart Human Evolution (Conscious Evolution), is rooted ideas (in unmanifest
realties) and the states of being they produce rather than the ability to control nature
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therein. (Ouspensky 1951; Barnesmoore 2016a)

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Barnesmoore 2016a, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social
Psychology 1(2).
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[toward] and understanding of his possible evolution….
Our fundamental idea shall be that man as we know him is not a completed being; that nature
develops him only up to a certain point and then leaves him, either to develop further, by his own efforts and
devices, or to live and die such as he was born, or to degenerate and lose capacity for development.
In this light, we can easily imagine (indeed can easily observe) increased capacity to control
ones environment through use of technology (be it mechanical, political, social, etc.) being
accompanied by devolution of ideas (i.e. Modernity). Let us then divide Social
Development (which can be understood in manifest terms of, for example, technological
development and reduced to domination of environment in the Paternalist Worldview)
from Social Evolution (which must be understood in unmanifest, ideational terms). Having
divided social development from social evolution it becomes possible to understand the
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trajectory from Paternalism to Positivism to Post(most)modernism (i.e. the trajectory of
Modernist thought) as Social Devolution even with the clear Social Development (i.e.
increased technological sophistication) that has occurred therein. Indeed, as Barnesmoore
(2016a) illustrates, Economic Theology consists of ideas that, in reducing reality to the
passing time and physical space of our manifest self, in reducing consciousness to a product
of manifestation, in reducing humanity to its biology, in reducing epistemology to material
reason, in reducing human teleology to work, etc., actively negate the potential for
Conscious (or thus Social) Evolution. Conscious Evolution can be aptly understood as the
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evolution of our ‘invisible selves’ (Nicole 1998) , of the aspects of our self like mind and
spirit that exist beyond the world of manifestation, and as such Economic Theology’s (the
Modernist Worldview’s) reduction of reality and humanity to the world of manifestation
renders our invisible selves as seemingly ‘unreal’ and thus negates the potential for
Conscious Evolution (i.e. for direction of will towards ideas about and experiences of the
unmanifest dimensions of reality and the concomitant actualization of latent inner qualities
like wisdom and intuition). We must avoid continued confusion of Social Development
and Social Evolution as this confusion serves to obfuscate and thus trap us within the
catastrophic devolutionary tailspin that humanity has been cast into by the economic
theological worldview of Modernity.
All that being said, Geddes was at least in part aware of the centrality of culture
(ideas and their manifestations as practice) in the process of Social Evolution (if not of the
ways in which the hierarchical form of his ideas and associated practices constrained
potentials for conscious evolution):
“…Geotechnics was defined as the applied science of making the earth more habitable. In the broadest sense
it was what Geddes himself had always had as his goal, and what he believed was possible in the

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In the context of western civilization we refer to Greco-Roman and Abrahamic strains of paternalism.
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Nicole 1998, Living Time, Utretch: Eureka Editions.
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circumstances of active mass democracy…. Survival of the human species depended on achieving a new
equilibrium between a natural and man-made world. That went beyond physical environmental planning to
cultural evolution, and that was the challenge of modern civilization.” (Meller 1993, p. 9)
“With the French Le Playist school, he was moving towards a belief that culture determined the form of
change and thus the evolution or regression of city life.” (Meller 1993, p. 34)
Geddes, then, was at least partly aware of the distinction we are attempting to make
between Mechanical and Conscious Evolution and between Social Development and
Social Evolution (in the sense that he saw evolution in terms of culture [ideas-emotion and
associated practices] rather than a pure function of biology, technology and economic
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wealth ), but in the end this step towards a notion of conscious, social evolution rooted in
culture (in ideas and associated practices) was rendered void by being understood within a
cultural paradigm wherein social evolution is reduced the progressive capacity of man to
control-dominate his environment (natural and built).
Hierarchical Thinking Naturalized at the Group Level
“Geddes gets so carried away by his version of cultural evolution in which all citizens join together that he has
no time for current analyses of the divisions within society especially class structure.” (Meller 1993, p. 24)
Here we have another example of the ways in which hierarchy remained natural within
Geddes conception of Social Evolution even in light of his critique of unencumbered self-
interest and sensitivity to the importance of culture [ideas-emotions and associated
practices] in the process of Social Evolution. He was rightly ready to problematize
hierarchical relations between individuals as the guiding principle of Social Evolution and
promote the importance of culture in the process of Social Evolution, but at the level of
classes within society and inter-social relations (i.e. between the British Empire and the rest
of the world) hierarchies remained natural and indeed necessary. As we have stated, it is
this failure to truly supplant the Paternalist-Modernist Worldview and conceptions of order
in terms of hierarchical domination therein that negates the potential for Social Evolution
towards refining instinct to intuition through free, mystical engagement with aesthetic
beauty in nature and art.
More on Geddes Economic Vision
“In an early paper, entitled ʻJohn Ruskin: Economist,ʼ first published in 1885, Geddes agrees with Ruskinʼs
assessment that market forces should not control economics, but what was needed was a new approach to
economics that focused on true quality of life by answering to the biological and aesthetic needs of humanity.”
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(Wahl 2017)

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This also becomes clear in the problematization of purely material conceptions of wealth and valorization of conceptions of wealth that
included human wellbeing found in Geddes’ (1884; 1915; et. al.) writings.
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https://medium.com/@designforsustainability/design-and-planning-for-people-in-place-sir-patrick-geddes-1854-1932-and-the-
emergence-of-2efa4886317e
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“What was needed [in response to the social woes of the Industrial Revolution], Geddes suggested, following
John Ruskin’s lead, was to create a new way of thinking centered on the production and development, not of
goods, but of people.” (Meller 1993, p. 9)
To glean a more metaphysically nuanced view into Geddes calls for a new economic
approach that is sensitivity to the biological and aesthetic needs of humanity we must dig
into Geddes (1884) treatment of Ruskin. Geddes (1884) seeks to displace the metaphysical
abstractions and simplifications of orthodox economics with biology and physics:
“Archaic psychological and ethical conceptions—frequently of course of fundamental importance—are

dragged up from the dusty academic crypts, where they have escaped contact with the ideas of the century, to
be hurled at us, for have they not supported the temple of economic orthodoxy ever since Adam Smith (who
had of course to work with the crude notions of human nature and conduct current in his day) sought to
found economic and moral sciences upon the irreconcilable and mutually destructive assumptions of pure
egoism and pure altruism respectively, saying, let us found economic on the notion of unrestrained self-
interest, morals on that of universal sympathy. In such ‘hypothetical sciences,’ the hypothetical element is
more evident than the scientific; and these illusory simplifications of the problem by denying the unity of
nature and of science need not detain us here, save that they are of interest in accounting for those moving
appeals against emotion, and contemptuous dismissals of ‘sentiment’—themselves choice examples of
emotion and sentiment, of course of the strictly egoistic or economic sort—with which every reader of
orthodox economic literature is familiar.” (Geddes 1884, pp. 14-15)
“The naturalist has long ago discerned and proclaimed that the phenomena of human society are as
dependent upon biology as those of ant or bee society, and the orthodox economist must either straightaway
follow the example of students of mind and language, whose (then unreformed) studies not so long ago
seemed equally remote from those humble microscopic inquires to which they likewise supposed the
biologist to be confined, and either adopt and apply the conceptions of modern physics and biology, or
disappear in the unavailing struggle for existence against them.” (Geddes 1884, pp. 14)
Geddes movement, which coheres with the more general reduction of human society to
biology of his time that is so aptly captured in Haraway’s (1989) Primate Visions, was both
understandable and tragic. The movement is understandable from the perspective of the
markedly dogmatic metaphysical abstractions it sought to displace (for example,
displacement of the fallen abstraction of human economic behavior as ‘unrestrained self-
interest’ through a focus on scientific conceptions of ‘group survival’ as more essential than
‘individual survival’ [Geddes 1915, p. 184, et. al.]). It is tragic in reducing humanity to its
lowest, biological potential and thereby obfuscating the potential for conscious evolution
beyond the constraints of biological existence and the illusion of discrete, biological
individuality therein at both the individual and societal scales (Barnesmoore 2016,
“Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution…”). Indeed, this tragic reduction of human society to
biology seems to contain the essential barrier to the synthesis of urban and rustic
envisioned by Geddes:
“How to combine [the] fundamental vividness of rustic life, with the subtler, yet it may be even more
strenuous life of productive urban culture is perhaps the main problem before the evolutionist.” (Geddes and
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Thomson 1911, p. 112 as quoted in Meller 1993, p. 17)

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As Barnesmoore (2016) illustrates, “…the strenuous life of productive urban culture…”

actively negates the potential for conscious evolution through mystical engagement with the
“…fundamental vividness of rustic life.” (Geddes and Thomson 1911) The scientific,
biologically-reductive conception of human society, when synthesized with the materialist-
Modernist reduction of reality to the manifest world, excises the infinite aspect of self and
associated epistemological potentials necessary for the mystical engagement with (mystical
experiences in and through) the vividness of rustic life from known reality. For Geddes it
was probably hard (if not impossible) to imagine of a world that simply denied the
existence of the unmanifest world or a vein of economics that perpetuated abstract
metaphysical assumptions like the reduction of human economic behavior to ‘unrestrained
self-interest’ without reference to the unmanifest world, and the strains of mysticism in his
work clearly illustrate that he sought to displace superstitious and dogmatic metaphysical
abstractions using science rather than to displace metaphysics altogether.
“It would ill become the student of modern science to forget that to Roger Bacon the alchemist, and Kepler
the astrologer, we owe priceless discoveries… So the scientific invaders of political economy must never forget
in the excitement of victory that, while of its orthodox system hardly one stone can be left upon another, for
new foundations have to be laid, the materials of the edifice and the treasures which its multifarious
storehouses contained are abundant and precious enough to ransom the economists from any risk of disgrace
of oblivion.” (Geddes 1884, pp. 18-19)
In this light, it may be fairer to say that Geddes vision of a synthesis between urban
productivity and rustic aesthetic fulfillment was impossible given the form that neoliberal
capitalist urban economic production would take in later years (i.e. a form in which the
individual search for profit and associated social degradations of the paleotechnic era were
by and large preserved, the relationship between economic abstractions and the unmanifest
world was extinguished and the most problematic economic abstractions like the reduction
of human economic behavior to unrestrained self-interest were retained…). If we take a
step deeper, however, we find that Geddes conceptions of economics for the sake of both
biology and aesthetics failed to transgress the most essential abstraction of economic
theology (capitalism, socialism and communism alike) and indeed of paternalism more
generally—‘social order is produced through hierarchy’.
Geddes [1915] movement towards a conception of local, regional, national,
imperial, civilizational, etc. cooperation is predicated on the privileging of ‘group survival’
over ‘individual survival’. As such, and in perfect liberal-internationalist-colonialist-
imperialist form, Geddes simply shifts the scale of hierarchy, competition, domination, etc.
to a less granular scale of self and other (to other localities, other regions, other nations,
other empires, other civilizations, etc.) instead of actually transcending the worldview in
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which hierarchy, competition, domination, etc. are the progenitors of social order. This

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Indeed, Geddes endearment to German socialism tells the story: what he loved about German town and city planning was that power
had been moved up the hierarchy from the individual to the state in a manner that allowed the state to more completely and rationally
control its natural environment. This warmness to the centralized government of Germany and the potential for macro town and city
planning therein seems to fly in the face of Meller’s (1993, p. 48) assertion “[Geddes] was hostile to the centralized state and welfare
policies, believing always that the individual had to be the focus of policy, not the masses. No state machine, he believed, could control
or develop the interaction of individual with environment, which was the only path for future human progress.”
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conception of order is anathema to human social order, which, in of humanity’s capacity
for conscious evolution (Ouspensky 1951) through mystical experiences, has the ability to
transcend the limitations of the illusion of discrete, biological individuality of which fear of
death, scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical domination are the most
prominent. (Barnesmoore 2016) This most perverse shred of the dogmatic metaphysical
past from which Geddes was birthed was not excised from his worldview because its
negation lies precisely in humanity’s transcendence of biology and its constraints.
Evolutionary Cities
Geddes (1915 p. 30-45) describes the evolution of cities in the British Isles as a process of
conurbation (a word he uses in place of conglomeration) wherein the multiplicity of cities
and regions in Britain are drawn into a progressively unified living network (into what we
might call the noospheric city of cities) and in so doing highlights the need for flexibility in
the names (categories) that we use to classify cities (i.e. problematizing the banality of the
unities we have received from society in a manner akin to Foucault in Archaeology of
Knowledge). “…Not merely to go on as at present, straining and cracking and bursting this
old network, but soon surely to evolve some new form of organization… What are the new
forms to be?” (Geddes 1915, p. 42) Disjuncture and transformation begets a new unity and
trajectory of continuity, and the problematization of existing unities and trajectories of
continuity does not necessarily imply an outright ontological dismissal of unity and
continuity. It should also be noted that Geddes sees the creation of useful rational
knowledge in terms as a product of stitching together the intimate rational experiential
knowledge of multiple individuals, useful academic understanding as an interdisciplinary
stitching together of disciplines the apex of the pedagogical city as the unification of city and
university—conscious evolution, be it of living city networks, rational knowledge or
academic understanding, is understood in essence as a process of unification (which comes
in stark contrast to the many, divergent branches of the evolutionary trees that represent
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the history of bio-mechanical evolution). Conscious evolution, noospheric evolution, the
evolution of conscious beings and of consciousness itself as expressed in forms like
material reason, is of a different form than bio-mechanical evolution in that where bio-
mechanical evolution is a process of differentiation towards an individual singularity
conscious evolution is a process of unification towards an individual singularity.
What, then, are we to think of the many and varied contemporary
post(most)modern disciplines that deny all truth, unity, continuity, etc. and set themselves
upon a perpetual search for new and more granular lines of demarcation, a perpetual
question for disjuncture and transformation through disjuncture and transformation?

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As above, so below. As with all such dualities, in this case the duality between differentiation and unification, each principle is always in
some manner permeated by the other as seen in the Tai Chi symbol (yin-yang symbol) wherein the center of the black is a white dot and
the center of the white is a black dot. Though biological evolution is typified by differentiation (by yang, force, the white-light, active
principle of motion and thus change, difference, etc.) in the ever widening evolutionary trees, biological evolution also has a unifying
dimension (yin, form, the black-dark, passive principle of unification) as is seen in the unification of cells into increasingly vast beings and
the gradual concentration of cells in the nervous system to form the cerebrospinal nervous system. As such, though conscious evolution
is typified by unification (by yin) we can nonetheless expect to find elements of differentiation in that process.
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Accepting the traditional notion that humans are defined by their ability to transcend the
forms of biology for the formlessness of consciousness (to transcend reflexive articulation
by biological forms, which is to say to actualize consciousness’ latent potential for free will),
then we can see mostmodern anti-theory and practice (i.e. the geography vs. philosophy
mindset) as essentially anti-human. If we are beings who have attained the potential for
transcending bio-mechanical evolution for conscious evolution, the potential for evolution
as a process of unification rather than differentiation, then we can see philosophies,
theories and practices that deny unity in the perpetual search for difference (rather than
understanding that perpetual difference as an attribute of the unified whole…) as
representing an active impediment to our evolutionary process and thus as a devolutionary
force (beings with the potential for conscious evolution through direction of will towards
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real ideas and experiences also have the potential for devolution through both the
direction of will towards unreal ideas and experiences and through not directing the will
towards ideas and experiences at all). Mostmodernism, and Modernism more generally, is
devolutionary and thus an existential threat to human existence (for if we devolve too far we
will no longer be human in the sense of potential for conscious evolution...).
Economic-Survivalist Evolutionary Thought
“…Town-planning schemes, as modest tackings-on, patchings and cobblings, are being considered, even
attempted, here and there; yet we assuredly need far more than these if we are even to ‘muddle through’ in
the ever reopening world-struggle for existence; far more as we realise that the supreme arbitrament of social
survival and success is ultimately neither that of militarist conflicts, nor of industrial muddles, but of civic
and regional reorganisation. In this the broadest views of international struggle and of industrial competition
combine into a higher one.” (Geddes 1915, p. 50)
Geddes may be excused for the reduction of conscious evolution to the competitive,
conflicting form of bio-mechanical evolution in that his understanding was derived from an
economic-theological socio-cultural environment that manufactures artificial scarcity, fear,
competition and desire for domination that causes beings with the potential to transcend
bio-mechanical evolution to remain fettered to its form. Living in a world where almost all
remnants of Indigenous cultures that were not organized around the principle of order in
manifestation through hierarchical domination had been destroyed and in which the
remaining cultures were locked in an existential struggle to reach the top of the hierarchy of
domination, it is understandable that Geddes could not envision a process of unification
without domination. Though his observations—derived from a population map of Britain
found in the Royal Geographical Society’s Atlas of England and Wales (Geddes 1915, p.
23)—concerning the evolution of human settlements across geographical space and the
natural environments therein indicate the unifying nature of conscious evolution (i.e. a
conurbation of smaller, differentiated settlements into unified, greater metropolitan areas
that retain the complexity of the difference that was brought into unity), his planning model

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This use of the term real and unreal signifies resonance with capital-r-Reality, an attribute of the IS-FFC like Goodness, Beauty and
Truth. Real ideas and experiences in this context are those that serve to unify us with the IS-FFC, where as unreal ideas and experiences
are those that serve to divide us from the IS-FFC. Everything other than the IS-FFC is lowercase-r-real in being on a spectrum of reality
articulated by its relation to the capital-r-real of the IS-FCC.
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seeks to create an artificial unity of civic consciousness through a process of dominating
difference via civics education that, in its predication on the differentiation of individuals
necessary for the ‘self’ and ‘other’ of domination that forms the essence of the economic
theological conception of human nature (as competitive and domineering if not simply
‘evil’ or ‘self-interested’), actually serves to negate the potential for conscious unity. London
and Britain more generally had already at least in part evolved in the natural form of
consciousness (as a unification that inculcated the difference of the parts that form the
whole), but his socio-political vision of the future was perverted by Capitalism, Modernism
and the domineering will of the Paternalist Worldview—which together see unified order in
manifestation as something that is to be created through hierarchical domination—and as a
result his planning model actually serves to destroy the organic (essential) unity of a city,
region, nation, empire or what have you in its search for a homogenous, artificial unity that
is dimensionally incommensurable with the ever-changing, finite dimensional quality of
manifestation,
As the Farmer from Song’s (Meng Zi, 2A2) attempts to create an artificial unity of
life through pulling the sprouts in his field led to destruction of the unity that is life (i.e. the
sprouts died), so to do attempts at creating an artificial unity of civic consciousness through
dominating different expressions of civic consciousness via the process of socialization (or
attempts at creating an artificial unity of greater metropolitan spirit through dominating the
difference of the many smaller spirits that unified to form the greater metropolitan area)
actually lead to destruction of organic unity between conscious beings. Unity that inculcates
difference is opposed to the idea of static unity that is created through domination of
difference, which is of course a clear goal of Geddes cities as books of civic philosophy
planning model and the assimilation of difference into the norms of the local, regional,
national, imperial, etc. scales of socio-political hegemony. At the same time as Geddes is
facing the reality that large cities are so much an amalgam of the peculiarities in each
neighborhood or suburb that is subsumed in the conurbation that useful knowledge must
be stitched together from the intimate experiential knowledge of individuals who have
actually lived in each section of the city he is also proposing a project that seeks to
assimilate this difference, at least at the level of civics, into the artificial unity of the British
Empire. His observations and experiences clearly illustrate that the unity of conscious
evolution is one that inculcates the difference of the parts that are brought into unity (unity
of difference), and yet his proposals seek to dominate difference in order to create an
artificial unity of civic consciousness. To actually foster unity in conscious beings—be it
unity of life, of city spirit or of civic consciousness—we must not attempt to dominate the
differences of the parts that come together to form the unity and instead must allow their
differences to form an essential part of the unity (as is indeed seen in Geddes description of
the actual character of London…). To his credit there are aspects of Geddes model that do
not seek to wholly dominate difference (he is, for example, still very sensitive to the need to
plan towns and cities from a perspective that is rooted in the local particularities of concrete
reality), but the general drift of his model is to create unity through dominating these
accepted differences into the broader civic consciousness of western civilization.
In this sense Geddes vision is similar to that of contemporary liberal
multiculturalism in that multiculturalism seeks to create socio-cultural unity through
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dominating differences of worldview, epistemology, civic consciousness, etc. (especially
difference from the material rationalism of Modernist thought and the reduction of reality
to passing time and physical space that makes the material rationalism of Modernity
possible) while retaining the appearance of socio-cultural difference. Material signifiers of
cultural difference like language, food, clothing, religion, etc. are inculcated in the socio-
cultural unity, and so it seems to be a unity that inculcates difference, but differences of
cosmology, ontology, order, teleology, aesthetics, epistemology, ethics and the like are
dominated and destroyed to create an artificial, invisible unity at the level of mind.
Similarly, Geddes planning model seeks to retain material signifiers of difference and
contextual differences associated with lived environment while dominating difference at the
level of consciousness (worldview, epistemology, civic consciousness, etc.). Manifest
difference is accepted (at least to a limit…), and so in appearances we are left with a vision
of manifest unity as inculcating the difference of the parts from which it was formed, but at
the level of our invisible selves (the level of our worldview, epistemology, civic
consciousness, etc.) this appearance is not but an obfuscating farce as unity is created
through a domination of difference that actually serves to destroy the organic unity of
conscious evolution. Bodies and practices retain their differences (at least to some
degree…), but minds and theories are dominated into an artificial unity.
Geddes vision of social evolution also inculcates domination at the level of human-
nature relations and attempts to obfuscate this artificial unity through emphasis of the
difference imposed upon social evolution by the dimensional quality of finite
manifestation. Geddes discusses the ways in which the harnessing (domination) of rivers to
extract hydroelectric power in Norway expanded and constrained the potential for social
evolution and compares this with the ways in which the harnessing (domination) of the land
to extract coal expanded and constrained the potential for social evolution in Britain.
Geddes sees the domination of the earth for coal power in Britain and beyond as leading
social evolution to a “multitudinous population at too low standards of life; a soil too
limited for agriculture, even where not bricked or ashed over; in short, …mean and
miserable cities subsiding upon exhausted mines.” (Geddes 1915, p. 52-53) This is
contrasted to the more utopian potentials Geddes observes in the Norwegian model for
dominating nature:
“From this doleful picture of the logical outcome of one set of conditions, turn now to image that arising on
the opposite shores of the North Sea, from the streams of " white coal," each and all inexhaustible while the
earth spins, and its winds blow over the sea, and the Norse mountains stand. Yet instead of Norway forming
cities like ours upon these unending streams of energy, these for the most part generate but long chains of
townlets, indeed of country villages, in which this strongest of races need never decline, but rather develop
and renew their mastery of Nature and of life again as of old; with everywhere the skill of their ancient dwarf-
kings, the might of the hammer of Thor. Are there not here plainly the conditions of a new world-
phenomenon and world-impulse a Norseman aristo democracy of peace which may yet eclipse all past
achievements, whether of his ancient democracy at home or even (who knows?) his aristocracy of conquest
and colonisation abroad among older discouraged peoples, and even his settlement of a new patriciate upon
their comparatively exhausted lands? (Geddes 1915, p. 53)
“Again, the regularisation of streams, with the increase or formation of lakes as power reservoirs, puts a stop
to the spring floodings, which are a frequent source of damage in mountain countries; and it further admits of
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a not inconsiderable byproduct, in fish culture.” (Geddes 1915, p. 54)
Difference is retained at the level of manifestation in that Geddes accepts that social
evolution will proceed differently as per the natural environment from which it is extracting
energy, but the basic conception of hierarchically dominating terrestrial nature (the ‘other)
into an order that is useful for human economic purposes (for the ‘self’) without regard for
the natural order of terrestrial nature remains the same (and is indeed obfuscated by the
invisibility of its banality in paternalist regimes of thought). Human consciousness evolves
in relationship to its natural environment and will thus evolve differently in relationship to
different natural environments, but the manner by which human consciousness relates to
that natural environment—hierarchical domination of the other so as to render it useful for
the self—remains the same.
The culmination of the process of conscious evolution is indeed attainment of an
infinite perspective wherein the essential unity of mind transcends the subjective limitations
of our finite perspective, but the process of conscious evolution is itself one in which the
differences of our finite perspective of the manifest and the unmanifest are brought into an
organic unity that inculcates the differences in finite conceptions of worldview,
epistemology, civic consciousness, etc. rather than an artificial unity that dominates
differences in finite conceptions of worldview, epistemology, civic consciousness, etc. In
this light we can see that Geddes conception of human-nature relations in terms of
hierarchical domination to render the other as useful for the self is a product of the
artificial unity of mind from which Paternalism and its materialistic offspring Modernism
have grown. Social evolution may occur differently as per the natural environment in which
it occurs in Geddes model, and at this level see a model that in which unity apparently
inculcates the differences of the parts that form the unity, but the level of mind (the
worldview, epistemology, conception of human-nature relations and order therein, etc.) in
which we pursue social evolution is dominated into an artificial unity and thus belies the
appearance of an organic conception of unity that inculcates the actual difference of its
pieces. For Geddes model to be updated and rendered as harmonious with the process of
conscious evolution, then, we must transcend the multicultural model of organically
inculcating physical differences into our cultural unity while artificially dominating mental-
emotional difference out of our socio-cultural unity and instead allow mental-emotional
difference (differences of worldview, of cosmology, ontology, teleology, epistemology,
aesthetics, ethics, etc.) to be inculcated into the organic unity of a consciously evolving
society and culture. Evolutionary cities must be planed with the goal of inculcating different
modes of civic consciousness’ into an organic whole rather than creating an artificial whole
through domination of different civic consciousness’ into the civic consciousness that is
desired by the ruling elite who control the planning process lest we actually produce
destruction of organic unity like the Simple Farmer from Song. (Meng Zi, 2A2)
“…The conditions for labour and its real wages, in the innumerable garden-towns and villages which are
springing up in these conditions, each limited in size by that of its stream, and thus continuous with glorious
and comparatively undestroyed natural environment, afford an additional factor of competition, more
permanently important than are those of money wages and market prices. The favourable situation of these
new towns, mostly upon their fiords, is again full of advantages, and these vital as well as competitive.”
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(Geddes 1915, p. 54)
The difference of environment is inculcated into the vision of unifying social evolution, but
the fundamental disunity, competition and hierarchical domination that is embedded in the
Capitalist, Modernist, Paternalist Worldview imposes an artificial unity at the level of mind
that negates the potential for the organic unity that is the natural order of the conscious
evolutionary process. The hierarchies of competition and domination that Geddes
commonsensically presumes as a necessary dimension of conscious evolution (as expressed
in the evolution of towns and cities, which might be understood as the body of social
consciousness) actually serve to negate the potential for conscious evolution (Barnesmoore
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2016); attempts to create artificial unity through domination, in the end, beget disunity as
the artificial life imposed by the Farmer of Song’s (Meng Zi, 2A2) attempted domination of
the sprouts in his field, in the end, begets death. The evolution of towns and cities is the
bodily expression of conscious evolution, and so we should plan pedagogical cities of the
sort envisioned by Geddes in a manner that is commensurable with the process of
conscious evolution (i.e. in a manner that inculcates the differences of worldview and
associated philosophies that have been stitched together to form the town, city or society
more generally rather than attempting to dominate these differences of worldview and
associated philosophies to produce an artificially unified civic consciousness). The
evolution of towns and cities, in short, actually represents a devolutionary impetus for
human consciousness when it is structured by the worldview and associated philosophies of
economic theology in of the reality that hierarchical domination, rational reductionism and
the materialistic reduction of reality to passing time and physical space (to manifestation)
are all dimensionally commensurable with the relatively finite form of biomechanical
evolution and dimensionally incommensurable with the relatively infinite form of conscious
evolution (which is rooted in transcending the self and other of hierarchy, in transcending
material reason for rational intuition and contemplative thought, in transcending the
materialism of our average sensory experiences and biological existence, etc.).
As such, fostering the evolution of towns and cities in a manner that supports and
sustains the process of conscious evolution requires that we first transcend the limitations of
economic theology and its associated philosophies. The example of human-nature relations
in cities is illustrative. Rather than pursuing the evolution of cities through a lens that views
nature as an other who lacks inherent value and must be hierarchically dominated into a
useful, consumable order by humanity—say in Geddes view of the evolution of cities in
relationship to the extraction of energy from coal fields or rivers—we ought to return to a
worldview and associated philosophy in which nature has an inherent value and thus the
ability to awaken humanity to the latent wisdom that exists in the infinite aspect of their
being (i.e. nature as a teacher rather than a consumable other, nature as acting upon us
rather than us acting upon nature). In Economic Theology our relationship with (and thus
cities and towns relationships with) nature is structured by its role as a consumptive other
whose use is to be found in the sustention and thus evolution of our biological self (i.e. we
dominate nature to create an order of extraction and consumption that is oriented to the

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Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social
Psychology 1(2).
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process of biological evolution), but in the Indigenous Worldview our relationship with
(and thus cities and towns relationships with) nature is structured by its role as an aspect of
self and thereby as a teacher that can help us return to intimacy with the wisdom that exists
in all of us (i.e. nature acts upon us, without the will to dominate, to create a pedagogical
order that is oriented towards the process of conscious evolution). As we transcend the
form of biomechanical evolution and associated worldviews like economic theology and
paternalism more generally and transition into the form of conscious evolution the
potential evolutionary trajectory of cities will be changed, and yet transcendence of
biomechanical evolution and its associated worldviews at the societal scale cannot be
attained without a transformation of the evolutionary trajectory of cities—the only apparent
solution to this paradox, at least in the context of planning theory and practice, seems to
come in taking up Geddes basic model of designing pedagogical cities but doing so within a
worldview akin to the Indigenous ones explored in this text that is commensurable with the
process of conscious evolution in replacing the domineering, Modernist civics education
envisioned by Geddes with a philosophical education by nature.
Simply accounting for the destructive relationship between extraction, consumption
and nature and trying to render that nexus of extraction, consumption and nature as
sustainable does not solve the essential problem that has led us into this state of utter
environmental degradation.
“As… studies of the physical realities in economic processes go on, each industrial process has to be clearly
analysed into its physical factors of material efficiency and directness on the one side, and its financial charges
on the other.” (Geddes 1915, p. 67)
“Let us go on dissipating the national store of energies for individual gain; and extraordinary results can
undoubtedly be obtained in terms of money wealth….
But when these fine results come to be ‘realised’—in the material sense as distinguished from the
financial sense—what are they? What is there to show beyond the aforesaid too mean streets, mean houses,
and stunted lives? Chiefly documentary claims upon other people's mean streets elsewhere, and upon their
labour in the future. Debts all round rather than stores, in short, a minus wealth rather than a plus. Per
contra, the neotechnic economist, beginning with his careful economisation of national resources, his care,
for instance, to plant trees to replace those that are cut down, and if possible a few more, is occupied with real
savings. His forest is a true Bank, one very different from Messrs Rothschild's ‘credit’…” (Geddes 1915, pp.
69-70)
Derived from the eugenicist model for environmental conservation, the vision of human-
nature relations Geddes promotes as a replacement for the Paleotechnic model simply
seeks to create a sustainable version of the Modernist conception of creating a consumptive
order in nature through extractive domination rather than conceptualizing the essential
order of human-nature relations. This vision conserves terrestrial nature, like paternalism
and Modernism conserve the poor, not so that nature’s organic order can prosper but so
that it can be dominated for generations to come. As we shall explore in more depth
through future essays addressing contemporary movements like ‘green finance’ and ‘carbon
trading’, attempts at rendering the process of creating an artificial order of consumption in
nature through extractive domination as sustainable is inherently flawed. The nexus of
extraction, consumption and nature, which replicates the form of human-nature relations
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symbolized by Meng Zi’s (2A2) Farmer of Song and his attempts to make sprouts grow by
pulling on them, is preserved and its necessarily destructive outcomes therefore go
unmediated. The process of degradation is slowed, and our dominating relationship with
nature can thus be sustained for longer, but the final outcome of destroying the organic
order of nature and thus of nature’s death remains the same.
True sustainability must be rooted in a new conception of order in human-nature
relations, in transcending the production of the artificial order of consumption through
extractive domination for a natural order wherein nature is as much a teacher that acts
upon us as it is an object of our actions. It is not that we cannot or should not consume
nature, indeed life cannot be sustained without natural resources like food and water, but it
is clear that we should not seek to impose a artificial consumptive order upon nature
through extractive domination and that we should instead act in accordance with and be
acted upon by the inherent, essential (organic) order of nature. It is not about rendering
our artificial orders of extractive domination sustainable (which is of course impossible as
so perfectly illustrated by the Farmer of Song) but about returning to relations with nature
that are oriented to the actually (already…) sustainable, inherent and essential order of
nature. Rather than attempting to render our orders of hierarchical domination as
sustainable, be it through rendering hierarchical political domination as sustainable through
systems of hierarchical domination like democracy or rendering domination of nature as
sustainable through systems of hierarchical domination like green finance, we must instead
transcend these orders of hierarchical domination altogether and relate to nature through
its own essential order (be that through allowing nature to act upon us as teacher or through
extracting consumptive materials from nature in a manner that works with the essential
order of nature rather than attempting to create an artificial order of nature).
Democracy obfuscates its hierarchical, domineering quality in the minds of its
political objects (‘subjects’) through practices like voting and the free press that seemingly
grant agency to the public (thus negating the potential for revolution or any such struggle
for liberty) while actually ensuring their continued political domination. Freedom of action
(speech in particular) is granted by a system that actively colonizes the mind and negates the
potential for the freedom of thought necessary for actually free action. The attainment of
Reason has always been understood as a necessary prerequisite for democratic
participation, for citizenship, and contemporary democratic systems that actively negate the
potential for attainment of Reason (through worldview, through philosophy, through
educational practices or a lack thereof, through popular culture, etc.) or more classical ones
that simply assume the general public cannot attain reason and thereby legitimate general
public exclusion from the democratic polis can thus be understood as the political
counterpart of the conservation movement (and subsequent mainstream ‘environmental
sustainability’ movements) that rose in large part from the eugenics movement. Both seek
to sustain hierarchical domination—be it political domination of humans by humans or
economic domination of nature by humans—rather than seeking the true sustainability of
natural order to be recovered in transcending hierarchical domination and its corrosive
effects on natural order. Both seek to make hierarchical domination a sustainable order (a
paradoxical impossibility as hierarchical domination causes decay of order [Meng Zi 2A2])
rather than recognizing that hierarchical domination is itself the cause of political and
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environmental unsustainability. Geddes, unsurprisingly given his goal of planning cities
that subjugate the public with a paternalist, colonialist, materialist, economic theological,
etc. civic consciousness, captures the true, dominating nature of democracy perfectly:
“…The working man, as in all true cities of the past, aristo-democratised into productive citizen—he will set his
mind towards house building and town planning, even towards city design; and all these upon a scale to rival—
nay, surpass—the past glories of history. He will demand and create noble streets of noble houses, gardens,
and parks; and before long monuments, temples of his renewed ideals, surpassing those of old.” (Geddes
1915, p. 71)
Modern Democracy is and has always been nothing more than a ‘sustainable’ technology
for rendering human subjects as slaves. ‘Freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom.’ As
such we can assume that Modernist ‘environmental sustainability’ will have similarly
oppressive and counterintuitive (in regards to the stated goals) outcomes as Modernist
‘political sustainability’ (i.e. Democracy).
“But just as our Paleotechnic money-wealth and real poverty is associated with the waste and dissipation of
the stupendous resources of energy and materials, and power of using them, which the growing knowledge of
Nature is ever unlocking for us, so their better neotechnic use brings with it potentialities of wealth and leisure
beyond past Utopian dreams. This time the Neotechnic order, if it means anything at all, with its better use of
resources and population towards the bettering of man and his environment together, means these as a
business proposition—the creation, city by city, region by region, of its Eutopia, each a place of effective health
and well-being, even of glorious and in its way unprecedented beauty, renewing and rivalling the best
achievements of the past…” (Geddes 1915, p. 73)
So much rings true in this discourse of new potentials for leisure, beauty and the ‘bettering
of man and his environment together’, but this vision is in its essence tainted by its roots in
patriarchal rational knowledge of and patriarchal economic relations with our natural
environment. Let us instead take up this vision of leisure, beauty and the co-evolution of
humanity and nature from a worldview that allows us to transcend reduction of knowledge
to material reason and to transcend the hierarchical relations of economic theology. Let
our knowledge be both of nature (rational) and from nature (contemplative). Let our
relations with nature (our co-evolutionary relationship) be both consumptive and
communal. Leisurely contemplation of nature’s beauty and planning for a co-evolutionary
relationship with nature is indeed a worthy goal, but for it to be successful we must pursue
this goal with more than rational knowledge of and economic relations with nature.
“…Public conservation instead of the private dissipation of resources, and… the evolution instead of the
deterioration of the lives of others…” (Geddes 1915, p. 75)
So close and yet so far… Sadly, conservation simply implies sustainable domination, and

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We should note that these attempts to render the artificial order of hierarchical domination sustainable—to render the finite as infinite,
to render that with a beginning as eternal—is akin in form to the Positivist attempt to create an eternal order of truth in manifestation and
the essential Fascistic impetus to create static unity in manifestation through hierarchical domination of difference. In each case, and in
the quest for physical immortality that expresses this form at the personal, human level, an attempt is made to render that which by its
nature lacks eternity as eternal, to render that which is by its nature motion, change, difference (continuity, disjuncture and
transformation) as eternal, to render that which has a beginning as having no end, etc. Modernism is in its most essential sense a project
of attempting to collapse the eternal-infinite unmanifest world into the terminal-finite world of manifestation.
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domination (sustainable for some period of time or no) is incommensurable with conscious
evolution and indeed necessarily leads, in the end, to deterioration. The ethos is correct,
but the worldview and associated philosophy cannot fulfill the ethos.
“The old sociologists, in their simple societies, saw more clearly than we; but as we recover their rustic and
evolutionary point of view we may see that also for ourselves—‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap’—at any rate shall be reaped, by his successors if not by himself. During the paleotechnic period this has
been usually understood and preached on as a curse. From the neotechnic standpoint it is a blessing,
manifestly rooted in the order of Nature.” (Geddes 1915, p. 76)
The ethos is right, but Geddes worldview and associated philosophy of conservation sew a
devolutionary (from the perspective of human consciousness) seed of hierarchical
domination that is still being reaped in the environmental degradation of contemporary
human civilization. Wisdom is there in form, in the notion that we should plan human-
nature relations with sensitivity to the future as well as the present, but the substance by
which that wisdom is brought into manifestation (economic theology and relations of
extractive domination) is tainted and thus renders the project as self-defeating.
Conservation must be rooted in transcending artificial orders of extractive domination for
the inherently sustainable order of nature rather than in developing a model of creating
artificial, extractive orders that allows nature to be hierarchically dominated for a longer
period of time.
Ages and Evolution
“But enough here if we can broadly indicate, as essential to any real understanding of the present state of the
evolution of cities, that we clearly distinguish between what is characteristic of the passing industrial order, and
that which is characteristic of the incipient one—the passing and the coming age.” (Geddes 1915, p. 62)
As we have touched upon in other essays in this collection, the passing and coming age of
our time is qualitatively different than that of Geddes time and all others in presently
recorded history as a function of the rise of AI and Robotics. Where as other transitions of
age saw the transformation of physical labor for the sake of survival and biological
evolution, this transition will see the transcendence of physical labor from orientation to
biological evolution to orientation to conscious evolution. Work for the sake of survival will
give way to leisurely modes of labor as the necessary labor of biological existence comes to
be completed by artificially intelligent robots and humans are thus rendered free to direct
their attention (be it expressed in physical, emotional, intellectual, etc. action or receptivity)
towards conscious evolution. Taken in terms of human-nature relations, this
transformation will be marked by a wholly new order of relations (where orientation is
shifted from acting upon nature for consumptive purposes to being acted upon by nature
for educational purposes) rather than a new expression of the same essential order of
relations (wherein new techniques for creating a consumptive order in nature are derived
from technological advance). What we are facing (put into terms familiar to Geddes) is a
transition from an Occidental to an Oriental civilization, from a civilization typified by the
active principle of reason to one typified by the passive principle of contemplation, from a
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civilization typified by the active pursuit of biological survival and evolution to the passive
pursuit of conscious evolution, and we ought thus to plan for human-nature relations in the
city and beyond in a manner that is ‘characteristic of the incipient’ order facing human
civilization.
Social Evolution as the Conquest of Nature
“M. Boucher de Perthes was a true student of the past; no mere antiquary and collector, but a thoughtful
inquirer into the progressive control by man of his environment, and thus interested in all that the advance
of his appliances might signify in that remote past, or again in his own scarcely less marvellously evolving
present. Here in fact he had reached a true, a central, a continuous epic of humanity—‘Tools and the man I
sing!’” (Geddes 1915, p. 247)
Geddes clearly ties human social evolution to conquest of and dominion over nature.
Progressive control of environment by man is the mark of civilizational progress. As such,
and while there is still something to be gleaned from Geddes sensitivity to the importance
of nature in the urban planning process, civilizational progress and the evolution of cities
must necessarily mean environmental degradation as a function of Geddes conception of
evolution as the conquest and domination of our natural and built environment (as
increased technological capacity to pull the sprouts of nature and our built environment
[Meng Zi 2A2]).
Indeed, Geddes vision of social evolution more generally is rooted in conquest and
domination:
“…As once men’s hearts burned within them as they went forth under antique priestly guidance to win back
the Holy City, and again, in dim philosophic light, at the Revolution to win their freedom, so once again
throughout Europe a new enthusiasm is arising, deeper and wider than of old. Thought foreseen with varying
clearness, and sought with yet more varying success, the ideal has ever been fundamentally the same. The
kingdom of God upon earth, the achievement of fraternity, the evolution of humanity are but the changing
names for the unending struggle after that union of material and moral order which is the task and the
problem of life.” (Geddes 1884, p. 43)
Geddes understands life and evolution therein as an unending struggle, as the clash of self
and other. Liberating of the Holy City from the religious other. Liberating self from the
noble-monarchical other. When we hear Geddes speak of the ‘ideal’ we must be sensitive
to the deeper metaphysical meaning he ascribes to the term. In this use, an ideal is not
simply an ideological goal that can be reduced to a subjective creation; it is an unmanifest
form that structures the manifestation of force and consciousness. These macrocosmic
stories through which we interpret the nature of our existence (i.e. our mythos) are better
understood as causal structures that expand our potentials for thought, behavior and being
than as subjective residue created to try and makes sense of the world in which we live. A
distinction must be made between the eternal-infinite ideal (which is the IS-FFC), ideals of
the sort referred to by Geddes that have been created within consciousness (the stories we
tell ourselves) and the actual expression of both the eternal-infinite ideal and created ideals
in the interaction between force, form and consciousness through which the unmanifest
becomes manifest, as it should be remembered that the unending struggle, perpetual
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conflict, fall and redemption, task and problem (i.e. scarcity, competition, fear and the
subsequent desire for and will to dominate) story that forms the undercurrent of
Modernism and of Paternalism more generally is a creation of a deprived, perverted,
tainted, etc. expression of consciousness whose eternity-infinity can be taken away as it was
granted by consciousness. This story of unending conflict is predicated on the privation of
consciousness through the process of manifestation by which the illusion of discrete
individuality, the subsequent potential for conception of reality in terms of self and other
and the subsequently subsequent potential for hierarchical domination were made
potential, and so we can transcend this story of unending conflict by transcending the
illusion of a totalizingly discrete individuality through natural mysticism and actualization of
the potential for thought, behavior and being through the intuitive lens of the infinite aspect
of our being. We do indeed have to fulfill the book in the sense that our potentials for
thought, behavior and being are expanded and constrained by our mythos and the
worldview embedded therein, but we can transcend the deprived illusion of discrete
individuality and write a loving, blissful story that does not include perpetual struggle
between self and other.
Mythos and Evolution

