New Age or Post-Everything: Aliens, Astrology, and Alternative Cosmology

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Philosophy in the Multiverse: Volume I. Layer II:

New Age or Post-Everything: Aliens, Astrology, and Alternative Cosmology

 

“Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”

-William Butler Yeats1

 

Introduction: The Cancer of Contemporary Knowledge Structure

 

“The object of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. Thus man’s highest activity, his spiritual creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity. Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.”

-Rudolf Steiner2

 

One of the most tragic consequences of modern ideology is the effect it has had on the way we probe the deep metaphysical questions of existence. Despite what some might think and say, doing without metaphysics has never been a serious proposition. And it has only become more obvious in our era, even if some still cling to the old hopes of liberal modernity, that some kind of metaphysics is unavoidable. 

 

Science has its philosophical assumptions and social context, and we all must have some slant of value or idea of the kind of universe we live in—some sense of stable meaning, however implicit, beyond the changing facts of visible reality, some more or less thought-out structure of ideas that we use to navigate the world and make decisions. Dogma has perhaps always had the potential to obfuscate or repress the deeper levels of inquiry with generic answers—both metaphysical and anti-metaphysical alike. Yet, no system or power can prevent for long an inconsolable questioning from emerging within the human spirit. 

 

There is something different with modern ideology, however. Nowadays, we not only get conflicting and uncertain answers—thus preventing the benefits of cultural coherence—but we also get a conversion of vital metaphysical questions into bland ontological or cosmological ones. That is, we get a conversion of questions probing why the universe is the way it is, into technical inquiries into its appearance, or, perhaps, some minor scientistic speculation on the distant origins of that appearance. This priority of questions solely concerning “the cause” of what is already assumed to exist matter-of-factly hides the particular tangle of metaphysical ideas that undergird any way of living and thinking.

 

Within modern ideology, thinking itself is made to seem a matter of more or less pragmatic speculation, rather than that which makes appearances intelligible in the first place. This is understandable given that most of what people consider “thinking” does not go deep enough to change the way they see things. And very few are aware of how much of the history of thought is embedded within their thoughtless apprehension of the world. 

 

Consequently, one of the primary vehicles of creative exploration—the question why?—has been reduced into a hunt for ever more minute or remote links in the chains of causal influence that bind us to the particular forms we experience, a mere question of content without much awareness or interest in expanding or questioning the contexts upon which those forms depend. 

 

There are of course philosophers and sociologists of science who do question the context, and because of that discover much that is helpful in the crucial task of understanding the construction of our knowledge. However, the tendency in contemporary academia has been towards forming competitive analytic niches, not feeding the critical insights garnered into some kind of cooperative project of cultural renewal or scientific revolution. 

 

The very idea of cultural renewal can even be alarming to the modern mind, smacking of an attack on democracy or multiculturalism. Indeed any strongly-valued vision, or especially, any politically charged project not coded as secular or culturally neutral has too many connotations of the most maligned movements in recent history to gain broad traction in liberal social climates. 

 

As for scientific revolutions, they have become reduced to endless and inconsequential posturing of new radical discoveries, over-hyped trivialities that merely sprout novelty niches in the knowledge industry—that is when they are not offering a boon for some bigger industry. In either case, these rarely add anything but niche interest or value to our view of the world, even if the technology produced often adds new frightening implications.

 

Consequently, the edifice of modern knowledge has grown as cancerous tumors do—which is not to imply, as it does in the religious beliefs of technological medicine, that it is some unique evil, but rather that it has been undergoing a desperate adaptation to unsupportive circumstances. 

 

Like all things undergoing such a struggle, without a healthy and dynamically coherent environment, there is little option but to probe in search of the structure necessary for growth and survival, to roll the dice with the off-chance that the randomized growth or expression will deliver the struggle back into the fold of vital life and sustainable coherence—or at least keep things going long enough for some stable order to be found or reinstated.3

 

And like cancer, such a strategy has its uses; the structural shuffle of this meandering mass of modern knowledge may be an important process placeholder, keeping things together just enough that the whole system doesn’t fail. It also, admittedly, generates a plethora of potentially helpful niche-information that can later be absorbed back into an organized pattern of development.4 

 

In the meantime, however, a convoluted gulf has formed between the how or why of particular things and any larger sense of their meaning, between knowledge and the possibility of understanding that knowledge in ways that could be extrapolated, simplified, or spontaneously applied—that is, given any value beyond the obedient, blind repetition of whatever the consensus form and context happens to be. 

 

With the important questions being decided by expert technicians, what passes for metaphysical meaning is reserved mostly for silly speculation on what else exists “beyond” our predefined reality. These metaphysical musings have little power to alter how we see or understand the things of this world, beyond the now-common conjuring of radically strange forms of belief or creative imagination.

 

Nonetheless, the modern focus on the details of appearances does create a greater potential to see the metaphysical—that is, the ultimate structure of existence—no longer as some absolute, separate, sovereign, representable truth to believe or speculate on, but as something inherently complex and intertwined with all experience and knowledge, and therefore not separate from the “ontological” or “epistemological”, not essentially divorced from any of the things of our reality, things through which we can test or explore the truth for ourselves. 

 

This is especially the case if we understand that whatever is being experienced or studied is never just content, never just part of the universe, but also some reflection of its essential structure. That is, there is no essential difference, no trenchant divide between the nature of the things that exist in the world and the ultimate structure of things—because all things are some kind of condensation of the larger pattern of connections, some modified repetition of the structure of all relations, which may or may not hold among other relations, but in any case connects to them in some way.5 

 

This line of thinking could be seen as a refinement or elaboration of ancient mysticism and early philosophy which still thought along these lines, which did not so much generalize from particulars to universals, as much as used the patterns of one thing to tease out the patterns of everything else. 

 

It read greater cosmic connections into the qualities, elements, and patterns observed in nature, or a truth about the structure of all things into the seemingly regionally-specific myths and the narratives of niche cultures—basically extracting and creating metaphysical values from whatever was around, but in a way not tied to particulars. Such thinking allowed one to think through the local conditions of culture or nature out into the greater nature and processes of existence.

 

This kind of metaphysical “immanence”, as it has been called, was mostly displaced by the “transcendent” structure of Western philosophy, theology, and science, which tended to dam up the creative flow of abstraction and extrapolation from one thing to another by making things merely particular instances of generic conceptual universals, even if these universals were eventually thought most often to be mere representations of the particular things.