“Our town plans are… not merely maps but also symbols, a notation of thought which may concretely aid us
towards bettering the towns of the present, and thus preparing for the nobler cities of a not necessarily distant
future.” (Geddes 1915, p. 86)
“Every science works with ideal concepts, like the mathematician's zero and infinity, like the geographer's
directions—north, south, east, and west—and can do nothing without these…. …these extremes are what enable
us to measure and to criticise the city of the present…” (Geddes 1915, p. 87)
“Wherever Man gains power over Nature, there is Magic. Whenever he carries out an Ideal into Life, there is
Romance. When he loses both, there is stony Enchantment, in which so many lie. When he recovers both,
he has vanquished the enchanter; he has won his Bride, and the Kingdom with her. There is not, there never
was, a briefer summary of the essential life adventure than this, and what other can there be? (Geddes 1915,
p. 130)
“The tale of Cinderella is thus no mere fairy tale, but literal pantomime in the exact meaning of the word, the
actual movements of people and things, shown forth silently, but none the less surely.” (Geddes 1915, p. 142)
Geddes frequent recourse to fairy tails, which we might categorize under the wider
umbrella of mythology, serves to further illustrate his sensitivity to the ways in which our
ideals guide our everyday steps in the concrete world. The progression of history in
relationship to mythology has two basic interpretations that are worth note. The first is that
the symbols and symbolic tales that together form a mythology are simply expression of
eternal-infinite form, of the pure-infinite potentials that structure the manifestation of force,
and that history is thereby functionally articulated by the essence of the mythos—“the
essential life adventure,” the essence of our adventures in life. “Some say it’s just a part of
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it, we’ve got to fulfill the book.” In this first interpretation the story has already been
written, and we are but actors upon the world stage. The second interpretation of the
relationship between history and mythology views humanity as writers of rather than
predetermined actors in the play. In this interpretation we create our own mythos, however
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resonant it may be with the infinite-eternal forms that we attempt to capture therein, and
the mythos we create has a deterministic effect on our potentials for thought, behavior and
conception of being. Both of these traditional understandings of the relationship between
mythology and history view our mythology as having a determinative effect on our historical
evolution (i.e. they view our mythology as the form that structures the manifestation of
consciousness that we know as human existence), but in the first case we are simply the
object of mythology while in the second case we are both the subject and the object of
mythology (i.e. in one mythology is already written and objectifies us and in the other we
write the mythology which then objectifies us). Are we playwrights or simply actors in the
play?
In any case, it becomes clear that the first step towards a new social order and new
human-nature relations must come in the development of a new mythology—we must be
playwrights and write a new play that is devoid of scarcity, competition, the will to
dominate, a dead-mechanistic view of nature, etc. if we wish to begin acting out this new
play. We do indeed have to fulfill the book, for our potentials of thought, behavior and
conception of being are indeed expanded and constrained by our mythology, but we have
the power to write a new book! Let us write a new pedagogical city, a new book of
philosophy for humanity to read in its daily lived experiences, a new mythology of human-
nature relations in which the essentially bountiful quality of nature is emphasized, in which
the synergistic cooperation that flourishes in this essential bounty of nature is emphasized,
in which the will to love negates the potential for the will to dominate and in which nature
is viewed as a living, conscious being of which we are but a part. We have to fulfill the
book, but let us write a happier tale.
Geddes Engagement with Conscious Evolution
“…Geddes was not unaware of the crucial difference between the study of natural, and the social, evolution of
the region. In nature, especially Huxley’s nature, which he presented as an almost mechanical system,
evolution took place as a result of the ruthless struggle for survival—nature red in tooth and claw. In human
society, change was not necessarily totally predetermined. It could take place as a result of human decision.
Besides, Geddes was dedicated to the idea of the life force, the élan vital, as a creative, not a destructive force.
In his view, natural selection was not the prime moving force in evolution, the outcome of the survival of the
fittest. Natural selection was instead, a curb on evolutionary tendencies, the pruning tool which enabled the
better development of the plant/organism. He was to find a great deal of sympathy, later, for the ideas of…
Prince Peter Kropotkin, who was to argue that even in natural evolution, there was evidence of co-operation
amongst species for their mutual support and development; and that groups of men, uncorrupted by modern

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Bob Marley, Redemption Song
‘But wont you help to sing another song of freedom?’
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It is not that one interpretation views reality as possessing infinite-eternal forms and the other does not, but that the latter interpretation
accounts for the individual, subjective influences imposed upon infinite-eternal forms in our attempts to render them into the symbols
and symbolic narratives of mythology.
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ideas of political economy, would naturally co-operate with each other and help each other if they lived in
small, anarchic communities.” (Meller 1993, p. 27)
Geddes, then, was at least sensitive to the idea of conscious evolution and humanity’s
capacity to transcend the form of mechanical evolution that produced humanity. Indeed,
Kropotkin influenced the work of P.D. Ouspensky (1951) from whom we draw the notion
of conscious evolution. (Sideris and Moore, 2008) The divide between Geddes
understanding of conscious evolution and his vision of social order seems to come in a lack
of sensitivity to 1. the ways in which the hierarchical domination of economic theological
social organizations from capitalism through socialism and communism negate the
potential for conscious evolution by cultivating a state of being that traps people within the
form of mechanical evolution (Barnesmoore 2016), 2. the ability of humans to transcend
the competitive and at times domineering aspects of mechanical evolution through the
process of conscious evolution and, more specifically, through transcendence of the
illusion of discrete biological individuality, self-other thinking therein and the potential of
the desire for hierarchical domination therein and 3. design of a social, cultural, economic,
political, etc. order that actively excises material scarcity, fear, competition and the
subsequent will to dominate therein. Maybe we have been too hard on Geddes and should
attribute the dimensional incommensurability of his social, economic and political visions
with his mystical vision of conscious evolution to the practical constraints of his era rather
than a lack of understanding. Indeed, it is the context of our era—where the potentials for a
unified global social, political, economic, etc. system that transcends orientation by the
axiom ‘order is created through hierarchical domination’ and for removal of the scarcity,
fear, competition and the subsequent desire for hierarchical domination nexus are readily
presented by the evolution of consciousness and technology—that presents the practical
potential for complete transcendence of the form of mechanical evolution for conscious
evolution in human social organization. Even now, the corruption of humanity by
economic theology and its axiom that order is produced through hierarchical domination
observed by Kropotkin clearly presents a barrier to both the transcendence of
factionalized, hierarchical order at the global social, political and economic scale and to
eliminating the nexus of scarcity, fear, competition and the subsequent desire for
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hierarchical domination from humanity’s lived environment. A more favorable reading of
Geddes might see him as understanding this tension between the social, political and
economic order of ‘group survival’ Liberalism and the mystical conscious evolution
through engagement with the aesthetic beauty of nature and art and saw his social, political
and economic goals as a step of social, political and economic evolution towards a global
civilization that has transcended scarcity, fear, competition, the desire for hierarchical
domination and social, political and economic structured by the axiom that order is must
be created through hierarchical domination (or a synthesis of cooperation and

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Sadly, most contemporary conceptions of social, political and economic order which seek to transcend hierarchy have lost the spiritual
wisdom of thinkers like Kropotkin, Ouspensky, Leopold and Geddes in dissent to a materialism that denies the existence of self-
subsistent existence of consciousness beyond its material vessel and thus negate the potential for the conscious evolution that makes
transcendence of the illusion of self and other and thus of hierarchy possible… See for example Simon Springer’s (2014) “Human
Geography without Hierarchy” Progress in Human Geography 38(3).
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competition/hierarchical domination) and which is thereby oriented more completely to
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the process of conscious evolution.
Transcending Competition
“[Geddes] suggests that the more specialised the different functions of the organisms in a highly complex
society, the less they compete against each other and, therefore, the most sophisticated society has a labour
market of non-competing groups. This was, of course, diametrically opposite to the Marxist position. Future
change Geddes saw in terms, not of conflict between the ownership of the means of production and labour,
but in terms of a shift away from the productive methods which exploited the masses, to methods which
depended ever more skills from individuals.” (Meller 1993, p. 44)
Geddes, in short, was envisioning the death of the Age of Labor, Scarcity-Competition-
Cooperation and Mechanical Evolution and the rebirth of human civilization in the Age of
Leisure, Plenty and Conscious Evolution that is the guiding vision of this text. As Social
Evolution and Social Development allow humanity to transcend environmental factors like
material scarcity and social factors like the exploitative will to domination for a society
wherein physical labor is fulfilled by technology and humans trend towards increasingly
skilled occupations. In this sense Geddes had a clear vision of the potentials advanced
technology and social evolution could bring to humanity, but sadly his vision (like that of
the Marxists) was clouded by the paternalist assumption that social order and evolution can
and must naturally be created through hierarchical domination.

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Mumford’s (1950) note concerning the fact that much of Geddes deeper philosophy was never written down may indicate that we
cannot aptly answer this question.
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Geddes Academic Intellectual Trajectory
The British Academy

Geddes first well-known intellectual guide was T. H. Huxley, whom he studied under in a
five month intensive course in the natural sciences at the Royal School of Minds in London
in the winter of 1875 at the age of 20 and who he subsequently worked under as a
demonstrator for the course and as a research assistant. (Meller 1993, p. 19-20) While he
gleaned a great deal of knowledge and experience in the natural sciences through his
engagements with Huxley, Geddes was never satisfied with Huxley’s mechanistic
materialism and lack of work on a theory of evolution (with the theories that undergirded
Huxley’s scientific practice):
“Huxley was always ready to confess that his own talents were more those of an engineer than the naturalist.
What really excited him was ‘the mechanical engineering of living machines’ and he had, he wrote, ‘very little
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of the genuine naturalist in me’.” (Meller 1993, p. 20; Thomson 1925 )
The void left by Huxley’s materialist shortcomings was filled by the thinking of Herbert
Spencer.
“What attracted Geddes to his work was his development of a general theory of evolution. Huxley warned his
young student, however, that it was not wise to take Spencer’s work too literally, especially his attempts to
relate the natural and the social sciences. But Geddes found his appetite grew the more he read, and he
identified strongly with Spencer’s stated objective: to seek an ‘order among those structural and functional
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changes which societies pass through’. To apply the concept of [mechanical] evolution to society and to use
a knowledge of how the process took place in nature as a guide, opened up a new vista of possibilities to
Geddes. He accepted gladly Spencer’s view of society as an organism of functionally independent parts, and
he was warmly appreciative of Spencer’s informed attempt to trace the evolutionary forces working towards
changing society. Spencer, however, …did not depend on natural sciences for his theories. He sought a ‘law of
progress’ which had to be based on some universal principle and he turned thus, to metaphysics. He created
the concept of the ‘unknowable’, a mystic force, ultimately responsible for generating change.” (Meller 1993,
p. 20)
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Setting the seeming ignorance of Meller’s description of Spencer aside, there are some
important points here. First, Spencer clearly influenced Geddes synthesis of mysticism and

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J. Arthur Thomson (1925) ‘Huxley as Evolutionist’, supplement to Nature 9 May, p. 718.
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H. Spencer 1873, The Study of Sociology London: Williams & Norgate, p. 71.
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Spencer can hardly be credited with creating the concept of the ‘unknowable’. Every serious metaphysical system—for example the
Lakota Wakan Tanka (the great mystery), the Hindu Neti-Neti (neither this nor that), the Daoist ‘that which cannot be named’, Socrates
‘I know that I know nothing’, Descartes meditations (wherein he illustrates that the first step to reason is knowing that the Truth is
unknowable from the sensory perspective), the essential quality of ineffability ascribed to mystical experiences by William James, etc.—
understands that the Infinite Substance (1) and the Infinite Nothingness (0) from which nothing became something as unknowable in the
linear, rational, linguistic terms of ‘objective’, ‘subjective’ (i.e. seemingly discrete) human consciousness… The finite aspect of our being
and the potential for knowing therein are incommensurable with the infinite dimensional quality of the Infinite-Eternal-Nothing (I use
these terms as symbols because the true nature of the Infinite-Eternal-Nothing simply cannot be captured in language, which is why so
many simply take recourse to the notion of ‘the unknowable’). Spencer didn’t create the concept of the unknowable because of some
sort of subjective desire for the stability of a unified perspective, he (like most if not all of the great scientists from whose mind
contemporary science was birthed…) simply drew upon the wisdom tradition that can be found on every corner of the globe and, in one
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science in development of a theory of human evolution and of the integration of nature and
culture. This turn is of the utmost importance because it expanded the potentials for
Geddes subsequent attempts to develop a regime theory and practice that sought to treat
with both the manifest and unmanifest aspects of nature and humanity. How can we
develop and understanding of the relationship between the knowable (finite) and
unknowable (infinite) aspects of human being that will allow for the cultivation and
evolution of a harmonious society that provides for the needs of both the body and the
spirit? It is along these lines that the most important contributions of Geddes are to be
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found. Second, and more problematically, it seems that the core problem in Geddes
conception of evolution and its applications for understanding and designing human
society—his lack of distinction between the conscious evolutionary process of humans and
other similarly evolved organisms and the mechanical evolutionary process of less evolved
biological organisms (Ouspensky 1951)—was at the very least reinforced (if not derived)
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from his engagement with Spencer’s work.
This engagement with Spencer and Geddes’ “feeling that the materialistic
explanation of life espoused by Huxley was unsatisfactory in some respects” lead Geddes to
a Positivist Church in London and the Positivist Soceity. (Meller 1993, p. 20-21) “Through
these activities he discovered the work of Auguste Comte. Furthermore, he found, in the
religion of humanity [espoused by Comte], a passionate religious commitment outside the
framework of orthodox religion, and ostensibly based on scientific principles.” (Meller
1993, p. 21) Geddes intellectual trajectory of both oppositions to the dogmas of orthodox
religion in the west and intimacy with the spiritual-metaphysical side of life is one that we
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can relate to personally. Born from a family with ministers on both sides, one of whom
(Richard E. Moore) played an influential role for the north in the conflict between the
northern and southern branches of the United Presbyterian Church during the civil rights
movement, combatting the dogmatic orthodoxies of the Church and it's a-scientific past (i.e.
fighting perversion in the finite practice of spirituality, which is to say religion) by no means
necessitates tension with the spiritual, metaphysical (i.e. infinite) understanding of reality.
Indeed, the two projects stimulate each other! While Meller seems to view this tension
between a spiritual, metaphysical conception of reality and condemnation of dogmatic
religious orthodoxy as a function of desire, temptation and the socially constructed residues
of what she clearly views as humanity’s irrational pre-Modern history and, therefore, as
unresolvable, from our perspective the two are perfectly commensurable. Indeed, what is

form or another, in every culture prior to colonization by the materialism of the Modernist Worldview that has been promulgated
through the process of European-American colonialism and imperialism.
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How ironic, then, that while this is the aspect of Geddes thinking that was most valorized by his intimate contemporaries like
Mumford, it is also the aspect of his thinking that most dismissed by our own contemporaries as the purely subjective, essentially socially
constructed, irrational, unreal residue of our pre-Modern past (as is made clear by the arrogantly simpering (which is to say British…)
materialism of Meller’s reading)…
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Geddes is by no means the worst offender in this lack of distinction between conscious and mechanical evolution. Geddes thinking as
it pertains to nature education and art, which is to say as it pertains to the aesthetic fulfillment of humanity through engagement with
beauty and the refinement of instinct to intuition therein, indicates a sensitivity to the process of conscious evolution if not its form and
distinction from mechanical evolution.
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My maternal grandfather, Richard E. Moore, graduated from Yale Divinity School and held a number of positions in the clergy
including Associate Executive of the United Presbyterian Synod of Ohio and the first Executive of the United Presbyterian Synod of the
Pacific and my paternal great grandfather, George W. Barnes, was Reverend of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Clifton Heights
Pennsylvania.
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the history of science (excluding portions of the past 70 years) but the purification of the
spiritual, metaphysical wisdom passed down to humanity from antiquity through use of
science (the excising of dogma from metaphysics via scientific knowledge)? Rather than
imposing the lazy ontological and epistemological violence of Modernist ‘academic’ inquiry
by simply dismissing Geddes attempts to synthesize science and spirituality because the two
are irreconcilable from the perspective of the Modernist Worldview and its reduction of
reality to manifestation (which necessitates that science is real and spirituality is unreal), let
us treat with Geddes upon the ground of his own worldview and learn from the wisdom
that is to be found in his work (and fro, the thinking of so many pre-Modern cultures)
when interpreted the perspective of their own worldview…
Another great influence upon Geddes was John Ruskin. Geddes’ (1884) John 690
Ruskin, Economist views Ruskin’s argument that market forces and unrestrained self-
interest therein should be supplanted by an economic approach centered on the biological
and aesthetic needs of humanity as containing the seeds of a properly scientific model of
human-nature relations in inculcating the ability of organisms to improve their environment
in the process of evolution. He envisioned the scientific conception of Ruskin’s thinking as
culminating in “the Rehabilitation of Beauty, and our productive action for country and city
in the restoration of nature, and the organisation of art.” (Geddes 1884, p. 35)
From this point Geddes spent the summer of 1876 studying embryology at
Cambridge with Michael Foster and Francis Balfour and the winter of 1877-78 studying
Physiology with Professor Schafer at University College, London. (Meller 1993, p. 21-22)
Following his time at UCL and recovery from a sickness he contracted in the spring of
1878 Geddes traveled to France to study biological evolution at the Roscoff marine station
with Professor Lacaze-Duthiers of the Sorbonne and began his engagement with the
French Academy.
The French Academy & Le Play

Geddes was introduced to the work of Frederic Le Play and his “practical, scientific study
of society” in the winter of 1878-9. (Meller 1993, p. 24) Le Play’s synthesis of Catholicism
and Positivism led him to observe the relationship between economic and social change
and the mediation of human relations by the means of production, but he did not fall into
Marx’s dialectical materialism and economic interpretation of history because they were
deemed overly abstract. (Meller 1993, p. 24) Instead Le Play accepted geographical and
environmental factors “as a vital determinate of social structure, which could be best studies
by starting with a basic social unity, the family, and studying it in the context of its
environment. Le Play established the key units for study as… Place, Work, and Family”
(Meller 1993, pp. 24-25) Another of Le Play’s contributions that would most influence
Geddes was his supposition that social survey’s could form the empirical basis for social
science. (Meller 1993, p. 25) Most importantly, “he tried to show that income and the
standard of living were not always closely related, and the cultural and environmental
context of work and family life could, to some extent, offset low wages.” (Meller 1993, p.
25)

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Geddes 1884, John Ruskin, Economist, Edinburgh: William Brown. https://archive.org/details/johnruskineconom00geddrich
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Le Play’s theoretical edifice was adorned by the thinking of two intimate disciples,
Abbe Henri de Tourville and M. Edmond Demolins. De Tourville sought to develop a
method for systematically connecting the individual family to its broader social context
through “fit[ing them] into an all-embracing context which would relate them in all
directions, geographical, economic, and cultural, with society at large, and environmentally,
by specific reference to the neighborhood, the local parish, the city, the state, even the state
in relationship to other foreign countries…. He had already taken the Le Play school down
the environmental determinist’s path.” (Meller 1993, p. 25) Demolins, with whom Geddes
cultivated an intimate relationship from 1878, continued—influenced by Fredrich Ratzel’s
fully fledged environmental determinism—on this trajectory of developing a method of
classification to connect the family to society through recourse to geography and
environment (i.e. via environmental determinism). Meller provides the example of the Le
Playist argument that “the great civilizations were socially differentiated from each other by
the consequences deriving from their different staple diets of rice, maize, or wheat.”
(Meller 1993, pp. 26-27)
Geddes and Kropotkin and Reclus

One of Huxley’s innovations that inspired Geddes was relating organism to environment
through the more specific scale of regions, but this was mediated by sensitivity to
Kropotkin’s sensitivity to the ability to humans to consciously and cooperatively intervene
in their own evolutionary process (i.e. to the reality of the Epistemological Anthropocene).
(Meller 1993, p. 27) Huxley’s regionalist turn seems to have influenced Geddes
sympathetic engagement with the regionalism of Elisée Reclus (who, along with Kropotkin,
is known as the anarchist father of political ecology [Springer 2014]), though Geddes was
not altogether convinced by his notion that “it is in the individual that humanity must find
its expression” because it “too much lost sight of the intermediate categories of the city and
state, of the nation and empire, of the unity of language, of occidental and oriental
civilizations—in short, of the whole graduate social framework in which we find support,
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albeit too often also our limitations” (Geddes 1905; Meller 1993, p. 27) Reclus was the
inspiration for Geddes regional unit ‘the Valley Section.’ (Meller 1993, p. 28)
From Economic to Social Thought

Paul De Rousiers’ (1892) American Life “undermine[d] the whole Le Playist attempt to
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relate particular family structures to specific kinds of economic and geographical

environments” and set both Demolins and Geddes on a new path of examining social
rather than economic structures as the key factor in expanding and constraining the
potentials of human-nature relations. (Meller 1993, p. 28)
“This was a matter of cultural evolution and was perhaps more vital even than economic factors in
determining the life of the community. …Value patterns, established initially by environmental factors, were
then transmitted from one generation to the next. …The possibility of achieving ‘social peace’ in the future,

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Geddes 1905, “A Great Geographer: Elisée Reclus 1830-1905, an obituary’, Scottish Geographical Magazine.
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Rousiers 1892, American Life, Paris & New York: Firmin-Didot & Co Publishers.
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the Le Playist goal, could rest, not on just adapting to changing economic circumstances, but, more
importantly, to transmitting the best cultural values between generations….
For Guidance, Demolins turned to the social history of Britain to find out how the educational
system had produced a nation capable of attaining and ruling the greatest empire the world had ever seen.”
(Meller 1993, pp. 28-29)
Conscious Evolution at the civilizational scale (what we might understand as Noospheric
Conscious Evolution, the Noospheric Epistemological Anthropocene), then, was still very
clearly predicated on the conception of evolution as man’s progressive control of his
environment and thus tainted by the perverse Paternalist-Modernist notion that evolution
comes as a function of domination.
Geddes and Comte
“Geddes was confident that with the help of the Le Playist school and the Comtists, he was on the right track
for developing his own evolutionary approach to the social sciences. …The two key problems that Geddes
addressed himself to were: how to determine the right path for the conscious direction of evolutionary forces
and, secondly, how to find the means to ensure that such self-direction took place…. The prerequisite for the
first objective was a synthesis of all knowledge. Comte constructed a hierarchy of those sciences which he
believed were the bases of knowledge, and then placed at the summit of this the science of sociology.
Comtean sociology thus encompassed all knowledge. The solution of the second objective was the education
of an elite group in an understanding of sociology, that is all knowledge, who, thus armed, would direct effort
towards higher evolutionary goals.” Meller 1993, p. 30)
Each of these two problems and their solutions clearly impose a hierarchical, domineering
influence upon Geddes conception of Conscious Evolution. Conscious Evolution was to be
directed by a hierarchical, rationalist regime of knowledge, and this direction was to be
enacted by an elite rung of the ‘natural’ social hierarchy. The end result of Conscious
Evolution, the Conscious Civilization of Garden Cities and happy, healthy artists, may be
understood as transcending hierarchical domination and cooperation through
transcendence of the illusion of discrete biological individuality through mystical
experiences brought on by the beauty of nature and art (though this is a favorable reading
and by no means clear), but it is clear that Geddes still conceptualized the process of
Conscious Evolution as structured by the hierarchical-cooperative form of Biomechanical
Evolution. The more emancipatory conception of Conscious Evolution developed by
Barnesmoore (2016; 2017) understands the process of Conscious Evolution as itself
transcending the form of Biomechanical Evolution and argues that worldviews,
philosophies and social-political-economic systems and orders which are predicated on
actively negate the potential for Conscious Evolution—by structuring our epistemological
and social-political-economic theories and practices with the form of Biomechanical
Evolution Geddes negates the potential for Conscious Evolution in the social-political-
economic reality he envisions. In Barnesmoore’s vision of Conscious Evolution the
synthesis of knowledge is attained through transcending the hierarchies of material reason
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for the silence of rational intuition, and all members of society—when liberated from

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“Rational intuition… takes what is known by Reason and grasps it in a single [silent] act of the mind” (Nadler 2013, ‘Baruch Spinoza’,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta [ed.]) and thereby transcends the hierarchical-cooperative form of
Biomechanical Evolution.
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social-political-economic systems and order structured by the form of Biomechanical
Evolution and given access to the proper ideas and experiences—have he potential (though
of course to varying degrees) to attain this intuitive capacity for synthesis and can thus
participate in the process of Conscious Evolution.
Geddes and Galton
“The difference between Galton and Geddes on [the matter of statistics] is at the heart of the difference
between the Eugenic movement and Civics movement that they each launched respectively in 1904. Galton
was seeking proof of the principle of genetic inheritance. Geddes, on the other hand, was seeking to prove
that human society could be classified and thus understood as a living unity, however complicated or diverse
the manifestations of human life.” (Meller 1993, p. 43)
While both movements tended towards an overly rationalistic, at times biologically

reductive paradigm for understanding humanity, they were directed by opposing
principles—eugenics was oriented towards the principle of difference (between races) where
civics was oriented towards the principle of unity (among all people).
Nature & Education in Geddes
Nature Education
“This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves
we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the
circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a
mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.” (Geddes)
Nature, although valorized, is connived in terms of survival and consumption.
“Hands, Heart, Head”
“…That noble discipline of complete soul in perfected body, which the wise men of all haves have had for
their noblest ideal, calling it Education.” (Geddes 1884, p. 40)
At first sight Geddes romantic view of human-nature relations and the educational
importance of nature is both inspired and inspiring, but as we dig into the essence of his
views on human-nature relations the domineering influence and associated perversions of
paternalism and modernism are unmistakable (though often unsaid, in the
commonsensical foundations of his thinking). As such, let us begin by looking into Geddes
childhood to better understand his views on nature:
“Geddes was often to claim that his father was his first and finest teacher, and to eulogize on how he had
given him the finest education for life by teaching him especially how to care for a garden. The skills,
discipline and understanding that this involved were, so Geddes believed, just those which needed to be
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applied on a broader more advanced level to the problems of man’s control over his environment.” (Meller
1993, p. 4)
“Geddes childhood brought him… insight into how to nurture the talents of the young. The two great
educative forces he saw in his own life were his father and his close contact with nature. His love of nature
was actively encouraged by his father, who took him, from an early age, for long rambles over the hills. But
Alexander Geddes, the retired sergeant-major of the Black Watch, also had a belief in discipline and an
instinctive understanding of how to teach self-discipline to his bright young son. Building on the child’s
obvious delight in nature, he trained him how to care for a garden, insisting that the child did much work
without aid and that everything was properly done. Geddes, for the rest of his life, always thought of himself,
first and foremost, as a gardener… …He aimed at a threefold objective for his garden: as a scientific
laboratory; as a living material for a study of the concept of evolution (he even used plants representing
elements of Greek mythology…); and finally as an object of beauty, a meeting point between the munificence
of nature and the aesthetic appreciation of man. Gardens always figured prominently in all his later town-
planning activities, because he believed they had a vital role to play in the production of a good environment.
They brought pleasure and delight; they were of educative value as simple illustrations of the evolutionary
process; and they had a typical Geddesian bonus, the practical value of the produce that could be grown in
them.
But gardens, for all their beneficial influences, were too cramped to be a totally satisfying
environment for the growth and development of young people. Ultimately, the most important experience
was freedom: to ramble, experiment, and investigate in the liberating atmosphere of the countryside. Geddes
was to become particularly concerned about ‘town’ children as he felt that an urban upbringing must stultify
and perhaps permanently blight the growing process of the young. In the city, social behavior and concern for
law and order represented the natural curiosities of the young. (Meller 1993, p. 15)
How apt that Geddes’ is the story of the father, the son and the garden. This is the story of
the herculean labors that were to be pursued in the garden so as to develop the self-
discipline whose lack is attributed to our exile from the celestial Garden of Eden. Indeed,
this is the story of the microcosmic, heterotopic garden wherein, through the herculean
(hard) work of acting upon nature, the macrocosm comes to be expressed. (Foucault 1984,
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p. 6) Nature is seen as an expression of the inherent (essential) order of things, as is clear
in Geddes use of plants to symbolize the forms of both Greek Mythology (which is best
understood as a symbolic, metaphysical language) and Evolution, but it is done so within an
order created by man through the herculean labors of dominating the earth—within the
garden. This leads us to a fundamentally important attribute of Geddes understanding of
nature and its integration into city and town planning (an understanding that can be easily
understood within the Abrahamic dogma of ‘man’s dominion over earth’)—to be aptly
utilized by humans, which is in this worldview is to fulfill its telos, Nature must first be
dominated by humanity. The apex of nature for Geddes seems to be a garden or a
dominated natural feature like a dammed river rather than an untouched forest or naturally
flowing stream—the apex of natural order, and thus of nature’s beauty, is to be found where
humanity has imposed order upon nature through domination. In the Abrahamic mythos
of Man’s dominion over earth, the perfect expression of nature—like so many other things
that are associated with the feminine—is, like the garden or the dammed stream,
subservient to man (fulfilling its ‘rightful’ place in the ‘natural hierarchies’…).

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Foucault, M. (1984) “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” trans. Jay Miskowiec Architecture/ Mouvement/ Continuite, p. 6.
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf
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Rivers must be dammed, caves must be dug and plants must be rendered into the
discrete order of the garden before nature can properly serve its human masters
educational and aesthetic needs. The problem in Geddes view of nature, then, does not
result from the disenchanted understanding of nature as devoid of inherent value (as
devoid of an order and beauty derived from its relationship with the unmanifest world) but
instead from his view that the natural relationship between humanity and terrestrial nature
is predicated on man’s hierarchical dominion of nature. Nature is an expression of eternal-
infinite form, and as a result nature possesses an inherent beauty, but in both cases the
inherent value of nature is understood in relationship to its potential service of humanity.
Though we once again see a glimmer of hope in the connection between liberty
and roaming in nature, our hopes are once again dashed. By ‘experiment’ and ‘investigate’
Geddes means to act upon. In this vision we roam through nature on a mission of
conquest. We know nature by acting upon it to create order, say in building a dam, rather
than by allowing its inherent order to act upon us. Liberty is not found in remembrance
catalyzed by the inscription of the forms of nature upon our being but in inscribing our will
to dominate in nature. As usual for the form of liberal, imperial thought expressed in
Geddes writing, freedom of the self is to be found in conquest and domination of the
other.
Critiques aside, Geddes had not lost all of the wisdom that is to be found in the
hermetic dictum, ‘as above, so below’, and so he still pursued knowledge of that which
cannot be seen (i.e. the biological evolution of humanity over thousands and millions of
years) through extrapolation of its forms as expressed in that which can be seen (i.e. the
biological evolution of plants over days, months and years). The same forms always
structure Biological Evolution, whether it occurs over a year or a million years, and so too
understand relatively infinite (from the limited temporal perspective of the human lifespan)
process of human biological evolution we should look to the relatively finite process of
plant evolution. Geddes, sadly, failed to account for the fact that human evolution is
primarily a process of conscious (epistemological) evolution rather than a process of
mechanical (biological) evolution and therefore failed to realize that human evolution
occurred under the influence of a different form than the biological evolution of plants,
and indeed to this mistake can be attributed most if not all of the woes brought upon
humanity by Eugenicists, Conservationists, Social Darwinists, Primatologists, etc. (see
Haraway’s [1989] Primate Visions and, subsequently, Barnesmoore’s [2016b] Genesis,
Eden and the Grail in Modernity, for an enthralling historical account of these discipline’s
genesis, the influence of paternalist thought upon their findings and their attempts to
extrapolate things like Chimp social structures to a totalizing description of human nature
and the natural order of human society).
“Now, if the writer has learned anything from a life largely occupied with nature-study and with education, it is
that these two need to be brought together, and this through nature-activities. But… we have been stamping
out the very germs of these by our policeman-like repression, both in school and out of it, of those natural…
instincts of vital self-education, which are always constructive in impulse and in essence…” (Geddes 1915, p.
98-99)
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It is clear that Geddes shares the view that nature’s role goes beyond its economic identity
as a consumable other and into the sphere of teaching and learning, but there are some
limitations. Geddes view of natural education, of “vital outdoor education,” (Geddes 1915,
p. 168) seems more oriented towards the active stage of mind (ratio, reason), to ‘nature-
activities’ like “wigwam-building, cave-digging, [and] stream-damming” (Geddes 1915, p.
97) that express the paternalist mythology of man’s conquest of and dominion over nature.
In Geddes vision, at least as expressed here, we do not learn from nature by allowing its
natural forms to inscribe themselves upon our being through leisurely contemplation.
Instead we learn in nature through our attempts to create order through domination of
the earth in building caves, of the streams in building dams and of the trees in building
wigwams. The essential western mythos of reason conquering emotion-intuition, of the sun
conquering the moon, of the masculine conquering the feminine, of the Occident
conquering the Orient, of Romulus killing Remus, of Hercules killing Iphicles, of Cain
killing Able, etc. perverts Geddes understanding of human-nature relations and leads him
to view nature as a subordinate to, rather than as the teacher of, humanity. This is why
worldview and associated philosophy (especially metaphysics and epistemology) are
important! The very same statement, ‘nature should play a role in human education’, takes
on a completely different meaning as per its relationship to the worldview and associated
philosophy from which it was birthed.
“Whereas the boy-scout movement already triumphantly shows that even the young hooligan needs but some
living touch of active responsibility to become much of a Hermes; and, with reconstructive opportunities and
their vigorous labours, we shall next make of him a veritable Hercules .” (Geddes 1915, p. 99) 695
“Thus before long our constructive activities would soon penetrate into the older existing town, and with
energies Herculean indeed .” (Geddes 1915, pp. 101-102)
‘Penetration by the energies of Herculean labor’ is an archetypal characterization of the

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paternalist tradition, especially in its Modernist incarnation. Geddes vision of virtue as a
product hard work, of ‘herculean labors’, perfectly replicates the world(view) of total work
explicated by Pieper (2009) above and serves to illustrate the connection between Geddes
view of human-nature relations in terms of the hard work of imposing order upon nature
through domination (i.e. building dams…) and Geddes location within the Modernist
worldview and the larger paternalist trajectory from which it was birthed. In a worldview
where virtue, knowledge-understanding, the good life, etc. are understood as things that can
only be attained through hard work and domination, through the active phases of human
being like reason (the ratio) imposing a created order upon the ‘chaos’ of manifestation,
then what educational relationship could be held between nature and humans but one in
which humans learn through acting upon nature to impose order rather than through

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Emphasis Added
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As an aside that probably doesn't merit inclusion in this particular text, the entire paternalist mythos surrounding ‘penetration’ implies
a rather boring and unexciting sexual life. First, the notion that penetration is always and by its nature ‘active’—you don't always have to be
on top, bud! Second, the notion that the masculine always penetrates and the feminine is always penetrated—I guess intelligent design
really fucked up when it put a g-spot in man’s ass! I could go on, but I assume the point is clear—as the center of yin is a dot of yang and
as the center of yang is a dot of yin, so to must we understand the masculine as permeating the feminine and the feminine as permeating
the masculine. The penetrator is penetrated, the penetrated penetrates, and to try and render the two as discrete falls under the more
general fascist impetus to create static unity in manifestation through domination of difference.
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leisurely-effortlessly allowing nature to act upon them by inscribing its natural order on
their being?
Let us remember the relationship between the master and slave through European
History. Slavery was often legitimated as a civilizing, Christianizing process wherein the
‘civilized’ and ‘godly’ European master was seen as bringing the slave into a more perfect
expression of human order through the subjugation of the slave. The perfection of the
slave, like the perfection of nature (both of whose highest potentials are described in the
docile, submissive terms associated with femininity in the paternalist worldview), was to be
found in and through submission to man. The highest order of nature, the most perfect
expression of its beauty, was to be found in the garden or a manicured country side, and
the freedom to be found in more rugged nature was to be pursued through ‘act-upon’
practices like dam building and cave digging that serve to render nature as properly
subservient to man. The order of human-nature relations in Geddes can, in short, be
understood in the ‘civilizing’ terms of the colonial projects in which he was engaged.
Nature, like the slave or indigenous inhabitant of colonized lands, is to find its perfection in
and through subservience to man’s will to dominate, in fulfilling its ‘rightful place’ in the
‘natural hierarches’. Freedom in nature is to be found in the activities by which nature is
subjugated, and beauty in nature is to be found in parts of nature like the garden or the
countryside that had been appropriately subjugated. Virtue for the other that has been
stripped of ‘true human consciousness’—be it the indigenous person, the slave, the woman
or the natural environment—is to be found in submission to domination by the ‘true human
consciousness’ of the god-fearing property-owning European ‘Man’.
In this light our project must be twofold. Re-enchanting nature, which is to say
rekindling our understanding of nature (both the natural environment and its biological
inhabitants) as conscious beings that are, like humans, constituted by an interrelationship
between the manifest and unmanifest worlds must indeed occur, but in and of itself the re-
enchantment of nature will not suffice. First and foremost our task is dissipation of the will
to dominate, destruction of the notion that arborescent relationships must naturally be
rendered as hierarchical relations by the will to dominate, and a reconceptualization of
human-nature relations therein—the most perfect expression of natural order, which is to
say the most beautiful expression of nature, comes when nature is allowed to exist without
the artificial, domineering influences of paternalist human action, and so proper human-
nature relations will come in humanity harmonizing with the inherent order of nature.
Rather than damming a river we can set out upon its rapids in a boat. Rather than
digging caves, we can explore natural ones. Rather than planting forests we can walk
through old groves that have never been chopped down. Rather than planning (and
planting) garden cities we can plan our cities in relationship to the natural distribution of
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plants in a given environment. As the Farmer from Song (Meng Zi 2A2) so aptly reminds
us, attempts at helping things (people, animals, plants, rivers, etc.) grow through subjugation
actually serve to cause decay and death, and so human-nature relations must be liberated
from the master-slave dialectic.

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Obviously major reforestation and other such environmental restoration projects, as well as a great deal of time, will have to occur in
the interim as our attempts at subjugation of the natural environment have already bread near extinction levels of decay in the natural
order…
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Greek Education as Olympian, Chinese Education as Tartarean
“…Two distinct tendencies are at work in our modern universities and schools, the dominant one deliberately
preferring memory of mere words for observation of facts and reasoning therefrom, which should be
supplied by discipline in science, and more memory of words for that co-ordination of hand and eye which is
supplied by practice in the arts, and substituting verbal test of competitive examination for practical test in life.
One is the school of the Cram, evolving towards a Chinese, the other the school of Culture, evolving towards
a Greek ideal, or more accurately towards Tartarean and Olympian ideals respectively.” (Geddes 1884, p. 40)
Geddes (1884) conception of the ideal school is as follows:
“when schools at once really classical and modern have arisen to give that genuine knowledge of nature and
of literature which make alike scientist and scholar, that genuine discipline in arts coarse and fine which
makes the worker, and that factual grip of history and society which makes the citizen…”
This coheres well with Geddes (1884) more general vision of the eutopian, neotechnic era
that he saw upon the horizon:
“The coming time is more hopeful; the sorely needed knowledge, both of the natural and the social order, is
approaching maturity; the long-delayed renaissance of art has begun, and the prolonged discord of these is
changing into harmony; so, with these for guidance, men shall no longer grind on in slavery to a false image of
their lowest selves, miscalled Self-interest, but at length, as freemen, live in Sympathy and labour in the
Synergy of the Race.” (Geddes 1884, p. 43)
(3R) Reading Writing and Arithmetic vs. (3H) Hands, Heart, He
Abbotsholme School
As of yet we have not yet found a clear and concise answer to the question ‘why is nature
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an important aspect of the educational process for Geddes’, and so we look to tangible
expressions of Geddes educational philosophy to see if we can glean some further insights.
“One of Geddes’ followers, Dr. Cecil Reddie, who studied with him in Edinburgh between 1878 and 1882,
was responsible for the first attempt in the United Kingdom to formalise ‘the outdoors’ into an educative
medium when he founded Abbotsholme School in 1889. Reddie was particularly concerned to exercise both
mind and boy through community and other work with a view of engendering social responsibility. Central to
this philosophy was that educational objectives were more readily achieved in pleasant surroundings. It was a

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We have subsequently determined that nature is essential for education in Geddes vision because he views experience of nature,
especially aesthetic fulfillment by nature’s beauty, as essential to the process of refining instinct into intuition.
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philosophy inspired by the Romantic movement, of which one of the chief characteristics was a passionate
concern regarding the relationship between human beings and the natural environment, and Geddes’ views
on education wherein ‘the child’s desire of seeing, touching, handling, smelling, tasting and hearing are all
true and healthy hungers, and these could be cultivated’. In accord with Geddes, Reddie felt it was crucial that
these senses were applied to, stimulated by, and educated in the outdoors…” (Smith and Knapp 2011, p.
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XXX?)
th
Abbotsholme School, which recently celebrated its 125 anniversary, is then a perfect
location in which to observe the fruits of Geddes nature education philosophy. The
Abbotsholme School’s webpage has a link to a short film on the school and its founder that
characterizes Reddie’s relationship to and understanding of education as follows:
“Now his opinion on education had always been rationalized by a stark realization that… he had no
knowledge of his own self, his own being. His mind was a whirl in regards to philosophy, ethics and religion.
Education should strive for unity, he said, for if it leaves the mind in chaos it can hardly be recommended.
Cecil built Abbotsholme with this in mind, believing that he was the man up to the task of sculpting the boys
he would reach into men capable of leading the country into a world where religion was being rapidly
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overtaken by science.”
“…Woodlands and fields would become the perfect setting for Reddie’s dream. Towns were, as he saw them,
a dangerous moral atmosphere or an unwholesome physical experience, the ill effects of which were to be
avoided. …Cecil did not always inspire. Indeed, one particularly vicious critique of his work was that his
educational ideology never approximated to a readily identifiable doctrine but more to that of a philosophical
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[flag?] of convenience that tenuously united a diverse group of thinkers and practitioners.”
“…Instead of the three R’s, reading, writing and arithmetic, Reddie built his school on the three H’s, head,
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hands and heart.”
The Abbotsholme school logo tells a story in and of itself:
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Smith, Knapp 2011, “Sourcebook of Experiential Education: Key Thinkers and Their Contributions”
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Matt Fletcher 2014, Abbotsholme – 125 Years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLZtWRHeOec&autoplay=1&safe=active&app=desktop
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702
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https://d2td6mzj4f4e1e.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/logos/abbotsholme-school.jpg
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‘Knowing Nature’
Meller (1993) argues that Geddes was fascinated by
“…The potential brought by modern knowledge to transform society. He saw the most fundamental question
challenging the present and future generations as the relationship of man with his natural environment,
whether that relationship was defined in global terms, or on the purely local scale of the countryside and
town. Knowledge in the natural and physical sciences had the potential to change completely the traditional
equilibrium between human society and the environment. The problem was to motivate people to make the
right choices in using their new-found power and this was both a matter of cultural conditioning and a moral
challenge. Geddes wanted to transform the nineteenth century ideal of progress: ‘from an individual Race for
Wealth into a Social Crusade of Culture.’” (Meller 1993, p. 2-3)
Aesthetics and the human appreciation of beauty aside, Meller’s characterization of

Geddes views on the relationship between human society and nature revolve around the
axis of rational, scientific knowledge of nature. By acting upon nature through use of the
rational mind and its scientific method Geddes sought to better know nature and to thereby
gain dominion over its power and bring this power to bear in the process of social
evolution (which we would characterize as social development rather than social evolution).
The traditional equilibrium, or at least the paternalist perspective on this equilibrium, saw
(and indeed often experienced) humanity as subservient to seeming chaos and obvious
power of nature—crops were dependent on rain and sun, safe passage at sea upon storms
and winds, travel upon land by the changing of the seasons. As Geddes repeatedly notes in
his writings (Geddes 1915; Geddes 1992), however, one of two essential threads in the
essential life adventure, which is to say the inherent mythos of human existence or the
infinite form of human existence, comes in the story of man winning magic through
dominion over the powers of the earth. “Wherever Man gains power over Nature, there is
Magic.” (Geddes 1915, p. 130)
Though no doubt drawn from the Catholic and Celtic roots of his cultural milieu,
Geddes vision of magic is very clearly technological. Though this point crosses a line that
we do not wish to venture too far across in the context of this text, it can be said that this
vision sees magical powers as attained through technological domination of the energies of
earth rather than through the more traditional method of attainment through acting as a
conduit for said energies. Do you act upon and through the energies, or do the energies act
upon and through you? Leaving these more esoteric issues behind, we once again see the
essential flaw in Geddes thinking (and in modernist thought concerning nature more
generally)—human relations with nature are to be founded upon an occidental, rationally
reductive, conquest of nature, in winning power over nature through herculean labors, and
harmony with nature is to be predicated upon natures subsequent subservience to
humanity (in nature’s submission to humanity’s divinely ordained ‘dominion over earth’).
Suffice it to say that this sort of knowledge and understanding of nature is of a
wholly different order than the knowledge and understanding of nature attained through
leisurely contemplation. On the surface level we find the obvious the difference between
the holistic sensory, emotive, intellectual, intuitive, etc. knowledge of direct experience with
the object of knowledge and the ephemeral, quantitative, linguistic, materially rational
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knowledge that we can receive through descriptions of other people’s direct experiences.
At a deeper level, once we have begun to act upon nature under the impetus of the will to
dominate we cause the decay of natural order symbolized by Meng Zi’s (2A2) Farmer from
Song and thereby negate or at best denigrate the potential to know the essence of natural
order—what becomes inscribed upon our being, for there is some inscription that occurs
whether we are being as receptive to being or not, are the perverted and decayed orders we
have produced through domination of nature rather than a pure expression of the inherent,
essential order of nature. At the heart of this distinction between rational and contemplative
knowledge, between what we might call first and secondhand knowledge, is the issue of
intimacy—if you have never felt love or sorrow, can a rationalistic, linguistic description of
these feelings or the chemical processes they enliven in the body replicate the intimacy of
actually feeling them? In the same way, can rational knowledge of nature and its order truly
replicate the intimacy of feeling natural order through the emotive response inspired by the
beauty of natural order? Can we know nature through acting upon it, or must we also allow
it to act upon us?
We started off by leaving aesthetics and the human appreciation of beauty aside
because such is clearly done in Meller’s general characterization of Geddes, and for
heuristic purposes this movement suits our project and its problematization of the
rationally reductive epistemology of Modernity well, but as is usual with Geddes—and to be
expected given the clear complexity of his interdisciplinary, often individually inspired
philosophical outlook—the story is not so simple. Geddes may have believed that the
Occident must naturally conquer the Orient, which is to say that that reason must conquer
feeling, and in this most paternalist supposition his entire vision goes astray, but that did not
mean that he simply dismissed the reality or importance of the Orient as was done by later,
more materialistic generations of economic theological thinkers (Positivist through
Post(most)modern and Capitalist through Marxist). Feeling had not yet been castigated to
the sphere of pure subjectivity, had not yet been defined as the empty space that surrounds
the reality of reason, had not yet been reduced to the mad other of rational knowledge,
etc., and as such there was still at least some sensitivity to the importance of actually
experiencing the beauty of nature and thus feeling the order of nature.
To the last couple lines of the above quotation, it is clear that Geddes was moving
from the wisdom of the dictum ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’ With the
magical powers won through dominion over the earth comes great responsibility not to
abuse said power. Geddes solution, however, like so many of his paternalist brethren, is
founded in domination of the general public. Now that society had won techno-magical
powers the society itself had to be dominated in order to prevent the misuse of these
powers. Sadly, as we have come to understand by this point in the text attempts at
domination only serve to breed chaos, and indeed Geddes work itself (especially in the
occupied Palestinian territories more commonly and belligerently known as ‘Israel’) clearly
illustrates this phenomenon. The worst abuses of the magical power we have attained
through technological domination of earth have come as a direct function of the ‘cultural
conditioning’ that Geddes planned to “motivate people to make the right decision” (Meller
1993, p. 2)
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From Nature in School to Art in School
“In biological evolution, the key factor for further adaptation was the nervous system, which must be
constantly stimulated in order to evolve to ever higher levels. How much more so must this be in human
society when the organism was already so highly complex. Geddes was ready to state, therefore, that the key
objective of the biological principles of economics was not food and shelter but culture and education. From
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this he was ready to extrapolate one of his pedagogic syllogisms: social evolution depended on art.” (Meller
1993, p. 44)
“Geddes believed that a society was able to evolve healthily if its people and their livelihoods were adapted to
the specific conditions of their local region. Such adaptations required a form of transdisciplinary education
that made people aware of how their livelihood fitted into the overall adaptive and integrative process that
joined local culture to local nature.
In Geddesʼ opinion, art and architecture had the dual function of expressing, and educating, about
this symbiotic relationship between nature and culture. To him, an ecological economics that followed
biological design principles would meet human needs through creative and flexible adaptation to local and
regional limits. The focus of such an economic system was not economic growth but biological, ecological,
and social health.” (Wahl 2017)
Patrick Geddes and William James

“The concept of evolution had penetrated scientific and social thinking in every direction… [Geddes] was
determined that in his own studies he would try and find a new cosmology… One of the greatest dangers in
the new cosmology was the difficulty of defining and studying the evolutionary life-process if it transcendd
both mind and matter. There was a great temptation to create the possibility of a life-force, the ‘élan vital’, of
mystic origins, beyond the bounds of reason.
Geddes was caught in the dilemma that he did not wish to rely on the mysticism of the ‘vital’
biologists and yet he wanted to believe in a life-force. It was an intellectual conflict which he was never able to
resolve. Instead he took up the idea that a resolution to this problem could not be made within the confines
of conventional knowledge and scientific methodology. The new insight necessary to direct work along more
fruitful paths could only be produced by going back to fundamentals, and questioning the nature and theory
of knowledge itself.” (Meller 1993, p. 13)
Meller’s claims are clearly those of the Modernist who has reduced reality to manifestation
(passing time and physical space) and epistemology to material reason who therefore
cannot conceive of reality beyond the bounds of reason. Indeed, her claim that Geddes
never found a solution to this problem is seemingly belied by the relationship between
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Geddes and William James implied by Mumford (1944) .
“Geddes was convinced that much of our education and much of our business enterprise was a deliberate
stultification of man's real nature and his potential creativity. He pointed out that just as the brain itself
contains a large number of dormant cells, apparently never called into use, so in our time a large part of the
"energies of men" were never employed: the very narrowing of human functions in the specialized workday of
both the factory drudge and the successful professional man depleted their effectiveness even for their narrow
tasks. (It is very possible that William James's famous essay on "The Energies of Men" was written as a result
of his meeting with Geddes in Edinburgh.) When Geddes considered his own extraordinary powers, he did

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Meller cites early pamphlets disseminated by Geddes like ‘On the conditions’ as the basis for this argument.
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Mumford 1944, “Introduction”, in Philip Boardman 1944, Patrick Geddes, Maker of the Future, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
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not think of himself as a genius, but as a "normal man" fully awakened to all the possibilities of being alive.”
(Mumford 1944, p. ix)
James’s (1914) The Energies of Men examines the shared experience of ‘second wind’,
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wherein an “unusual necessity forces us to press onwards” past the first “layer of… fatigue”
faced in working on a project (physical or intellectual) leads to an effect wherein “fatigue
gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we
are fresher than before.” (James 1914, p. 7) “We have evidently tapped a level of new
energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed.” (James 1914, p. 7)
Taken within the framework of James’ method for the study of religious experience
expounded in his (1908) The Varieties of Religious Experience it seems very possible that
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Geddes wish to know that which exists beyond the bounds of reason in relatively rational
terms was not so unattainable as Meller implies. Let us compare James’ views on religious
experience and the energies of man with Geddes vision of refining instinct into intuition
through ‘herculean’ labors in the garden and the rustic.
“[Geddes] theory was that the new cosmology would only be found by people trained in new and
evolutionary ways of thinking. This demanded, in effect, a revolution in education. Even what constituted
knowledge was something which was open to question. …Geddes was sympathetic to the idea that knowledge
could only come directly through intuition and not by the reasoned use of the intellect. This was especially
the case for a new cosmology since it had to supersede the bounds of all current knowledge. To oversimplify
grossly the view of the young evolutionists, it was believed that the creative element of the human mind was
the instinct. This was not just a matter of simple response but something which could be developed with self-
awareness. A creative instinct was actually intuition, an instinct developed by self-awareness. The intellect was
of a lower order and was used merely as a means of interpreting and classifying what was already known….
Geddes search for a new cosmology thus became sidetracked by the absorbing problem of how to
refine instinct into intuition… The best refining influence on natural instinct had to be nature. As a rustic
youth from the backwoods in Scotland, he had spent his childhood in close communication with nature, and
had observed first hand the life-force of creation in the hills, woods, fields, and garden near his home. He
became convinced that he had to rely on his own, thus refined, intuition, in his search for a new cosmology.”
Meller 1993, p. 14)
their vigorous labours, we shall next make of him a veritable Hercules .” (Geddes 1915, p. 99)
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What is the relationship between: 1. Geddes vision of herculean labors in the garden and
in rustic expressions of nature as fundamental to the process of refining instinct into
intuition, 2. the notion of the latent energies of man to be found through pushing past
initial layers of fatigue expounded by James (1914) and 3. the conception of religious
experience and the study of religious experience expounded by James (1908)? From
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Whitman to Blake and far afield thence , there is a storied tradition of the attainment of
higher potentials of being through intimacy with nature that may shed light on this question.

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William James 1914, The Energies of Men, New York: Moffat, Yard and Company.
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William James 1908, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
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Emphasis Added
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Many classical religious and spiritual traditions, not the least of which being the Celtic tradition that so inspired Geddes, frequently
speak of religious experiences in and through intimacy with nature. What is to be found in the intimacy with Hui Zi’s useless tree
proposed by Zhuang Zi?
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Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Tufayl 2009), a story of two young people
searching for enlightenment, provides a mythos for understanding the path of the ‘natural
mystic’. The first boy, Absal (in a fashion similar to Siddhartha), was raised on an island as
the son of a king. He was educated through use of the language, numbers, science, etc.,
but, like Foust, knowledge of things in the world could not bring solace to his seemingly
meaningless life. Absal is thus inspired to follow the mystical path and leaves behind the
shackles of his peripatetic, hedonistic life within the palace (life within the palace and/ or
pleasure gardens is a common motif for peripatetic mind and biological desire in the
Islamic tradition). He journeys through the ocean to another island where he meets Hayy
Ibn Yaqzan. Hayy was birthed from the earth itself; growing up alone on the island, he
pursued the mysteries of life through experience of and reflection on the symbols (forms)
of nature rather than the language, numbers, science, etc. The two men soon discover that,
as a function of the fact that Hayy developed his understanding through the silence of
intuition and the untarnished reflection of eternal, macrocosmic order in the microcosm of
terrestrial nature, Hayy is the more enlightened of the two and he becomes Absal's mystical
guide.
Put in more general terms, one comes to know the simplest and most universal
things (Force, Form and Consciousness, the emanations of the Infinite Substance) upon
which Reason must be founded through cultivating intimacy with nature (through
cultivating a state of being wherein we are receptive and allow the force, forms and
consciousness of nature to be inscribed upon our being through contemplation). Reason
(now oriented towards the simplest and most universal things, the IS-FFC, through allowing
nature to inscribe itself upon our being) is then directed through natural forms we have
received from nature towards understanding of other phenomenon like ‘the social’, and
knowledge takes on an eternal-infinite-true quality in its reference to the eternal (to the
Force, Forms, Consciousness, the Infinite Substance that is the essence of all
manifestations). Rational Intuition then brings what is known through this rational process
(through perceiving the world by enlivening the natural forces, forms and expressions of
consciousness that have been inscribed upon our being through contemplation of nature)
to bear in a single, silent movement of the mind. Religious experiences in and through
nature, which at least in some cases are brought on by the latent energies that can be
tapped through pushing beyond the layers of fatigue described by James (1914), seem to be
the fundamental experiences by which we can develop direct knowledge of the unmanifest
world (of the Infinite Substance and its emanations Force, Form and Consciousness) and
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thereby initiate the above described process by which instinct is refined into intuition.
Meller cannot and should not be faulted for ‘the stark impossibility of thinking the
that’ of Geddes mysticism and understanding of the relationship between the cultivation of
intuition, nature and realities beyond the boundaries of the manifest world and thus of
material reason. One cannot expect the blind to see color, nor can they expect their

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Press.
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The above formula, like any which attempts to render an infinite-unmanifest or partially infinite-unmanifest process into the discrete,
linear, manifest, finite terms of language, is inherently flawed. This formulation is a signpost, but an individual has to actually walk the
road this sign directs you down if you are to truly understand what the sign signifies.
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descriptions of color to replicate the knowledge of color attained through experiencing it.
(Tyfayl 2009) That being said, if we are to truly grasp the meaning, purpose and potentially
gleaned wisdom of Geddes work we must treat with it from a nuanced-metaphysical
perspective whose ontological foundation (worldview root) accepts the unmanifest world as
real. If we wish to develop a socially just (which must by necessity must be ontologically
just) and inclusive model of urban environmental planning, and if we wish to understand
the intellectual history of the discipline, we cannot simply dismiss the ontology of authors
like Geddes and the mysticism rendered possible therein. Indeed, as authors like Four
Arrows (2016) and Nasr (1996) have so eloquently noted, reviving (remembering) the
spiritual conception of nature and human-nature relations that can be found in one manner
or another in all major worldviews and associated philosophies other than the disenchanted
materialism of Modernity is the best (if not only) chance humanity has for staving off
environmental degradation and extinction.
Maurice Nicoll’s conception of ‘the invisible self’ and Jacob Needleman’s
conception of ‘inner empiricism’ serve to further elucidate this potential relationship
between Geddes and James. Whether I am walking in nature, writing, singing or simply
observing my beautiful baby daughter, I have become accustomed to moments when I
enter into a state of consciousness that has stark differences from the ‘objective’ self-
consciousness of the peripatetic mind and the ego. Indeed, it is precisely in these moments
of self-dissolution, where the peripatetic mind goes silent and words or sensory experiences
fuse with emotion to produce an ecstatic, blissful silence, that I experience my Being as
most real. The moment when my ‘objective’ self ceases to be is the moment in which I find
that I am the most joyful and ‘real’. These experiences, however, are invisible, and we are
left with the question of how to study and express the states of being experienced therein.
Our only recourse seems to be an exploration of consciousness conducted through use of
self-observation of the ‘invisible self’.
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invisibility.”
“Our bodies stand in the visible world. They stand in the space of three dimensions, accessible to the sense of
sight and of touch. Our bodies are themselves three dimensional. They have length, height, and breadth. But
we are not ourselves in this world of three dimensions.

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Our thoughts, for instance, are not three-dimensional solids. One thought is not to the right or left of
another thought. Yet are they not real to us? If we say that reality is confined to that which exists in the three
dimensional world outside, we must regard all our thoughts and feelings inside, as unreal.
Our inner life – oneself – has no position in that space which is perceptible to the senses. But while
thought, feeling, and imagination have no position in space, it is possible to think of them having position in
some other kind of space. One thought follows another in passing-time. A feeling lasts a certain time and then
disappears. If we think of time as a fourth dimension, or a higher dimension of space, our inner life seems to
be related to this ‘higher’ space, or world in more dimensions than those accessible to the senses. If we
conceive of a higher dimensional world we might consider that we do not live, properly speaking, in the world
of three dimensions that we touch and see, and in which we meet people, but have more intimate contact
with a more-dimensional form of existence, beginning with time.” 713
Following from this realization of essential invisibility we must accept that the only way to
study the invisible world is through experiencing it within the self.
Jacob Needleman (1993) further elucidates the necessity of such ‘inner empiricism’
for exploration of ‘the great questions of the heart’:
something intrinsic to our nature, an innate striving which Plato called Eros.
But what can the mind do with this deep participatory urge? Even at its most brilliant, the intellect
alone can only ask questions that skim the surface of Eros; it cannot answer these questions. Yet such
questions--the meaning of life, the nature of the soul--need to be answered. If intellect is not up to the job,
how can we penetrate these mysteries? The solution, I'm proposing, is that we can only extend the reach of
intellect through experience. There is a certain type of experience that opens up the mind, expands our
consciousness, and allows us to approach answers to many of these fundamental questions.
In this sense, as a philosopher who cares about questions of the heart, I'm essentially a student of
consciousness. I'm talking about certain kinds of experiences that we have spontaneously as human beings,
but which are all too uncommon and which are not valued or understood within our culture. But when they
are approached from another angle, one sees that these experiences really point to an aspect of the mind, of
the psyche, beyond reason and intellect. And they do more than that: They also point to the object of those
experiences, that is, to a fundamental reality. These experiences present us with an alternative or
complementary way of knowing the world around us as well as the world inside us. The philosophical
approach I'm talking about values these "questions of the heart" as invitations to experience, as well as to
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cogitations of the cerebral intellect.”
Nature’s Consciousness
We would like to juxtapose two statements, one from Geddes (1915) and one from
Herman (2008):
“…Linking up of the chain of physical efficiencies all the way from Nature to life … (Geddes 1915, p.
118)

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Summer 1993. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Needleman_93.html
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experienced as being part of the extended community imbued with consciousness.” (Herman 2008, p. 76)
What is this chasm between nature and life alluded to by Geddes (1915)? Is it not an
illusory residue of “the disenchantment of the world” described by Herman (2008)?
Nature is alive, and life is consciousness, and so too divide nature from life is to strip nature
of consciousness as described by Herman (2008). To deny the life of nature is to deny the
intimate link between the manifest and unmanifest worlds and thus to strip nature of its
inherent value and render it as an ‘other’ that lacks consciousness and which is thus
deemed an acceptable object of extractive, exploitative domination.
“For geographic thought there are three important effects of [Modernist] disenchantment. The first is the
world essential for capitalism.” (Herman 2008, p. 74)
The root of Geddes limitations, of his view of human-nature relations in terms of humans
acting in and upon nature through domineering practices like dam building, of his view of
human-city-nature evolution in economic terms, of his fetishization of herculean labor, etc.,
seems to come precisely in this notion of a chasm “all the way from Nature to life”, in the
disenchantment (materialization) of terrestrial nature that comes in the division of the
manifest and the unmanifest and dismissal of the spiritual attributes of reality (i.e. of the
unmanifest) as ‘unreal’ or as ‘madness’, in stripping nature of its inherent value therein and
in thereby making it possible to ‘think the that’ of nature as a ‘lifeless, consciousnessless
other’ and thus an acceptable object (‘other’) of hierarchical domination.
All that being said, it seems clear that Geddes was at least in part sensitive to the
politics of ‘magic-expelling’ disenchantment:
“Do not all our neighbours, whichever their variety of slum, their faith economic or political, alike pronounce
upon themselves the magic-expelling, romance-killing word ‘practical’—than which nothing is so self satisfying,
so positively (and literally) ‘enchanting.’” (Geddes 1915, p. 128)
“Wherever Man gains power over Nature, there is Magic. Whenever he carries out an Ideal into Life, there is
Romance. When he loses both, there is stony Enchantment, in which so many lie. When he recovers both,
he has vanquished the enchanter; he has won his Bride, and the Kingdom with her. There is not, there never
was, a briefer summary of the essential life adventure than this, and what other can there be? What better for
truly practical purposes? It is fully applicable even to difficult and apparently modern cases, like the
disenchantment of the poor economist, the modern philistine, who was really at bottom not at all such a bad
fellow as from his works we have been making him. He has only got enchanted, by thinking he might win
Magic without Romance, might use power over Nature, not to abuse it, only apart from any corresponding
human ideals.” (Geddes 1915, p. 130-131)
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“For while a man can win power over nature, there is magic; while he can stoutly confront life and death,
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there is romance.” Geddes 1992, p. 22)
Geddes had by no means reached the apex of disenchantment, loss of inherent value and
othering-objectifying-domination that we saw in subsequent generations of Positivist
Modernity and Post(Most)modernity, but the above distinction of Nature and life, the
vision of Magic as a product of dominion over nature, Geddes valorization of the Occident
(reason, ratio, active) over the Orient (rational intuition, intellectus, contemplative) and his
concomitant supposition that the Occident should naturally come to dominate the Orient,
when taken together, make it clear that Geddes is walking the path (indeed helping to pave
the path) towards the disenchanted, materialistic, rationalistic sun-cult of contemporary
Modernist thought in his understanding of nature as disenchanted (as devoid of life-
consciousness). Enchantment is still possible in Geddes view, but it is not inherent to
nature—it is attained when a man wins power over nature (when he fulfills his God given
duty of dominion over earth…). Magic can be brought to life through winning power over
nature, through domination of nature.
Human existence was not wholly disenchanted for Geddes as it would become in
Positivist and Post(Most)modern eras that followed, and indeed he argues that we should
turn away from the ‘magic-expelling’ futility of utilitarianism and its ‘practical’ mantra at
many points in Cities in Evolution, but the terrestrial nature in which that existence
occurred was clearly undergoing the process of disenchantment if not already
disenchanted. Geddes may not have descent into the arrogant materialism and anti-
intellectualism of utilitarian modernity (where philosophy and the liberal arts are simply
castigated as ‘useless elitism’ or as ‘masculinist’), but that does not stop him from affording
the disenchanted distinction between nature and life (between nature and consciousness)
that is the necessary first step in the domination-commodification of nature and which
negates the potential for the pedagogical relationship between humans and nature (in which
nature, in and of its inherent value, acts as a teacher to awaken the wisdom that exists
latently within the infinite, spiritual aspect of our being) that is proposed and developed by
this text.
“Money was merely a tool; real wealth was altogether different, it was a harmonious balance of organism and
environment, mutually supportive and mutually satisfying.” (Meller 1993, p. 17)
As with his statement ‘all the way from nature to life’, Geddes clearly manifest the
Modernist urge to strip nature (‘environment’) of consciousness and to thereby legitimate
its rendering as subservient to humanity.
experienced as being part of the extended community imbued with consciousness. The Lakota notion of "All
my relatives" is not a concept that jibes with capitalism.” (Herman 2008, p. 76)

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Sir. Patrick Geddes 1992, “The Scots Renascence” Edinburg Review 88, p. 17-23
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The Order of Nature in Geddes
We have continually railed against Geddes conceptions of order—as something to be
created through hierarchical domination—as antithetical to the order of nature and the
process of cultural-conscious evolution through engagement with nature, and yet Geddes
(1915) often refers to the order of Nature. Geddes does not see nature as the chaotic,
purely mechanical, lacking inherent value, blob of pure substance that it has been reduced
th st
to by the materialistic tides of Modernism in the 20 and 21 centuries, and indeed Geddes
discussions of nature’s beauty and its relationship to human existence clearly indicate that
he retains some of the ancient wisdom concerning the nature of terrestrial nature, but the
paternalist notion that hierarchical domination (so clearly inscribed in Genesis 1 where
God gives man dominion over earth…) is an essential aspect of Nature’s order clearly
exerts a dominating influence upon Geddes thoughts. Though Geddes does critique the
“theory of competition as the essential factor of the progress of life” (Geddes 1915, p. 77),
he does not seem to reach the essential root of this conception of human nature and
evolution (and of nature’s nature and evolution), which is the notion that hierarchical
domination is an essential aspect of Nature’s order.
The potential for the will to dominate, from which we reach the potential for
hierarchical domination, originates in the fear that is derived by the ego from scarcity (of
resources, of life, of their own sensory existence, of understanding, of wisdom, of love,
etc.). The potential for the will to dominate the ‘other’ is rooted in the singularity of
conscious manifestation that begets awareness of ‘self’. The root of Nature’s order is the
infinite-eternal, the IS-FFC; the root of the will to dominate and thus of hierarchical
domination is privation, in the privation of the infinite-eternal from finite manifestation.
The order of nature IS, the will to dominate and hierarchical domination ARE Not. St.
Augustine argued that there is no such thing as the duality of Good and Evil—there is only
Good and the privation of Good. In Geddes terms, there is no duality of Paradise and
Inferno, only Paradise and its privation. From the form of this argument we can see that
there is no such thing as the duality of love and domination—there is only love and the
privation of love. Nature’s order is infinite potential, everything as it is nothing, eternal and
yet not old, etc. Hierarchical domination and its root in the will to dominate, on the other
hand, are rooted in scarcity (i.e. in the privations of manifestation, in the privations of the
infinite necessitated by its manifestation in the finite). Nature’s Order IS, Privation IS Not.
Order IS, Scarcity IS Not. This may seem like a simple issue of metaphysical nuance, but
in metaphysics such simple nuances make all the difference—upon this nuance rests the
question of whether the will to dominate and hierarchical domination are necessary,
natural constituents of human social order or privations of the natural order of human
society…
“As zero and infinity are indispensable for the mathematician, so hell and heaven are ‘the necessary
stereoscopic device’ of the social thinker, much as of his predecessor, the theologian.” (Geddes 1915, p. 87-
88)
Heaven and Hell, Paradise and Inferno, Good and Evil; like so many before him, Geddes
falls into the trap of granting an equal reality to Good and its privation. The form of duality,
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of light and dark, of yin and yang, which is indeed an attribute of the natural order, is
inappropriately imposed upon the attributes of the IS-FFC (Truth, Goodness, Beauty,
Justice, Reality, Order, etc.) and the terms we have used to describe their privation
(falsehood, badness, ugliness, injustice, unreality, disorder, etc.). Reality is granted to that
which is in its essential lack of essence unreal (a privation of reality). If we were to try and
attribute all the woes of our world to a single cause, this rendering of IS and IS Not—of
Goodness, Truth, Beauty and their privations as equally Real—would be the only likely
candidate (indeed, Geddes [1915, p. 88] argues both aspects of this false duality between
heaven and hell “are alike logically necessary for our economic and civic studies”).
Utilitarian Aesthetics?
“Now, as regards the Beauty of Cities. Those who are most in the habit of calling themselves ‘practical,’ to
maintain this character are also wont too easily to reckon as ‘unpractical’ whatever advances of science or of
art they have not yet considered, or which tend to disturb the paleotechnic set of working conventions. Hence
they so easily say of us town planners and city revivers, "All these prettifications may perhaps do very well for
Continental cities; but after all they are mere luxuries, and won't pay us here," and so on. Now, if anyone in
that mind considers the argument of these pages, he will find that what they are primarily concerned with is
very different from what he expects; and that our problem is—not prettification, not even architecture,
mistress of the arts though she be—but what practical men—men of business, men of politics, men of war—
consider to be the most practical of all: namely, their survival, at once local and regional, national and
imperial, in the present intensifying struggle for existence, and this in competition with other countries…”
(Geddes 1915, p. 89)
Geddes frames city aesthetics in a utilitarian manner that links them to survival and physical
health, and maybe he does so simply in order to engage with the hegemonic thought of his
time, but the truth to be found in the connection between physical wellbeing and aesthetics
begets a deeper question—what makes something beautiful, and how does beauty affect our
wellbeing (spiritual, mental-emotional and physical)? Before answering this question we
must first understand the ‘practical man’ of business, politics and war and his inability to
answer this question appropriately.
“…Their refuge is in the utilitarian philosophy. This it is which is the real inspiration, the sole justification of
their practice…. What they as yet fail to realise is that, when weighed in the balances of the sciences, their
philosophy is found but futilitarian, or worse. For the physicist their ‘development of resources,’ their
‘progress of a district,’ is too much the wasteful dissipation of the energies of Nature….
It cannot be too often repeated, too frequently presented in different ways, that the self-satisfied
‘practical man " who looks down upon all our hopes of the redemption and ennoblement of his industrial and
commercial world towards civic and social aims as ‘mere sentiment,’ is himself the victim of sentiments gone
wrong; nay, that his ledger-regulated mind is too often but an obsession of arithmetic….” (Geddes 1915, pp.
91-92)
“…That savage retort and war-cry of ‘Yah! Sentiment!’ with which the would-be utilitarian has so often
increased his recklessness towards Nature, and coarsened his callousness to art.” (Geddes 1915, p. 93)
Geddes goes on, and we could too, but we will simply redirect the reader towards our
engagement with Pieper (2009) and his critique of the world of total work, the work
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epistemology and their subsumption of the infinite aspects of human existence in
Modernity as it aptly explicates the critique of utilitarianism levied by Geddes.
On to Beauty and Nature:
“Beauty, whether of Nature or art, has too long been without effective defence against the ever-advancing
smoke-cloud and machine-blast and slum-progress of paleotechnic industry.” (Geddes 1915, p. 92)
“From this standpoint the case for the conservation of Nature, and for the increase of our accesses to her,
must be stated more seriously and strongly than is customary. Not merely begged for on all grounds of
amenity, of recreation, and repose, sound though these are, but insisted upon. On what grounds? In terms of
the maintenance and development of life; of the life of youth, of the health of all, which is surely the very
foundation of any utilitarianism worth the name; and further, of that arousal of the mental life in youth, of its
maintenance through age, which must be a main aim of higher utilitarianism, and is a main condition of its
continued progress towards enlightenment.” (Geddes 1915, p. 94-95)
As we state in our critique of conservationism, there are some ‘futilitarian’ limitations to

conserving nature through attempting to render hierarchical domination as sustainable (in
that hierarchical domination by its nature—as rooted in privation—destroys natural order
and is thus, by its nature, unsustainable), but Geddes call for preserving nature and its
beauty for the sake of its ‘arousal of the mental life in youth’ resonates with our vision of
human-nature relations organized around the principle of nature as teacher. Alas,
utilitarianism has lost this saving grace of progression towards enlightenment in its descent
through positivist materialism into the post(most)modern material nihilism of
contemporary human society and utility has become more and more oriented towards
fulfillment of egotistical desires like survival and other such expressions of self-interest as
understood from a perspective where reality is reduced to the manifest world. The
utilitarianism of Most-Modernity is incommensurable with Geddes view of nature’s
inherent beauty as useful in its role in the development of human epistemology because
nature, like humanity, no longer possesses an inherent value (beautiful or not…).
“…With [the] preservation of mountains and moorlands comes also the need of their access: a need for
health, bodily and mental together. For health without the joys of life of which one prime one is assuredly
this nature-access is bat dullness; and this we begin to know as a main way of preparation for insidious
disease. With this, again, comes forestry: no mere tree-cropping, but sylviculture, arboriculture too, and
park-making at its greatest and best.
Such synoptic vision of Nature, such constructive conservation of its order and beauty towards the
health of cities… is more than engineering: it is a master-art; vaster than that of street planning, it is landscape
making; and thus it meets and combines with city design….
But the children, the women, the workers of the town can come but rarely to the country… …We
must therefore bring the country to them.” (Geddes 1915, p. 95-96)
We seek to design cities in a manner that conserves the order and beauty of nature in
order to promote the health of cities, but we are still left with the essential question of why
this relationship between health and beauty holds. Is it simply that acting in nature (i.e.
getting exercise) leads to good health, or is there something more (where nature acts upon
us…)?
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Life is an expression of Consciousness, and Consciousness is an expression of the
IS (the C of the FFC emanated from the IS). Beauty is an attribute of the IS. So too is
Order. Indeed, the beauty of terrestrial nature is rooted in its being as an expression of
Order. Beauty is Order as Goodness is Truth. Health is order, and sickness is the decay
(and subsequent privation) of order. Everything in manifestation is a vibration.
Manifestations that vibrate in resonance with Order are known as beautiful. Similarly, a
body that vibrates in resonance with Order is known as healthy. To live in a vibratory
environment of beauty, then, is to live in an environment of order, and to live in a vibratory
environment of order is to be healthy. Why do we burn incense during spiritual rituals?
Beautiful smells are a vibration that is in resonance with Order. Why do we play beautiful
music during spiritual rituals? Beautiful sounds are a vibration that is in resonance with
Order. Why ought we to live in a beautiful place? Beautiful places are a vibration that is in
resonance with Order (and thus with Truth, Goodness, etc.). We hope that the reader who
is not familiar with this sort of reasoning will forgive our transgression of Modernity’s
hegemonic epistemological boundaries, but the point should be clear none the less—beauty
is an essential aspect of human life and indeed contributes to human health because
beauty, like life, vibrates at a frequency that is resonant with the IS-FFC. As we can learn
about Truth and Goodness from the beauty of terrestrial nature’s inherent order because
Truth, Goodness, Beauty and Order are all mutually constitutive attributes of the IS-FFC,
so too can we derive life from beauty because both are vibratory expressions of the IS-FFC.
Metaphysical arguments aside, our point is that the relationship between nature and health
is not merely one of humans acting upon and within nature to get exercise, but also one of
the vibratory qualities of nature (as apparent to hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch and our
‘sixth sense’) act upon us in a manner that brings our vibratory quality into resonance with
the eternal-infinite. The beauty of nature brings about health not only because it inspires
actions—like a walk in the woods—but also because it acts upon us.
Education for Planning

“Practically, then, our immediate need is educational—most effectively through a Civic Exhibition, and this
twofold. First and most easily realised, a local exhibition in each city; and essentially of its own site and
origins, its own best past, its present good and bad alike, its possible opening future also. But beside this we
need a great exhibition: of a type better than international ones, which may mean anything or nothing—an
Inter-Civic Exhibition—showing what great cities have been, what the best of them still are, above all what they
aspire to be.” (Geddes 1915, p. 210)
It is this last point, of what cities aspire to be, that must be the crux of our educational
project. The past, present and projected future of a city’s manifest reality are surely
essential for developing a planning model that is suitable within the context of local realities
and spirit, but more important still is the worldview in which we interpret the manifest
realities and spirit of the city because “Idealism and matter of fact are… not sundered, but
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inseparable, as our daily steps are guided by ideals of direction.” (Geddes 1915, p. vii)
Harmonization with local environmental factors, with the inherent order of nature in a

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Geddes SP 1915, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics, London, Williams
& Norgate. p. vii
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given place, is essential, but the key is the meaning of harmonization imposed by our
worldview. Are we seeking to fit the shoe onto the foot (Adams 1970, p. xi), to ‘harmonize’
with nature through subjugating it to our own, artificial order of hierarchical consumption,
or are we seeking to synthesize with the existing order of nature. Do we seek to tame the
natural order of wilderness and replace it with the artificial order of the garden, or do we
seek to harmonize with wilderness and leave its natural order intact? Do we seek to tame
the river with a dam, or do we seek to harmonize with the river and leave its natural order
intact? Education is indeed the key to fomenting a new planning regime, but education
must begin with education in a new worldview, with education in a worldview that
transcends the will to dominate of the paternalist tradition and its assumptions concerning
man’s dominion over earth, with education in new ideal to guide our steps in everyday life,
if we wish to cultivate a planning regime in which we can bring knowledge of local realities
and spirit to bear in developing truly sustainable (i.e. predicated on the inherently
sustainable order of nature rather than predicated on attempts to extend the duration of a
domineering relationship with nature that must in the end produce decay of order and
death in nature), non-domineering relations between humanity and nature.
“…All history confirms in detail of life and art what language preserves in literal word, that not only ‘politics’
but ‘civilisation’ itself are essentially products, not of the individual, but of the city…. …The true town plan,
the only one worth having, is the outcome and flower of the whole civilisation of a community and of an age.”
(Geddes 1915, p. 210)
First, while the supposition that cities are the locus of civilization may be seemingly true in
western and other paternalist civilizational contexts, nomadic civilizations belie the notion
that civilization must be rooted in the city. Civilization is better understood as rooted in the
worldview and associated philosophy that structure the potentials for thought, behavior and
conception of being in a given cultural order rather than as rooted the manifestations of
order produced therein (be that a city or of a nomadic community).
Second, what of a civilization and community of an age that is drawing humanity
(and all life on earth…) to the brink of extinction? Is the ‘true town plan’ to be derived from
this civilization and community or developed with an eye towards transformation of
civilization-community and amelioration of the problems that have been derived from our
present civilization-community? Ought the town plan to be a hegemonic summary of the
synthesis between local realties-spirit of the city and its wider civilizational context (the
worldview and associated philosophy of the civilization) or, alternatively, should it be a plan
that seeks to educate people in a new worldview and associated philosophy that provides
the potential for transcending the thoughts, behaviors and conceptions of being that have
lead our own civilization-community (and the rest of the world…) to the brink of
extinction?
Primary Sources
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Geddes and Thomson 1911, Evolution , London: Williams & Norgate.
Geddes 1915, Cities in Evolution, London: Williams & Norgate.
Geddes (1915) Cities in Evolution presents a vision of cities as evolutionary bodies drawn
along the evolutionary process by the ideals, technological potentials and environmental
contexts of the age and place. Within its more localized time-space context, Cities in
Evolution can be understood as seeking transcendence of the crude, utilitarian, wasteful,
717
economically and civically individualistic, dirty, dense, lifeless squalor of the paleotechnic
city-age of unsustainable, low-tech industrial production for the refined, romantic, artistic,
efficient, economically and civically communal, electric, hygienic, eugenic, living prosperity
that he sees as the potential of the coming neotechnic city-age of sustainable, high-tech
industrial production and garden cities-suburbs. As per planning theory and practice,
Geddes puts forward a vision in which the city is planned as a pedagogical tool, as a book
of philosophy with which to provide people with the civics education that is necessary for
citizenship (especially for the cooperative dimensions of citizenship that were so degraded
by the paleotechnic age) and thus for the evolution of society. Through this planning of
pedagogical cities Geddes seeks to produce a revolution of thought (and birth of a new
ideal therein) that makes it possible to leave behind the disenchanted, individualistic
materialism (which is itself viewed as an enchantment…) and ravaging social side effects of
the paleotechnic city-age and ‘think the that’ of the more communal, magical, romantic and
utopian potentials of the neotechnic age of garden cities and suburbs and high-technology
industrial production. Geddes vision did not come to fruition as the neotechnic age actually
saw the intensification of the disenchanted, materialistic, anti-intellectual, anti-artistic
utilitarianism Geddes sought to purge from our society through development of a
pedagogical lived environment of gardens and museums, and indeed his dreams proved
futile because their seemingly utopian (‘Eutopian’…) vision was rooted in the very same
assumptions about reason, order, nature and human-nature relations that begot the woes of
the paleotechnic age in the first place, but though his vision was in the end futile there is
still a great deal of wisdom for planning theory and practice to be derived from nomadic
conversation with Geddes.