 

And so God was naturally separated from nature, and metaphysics from ontology. With this eventually leading to God and metaphysics—and all cultural coherence—getting somewhat lost in the process, truth could not help but become a piecemeal affair, a mundane fragment of a patchwork culture of separate disciplines and theories. 

 

Metaphysical immanence, however, has remained a theme within the underground and counter-traditions of Western culture, especially the esoteric tradition—especially in its frequently misunderstood “hermetic” principle which says: “as above, so below”. 

 

Immanence and the themes of relational continuity it implies have emerged intermittently into the main currents of Western cultural history, becoming in the late twentieth century, an important force within philosophy and science.6 While the sciences that have since emerged along these lines have continued to grow in relevance, seeing the universe in a fractal way—like William Blake’s infinity in the grain of sand—remains more of a niche curiosity and a psychedelic cliche than it does any new worldview.7 

 

The science and theory of chaos and complexity, however powerful in their potential to integrate fields of knowledge and help redraw the lines of culture and our metaphysical musing, ultimately must compete in a chaotic marketplace of ideas, where new dazzling theories emerge frequently, but little challenge to the working assumptions of specific fields are possible.

 

Out of the jumble of incongruent facts of science—unconsciously conflated with various incompatible theories—comes a metaphysical sterility. With the foundations of how we see the world determined by the contingencies of historical power struggles over truth and buried under so many layers of pragmatic compromise and ad hoc theorizing, any metaphysics up to the demands of our time seems like a pipe dream. 

 

With the search for ultimate truth relegated to niche experts speculating about how things came to be the particular way we happen to see them, what can the rest of us do beyond vague dreaming of what lies beyond?

 

When the basic questions do not lead through layers of meaningful but ultimately dissatisfying answers to other questions and potential insight, modern metaphysical thinking has had nowhere serious to go, and cannot quite grasp the problem festering in its foundation, hobbling any possible flight from the obvious. 

 

Questions concerning who we are and what we are doing here—questions that every curious child will ask—mostly remain childlike, though often lacking the child’s spontaneous wisdom unclouded by dogmatic learning. Consequently, much of metaphysics has become, not only lacking in serious quality but lacking in the potential to grow into serious insight or understanding. 

 

But since this hasn’t always been the case, why did things change? Why can’t we connect the physical and metaphysical dimensions of our culture? Is there no effective way to, if not integrate them into some single vision, then at least harmonize our scientific worldview with satisfying paths of spiritual insight? Or, do the structure and foundations of our knowledge need the radical overhaul implied here? What made traditional culture different?

 

Religious myth may seem childish to us, but it has long been the claim of mystics and occultists that hiding within what we call religion—that is, metaphysics for the masses—were much deeper layers of insight. Some contemporary thinkers have tried to do something similar for our times, teasing out the myths of scientific cosmology so that their spiritual value can be revealed.8 

 

The results, however, do not lend well to immanence, that is, to being taken as springboards to ever-deeper insight. Much like the transcendent structure so common in much of Western cultural history, they merely install an inflexible master narrative and strain to find the poetry in it.

 

It is true that mystics have often been able to take politicized dogma and turn it into illuminated poetry and spiritual insight, as the Sufis did with Islamic doctrine. With the right eyes, everything is a great text of metaphysical insight; so why haven’t intuitive thinkers and artists done the same with modern and postmodern culture? 

 

Why have they so often turned their back on the metaphysical substance of their societies in a desperate attempt to break free, either by forcing a fit with foreign cultures, or naively thinking they could form a new vision free of the problems within which we are all submerged, especially now as modernity’s unconscious depth increasingly swallows up the globe.

 

To be fair, many artists and thinkers have tried to find or form a metaphysical vision for the modern West and continue to do so. However, without institutional support for an  intelligentsia—an intellectual elite, which in our days has become fragmented into bitterly competitive niches vying for a servile place in the technocracy—concerns over cultural coherence cannot help but be framed as a reactionary threat to the bureaucracy and pushed into ever smaller niches in the face of the advance of techno-culture. 

 

Even if certain powerful people might want to reorient the world towards something more spiritually or cosmically aware, the kind of power and intuitive knowledge required to not only form a supplemental tradition of metaphysical insight but to help guide a whole culture—not to mention one so complex and incoherent—requires serious support and training. Even if there was the political will for such things, the kind of lifestyle, training, and discipline it would take is not well integrated into modern culture. 

 

This of course is part of the reason things have gotten so out of hand. The tumultuous and complex nature of the West, especially in its recent history, has made it difficult to sustain any kind of cultural elite for long. Entrenched values and centralized traditions can seldom maintain continuity through the chaos and conflict of the West’s centrifugal passion for the horizon.

 

The centripetal forces of value-oriented power blocs cannot withstand the test of a time—and a spatial distribution—that favors the inclusivity and the ambivalence towards cultural values that are characteristic of distributed power networks—the systems of power that favor and follow (and end up reflecting) the rhythms of material and commercial interests.

 

These interests inherently instrumentalize values and cannot long stand knowledge-producers who do not. The mystical and even the monastic cultures of Western Christianity, even if ironically playing a large role in the rise of the religion of technology and progress, were repeatedly attacked by the power network they helped set free.9 In the wake of the Protestant Reformation—and especially after the liberal revolutions—knowledge producers, along with everything else, including the state itself, have not so much been freed from the repressive power of religious authorities as much as they have been taken over by the merchant class.10

 

With the rise of the modern liberal state, not just religious authorities, but any real cultural elites or knowledge producers not in step with the technocratic project of business elites, cannot help but be framed at best as backward or countercultural, but often as dangerous if at all politicized around their values—even when these are not anti-modern or anti-democratic but only at odds with the narrow modernity of the times.

 

The result is that all culture not serving as a completely subordinate extension of industry is relegated to the counterculture, or to an insular culture of art stripped of any metaphysical knowledge or power to consciously or responsibly affect the trajectory of civilization. 

 

This is especially the case ever since the most infamous exception to this, the one major attempt at an alternative modernity, not only attained considerable power through an admittedly dangerous compromise between cultural and business elites, but ended in global disaster, and has since become the central specter in the liberal religion, the fascist evil to which all must be united against. So even if the modern West had a knowledge tradition with spiritual training beyond increasingly scientistic philosophical contemplation, there has been little chance of any cultural elite forming that could challenge culture’s destruction or co-optation by industry.