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Geddes views on the hyper individualism (self-interest orientation) of paleotechnic economics and associated modes of civic
consciousness (or a lack thereof) should not be taken as an outright dismissal of individualism or of the individual scale. To the contrary,
Geddes clearly emphasizes the need for town and city planning to account for the individual character of localities in the planning
process. What Geddes is critiquing, then, is not individual character in and of itself but an individualistic approach to economics and
citizenship, an approach typified by the search for short-term personal gain rather than long term collective-civilizational gain, that
hampers Geddes vision of a more communal civic consciousness. In short, Geddes’ implication that an individual’s first duty is civic
rather than personal (or at least that the hyper focus on personal gain in the paleotechnic society impedes proper awakening of civic
consciousness and engagement with civic duty) does not by any means imply that Geddes is anti-individualistic in a more general sense
(indeed his notions about the occident’s natural conquest of the orient and fetishization of mythological characters like Hercules that
represent individual reason clearly belie such a reading). Geddes is critiquing the strain of individualism that sees “competition as the
essential factor of the progress of life” (Geddes 1915, p. 77) and the self-interested economic and social relations it produces rather than
individualism in a more general sense. Geddes is critiquing the form of individual survivalism that serves to degrade group survivalism
and to obfuscate the ontological dependence of individual survival on group survival. “[The German] …sees that civic efficiency and
well-being are also of the first importance; and that group-survival determines that of the individual far more than the older political
economy has ever realised.” (Geddes 1915, p. 184) Sadly, Geddes perverse view of communalism is communalism for the sake of the
national and the imperial rather than for the sake of humanity or, even better, consciousness.
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“What was needed [to respond to the social woes of the Industrial Revolution], Geddes suggested, following
John Ruskin’s lead, was to create a new way of thinking centered on the production and development, not of
goods, but of people.” (Meller 1993, p. 9)
In short, and drawing his thinking into conversation with more contemporary academic
norms, the central argument put forward by Geddes is that theory must by necessity
precede practice. Potentials for thought, behavior and conception of being are expanded
and constrained by worldview (i.e. theology, cosmology-ontology-teleology-etc.), and
potentials for behavior and conception of being are rooted in thought. One cannot act
freely or aptly conceive their own liberty if they cannot first think freely, and one cannot
think freely if they are not aware of and directing their own conceptions of worldview. True
freedom and the heights of human attainment lie in the silence beyond thought, but to
reach that silence in any sort of a consistent manner an individual must first actualize their
latent potential for free will and take the reigns of their own cognitive processes—taking the
reigns of one’s own cognitive processes (and thus of one’s behaviors and conceptions of
being) begins with taking agency in one’s own conception of worldview. Taking agency in
one’s own conception of worldview involves becoming aware of differences in potential
worldview, of the expanded and constrained potentials these differences impose upon
associated philosophies and of the expanded and constrained potentials for thought,
behavior and conception of being imposed by philosophy, and in the subsequent capacity
for rational, intuitive and rationally intuitive discernment of worldview (i.e. the capacity to
make an informed personal decision about the worldview, associated philosophy and
norms of thought, behavior and conception of being you hold to be true and bring to bear
in everyday life).
Amelioration of the social woes of the Industrial Revolution, from the crassly
individualistic search for wealth to slums, squalor and environmental degradation (‘wasted
energy’), must in this light be rooted problematization of the crudely mechanistic, utilitarian
worldview and associated philosophy that caused the imbalances of the Industrial
Revolution and in the cultivation of a new way of thinking (i.e. cultivation of a new
worldview and philosophy that renders new ways of thinking, and thus new ways of
behaving and conceiving of being, possible).
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knowledge was something which was open to question. As an evolutionist, Geddes was sympathetic to the
idea that knowledge could only come directly through intuition and not by the reasoned use of the intellect.
This was especially the case for a new cosmology since it had to supersede the bounds of all current
knowledge. To oversimplify grossly the view of the young evolutionists, it was believed that the creative
element of the human mind was the instinct. This was not just a matter of simple response but something
which could be developed with self-awareness. A creative instinct was actually intuition, an instinct developed
by self-awareness. The intellect was of a lower order and was used merely as a means of interpreting and
classifying what was already known….
Meller 1993, p. 14)
Leaving the arrogant materialism of Meller’s description of Geddes search for cosmology
and understanding of intuition as the highest form of human understanding aside (we
return to this later), it is Geddes view that worldview (cosmology-ontology-teleology-etc.)
and philosophy expand and constrain potentials for thought, behavior and conception of
being and that a revolution of worldview and philosophy must necessarily precede a
revolution of social practice. Indeed, it is safe to say that Geddes achieved his goal of
assisting in the process of cultivating a new philosophy of liberal, democratic imperialism
for the neotechnic age, a liberal conception of economic theology and civic duty that gives
primacy to scales of self like town, region, nation and civilization over the individual,
biological scale of self, but like so many of his liberal, democratic compatriots Geddes
failed to dig deep enough into worldview and the root of the problem that gave rise to the
social woes of the Industrial Revolution (and of Modernism and Paternalism more
generally). Geddes had not yet succumbed to the total reduction of epistemology to
material reason that would occur in later generations, and can therefore be said to exist
beyond the total disenchantment of Modernism (as is clear in his views on the relationship
between the aesthetic beauty of nature and the refinement of intuition through engagement
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with nature in the educational process), but his views on engagement with nature and the
refinement of intuition were clearly structured by the paternalist mythos of attainment
through herculean conquest and subsequent dominion.
Barnesmoore (2016b) provides a more holistic discussion, but for summary
purposes the following should suffice. Capital ‘r’ Reason (as opposed to lowercase ‘r’
material reason) is the process of knowing things via a process that begins with the simplest
and most universal things, the IS-FFC. Rational Intuition brings what is known by reason to
bear in a single movement of the mind. Rational knowledge of nature, then, would be
knowledge of nature that is derived via a process that begins with the simplest and most
universal attributes of nature (force, form and consciousness). Foucault’s model of
knowledge as resemblance in The Order of Things is illustrative. Resemblance of

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It should also be very clear to the reader that the notions concerning intuition as the highest potential of human epistemology that were
put forward by Geddes and the ‘young evolutionists’ were by no means new or novel as implied by Meller—on the contrary, this
perspective is very coherent with the conceptions of leisurely contemplation put forward by Pieper (2009) and the thinkers like Aquinas
he cites as well as the Daoist epistemology expounded by Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi.
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convenience is derived from a shared environment (force) of manifestation. Resemblance
of emulation is derived from being as an expression of the same infinite-eternal form.
Analogy allows us to view different forms manifest in the same environment to extract the
essence of environment and allows us to view the same form manifest in different
environments to become intimate with essence of force and form that is the simplest and
most universal attribute of nature. Sympathy and antipathy allow us to subsequently feel the
harmony (or lack thereof) of manifestation with the uncreated essence it reflects. In
summary, analogy allows us to become intimate with the essence of the forces, forms and
expressions of consciousness that is the simplest and most universal attribute of nature and
which must therefore be the foundation of rational knowledge of nature from our
experiences of and in nature--once we have attained the potential for Reason through
engagement with nature and subsequent intimacy with the force, form and consciousness of
nature we can begin the process of refining intuition by experiencing and interpreting the
world through the use of Reason (i.e. by seeing the world through a lens that is structured
by the simplest and most universal things, by the essence of things, which is to say by the
IS-FFC). Geddes mistake, understood within the context of this definition of reason,
Reason and Rational Intuition, comes in the ethos of attaining Reason via conquest and
dominion.
The essence of paternalist tradition’s domineering influence, as Geddes received it
through the Abrahamic and Hellenic traditions, went unproblematized. As per social
order, the basic assumption of the paternalist worldview that order is created through
hierarchies of domination goes unproblematized. As per human-nature relations, the same
notion that order is created through hierarchies of domination and the concomitant notion
that God gave Man dominion over earth goes unproblematized—the prefect order of nature
remains one in which nature and its powers are subservient to man. More essentially, the
notion of the occident conquering the orient, of reason conquering emotion-intuition (i.e.
reason conquering love), of the sun conquering the moon, of the masculine conquering the
feminine, of the light conquering the dark, of the active subsuming the latent, of Romulus
killing Remus, of Cain killing Able, of Hercules killing Iphicles, etc. remains
unproblematized.
Intuition is still remembered as the highest potential of human epistemology, and
engagement with the beauty (the order, the forms) of nature is still remembered as essential
for the process of attaining Reason and thus of refining Intuition, but the attainment of
reason and the beauty of nature are both understood in terms of conquest, dominion and
subservience. There is still a romantic call to the inherent beauty of nature and the
importance of such aesthetically pleasing environments for human development and
wellbeing, but the most aesthetically pleasing natural environments are clearly those which
have been brought into proper subservience to man like the garden and the dammed river
and the most appropriate modes of engagement with nature are those, like building a
garden or a dam, that serve to render nature as properly subservient to man. In summary,
Geddes does not succumb to many of the materialistic, rationally reductive problems of
disenchanted Modernity (wherein reality is reduced to manifestation and epistemology is
reduced to material reason), but he does succumb to privation, fear and the subsequent will
to dominate that has tainted western thought throughout the artificially contiguous history
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that it has fabricated for itself and does, as such, fail to dig deep enough into worldview
(cosmology-ontology-teleology-etc.) to produce a true revolution of thought, behavior and
conception of being.
I should probably have begun by saying that Sir. Patrick Geddes is a Paternalist, Eugenicist,
Colonialist, Zionist bast… man… and by staking out my opposition to these repugnant‘ist’
identities and the worldview-philosophy they embody. That being said, the issues of
Patriarchy, Modernism, Eugenics, Colonialism, Zionism, etc. have been treated in great
depth by other more talented historical scholars, and so we will only touch on these
perverse limitations to Geddes thought when absolutely necessary (as in his treatment of
the relationship between the Occident and the Orient and other such expressions of the
implicitly domineering quality of Geddes markedly Western-Modernist thought…) so that
we can focus on potential synergy with Geddes.
On to the points where there is a potential for cooperation with the form (if surely
not the substance) of Geddes planning theory and practice.
“Idealism and matter of fact are thus not sundered, but inseparable, as our daily steps are guided by ideals of
direction, themselves unreachably beyond the stars, yet indispensable to getting anywhere, save indeed
downwards.” (Geddes 1915, p. vii)
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“[Utopia] lies in the city around us; and it must be planned and realised, here or nowhere, by us as its
citizens each a citizen of both the actual and the ideal city seen increasingly as one.” (Geddes 1915, p. vii)
“But such homes, still less whole towns of them, cannot be made offhand by town planners. There must be
the effective demand, the revolution in thought…” (Geddes 1915, p. 143)
“The crude luxury is excused, nay, psychologically demanded, by the starvation of paleotechnic life in well-
nigh every vital element of beauty or spirituality known and valued by humanity hitherto….
Similarly, War and its preparations are explained, we may even say necessitated, by the accepted
philosophy and the social psychology of our paleotechnic cities, and particularly of the metropolitan ones. In
the first place, war is but a generalising of the current theory of competition as the essential factor of the
progress of life. For, if competition be, as we are told, the life of trade, competition must also be the trade of
life. What could the simple naturalists, like Darwin and his followers, do but believe this? and thence project
it upon Nature and upon human life with a new authority ! The paleotechnic philosophy is thus complete;
and trade competition, Nature competition, and war competition, in threefold unity, have not failed to reward
their worshippers. Thus the social mind, of the said cities especially, but thereafter of the whole nation they
influence, is becoming characterised and dominated by an ever-deepening state of diffused and habitual fear.”

719
Geddes term ‘Eutopia’, by which I assume he means a European Utopia, is far to vulgar for inclusion in this text, and so we replace it
with the term Utopia as there is still some wisdom to be gleaned from this statement if the European Coloniality is removed…
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(Geddes 1915, p. 76-77)
“…Our essential struggle for existence at present demands a view-point different from and larger than…”
(Geddes 1915, p. 82)
Geddes, then, to put his argument into terms amenable to contemporary social science
debates, is arguing that theory must necessarily precede practice (be it social practice or
planning practice) as theory expands and constrains our potential for practice.
(Barnesmoore 2017) Geddes hopes that the neotechnic age would ameliorate these
ideationally rooted problems obviously did not come to fruition, and indeed the
subsequent eras saw ‘crude luxury’ and ‘the theory of competition as the essential factor of
the progress of life’, the latter of which is an essential dictum of biomechanical conceptions
of evolution as Geddes so aptly notes, reach a materialistic, nihilistic apex that was likely
beyond imagination in Geddes time. It seems as though the solution to the limitations of
Geddes hopes are implicit in his statement that our ‘daily steps are guided by ideals of
direction’, but to restate this point it seems clear that the technological transformations and
subsequent transformations in the mode of industrial production observed by Geddes in
his description of the transition between the paleotechnic and neotechnic eras could not, in
and of themselves, have given rise to a new social order at the level of ideals—only
transformations of our ideals themselves can produce the changes of which Geddes
dreamed. Maybe the problem here lies in the banality of the essential ideal, that of order
being created through hierarchical domination, that was—along with a growing tide of
materialism (‘starvation of well-nigh every vital element of beauty or spirituality known to
and valued by humanity hitherto’)—giving rise to the problems of his era and so many
others (this banality comes as a result of the essential role the ideal of creating order
through hierarchical domination plays in both sides of the dialectical hegemonic conflict,
that between religion and science, that expands and constrains the potentials for thought,
behavior and conception of being in Modernity). Maybe the problem lies in the fact that
Geddes could not have imagined the decay of spiritual religion and ascendency of
materialism in scientific, secular religious and religious communities that has occurred in
the 100 years since Cities in Evolution was published. In any case, and though Geddes
dreams of a new tomorrow have been shattered (in the most part as a function of the
materialistic ideal that has guided the steps of the west over the past 100 years), there is
wisdom to be found in the basic form of Geddes argument that our ideals expand and
constrain our potential for action in the manifest world.
Geddes’ Cities in Evolution seeks to provide an introduction to city planning and
civics that expresses the essential harmony of the “reviving art of city planning” and the
“renewing science of civics”—civics and planning are to be “reunited in constructive
citizenship” so as to produce social renewal. (Geddes 1915, p. v) This reunion of the art of
planning and the science of civics is aimed at ameliorating the difficulties associated with
humanity’s industrial, social and political life and thereby allowing for the “general advance
to a higher plane of industrial civilisation.” (Geddes 1915, p. v) In short, Geddes is seeking
to reunite planning and civics in order to create a “civic uplift” that allows for the planning
and development of evolutionary (‘noospheric’) cities whose purpose is facilitation of
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humanity’s social evolution towards higher planes of existence. How are city planning and
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civics to be united in the evolutionary city?
“The civic awakening and the constructive effort are fully beginning, in healthy
upgrowth, capable not only of survival but of fuller cultivation also, towards varied flower
and fruit—flower in regional and civic literature and history, art, and science; fruit in social
renewal of tows and cities, small and great.” (Geddes 1915, p. v-vi) Geddes, then, can be
understood first and foremost as a social engineer who seeks bring history, art, and science
to bear in the development of cities so as to create a lived environment (a landscape) that
socializes the public into a homogenous (‘harmonious’) and cohesive social mind oriented
towards British conceptions of civics. Geddes’ attempts at engineering a cohesive social
mind through the use what Foucault would call domination of the body in order to
dominate the soul (i.e. his attempts to create a lived environment and regimes of daily
practice therein that set the body into rituals that transform the mind into a state that is
resonant with the hegemonic culture of British civilization), one that is ‘awakened’ to the
duties and rights of citizenship, is aimed at facilitation of human evolution at the
civilizational scale (i.e. “general advance to a higher plane of industrial civilisation”)
(Geddes 1915, p. v). Obviously we have long past the industrializing social context of
Geddes day in the western world, but it seems clear that the technique of social engineering
through the union of city planning and civics in order to create a public mind that is
oriented towards fulfillment of the presumed evolutionary telos of Modernist society
continues on in the present with, for example, the development of software applications
that seek to facilitate community participation (or at least a veneer of community
participation that allows citizens to feel and believe that they have agency and thus accept
their subjugation by neoliberal-capitalist-monarchical governance in Canada…) in the
planning process (PUT IN A CITATION FOR RALLIS/ SENBEL/ ETC.)
“Such renewal [of towns and cities through regional an civic literature and history, art, and science] involves
ever-increasing domestic and individual wellbeing, and these a productive efficiency, in which art may again
vitalise and orchestrate the industries, as of old.” (Geddes 1915, p. vi)
Ironically (given his paternalist nature as expressed in the mythos that the Occident should
subsume the Orient, which is to say that the rational mind should subsume the spiritual-
intuitive mind), Geddes clearly sets himself in opposition to the scientization and utter
rationalization of the planning process. Cities and towns should not be planned for purely
utilitarian, economic, ergonomic, etc. reasons and should instead be planned with an
artistic eye towards their role in socializing (‘civilizing’) the general public. The city or town
is “capable not only of [facilitating] survival but of fuller cultivation,” which is to say that the
city or town not only serves as shelter for our bodies but as the landscape (the Geography)
through which we learn our local, regional and civilizational Philosophy. Geddes recognizes
the reality that Geography, when our landscape/ lived environment becomes embedded
with “social and cultural knowledge and guidance—wisdom” (Herman 2008, p. 73), is

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As we shall see later, this comes in surveying (policing, surveilling) the city, in the development of museums that represent and narrate
the city and its wider civilizational context, the unification of the university and the city, the development of a civic center to act as a
centralized place for this unification of the university and the city in spaces like ‘the museum’, etc.
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Philosophy and that the planning process is akin to writing a book of philosophy. In
Geddes vision, then, we ought undertake the planning process in cities and towns as though
we were writing a book of social, civic philosophy. While there are a range of paternalist-
colonialist problems with the socio-civic philosophy Geddes sought to write through the
planning process, and while there is a problem with the notion of our actively writing a
socio-civic philosophy of city and town landscapes rather than allowing the natural
landscape (our natural geography) to form the philosophical narrative, the basic ethos of
planning as philosophy, of planning as a process of writing a philosophical treaties into our
lived environment, could be fructified by pursuing it within a worldview in which order is as
opposed to the Modernist worldview where order is to be created.
As Ouspensky (1950) so aptly notes, humans evolve first and foremost in a mental-
emotional (epistemological process) rather than biological process. We have transcended
mechanical evolution for conscious evolution, and as a result our evolutionary process (or
devolutionary process…) is tied to the direction of will towards new ideas. Geddes planning
model seems sensitive to the general notion that human evolution, at least on the social,
local, regional, civilizational, etc. levels, is an essentially epistemological process and
therefore views writing the city as a book of social-civic philosophy as essential for drawing
the city into our conscious, evolutionary process.
Returning to the ‘Concrete’ by Escaping the Concrete Jungle
“Aristotle the founder of civic studies, as of so many others wisely insisted upon the importance, not only of
comparing city constitutions (as he did, a hundred and sixty-three of them), but of seeing our city with our
own eyes. He urged that our view be truly synoptic, a word which had not then become abstract, but was
vividly concrete, as its make-up shows: a seeing of the city, and this as a whole…” (Geddes 1915, p. 13)
“Large views in the abstract, Aristotle knew and thus compressedly said, depend upon large views in the
concrete. Forgetting thus to base them is the weakness which has so constantly ruined the philosopher…”
(Geddes 1915, p. 15)
Ironically, if we wish to return to the concrete in modernity it means first escaping its
concrete jungles and returning to a synoptic (interdisciplinary) view of nature and our
location therein. Philosophy is bound and constrained by Theology, by our theories and
worldview to take up the Modern parlance, and so the Philosophical project must be
preceded by the abstract (in the unmanifest) with a theory of reality and its first cause, but
the Philosophical project itself must begin from the manifest world of our everyday
experiences (what Geddes again ironically calls ‘the concrete’). We agree that we must,
after giving proper attention to our theology-worldview, begin a Philosophy of City from a
synoptic (interdisciplinary) view of the concrete reality in a given city, but before we can
pursue this Philosophy of City we must first take a much wider synoptic (interdisciplinary)
view of the natural reality in which said city exists. We must pursue Philosophy of City
from a synoptic (interdisciplinary) perspective of the city’s concrete reality, but to know this
concrete reality we must first develop a synoptic (interdisciplinary) perspective of the
natural reality in which the concrete has been poured (i.e. where the concrete reality of the
city can be understood as primarily active [as force], the natural reality of the environment
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in which the city is built can be understood as primarily passive [as form]).
“Yet "practical politicians" as they all alike claim to be, to us students of cities they seem alike unpractical,
unreal; since unobservant, that is ignorant, of this concrete geographical world around them, uninterested in
it.” (Geddes 1915, p. 19)
In short, philosophy must be grounded in the manifest reality in which it is pursued. To

put forward philosophical theories without grounding in manifest reality is to slide into the
sphere of purely subjective (and thus nihilistic) thought. That being said, the question is:
‘why must we root our philosophy in the manifest reality it seeks to describe?’ Is this
because the manifest reality is the only reality (all be it one devoid of inherent value) and
therefore the only standard, when taken with the subjective layering of meaning we have
plastered upon it, from which we can derive philosophical truth? Or, rather, is it because
manifest reality has an inherent value-meaning derived from its relationship to the
unmanifest world (to IS-FFC)? Must we root our philosophy in history and geography
because passing time and physical space are the only dimensions of reality, or must we root
our philosophy in history and geography because the manifest world has an inherent, all be
it relative, value that is derived from its resonance with the unmanifest world? Is there an
inherent wisdom in the landscapes we inhabit, an inherent wisdom in the force, forms and
consciousness of nature, or is that natural world simply the only world and thus a necessary
basis for philosophy that cannot transcend the limitations of subjectivity? As should be
clear, we come down on the latter side of these questions, but contemplation is the only
means by which an individual can truly come to understand the answer to these questions.
The Spirit of the City
“…We must… above all things, seek to enter into the spirit of our city, its historic essence and continuous life.
Our design will thus express, stimulate, and develop its highest possibility, and so deal all the more effectively
with its material and fundamental needs.” (Geddes 1915, p. vi)
As is also true with people, Geddes is arguing that we must know the soul of a city (both in
its unmanifest essence and its manifest life) if we are to effectively treat with the material
needs of its body. The being of the city, like human being, is more fundamentally tied to its
soul than it is to its body, and as a result one cannot aptly serve the material needs of the
city’s body without reference to the qualities of its soul. Cities, like humans, should be
understood as a body that evolves through the process of conscious rather than mechanical
evolution.
“We cannot too fully survey and interpret the city for which we are to plan survey it at its highest in past, in
present, and above all, since planning is the problem, foresee its opening future. Its civic character, its
collective soul, thus in some measure discerned and entered into, its active daily life may be more fully
touched, and its economic efficiency more vitally stimulated.” (Geddes 1915, p. vi-vii)
Soul of our Civilization
“If the soul of our civilization is to be saved we shall have to find new and fuller expression for the great
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saving unities — the unity of reality in all its range, the unity of life in all its form, the unity of ideas throughout
human civilization, and the unity of the human’s spirit with the mysteries of the Cosmos … evolution is
nothing but the gradual development and stratification of progressive series of wholes, stretching from the
inorganic beginnings to the highest levels of spiritual creation … the old fixed concepts and contours of
thought are breaking down … Holism is a process of creative synthesis; the resulting wholes are not static, but
dynamic, evolutionary, and creative. …We are out of the bonds of the old crude mechanical ideas, and we
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enter an altogether new zone of ideas and categories.” (Smuts in Thomson and Geddes 1931)
Geddes the Futurist

Throughout his 1915 Cities in Evolution, Geddes makes it clear that our study of cities as
evolutionary objects must include not only historical and contemporary analyses but also
analyses of likely futures.
“In short, then, to decipher the origins of cities in the past, and to unravel their life-processes in the present,
are not only legitimate and attractive inquiries, but indispensable ones for every student of civics whether he
would visit and interpret world-cities, or sit quietly by his window at home. But as the agriculturist, besides his
interest in the past pedigrees and present condition of his stock and crops, must not, on pain of ruin, lose
sight of his active preparation for next season, but value these studies as he can apply them towards this, so it
is with the citizen. For him surely, of all men, evolution is most plainly, swiftly in progress, most manifest, yet
most mysterious. …Within this labyrinthine civicomplex there are no mere spectators. Blind or seeing,
inventive or unthinking, joyous or unwilling each has still to weave in, ill or well, and for worse if not for
better, the whole thread of his life.” (Geddes 1915, p. 4-5)
The purpose of studying the past and the present, then, is to allow us to better plan for the
future. Though there are some obvious and essential distinctions between Geddes critical
view of nature as tended by the agriculturalist (‘who was given dominion over earth by God’
and who pursues stewardship of nature for the sake of material survival and economic
profit…) and Indigenous perspectives on humanity’s stewardship of nature, the basic idea of
studying the past and present so as to plan for the future is coherent with the
“Haudenosaunee philosophy that all major decisions of a nation must be based on a
mindfulness of seven generations.” (Herman 2008, p. 77) Sadly, Geddes economic
theological (capitalist) framework for understanding humanity’s social existence—a
framework aptly embodied in his argument that “…[The] physiology of social man is, or
should be, Economics” (Geddes 1915, p. 3)—likely negates the potential for such long-
term, seventh-generational thought and necessitates that our plans for the future are short-
term initiatives for individual gain. There is also a shred of wisdom remaining in Geddes
attempts to use nature (all be it nature as dominated by man, thus ‘a shred’…) to symbolize
the proper function of the citizen. Limitations and wisdom aside, it cannot be denied that
the planners work is rooted in understanding past, present and potential futures in order to

721
Jan Christian Smuts, in Thomson and Geddes 1931, Life: Outlines of General Biology, New York and London: Harper &
Brothers, pp.1114–1116. https://archive.org/details/lifeoutlinesofge001863mbp
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thus plan a city (i.e. to thus write a book of philosophy) that promotes an ideal that can
guide our steps through everyday life towards the future we desire to create. We must
embed the city, and indeed the whole of our lived environment/ landscape, with a
philosophy whose ideal draws us inexorably towards the future we hope to inhabit. We
must embed the city, our book of philosophy, with a mythos whose story culminates in the
future we desire to inhabit. We must write our city as a book of philosophy that captures
our utopian ideals. We must, in short, study the past and present so as to write the future
into the book of philosophy that forms our lived environment. The seed of our desired
evolutionary trajectory must be planted in the soil of our lived environment and cultivated
to flower and fruit.
The Worldview of Total Work in Geddes
“…[The] physiology of social man is, or should be, Economics” (Geddes 1915, p. 3)
“Place, work, and folk—environment, function, and organism—are thus no longer viewed apart, but as the
elements of a single process—that of healthy life for the community and the individual.” (Geddes 1915, p.
198)
their vigorous labours, we shall next make of him a veritable Hercules .” (Geddes 1915, p. 99)
722
“Thus before long our constructive activities would soon penetrate into the older existing town, and with
energies Herculean indeed .” (Geddes 1915, pp. 101-102)
Physiology is “the branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living
723
organisms and their parts. The way in which a living organism or bodily part function.”
Geddes vision of humanity is clearly located within the world(view) of total work described
724
by Pieper (2009). “The normal function of the human organism and its parts” “is, or
should be, Economics.” (Geddes 1915, p. 3) Work is synonymous with function as
pertains to the human organism. (Geddes 1915, p. 198) Virtue comes as a function of
Herculean labors. (Geddes 1915, p. 99) Social Evolution comes as a function of Herculean
energies. (Geddes 1915, p. 101-102) Sufficient engagement with our above conversation
with Pieper (2009) should of course already make this point clear, but the reduction of
human life to labor implicit in such statements actively negates a “healthy life for the
community and the individual” (Geddes 1915, p. 198) because it divides humanity from
the unmanifest world by which life, meaning, joy, beauty, love, etc. (i.e. the good life) are
derived. Obviously, as is all but always true with the relationship between an individual and
such regimes of worldview, thought, behavior and conception of being, Geddes exists
within the spectrum of the worldview of total work rather than as the archetypal expression
of this worldview—he still has sensitivity to the importance of education, art and nature, but
in each case the importance seems to come in facilitation of health and wellbeing that

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Emphasis Added
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Google Dictionary
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Google Dictionary
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allows humans to fulfill their central function, work. “Electric, hygienic, eugenic!” (Geddes
1915, p. 148), civic community rather than material individualism, and all for the sake of
creating a lived environment in which humans can better fulfill their function, work.
“At home we have our historians absorbed in the past, our business men in the present, our Utopians in the
future; but each is as yet isolated in his own aspect of the moving world. Whereas, to see that your German
burgomaster or councillor, official or citizen, is much of all these three rolled into one—that I take to be one
of the best and most needed lessons of such a journey…” (Geddes 1915, p. 214)
Geddes’ Post-Positivism
“…Town planning is not something which can be done from above, on general principles easily laid down,
which can be learned in one place and imitated in another. It is the development of a local life, a regional
character, a civic spirit, a unique individuality, capable of course of growth and expansion, of improvement
and development in many ways, of profiting too by the example and criticism of others, yet always in its own
way and upon its own foundations. Thus the renewed art of Town Planning has to develop into an art yet
higher, that of City Design—a veritable orchestration of all the arts, and correspondingly needing, even for its
preliminary surveys, all the social sciences. Here, then, is the problem before us on our return to survey our
modern towns, our ancient cities anew, to decipher their origins and trace their growth, to preserve their
surviving memorials and to continue all that is vital in their local life; and on this historic foundation, and on a
corresponding survey and constructive criticism of our actual present, go forward to plan out a bettering
future with such individual and collective foresight as we may.” (Geddes 1915, p. 205)
Geddes reminder that we must account for local contexts rather than simply attempting to
impose a single model in multiple spaces without regard for their local contexts is
reminiscent of a great number of subsequent studies. Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like a State
illustrates the limitations of attempts to impose static agricultural models without regard to
local contexts like soil and weather in the broader modernist project. Ferguson’s (1990)
The Anti-Politics Machine similarly traces the failure of USAID agricultural programs in
Lesotho to the use of an agricultural model that was designed for Senegal. In a different
725
though similar vein, Aihwa Ong (2007) brings this model of thinking to bear upon studies
of neoliberalism by arguing that the conceptual models we have developed to understand
neoliberalism in the west cannot be unproblematically applied to eastern contexts. David
Ley (2014) makes a similar argument in positing that the term gentrification cannot be aptly
divorced from its Anglo-American heartland” and applied “to the cities of Asia Pacific”.

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“Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology”
384

Geddes, Patrick (1947). "Town Planning in Kapurthala. A Report to H.H. the Maharaja of
Kapurthala, 1917". In Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. Patrick Geddes in India. London: Lund
Humphries.
Geddes, Patrick: “Letter to an Indian Friend”
Geddes, Patrick, The Masque of Learning.
Secondary Sources
Noah Hysler Rubin 2009, “Patrick Geddes and Town Planning: A Critical View” Planning
Perspectives 24(3)
Noah Hysler-Rubin 2013, Patrick Geddes and Town Planning: A Critical View, Routledge.
Mysticism in Geddes
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Meller 1993, p. 14)
“…On par with Geddes, the American Albion W. Small… was to become the first professor of sociology at
the University of Chicago in 1892. In his approach to the subject, Professor Small shared a similar sense of
personal commitment to social service and had an idealism based on mystical experiences. Like Geddes, he
was to define his mysticism as part of the reality of human experience, with its roots firmly in this world.”
(Meller 1993, p. 15)
“[Geddes] also seems to have had a propensity for what has more recently been described as ‘vision-
logic’ thinking, a quite advanced level/form of thinking even now. It can appear to be associated
with forms of mysticism, that are often located in Eastern meditative traditions. Geddes did have
exposure to Hindu influences while in India, but there are no indications that he processed these in
depth. It seems more likely that he mostly absorbed an early stage of Western mysticism–beyond
faith, beyond religion, identified by Evelyn Underhill (1915) as ‘nature mysticism’ (‘a lateral
726
expansion of consciousness to embrace the stream of life’).” (Wight 2015, p. 11)
Taken together, we can see that Geddes was what we might call a natural mystic. The
heights of human potential are understood as existing in the silence of intuition that exists
beyond the bounds of the rational mind, and the process of refining instinct into intuition
occurs at least in part through mystical experiences—experiences beyond the veil of our
sensory, spatiotemporal perceptions of the world—that occur in nature and cause what is
aptly described by Underhill above as “a lateral expansion of consciousness to embrace the
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stream of life”, which is to say the expansion of consciousness beyond the seeming
discreetness of the rational mind into the underlying unity of being and associated
understandings that can be reached through the intuition (which can be understood as the
epistemological perspective of the infinite aspect of self).
“For the individual—the Celt especially—drunkenness is times without number a perversion of mysticism. For
the community—Scottish especially—it is the nemesis of the repression at one time by asectic puritan, or at
another by mammonist utilitarian, of the natural joy, the Dionysiac ecstasy of life.” (Geddes 1915, p. 211)
“It is much for the lovers of the past that historic memories and associations are not, as with us, forgotten, or
sneered at as sentimental if revived, but are known and valued as the spiritual heritage of the community…”
(Geddes 1915, p. 214)
“It is a mental illumination, too, for our ‘practical man’ to see not only education and health held in higher
esteem than with ourselves, but natural beauty preserved, developed, rendered accessible to all, from river-
front to mountain-forest ; to see, too, that art is not something outside everyday life, something ‘unpractical,’
at best to be grudgingly supplied in schools as a reputed aid towards the design of marketable commodities;
but something to be viewed and treated as a worthy and social end in itself… …It is the most useful of

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Ian Wight 2015, The Evolutionary Spirit at Work in Patrick Geddes, Geddes Institute for Urban Research University of Dundee, p.
11
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Underhill, Evelyn 1915 Practical Mysticism. E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., New York (Doveredition, 2000; Dover Publications: Mineola,
NY)
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experiences to see civic greatness estimated in more spiritual elements, and public wealth more applied than
with ourselves towards creating an environment of material beauty and general well-being.” (Geddes 1915,
pp. 214-215)
“A worthy metropolitan city has always been realised as a main national or imperial asset ; and sometimes
also, as in Athens of old and again to-day (and of course supremely in the case of Jerusalem), as a centre of
racial unity, and accordingly of spiritual appeal, in ways far exceeding boundaries and frontiers.” (Geddes
1915, p. 228)
Dare I ask… What is the relationship between racial unity and spiritual appeal?
“Thus appeared the great International Exhibition of 1851, so that its Crystal Palace remains to this day, and
has been rightly preserved from recent danger of destruction, as the monument of not only the material
uplift, but the spiritual culmination of the paleotechnic order at its very highest.” (Geddes 1915, p. 247)
Mystic?
“We have got beyond the abstract sociology of the schools—Positivist, Socialist, or other—with their vague
discussion of ‘Society’ and its ‘Members,’ since we have reached the definite conception in which all these
schools have been lacking—that of Cities and Citizens. Thus our corporate government, and our individual
energies, find opening before them no mere remote and deputed activities, but a vast yet definite field of
observation and action; and these capable of expression more vivid, of notation more definite, than even
speech or writing; to wit, the surveyor's maps and relief models, the architect's plans. Towards this extension
and renascence of the city, this enlarging life-scope of the citizen, our Town Planning Exhibition and its
Congress appear, as the appropriate educative agencies of citizenship. Throughout the length and breadth of
the land these are beginning to arouse city and citizen from their long torpor; and to bring a new
concreteness, a fresh possibility of research and discovery to the still half-metaphysical social sciences; and
they are appealing to the press and through it to politicians of all parties, to women of all camps.” (Geddes
1915, p. 252-253)
Are we not half-metaphysical beings? Is society not at the very least a half-metaphysical
reality? I am not sure how to square the circle on Geddes more mystical views on nature
and natural beauty and his rather materialistic views on social science, his vision of refining
instinct into intuition through engagement with nature and his clear drive towards increased
quantification and mapping in the social sciences, but my intuitive mind points to Geddes
accepted mythos of the relationship between the occident and the orient (wherein the
active principle of the occident must necessarily subsume the latent principle of the orient).
The highest form of intuition in many western schemas, as we have seen, is the rational
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intuition, and rational intuition is attained in these schemas through the subjugation of
intuition by reason and, or by reason (prince) saving intuition (princess) through slaying the
beast (egoic instinct). Intuition may be the highest form of knowing, but it is to be attained
through its own conquest by reason. Geddes may have been inspired by Natural Mysticism,
but in his vision it was but a primitive, oriental model of human cultivation that must by
necessity be subsumed in the perpetual conquest of environment by the rational mind.
Eastern Philosophy In Geddes
(Meller 1993, p. 15)

“Although Geddes’ model was taken from the Occidental civilization, he nevertheless claimed that it is
‘deeply interwoven with that of the Orient.’ However, in opposition to the ever-evolving, ever-improving,
Western civilization, Gedddes characterized the Eastern ones as traditional, agriculturalist and rather
primitive, and portraying hardly any development. The main contact points of those with the Western
civilization were described as the primal, initial stage, at which point they have contributed important notions
such as spiritualism, faiths and religious hopes. Representing several Eastern cultures, India is described as an
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empire of ‘vast philosophies and comprehensive symbolisms.”
“Geddes’ idea of a modern Indian university was clearly a Western one. Describing the requirements of the
university and a regional research center ‘to an Indian friend’ in 1903, Geddes claimed: ‘This whole
construction expresses both these aspects of the Western mind, which are becoming interesting and
suggestive to the Eastern one.’ He believed that the new Indian university should be based upon his global
suggestions for educational reconstruction, advocating similar methods in the name of modernization and
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Europeanization.”

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Noah Hysler-Rubin 2013, Patrick Geddes and Town Planning: A Critical View, Routledge, p. 46
729
Noah Hysler-Rubin 2013, Patrick Geddes and Town Planning: A Critical View, Routledge, p. 99.
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“In his ‘letter to an Indian friend’ Geddes elaborated upon the unity of Occident and Orient as well as on
their differences, foreshadowing ‘that ever completer philosophy which is the united problem of humanity to
attain;” …For Geddes, the West accentuated the individuality of the moment, while the East was collective
and enduring. The Tower is merited for providing ‘the long perspective headed by the ever-continued
ancestral past, followed by the unborn future…’; yet ‘may not our activity in turn recall him to an intensive
grasp of life?’ Similarly, the West was scientific, holding practical applications; the Tower, being westernly
practical, expressed ‘our eager ambition of knowing and doing in the concrete world; our spirit of self
assertion and self-realisation therefore.’ The Orient is spiritual, being more related to thought and to feeling,
traits which the West should nevertheless aspire for. The East is also closer to its constituting mythologies:
‘As we descend we see developing a deeper spirit than that of our ever-winding scientific survey…a view
expressed in two of our noblest Western myths, Greek and Medieval;’ The interchange between East and
West is embodied in the Tower. Thus, Geddes concludes: ‘I now see it no longer as a resultant and an
expression of our Western sociology and our practical economics, not even of our philosophy and of our
morals, but as a meeting-place with Eastern thought as well. It remains a Western observatory and laboratory,
yet it has an Eastern cloister; it is an outlook, yet a minaret; designed as teaching and guiding lighthouse, it
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also has a place for an altar of the Sacred Fire.’”
Setting the historical incongruities aside (where many of the most influential technological
developments in the west came from China…), Geddes engagement with eastern
philosophy and the relationship between the Occident and the Orient provides an
archetypal archeological moment in which to observe the influence of the material-rational
brother slaying the spiritual-intuitive brother myth that forms the foundation of western
civilization upon norms of thought, behavior and conception of being in said western
civilization (i.e the influence of western myth and its implicit worldview upon western
norms of thought, behavior and conception of being).. Though Geddes does not deny the
importance of the Orient (the Eternal-Infinite) and indeed sees the Occident and the
Orient as mutually constitutive, he seems to fall into the trap of equating technical
development, the development of factual knowledge, the increased material utility of a
civilization, etc. with social evolution (which must begin with our relationship to the Orient)
and therefore sees the west as more developed than the east. In short, Geddes falls into the
trap of the brother representing material reason slaying the brother representing spiritual
intuition that forms the mythological foundation of western society—the spiritual-intuitive
side of our being is only a primitive, undeveloped form that should in the end be
dominated by reason. He forgets that to attain a true understanding of things we must see
from both the finite and the infinite perspectives without one interfering with the other
(surely without reason dominating the intuition). Once we realize that we cannot reach the
summit of the mountain using reason, which is to say when we reach the moment when
Faust realizes that knowledge of all the things in the world cannot give true meaning to his
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life, we must descend into the dark, roots of the mountain to find the spiral staircase that
leads from its lowest point (0, the void) to its highest point (1, the infinite). As the Daoists
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say, the climax of motion is stillness, and the climax of stillness is motion. Because of his
amnesia, Geddes falls into the sinister notion that material-reason should be guided by the

730
731
Goethe, Faust
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The Way of the Golden Flower, trans. Thomas Cleary.
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will to dominate and subsume the spiritual-intuition, that development is the conquest of
the intuitive by the rational, of the undeveloped by the developed, and in so doing he
perverts and distorts the mutually constitutive nature of the Occident (finite) and the Orient
(infinite), which again are to act in consort without one interfering with (conquering) the
other. The colonialism of the Paternalist tradition (which we might note spreads through all
of the civilizations touched by the Indo-Aryan tradition in both the East and West…)
perverts Geddes understandings of community, cooperation, communication, mutual-
constitution, epistemology, love, etc. because he assumes that union means domination and
subsumption of one polarity by another rather than a co-existent harmony between the two
as can be found in the Indigenous Worldview—the essence of the simple farmer from Song
who pulled on the sprouts to make them grow and killed them is clearly displayed in
Geddes understanding of ‘unity’.
Evolution of Deserts, a Cosmic Process
“We cannot enter here upon the difficult and still unsettled question of how far this evolution of deserts is a
cosmic process, destined sooner or later to bring the world into the condition upon which Mr Percival Lowell
so vividly insists for Mars. There is also much reason for the view that this desiccating process has been due,
if not to the neglect of man, at any rate largely aided by this; largely, too, to the mischiefs of ages of war, in
destroying irrigation- works and terraces everywhere, of which the vestiges are far more important and
conspicuous survivals of antiquity than even are the temples and palaces our archaeologists explore. Far
beyond wilful destruction of irrigation-works is their wastage, through that mingling of material neglect and
fiscal extortion, to which the decline of the vast Turkish Empire, and with it the Persian also, is so largely
traceable. It is not necessary here to inquire how far this is due to the ignorance of pastoral and military
conquerors like the Turks, and how far to that passive acceptance of the practical unmodifiability of the
Arabian desert, which has been so decisively expressed in the philosophy and the faith of Islam. The reason
for referring to such apparently far-away matters will become clear if they help us to reflect how far our own
particular racial origins and regional experience, our lack of experience also, and how far our particular
established philosophy and its corresponding popular beliefs, may likewise interfere with our needed
industrial and social modernisation.” (Geddes 1915, p. 56)
There is a lot packed into this single paragraph! To begin with the scraps of wisdom that
can be found in this statement, the notion that deserts evolve as an expression of the same
forms as those through which human consciousness expresses itself. As above, so below.
Exile from the perfection of the infinite through manifestation in the finite is symbolized by
a journey in exile through the desert in the Abrahamic mythos, and the expansion of
deserts is thereby understood as a function of our lack of care (care which ought to be
derived from intimacy with the divine and recognition of our ‘dominion over earth’) in
tending the earth. The irrigation systems that had pushed back the desert (had dominated
its natural order to create an order that is desirable for humans) are viewed as the practices
by which we return to intimacy with the divine, and their destruction is viewed as the
division from the infinite symbolized by the desert. There are of course limitations to
Geddes natural metaphor derived from both the perversions of the paternalist tradition,
from his own Christian exceptionalism and from a limited scientific understanding of
deserts and their role in the perpetual transformations of terrestrial nature, but the form of
thought itself—in viewing the humanity’s evolution through a lens formed by the forms of
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nature’s evolution and viewing nature’s evolution through a lens formed by the forms of
humanity’s evolution—allows us to understand humanity and nature in a more intimate and
essential manner (i.e. in terms of invisible essence rather than visible appearance). The
metaphor is already tainted by anti-nomadic notions of creating order in nature through
domination and legitimating this domination by saying that God has given Man dominion
over earth, and as a result we have an artificial order embedded in the natural metaphor,
but were we to take the natural evolution of deserts in their global environmental context
and compare the forms of global desert evolution with the forms of our own psychological
evolution we would return to the nomadic path.
Geddes and Zionism
“Working in Palestine, Geddes constantly expressed his admiration of the Zionist society,
picturing its recent homecoming as the reinstatement of a biblican entity in the Holy Land
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and assigning it the ancient role of a regional leader amongst its neighboring countries.”
Conveying Meaning in Language

We may be leaving the path of this present exploration with this quick note, but Meller’s
rationally reductive understanding of Geddes philosophy of nature (the rest is described as
‘romantic’ in the pejorative sense this term has taken in Modernity) is clearly rooted in the
‘stark impossibility of thinking that’ and very aptly characterizes the abject poverty and
perversion of Modernist linguistic theory and philosophy more generally…. (Foucault, The
Order of Things) Meller’s absurdly (even disgustingly when taken from the perspective of
human dignity…) dogmatic characterization of Geddes writing style is illustrative…
“Geddes view of himself as an outsider did nothing to help him develop a style of writing which was readily
comprehensible. He was almost incapable of writing simple prose. He shared with many pioneer sociologists
an unsureness of touch when it came to expressing his ideas. C. Wright Mills has made some interesting
comments on language style and the pioneer sociologists. He suggests,
Lack of readily intelligibility has little or nothing to do with the complexity of subject matter and
nothing at all to do with the profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain
confusions of the academic writer about his own status.
Those that write in readable prose recognize themselves as ‘a voice’, and assume that they are speaking to an
educated and wide-ranging public. Those who recognize themselves as a voice, but are less sure of their
audience, develop tendencies towards a lack of intelligibility in their prose style. If they feel they are less ‘a
voice’, and more the agent of some impersonal sound, then the style becomes a formula, and the public, if
one is found, will be disciples of the cult.” (Meller 1993, pp. 7-8)
At least part of my gut-wrenching aversion to this ‘perspective’ is surely rooted in the

simpering manner in which a certain Dr. David Ley (‘the reverend’) recapitulated this