 

The Postmodern Crossroads

 

“[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing”. 

-George Santayana.11

 

It should be relatively clear that modern technocratic state power is not just at odds with its competitors, as is any state, but it also cannot for long allow cooperation with a true cultural intelligentsia, even one that would support the state (it was the Nazi scientists and technocrats that didn’t care about the cultural program who were able to merge with the postwar power-structure).12

 

The only cultural program beneficial to the technocratic state is one where all potential cultural elites are busy fighting each other, and the structure and value of knowledge are thoroughly instrumentalized to be at the service of the corporate state system, an arrangement threatened by entrenched and influential cultural values not oriented towards the trajectory of technocratic funding.

    

At this point, if one did want to develop the kind of visionary power required to develop an effective spiritual supplement to contemporary culture, there hasn’t been a coherent metaphysical tradition of the West in centuries. 

 

The disparate visions of Romantic thinkers, mystics, and artists have been our closest thing, but the knowledge they have produced has been neglected or rendered countercultural or esoteric, and therefore difficult to apply to contemporary knowledge structures without reinventing some core areas of modern science. 

 

Whatever success the Nazis had with this is difficult to ascertain, and their association has only further pushed the subject to the margins.13 Most people inclined to the esoteric side of things then naturally abandon mainstream knowledge-culture altogether. 

 

Even those inclined to apply esoteric training to or along with modern knowledge, a fetish is too often made of both, the result being clunky or culty integrations of modern and traditional dogma. Modern liberal culture in general has more or less accepted or embraced a materialized mysticism, instrumentalizing the special texts, schools, and practices of various cultures in innocuous ways that either obfuscate or romanticize their visionary potential.

 

Reductive romanticization of mystical methods and formulas for wisdom mostly preclude a sensitivity to wisdom’s context dependency, an understanding of the appropriateness of different methods, and a sense of when new ideas and frameworks are needed. Widespread shallow understanding ironically only further contributes to the cultic or marginal status of serious esoteric wisdom, since a choice is forced between a watered-down modernization of spiritual culture or the “anti-modern” danger of deep engagement or true belief. 

 

Compromises abound, but the result, again, is just awkward integrations of two incompatible worldviews. Science and spirit can be set alongside each other just fine, even reflect each other at points, but the physical and metaphysical remain separate spheres, each with their specialized dogmatic structure of reasons, with “the spiritual” being a mostly private otherworldly or inner-worldly affair. This reduces the all-important experiential and experimental side of metaphysics to something reductively “mystical”—which will remain to many in secular culture something strange, something set off from normal physical or social life. 

 

But since so many people crave such things, there is great pressure on the modern worldview to incorporate a version of spirituality that fits the mystical into modern life and scientistic expectations. Such a modern metaphysics must explain away the mystery and eschew the challenging social or cosmological components to make it palatable as a product in the burgeoning marketplace of lifestyle commodities. Yet an antagonism remains.

 

The liberalized conception of the esoteric is hard-pressed to not be dominated by the idea that it is some set of beliefs or practices merely added on to a normative life, and to a consciousness that has been more or less the same for millennia—more or less physically concerned if not for the idle musings of elites or the desperate dreamings of the common man. 

 

Or, to the more radical liberal, the mystical, like religion itself, is nothing more than an imposition from those spurious elites, which modernity is in the process of replacing with a more honest and democratic truth.

 

Modern liberalism can barely help but see the human being as either a generic ahistorical subject or a historical object to which various systems and practices can be applied. This trivializes and obfuscates the real problem of metaphysics in our times, which is not a question of individual “spirituality”, or the contingent beliefs of collective religion, not about quaint personal experiences, or the mere cultural coding of the material forces of history, but of the diverse possibilities for revolution, evolution, and the future existence of life on earth. 

 

For example, it was central to Theosophy—the major force of metaphysical culture in the 19th century, and which was watered-down into contemporary spiritual culture—that there was a structure of possibilities given for the evolution of not only our planet and solar system but of the cosmos and all its beings. 

 

While the idea of spiritual evolution has now become a cliche, and skeptics reduce it to an invention of modern spiritualists trying to integrate religion and science, there is evidence that Theosophy’s vast cosmology of spiritual evolution was just a modern adaptation of an old idea.17

Adapting cosmology and metaphysics to the times is not necessarily a sign of relativism or opportunism. When done not to appease or manipulate the masses, but compassionately connect and reform the physical and the metaphysical, attempting to guide culture could be considered the highest art and science. 

 

The Theosophical system was from the start full of bizarre ideas, so was therefore anything but a cheap integration of accepted truisms. Theosophists claimed that various hidden spiritual elites were attempting to guide our cultural evolution to greater consciousness, and that, given our materialist trajectory, some of them were worried.14

 

Whether one puts stock in this as truth or an interesting myth or not is beside the point. Concerns over—and attempts to direct—the future of humanity, technology, and even the future evolution of life on Earth have hardly been restricted to a mythical spiritual elite. Nowadays such concerns and ambitions are commonplace. 

 

Yet, they seldom take a form that recognizes how important the structure of human knowledge is becoming to life on earth. Most concerns are directed towards questions of political structure, often ironically suggesting we just need a technocratic elite to properly apply the knowledge we have accumulated.

 

It is certainly understandable for people to think that technology and a knowledgeable elite should play leading roles in addressing problems when the problems are framed as a result of an unwise use and disorganized development of technology. And so much human potential is indeed wasted in avenues of development that only benefit the power of certain groups, dispersing any momentum away from what could be a more unified human endeavor. 

 

However, this framing sets up solutions that are potentially worse than the perceived problem, a problem that is too seldom understood as one of disorganized or misevaluated knowledge, and not just a disorganized application of knowledge in need of a political (and usually centralized) solution. Had modern knowledge been, from the start, well-organized by metaphysical wisdom, our technological and political systems would both have reflected some of that coherence, and capitalism might have had a clear road of evolution into at least some modicum of harmonious “socialism”. Instead, it has morphed into some new kind of feudalism.15

 

But of course, the new feudalism isn’t that different from the old, despite the radical changes in the look of society, dressing up the same old power structure, which itself hasn’t changed in quality as much as it has grown more sophisticated. One can speculate about how what might have been would have worked, but the truth is that there is too much that must be transformed in humanity before the character of the power structure can change all that much. 

 

This ignorance of the deeper layers, not only in the mind of humanity but in the structure of its values and knowledge, was one of the biggest mistakes of modern thought. Not only are there recalcitrant psychological forces thwarting modern ideals, but those very ideals—and the ideas they were supposed to replace—are far more than they seem. 

 

The structure of knowledge and consciousness of any period is not just a collection of beliefs and values, but a metaphysical reality, a more or less vivid reality persisting beyond whatever terms occupy the space in its structure of relations. 

 

If one merely changes or proliferates the terms of belief without awareness of the structure of this metaphysical reality, this space of recurring relations enduring through every change or selection of outward form—this space which we all experience more or less unconsciously—then we make it even less conscious, we obfuscate it more and make it more difficult to understand or change.

 

Modernity began not so much as a radical attempt to break with metaphysics in the widest sense, or even with traditional values, but more as an attempt to build the structure of values and tradition on something transparent and universally applicable. There has been a lot of confusion and debate ever since about what to do with everything that does not fit this paradigm, especially anything resembling accounts of a reality that cannot be rendered into something obvious. 

 

While some indeed believed such things were illusions to be cast aside, or else rendered a matter of private indulgence, many realized that some kind of awareness of or account for the beyond was of vital importance, not just for the spiritual satisfaction of individuals, but for its role in determining the future of humanity. Yet it is challenging to put back in what has been factored out in the foundation. Trying to force it back in leads to many problems, even if that doesn’t stop people from trying.

 

In the wake of the European Enlightenment, and long before our technology became an obvious threat to life on earth, the concerns of many intelligent people across the fields of culture were variously animated around these specific metaphysical concerns, especially around what has been labeled as the problem of “disenchantment”.16

 

Romanticism and Theosophy are the most notable examples of what is often considered a reaction against the reductionist trends of the Enlightenment era. However, these cultural phenomena are better understood as part of a spectrum of responses to the broader problems in the structure of modern knowledge, a spectrum not confined to any specific cultural movement. 

 

Recontextualizing these cultural trends, especially reconstructing them in light of contemporary developments, can go a long way toward healing the current cultural chaos. It can help build the principles of a metaphysical understanding of the various sciences, and modernity as a whole—and, by extension, everything else.

 

Along such lines, it could be helpful first to see how Romanticism went far beyond abstract metaphysics or simple subjective concerns about the place of the individual in a mechanized society. Many of its nearly forgotten ideas on medicine, biology, and physics are becoming increasingly relevant as many knowledge trends stumble blindly back into similar territory.17 

 

Though again, it is better to resist any easy categorization of these cultural threads, as people from all disciplines and various periods have struggled in different but overlapping ways to address the moral and spiritual concerns that modern science has made unavoidable (to anyone with a sensitivity to the consequences of not doing so). 

 

What is most important to address, however, is what happened as these concerns reached their peak in the early twentieth century. The peak of modernism still holds much promise and relevance, but if we want to take it further, we must come to terms with what happened next, with the fall of metaphysics and cultural coherence into its current confused state.

 

Basically, with the world wars making most people wary of any struggle over fundamental metaphysical visions, the anti-metaphysical foundation inherent in liberalism found a more sure footing and broad acceptance. 

 

Yet just as this was happening, it was also becoming more recognized by philosophers, that beneath the factual appearance of scientific dogma, lies not only an implicit metaphysics, however incoherent, but an ambitious and repressive political force, strongly fortified by the success it has had weaving its metaphysics and politics imperceptibly into what we are taught to see as neutral factual experience.

 

The implicit metaphysics involves the suggestion that science has created the ultimate plane of mutual understanding and universal reference, a network of functional quantities to which all values can be reduced and every conflicting cultural sign referred. It has satisfied the escalating desire of modern peoples to transcend the ambiguity, conflict, and potential confusion inherent in language, philosophy, and politics, or in subjective values of any kind. 

 

A formal scientific basis for achieving the fraternity that equality and freedom need to fully coexist has always been the more or less tacit promise and necessary condition of liberalism’s trinity of core values. It has an undeniable appeal to a world with a history of so much violent struggle over values, an appeal that philosophers have had a difficult time competing with.

 

Even if the liberal dream was not destined to ironically become some version of a technocratic nightmare, few people now, even philosophers, are willing or capable of imagining anything outside of the scientism it has made into a global religion. Even without the belief in a transcendent truth and final utopia, science has mostly won the propaganda war against its competitors as the name of mankind’s hope for a pragmatic and democratic handling of problems. 

 

It has convinced people that, while it may not have the truth, or at least the final truth, its neutral language and plane of supposedly universal reference, is the one true path of the horizontal open system. It can allow its dogmatists to claim a vertically aligned authority of transcendent truth, thereby securing the partisan allegiance of conservatives longing for such things, while at the same time pointing to its tolerance and openness to all values—with the more or less hidden prerequisite that they don’t undermine institutional science’s monopoly on power. But is this so bad? Where is it all headed? 

 

It can be difficult to answer these questions without coming to terms with the important juncture we are at in time. To continue to apply labels merely denoting successive phases of history or culture, as philosophers love to do, is to fail to grasp what is happening, what has always been happening, but which is only now—as we are forced to question the ground and bounds of our reality—becoming understandable in some provisional sense: that not only is there a metaphysical process behind our narrow view of history, there is in actuality no single layer of history at all, no determinate material order of events, and no linear sequence of time, because there is no stable center or material origin from which it might progress.  

 

Any further attempts at periodizing history and culture need to go deeper than the modernist fad of inventing movements, or merely adding another qualifying phase or stage to some unproblematic substance or subject of history. Human society has never been a closed system. 

That we are discovering again—and inventing new terms and concepts for—the fact that we are not and have never been alone in the universe and that the boundaries we put on ourselves and our world are mostly conventions, is, however, admittedly good justification for marking a turning point in our history. 

 

To the explicitly spiritual person, of course, much of this isn’t news. The belief that we are becoming more aware of our part in a greater reality and community of beings and that our limitations are in some sense self-imposed is central to contemporary spirituality, and these themes barely differ from the mythic inspiration that has animated human culture and religion for millennia. 

 

But when science and technology are thrown into the mix, things get more complicated. Infinite realities and strange beings are no longer just a matter of belief, becoming a crucial part of our technological opening into endless powers and problems. 

 

To the modern intellectual order, a materialism that has ceased to mean much beyond a slogan is preferable to fully facing the implications of an infinite reality, which with honest eyes can be seen bursting from every corner of our culture, as the alien and artificial reveal themselves to be, not only lurking in the margins, but working at the depths and origins of our existence. 