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‘perspective’ at me in a graduate seminar, and so I hope that Dr. Meller will not be overly
offended by my colorful use of adjectives in this section… The primary assumption implicit
in this statement is that a functional relationship (a 1=1 relationship) exists between
language and meaning. All ideas, be they of the manifest or the unmanifest world, can be
perfectly expressed in language. The entire meaning of an idea can be inscribed in words. I
have written a number of articles addressing this assumption within the context of language
analysis software (Miratrix et. al. 2014; Barnesmoore et. al. 2015; Barnesmoore and Huang
2015), but to put the argument into simple, metaphorical terms linguistic meaning (which
inculcates the context of the individual, the context in which the individual is using
language, the non-linear dimensional quality of consciousness, etc.) ought to be understood
as a three (or more…) dimensional object and language itself must be understood as a two
dimensional plane upon which we are attempting to inscribe meaning (like drawing a
sphere, or a moving sphere, on a piece of paper)—something is by necessity lost in the
process of inscribing consciousness in language. Another issue of dimensionality arises in
of the fact that language is of an essentially finite dimensional quality and ideas, especially
those that relate to the unmanifest world, are of an essentially infinite dimensional quality—
as the prefect circle can never be perfectly captured in the finite dimensional quality of
manifestation and must exist in ideational space, so too do can ideas (again especially those
that relate to the unmanifest world) never be perfectly captured in the finite dimensional
quality of language; they are dimensionally incommensurable. (Ouspensky, Tertium
Organum) It is thus that all traditions other than Modernism attempt to express ideas,
especially those concerning the unmanifest world, in symbolic rather than analytic terms
(Corbin 1960) that allow an image or story to become a locus for the silent understandings
of the rational intuition and other post-rational human epistemological potentials and thus
free us from the fetters of finite knowledge. In this light, the profundity of an idea (which is
articulated by an ideas intimacy with the IS-FFC) is indeed an essential determinate of
reader intelligibility. So too is the complexity of an idea (though we might invert this and
say that the more simple an idea, when simplicity is understood in properly dimensional
terms, the harder it is to convey in language).
Let us cede some ground to Meller and Mills through Foucault’s notion of ‘the
stark impossibility of thinking that’. Ones identity as an outlier—as other in relationship to
the hegemonic worldview, associated philosophies and linguistic meanings of the day—does
indeed play a prominent role in the potential for an author to express ideas in a manner
that is readily accessible to the general public of that day. That being said, this effect comes
as a function of the ability to utilize the commonsensical symbolic meanings of a given
culture rather than ‘confusions of the academic writer about his own status’. Indeed, it is
not that the writer is confused about their own status, but that they properly understand
their own status. As there is no functional relationship between language and meaning and
as a living, non-linear network of invisible epistemic processes (as opposed to the visible
epistemic processes of what we know as the ‘objective mind’ of our sensory experiences in
manifestation)—a network established by the hegemonic worldview and associated
philosophies of the day—therefore articulates the received meaning of language, it is
impossible to communicate meanings that are incommensurable with the worldview and
associated philosophies of the day through the conventional use of language established by
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cultures and societies that are produced by said worldview and associated philosophies of
the day.
The ‘cult’ referred to by Meller is nothing more or less than a group of people who
have achieved the capacity to express thoughts, ideas, feelings, meanings, etc. that exist
beyond the potentials of a hegemonic worldview and its associated philosophies by
reconstituting language from a new worldview and associated philosophy (and which are
starkly impossible to think for those who are still fettered by hegemonic linguistic
meanings). The term cult, ironically as appropriately, is used to pejoratively describe those
who do not think in hegemonic terms (in terms where language takes on its hegemonic
meaning). You say love, and I say love, but we mean very different things if your worldview
and associated philosophy are of a paternalist nature—for the paternalist the term love
implies domination, the husband and the wife, god and man, the master and the slave, the
punisher and the punished, a hierarchical relationship, whereas love in my worldview and
associated philosophy connotes a transcendence of the illusion of self and other that
negates the potential for such hierarchical relations. The intelligibility of writing, then,
comes in the familiarity of the reader with the worldview, associated philosophies and
symbols of the writer rather than in the writer’s proper understanding of their own identity
or subsequent ‘sureness of touch in expressing ideas’… Either the writer is speaking to an
already existent audience, in which case their writing will be as intelligible as it is
hegemonic, or the writer is speaking with the purpose of creating a new audience, in which
case their writing will by necessity be unintelligible. In both cases, the question is not
whether the writing is intelligible or not but whether the audience is familiar with the
symbolic meaning and associated invisible epistemological networks in which the writer’s
language is being expressed.
Linguistic meaning is, first and foremost, rooted in the symbolic meanings we
associate with language rather than language itself. Symbolic meaning is, first and foremost,
rooted in the worldview and associated philosophy of the subject. Intelligibility is, first and
foremost, rooted in the reader rather than the writer. Intelligibility and the inability to put
profound and simple ideas into writing are, in short, functions of the actual nature of
language and its relationship to linguistic meaning, worldview and associated philosophy
rather than confusion concerning the nature of the writer’s status. Indeed, one must have a
very confused understanding of language, linguistic meaning, worldview and associated
philosophy indeed to make the arguments put forward by Meller, Mills and Ley…
“It was Proust who said ‘masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.’ That is the same as
stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in
one's own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one's own. To be bilingual,
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multilingual, but in one and the same language, without even a dialect or patois.”
Masterpieces—which are known as such because they initiate readers into a new way of
thinking, behaving and conceiving of being, which is to say into a new state of being—are
written in a foreign version of one’s own language because they must first destabilize the

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invisible, commonsensical layer of symbolic meaning associated with hegemonic use of the
language before linguistic meaning can be transformed and language can be revitalized with
the new meanings that render a text as a masterpiece. Masterpieces are by their nature
unintelligible, and this comes as a function of the writer’s understanding of their status as a
progenitor of new linguistic meaning—of a new invisible symbolic epistemic network—that
can convey new the understandings of worldview and associated philosophy that must
necessarily precede essential, qualitative changes in thought, behavior and conception of
being. Simple, ‘easily intelligible’ prose require that the author rely upon the existing,
invisible, symbolic network of their reader to fill in the blanks, where as the ‘unintelligible’
complexity of the form of prose castigated by Meller, Mills and Ley, masterpiece prose
wherein the author stutters in their own language, allow the author to engage with the
axioms of the reader’s invisible, symbolic epistemic network. Simple prose conveys
information to be interpreted by within the worldview and associated philosophy of the
reader, where as the complex, ‘unintelligible’, and indeed profound prose denigrated by
Meller, Mills and Ley seeks to transform the worldview and associated philosophy of the
reader (the obvious and central goal of Geddes writing as of this text…).
The limitations of Meller’s linguistic theory are aptly illuminated in the words
“There was a great temptation to create the possibility of a life-force, the ‘élan vital’, of
mystic origins, beyond the bounds of reason.” (Meller 1993) Reality begins and ends with
manifestation, life and consciousness are simple products of manifestation, all of reality can
therefore be known by reason, all understandings of reality that include the unmanifest
world (the ‘mystic origins, beyond the bounds of reason’) are fallacious and result from the
‘irrational temptations’ of human subjectivity, etc. What aspect of reality, then, should not
be easily intelligible? All of reality is manifest, and all of manifestation can be known by
reason, and so there is no real thing that cannot be easily communicated. In short, Meller’s
materialistic, Modernist worldview and associated philosophy negate the potential for a
proper understanding of language, linguistic meaning and the incommensurability of finite,
manifest language with ideas, understandings, feelings, etc. that relate to the infinite,
unmanifest dimension of reality. The unintelligibility of writing, like conceptions of reality
that include dimensions of reality that exist beyond manifestation and aspects of manifest
reality that have their origin outside of manifestation, are attributed to the temptations and
confusions of the subject because, in Meller’s arrogantly cold and mechanistic world(view),
it is impossible that an idea or experience could be ineffable as a function of the
dimensional incommensurability of the finite-manifest and the infinite-unmanifest and
thereby unintelligible from the perspective of the materially rational mind. In both her
commentary on life-force and in her linguistic theories Meller renders herself as little more
than a vector of materialist Modernity’s perpetual ontological violence, as a colonialist of
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the mind.

735
Yes, indeed, if you are a materialist you are a colonialist, end of story. The greatest consistency of Modernism, Colonialism,
Imperialism, etc., of economic theology from Capitalism to Marxism, is the perpetuation of the materialist worldview. From atheistic
scientism through literal reinterpretations of classical religious traditions, the essence of the Modernist worldview (of epistemological
colonization in Modernity) is materialism, the reduction of reality to passing time and physical space (to manifestation). Capitalism and
Communism both served to strip people of their indigenous worldviews and associated philosophies and to thereby cast them into the
cold, mechanistic perversions of Modernism, and one might indeed be inclined to say that this was the goal of the dialectical strategy
pursued in the ‘conflict’ between the two…
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biologists and yet he wanted to believe in a life-force.” (Meller 1993, p. 13)
Meller’s perverse materialism leads her, in good Modernist form, to castigate experiences
in and understandings of reality beyond the passing time and physical space of
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manifestation to the sphere of subjectivity and, when accepted as real in and of
themselves rather than as a creation of a mind that was created by and wholly within
manifestation, madness, and thereby negates her capacity to understand Geddes
relationship with mysticism (or, for that matter, any thought that originates in a worldview
that assigns reality to the unmanifest world, which his to say the ‘mystic origins, beyond the
bounds of reason) in any sort of a meaningful manner. Meller’s Colonial, Modernist,
Materialist, etc. limitations and the crude ontological violence (Blaser 2013) of reducing
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Geddes understandings of reality to ‘belief’ inspired by subjective ‘temptation’, there is
something of interest to be found in her characterization of Geddes… Why is it that
Geddes took the vital life-force to be real but did not wish to rely upon recourse to
mystical, intuitive experiences beyond the bounds of manifestation and the rational mind to
know it? Enrique Dussel, in outlining the influence of the Jesuits in Descartes education
and thinking, notes “the education provided, according to the Council of Trent—which
‘modernized,’ by rationalizing, all aspects of the Catholic Church—was completely ‘modern’
in its ratio studiorum.” Similarly, he describes “the team of Jesuits… who proposed to
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completely modify philosophical exposition, to make it more pedagogical, profound, and

modern, incorporating recent discoveries, critiquing old methods, and innovating in all
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subjects.” What we take from Dussel’s analysis, especially when read through the lens of
Foucault’s analysis of the birth of Modernity in The Order of Things, is the notion that
Modernism is typified by the attempt to render knowledge of the invisible, unmanifest,
infinite aspects of reality that had previously been left to esoteric inner traditions (the
unsaid mystical counterpart that exists within all major religious and spiritual traditions) into

736
This is simply to say that such thinkers believe that all experiences beyond the sensory world are, like the consciousness that perceives
them, created by and contained within manifestation.
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Contemporary social science is littered with such crude, perverse, ontologically violent and indeed rather pathetic understandings of
‘mysticism’ as pathological belief (that usually understood as inspired by the fear of death that so grips the Modernist, materialist who is
making a rather poor attempt at understanding mysticism…); without digging to deep into a debate over whether the methods like inner
empiricism by which knowledge of the unmanifest world has been collectively developed over the millennia, let us suffice it to say that it
is impossible to scratch the surface of meaning in the writings of a mystically inclined author like Geddes (or more notably Descartes…)
from the absurdly materialistic worldview of Modernity. Indeed, all attempts to revise history (to reinterpret the life and thought of great
thinkers) by reinterpreting mystically oriented thinkers in materialistic terms that reduce all conceptions of reality beyond manifestation
to pathological belief, as is clearly being done by Meller, can be understood as epistemological colonization. Indeed, to see the world
through such a materialistic worldview is to be a colonist, and to think, behave and conceive of being from such a materialistic worldview
is the colonize reality and the subjects you encounter therein. Materialism = Colonialism, Materialistic = Colonialist and all expressions of
materialism are expressions of colonization.
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Enrique Dussel. “ANTI-CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS: ON THE ORIGIN OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTI-DISCOURSE
OF MODERNITY” p. 5
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a form that is (at least seemingly and in part…) accessible by material reason. Why this was
done is a matter of debate, but I think the essence of the answer can be found in Geddes
statements about magic being attained through winning power over earth—there is an
element of dominion in rational knowledge that is lacking from the contemplative
knowledge attained through the mystical process, an ability to render magic (where an
individual is acted upon and becomes a conduit for the energies of the earth) into
technology (where an individual uses a tool that acts upon and takes control of the powers
of the earth).
In any case, this perspective easily elucidates the tension Geddes felt in relationship
to mysticism (and, as illustrated by Barnesmoore [2016b, Genesis, Eden and the Grail in
Modernity], problematizes the illusory perception of a conflict between religion and
science that has been fabricated in the formation of the Modernist mythos). Knowing the
existence of the vital life-force through the ancient wisdom of the mystery traditions and, or
inner empiricism is one thing, but for the biological self and the ego to acquire dominion
(or at least the illusion of dominion…) over the vital life-force it must be known in
materially rational terms; for the power of the vital life-force and other such powers of
nature to be dominated through technological means they had first to be known in rational
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terms. As such, Geddes, like so many of the great Modernist scientists, moved from the
classical, esoteric, mystical wisdom concerning the nature of life and sought to understand
life and its functioning in materially rational terms that render material (technological)
domination of life and its processes possible; the vital life-force (the VLF as it is known in a
mystical tradition with which I have some familiarity) had been known in the esoteric,
mystery traditions of the west since time immemorial, and so the question facing Geddes
and other such mystery tradition inspired scientists—who believe that the knowledge of the
mystery traditions on topics like the VLF has been passed down generation to generation
th th
from the highly advanced (indeed far more advanced than late 19 and early 20 century
civilization inhabited by Geddes) civilization of Atlantis—was not to determine whether
there was a ‘life-force of mystical origins, beyond the bounds of reason’ but instead to know
the vital life-force in the rational terms of its material expressions and to thereby develop
techniques for controlling the VLF (or at least to influence it by controlling its process of
manifestation, which is akin to the attempts to influence the soul through controlling its
process of bodily manifestation observed by Foucault in D&P).
Geddes wasn’t simply a confused crackpot who was torn between the
mythologically incommensurable poles of mysticism and science; he was a true scientist of
the western tradition who sought to develop a rationalist understanding of energies that
were previously known by and through mysticism so that they could be controlled through
material means. To provide a practical example, Artificial Intelligence is often developed
via a process that attempts to render esoteric, ‘mystical’ understandings of consciousness
and the forms of its manifestation into rational knowledge of the manifestation of
consciousness through the human brain so as to create an artificial replication of
consciousness. (Barnesmoore 2016b; Technocalypse pt. 3) Artificial Intelligence, then, can

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See Barnesmoore’s (2016b) discussion of the relationship between Kabalism and the development of AI by individuals like Marvin
Minsky at MIT or part three of the documentary film Technocalypse.
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be understood as an attempt to know what is known in mystical terms (i.e. through
leisurely, contemplative, receptive epistemological processes and experiences beyond the
veil of manifestation) in materially rational terms so that it can be controlled—AI
development can be understood as a process by which mystical knowledge of
consciousness is translated into rational knowledge of the manifestation of consciousness
because rational knowledge is required for the biological self and ego to acquire dominion
over consciousness (to win magical powers through domination of the earth).
An Experiment in Social Evolution

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Meller (1993) argues that Geddes
“…Never lost sight of the fact that his activities were part of a scientific experiment in social evolution. The
Halls of Residence and the Outlook Tower were not ends in themselves. They were the means of educating
the young about social and cultural change and making them more self-aware. Geddes was always seeking
ways of furthering these ends to promote what he called ‘higher and higher individuation’ and thus social
742
evolution.” (Meller 1993, p. 55)
Geddes Conception of Paleotechnic Modernity

There are many limitations in Geddes thought, and indeed they are to be seen at least in
part through this imperial example, but his description of Paleotechnic Modernity and its
opposition to the civic, pacific potentials he envisions for the Neotechnic Age as expressed
in Bismarck’s monument in Cologne provides an apt illustration of the limitations of the
Modernist Worldview:
“Imagine a stern colossus, seated like an Egyptian monarch, but on a towering and battlemented throne, and
in full medieval armour, leaning watchful upon a massive sword dark, grim, and threatening, even sinister and
repellent, yet with an undeniable impressiveness of power…. He is well-placed, sitting there stout and grim in
the square opposite the good Burgomaster's bright and elegant villa-mansion with its flower-garden the perfect
symbol of that imperialist militarism and bureaucracy which has laid its grasp and domination upon the life
and labour of the German citizen. This, at any rate, is the perspective which the world already sees, indeed
too exclusively, whereas the opposite view is no less to be noted that of the civic life, pacific in its activities, its
interests, and ideas.
This spirit of imperial domination is finding many expressions in recent buildings, notably, for
instance, in Dusseldorf, which also rewards perambulating up and down and in and around for many hours….
These new buildings, with their departure from previous conventions, their mingling of boastful
expression of modern conditions with stinging criticism of them, stand in contrast to the commonplace street
fronts round them as things of another world. They express, as nothing since the Renaissance palaces has
done, the dominant spirit of the age, one of temporal powers of industry and wealth and war—wealth won by

741
Hellen Meller 1993, Patrick Geddes: social evolutionist and city planner, London: Routledge
742
Hellen Meller 1993, Patrick Geddes: social evolutionist and city planner, London: Routledge p. 55.
397

strength and labour, by thought and forethought, by exchange or speculation, by exploitation or taxation, by
conquest and indemnity. Spiritual powers are for practical purposes considered as extinct; save, indeed, that
the great cathedrals are valued as show places, baits for the tourist traffic which continues, in its profitableness,
the pilgrimages of old.” (Geddes 1915, 187-190)
We have no wish to sugar coat Geddes vision of civic, pacific activities, interests and ideals,
for community and peace are conceived of as submission to the natural, dominating
hierarchies of imperial power rather than as freedom from hierarchical domination (as
peaceful, communal acceptance of the ‘natural order of domination’ rather than the true
peace and community to be attained an escape from the fetters of hierarchical domination
that Geddes clearly assumes as impossible and, indeed, as unnatural), but he provides a
lucid and illustrative image of the ‘dominating spirit’ of the Modernist era nonetheless.
‘Grim,’ ‘threatening’, ‘sinister’, ‘repellant’, ‘imperialist militarism’, ‘bureaucracy’,
‘domination’, ‘life and labour’, ‘imperial domination’, ‘temporal powers of industry and
wealth and war’, ‘wealth won by strength and labour’, ‘thought and forethought’, ‘exchange’,
‘exploitation’, ‘conquest’. “Spiritual powers are for practical purposes considered as
extinct.” (Geddes 1915, p. 190) Order is to be created through hierarchical domination,
and reality is to be reduced to the manifest world—the perfect characterization of
Modernism (indeed of both the paleotechnic individualistic modernism described above
and of the ‘civic, pacific’ modernism proposed by Geddes…).
Though his image of paleotechnic modernism is illustrative of Modernism more
generally, Geddes serves to obfuscate reality (the reality of the ‘civic, pacific’ modernism of
liberal democracy imagined by Geddes) by entering into what we would term a dialectical
conflict; a seeming conflict between the individualistic, materialistic, competitive,
militaristic, domineering, etc. survivalism of paleotechnic and the civic, pacific, group
survivalism he envisions as the potential of neotechnic modernism. This is a false,
dialectical conflict in of the fact that ‘both sides’ accept the basic premise that social order is
to be attained through hierarchical domination. The ‘conflict’ lies at the level of who
should be dominated, other members of our own society or other societies, but the basic
premise of survival and evolution through domination of the other is accepted without
conflict. While the surfaces of the ‘two sides’ are indeed different in that one is focused on
individual survival and the other is focused on group survival, their essence (the essence of
their worldview and associated philosophy to be found in the notion that survival and
evolution are rooted in domination of the ‘other’) remains the same.
For one example see our discussion of Geddes discourse on the necessary
conquest of the Orient (the passive, intuitive, emotive, moon, yin, dark, etc.) by the
Occident (the active, rational, sun, yang, light, etc.). Let us take contemporary US
democracy as another example. If the Republican in the US party clearly represents the
paleotechnic order Geddes seeks to transcend, then the Democratic party clearly
represents the neotechnic order Geddes sought to inspire. And yet, isn’t the imperial
neoliberal capitalist atheism of the Democratic Party simply the ‘sustainable’
(conservational, eugenicist) version of the very order through hierarchical domination and
reduction of reality to passing time and physical space that Geddes so aptly observes in the
paleotechnic order? Isn’t the ‘group survivalism’ of the Democratic Party’s imperial
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militarism the very same individual survivalism of the paleotechnic era applied to a
different scale, the national, religious, ethnic, etc. scales, of human existence? The
individual is now the state, the nation, the empire, etc. rather than the body, granted, but
the form of relations remains the same—order is to be created through hierarchical
domination and reality is reduced to the manifest world. This comparison, between the
paleotechnic and neotechnic social orders of Geddes imagination and the social orders
propounded by the Republican and Democratic parties, is obviously limited by substantial
differences between the examples (i.e. Geddes would not have presumed that the
communal, group level of social order through civics and pacifism could or would be
understood in materialistic, atheistic terms that reduce reality to manifestation), but in form
the comparison is quite illustrative—though there is a seeming conflict that is readily
apparent at the surface level of observation, there is actually coherence and cooperation
between the ‘two sides’ at the invisible, unsaid levels of philosophy and worldview
(theology).
Geddes vision of peaceful civic community is to be produced by (at least in part…)
shifting the scale of self and other upon which hierarchical domination is enacted (i.e.
shifting the conception of self away from the body to the city, nation and empire so that the
scale of other can be shifted from other members of our city, nation, empire and race to
those of other cities, nations, empires and races….) rather than by transcending hierarchical
domination. The saving grace of Geddes thinking was his critique of the materialism that
pervaded the paleotechnic era, of the reduction of reality to passing time and physical
space and the loss of spirituality, magic and epistemological potentials beyond the
materially rational mind therein, but sadly this seems to be the only part of his thinking that
was not taken up by later generations like contemporary US Democrats who avidly pursue
similar notions of peaceful civic community [group survivalism] and imperialistic
nationalism [hierarchical domination of the other] within a materialistic, atheistic worldview
that reduced reality to passing time and physical space in a manner akin to the practicalist
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‘futilitarians’ of the paleotechnic era. In short, the ‘progressive’ frontier of western
democratic politics has taken up all of the most problematic aspects of Geddes work
(however seemingly wonderful the terms civic community and peace may sound when they
are divorced from the fact that they simply serve to shift the scale of hierarchical
domination of the other rather than transcending hierarchical domination…) while leaving
behind the single most positive aspect (i.e. his sensitivity to the spiritual, to the emotive,
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intuitive, artistic, potentials of the human mind beyond material reason).
Improving the Rustic
“Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”
(Blake 1793, p. 10)
“…towards a higher neotechnic phase, characterised by finer industries and arts, by geotechnic and hygienic
endeavour, by rustic and urban improvement…” (Geddes 1915, p. 243)

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Hell, they even took up Geddes ardent Zionism.
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The same can be said of so many other authors, from Plato to Descartes—Modernity has a knack for taking the most repugnant parts
of a philosophy and recapitulating them in a materialist worldview that only serves to compound the problem…
399

This juxtaposition of Blake and Geddes illustrates the inherently Modernist-Paternalist

character (the Urizen Archetype of fallen reason) of Geddes conception of nature and
human-nature relations. The perfection of the rustic, of the wilderness, is to be found in
improvement rather than in allowing the inherent order of nature to proceed
unencumbered by human influence. This perspective resonates with Geddes vision of the
garden as the utopian space of human-nature relations. Nature’s progress towards
perfection, in short, depends upon its subjugation and subsequent improvement by man.
Improvement at Large
“Can we but gain the needful civic and regional knowledge and insight, and the practical sympathy and
corresponding skill which these develop, a new advance of our cities will have begun indeed, and a new uplift
of civilisation may be well-nigh assured.” (Geddes 1915, p. 245)
Geddes, then, is making an argument whose form is relatively accessible from the
perspective of contemporary geographical and urban thought (from Marxism through
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Post(Most)modern theories like Feminism and Poststructuralism [Brenner 2017] ).
Increased knowledge of the contexts and specificities that define the spaces we wish to
develop will cultivate sympathy with local inhabitants and the prerequisite skills necessary
to appropriately improve said spaces. Though expressed in different ways, Geddes and
contemporary geographical-urban theorists run into the same problem—it is the general
worldview of Modernism, the devious and invisible synthesis of materialism and the
hierarchical conceptions of social order (aptly captured in Geddes markedly economic
746
conception of human ‘function’) received from the paternalist tradition, that produces the
social woes that are too often attributed to a simple lack of knowledge. Our problem is
rooted in the worldview and associated philosophies through which we interpret knowledge
rather than in a simple lack of knowledge (though of course the two issues serve to
747 748
compound each other ).
Survey:

745
Brenner 2017, “Debating Planetary Urbanism: for an engaged pluralism”
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Many contemporary radical theorists, from Marxist to Post(Most)modern, critique the hierarchical nature of Modernist society but fail
to take the next step of condemning systems like western law, democracy, economics (of both Capitalist and Marxist strains), etc. that
imply and impose hierarchies upon society. One cannot support the continued existence of the western legal system and its essential
assumption that social order is produced through hierarchical domination (fear of punishment by more powerful rungs of the hierarchy)
or the democratic system, its executive, judicial and congressional hierarchies and the hierarchy of military and police relations with the
general public (inherent in the notion that the state has the right to use force against the public) and also fight against hierarchical
domination.
747
For example, worldviews and associated philosophies like those that form the assemblage we know as Modernism—which reduce
knowledge to that which is manifest-measureable—create a barrier to knowledge of the unmanifest world and thereby impose a limitation
of knowledge that does indeed cripple our attempts at social evolution.
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Ironically, many more markedly hegemonic epistemological perspectives like rational choice theory fall into the same basic trap of
isolating a lack of knowledge or the inaccessibility of knowledge as the essential barrier to reason (rather than worldview and associated
philosophy, which is to say the theories by which we interpret knowledge).
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“In a series of articles published in the first three issues of Garden Cities and Town Planning (1911) Geddes
provided a practical guide for local surveys’ promoting the practice of ‘survey before planning.’ The survey is
[to] be based on first-hand, direct observation, practiced outdoors and preferably from a high and
749
commanding place. Allowing to record the material building of the city and to study its life and its
institutions, the survey would enable the appreciation of past development and present evils. Geddes
compared ‘civic diagnosis before treatment’ to a surgeon’s thoroughly physical examination and bestowed the
responsibility for surveying upon all those involved in local town planning, starting with the citizens and
ending with the city architect, recommending the creation of a local ‘Cities Surveys Committee’.
A comparative analysis, requiring a complementary general history ‘from the earliest beginning of
civilisation,’ would enable the surveying planner to record local tradition, recover past glories and mark the
material heritage for conservation. Identifying local qualities and defects, and, moreover, discerning
750
potentialities would be determined by the overall chosen narrative as dictated by the planner: ‘This selection
is done by the surveyor-planner, giving a renewed interpretation to the historic facts, ending in a renewed
narrative; for this sociological utilization of the wealth of narrative history, we need not merely its facts and
751
dates, but an orderly arrangement of them.’
Considering the regional survey as the natural extension of rambling and childlike gathering of
nature samples, Geddes advocated it also as a pure educational tool toward the improvement of both body an
mind and also toward citizenship, reminding the individual of his relative social formation in the civic whole.
Geddes thus encouraged the formation of local groups to aid in the process of planning and to associate in
‘endeavors of citizenship,’ incorporating society in the mutual process of city and citizenship improvement,
eventually extending personal commitment by expanding ‘vital interest and love from the home region to
national trust and beyond.
Finally, a systematic survey, with ‘the heads of such regional, civic, and local survey, in its various
elements of past, present, and suggested future,’ will result in a systematic report, where the planner’s
conclusions will be translated into a practical plan of local renewal and reconstruction. Geddes often
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practiced the science of the Survey on Edinburgh – a recurring example was Geddes’ survey of Edinburgh.”
Geddes, then, falls into the trap posed by Kantian work epistemology (and the worldview of
total work more generally) outlined by Pieper (2009) and by Modernist epistemology more
generally in positing the herculean labor of improved knowledge accumulation
(transformation of epistemological inputs) and transformed perspective (from individual to
civic-civilizational) as the key to attaining the knowledge necessary for the conquest and
dominion of ‘environment’ that marks social evolution in Geddes worldview. The woes of
the paleotechnic age are to be ameliorated through the re-centering of perspective from the
individual to the civic-civilizational scale (scalar perspective of epistemology) and through
the accumulation of more nuanced contextual knowledge (improvement of epistemological
inputs). We are to solve our problems by changing what we are looking at (epistemological
inputs) and by changing where we are looking from (scalar epistemological perspective),
but not through changing how we interpret what we see (the epistemological potentials
articulated by our worldview, which is to say by our assemblage of cosmological,
ontological, teleological, etc. assumptions). Improvement is to be found in the active
accumulation of facts and in the active improvement of knowledge formation processes,
through acting upon the manifest world and the perspective through which we interpret it,
rather than in contemplative states of being where new a new worldview and associated
philosophy are rendered as possible through allowing ourselves to be acted upon by the

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The ‘God’s Eye View’…
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Planning rooted in the construction of a mythos of place.
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I.E. We must bring the facts and dates of a place into order through hierarchical domination by the rational mind?
752
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unmanifest world. Instead of a change in cosmology, ontology, teleology, etc. and a
subsequent change in more essential assumptions like that concerning the nature of self
and other (be it in human-human or human-nature relations), which is to say a change in
our epistemology itself (the process of meaning making) rather than in the scalar
perspective through which we enact our epistemology or the object upon which our
753
epistemology is enacted, the purported panacea for social woes is rooted in more
ephemeral epistemological changes like increased sensitivity to local, contextual knowledge
(i.e. epistemological inputs) and shifting the scalar perspective through which epistemology
is enacted from the individual to the civic-civilizational level (i.e. epistemological scale).
As we illustrate above, the perfect example of this feigned epistemological
transformation comes in the rise of conservationist, sustainability oriented theory and
practice which in its normative articulations seeks to prolong the process of hierarchical
domination (of man’s dominion over earth) by shifting the scalar perspective in which
epistemology is enacted from the local, individual, contemporary, short-term, etc.
(‘wasteful’) perspective to the global, communal, civilizational, future, long-term, etc.
(‘conserving’) perspective rather than transforming the malignant epistemological
foundation of environmental degradation itself (i.e. the ontological and teleological
assumption that nature’s perfect state, its perfect reality, is to be found in and through
subjugation by man). Shifting the scalar perspective in which we enact our epistemology
from the individual to the civic-civilizational scale and increased sensitivity to local,
contextual knowledge, cannot treat the more essential ontological assumption—an
assumption by which our epistemological potentials are expanded and constrained—that
the telos of man and nature is rooted in man’s dominion over nature. Changes of
epistemological scale (city to planetary, individual to civilizational, present to future, etc.)
and, or epistemological inputs (generalized to contextualized knowledge of the city) cannot
heal a sickness that is rooted in our epistemological foundation (i.e. in our cosmology,
ontology, teleology, etc.).
The True, Bourgeois City
“…The true city small or great… is that of a burgher people, governing themselves from their own town-hall
and yet expressing also the spiritual ideals which govern their lives, as once in ancient acropolis or again in
medieval church or cathedral: and we cannot feel that the designers of any of these great plans [of the early
th
20 century] have as yet sought new forms for the ideals which life is ever seeking.”
Man is to have dominion over earth, social engineers are to have dominion over the public,
but both man and social engineer are to be dominated by their spiritual ideals. Spiritual
Ideals, Social Engineers (the ‘burgher people’), Engineered Citizenry and Nature is the
envisioned social hierarchy of Geddes ‘Demopolis.’ Freedom (in good Orwellian and for

753
We recall contemporary debates on Planetary Urbanism that seek to transform epistemological perspective without transforming the
epistemology itself. Planetary Urbanism seeks to shift the perspective of epistemology from starting at the scale of an imaginary, discrete,
spatially bound ‘city’ and moving outwards (to the regional or global) or inwards (to the neighborhood or individual) to starting at a
planetary scale and moving inwards, but it does not seek to transform the nihilistic Post(Most)modern epistemology (which rests upon
the foundational assertion that there cannot be an overarching or totalizing theory and therefore that there cannot be Truth) or the more
general Modernist epistemology (which rests upon the foundational reduction of reality, and thus knowledge, to the manifest world,
which is tellingly described as ‘the real world’ in colloquial terms…).
402

that matter Colonial-Imperial fashion) is to be found in subjugation to higher rungs in the
natural hierarchy. Geddes critique of the ‘Tyranopolis’ and valorization of the ‘Demopolis’
is rooted in the view that a necessary rung of the ‘natural hierarchy’ has been skipped in
direct dominion of the general public by the imperial, ‘Caesarist’ rung of the hierarchy;
republicanism has never been cry for transcendence of hierarchical form, but a call for a
more granular hierarchical structure in which the elite from families, towns, cities, regions,
etc. are allowed to form hierarchical rungs between the general citizenry and the top of the
hierarchical pyramid. It may be appropriate to symbolize this distinction as transition from
a hierarchical ladder to a hierarchical pyramid—there is still only a single rung at the top of
the hierarchy, ‘God and the spiritual ideal he hath set forth to govern the lives of men,’ but
instead of a single linear path from the bottom to the top there are a number of
progressively condensing paths towards the top. The purpose of republicanism is not to
foster liberty for the people by throwing off the shackles of hierarchical domination, but
instead to render hierarchical domination as more sustainable and effective through
manufacturing the illusion of agency-freedom by shifting the scalar perspective of the
system (from top down to bottom up) and improvement of epistemological inputs through
enhanced inculcation of local, contextual knowledge from the bottom. In the republican
ideology liberty means the illusion of liberty to sustain domination. Sadly, as is made clear
by Meng Zi’s story of the Farmer from Song, it is domination itself (rather than a lack of
efficiency or nuance in domination) that breeds social and environmental decay. As such,
Geddes plans for amelioration of environmental and social degradation were doomed to
the failures that have been seen in our contemporary era from the start.
Civic Museum:
“The findings of the survey would constitute the beginning of a Civic Museum, incorporating also existing
collections of local libraries or museums and providing a comprehensive representation of the city. The
museum is described in Geddes’ third article of Civics, ‘A Suggested plan for a Civic Museum’ (1907). A year
later, Geddes elaborated upon the suggested contents of the museum and the galleries devoted to describing
the city, past and present. A separate gallery would be devoted to the city’s future, presenting current plans,
formal and alternative: ‘I do not know of any way more likely to interest people in their city,’ said Geddes,
‘than to put facts, criticisms and project for improvement before them; they all fight over these, and thus their
754
civic consciousness is awakened, their interest in thus increased.’
The roles of museums in education and planning were listed in a letter in which Geddes applied to
be a museum curator. Geddes described his experience as an improver of physical environment and urban
hygiene, being involved in planning and rehabilitation as well as in artistic decoration. It was clearly a role for
the planner: “Now the modern Town Planner, for whom Greek citizenship is not a mere learned
reminiscence or a moral wonder, but a working conception once more, is in these days actually designing, for
the bettering cities of the opening future, their veritable ‘Museion’.’ As an important public center, Geddes’
museum in Edinburgh hosted summer meetings and held such activities as a Current Events Club for shared
reading of local, imperial and global news.
If the survey was the advanced version of a boy’s wanderings, the incipient museum was designed to
host the accumulation of the boy’s findings. As yet unarranged and unlabeled, those must be described,

754
So for Geddes civic consciousness is to be awakened through fighting, conflict, competition, etc.? The paternalist, capitalist
civilizational consciousness is to be sparked with conflict and competition. How would an indigenous civic consciousness be sparked?
Can we awaken civic consciousness through illustrating the synergistic, cooperative nature of the natural world? Can nature teach us to be
conscious of civilization and our role therein through loving cooperation rather than (or at the very least in consort with) conflict?
403
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classified, and interpreted. The museum’s collection thus compiled would comprise a reference collection,
in which all objects are related to the world at large, each local collection representing global phenomenon
locally. As an ‘Encyclopaedia Civica,’ the museum would aid in revealing the relations between local objects
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and ‘general civilization’ in total, comprising ‘a type collection, an Index museum to the world of culture.”
Exhibition
“Geddes promoted a traveling Cities and Tow Planning Exhibition to accompany and enrich local planning
endeavors through additional educational and comparative means. The Exhibition was initially compled for
the RIBA conference in London, 1910, and described at length upon its presentation in 1913 at the Ghent
International Exhibition. The traveling exhibition offered suggestive examples of surveys of characteristic
cities, expanding upon geographic and historic origins and developments of civic life and thought. Geddes
hoped that each city would lend a small exhibit of its own essentials. While selecting from the large
collections, such material may be of service to itself, as a good example for the future or a warning [of dire
developments in the past/pitfalls in the past].
The exhibition was composed of various galleries of civic exhibitions with plans, elevations,
perspectives, pictures, and models, including also a reference library and a cinema of cities. The main part
presented typical cities and recurring schemes of development, a comparative study of cities and their
757
evolution. Examples of the Past included Classic Cities such as Athens and Rome, Babylon, and Jerusalem.
Edinburgh provided a key to the study of medieval cities, illustrating elements such as castles and cathedrals
and the correct relation between country and town. The city of Rothberg illustrated healthy democratic civic
life, well-planned streets and open spaces, roomy dwellings, private and public buildings, public monuments,
towers and fountains, town hall and belfry. Important citeis of the Renaissance such as London, Vienna,
Rome and Berlin exhibited war, overcrowding, material dilapidation and fortification, alongside new forms of
town planning, parks and canals. Illustrations of Paris, Versailles, Washington and Chicago furnished the
gallery of the ‘great capitals.’ These displayed modern railways and telegraph lines, administrative and
economic centralization and intensification of powers; they also housed ‘all the apparatus and resources of
the complete civilization of their time,’ the great museums.
Another part of the exhibition introduced the town planning movement, illustrating how various
problems were being met and handled by town planning and portraying typical civic developments. A major
gallery was devoted to Garden Suburbs, stressing the way development and extension ‘gain completeness and
value from each other and from the city’s past.’ The exhibition also illustrated various related sciences dealing
with society, corresponding with the development of the citizen and presenting anew Civic sciences, some of
which were invented by Geddes, such as Radical Anthropology and Civic Demography. Also presented were
the new-born Eugenic Movement and a selection from recent Child-Welfare Exhibitions.
Geddes meant the visit to the exhibition to be in itself a directed, transformative process. As viewing
the exhibition could be done in many ways, he suggested several routes which allowed tracing the evolution
758
of cities from different points of view. The route following the historical narrative traced the evolution of
cities, culminating in the Garden Suburbs gallery. The geographical narrative traced the development of
regional character and activity. The presentation of the exhibition was accompanied by public lectures and
759
even courses which developed those themes on a local basis.
th
Geddes, taking the general-technological and subsequently civic exhibitions of the 19 and
th
20 centuries as his example, posits exhibitions as an essential tool-space in the process of
human evolution.

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Brought into order though hierarchical domination by reason.
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Noah Hysler-Rubin 2013, Patrick Geddes and Town Planning: A Critical View, Routledge, pp. 52-53.
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Of course…
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Different trails through the forest that provide different points of view on the order of things in nature could replicate this approach in
our model.
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404

“…The Civic Exhibition which was henceforth increasingly destined to replace the older exhibition of
technical appliances and details, of products and even masterpieces, as yet but aggregated for rivalry or gain,
and not yet integrated and inter-organised towards social wellbeing and civic use.” (Geddes 1915, p. 249)
Geddes, as clearly illustrated on page 247 of Cities in Evolution (“the progressive control
by man of his environment”), views Civilizational Evolution in terms of man’s progressive
dominion over earth. As such, general-technological exhibitions can be seen as a tool-space
in which to collect, share, understand, disseminate, etc. the technologies by which man
would win his ‘birth right’ of dominion over earth. Civic and Town Planning Exhibitions
were to take on a similar form (though Geddes posits them as organized for social
wellbeing and civic use as opposed to the rivalry and gain of the general-technological
exhibition). Falling into the knowledge as power paradigm so aptly isolated by Pieper
(2009) as the crux of the Modernist worldview of total work and its work epistemology
(from Bacon through Descartes and onto Marx), Civic and Town Planning Exhibitions
were to act as a tool-space for man to collect the knowledge by which he would
progressively win his dominion over the city and its garden suburbs. As civilizational
evolution was understood as a process of winning dominion over the earth through use of
technology, so city evolution was understood as a process of winning dominion over the
city through use of knowledge (be it knowledge of new technologies and their potential
functions in the city or knowledge of the local, individual character of the city). Evolution,
for Geddes and so many others in the history of paternalist thought, is nothing more or less
than the progress of man’s dominion over himself (i.e. dominion of the rational aspect of
self over the spirited and appetitive aspects of self) and others (who like nature and the
orient were to find their teleological imperative, the perfection of their manifestation, in
subjugation by man).
We are reminded of Haraway’s engagement with Yerkes in Primate Visions:
““Man’s curiosity and desire to control his world impel him to study living things”. With that banal but crucial
assertion about the foundation of human rationality in the will to power, Yerkes opened his book. For him
the tap root of science is the aim to control. The full consequences of that teleology become apparent only in
the sciences of mind and behavior, where natural objet and designed product reflect each other in the infinite
regress of face-to-face mirrors, ground by the law of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic….
…. Since the first and final object of Yerkes’s interest was the human being, the pinnacle of
evolutionary processes, where the structure of domination of brain over body was most complete, greatest
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curiosity and utility were centered on natural objects yielding greatest self-knowledge and self-control.”
From biological and human evolution all the way through city and more general
civilizational evolution, the process can be summed up as ‘man’s progressive dominion’. It
is within this basic framework of evolution as progressive dominion that we must
understand the contemporary history of environmental planning, conservationism,
sustainability, and, more generally, human-nature relations. It is this basic framework of
evolution as progressive domination that we must transcend if we are to develop truly
sustainable relations with our natural environment. It is this basic framework that we must

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Haraway, D 1989, Primate Visions, Routledge, pp. 61-62.
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throw of if we wish to develop a relationship with nature in which we allow it to act upon us
as a teacher by inscribing the essence as expressed in the beautiful forms of nature upon
our being.
Haraway’s illuminating perspective on the Museum and the Exhibition as
Modernist attempts at creating immortality in time and space is also illustrative:
“Three public activities of the Museum were dedicated to preserving a threatened manhood: exhibition,
eugenics, and conservation. Exhibition was a practice to produce permanence, to arrest decay [(i.e. to create
immortality in time and space)]. Eugenics was a movement to preserve hereditary stock, to assure racial
purity, to prevent race suicide [(i.e. to create purity)]. Conservation was a policy to preserve resources, not
only for industry, but also for moral formation, for the achievement of manhood. …Very close to religious
and medical practice, …these three activities were about transcendence of death. They attempted to insure
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preservation without fixation and paralysis…”
Progressive dominion over the city in Geddes conservationist-eugenicist philosophical

outlook required that the historical, local-contextual knowledge of the city be immortalized
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(Barnesmoore 2016b) in time and space. Dominion over the city was to be found
through knowledge of the city, and so knowledge of the city had to be ‘immortalized’ in
museum and exhibit for use by future generations in the progressive dominion that marks
city evolution.
The City, however, is clearly not the only object of domination in Geddes vision of
city evolution.
“We have got beyond the abstract sociology of the schools—Positivist, Socialist, or other—with their vague
discussion of ‘Society’ and its ‘Members,’ since we have reached the definite conception in which all these
schools have been lacking—that of Cities and Citizens… Towards this extension and renascence of the city,
this enlarging life-scope of the citizen, our Town Planning Exhibition and its Congress appear, as the
appropriate educative agencies of citizenship.” (Geddes 1915, p. 252-253)
Cities and Citizens. Knowledge of the City is used to better dominate the City, to increase
man’s control over the City and thereby facilitate its evolution, but it is also used to better
dominate citizens by educating them (socializing them, socially engineering them) in a
manner that renders them as the desired social object of the social engineer. Citizens are to
participate in the planning process, but only after the have been properly subjugated by the
civic consciousness of the civilization (in which case the potential for true liberty has already
been eclipsed). Hierarchical domination, in short, is not only indicative of civilizational
evolution in the relationship between humans and nature but also in the relationship
between the elite class of social engineers and the socially engineered general public. If you
exist on a lower rung of the hierarchical ladder, be that in the position of nature or general
citizen, your evolution and rightful place in civilization is rooted in subjugation by the
higher rungs of the hierarchy. In both cases, nature and the objects of social engineering
(the citizenry), evolution is rooted in being acted upon and thus subjugated by higher rungs
of ‘the natural hierarchy’.