 

Our materialism is unraveling and revealing it was nothing but a knot of recalcitrant relations; what was assumed to be some grounding substance or nature gives way to an endless deferring along other lines with alternative conditions and environments. 

 

This need not imply a void of all grounding principles; but to the intellect in need of some ground of reality outside the guiding logic inherent in any idea, this can be disorienting. Yet there is no going back. Some may embrace reaching backward in an attempt to shore up the old foundations, but no one can make them work for long in a world where any powerful idea can animate a reality as real as the so-called material world.

 

The practical liberal mind, of course, needs no ground, and so will continue on even with the reduction of matter and substance to an empty placeholder, or pragmatic metaphor for this mind’s own social product, a supposedly neutral medium for the play of democratic struggle and historical conflict. 

 

This universalized relativism of liberalism’s late stage may indeed seem necessary when faced with society’s lack of secure cultural foundations after the world wars. But this is only true as far as we retain the empty husk of materialism, as long as we believe that the conventions of culture—and the phases of material production they supposedly reflect—are some set of arbitrary but determinate elements emerging on some random rock in space. 

 

Being part of an open system of nature is not just about contingency, not just about all things being open on the borders to change and chance, but being always already a transformation or modification of other changes, ad infinitum. 

 

At the heart of every element of every system is a contextual dependence and openness that defies any simple accounting or location, any prison of predetermined being or preordained stream of becoming. While this principle may be easy to admit in abstract philosophy, the strange reality of its extent is becoming harder to ignore, even if it is very difficult to understand and accept. 

 

Going all the way with the implications of a thoroughly relational ground for all of our concepts and distinctions leads us to an unavoidable truth: not that value is a mere relative illusion clinging to a material machine in a soulless void, but that so-called matter as we think of it, emerges already folded into a nexus of partially overlapping syntactical arrangements and evolving narratives.

 

That which undergoes change is already a change of something else in a potentially endless portal of relation, with values and the worlds that spring from them shimmering in the core of every seemingly separated thing. In other words, the expanse of time is internal to everything. Therefore, everything is in some sense open to the infinite network of other times, ideas, and relations. 

 

The seemingly substantial ground of objects and space are at their founding already a kind of symbolic abstraction, or a prismatic contraction of other contractions without end or beginning, without center or margin—except those reflected in the worlds formed by each thing as a prism of time’s diverging and converging possibilities.

 

Everything exists as part of a vast interweaving of always mutually implicated, but more or less creatively divergent narratives, of an inexhaustible adventure in value fulfillment, where no event is ever complete or completely determined, so none can completely escape the threads of other spaces and times.

 

Nonetheless, to understand anything, we have to start somewhere. But where? Just as every thing only makes sense between other things, every beginning is already somewhere and along some way—already in the middle of other developments. As should be obvious (since we cannot do otherwise), we begin wherever we are, and there we find ourselves already confronted with contexts and concepts at work in forming the horizon of our world. 

 

While these may be confused and limit much extrapolation, it does no good to simply cast away appearances and simplicity for some ostensibly more solid but ponderous or complicated ground as the transcendent orientation of modern academics and scientists leads them to do. Appearances and assumptions must be worked with and worked through, so they do not simply return in a more complicated and harder-to-recognize form.18

 

When we do this, when we continually expand and supplement, critique, and reform the contexts surrounding each appearance, more and more lines of implication become visible to the mind’s eye, with the contingencies, errors, and potential pitfalls of certain knowledge-formations standing out like ominous signs.

 

With alternative histories, endless narrative frames, and creative lines of future implication in mind, we can make a kind of sense of our world in ways not beholden to the somewhat arbitrary constructs of settled fact and history. We can historicize and even periodize ourselves and our society in various ways without falling into dogma. We then need not lay down a definitive or objective historical context for things, but can offer one or more possible—but hopefully relevant—narrative “histories of the present”.

 

For while human society may not be any single progressing subject, or some fully determined entity trackable from any single view or collection of perspectives, its culture and history are portals to relevant and important contexts for the self-understanding of its subjects. Just as we, as these subjects, are portals to the history of consciousness on this planet, even if that history will always remain a mystery that is never complete. For the past is never fully past, and even the distant past is only distant from our limited point of view.

 

From the vantage point of the current era and common consciousness, however, modern society has gone through some rapid changes that are important to understand. Certainly, conceiving of lines of development is helpful to an understanding of the world, however the world—or the chosen subject undergoing development—is conceived. 

 

Certainly recognizing that development does not necessarily imply improvement, or that the subject of development depends on a choice of scale and context, does not mean we must abandon—or adopt a nihilistic “incredulity” towards—metaphysical narratives and value-laden worldviews.19

 

It is true that the negation of value becoming the supreme value was perhaps bound to happen, as faith in the content of our society fell away without a change in form. Indeed, the ground has pretty much fallen away beneath our most central narratives and categories of thought, and we have had a hard time replacing them. 

 

It is not surprising, then, even if ironic, that an acknowledgment of the naivety in notions of linear history and progress, have contributed to the label of “postmodern” being applied to late 20th-century disillusionment, thus continuing the progressive march, this time into nowhere. But the timidity and vacuity of merely marking the passage into a new era, without any characterization beyond a loss of faith in modernity, has made the term more trouble than it has been worth. 

 

It does, however, effectively capture the cultural confusion it could not help but contribute to. As the West has been forced to confront the complexity of the universe and society, a proper understanding of that complexity has taken a while to process, formulate, and become more widely recognized. 

 

The implications are still poorly understood. Part of this is due to most thinking people living in the wake of the epistemological discoveries of 20th-century science and theory feeling driven to reinvigorate the corpse of modern materialism and liberalism when what should have happened more widely was a following through with the metaphysical implications of liberal dogma confronting its limits.

 

Without something truly “post-liberal”, some new politics of knowledge, some creative foundation for thought and being, it makes sense to say we have actually had just a continuation of modernism; or, as it is sometimes said, that we have “hypermodernism”, with the “postmodern” just marking the time when we lost faith in the form, but not the substance of our accelerating machine. 

 

But we are indeed no longer modern in the sense that we realized we weren’t ever fully modern, and weren’t going to get to its ideals, or any social ideal, without a better understanding of a world more complex than was previously thought, or perhaps, can be thought in a completely determinate way.