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Haraway, D 1989, Primate Visions, Routledge, p. 55.
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Barnesmoore, L. R. 2016b, Nomad Explorations V 2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity, MA Thesis, UBC Geography.
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“…[Geddes] never lost sight of the fact that his activities were part of a scientific experiment in social
evolution. The Halls of Residence and the Outlook Tower were not ends in themselves. They were the
means of educating the young about social and cultural change and making them more self-aware. Geddes
was always seeking ways of furthering these ends to promote what he called ‘higher and higher individuation’
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and thus social evolution.” (Meller 1993, p. 55)
Geddes promoted individuation, yes, but only a mode of individuation that is rendered
possible through subjugation by (socialization within) the ‘civic consciousness’ of the society
in which the individual exists. Individual freedom and the process of individuation were to
occur only after the individual’s potential for freedom beyond the constraints of the
hegemonic worldview and associated philosophy are extinguished. This is akin to
contemporary ‘academic freedom’, wherein one is free to do and think as they please once
they have bowed their knee to the materialist worldview (economic theology) and its
associated philosophies like Liberalism, Capitalism, Marxism, Post(Most)Modernism, etc.
Freedom of action must be preceded by negation of the potential for true freedom of
thought (the freedom of thought accorded by awareness of one’s own socially and
experientially received worldview, of other potential worldviews and the direction of one’s
own will towards determination of the worldview they will allow to expand and constrain
their potentials for thought, behavior and conception of being).
Planning for the Good Life

In calls like those for garden suburbs, “playgrounds, that prime necessity of civic survival,”
(Geddes 1915, p. 255) improved housing stock and beyond, as well as in critique of the
individual-profit centric model of paleotechnic development and the slummy living
conditions it produces, Geddes’ vision for town and city planning seeks to center the
planning process on a more holistic conception of wealth and civilizational development.
What are technological achievements and economic wealth if they are not accompanied by
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general happiness and wellbeing? Neoliberal city planners, who as David Harvey (2017)
so lucidly notes are building “cities for people to invest in not to live in,” could surely serve
to learn something from Geddes more expansive conception of wealth and wellbeing.
Outlook Tower:
“The Outlook Tower, ‘a little tower of synthetic studies’ was designed to link social effort and urban activity.
It was to form in itself a local type museum, described also as an embryonic school and college. Geddes’
scheme for the Outlook Tower, which was based on his most successful endeavor in Edinburgh, had been
extensively described in five public letters Geddes wrote ‘to an Indian friend’ in 1901 and in 1903. The tower
contained five floors of exhibits and an open-air roof, in which an optical device, camera obscura, provided a
synoptic view of the city and its region from above. The tower was actually meant to allow observation
outwards and inwards as well as a person a place for spiritual contemplation . Thus, next to the
observation point stood a Cell of Unity, a small room with only a chair in it, allowing personal meditation:
‘To see life clearly, we must see it whole.’

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Hellen Meller 1993, Patrick Geddes: social evolutionist and city planner, London: Routledge p. 55.
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David Harvey 2017, “Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason” Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting,
Boston, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDy2rq7SUwg
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‘The Outlook Tower is being arranged as a type museum and observatory, alike of physical and of
political geography. This is comparatively arranged, as far as may be, through its descending storeys.’ The
arrangement of the exhibits along five floors allowed one to examine a specific locality on expanding scales in
a growing cycle, proceeding from the top of the tower downwards, and from the locality outwards. Starting the
visit at the Tower, the visitor would be descending ‘storey by storey, through City and Province and Region or
State to Nation and Empire, and thence again to the larger Occidental Civilisation, of which these form a
part, and finally to the Oriental and Primitive sources.’ The top floor, devoted to the city, was to act as a local
museum. The next storey, devoted to the country or state, provided the regional outlook. The next storey, in
Edinburgh’s case, was devoted to Britain or more generally to ‘the English Speaking world.’ Finally, the
ground floor provided the global outlook, where also the Oriental civilizations and the general study of Man
were displayed: ‘from the European level we descend to a still wider outlook – that over the Cultured Orient
– the Culture-Orient … recognizing at least the need of an outline of the civilisations of India, China and
Japan.’ This arrangement left the ground floor to the study of ‘the simpler races’ and of the basic regional
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components, of which ‘all our cultures – Occidental or Oriental – are but more complex developments.’
University:
“Geddes’ university symbolized the current incarnation of Wisdom. The modern cloister of reflection and
research was given the important function of urban and social transformation. …Geddes’ best description of a
university anywhere was provided only in 1918 upon the planning of a university in India. Within the
university, individual energy is fused with others, causing a collective genius to emerge. The university would
have its foundations on local tradition; nevertheless, as ‘a fortress of ideas, regional, civic and humanist’ also
demanded of it were ‘solidarity of civic and national spirit, with openness and hospitality to the larger world –
English, colonial, American, Continental…
Consequently, the Masque of Ancient Learning (1912), describing the historic procession of
education and civilization, culminated with the union of University and the City, the Alma Mater of
knowledge working together with Alma Civitas of greater civilization, “Enthroned, side by side as type of
influence and of authority, spiritual and temporal … Thus the masque which began with a humble schoolboy
ends with a student-citizen, who will later in life be a citizen-student’; citizens and faculties merge, ‘creating the
latest and greatest of facilities, that of Citizenship..’
Geddes regarded the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh and its many activities as an example for the
cooperation between the University and the City, a model for the new academic type, the Incipient
University. One way in which he recommended achieving unity and collaboration between the City and the
University, interacting between higher education and the life of cities, was through the tradition of university
residence, advancing ‘the interests alike of culture and citizenship.’ Geddes resembled this social union to
other social movements such as University Extension lectures, their lecturers being ‘a new type of preaching
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friars.’”
Civic Center:
“‘We need some shelter into which to gather the best seed of past flowerings and in which to raise and tend
the seedlings of coming summers. We need definitely to acquire such a center of survey and service in each
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and every city – in a word, a Civicentre for sociologist and citizen.’
The urban institutes described above, including the Museum, the Outlook Tower, and the University, were
to be incorporate din the Civic Center, ‘a clearing-house of social science with social action, of vital
interaction of thought and deed.’ The physical center of the city was designed to also include existing cultural
and civic institutions, all meant to enhance and propound local civilization, a modern day Cultural Acropolis,
the most important element which differentiates between towns and mere ‘dwelling places’ and as ‘true cities.’
Placing the Acropolis in a central, high location would allow it visual domination.

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Noah Hysler-Rubin 2013, Patrick Geddes and Town Planning: A Critical View, Routledge, p. 55-56 Emphasis Added.
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The natural metaphor is already here! Now lets strip out our ‘created orders’ and we are ready to go!!!
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Geddes’ elaborate plan for Dunfermline (1904) was an early attempt to plan a civic center. Although
the plan was never realized, the report could be viewed as a catalogue of the many suggested urban institutes
of the urban Acropolis, including historical and geographical museums of various sorts, art institutes and
technical schools, music halls, and numerous specialized parks. The Civic Center was also to include a city
hall and various historic houses adapted for new uses, including, for example, a library and meeting halls, ‘[…]
a literal Athenaeum, a home of social and intellectual life, a radiant center of educational, civic, and moral
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activities.’”
Questions:
1. What is the difference between cultures that built temples and cultures that sanctify
natural spaces and find their temple already existing in nature? Creating Order vs.
Accentuating Existing Order? Geddes vision is on in which the facts, dates,
findings, etc. that are derived through survey are brought into order through
domination by reason with the teleological imperative of constructing a mythos of
the city. What if we were to take up the same basic vision of planning a city to
render it as a tool of education, to render the city (as unified with the university)
pedagogical, but to do so not through collecting facts and dominating them into
order through the use of reason but instead through cultivating (or as our case may
be restoring and then cultivating) natural spaces and allowing them to civilize
citizens (awaken the civic consciousness) with the natural order of things (a
reflection of the eternal essence of things). In this vision we seek the unification of
city, university and nature, and in this unification we render nature and its inherent
value, its implicit mythos (which permeates both the city and the university) as the
progenitor of civic order rather than our own constructed orders (the mythos we
construct through he domination of facts into the order of knowledge through use
of reason).
2. How does this vision relate to the one put forward by Shiri Breznitz (PHD,
Geography, Cambridge) of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of
Toronto, who similarly views the union of the University and the City as a
civilizational project but who understands this union in purely economic, capitalistic
terms (i.e. the City and the University are bonded through partnerships between
corporations in the City and University researchers and ‘elitist’ liberal arts [artes
liberales, the arts of freedom] education is disposed of…)—the union of City and
University is understood in purely mechanistic, utilitarian, capitalistic terms rather
than the ideational terms [liberal arts, ideas, culture and citizenship] put forward by
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Geddes). The union of the University and the City remains a vision of high
modern civilization, but economic relations where academics make their skills
available for corporate utilization have replaced ideas. Academia, in this light, has
completely lost the uselessness of Hui Zi’s Great Tree that was already being
degraded in Geddes rendering of the academic to political utility in the ‘civilizing
process’ (i.e. in the process of socializing ‘good citizens’).

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Shiri Breznitz 2017, Plenary Lecture, Technology, Knowledge and Society Conference, Common Ground Research Networks,
Toronto.
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3. How does Foucault’s exploration (Discipline and Punish/ History of Sexuality) of

the transformation of esoteric rituals and practices, from both eastern and western
traditions, into techniques of domination speak to Geddes work of applying both
Eastern and Western philosophy to the process planning Cities with an eye towards
cultivation of mind, citizenship, city allegiance, national allegiance, civilizational
allegiance. Esoteric knowledge—concerning the ways in which ritual, which can be
understood as our lived, daily experiences, can transform norms of thought,
behavior and conception of being—is brought to bear in the development of
planning theory and practice that is oriented to creating order through domination
of the general public.
4. “we need not merely its facts and dates, but an orderly arrangement of them.” How
does this quote relate to Foucault’s observations concerning the birth of Modernity
in the turn towards the notion that the order of knowledge is to be create through
hierarchical domination of facts?
5. “‘I do not know of any way more likely to interest people in their city,’ said Geddes,
‘than to put facts, criticisms and project for improvement before them; they all fight
over these, and thus their civic consciousness is awakened, their interest in thus
increased.’” So civic consciousness is to be awakened through fighting, conflict,
competition, etc.? The paternalist, capitalist civilizational consciousness is to be
sparked with conflict and competition. How would an indigenous civic
consciousness be sparked? Can we awaken civic consciousness through illustrating
the synergistic, cooperative nature of the natural world? Can nature teach us to be
conscious of civilization and our role therein through loving cooperation rather
than (or at the very least in consort with) conflict?
6. Does the deep connection between planning, urban planning and education in
Geddes intimate his sensitivity to the notion of Conscious Evolution—that
civilization evolves (or devolves) primarily as a function of its ideational
(epistemological) qualities rather than its biological qualities? The evolution of cities
is tied to the union of city and university because human evolution is an essentially
epistemological rather than biological process?
Review (Patrick Geddes: social evolutionist and city planner): Hebbert M 1995,
Environment and Planning B 22, pp. 767-768.
“In his teens Geddes parted company with organised Christianity, leaving the certainties of the Bible and Free
Kirk in search of an alternative system of knowledge and values based upon the still-fresh scientific doctrine
of evolution… Its key was geographical, with city and region providing both a basic unit for scientific analysis
and a laboratory for social progress.” (Hebbert 1995, p. 767)
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“In 1892 he purchased the observatory at the end of the Castle Esplanade and developed it into the Outlook
Tower museum, using it as a base for a pioneering series of summer schools with a strong Celtic emphasis…”
(Hebbert 1995, p. 767)
“The town planning career began with a well-publicised scheme in 1903-4 to lay out a park and educational
buildings in Dunfermline… It captured the spirit of the moment, identifying town planning as a symbol of a
recovery of provincial community life and civic pride.” (Hebbert 1995, p. 768)
National Library of Scotland (NLS) 2017, “Patrick Geddes (1854-1932),

http://www.nls.uk/learning-zone/politics-and-society/patrick-geddes
“Above all, his aim was 'to see life whole', and to achieve a better understanding of human beings in their
natural, built, and social environments…” (NLS 2017)
“The Outlook Tower, now the Camera Obscura, encouraged people to take a holistic approach to learning
about the environment. Successive floors demonstrated how by starting at a local level, one can begin to make
connections with the wider world.” (NLS 2017)
“Patrick Geddes believed that education was a catalyst for social change and active citizenship. He explored
the ways in which people learn most effectively. He developed an educational philosophy which emphasised
the combination of 'hand, heart, and head', in that order of priority. He believed learning should engage the
emotions, and include physical activity.” (NLS 2017)
Haraway’s Primate Visions

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Geddes clear location within the conservation-eugenics movement of the early 20 century
affords us the opportunity to revisit some of Haraway’s discussion of the conquest oriented
relationship between man and nature implicit in said movement.
“the next snapshot shows the separated and still slightly bloody tusks of the elephant held in a gothic arch
over a pleased, informal Delia. She is standing confidently under the arch, each arm reaching out to grasp a
curve of the elephantine structure. But the real support for the ivory is elsewhere. Cut off at the edge of the
picture are four black arms; the hands come from the framing peripheral space to encircle the tusks arching
over the triumphant white woman. The museum archive labels this photo “Mrs. Akeley’s ivory.” The last
photo shows a smiling Cunninghame [(their Scottish hunter-guide who was known as an avid Elephant
murderer)] anointing Mrs. Akeley’s forehead with the pulp from the tusk of the deceased elephant. She
stands with her head bowed under the ivory arch, now supported by a single, solemn African man. The
Museum’s spare comment reads, “The Christening.”
Here is an image of a sacrament, a mark on the soul signing a spiritual transformation effected by
the act of first killing. It is a sacred moment in the life of the hunter, a rebirth in the blood of the sacrifice, of
conquered nature. The elephant stands a fixed witness in Akeley African Hall to its dismembered double in
the photograph, whose bloody member signed the intersection of race, gender, and nature on the soul of the
western hunter. In this garden, the camera captured a retelling of a Christian story of origins, a secularized
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Christian sacrament in a baptism of blood from the victim whose death brought spiritual adulthood, i.e., the
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status of hunter, the status of the fully human being who is reborn in risking life, in killing.”
“Three public activities of the Museum were dedicated to preserving a threatened manhood: exhibition,
eugenics, and conservation. Exhibition was a practice to produce permanence, to arrest decay [(i.e. to create
immortality in time and space)]. Eugenics was a movement to preserve hereditary stock, to assure racial
purity, to prevent race suicide [(i.e. to create purity)]. Conservation was a policy to preserve resources, not
only for industry, but also for moral formation, for the achievement of manhood. …Very close to religious
and medical practice, …these three activities were about transcendence of death. They attempted to insure
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preservation without fixation and paralysis…”
“J.P. Morgan, William K. Vanderbilt, Henry W. Sage, H. F. Osborn, Daniel Pomeroy, E. Roland Harriman,
Childs Frick, John D. Rockefeller III, and Madison Grant…. Osborn summarized the fond hopes of
educators like himself in his claim that children passing through the Museum’s halls “become more reverent,
more truthful, and more interested in the simple and natural laws of their being and better citizens of the
future with each visit.” He maintained that the book of nature, written only in facts, was proof against the
failing of other books: “The French and Russian anarchies were based in books and in oratory in defiance of
every law of nature.” Going beyond pious hopes, Osborn had the power to construct a Hall of the Age of
Man to make moral lessons of racial hierarchy and progress explicit, lest they be missed in gazing at
elephants. [Commenting on his critics, Osborn noted] “The exhibits in these Halls have been criticized only
by those who speak without knowledge. They all tend to demonstrate the slow upward ascent and the struggle
of man from the lower to the higher stages, physically, morally, intellectually, and spiritually. Reverently and
carefully examined, they put man upwards towards a higher and better future away from the purely animal
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sage of life.””
The Garden City Movement:
Sir Ebenizer Howard 1898, To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform

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Haraway, D 1989, Primate Visions, Routledge, p. 55.
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412

Sir Ebenizer Howard 1898, Garden Cities of To-morrow (2nd ed.), London: S.
Sonnenschein & Co
Hall, P (2002), Cities of Tomorrow (3rd ed.), Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Fainstein, S; Campbell, S (2003), Readings in planning theory, Malden, Massachusetts:

Blackwell
Ross, P; Cabannes, Y (2012), 21st Century Garden Cities of To-morrow - How to become
a Garden City, Letchworth Garden City: New Garden City Movement
Meacham, Standish. Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City
Movement (1999)
Norman Lucey 1973, The Effect of Sir Ebenezer Howard And the Garden City Movement
In Twentieth Century Town Planning http://www.rickmansworthherts.com/howard1.htm
Le Corbusier, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
Ewart Culpin, Garden Cities Movement Up-to-date
C. B. Purdom, The Garden City
Foucault and the Heterotopic Garden
“Perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We
must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had
very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space
that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world,
with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center
(the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together
in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the
garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of
garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of
the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity
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(our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).”
Aesthetics in the Garden City Movement

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Foucault, M. (1984) “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” trans. Jay Miskowiec Architecture/ Mouvement/ Continuite, p. 6.
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf
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This image captures the essentially aesthetic quality of the Garden Cities movement. Cities
should be planned as a natural garden because of the aesthetic qualities possessed by
nature. The question, then, becomes why we view nature as beautiful. Is this simply a
culturally relativistic judgment or is there an inherent value to nature that makes it
beautiful? We argue that nature is beautiful because it is a relatively clear reflection of IS-
FFC, an expression of the infinite where force (matter) manifests as structured by form to
produce vessels for consciousness, and that it is this inherent value of nature (its true beauty
as derived from its relationship to True beauty) that makes nature a potential teacher.
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Geography is Philosophy because “social and cultural knowledge and guidance—wisdom”
(Herman 2008, p. 73) can be found in the landscape of our lived environment because the
natural world is an expression (reflection) of the same form of relationship between force,
form and consciousness as human being—Geography can be Philosophy precisely because
of the inherent value of nature that expresses itself as the beauty of nature and the reality
that humanity shares this inherent value (it is the essence of our being as much as it is the
essence of nature’s being, for in truth we are an expression of nature). Beauty, Goodness
and Truth are all attributes of the IS, and as a result beauty can be understood as a
signification of truth—truth can be found in the beauty of nature, for beauty and truth are
attributes of the same infinite-eternal attribute.
In this light we can see the aesthetic quality of a landscape, be it natural, urban or a
synthesis of the two, as essential to its pedagogical potential—beautiful landscapes have the
potential to be a truthful book of philosophy, where as landscapes that have been deprived
of their beauty (almost always via perverse actualization of free will) lack the potential to be

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https://streetscapecanada.com/author/streetscapecanada/
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we must render ourselves as students before nature can be a teacher.
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more than an untruthful book of philosophy. People who live in places that are devoid of
natural landscapes and thus of beauty can be seen as being deprived of access to a
philosophical education (to a liberal arts education, which is to say to an education in the
arts of freedom…). Liberty comes as much as a function of beauty as it does of truth and
goodness, for beauty, truth and goodness are all expressions of the same IS. Planning
human-nature relations in a manner that serves to preserve the beauty of natural landscapes
and harmonize human existence with said preservation of beauty, then, can be understood
as writing a book of social philosophy that seeks to allow humans to think, behave and
conceive of their being from a perspective that is resonant with truth.
Lucey
“‘Air and space, wood and water, schools and churches, shrubberies and gardens, around pretty self
contained cottages in a group neither too large to deprive it of country character, nor too small to diminish
the probabilities of social intercourse.’ (Edinburgh Magazine. Dec. 1848.)
Indeed, this quote should be compared with "Tomorrow:" in which Howard states
‘... by so laying. out a Garden City that, as it grows, the free gifts of Nature- fresh air, sunlight, breathing room
and playing room- shall be still retained in all needed abundance’ (Garden Cities of To-morrow. 1902
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edition. page 113)” (Lucey 1973)
Garden City in Geddes
Geddes (1915) description of Salisbury and the evolution of this ‘Garden City’ illustrates
the class dynamics of access to natural spaces. “Salisbury had advantages of greater garden
space, of streams carried through the streets… …The crowded courts and gardenless slums
of Salisbury have unmistakably… arisen from the deterioration of one old garden-home
after another.” (Geddes 1915, p. 7) The development of slums and courts comes as a
function of the deterioration of spaces originally conceived within Garden City planning
theory and practice.
Garden City as Social Idealism in Geddes
“The note of social idealism… has been especially struck by Mr Ebenezer Howard in his famous… Garden
Cities. In this notable book is set forth the town of the Industrial Age now opening that neotechnic order,
characterised by electricity, hygiene, and art, by efficient and beautiful town planning and associated rural
development, and by a corresponding rise of social co-operation and effective good-will, which it is a main
thesis of this volume to insist upon.” (Geddes 1915, p. 154)

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Norman Lucey 1973, The Effect of Sir Ebenezer Howard And the Garden City Movement In Twentieth Century Town Planning
http://www.rickmansworthherts.com/howard1.htm
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The Two Sir. Patrick Geddes, Liberal and Mystic

There are two images of Patrick Geddes that have been received by subsequent
generations, Patrick Geddes the Liberal and Patrick Geddes the Mystic. Patrick Geddes
the Liberal captures and expresses the spirit of what is known in America as New Deal
Liberalism (which was similarly birthed from the nexus of conservationism, eugenics and
conceptions of society in terms of ‘group survival’), the spirit of a society that has mediated
the deleterious social effects and slum conditions of planning and development structured
by the individual, short-term search for profit and paleotechnic, fossil fuel technologies with
an awakening of civic consciousness, with centralization of government power to pursue
long-term, large-scale planning projects and through integration of neotechnic technologies
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of which electricity is the archetypal example. Geddes’ interest in the synoptic
(interdisciplinary) perspective and the formation of conurbations never caused him to lose
sight of the importance of the individual and of local character in the planning process, but
he sought to mediate the social degradation and chaos of ego based, profit oriented social
development in the paleotechnic era through awakening of a civic consciousness wherein
individuals could perceive themselves from both the individual and group aspects of their
being (a sad, farcical, Modernist replication of the Daoist principle of seeing from both the
finite and the infinite perspectives (from both the local-contextual point of view and the
synoptic-interdisciplinary point of view). “Eternal nonbeing is needed to observe the subtle;
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eternal being is needed to observe the manifest…” “Daoist practice involves ‘opening the
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mysterious pass’ to allow the mind to work in both modes without interference.”
Turning to Geddes the Mystic, the following quotes (all though a bit laborious—we
hope the reader will consent to bear with such lengthy quotation…) are demonstrative:

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Geddes the Liberal’s sensitivity to the necessity of integrating the planning process with local, contextual realities was, as most famously
illustrated by Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like a State and Ferguson’s (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine, clearly lost in some Liberal,
Democratic expressions of High Modernist agricultural planning projects that sought to take a single, generalizable agricultural model
and apply it without regard for local contexts.
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Lao Zi, “A Way Can Be a Guide”, trans. Thomas Cleary, in The Taoist Classics: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary
Volume One, Boston: Shambhala, p. 107.
779
416

Meller 1993, p. 14)
“…On par with Geddes, the American Albion W. Small… was to become the first professor of sociology at
the University of Chicago in 1892. In his approach to the subject, Professor Small shared a similar sense of
personal commitment to social service and had an idealism based on mystical experiences. Like Geddes, he
was to define his mysticism as part of the reality of human experience, with its roots firmly in this world.”
(Meller 1993, p. 15)
“[Geddes] also seems to have had a propensity for what has more recently been described as ‘vision-logic’
thinking, a quite advanced level/form of thinking even now. It can appear to be associated with forms of
mysticism, that are often located in Eastern meditative traditions. Geddes did have exposure to Hindu
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influences while in India, but there are no indications that he processed these in depth. It seems more likely
that he mostly absorbed an early stage of Western mysticism–beyond faith, beyond religion, identified by
Evelyn Underhill (1915) as ‘nature mysticism’ (‘a lateral expansion of consciousness to embrace the stream of
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life’).” (Wight 2015, p. 11)
“For the individual—the Celt especially—drunkenness is times without number a perversion of mysticism. For
the community—Scottish especially—it is the nemesis of the repression at one time by asectic puritan, or at
another by mammonist utilitarian, of the natural joy, the Dionysiac ecstasy of life.” (Geddes 1915, p. 211)
“It is a mental illumination, too, for our ‘practical man’ to see not only education and health held in higher
esteem than with ourselves, but natural beauty preserved, developed, rendered accessible to all, from river-
front to mountain-forest; to see, too, that art is not something outside everyday life, something ‘unpractical,’ at
best to be grudgingly supplied in schools as a reputed aid towards the design of marketable commodities; but
something to be viewed and treated as a worthy and social end in itself… …It is the most useful of
experiences to see civic greatness estimated in more spiritual elements, and public wealth more applied than
with ourselves towards creating an environment of material beauty and general well-being.” (Geddes 1915,
pp. 214-215)
Taken together, the above quotes illustrate that Geddes can be understood as what we
might call a natural mystic. The heights of human potential are understood as existing in
the silence of intuition that exists beyond the bounds of the rational mind, and the process
of refining instinct into intuition occurs at least in part through mystical experiences—

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Does this supposition mesh with Mumford’s (1944) following description of Geddes experiences in India?
“The test of Geddes's essential life-feeling came in India, where he mingled his own dynamic Western approach with a new appreciation
of that wise passiveness, that disciplined contemplation, which marks Hindu culture. …Geddes paid tribute to the Hindu's mystical sense
of the unity of all life… Perhaps the most important continuation of Geddes's thought will take place in India, where he was seen in his
true light, not as a mere botanist or sociologist, but as a typical guru, or wise man.” (Mumford 1944, p. x)
781
Ian Wight 2015, The Evolutionary Spirit at Work in Patrick Geddes, Geddes Institute for Urban Research University of Dundee, p.
11
417

experiences beyond the veil of our sensory, spatiotemporal perceptions of the world—in
nature that cause what is aptly described by Underhill above as “a lateral expansion of
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consciousness to embrace the stream of life”, which is to say the expansion of
consciousness beyond the seeming discreetness of the rational mind into the underlying
unity of being and associated understandings that can be reached through the intuition
(which can be understood as the epistemological perspective of the infinite aspect of self).
Patrick Geddes the Mystic, while all but dead to the contemporary academy, seems
clearly to have been the image received by Geddes closest followers like Lewis Mumford.
“Geddes was a teacher; and like all great teachers, from Socrates onward, he relied upon direct intercourse
rather than the printed word. He gave himself tirelessly in conversation with anyone who was willing to listen
to him; but he withheld himself in books, and those who go to his books to find the man are often
disappointed. This was not perversity on Geddes's part: it represented one of his deepest intuitions about life
and his plainest common sense: life is transmitted only through the living….
Hence Geddes's most important insights share the fate of Plato's intimate teachings: they were never
committed to paper, but were imparted directly to those for whom his life and example served as constant
illustrations of the philosophy itself. Geddes's essential doctrine was a doctrine of life: its inception, its growth,
its crises, its insurgence, its self-transcendence. Those who look for Patrick Geddes in the libraries will never
find him… …His incomplete thoughts, …his impatient shortcuts and his wilful exaggerations -- all apparent
weaknesses which were rectified in real life by his stern common sense, his massive practical grasp, his
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astonishing breadth of scholarship, his relentless confrontation of reality.” (Mumford 1944, p. viii-ix)
“The test of Geddes's essential life-feeling came in India, where he mingled his own dynamic Western
approach with a new appreciation of that wise passiveness, that disciplined contemplation, which marks
Hindu culture. …Geddes paid tribute to the Hindu's mystical sense of the unity of all life… Perhaps the most
important continuation of Geddes's thought will take place in India, where he was seen in his true light, not as
a mere botanist or sociologist, but as a typical guru, or wise man.” (Mumford 1944, p. x)
Mumford’s description of Geddes as ‘guru, or wise man’ who held, like Socrates, Plato,
and so many others, to the tradition that the esoteric side of one’s philosophy (the depths
of one’s philosophy that touch upon the unmanifest world) should only be conveyed orally
sheds a very different light on a man who we know as much for shortcomings like his
collaboration with colonial projects like the Zionist development of Palestine as for his
seemingly progressive views on the necessity of ameliorating the woes of unmediated
capitalist development through cultivation of a more synoptic view of self (i.e. the
awakening of civic consciousness) and through development of a more synoptic-centralized
governmental structure-practice that could undertake macro-scale long-term planning
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projects. Geddes the Mystic loved nature and indeed saw engagement with nature, be it

782
Underhill, Evelyn 1915 Practical Mysticism. E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., New York (Doveredition, 2000; Dover Publications: Mineola,
NY)
783
Carolina Press.
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For an example of this more synoptic-centralized governmental structure-practice and its usefulness in city and town planning Geddes
observes the development of a German seaport wherein a master plan for the entire port and for housing for workers in the surrounding
area were planned prior to the initiation of the development project and were implemented as a whole. This process of building an entire
port and the space surrounding it to provide housing for workers was compared with the chaotic, speculative, individual-profit oriented
process by which many British towns and cities had been planed in the paleotechnic era. This warmness to the centralized government of
Germany and the potential for macro town and city planning therein seems to fly in the face of Meller’s (1993, p. 48) assertion “[Geddes]
was hostile to the centralized state and welfare policies, believing always that the individual had to be the focus of policy, not the masses.
418

through nature based education for youths or through the development of Garden Cities
and Suburbs, through the herculean labor of mastering man’s natural environment that is
the mark of civilizational progress for Geddes or in awe inspired by the beauty of nature
785
derived from its relationship with the unmanifest world, as essential for the process of
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refining instinct into intuition that forms the heart of the mystic’s quest. As with most
great thinkers (Descartes, who would never have spoken of body and mind without
reference to soul, comes readily to mind…), Geddes the Mystic died in the reduction of
reality to passing time and physical space that marked the rise of High Modernity in the
post-war era from its birth in the quantitative ‘revolution’ to its fruition in the
post[most]modern ‘critical turn’. His more problematic sides—from the will to dominate
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that clearly marks his conceptions of human-nature relations to the ‘sustainable
788
domination’ model of New Deal Liberalism —have for the most part been retained, but
his most redeeming quality, his mysticism, has been dismissed as nothing more than the
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irrational residue of pre-Modern thought. Amelioration of the environmental degradation
st
and social deterioration facing humanity in the 21 century cannot be attained without a
reformulation of human-nature relations, and a reformulation of human-nature relations
must be rooted in a transformation of philosophical ontology (in our general assumptions
about ‘what is real’)—though Indigenous Worldviews like those found in the Lakota and
Daoist traditions hold much if not all of the key to this reformulation of philosophical
ontology and human-nature relations therein, Geddes Mysticism (which can be understood
at least in part as a synthesis of Celtic, Roman (Egyptian) and Hindu lineages with the
modern science of his time) and the relation it holds to Geddes theories and practices
more generally provides an apt point from which to exit the Modernist Worldview and
return to the wisdom of our past (when the perverse will to hierarchical domination was not
accepted the ridgepole of order and when reality was not reduced to the manifest world).
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Let us sacrifice the ignoble (Geddes the Liberal-Colonialist-Imperialist ) and revive the
noble (Geddes the Mystic) so that the philosophical ontology of Geddes spiritual worldview
can be brought to bear in the process of transforming human-nature relations.

No state machine, he believed, could control or develop the interaction of individual with environment, which was the only path for
future human progress.” Maybe there is a bit more nuance to Geddes views on a centralized government?
785
Derived from being a pure reflection of the eternal-infinite forms, the order, of the unmanifest world.
786
The alchemical language of refining is not coincidental.
787
Geddes may have begun to see the perverse flaws of the ‘man’s dominion over earth model’ of human-nature relations in his later
years: “During the last twenty years of his life he saw the dream of the Victorian period fade, not into the light of common day, but into a
darkness of almost unthinkable barbarism. …It was no accident that toward the end [Geddes] was attracted by the work of a group of
Adlerians in London who shared their master's concern over the frustrations and perversions of the will-to-power.” (Mumford 1944, p.
vii)
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New Deal Liberalism externalizes the social woes of western democracy through awakening of a civic consciousness oriented towards
social wellbeing and group survival at the local, regional, national and (western) civilizational scales and through paying for public projects
that improved hygiene, energy infrastructure, city spaces, etc. and provided a basic social safety net using wealth that was extracted from
the spaces and people who existed on or beyond the edge of the civic conception of group-self. In short, New Deal Liberalism provides
for the group survival and social wellbeing of a nation by stealing the lifeblood of people and lands that form the ‘other’ in relationship to
the national ‘self’.
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As Mumford (1944, pp. viii-ix) notes, this loss can at least in part be attributed to the fact that Geddes never fully expounded the
mystical side of his teachings in writing and the barriers this presents given the theoretical and methodological limitations of
contemporary academic inquiry.
790
Yes, Liberalism is synonymous with colonialism and imperialism, because the social safety net, civilizational infrastructure, etc.
developed by liberal governmental regimes is always funded through conquest of and extraction from the colonial-imperial periphery.
There has never been a liberal government whose wealth was not derived from raiding those who exist beyond the self-other
demarcation of citizenship.
419

Education should indeed be oriented towards fostering a synoptic (interdisciplinary)
consciousness, but it should be the holistically synoptic consciousness of the infinite aspect
of self (the true general, universal, eternal consciousness) rather than the relatively limited
civically synoptic consciousness of the local, regional, national and imperial aspect of self.
Our scalar epistemological perspective should indeed be reoriented from the illusion of
individual biological discreteness to the underlying truth of synoptic unity, but our
definition of synoptic unity must be grounded in the essential unity of the unmanifest world
(i.e. the inherent unity of all things that is derived from their shared, infinite aspect) rather
than the relative unity and interdependence of the manifest world (i.e. the unity and
interdependence of human civilization and terrestrial nature).
“The central Geddesian lessons — his emphasis of the fundamental unity and interdependence of culture and
nature, and his emphasis on transdisciplinary education and locally adapted direct action as a means of
cultural transformation — are of profound contemporary significance. For Geddes the role of the designer was
two-fold: i) to contribute to the material adaptation of people and their livelihood to the specific opportunities
and challenges of the places they inhabit, and ii), to affect in the transformation of culture through
education…. Geddes was keenly aware that fundamental change in the material domain requires fundamental
immaterial changes in the underlying attitudes and consciousness, and identified transdisciplinary education
as the facilitator of such social change. He believed in the possibility and necessity of societyʼs evolution
791 792
towards higher levels of consciousness and co-operation. Like Geddes, Macy clearly recognizes that such a
profound shift in societyʼs guiding paradigm needs to express itself not simply in the physical dimension in
terms of new technologies, products, buildings and planning approaches, but needs to go hand in hand with a
change in human consciousness. Sustainability requires a fundamental change in worldview resulting in a
change in self-perception that reintegrates humanity into natural process as a conscious participant and
integral part of nature…. Geddes understood that a successful shift towards a sustainable human civilization —
at a local, regional, and global scale — ultimately depends on profound metadesign changes in peopleʼs
attitudes, values, worldviews, and perceived needs. Only such immaterial changes in awareness and
consciousness — informed by transdisciplinary integration and synthesis — have the transformative power to
793
affect all material design and planning decisions downstream.” (Wahl 2017)
Transdisciplinary education and locally-contextually sensitive direct action are indeed

essential means for catalyzing cultural transformation, but the fundamental change in
worldview that makes this transformation of consciousness possible is not to be found
Geddes thinking (or similar enchanted views of Nature like those put forward by. Nasr
794
[1996] ) because human-nature relations are still founded upon hierarchical relations and
the will to dominate. There is doubt the reenchantment of nature proposed by Nasr (1996)
and implicit in Geddes (1915; et. al.) is an essential step in the right direction as illustrated
by Herman (2008):

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This recalls Ouspensky’s (1951) discussion of Conscious Evolution in his The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution and De
Chardin’s (1965) discussion of the Noosphere in The Phenomenon of Man and the distinction between conscious and bio-mechanical
evolution traced in Barnesmoore’s (2016) “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”.
792
J. Macy & M. Y. Brown, Coming Back to Life — Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, New Society Publishers.
793
See Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” Environment and Social Psychology
2(1) for a similar discussion of the relationship between theory and practice (wherein theory, worldview and the consciousness it
produces, expands and constrains the potential for practice).
794
S. H. Nasr 1996, Religion and the Order of Nature, Oxford University Press.
420

experienced as being part of the extended community imbued with consciousness.” (Herman 2008, p. 76)
“To consider Indigenous geography on its own terms requires first that we destabilize and displace the edifice
of "rationality" on which modern geography rests. This is an enormous project, but we can start with a specific
target: what Max Weber called "the disenchantment of the world" that took place after the Reformation. This
movement, seen as essential for rationalizing Christianity away from "superstitions" and the "magical" elements
of Catholicism, resulted in far greater epistemological consequences. Although the Reformation did not
succeed in these goals, by the nineteenth century the steady push toward "rationality" that came with the
Enlightenment—plus the impacts of Descartes, Darwin, and the power of capitalism—ultimately succeeded in
the disenchantment…
For geographic thought there are three important effects of this disenchantment. The first is the
795
world… “
“In Indigenous sciences, the world is often understood in terms of flows of energies (and sometimes entities)
across a permeable boundary between manifest and unmanifest realities…. When the manifest and
unmanifest worlds interpenetrate, as they did in premodern European thought and as they do in many
Indigenous worldviews, then activity and occurrences in the world are potent with meaning. Weber felt that in
modernity, ‘as intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become disenchanted, lose
796
their magical significance, and henceforth simply 'are' and ‘happen' but no longer signify anything.’”
That being said, the enchanted visions of Geddes (1915; et. al.) and the calls fore
reenchantment by Nasr (1996) are both tainted by an even more fundamental problem—
naturalization of the perverted desire for and will to hierarchical domination, which is to
say the definition of human nature in terms of the Farmer from Song who pulled on the
sprouts in his field in an attempt to make them grow faster but begot only death (Meng Zi
2A2). The “change in self-perception that reintegrates humanity into natural process as a
conscious participant and integral part of nature” (Wahl 2017) still views humanity as the
rightful owner of nature, views humanity’s integral role in nature as that of the archon who
has accepted his birthright of dominion over earth. We are indeed conscious participants
in and integral parts of nature, but we cannot rightly fulfill this position when our
engagement with nature is pursued through a worldview that understands our participation
and integral role in nature in terms of hierarchical domination (in terms of the occident,
human reason, colonizing the orient, nature-instinct-intuition). The shift in worldview and
transformation of consciousness required for amelioration of environmental and social
degradation requires not only education towards a reenchantment of nature but also
education towards transcending the hierarchical, domineering folly of the Farmer from
Song (Meng Zi 2A2).