 

Maybe “postmodernity” marks the culmination of modernity in its ironic self-overcoming—a realization of liberalism’s drive to shed all positive content and form to become pure function, to embrace freedom and “becoming” for its own sake, without any pretense to determining a positive use of that freedom, or a value for progression. 

 

The counterculture of cults, or “cultic milieu” of the 19th and 20th centuries, which liberalized into the “New Age” metaphysical culture of today, has followed suit. It has made the very postmodern and still very liberal mistake of attempting to include diverse values through an instrumentalization and relativization of its cults and traditions. 

 

Yet, without a strong understanding of how all these differences hang together, and what it is all for—beyond individual empowerment and comforting belief—such diversity too often settles into a collection of fetishized fashions with no real metaphysical difference, substance, or potential for transformation.

 

Even so, the Romantic and Theosophical impulse to construct a systematic form of alternative or modified modernity, as well as attempts in the “Modernist” era at founding an artistic or philosophical vision with similar metaphysical ambitions, live on in different ways. Many people across different fields, cultures, and subcultures, still are drawn to make meaningful sense of the complex structure of time and reality visible from our point of cultural evolution. Such developments, however, must address the following question: is there a way to reconcile the liberation of difference characteristic of postmodern society with the desire and increasing need for cultural coherence, that is, with a sense of collective meaning and purpose for human life and civilization?

 

The Real Problem of Consciousness

 

 “It is the intrinsic consistency of relations at whatever scale that determines what is real, not a distance metric from some supposedly foundational base level.” 

-Rocco Gangle20

 

Is it possible that life, and even humanoid culture and intelligence, are not only important and common products of a living intelligent universe but central and even generative to the order of cosmic processes that seem to give rise to them? Can we understand and reframe this ancient truth in new ways without any anthropocentric or earth-centric associations? 

 

What happens when we consider, not just that the universe is alive and meaningful—even in its mechanical margins or basic materiality—but that there is no fundamental base, no absolute ground or periphery, only relations with no center? Then would not everywhere and everything be central, every “thing” or idea be not a small part of or perspective on one large thing, but essentially be the “one thing” under specific conditions, a single “being” without comprehensive boundaries, only relative lines of connection within—and possible modification on—an infinitely-sided process of creation and self-discovery? 

 

What happens when we don’t just spiritualize nature as framed by the modern mind, or project our romanticized ideas of consciousness or overarching purpose down into the heart of matter—when we don’t merely entertain various flights of fanciful or comforting meaning, while the assumed objects of our thinking remain unchanged? 

 

What if, instead, we strove to understand the continually conditioned but boundless universal process that we all are, with the awareness that the way our knowledge is formed, that is, the structure we give it, is highly variable, and that the path taken may even have some kind of cosmic significance, some essential function within the workings of the world at large—some vital place within the economy and evolution of so-called matter and energy, as well as that of consciousness, and even that of worlds seemingly alien to our own? 

 

Must this necessarily imply that humanity is solely at the helm of things, or suggest that we make our thinking anthropocentric again for the rationalizations it provides for our hubris? Certainly, seeing ourselves or the earth myopically as the center of the cosmos is problematic, to say the least. Certainly, the idea of absolute hierarchies of being, which gave us pride of place at least over other physical life forms, seems not just antiquated but arrogant. 

 

Hierarchies have mesmerized human thought for too long. They are an obsession that hobbles the thinking of both their defendants and detractors. It should be a rather simple thing to see that they are a necessary but relative feature of the world and any sense we make of it. They need not imply any definitive superiority or natural order since all they show us is one line or thread of lines delineating a logical sequence or path of history—perhaps viewed from a relatively important perspective within the complex tapestry of existence, but a relative position nonetheless.

 

On the other hand, just because any logical or narrative line needs some amount of abstraction from the network of possible relations—just because any perspective is a reduction from and (more or less) an addition to what is—this does not denigrate truth, or make it some mere vestigial remnant of an inaccessibly-real or soon-to-be alienated material world fading into the background of our intractable webs of meaning and media.

 

Recognizing that truth is conditioned within contexts does not mean there can be no stable standards, or that, to have standards, some condition or model must be universalized, or truth otherwise reduced to, or based on, the least meaningful or minimally imposing bare reality of physical facts. 

 

It does not bar constructing intelligent metaphysical narratives to synthesize truth with a critical sense of purpose to guide our culture. We need not be doomed to either being collectively determined by the stagnant stories of tradition, or by nothing more than the lowest common denominator of a supposedly neutral science and democratic materialism, which always masks a techno-subservience.

 

Yet, with cultures clashing and forming a multicultural civilization, is it not inevitable or desirable that this be based on something fairly generic—and as neutral as possible—rather than the niche values of any specific culture? 

 

There is certainly value in objectivity. But this is the challenge of both the concept and process of cultural evolution, not to assume there is some natural value system or neutral progression, but rather to attempt a creative working with all ideas, connecting each niche to a larger cultural ecosystem. However, if the belief in an absolute separation between science and culture, fact and value, continues, then culture will continue to exist mostly to serve as decoration for the prison of a life lived for nothing, building enchanted structures on the just-as-precarious and shifting sands of materialistic science. 

 

If we never question the ground and walls of our prison, meaning and metaphysics will indeed merely serve to reinforce invisible restrictions, and further separate us from the reality beyond our reflections. Our world will remain what we most basically assume it is: nothing but a collection of objects and events upon which we ride and inscribe our varied jumble of significations. 

 

Life is then nothing more than the relations and combinations of preconditioned subjects and their objects, its meaning reduced to some single system and its story, even in its varied justifications and embellishments. Even in the most spiritual-sounding models of culture, consciousness, or cosmic evolution, the singularity and finality of purpose that often frames their meaning can still echo the ego’s fearful projections, still reflect a subjectivity conditioned by its precarious past, anxiously reaching for some stable convergent future. 

 

It doesn’t help that in the cosmology of popular science, that projection is stripped of its adornment and revealed to be the nihilistic nightmare it is: a future convergence that is more or less annihilation, with all life being doomed to be frozen in finality along with the matter it is supposedly tied to—and all meaning voided by the heat death or mindless repetition of an ultimately indifferent universe. 

 

Of course, in practice, the bleak realities of physical cosmology are barely believed, or at least, hardly concern a people obsessed with avoiding the inevitability of their death (let alone the death of the universe), especially now that technology seems capable of providing some kind of pseudo-salvation. 

 

Whatever the belief, the value hierarchy of our civilization remains the same: stave off or bring on the inevitable. But in either case, meaning is bound to some generic progression—the most common in our day, of course, being science’s metaphysics of progressive truth. 

 

Progressive truth is all well and good, especially if truth is essentially tied up with the good and beautiful. But if it is true that the kind of beauty and good of a truth is relative to the quality of its concern, then that all-important quality, that value or consciousness, can be easily obfuscated. This is certainly the case in contemporary metaphysics of all varieties, even potentially in cosmologies of consciousness, but especially within the most powerful institutional knowledge systems of liberal modernity.

 

For what is missing in liberal modernity is an appreciation for how different values illuminate and condition different truths. Even when attempts are made to include or integrate all the different models out there, the assumption is that there is some finite space of perspectives or map of values and consciousness that can be absolutely accounted for from some neutral position. Making meaning or consciousness part of, or integral to, one’s knowledge-system, doesn’t undermine “materialism” as one might think. 

 

Saying everything is consciousness might shift the structure of values to something more “spiritual”, but this can, of course, lead to a repression even more depressing than the shallow cultural utilitarianism of modern materialism. Even in its relatively benign forms, spiritualism isn’t any better than materialism if one proceeds to then judge how much spirit, value, or consciousness there is in something in an absolute way, or decides that a ground in consciousness means everything contrasted to consciousness is derivative, illusionary, or under its complete control, with consciousness being the one true “thing”.

 

One is then merely turning the open, unconditioned side of things into just another condition or thing opposed to other things, just some style or form of the universe that one feels more comfortable with or in control of, when the whole point of such shifts should be to emphasize the possibilities, to open to the not-yet formed, or at least to the variable forms and conditions which make each thing more than how it appears in any particular instance.

 

The fixed abodes of judgment, taken without awareness of their own conditions and contingency, will more or less unconsciously read the preferred criteria into every situation, arresting any expansion of context that doesn’t fit their presumptions. They will prevent the possibility of a helpful shift of boundaries, a true act of consciousness or value creation that could have revealed alternate value hierarchies and the worlds that connect them. 

 

This has long been the danger of metaphysics and monistic doctrines that do not give enough space for new evidence or alternative lines of thought. But the danger remains even when critical space is opened up by skepticism and empirical epistemology. In fact, these can become deceptively restrictive even if powerful tools, effectively grounding all growth of knowledge in a dogmatically one-sided expansion, seemingly open to change, but rooted in an unchanging subjective orientation. 

 

In the end, what matters more than any tiresome debate about the truth of competing theories is not only the value of the sense that different ideas and approaches can make of things but the understanding that arises from the sense they can make of each other. And it is this sense beyond any particular meaning—yet flowing formatively through and from them all—that all meaning-making should keep in mind.

 

Upon deep introspection, what stands sovereign at the end of any line of analysis is an inescapable inherence, an occasionally labyrinthine but dependable circularity that always returns each attempt at definitive separation of anything, back to some contingent contextuality, dovetailing with other lines of reason and conditions, ad infinitum. In such a nexus, there can be no convincingly fundamental or unproblematically sovereign appellation. Any quality or idea can be made a starting point and carries its own standard and slant of interest. 

 

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should avoid foundational ideas or a sustained slant of emphasis in our theories and terms, only that those biases should be made a continual conscious choice, and understood as inherently experimental extrapolations on the paradoxical problems of existence. Yet, without at least some kind of stability in meaning created by hierarchies of value, no lasting sense can be made of anything, so their problematic nature is not something to be regretted. It should be joyously affirmed as an eternal adventure.

 

One can call these problematic biases of culture—or within its structure of knowledge—a culture’s “metaphysics”, but, again, it should be remembered that this is not something simply added on to the facts, not something “above” a culture’s physics or the objects its sciences may study. Though neither is it the other way around. Cultures and concepts are not some all-powerful ground; they do not simply determine truth in some arbitrary way. 

 

The subject may “come before” the object; consciousness may even precede matter, but that is because these terms gain their meaning essentially by their place in a logical or temporal sequence, where the former by definition frames or acts on the latter, not necessarily because they are fundamentally different kinds of things. “Consciousness” like “matter” has accrued a lot of conceptual baggage, but they are both just conceptual extensions of the subjects and objects of our language.

 

It is common to think that there is something special called consciousness, or some radical break between the mechanical movements of objects getting pushed around, and the true subjects and agents of action, or else that the subjectivity is just an illusion inserted into the perceived joints of nature’s working. But in light of how varied the structure of those joints can be “imagined” and effectively understood, what we mean by subjectivity and its being or action seems to have less to do with independent awareness or agency, and more to do with being capable of some kind of notable differentiation of meaning.

 

Certainly, some things are more complex and active in certain contexts than others, but that is no reason to put one kind of thing in a privileged class of being. In a typical sentence, objects are organized around the actions or existence of a subject, but anything can become a subject or an object—or an adjective or verb for that matter if one thinks of everything, even so-called substances, as qualifying processes, that is, thinks of every “thing” or “being” as something applied to other things. 

 

In any case, a relative order in a sequence is not the same as an absolute order of being. So one can, of course, as materialism does, reverse the usual order of experience and point out that, actually, objects can precede any particular subjective experience of them, but this is obvious; or one can say it is the act of relating subject and objects that forms them both, so it is the verb or “becoming” that is primary to the being or beings, whether they be subjects or objects. 

 

But this is also obvious. Events bring subject and object, actors and actions together, but does that mean all the joints of nature, all the discrete things of existence, are just illusions derivative of the smooth flow of the event of existence? Or are events formed by subjects and objects? Again, is there a significant difference? Aren’t all things events? What does that say about there being a distinct order of matter and one of consciousness, or the claim that one or the other order is all there “really” is? Are events more essentially a distinct activity brought about by agents, or is everything an abstraction from its links in some continuous chain?

 

Is there some kind of interplay between two apparent orders of being that are “really one”, or is it rather that the duality of separate orders or substances is just an exaggeration of the two sides of the event as a relative process, just as seen in any simple sentence? “I” am the subject from my point of view and “you” are the object, and vice versa.

 

Yet “we” can also be on the same side as a collective subject in relation to other things as objects, even if we are the objects as well, as in “We are talking to each other”. The “we” suggests some shared convergence or overlap of activity, some shared subjectivity as well as (at least) comparable objects. 