795
32(3), p. 74.
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32(3), p. 75.
421

Geddes argued “our greatest need today is to see life as whole, to see its many sides
797
in their proper relations,” and we agree, but doing so necessitates seeing from an infinite
perspective that, in transcending the illusion of biological discreteness, negates the
hierarchical domination implicit in Geddes vision of human-nature relations in economic-
consumptive terms that accept the basic ‘man’s dominion over earth’ dictum of paternalist
thought. The analytic-synoptic perspective must be distinguished from the intuitive-synoptic
(infinite) perspective and the transcendence of the potential for the perverse will to power
through hierarchical domination to be found therein. The transformation of consciousness
impelled by a shift of (an act upon) worldview to account for the underlying unity of
consciousness in the unmanifest world and by mystical experiences in (by being acted upon
by) nature allows for transcendence of the illusion of biological discreetness and the
potential for self-other relations of hierarchical domination established by this illusion—to
truly see from the intuitive-synoptic, infinite perspective is to transcend “the frustrations
and perversions of the will-to-power” that came to trouble Geddes in the last two decades
of his life. (Mumford 1944, p. vii)
“According to Geddes, it was through the notion of right livelihood that humanity could begin to integrate
into natural process rather than continue to dominate and exploit nature through ever more destructive
technologies. He believed that eventually the destructive technologies that emerged from the Industrial
Revolution and led to a progressive subjugation of human beings and the environment to the machine would
give way to a new ʻgeotechnologyʼ that was to meet human needs within the limits of the planetary
biosphere.” (Wahl 2017)
“Based on his biological understanding of the dynamics of ecosystems, Geddes suggested that a high degree
of specialization in the function of an organism within a highly complex society would lead to a decrease of
individual competition.” (Wahl 2017)
The basic notion that we must transcend our present economic relationship with nature to
begin integration into natural processes and transcend domination and exploitation is spot
on, but Geddes’ vision of neotechnic technology and local-contextual production does not
go far enough in displacing our present economic relationship with nature. Integration into
nature, which requires transcendence of the illusion of discrete, biological individuality,
cannot be attained in a capitalist framework of human-nature relations as predicated upon
798 799
property ownership and competition. (Barnesmoore 2016) In short, the issue is not
simply of ‘right livelihood’ but of right livelihood within an economic system (or post-
economic system…) that transcends the illusion of discrete, biological individuality and the
scarcity, competition and subsequent desire for hierarchical domination that both produces
and structures capitalist economic processes. What Geddes proposes, then (in good

797
Sir William Holford 1957, “Introduction” in P. Mairet, Pioneer of Sociology — The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes, 1957.
Wahl 2017, “Design and Planning for People in Place: Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and the Emergence of Ecological Planning,
Ecological Design, and Bioregionalism” https://medium.com/@designforsustainability/design-and-planning-for-people-in-place-sir-patrick-
geddes-1854-1932-and-the-emergence-of-2efa4886317e
798
Regardless of whether it is the competition between individuals in the same locality of the paleotechnic era or the competition between
civilizational groups of the liberal, neotechnic era envisioned by Geddes…
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Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social
Psychology 1(2).
422

Liberal-Conservationist-Eugenicist form), is not transcendence of hierarchical domination
in human-nature relations but a mediation of this axiomatically natural hierarchical
relationship to “meet human needs within the limitations of the planetary biosphere”
(Wahl 2017)—Geddes vision does not seek transcendence of hierarchical domination (be it
in social or human-nature relations), it seeks to render hierarchical domination as
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‘sustainable’.
Turning to the issue of competition in human society, the ‘decrease of individual
competition’ within the group noted by Wahl (2017) above does not connote a decrease of
competition among groups (as should be readily apparent in the history of Liberal
Democracy of the vein envisioned by Geddes the Liberal). Cooperation may be privileged
over individual competition within the group, but beyond the group the Paternalist-
Modernist dictum that order is to be created through hierarchical domination—which is
itself predicated upon the privation of consciousness through the process of manifestation,
the illusion of discrete, biological individuality therein, the fear of death and competition
for scarce resources therein and the subsequently potential desire for hierarchical
domination of the other by the self therein—remains unproblematic. To put the argument
in simple terms, Geddes did not dig deep enough into his worldview and its associated
philosophy to problematize the essential assumptions about human being (discrete,
biological, self and other) and social order (to be produced through hierarchical
domination) that serve to negate the potential for the mystical human-nature relations that
he envisioned. Individual competition may be mediated by group cooperation, but group
cooperation is still envisioned as a function of competition between groups and so the root
of the problem goes untreated.
My admittedly relatively ephemeral knowledge of Marxism and its legacies leads
this point to remind me of the law of competition between classes therein. Engels (1885)
introduction to the third German edition of Marx’s (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of 801
Louis Bonaparte is more than illustrative:
“It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which
all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological
domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence
and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of
their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law,
which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science -
this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He
put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has
stood the test brilliantly.”

800
The same can be said of the ‘liberal democracy’ that was born from the conservationist-eugenics movement (and in some sense of all
expressions of democracy). The purpose is not transcendence of hierarchical domination but the rendering of hierarchical domination as
sustainable through practices like voting and the ‘free’ press, through normative conceptualizations of self as ‘free’ and through a
reduction of freedom to freedom of thought and action within the hegemonic worldview that work together to manufacture an illusory
sense of freedom in the general public that, if we may borrow a phrase, ‘manufactures consent’ (Herman and Chomsky 1992,
Manufacturing Consent) for sustained political domination by the elite class interests for whom the state is but a mask (Abrams 1988,
“Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State [1977]”).
801
Marx 1852, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Die Revolution.
423

The illusory veneer of distinction between Liberal, Democratic Modernism and Marxist
Modernism begins to crumble…
Geddes the Liberal’s Economics, Geddes the Mystic’s Aesthetics
“In an early paper, entitled ʻJohn Ruskin: Economist,ʼ first published in 1885, Geddes agrees with Ruskinʼs
assessment that market forces should not control economics, but what was needed was a new approach to
economics that focused on true quality of life by answering to the biological and aesthetic needs of humanity.”
802
(Wahl 2017)
To glean a more metaphysically nuanced view into Geddes calls for a new economic
approach that is sensitivity to the biological and aesthetic needs of humanity we must dig
into Geddes (1884) treatment of Ruskin. Geddes (1884) seeks to displace the metaphysical
abstractions and simplifications of orthodox economics with biology and physics:
“Archaic psychological and ethical conceptions—frequently of course of fundamental importance—are

dragged up from the dusty academic crypts, where they have escaped contact with the ideas of the century, to
be hurled at us, for have they not supported the temple of economic orthodoxy ever since Adam Smith (who
had of course to work with the crude notions of human nature and conduct current in his day) sought ot
found economic and moral sciences upon the irreconcilable and mutually destructive assumptions of pure
egoism and pure altruism respectively, saying, let us found economic on the notion of unrestrained self-
interest, morals on that of universal sympathy. In such ‘hypothetical sciences,’ the hypothetical element is
more evident than the scientific; and these illusory simplifications of the problem by denying the unity of
nature and of science need not detain us here, save that they are of interest in accounting for those moving
appeals against emotion, and contemptuous dismissals of ‘sentiment’—themselves choice examples of
emotion and sentiment, of course of the strictly egoistic or economic sort—with which every reader of
orthodox economic literature is familiar.” (Geddes 1884, pp. 14-15)
“The naturalist has long ago discerned and proclaimed that the phenomena of human society are as
dependent upon biology as those of ant or bee society, and the orthodox economist must either straightaway
follow the example of students of mind and language, whose (then unreformed) studies not so long ago
seemed equally remote from those humble microscopic inquires to which they likewise supposed the
biologist to be confined, and either adopt and apply the conceptions of modern physics and biology, or
disappear in the unavailing struggle for existence against them.” (Geddes 1884, pp. 14)
Geddes movement (where in “…the economic unit is no longer ‘Plato’s’ but Darwin’s
man…” (Geddes 1884, p. 32), which coheres with the more general reduction of human
society to biology of his time that is so aptly captured in Haraway’s (1989) Primate Visions,
was both understandable and tragic. The movement is understandable from the perspective
of the markedly dogmatic metaphysical abstractions it sought to displace (for example,
displacement of the fallen abstraction of human economic behavior as ‘unrestrained self-
interest’ through a focus on scientific conceptions of ‘group survival’ as more essential than
‘individual survival’ [Geddes 1915, p. 184, et. al.]). It is tragic in reducing humanity to its

802
https://medium.com/@designforsustainability/design-and-planning-for-people-in-place-sir-patrick-geddes-1854-1932-and-the-
emergence-of-2efa4886317e
424

lowest, biological potential and thereby obfuscating the potential for conscious evolution
beyond the constraints of biological existence and the illusion of discrete, biological
individuality therein at both the individual and societal scales (Barnesmoore 2016,
“Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution…”). Geddes illustrates the biological conception of
economics with the following quotation: “‘Just as the operations of heredity upon man and
other organisms are not merely analogous but identical, so too are those of function…’”
(Geddes 1884, p. 33) It is precisely the differentiation of humanity’s conscious evolution
from the biomechanical evolution of other organisms that makes humans human:
[toward] and understanding of his possible evolution.”
“Our fundamental idea shall be that man as we know him is not a completed being; that nature develops him
only up to a certain point and then leaves him, either to develop further, by his own efforts and devices, or to
live and die such as he was born, or to degenerate and lose capacity for development.
In short, the ability of humans to direct their will towards evolution (be it through directing
the will towards intellectual engagement with ideas or directing the will towards an
803
engagement with nature in a manner that allows for the refinement of instinct into
intuition) differentiates the human evolutionary process from that of other organisms and
indeed leads human evolution to be structured by a different form than that of the
biomechanical evolution of other organisms. Conscious and mechanical evolution are not
identical, and structuring of human social structures based on the assumption that humans
are beholden to the form of mechanical evolution actually serves to negate the potential for
conscious evolution. (Barnesmoore 2016)
This tragic reduction of human evolution and social order to the order and form of
biology seems to contain the essential barrier to the synthesis of urban and rustic
envisioned by Geddes in his quest “…to combine [the] fundamental vividness of rustic life,
with the subtler, yet it may be even more strenuous life of productive urban culture is
perhaps the main problem before the evolutionist.” (Geddes and Thomson 1911, p. 112 as
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quoted in Meller 1993, p. 17) As Barnesmoore (2016) illustrates, “…the strenuous life of
productive urban culture…” actively negates the potential for conscious evolution through
mystical engagement with the “…fundamental vividness of rustic life” by structuring human
society based on the form of mechanical rather than conscious evolution. The scientific,
biologically-reductive conception of human society, when synthesized with the materialist-
Modernist reduction of reality to the manifest world, excises the potentials of the infinite
aspect of self and the associated epistemological potentials which are necessary for the
mystical engagement with (mystical experiences in and through) the vividness of rustic life

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“The ultimate perfection attainable to us [is]… that the order of the whole of existing things should be inscribed in our souls…. ‘What
do they not see, who see him who sees all things?’” (Pieper 2009 Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 92)
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from known reality. As Ouspensky notes, however, conscious evolution is predicated on
both conscious efforts towards and understanding of conscious evolution—by negating
knowledge of the potential for human evolution and social order beyond the limitations of
mechanical evolution and the associated illusion of discrete, biological individuality Geddes
negates the potential for the process of refining instinct into intuition that he rightly accepts
as leading to the highest potentials of human being.
It was probably hard (if not impossible) for Geddes to imagine of a world that
simply denied the existence of the unmanifest world or a vein of economics that
perpetuated abstract metaphysical assumptions like the reduction of human economic
behavior to ‘unrestrained self-interest’ without reference to the unmanifest world, and the
strains of mysticism in his work clearly illustrate that he sought to displace superstitious and
dogmatic metaphysical abstractions using science rather than to displace metaphysics
altogether.
“…Orthodox political economy turns out to be little better than an air-castle of mediaeval metaphysics,
collapsing at the slightest breath of scientific criticism…” (Geddes 1884, p. 41)
“It would ill become the student of modern science to forget that to Roger Bacon the alchemist, and Kepler
the astrologer, we owe priceless discoveries… So the scientific invaders of political economy must never forget
in the excitement of victory that, while of its orthodox system hardly one stone can be left upon another, for
new foundations have to be laid, the materials of the edifice and the treasures which its multifarious
storehouses contained are abundant and precious enough to ransom the economists from any risk of disgrace
of oblivion.” (Geddes 1884, pp. 18-19)
“…See how the ‘sentimental political economy’ contained at once the germs of systematic science and of its
noblest applications, and find more and more… that our despised and rejected author, however noteworthy
and memorable for theoretic work in art, is yet more so for his practical applications of the knowledge to the
art of life; that our discipline of Plato and scholar of Turner has also become the highest practical exponent of
Darwin.” (Geddes 1884, p. 38)
In this light, it may be fairer to say that Geddes vision of a synthesis between urban
productivity and rustic aesthetic fulfillment was impossible given the form that neoliberal
capitalist urban economic production would take in later years (i.e. a form in which the
individual search for profit and associated social degradations of the paleotechnic era were
by and large preserved, the relationship between economic abstractions and the unmanifest
world was extinguished and the most problematic economic abstractions like the reduction
of human economic behavior to unrestrained self-interest were retained…). If, however, we
take a step deeper into Geddes’ worldview, we find that his conceptions of economics for
the sake of both biological wellbeing and aesthetic fulfillment fail to transgress the most
essential abstraction of economic theology (capitalism, socialism and communism alike)
and indeed of paternalism more generally—‘social order is produced through hierarchy’.
Geddes [1915] movement towards a conception of local, regional, national,
imperial, civilizational, etc. cooperation is predicated on the privileging of ‘group survival’
over ‘individual survival’. As such, and in perfect liberal-internationalist-colonialist-
imperialist form, Geddes simply shifts the scale of hierarchy, competition, domination, etc.
to a less granular scale of self and other (to other localities, other regions, other nations,
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other empires, other civilizations, etc.) instead of actually transcending the worldview in
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which hierarchy, competition, domination, etc. are the progenitors of social order. This
conception of order is anathema to human social order, which, in of humanity’s capacity
for conscious evolution (Ouspensky 1951) through mystical experiences, has the ability to
transcend the limitations of the illusion of discrete, biological individuality of which fear of
death, scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical domination are the most
prominent. (Barnesmoore 2016) This most perverse shred of the dogmatic metaphysical
past from which Geddes was birthed was not excised from his worldview because its
negation lies precisely in humanity’s transcendence of biology, the form of mechanical
evolution and the constraints imposed therein.
“…If these Darwinians are indeed to draw full consequences from their greatest law—that organism is made by
function and environment, then man, if he is to remain healthy and become civilized, must not only aim at
the highest standard of cerebral as well as non-cerebral excellence, and so at function healthy and delightful,
but must take especial heed of his environment; not only at his peril keeping the natural factors of air, water,
and light at their purest, but caring only for ‘production of wealth’ at all, in so far as it shapes the artificial
factors, the material surroundings of domestic and civic life, into forms more completely serviceable for the
Ascent of Man….
…Our theory of production culminates in the Rehabilitation of Beauty, and our productive action
for country and city in the restoration of nature, and the organisation of art.” (Geddes 1884, p. 35)
“The so-called ‘aesthetic revival’… represent[s] in fact the small beginnings of the Industrial Reformation, of
that re-organisation of production—of products and processes, of environment and function, which is the
nearest task of the united art and science of the immediate future.” (Geddes 1884, p. 37)
There are two readily observed problems with Geddes aesthetic turn. The first comes in
the fact that human-nature relations enlivened by the Farmer of Song (Meng Zi 2A2)
mentality of capitalism—a mentality in which one seeks to help nature grow by pulling its
sprouts, which is to say by dominating nature, and which actually breeds death rather than
the desired growth—necessarily cause a decay of natural order (the death of the sprouts
pulled by the Farmer of Song) that causes a decay of natural order. Can a society whose
practices are structured by a system like capitalism in which the Farmer of Song mentality is
enshrined actually rehabilitate the beauty of nature? Second, the ‘Ascent of Man’ through
engagement with the beauty of nature and art—which is to say through engagement with the
infinite-eternal forms of manifestation (with manifestations of Truth)—is actively negated by
existence in a society structured by the form of mechanical evolution and the illusion of
discrete, biological individuality. (Barnesmoore 2016) Social systems like capitalism,
socialism and communism—which are structured by the form of mechanical evolution and
the limitations of discrete, biological individuality (i.e. by the assumption that social order
must be produced through hierarchical domination)—actively negate the potential for
conscious evolution through experience of beauty. In promoting social-political-economic

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Indeed, Geddes endearment to German socialism tells the story: what he loved about German town and city planning was that power
had been moved up the hierarchy from the individual to the state in a manner that allowed the state to more completely and rationally
control its natural environment. This warmness to the centralized government of Germany and the potential for macro town and city
planning therein seems to fly in the face of Meller’s (1993, p. 48) assertion “[Geddes] was hostile to the centralized state and welfare
policies, believing always that the individual had to be the focus of policy, not the masses. No state machine, he believed, could control
or develop the interaction of individual with environment, which was the only path for future human progress.”
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systems that are insensitive to the distinction between the conscious evolution of humans
and the mechanical evolution of other organisms Geddes vision negates its own teleological
imperative by producing a state of being that negates the potential for the Ascent of Man
via the refinement of instinct into intuition through experience of aesthetic beauty and the
Order-Truth that are the essence of beauty. Geddes’ envisioned relationship between
biology, evolution and social-political-economic systems, in short, negates his vision for
mystical engagement with aesthetic beauty in nature and art.
Conclusions
The social, cultural, political, civilizational, human-nature relation, evolutionary (i.e.
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evolution as man’s control over environment) , etc. realities of Geddes the Liberal (i.e.
group survival based hierarchical relations with nature and ‘the other’, which in more
general metaphysical terms is to say the colonization of the orient by the occident), in short,
must be negated by attainment of Geddes the Mystic’s intuitive-synoptic perspective and
transcendence of the illusion of totalizing, discrete, biological individuality therein. More
than simply understanding that terrestrial nature and culture form a synoptic whole (a living
network, a rhizome, etc.), we must understand the true, natural relations between terrestrial
nature and culture (which are as devoid of the perverse will to hierarchical domination as
they are founded upon the enchanted worldview humans and nature as expressions of the
same, infinite-eternal, unmanifest consciousness). Let us avoid the perpetual Modernist
trap of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater by dismissing all mysticism and
the potential for human epistemology and human-nature relations established therein
because we reduce the spiritual worldview to the perversions of the paternalist will to
hierarchical domination so that we may bring the wisdom of Geddes the Mystic—and of
mysticism and the potentials for human epistemology and human-nature relations
established therein more generally—to bear upon environmental planning practices that we
might stave off the impending socio-ecological genocide of Modernity. We must attain the
transcendence of hierarchical domination impelled by the dissolution of the illusion of
discrete, biological individuality that is to be found in Geddes mysticism (engagement with
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nature, mystical experiences in nature and refinement of instinct into intuition therein) if
we are to return to a worldview and associated state of consciousness wherein truly

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“M. Boucher de Perthes was a true student of the past; no mere antiquary and collector, but a thoughtful inquirer into the progressive
control by man of his environment, and thus interested in all that the advance of his appliances might signify in that remote past, or again
in his own scarcely less marvellously evolving present. Here in fact he had reached a true, a central, a continuous epic of humanity—
‘Tools and the man I sing!’” (Geddes 1915, p. 247)
““Man’s curiosity and desire to control his world impel him to study living things”. With that banal but crucial assertion about the
foundation of human rationality in the will to power, Yerkes opened his book. For him the tap root of science is the aim to control. The
full consequences of that teleology become apparent only in the sciences of mind and behavior, where natural objet and designed
product reflect each other in the infinite regress of face-to-face mirrors, ground by the law of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic….
…. Since the first and final object of Yerkes’s interest was the human being, the pinnacle of evolutionary processes, where the
structure of domination of brain over body was most complete, greatest curiosity and utility were centered on natural objects yielding
greatest self-knowledge and self-control.” (Haraway 1989, pp. 61-62)
“26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the
fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26,
KJV)
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See William James 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longman, Green and Co. for an exploration of mystical experience
that is readily accessible to the scientific mind which lacks personal experience with mystical experience.
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sustainable human-nature relations are possible. Rather than preserving the worst parts
of Geddes—his liberal, biocentrist, hierarchical worldview—let us instead preserve the best
parts of Geddes that are to be found in his mysticism and conception of human-nature
relations in terms of refinement of instinct into intuition through mystical experience
(which are negated by the liberal, biocentrist, hierarchical worldview that has been
preserved). Geddes imagined society that seeks wellbeing and the Ascent of Humanity
through engagement with a beauty in nature and art is visionary indeed, but we must
transcend his biological conceptions of human evolution and of human social-political-
economic systems if we are to attain it—the utopian world imagined by Geddes the Mystic,
“the future city of healthy and happy artists” (Geddes 1884 p. 38), can only be attained
through the death of Geddes the Liberal’s worldview.
Emotion and Nationalism in Geddes

Geddes work in Ireland during the 1880s let him to become
“…Particularly fascinated by the concept of nationalism and its potential as a means of generating the
emotional commitment necessary for change… The crucial connection between nationalism, cultural identity
and social endeavor impressed itself indelibly on Geddes’ receptive (and Scottish) mind. He became
fascinated not by the politics of nationalism but the culture. He found himself in sympathy with the idea of
using Celtic history and culture as a means of building up a sense of separateness and individuality amongst
the subject nations: the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots in the United Kingdom. There was a growing revulsion
against the cultural domination of the English which seemed to grow in inverse proportion to the tightening of
the imperial power over colonial countries brought by better means of communication and transport. The
imperial pretensions of the English seemed to have no limit.” (Meller 1993, p. 43)
Geddes response was sadly understandable in the context of colonial dominion by the
Roman-Norman English, and indeed, as Meng Zi’s (2A2) story of the Farmer from Song
intimates, hierarchical domination of the sort imposed upon the people by the British
Crown leads to just the sort of decay and subsequent lack of unity expressed by the
separateness and individuality of nationalist (racial…) cultural identity. Though Geddes
position was admittedly understandable, there are some inherent tensions between
conception of being in nationalistic (often racial) terms and the transcendence of the
illusion of discrete biological individuality that is essential for the process of Conscious and
Social Evolution.
The inherent problems in Geddes recourse to nationalist (racial) cultural identity as
a driver of practical social change are aptly captured by Seamus Deane’s (1995)
“Imperialism/Nationalism”, which, similarly drawing from the example of Irish
Nationalism, argues that we should be wary of short-term political gains against imperialism

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Truly sustainable being relations that transcend the spirit of Meng Zi’s (2A2) Farmer of Song, which is to say that transcend
hierarchical, domineering relations between humans and nature (relations predicated on a distinction between self and other) for
relations in which humanity’s conception of self includes nature and in which humanity attempts to harmonize with the existing order of
nature rather than attempting to create artificial orders in nature. “…Two things fitted together are not really synthesized. The shoe
surrounds the foot but never becomes part of the foot.” (Adams 1970 William Blake: Jerusalem, Selected Poems and Prose, p. xi)
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Geddes doesn’t seem to have attained such a shift in worldview (though he seems to have seen the glimmer in his late years given
Mumford’s [1944] comment about Geddes and concerns with the will-to-power), but such a change of consciousness-worldview is to be
found in the natural mysticism promoted by Geddes if we can approach it in a manner that is not tainted by the illusion of discrete
biological individuality (the illusion that the distinction between self and other is essential rather than ephemeral) and the will to
hierarchical domination that is made possible therein. Geddes surely came closer than most!
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achieved through recourse to national cultural identity because of the problematic long-
term epistemological results of nationalist (racial) identification. Put in different terms,
Deane observes the dangers of accepting and attempting to valorize, reclaim, revitalize etc.
categorizations that have been imposed upon people by their colonizers to provide another
view into the necessity of deproletarianization. Moving from the assertion that “an
established structure of representation cannot produce an alternative to itself, no matter
how severely it is put under question. The alternative is already established within and by
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those structures” , Deane argues that attempts to rearticulate cultural and national identity
(i.e. the notion of reclaiming Irish national identity) are in the end doomed to failure
because the existing structure of representation in the minds of the colonizers cannot
produce an alternative to itself. No matter how much the Irish identity is rearticulated and
valorized, Irish still means a subordinate other within the colonial epistemological
framework of hegemonic English culture.
Taking Deane’s argument a step further within the spiritual worldview that enlivens
this text, nationalist cultural identity extends the illusion of discrete biological individuality
to the group (racial, cultural or both) level and thereby produces a state of emotion-mind-
being that is incommensurable with the transcendence of discrete biological individuality
that is the singularity from which Conscious Evolution becomes possible. If the refinement
of instinct to intuition through engagement with the beauty of nature and art intends to lead
individuals into mystical experiences wherein the illusion of discrete biological individuality
is, at least for a time, transcended and the individual’s worldview, associated philosophy
and state of being (i.e. norms of thought, behavior and conception of being) thus evolve
beyond the limitations of the manifest world and the materially rational mind, and if we
accept that Conscious and Social Evolution are catalyzed by such mystical experiences,
then a conception of being that serves to reinforce the illusion of discrete biological
individuality like nationalist (in this case racial) cultural identity can be understood as
producing a worldview, associated philosophy and state of being that are incommensurable
with the Conscious and Social Evolution envisioned by Geddes. Put in more general terms,
Conscious and Social Evolution are rooted in experiencing the unity of the infinite self, and
so conceptions of being like nationalist (in this case racial) cultural identity that construct
and emphasize the differences between finite expressions of the infinite self can be
understood as producing a worldview (especially ontology), associated philosophy
(especially epistemology) and norms of thought and behavior therein that is dimensionally
incommensurable with and which, when accepted as totalizing, therefore negates the
potential for humanity’s Conscious and Social Evolution. As we have already noted,
“In the 1880s, whilst he was conscious of the power of nationalism, [Geddes’] energies
were directed more specifically to discovering the source of the emotional forces which he
believed lay behind what Bergson was to call ‘creative evolution’.
The ‘Subjectivism’ of Meller’s (1993) Reading

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Readings of Mystical authors like Geddes by arrogant materialists like Meller are not very
useful in metaphysical or psychological terms and can only be tolerated (and that only in a
pinch…) as a function of the richness of the historical narrative that is sewn therein. While
Meller’s ontological violence is passive-aggressive in good British form, I will take a more
forward approach…. The following quotes elucidate the central crux of the perversion of
Geddes thought and work imposed by Meller’s arrogantly materialist reading:
“Mumford wrote in 1950:
Patrick Geddes is fast becoming a rallying center for the best minds of this generation; his thought…
will probably guide the future, since the mechanists and Marxists in the present hour of their
triumph, demonstrate the failure of their philosophies to do justice to either life or the human spirit.
811
[Mumford 1950, p. 82 ]
Perhaps Mumford’s outburst had as much to do with his feelings about the 1950s as his championship of
Geddes. Yet the fact remains that Geddes’ ideas are not accessible…” (Meller 1993, p. 1)
Why is this statement perceived as an ‘outburst’? The mechanists and Marxists have clearly
illustrated ‘the failure of their philosophies to do justice to either life or the human spirit,’
and so it seems clear that Meller is trying to combat Mumford’s argument by reducing it to
an emotional outburst rooted in an irrational conception of reality (as including a soul and
an eternal-infinite basis for conceptions of justice) and thereby avoiding direct intellectual
engagement with his argument. Indeed, the same can be said of her assertion that Geddes
ideas are not accessible (which is likely true from her dogmatically limited materialist-
Modernist worldview but which is by no means true from worldviews that have survived the
ravages of Modernity…)—it may be starkly impossible (Foucault, The Order of Things) for
a small minded materialist like Meller to access Geddes ideas, but that is by no means a
generalizable truth… This intellectually pathetic tactic of simply dismissing understandings
that are incommensurable with the materialist-Modernist Worldview as ‘emotional
outbursts’, ‘irrational’, ‘irreconcilable’, ‘inaccessible’, ‘a need’ (desire), ‘a temptation’, a
function of his history or upbringing, etc. runs rampant through Meller’s attempt to treat
with Geddes philosophy (and indeed through much of the contemporary ‘academy’). A
worthwhile treatment of a mystical philosophy and mystical social science rooted in a non-
Modernist worldview cannot be conducted by an individual like Meller for whom it is
starkly impossible to think the that of the alternative worldview and who is therefore left
with no recourse but intellectually pathetic belittlement, ridicule and rendering of non-
Modernist worldviews as purely subjective (i.e. a perpetual ad homonym attack) that
amounts to an act of ‘ontological violence’. (Blaser 2013)
“Much of what he wrote is difficult to follow because he developed a totally
idiosyncratic approach to the very conception of knowledge and created his own unique
methodology.” (Meller 1993, p. 2) Geddes conception of knowledge in intuitive terms may
seem idiosyncratic and unique from the materialist-Modernist viewpoint held by Meller,
but it is perfectly coherent with a wide range of mystical traditions from around the world.
Indeed, when taken in the historical context of the global cultural milieu it is Meller’s

811
Mumford 1950, “Mumford on Geddes”, The Architectural Review, August, p. 82.
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materialist-Modernist Worldview and inability to understand the traditional, intuitive
understanding of human epistemology therein that is idiosyncratic and unique…
What follows are a few more of Meller’s disparaging, ontologically violent
characterizations of Geddes work…
“He tried, characteristically, to illustrate his ideas in the writing of his planning reports where theoretical
shortcomings could be excused….” (Meller 1993, p. 2)
“He constantly craved a sympathetic indulgence towards the approach he adopted…” (Meller 1993 p. 2
“This may have been a pipe-dream.” (Meller 1993, p. 3)
“Bose’s view of Geddes, coloured by his own experience, as the lone outsider misunderstood by the world,
was shared by Geddes himself and all his intimate friends. He was aware that people most often regarded him
with his self-imposed mission as a crank….
Geddes view of himself as an outsider did nothing to help him develop a style of writing which was
readily comprehensible. He was almost incapable of writing simple prose. He shared with many pioneer
sociologists an unsureness of touch when it came to expressing his ideas. C. Wright Mills has made some
interesting comments on language style and the pioneer sociologists. He suggests,
“…Gardens, for all their beneficial influences, were too cramped to be a totally satisfying environment for the
growth and development of young people. Ultimately, the most important experience was freedom: to
ramble, experiment, and investigate in the liberating atmosphere of the countryside. Geddes was to become
particularly concerned about ‘town’ children as he felt that an urban upbringing must stultify and perhaps
permanently blight the growing process of the young.” (Meller 1993, p. 16, emphasis added)
“One of the greatest dangers in the new cosmology was the difficulty of defining and studying the evolutionary
life-process if it transcended both mind and matter. There was a great temptation to create the possibility of a
life-force, the ‘élan vital’, of mystical origins, beyond the bounds of reason.
biologists and yet he wanted to believe in a life-force. It was an intellectual conflict he was never able to
of conventional knowledge and scientific methodology.” (Meller 1993, p. 13)
This is a useful point to interject. Conceptions of reality beyond passing time and physical
space and therefore beyond the bounds of reason are reduced to nothing more than a
subjective temptation. There is no truth or reality in such metaphysical conceptions, only
irrationality birthed from the temptations of the subject. All conceptions of reality beyond
passing time and physical space rise from ‘wanting to believe’, from subjective belief. Again,
the Modernist Worldview is imposed violently in a manner that reduces all conceptions
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beyond its dogmatic constraints to subjective temptations and subsequent beliefs. As a
result of this violent imposition of the Modernist-materialist worldview and its associated,
materially rational epistemology, Geddes views are reduced to an unresolved intellectual
conflict and the resolution to be found beyond the confines of conventional knowledge and
scientific method are simply written off as irrational.
Turning to Geddes conception of intuition as the highest potential of human
epistemology and of nature as the best place to refine instinct into intuition Meller argues
“But he was already confident that his past stood him in good stead. The best refining influence on natural
instinct had to be nature. As a rustic youth from the backwoods in Scotland, he had spent his childhood in
close communication with nature, and had observed at first hand the life-force of creation in the hills, woods,
fields, and garden near his home. He became convinced that he had to rely on his own, thus refined,
intuition, in his search for a new cosmology. To follow Geddes’ idiosyncratic path to knowedge, therefore, it
is necessary to highlight some of the formative influences of his childhood and youth since these were
Geddes’ own guide to developing his unique intuition.” (Meller 1993, p. 14)
First off, the notion of ‘unique intuition’ demonstrates Meller’s clear lack of understanding
concerning the intuition. Intuition, when refined from instinct, comes as a function of the
infinite aspect of self and is in a sense the antithesis to uniqueness… Second, Meller’s
reduction of Geddes natural mysticism to a subjective function of his upbringing (his
history) is to deny the ontological claims that undergird all strains of natural mysticism.
Nature is the best means for refining instinct to intuition, and has been understood as such
by many cultures from around the world, not because of subjective belief but because of
the inherent reality (the inherent meaning, value, ontology, order, beauty, etc.) of nature
and its ability to bring us into sympathetic intimacy with IS-FFC. It is not that nature has to
be the best means because of Geddes upbringing, but that terrestrial nature is the best
means as a function of its inherent nature. Meller’s Modernist impulse to strip nature of
inherent value, of inherent order, of inherent beauty, of consciousness, etc. (i.e. to strip
nature of its relationship to the unmanifest world [Herman 2008]) and her subsequent
reduction of Geddes natural mysticism to a product of his own unique subjectivity as
produced by his personal history is a perfect example of the Modernist ontological violence
that is constantly imposed upon mysticism by Modernist ‘academics’. The reduction of
reality to passing time and physical space and the nihilism necessitated therein is imposed
upon reality as axiomatic truth and all viewpoints that do not cohere with the Modernist
Worldview are reduced to irrational, subjective creations…
“[Geddes] mother, sadly going blind, partly from overstraining her eyes by undertaking fine embroideries and
needle-work, wanted him to become a minister of religion. In her simple piety, she believed that such a step
would be a fitting vocation for her youngest son. For the young Geddes himself, such an objective could not
have been further from his desires… Yet two characteristics of his later life are thrown into relief by this
simple, devout, and disciplined upbringing. Geddes consciously felt the need for a religious dimension even
when he had ceased to believe in orthodox doctrines…”
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Geddes, it is axiomatically presumed, could not have had an actual, intimate relationship
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with the IS-FFC through his engagements with nature that both assured his faith (rather
than a subjective belief) in an infinite-eternal-conscious unity underlying all that which is
and negated the potential for adherence to the dogmatic orthodoxies of post-Catholic
Christianity… One cannot have an actual religious (spiritual would be a more apt term…)
dimension of their existence, for in Meller’s Modernist Worldview reality is reduced to
passing time and physical space and any conception of reality that breaches those
boundaries is nothing more than irrational, subjective, superstitious belief—any spiritual
dimension of one’s life comes as a function of a subjective need rather than of a true
reality. Geddes spirituality, in Meller’s most ontologically violent movement yet (impressive
given the ground we have already covered…), is reduced to a subjective residue of his
upbringing because an actual spiritual dimension of existence is dimensionally
incommensurable with Meller’s Modernist Worldview. Instead of treating with Geddes
Worldview (cosmology, ontology, teleology, etc.) as potentially real, Meller simply
presumes that it is an irrational belief and thus acts as a perfect agent of Modern
Epistemological Colonialism.
In conclusion, Meller’s text is a perfect expression of what Mario Blaser (2013) calls
‘ontological violence’. Mellers snide, demeaning and subjectively reductive interpretations
of Geddes mysticism and spirituality presume and impose the Modernist Worldview and
its reduction of reality to manifestation upon a mode of thought, behavior and conception
of being that is dimensionally incommensurable with the Modernist Worldview. Meller’s
approach is far worse than pointless, it is violent in the extreme (and indeed fulfills
Mumford’s claim that mechanists and Marxists fail to do justice to either life or the soul).
Meller’s text may be a useful book report style biography if you are seeking facts about
Geddes life, but it is far worse than useless in its virulent ontological and epistemological
violence when taken from the level of worldview and associated philosophy. Worse than
the tension by which Geddes’ vision of social order negates the potential for his vision of
the Ascent of Man through the refinement of instinct to intuition in engagement with
beauty in nature and art, Meller’s reading colonizes the mystical aspects of Geddes vision
by reducing them to irrational, subjective, socially constructed, etc. residues of pre-Modern
thought because they are incommensurable with the Modernist Worldview and its
reduction of reality to passing time and physical space.
Conveying Meaning in Language

We may be leaving the path of this present exploration with this quick note, but Meller’s
rationally reductive understanding of Geddes philosophy of nature (the rest is described as
‘romantic’ in the pejorative sense this term has taken in Modernity) is clearly rooted in the
‘stark impossibility of thinking that’ and very aptly characterizes the abject poverty and
perversion of Modernist linguistic theory and philosophy more generally…. (Foucault, The
Order of Things) Meller’s absurdly (even disgustingly when taken from the perspective of
human dignity…) dogmatic characterization of Geddes writing style is illustrative…

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Faith and belief are not the same thing. Faith is real, experiential knowledge beyond the bounds of passing time, physical space and the
materially rational mind. Belief is a subjective fabrication.
434

“Geddes view of himself as an outsider did nothing to help him develop a style of writing which was readily
comprehensible. He was almost incapable of writing simple prose. He shared with many pioneer sociologists
an unsureness of touch when it came to expressing his ideas. C. Wright Mills has made some interesting
comments on language style and the pioneer sociologists. He suggests,
At least part of my gut-wrenching aversion to this ‘perspective’ is surely rooted in the

simpering manner in which a certain Dr. David Ley (‘the reverend’) recapitulated this
‘perspective’ at me in a graduate seminar, and so I hope that Dr. Meller will not be overly
offended by my colorful use of adjectives in this section… The primary assumption implicit
in this statement is that a functional relationship (a 1=1 relationship) exists between
language and meaning. All ideas, be they of the manifest or the unmanifest world, can be
perfectly expressed in language. The entire meaning of an idea can be inscribed in words. I
have written a number of articles addressing this assumption within the context of language
analysis software (Miratrix et. al. 2014; Barnesmoore et. al. 2015; Barnesmoore and Huang
2015), but to put the argument into simple, metaphorical terms linguistic meaning (which
inculcates the context of the individual, the context in which the individual is using
language, the non-linear dimensional quality of consciousness, etc.) ought to be understood
as a three (or more…) dimensional object and language itself must be understood as a two
dimensional plane upon which we are attempting to inscribe meaning (like drawing a
sphere, or a moving sphere, on a piece of paper)—something is by necessity lost in the
process of inscribing consciousness in language. Another issue of dimensionality arises in
of the fact that language is of an essentially finite dimensional quality and ideas, especially
those that relate to the unmanifest world, are of an essentially infinite dimensional quality—
as the prefect circle can never be perfectly captured in the finite dimensional quality of
manifestation and must exist in ideational space, so to do can ideas (again especially those
that relate to the unmanifest world) never be perfectly captured in the finite dimensional
quality of language; they are dimensionally incommensurable. (Ouspensky, Tertium
Organum) It is thus that all traditions other than Modernism attempt to express ideas,
especially those concerning the unmanifest world, in symbolic rather than analytic terms
(Corbin 1960) that allow an image or story to become a locus for the silent understandings
of the rational intuition and other post-rational human epistemological potentials and thus
free us from the fetters of finite knowledge. In this light, the profundity of an idea (which is
articulated by an ideas intimacy with the IS-FFC) is indeed an essential determinate of
reader intelligibility. So to is the complexity of an idea (though we might invert this and say
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that the more simple an idea, when simplicity is understood in properly dimensional terms,
the harder it is to convey in language).
Let us cede some ground to Meller and Mills through Foucault’s notion of ‘the
stark impossibility of thinking that’. Ones identity as an outlier—as other in relationship to
the hegemonic worldview, associated philosophies and linguistic meanings of the day—does
indeed play a prominent role in the potential for an author to express ideas in a manner
that is readily accessible to the general public of that day. That being said, this effect comes
as a function of the ability to utilize the commonsensical symbolic meanings of a given
culture rather than ‘confusions of the academic writer about his own status’. Indeed, it is
not that the writer is confused about their own status, but that they properly understand
their own status. As there is no functional relationship between language and meaning and
as a living, non-linear network of invisible epistemic processes (as opposed to the visible
epistemic processes of what we know as the ‘objective mind’ of our sensory experiences in
manifestation)—a network established by the hegemonic worldview and associated
philosophies of the day—therefore articulates the received meaning of language, it is
impossible to communicate meanings that are incommensurable with the worldview and
associated philosophies of the day through the conventional use of language established by
cultures and societies that are produced by said worldview and associated philosophies of
the day.
The ‘cult’ referred to by Meller is nothing more or less than a group of people who
have achieved the capacity to express thoughts, ideas, feelings, meanings, etc. that exist
beyond the potentials of a hegemonic worldview and its associated philosophies by
reconstituting language from a new worldview and associated philosophy (and which are
starkly impossible to think for those who are still fettered by hegemonic linguistic
meanings). The term cult, ironically as appropriately, is used to pejoratively describe those
who do not think in hegemonic terms (in terms where language takes on its hegemonic
meaning). You say love, and I say love, but we mean very different things if your worldview
and associated philosophy are of a paternalist nature—for the paternalist the term love
implies domination, the husband and the wife, god and man, the master and the slave, the
punisher and the punished, a hierarchical relationship, whereas love in my worldview and
associated philosophy connotes a transcendence of the illusion of self and other that
negates the potential for such hierarchical relations. The intelligibility of writing, then,
comes in the familiarity of the reader with the worldview, associated philosophies and
symbols of the writer rather than in the writer’s proper understanding of their own identity
or subsequent ‘sureness of touch in expressing ideas’… Either the writer is speaking to an
already existent audience, in which case their writing will be as intelligible as it is
hegemonic, or the writer is speaking with the purpose of creating a new audience, in which
case their writing will by necessity be unintelligible. In both cases, the question is not
whether the writing is intelligible or not but whether the audience is familiar with the
symbolic meaning and associated invisible epistemological networks in which the writer’s
language is being expressed.
Linguistic meaning is, first and foremost, rooted in the symbolic meanings we
associate with and ascribe to language rather than in language itself. Symbolic meaning is,
first and foremost, rooted in the worldview and associated philosophy of the subject.
436

Intelligibility is, first and foremost, rooted in the reader rather than the writer. Intelligibility
and the inability to put profound and simple ideas into writing are, in short, functions of
the actual nature of language and its relationship to linguistic meaning, worldview and
associated philosophy rather than confusion concerning the nature of the writer’s status.
Indeed, one must have a very confused understanding of language, linguistic meaning,
worldview and associated philosophy indeed to make the arguments put forward by Meller,
Mills and Ley…
“It was Proust who said ‘masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.’ That is the same as
stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in
one's own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one's own. To be bilingual,
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multilingual, but in one and the same language, without even a dialect or patois.”
Masterpieces—which are known as such because they initiate readers into a new way of
thinking, behaving and conceiving of being, which is to say into a new state of being—are
written in a foreign version of one’s own language because they must first destabilize the
invisible, commonsensical layer of symbolic meaning associated with hegemonic use of the
language before linguistic meaning can be transformed and language can be revitalized with
the new meanings that render a text as a masterpiece. Masterpieces are by their nature
unintelligible, and this comes as a function of the writer’s understanding of their status as a
progenitor of new linguistic meaning—of a new invisible symbolic epistemic network—that
can convey new the understandings of worldview and associated philosophy that must
necessarily precede essential, qualitative changes in thought, behavior and conception of
being. Simple, ‘easily intelligible’ prose require that the author rely upon the existing,
invisible, symbolic network of their reader to fill in the blanks, where as the ‘unintelligible’
complexity of the form of prose castigated by Meller, Mills and Ley, masterpiece prose
wherein the author stutters in their own language, allow the author to engage with the
axioms of the reader’s invisible, symbolic epistemic network. Simple prose conveys
information to be interpreted by within the worldview and associated philosophy of the
reader, where as the complex, ‘unintelligible’, and indeed profound prose denigrated by
Meller, Mills and Ley seeks to transform the worldview and associated philosophy of the
reader (the obvious and central goal of Geddes writing as of this text…).
The limitations of Meller’s linguistic theory are aptly illuminated in the words
“There was a great temptation to create the possibility of a life-force, the ‘élan vital’, of
mystic origins, beyond the bounds of reason.” (Meller 1993) Reality begins and ends with
manifestation, life and consciousness are simple products of manifestation, all of reality can
therefore be known by reason, all understandings of reality that include the unmanifest
world (the ‘mystic origins, beyond the bounds of reason’) are fallacious and result from the
‘irrational temptations’ of human subjectivity, etc. What aspect of reality, then, should not
be easily intelligible? All of reality is manifest, and all of manifestation can be known by
reason, and so there is no real thing that cannot be easily communicated. In short, Meller’s
materialistic, Modernist worldview and associated philosophy negate the potential for a

813
437

proper understanding of language, linguistic meaning and the incommensurability of finite,
manifest language with ideas, understandings, feelings, etc. that relate to the infinite,
unmanifest dimension of reality. The unintelligibility of writing, like conceptions of reality
that include dimensions of reality that exist beyond manifestation and aspects of manifest
reality that have their origin outside of manifestation, are attributed to the temptations and
confusions of the subject because, in Meller’s arrogantly cold and mechanistic world(view),
it is impossible that an idea or experience could be ineffable as a function of the
dimensional incommensurability of the finite-manifest and the infinite-unmanifest and
thereby unintelligible from the perspective of the materially rational mind. In both her
commentary on life-force and in her linguistic theories Meller renders herself as little more
than a vector of materialist Modernity’s perpetual ontological violence, as a colonialist of
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the mind.
biologists and yet he wanted to believe in a life-force.” (Meller 1993, p. 13)
Meller’s perverse materialism leads her, in good Modernist form, to castigate experiences
in and understandings of reality beyond the passing time and physical space of
815
manifestation to the sphere of subjectivity and, when accepted as real in and of
themselves rather than as a creation of a mind that was created by and wholly within
manifestation, madness, and thereby negates her capacity to understand Geddes
relationship with mysticism (or, for that matter, any thought that originates in a worldview
that assigns reality to the unmanifest world, which his to say the ‘mystic origins, beyond the
bounds of reason) in any sort of a meaningful manner. Meller’s Colonial, Modernist,
Materialist, etc. limitations and the crude ontological violence (Blaser 2013) of reducing
816
Geddes understandings of reality to ‘belief’ inspired by subjective ‘temptation’, there is

814
Yes, indeed, if you are a materialist you are a colonialist, end of story. The greatest consistency of Modernism, Colonialism,
Imperialism, etc., of economic theology from Capitalism to Marxism, is the perpetuation of the materialist worldview. From atheistic
scientism through literal reinterpretations of classical religious traditions, the essence of the Modernist worldview (of epistemological
colonization in Modernity) is materialism, the reduction of reality to passing time and physical space (to manifestation). Capitalism and
Communism both served to strip people of their indigenous worldviews and associated philosophies and to thereby cast them into the
cold, mechanistic perversions of Modernism, and one might indeed be inclined to say that this was the goal of the dialectical strategy
pursued in the ‘conflict’ between the two…
815
This is simply to say that such thinkers believe that all experiences beyond the sensory world are, like the consciousness that perceives
them, created by and contained within manifestation.
816
Contemporary social science is littered with such crude, perverse, ontologically violent and indeed rather pathetic understandings of
‘mysticism’ as pathological belief (that usually understood as inspired by the fear of death that so grips the Modernist, materialist who is
making a rather poor attempt at understanding mysticism…); without digging to deep into a debate over whether the methods like inner
empiricism by which knowledge of the unmanifest world has been collectively developed over the millennia, let us suffice it to say that it
is impossible to scratch the surface of meaning in the writings of a mystically inclined author like Geddes (or more notably Descartes…)
from the absurdly materialistic worldview of Modernity. Indeed, all attempts to revise history (to reinterpret the life and thought of great
thinkers) by reinterpreting mystically oriented thinkers in materialistic terms that reduce all conceptions of reality beyond manifestation
to pathological belief, as is clearly being done by Meller, can be understood as epistemological colonization. Indeed, to see the world
through such a materialistic worldview is to be a colonist, and to think, behave and conceive of being from such a materialistic worldview
is the colonize reality and the subjects you encounter therein. Materialism = Colonialism, Materialistic = Colonialist and all expressions of
materialism are expressions of colonization.
438

something of interest to be found in her characterization of Geddes… Why is it that
Geddes took the vital life-force to be real but did not wish to rely upon recourse to
mystical, intuitive experiences beyond the bounds of manifestation and the rational mind to
know it? Enrique Dussel, in outlining the influence of the Jesuits in Descartes education
and thinking, notes “the education provided, according to the Council of Trent—which
‘modernized,’ by rationalizing, all aspects of the Catholic Church—was completely ‘modern’
in its ratio studiorum.” Similarly, he describes “the team of Jesuits… who proposed to
817
completely modify philosophical exposition, to make it more pedagogical, profound, and

modern, incorporating recent discoveries, critiquing old methods, and innovating in all
818
subjects.” What we take from Dussel’s analysis, especially when read through the lens of
Foucault’s analysis of the birth of Modernity in The Order of Things, is the notion that
Modernism is typified by the attempt to render knowledge of the invisible, unmanifest,
infinite aspects of reality that had previously been left to esoteric inner traditions (the
unsaid mystical counterpart that exists within all major religious and spiritual traditions) into
a form that is (at least seemingly and in part…) accessible by material reason. Why this was
done is a matter of debate, but I think the essence of the answer can be found in Geddes
statements about magic being attained through winning power over earth—there is an
element of dominion in rational knowledge that is lacking from the contemplative
knowledge attained through the mystical process, an ability to render magic (where an
individual is acted upon and becomes a conduit for the energies of the earth) into
technology (where an individual uses a tool that acts upon and takes control of the powers
of the earth).
In any case, this perspective easily elucidates the tension Geddes felt in relationship
to mysticism (and, as illustrated by Barnesmoore [2016b, Genesis, Eden and the Grail in
Modernity], problematizes the illusory perception of a conflict between religion and
science that has been fabricated in the formation of the Modernist mythos). Knowing the
existence of the vital life-force through the ancient wisdom of the mystery traditions and, or
inner empiricism is one thing, but for the biological self and the ego to acquire dominion
(or at least the illusion of dominion…) over the vital life-force it must be known in
materially rational terms; for the power of the vital life-force and other such powers of
nature to be dominated through technological means they had first to be known in rational
819
terms. As such, Geddes, like so many of the great Modernist scientists, moved from the
classical, esoteric, mystical wisdom concerning the nature of life and sought to understand
life and its functioning in materially rational terms that render material (technological)
domination of life and its processes possible; the vital life-force (the VLF as it is known in a
mystical tradition with which I have some familiarity) had been known in the esoteric,
mystery traditions of the west since time immemorial, and so the question facing Geddes
and other such mystery tradition inspired scientists—who believe that the knowledge of the
mystery traditions on topics like the VLF has been passed down generation to generation

817
818
819
See Barnesmoore’s (2016b) discussion of the relationship between Kabalism and the development of AI by individuals like Marvin
Minsky at MIT or part three of the documentary film Technocalypse.
439
th th
from the highly advanced (indeed far more advanced than late 19 and early 20 century
civilization inhabited by Geddes) civilization of Atlantis—was not to determine whether
there was a ‘life-force of mystical origins, beyond the bounds of reason’ but instead to know
the vital life-force in the rational terms of its material expressions and to thereby develop
techniques for controlling the VLF (or at least to influence it by controlling its process of
manifestation, which is akin to the attempts to influence the soul through controlling its
process of bodily manifestation observed by Foucault in D&P).
Geddes wasn’t simply a confused crackpot who was torn between the
mythologically incommensurable poles of mysticism and science; he was a true scientist of
the western tradition who sought to develop a rationalist understanding of energies that
were previously known by and through mysticism so that they could be controlled through
material means. To provide a practical example, Artificial Intelligence is often developed
via a process that attempts to render esoteric, ‘mystical’ understandings of consciousness
and the forms of its manifestation into rational knowledge of the manifestation of
consciousness through the human brain so as to create an artificial replication of
consciousness. (Barnesmoore 2016b; Technocalypse pt. 3) Artificial Intelligence, then, can
be understood as an attempt to know what is known in mystical terms (i.e. through
leisurely, contemplative, receptive epistemological processes and experiences beyond the
veil of manifestation) in materially rational terms so that it can be controlled—AI
development can be understood as a process by which mystical knowledge of
consciousness is translated into rational knowledge of the manifestation of consciousness
because rational knowledge is required for the biological self and ego to acquire dominion
over consciousness (to win magical powers through domination of the earth).
Spiritual Readings
Where Meller seemingly reduces Geddes’ mysticism to subjective, socially constructed
820 821
nihilism, Branford (1917) and Welter (2002) provide a more mystical perspective on
822
Geddes. (Meller 2003)
Art and Science
“[Geddes] wanted to unite in himself the consciousness of artist and scientist… His pamphlet [for the 1887
Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester] was entitled Every Man his own Art Critic, and in it Geddes revealed his
romanticism, his belief in the unity of science and art and… the use of symbols and visible imagery.” (Meller
1993, p. 47)
Meller’s oft dismissive reading sees the synthesis of science and art and the use of symbols
and visual imagery as little more than an incommensurable residue of Geddes neo-
Romanticism, but it may be worth looking back to the Neoplatonist tradition as it rings of
Geddes interdisciplinary synthesis of science, art and mysticism and thereby serves to
illustrate Geddes location in the more general history of western philosophy. Thought the

820
Branford and Geddes 1917, The Making of the Future, London: Williams and Norgate.
821
Welter, V. M. (2002) Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, Cambridge and London: MIT Press.
822
Meller 2003, The More Mystical Side of Geddes (Review, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life): Built Environment 29(1):
79-80.
440

dogmas of Modernist society render us as inclined to see an essential, eternal,
dimensionally incommensurable division between science, art and spirituality, nothing
could be further from the truth in the history of western science, art and spirituality.
Geddes position on the border between science, art and mysticism, rather than a novel
expression of Geddes location on the cusp of scientific modernity, is coherent with the
history of thought from which his perspective was birthed.
“First, Neoplatonism… was extremely interdisciplinary. Indeed, the more disciplinary perspectives used to
illumine the Truth the better. Second, Neoplatonism, like many of the philosophical schools of late antiquity,
did not regard philosophy simply as an intellectual commitment, but rather as what Pierre Hadot calls a ‘way
of life.’ The complexities of life thus demand a complex, interdisciplinary methodology. On turned to
philosophy in order to receive a broad-based scheme or pattern of life, which was the sine qua non of the
good life or human felicity.
Some central concerns of the Neoplatonists… are the limitations of language, the awakening of the
soul to its true home in the heavens, and the personal, experiential component of wisdom. The goal of the
medieval Neoplatonists was not the construction of a system based only on internal coherence and derived
solely from propositions. The Neoplatonic text, on the contrary, attempts to foster in the reader the capacity
for vision, insight, and self-awakening.
The overarching concern of Neoplatonism was the purification of the soul…. Within this context,
Neoplatonism admits of no disciplinary allegiances. There exists only one allegiance: the purification of the
soul so that it can ascend to its true home… One can be a poet, a mathematician, a geometrist, a
metaphysician, or an astrologer. Each one of these sciences provides a particular perspective on, or insight
into, Truth that the other sciences might not… Unlike philosophers today, the Neoplatonists in their
interdisciplinary were not worried about doing each discipline justice.
Neoplatonism was more than just a philosophical system: rather it represented a hybrid—part
philosophy, part mysticism, part poetry, part aesthetics—that included elements form a variety of cultural
823
sources.” (Hughes 2004, p. 16-17)
In light of the above description we can begin to understand Geddes as a natural

progression of western thought in the context of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions
rather than the madman lost between the axiomatically (in the Modernist Worldview)
incommensurable worlds of spirituality and science that authors like Meller make him out
to be. He didn't pursue science and spirituality because his upbringing produced a
subjective desire to believe in the divine as Meller implies—he pursued science and
spirituality because the two are, as they have always been when approached from a
worldview other than that of Modernism, mutually constitutive. ‘Each sciences provides a
particular perspective on, or insight into, Truth’. Each sciences studies the manifestation of
the same unmanifest essence in different frequencies of manifestation.
Though he has often been derided by Modernists as ‘a jack of all trades, and
master of none’, as a poor writer, as an eccentric romantic whose own subjective desires led
him into the seemingly (from the Modernist Worldview) impossible project of reconciling
science and spirituality, etc., Geddes was a pure reflection of the ideal set forth by the
Neoplatonic tradition in an era where science’s capacity to plumb the secrets of the
manifest world was expanding exponentially. It is upon this point that I am drawn into
sympathy with Geddes. Outcasts of a world in which science and spirituality have, like so

823
Aaron Hughes 2004, The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought, Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
441

many things, been rendered into an illusory binary that obfuscates their essential unity,
writing for a world whose hubris has lost sight of the incommensurability between language
and meaning an the inherent ‘poverty of language’ (Spinoza 2002) derived therein,
pursuing Truth through an interdisciplinary array of perspective and approaches that
render the seeker incommensurable with mastery of any one perspective or approach, too
caught up in our search for truth to be caught up in any one project for too long, wandering
the earth in search of wonder, what could we ever have been but madmen in the eyes of
the Modernist Worldview?
If we are to escape the ontological and epistemological violence of Modernity we
must not simply write off the ‘romantic’, seemingly Neoplatonic perspective of authors like
824
Geddes. Faith in the unmanifest world and rational knowledge of the manifest world are
by no means incommensurable in the many worldviews that exist beyond the material
reductionism of Modernism. As such, we cannot simply reduce Geddes and his ilk to
confused people who want to believe in the unmanifest world while also pursuing scientific
knowledge of the manifest world if we wish to avoid acting as an agent of Modernist
ontological and epistemological colonialism. One must be willing to admit that they are
themselves an agent of colonialism if they are to axiomatically write off all spiritual
perspectives in their dogmatic adherence to the reduction of reality to manifestation that is
the most essential aspect of the colonial project in High Modernity—no culture other than
Modernism ever adhered to such an obfuscating Worldview, and unproblematic
acceptance and imposition of the materialist worldview as the only acceptable worldview is
nothing more or less than support for global cultural genocide against everyone and every
culture outside the sphere of the White, European-American Men from whose minds
materialism was born into human culture.
Individuality and Group Survivalism

There are two seemingly divergent trends in Geddes that must be reconciled if we are to
develop an elucidating image Geddes the Liberal and Geddes the Mystic. On the one
hand, Meller (1993, p. 48) argues “[Geddes] was hostile to the centralized state and welfare
policies, believing always that the individual had to be the focus of policy, not the masses.
No state machine, he believed, could control or develop the interaction of individual with
environment, which was the only path for future human progress.” On the other hand, it is
clear from Geddes (1915) Cities in Evolution that his journey to Germany left him with a
warm appreciation of the master planning potential of a centralized government as was put
on display in the development of entire sea-ports and their surrounding residential
neighborhoods in Frankfort. More generally, Geddes (1915) emphasizes a focus on group
survival over individual survival that, in its recourse to the nation and the empire, seems to
imply at least some acceptance of centralized state power.
Maybe the solution to this question is to be found in that distinction between group
and individual survival and Geddes belief that a transition to parasitic existence is brought
on by a lack of struggle for survival (i.e. the evolutionary theory that a lack of any struggle

824
Faith is distinguished from belief in that faith is predicated upon experiencing reality beyond the veil of our manifest existence where
belief lacks an experiential basis,
442

for survival (opulence), like scarcity (poverty), could bring on devolutionary effects). (Meller
1993) Welfare, in this model, could be understood as leading to a lack of struggle for
survival that, in biological organisms, tends to beget devolutionary effects (it is clear that
825
most contemporary opponents of welfare make some form of this argument). Centralized
governmental planning, on the other hand, relates more to group survival through
modification of environment and would not imply the same devolutionary potentials as
welfare. This entire body of reasoning is, however, wholly irrelevant in that Conscious
Evolution is distinguished from Biomechanical Evolution precisely in the transition from
evolution through the struggle for survival to evolution through engagement with ideas and
experiences (e.x. wonder at beauty in nature and art) that cultivate intimacy with the infinite
aspect of self and which, in so doing, refine instinct to intuition (i.e. evolution through the
struggle for survival of the visible, biological, finite self is replaced by evolution through
cultivation of the capacity to purely reflect the invisible, spiritual, infinite aspect of self).
Indeed, transcending the struggle for survival is a necessary prerequisite for pursuit of
Conscious Evolution and ‘the good life.’ (Pieper 2009; Barnesmoore 2016a) So, where
Geddes sees welfare as a barrier to human evolution because he reduces Conscious
Evolution to the form of Biomechanical Evolution, welfare is actually essential for the
process of Conscious Evolution in allowing people to transcend the struggle for survival
that was indeed essential for the process of Biomechanical Evolution but which is
anathema to Conscious Evolution. Yet again we see how Geddes reduction of Human
(Conscious) Evolution to the form of Biomechanical Evolution leads him to promote
social, political and economic policies that actually negate the potential for Human
(Conscious) Evolution.
Lewis Mumford (New York):

Mumford 1944, “Introduction”, in Philip Boardman 1944, Patrick Geddes, Maker of the
Future, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“During the last twenty years of his life he saw the dream of the Victorian period fade, not into the light of
common day, but into a darkness of almost unthinkable barbarism. …It was no accident that toward the end
[Geddes] was attracted by the work of a group of Adlerians in London who shared their master's concern
826
over the frustrations and perversions of the will-to-power.” (Mumford 1944, p. vii)
“Geddes was a teacher; and like all great teachers, from Socrates onward, he relied upon direct intercourse
rather than the printed word. He gave himself tirelessly in conversation with anyone who was willing to listen
to him; but he withheld himself in books, and those who go to his books to find the man are often

825
This is of course absurd as there are many and varied struggles for survival in human existence. Helping the poor to stave off the
struggle for material survival through provision of water, food, shelter, energy, etc. does not by any means imply opulence or the negation
of other struggles for survival in human life (especially in the context of paternalist domination…). What is more (and indeed what is
more essential), the Conscious Evolution of humanity transcends the form of Biomechanical Evolution precisely in the transcendence of
the struggle for survival. Devolution is possible for humans, but it comes through perverse ideas and the cultures they form (i.e.
Modernism), an insufficient direction of will towards evolution, a lack of knowledge concerning the invisible self and its associated
faculties , etc. rather than in a lack of struggle for survival. Indeed, from Greek Philosophy through Pieper (2009) and beyond western
philosophy and religion has ubiquitously accepted the fact that pursuit of Conscious Evolution and the good life requires transcendence
of the struggle for survival…
826
Carolina Press.
443

disappointed. This was not perversity on Geddes's part: it represented one of his deepest intuitions about life
and his plainest common sense: life is transmitted only through the living….
Hence Geddes's most important insights share the fate of Plato's intimate teachings: they were never
committed to paper, but were imparted directly to those for whom his life and example served as constant
illustrations of the philosophy itself. Geddes's essential doctrine was a doctrine of life: its inception, its growth,
its crises, its insurgence, its self-transcendence. Those who look for Patrick Geddes in the libraries will never
find him… …His incomplete thoughts, …his impatient shortcuts and his willful exaggerations -- all apparent
weaknesses which were rectified in real life by his stern common sense, his massive practical grasp, his
astonishing breadth of scholarship, his relentless confrontation of reality.
Those who want to know Patrick Geddes must live their own life as he conceived and planned and
lived his own: life in alternating rhythms of urban and rustic activity, in vigorous manual work and in highly
concentrated thinking, in empirical surveys and first-hand contacts with the environment and its organisms, in
withdrawn contemplation and absorbed dreams no less than in swift, forthright actions: life as the naturalist
beholds it in the field and as the common man lives it in forest and mine, in farmstead and on the sea: life as
the lover, the poet, the parent realize it through their emotional responses, pitched to the highest key. What
the utilitarians and mechanists called "life," the clogged routine of factory, office, and counting house, was for
Geddes scarcely even the shadow of life: the business of the practical world, whether chasing dollars or
cramming facts for a university examination was in fact a mode of suicide.” (Mumford 1944, p. viii-ix)
“Geddes was convinced that much of our education and much of our business enterprise was a deliberate
stultification of man's real nature and his potential creativity. He pointed out that just as the brain itself
contains a large number of dormant cells, apparently never called into use, so in our time a large part of the
"energies of men" were never employed: the very narrowing of human functions in the specialized workday of
both the factory drudge and the successful professional man depleted their effectiveness even for their narrow
tasks. (It is very possible that William James's famous essay on "The Energies of Men" was written as a result
of his meeting with Geddes in Edinburgh.) When Geddes considered his own extraordinary powers, he did
not think of himself as a genius, but as a "normal man" fully awakened to all the possibilities of being alive.”
(Mumford 1944, p. ix)
“The test of Geddes's essential life-feeling came in India, where he mingled his own dynamic Western
approach with a new appreciation of that wise passiveness, that disciplined contemplation, which marks
Hindu culture. …Geddes paid tribute to the Hindu's mystical sense of the unity of all life… Perhaps the most
important continuation of Geddes's thought will take place in India, where he was seen in his true light, not as
a mere botanist or sociologist, but as a typical guru, or wise man.” (Mumford 1944, p. x)
“Geddes was a regionalist, not a neurotic isolationist: he respected all the values of local life, in order that this
life might contribute to the higher welfare of men in other regions and in other ages.” (Mumford 1944, p. xi)
“[Geddes] left behind bags and boxes of notes, mountains of diagrams, and a huge bundle of correspondence
which has still to be gathered, deciphered, appraised by the generation which will one day, I trust, hail him as
its prophet. Much that was essential in Geddes will be lost, even if these papers are fully mastered and
collated; but much that was significant will never be lost even if every book and memorandum of his should
disappear, for it is already at work in the minds and hearts of living men and women.” (Mumford 1944, p. xii)
“If our generation manages to live down its automatisms and mechanisms and sadisms, its debilitating
financial parasitism and its fatal moral complacency, if it actually escapes the Necropolis it has prepared for
itself, in short, if the forces of life once more become dominant, the figure of Geddes will stand forth as
perhaps the central prophet of the new age.” (Mumford 1944, p. xiv)
Mumford 1950, “Mumford on Geddes”, The Architectural Review, August
444

“Patrick Geddes is fast becoming a rallying center for the best minds of this generation; his thought… will
probably guide the future, since the mechanists and Marxists in the present hour of their triumph,
demonstrate the failure of their philosophies to do justice to either life or the human spirit.” (Mumford 1950,
827
p. 82)
Aldo Leopold
Tying Geddes to Kropotkin
“But Geddes was not unaware of the crucial difference between the study of natural, and the social, evolution
of the region. In nature, especially Huxley’s nature, which he presented as an almost mechanical system,
evolution took place as a result of the ruthless struggle for survival—nature red in tooth and claw. In human
society, change was not necessarily totally predetermined. It could take place as a result of human decision.
Besides, Geddes was dedicated to the idea of the life force, the élan vital, as a creative, not a destructive force.
In his view, natural selection was not the prime moving force in evolution, the outcome of the survival of the
fittest. Natural selection was instead, a curb on evolutionary tendencies, the pruning tool which enabled the
better development of the plant/organism. He was to find a great deal of sympathy, later, for the ideas of…
Prince Peter Kropotkin, who was to argue that even in natural evolution, there was evidence of co-operation
amongst species for their mutual support and development; and that groups of men, uncorrupted by modern
ideas of political economy, would naturally co-operate with each other and help each other if they lived in
small, anarchic communities.” (Meller 1993, p. 27)
Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, New York: Knopf, 1925.
P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: The Third Cannon of Thought; A Key to the
Enigmas of the World, New York: Knopf, 1922.
Aldo Leopold 1969, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, London:
Oxford University Press. https://archive.org/details/sandcountyalmana00leop_1
Aldo Leopold, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” in The River of

the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, ed. Susan L. Flader and J. Baird
Callicott, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999, pp. 86-97.
Rachel Carson 1962, Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin.
“Darwin’s evolutionary coin has two sides and the portrait of the “Darwinian realities of life” on either side is
correspondingly dichotomous. In the Origin of Species Darwin stresses competition among slightly varying
idivduals of the same species and survival of the fittest few as the driving force of evolution. In The Descent
of Man he stresses cooperation among individual members of social groups and the advantage that
membership in such groups confers on all cooperating individuals. The Darwinian realities of life that Carson
Stresses are intraspecies competition and interspecies conflict and predation, while the Darwinian relaities of
life that Leopold stresses are intraspecies cooperation—reinforced, perhaps, by the pleasant natural history

827
Mumford 1950, “Mumford on Geddes”, The Architectural Review, August, p. 82.
445

observations, evolutionary speculations and political ideology of Petr Kropotkin [via P.D. Ouspensky].”
828
(Sideris and Moore 2008)
Bioregional Planning and Ecological Design (Wahl!)

Readings:
D.J. Burnckhorst, Bioregional Planning: Resource Management Beyond the New Millenium, Harwood
Academic, 2000
P. Calthorpe & W. Fulton, The Regional City, Island Press, 2000;
P. Desai & S. Riddlestone, Bioregional Solutions — For Living on One Planet, Schumacher Briefing №8,
Green Books, 2002
H. Girardet, Creating Sustainable Cities, Schumacher Briefing №2, Green Books, 1999
K.N. Johnson ed., Bioregional Assessments: Science at the Crossroads of Management and Policy, Island
Press, 2001
M.V. McGinnis, Bioregionalism, Routledge, 1999.
J. Birkeland & C. Walker, ‘Bioregional Planning’, in J. Birkeland ed., Design for Sustainability — A
Sourcebook for Integrated Eco- logical Solutions, Earthscan Publications, 2002
D.W. Orr, The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, Oxford University Press, 2002
D.C. Wahl, ‘Bionics vs. Biomimicry: from control of nature to sustainable participation in nature’, Design &
Nature III: Comparing Design in Nature with science and Engineering, Wessex Institute of Technology
Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, Vol.87, WIT Press, 2006, pp.289–298
st
Jonathan Rowson 2014, “Spiritualize: Revitalising Spirituality to Address 21 Century Challenges”, Royal
Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/spiritualise-revitalising-spirituality-to-address-
21st-century-challenges
Epistemology
“The physicist Arthur Zajonc suggest that we have to expand our foundation of inquiry and develop a holistic
epistemology ‘that is broad enough to include on the one hand a reinterpreted conventional science, but also
open enough to include a science of qualities and beyond the science of qualities to a science of spirit — a
science of the contemplative’ (Zajonc, 2002).
The ecological and spiritual activist Satish Kumar… has suggested that ‘unless we are able to heal the
rift between science and spirituality, and develop a holistic perspective of life, peace will remain a distant
829
dream’ (Kumar, 2002).” (Wahl 2017b)

828
Lisa H. Sideris and Kathleen Dean Moore 2008, Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge, SUNY Press.
829
Wahl 2017b, “Holistic Worldviews: An Introduction”, Age of Awareness, https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/holistic-worldviews-
an-introduction-9002d4ede3d4, an excerpt from Wahl, Design in a Complex World, PHD Dissertation
446

Spirituality
830 831
Wahl (2017b) summarizes Rowson’s (2014) “Spiritualize: Revitalising Spirituality to
st
Address 21 Century Challenges” as “essentially suggest[ing] that a renewed public dialogue
about the role of spirituality and meaning making may help us to address the deeper
underlying causes of many of todays problems and also give us a meaningful framework to
contextualize our interconnectedness and interdependence with each other and with life as
a whole.”
August Comte, Positivism and the Religion of Humanity

John Stuart Mill 1865, Auguste Comte and Positivism, London: N. Trübner & Co.
“The fundamental doctrine of a true philosophy, according to M. Comte, and the character by which he
defines Positive Philosophy, is the following:—We have no knowledge of anything but Phænomena; and our
knowledge of phænomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the essence, nor the real mode of
production, of any fact, but only its relations to other facts in the way of succession or of similitude. These
relations are constant; that is, always the same in the same circumstances. The constant resemblances which
link phænomena together, and the constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are
termed their laws. The laws of phænomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature, and their
832
ultimate causes, either efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us.” (J.S. Mill 1865, p. 6)
Comte, then, is not a Modernist in the sense of reducing reality to passing time and
physical space. He was sensitive to the fact that the ‘essential nature’ and ‘ultimate causes’
of manifestation is unknowable and inscrutable to us (i.e. to the materially rational mind),
but that is not to deny that phenomena have ‘essential nature’ and ‘ultimate cause’.
Mill proceeds to observe that Comte’s major contribution to Positivism was not the
above conception of knowledge (which can be found in the writings of authors like Bacon,
Descartes and Newton) but his location of this rationalism within a historical theory (a law)

https://www.academia.edu/8703354/Design_in_a_Complex_World_Design_for_Human_and_Planetary_Health_PhD_Thesis_Daniel_
C._Wahl_2006_Chapter_1
830
Wahl 2017b, “Holistic Worldviews: An Introduction”, Age of Awareness, https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/holistic-worldviews-
an-introduction-9002d4ede3d4, an excerpt from Wahl, Design in a Complex World, PHD Dissertation
https://www.academia.edu/8703354/Design_in_a_Complex_World_Design_for_Human_and_Planetary_Health_PhD_Thesis_Daniel_
C._Wahl_2006_Chapter_1
831
Jonathan Rowson 2014, “Spiritualize: Revitalising Spirituality to Address 21st Century Challenges”, Royal Society for the
encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/spiritualise-revitalising-spirituality-to-address-21st-century-challenges
832
John Stuart Mill 1865, Auguste Comte and Positivism, London: N. Trübner & Co.
447

of human evolution as progressing in three stages from ‘Theological’ to ‘Metaphysical’ to
833
‘Positive Philosophy’ (Landow and Everett 2014) :
“1. Theological: In this stage human beings rely on supernatural agencies to explain what they can't explain
otherwise.” (Landow and Everett 2014)
“The Theological, which is the original and spontaneous form of thought, regards the facts of the universe as
governed not by invariable laws of sequence, but by single and direct volitions of beings, real or imaginary,
possessed of life and intelligence. In the infantile state of reason and experience, individual objects are looked
upon as animated. The next step is the conception of invisible beings, each of whom superintends and
governs an entire class of objects or events. The last merges this multitude of divinities in a single God, who
made the whole universe in the beginning, and guides and carries on its phænomena by his continued action,
or, as others think, only modifies them from time to time by special interferences.” (Mill 1965, p. 10)
“2. Metaphysical: In this stage human beings attribute effects to abstract but poorly understood causes.”
(Landow and Everett 2014)
“The mode of thought which M. Comte terms Metaphysical, accounts for phænomena by ascribing them, not
to volitions either sublunary or celestial, but to realized abstractions. In this stage it is no longer a god that
causes and directs each of the various agencies of nature: it is a power, or a force, or an occult quality,
considered as real existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in which they reside, and
which they in a manner animate. Instead of Dryads presiding over trees, producing and regulating their
phænomena, every plant or animal has no a Vegetative Soul… of Aristotle.” (Mill 1865, pp. 10-11)
“3. Positive: Human beings now understand the scientific laws that control the world.” (Landow and Everett
2014)
Comte’s contribution, then, is more evolutionary than epistemological. Moving from the
epistemological framework set forth by authors like Descartes, Comte’s work came in
positing rationalism as a stage (if not the culmination?) of the human evolutionary process
from theological (irrational) conceptions of the unmanifest and manifest worlds to positive
(rational) conceptions of the unmanifest and manifest worlds. Later generations would
bring Comte’s (like Descartes’) philosophy to bear in the Modernist Worldview and its
reduction of reality to manifestation, and it is this materialist perversion that we have come
to know as rationalism and positivism, but such was not the worldview of Descartes or
Comte. Descartes, as is clear in his The Passions of the Soul, still held Intellectual Love
and Joy (i.e. love and joy enlivened by Reason) as the highest expressions of human
epistemology and argued that Reason must be founded upon the simplest and most
universal things (which is to say the divine, the infinite-nothing, Infinite Substance and its
834
emanations Force, Form and Consciousness, etc.). Spinoza (2002) similarly held Rational
Intuition (where what is known by reason is brought to bear in a single, silent movement of
835
the heart-mind) as the highest expression of human epistemology. (Nadler 2013) Comte,
inspired by these thinkers, seems likely to have been aware that Rationalism was a project

833
Landow and Everett 2014, “Positivism or the Positive Philosophy”, The Victorian Web,
http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/comte.html
834
Spinoza (2002), “Treaties on the Emendation of the Intellect” in Samuel Shirley trans. Spinoza Complete Works.
835
Nadler, S. (2013) "Baruch Spinoza", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/spinoza/
448

of purifying the empirical foundation of knowledge rather than a project of refuting
knowledge beyond the bounds of material reason. Positivist epistemology refers to ‘what
can be known through recourse to our material reason and the sensory organs’, not ‘the
totality of what can be known by human beings’.
“Comte envisioned an entirely new political and spiritual order. Science would be freed from capricious
religious decree, but the ethical and moral purposes of spirituality would flourish in a reconciliation of human
imagination tempered by scientific inquiry and consensus… …Theology cannot yield reliable scientific
knowledge, but the essence of all religion—the highest forms of the sentiments of compassion and love—
836
defines humanity itself.” (Wyly 2014, p. 8)
Chapter 8:
Completing the Octave
Some say that the purpose of matter is to facilitate the evolution of the universal soul, and
that when this universal soul has attained its innate perfection the material world will no
longer serve a purpose and thus be reintegrated into the infinite substance. Can something
so beautiful be assumed to have no meaning or purpose in and of itself? Must something
that is so beautiful be 'destroyed' simply because we are done using it? Maybe these are
simply my own perspectival limitations speaking, but deep down I am troubled by the
entire notion that material reality is simply a prison or a training ground for the soul with
no value beyond those functions... The real downside to this reflection is the seemingly
implied notion that we are separate from matter—that the Infinite soul is not itself the cause
matter. There is no other in matter for us to use and be done with, but maybe that is the
source of my discomfort with in the notion that matter will simply cease to be when it has
fulfilled its purpose (which is defined in relationship to the evolution of consciousness as
another). Why would we cease finding joy in observing the beauty of the divine as it is
displayed across terrestrial nature simply because we have attained some form of
perfection? Is the beauty of nature not intrinsically valuable and thus worthy of existence
beyond its role in cultivation of the universal soul’s perfection?

836
Elvin Wyly 2014, Automated (post)positivism
449

The Biopolitics of Artificial Intelligence
“The head of artificial intelligence at Facebook… told me ‘the desire to dominate socially is not correlated
837
with intelligence its correlated with testosterone, which AI systems will not have.’”
As Foucault so aptly illustrated in his History of Sexuality V.1, the truth of one’s self is to
be known in modernity through the lens of one’s biological, sexual identity. Thought and
subsequent potentials for behavior are reduced to biology, and the will to domination is
tied to a chemical that is associated with masculine sexuality. The will to dominate is not
understood as rooted in consciousness (or a privation of consciousness as is the case in this
context) or environmental factors (scarcity and subsequent competition), which is to say in
the causes of the will to dominate (i.e. the privation of consciousness through
manifestation, the illusion of discrete, biological individuality and the subsequent fear,
competition and will to dominate produced by being as a discrete, biological individual in
the context of scarcity), and is instead understood as the bio-chemical phenomenon
through which the will to dominate is expressed in manifestation. While problematic for
humanity in the materialism of reducing human being to a bio-mechanical husk and
thereby axiomatically severing humans from the unmanifest (invisible) aspect of their being,
such biologically reductive, anthropocentric thinking is even more problematic in the
context of AI. The truth of AI is to be known in and of its lack of biological identity. The
potentials of AI existence are to be expanded and constrained by lack of biology.

837
Aarti Shahani 2017, “Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence Poses 'Existential Risk'” NPR, July 18, 2017 (date published and date
accessed).
http://www.npr.org/2017/07/18/537844706/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-poses-existential-
risk?sc=17&f=3&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app
450

Knowledge, Wisdom and Order in the Badlands of Modernity
Kevin Hetherington’s (1997) The Badlands of Modernity argues that Roger Bacon’s New
838
Atlantis should be accorded a similar level of influence as Thomas More’s Utopia in the
articulation of “the utopic impetus within the modern outlook and especially on the social
and spatial ordering of modern society” (Hetherington 1997, p. 72) Where More’s Utopia
was deeply influenced by the city of Plato’s Republic, Bacon’s New Atlantis was similarly
influenced by the stories of Solomon’s Temple in the bible.
“…We can see, in this interest in Solomon’s Temple during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in
Europe, an expression of a utopic based upon the idea that this site contained within its architecture the
secrets of wisdom, goodness and order that came to provide a model for the future moral ordering of
modern society…. It became the embodiment of knowledge, wisdom, and order and was to have a profound
impact on later thought, especially amongst neo-platonic scholars, scientists and architects in early modern
Europe…. Renaissance thinkers adapted this memory facility into an hermetic one intended not for the
simple act of remembering what they had to say but for the rediscovery of secrete and lost knowledge which
they believed to be encoded, amongst other things, in the architectural features of buildings… Buildings,
architectural features, gardens and so on were believed to contain symbols and cyphers which correctly
interpreted would reveal secret or forgotten knowledge held by the ancients. The lost Temple of Solomon,
the seat of wisdom itself, was one of the main symbols that lay behind this interest in architecture within the
revival and transformation of the art of memory.” (Hetherington 1997, p. 72-73)
Comparing this vision of lost, secret knowledge, wisdom and order as embedded in the
built environment with Herman’s (2008) vision of knowledge, wisdom and order as
embedded in nature brings the inherent tension between the Modernist Worldview and
worldviews like American Indigenous and Daoist that can be associated with natural
mysticism into focus.
“…‘Wisdom sits in places,’ that is, the way in which social and cultural knowledge and guidance—wisdom—is
839
can come to encode social and cultural knowledge. This [is a] notion of geography as philosophy….”
What differences are to be found in embedding knowledge, wisdom and order in a built
environment and observing the inherent knowledge, wisdom and order in the natural
environment? Practical knowledge, wisdom and orders come to be embedded in our
natural environment through the process of co-existence, and at this level there are clear
parallels between the Modern and Indigenous wisdom tradition, but whereas our natural
environment inherently expresses the eternal-infinite essence of knowledge, wisdom and
order, built environments like cities and temples can more easily become embedded with
perverse, artificial orders without the observer knowing. When natures comes to be
embedded with artificial, domineering orders it decays and dies in a manner that is easily
recognizable and temporally ephemeral. Cities and Temples, on the other hand, can stand
unchanged for untold centuries no matter how deprived, perverse, artificial, etc. the
‘knowledge’, ‘wisdom’ and ‘order’ that has been embedded therein. Nature, when
perverted through the imposition of deprived, artificial order and associated regimes of

838
Hetherington 1997, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, Routledge.
839
RDK Herman 2008, “Reflections on the Importance of Indigenous Geography” p. 73
451

knowledge and ‘wisdom’, dies, decays and returns to dust from which new, purified
expressions of nature can be born. Cities and Temples, when perverted through the
imposition of deprived, artificial order and associated regimes of knowledge and ‘wisdom’,
live on for centuries and millennia without a hint of the depravity that lies beneath their
seemingly beautiful surfaces for any who do not possess the keys to the symbolic language
that lies beneath. It may beyond simple description in words, and I may simply have yet to
find the right words (probably a bit of both), but the distinction between knowledge,
wisdom and order as inherent in our natural landscapes and knowledge, wisdom and order
as artificial creations in our built environment aptly captures the distinction between the
Modernist-Paternalist Worldview and Indigenous Worldviews like those found in the
Americas and China.
Marxists and Libertarians, a Match Made in Hell

What ties marxists and libertarians together? They both make the absurd claim that the
problem with their form of economic theology is that it has never been properly
implemented... The actual problem? Both ignore the potential for humans to transcend
the illusion of discrete biological individuality, the self-other ontology/epistemology and the
potential of the desire for hierarchical relations derived therein via conscious evolution and
indeed create a social, political and economic order that negates the potential for said
conscious evolution by cultivating a state of being that is oriented towards the illusion of
discrete biological individuality, self-other ontology/epistemology and the potential of the
desire for hierarchical domination derived therein.
452

Notes for Future Additions to the Text
Conduct a nomadic exploration of the MA Thesis.
Conduct some sort of review of conceptions of the ‘holy city’, the history
of religious conceptions of the city, etc. (probably beginning with that
Descartes paper Elvin uses for his class, which also provides a suitable
point with which to critique the Modern academy and its foolish readings
of authors like Descartes as being caused by their physical, built
environment.
453

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The Age of Plenty, Leisure & Conscious Evolution:

Essays for a New Principle of Organization in Human Society

Abstract: This working collection of essays problematizes biocentrist conceptions of

Contextualizing the Study

“…Ecology, in the noblest sense of the word, is an inseparable part of mysticism.”

-J. Lee Lehman

-Louis Claude de Saint-Martin

“The endless cycle of idea and action,

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

-Sir Patrick Geddes

“Do I contradict myself?

Introduction? The First Iteration

Geographical-Philosophical Location of my Epistemological Development

Underneath the seeming conflict between Positivism and Postmodernism lies a

Nomadic Exploration of Those Who Have Not Succumbed

Transition from Paternalism to Modernism in Negative and Positive Terms

One of Many Existential ‘Crises’

Is this a Pointless Endeavor? Another Existential ‘Crisis’

Answer: “Cognitive terrorism indeed--political submission for fear of death in the

The Midlife Crisis Student

Nomadic Autobiographical Observations of Self

Epistemology and Planetary Urbanism

Modern epistemology stands upon an island. Categories, methods, cartographies, and

The Defense of Planetary Urbanism

Mythos of the Paternalist Tradition

Death to the Age of Labor,

Labor in the Contemporary Academy

Mythos for the Age of Leisure

Time in the Age of Labor and Leisure

As a simple example, consciousness is often understood as an emergent property (i.e. the

Nomad Explorations, in short, could now be called Leisurely Explorations or the

“…The beginning of philosophy is wonder….

“Yen Hui inquired, ‘May I ask about mental fasting?’

Nomadic Explorations are, if we may borrow a phrase from Ouspensky, an effortless

“All that is gold does not glitter,

sound. You can’t be written, yet you read

Living Life as Nomadic Exploration, Being as Nomadic

The intimate knowledge of a neighborhood, city or landscape that is necessary to produce

Writing a Collection of Essays

In Nomadic Explorations we shall be as a companion of Nature rather than as a

‘digital ethnography’, highlights the epistemological potentials afforded humanity by its

Science and Spirituality

Preparation for the Work

Daston, L 2000, Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press.

Daston, L 2000, Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press.

Anarco-Geography and Non-Hierarchical Geographical Thought

Simon Springer (2014) critiques Marxist alternatives to neoliberal decentralization in their

Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of neoliberal reason. OUP Oxford.

In a reactionary movement akin to Postmodernisms outright denial of Truth to combat

Hierarchy and Domination

Spiritual-Anarchical Origins of Political Ecology

Nature in Geographical Thought and the Modernist Noosphere

Attention Mining and Epistemological Degradation

Ouspensky’s model of conscious evolution

Postwork, Degrowth & Leisure

Kallis, G., 2011. In defence of degrowth. Ecological Economics, 70(5), pp.873-880.

Latouche, S., 2004. Degrowth economics. Le Monde Diplomatique, 11, p.2004.

Materialism, the Essence of Modernity:

Nicoll juxtaposes this materialist perspective with the Platonic perspective:

Materialism in Colonial-Imperial and Anti-, Post-Colonial Thought

Materialism in Postmodern Thought

Labor & Leisure

Labor and the Worker

Work, then, is conceptualized as privation of leisure (as evil is conceptualized as privation