 

This suggests that there can be a collective subjective “realm” of sorts, but this would just be the other side of our shared relations, the background of possibly relevant values and factors that are presupposed by or have brought us into, overlapping events with mutually perceptible or comparable objects. 

 

This would include our shared or overlapping evolutionary history that makes interaction possible, not just related cultural values and language that make mutual understanding possible. (Even interacting with a rock, plant, or animal assumes some shared metaphysical structure, a structure of “ideas” in a much broader sense than human concepts.)

 

It should be obvious that what is metaphysical isn’t some mysterious order of being but the structure of everything that any action must assume and condition to become focused on particular objects. Perhaps it is the “spiritual” side of events, logically prior to their actual occurrence, but that need not imply a privileged realm of fundamental priority, just the priority made by taking a particular perspective or action, a perspective or activity not formed in a vacuum, but as part of the structure of relationships. 

 

That structure, despite being something real and formative, is not objective, if by that is meant that it exists as some global totality; but neither is it subjective if by that is meant that it is formed wholly by the actions or qualities of any subject, group, or thing. All agency is structured and all structure is formed by agents—or in other words, all things are conditioned by each other and so are extensions of each other in various ways. 

 

Culture indeed is influenced by material conditions, but those conditions have no absolute beginning, and no absolute existence as something apart from or prior to the situated subjects or contexts of consciousness, because these are all relative terms, as all terms must necessarily be.

 

Post-New Age Denial

 

 “…esoteric views of higher knowledge do not only reflect their contexts, they stand on a continuum with broader and more generally accepted intellectual currents. They do not simply constitute exceptional and “backward” reactions to a “forward-looking” post-Enlightenment establishment. Rather, they respond to pre-existing tensions and internal differences in establishment discourses, concerning the boundaries of knowledge and its attainment, and actively seek support from some of the positions in those discourses. This makes their presumed status as oppositional “rejected knowledge” problematic: the occultists are part of ever-shifting constellations of power and knowledge, facing the same struggles to legitimise themselves as everybody else.”-Egil Asprem21

 

It should be obvious that the metaphysics of materialism and its spiritualist reactions are quite similar in the manner in which they divide up the world, even if they may emphasize different sides of the accepted subject/object divide. Academic philosophers tend to lean on science, so materialism is still quite popular with them—despite a general awareness that these terms must necessarily mean something more complicated in our day. 

 

Even in its most sophisticated forms, materialism is often weighed down by a subservience of theoretical coherence to the so-called “messiness” of “matter”. The phrase signifies laudable intentions; nonetheless, it has become little more than a euphemism for chaotic contingencies in the politics of knowledge trumping deep thinking on the philosophical biases at play in science, and completely displacing the construction of some kind of coherent collective vision.

 

Despite “matter” being a much more complicated concept in the 21st century than it was in the heyday of scientific materialism, it continues to have legitimate metaphysical value, especially in helping empirically oriented intellectuals in their fight against the philosophical tradition’s frequent dissociation from material processes.

 

But more often it just reflects the extent to which philosophers put partisan cultural politics before the deeper politics of knowledge. A preference for insular debates about the aesthetic or political nuances of abstract terminology still reigns supreme over any metaphysical evaluation of the specific structure of knowledge in our times. The weakness of philosophy and contemporary thinking is more responsible for the chaotic jumble of current explanations for things than any inherent incoherence or arbitrariness of nature implied in so much of contemporary science.

 

To be fair, it is understandable that philosophy should emphasize matter and contingency against the totalizing logic of information encroaching on everything today. Amidst the mass migration of human consciousness into the ephemeral space of digital culture, affirming some essential, substantial, or natural qualities over their opposites is indeed valuable and occasionally productive of important insight. As the world of both material objects and sovereign subjects slides into mere content for the ethereal mediasphere, affirming some substantial truth that can resist its distortion by power, media, and narrative manipulation, is increasingly attractive in different forms. 

 

Conservative pundits calling for a new rationalism, objectivism, or some kind of messianic return of reason and truth to a post-truth world, have a powerful popular appeal, just as the philosophers calling for a new realism or materialism do among the academic left for similar reasons.22 To conservatives, “materialism” is not a useful weapon against the denigration of firm and substantial principles, since the term is associated with the left’s long tradition of historicizing truth and, more recently, contextualizing its meaning according to its use by power, precisely what some on the right feel is fueling this assault on truth, however vaguely defined.

 

In any case, the modern liberal worldview, whether of the right or left, and whether essentialized or historicized, is usually grounded in an appeal to a rational edifice that can represent sovereign scientific truth, and it is this that has become more difficult to maintain in the so-called “postmodern” era. 

 

Particularly, any notion of foundational matter or substance in the 21st century has had to make way for the decidedly less clear and simple concepts of energy and information, which the physical sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries have made necessary. The incursion of time and complexity have gradually infiltrated and complicated the neat logical categories of traditional reason that depend on the idea of a generalizable medium of being or simplistic fundamental terms of existence. 

 

The shaky foundations at the core of what is supposed to be the hardest of sciences are often paved over by rationalists, even if sometimes mystified or exaggerated by the counterculture. But the fact remains that the dreaded “postmodernism” is not some isolated or arbitrary cultural phenomenon, but an unavoidable fact of the complexity of contemporary knowledge and society.

 

While a materialist may see no problem with a lack of physical or metaphysical ground to scientific truth, seemingly content with the utilitarian compromise that has worked since the dawning of post-classical physics, others are not so content—a sentiment that has persisted since the days of the debates between Bohr and Einstein.

 

Since many so-called “postmodernists” and “New Age” counter-culturalists do seem to more explicitly struggle with the riddles of the relative, subjective, and intersubjective, it is not surprising that many modern liberals, especially the conservative variety, insist that postmodernism is some evil plot. 

 

The unfortunate result, however, is that these scapegoat narratives often just serve to blame the messenger, demonizing the very people attempting to analyze the complex historical and socioeconomic factors behind the rapid changes in our society. But it doesn’t help that most academic theorists are willfully opaque and contrarian, often doing little to try and remedy the maladies they diagnose. These factors understandably contribute to the religious fervor with which they are condemned as a contaminating cause of confusion creeping into the pure order of factual truth.

 

Meanwhile “materialism”, especially with the qualifier “scientific”, for most people just brings to mind countercultural critiques. And given the frequent shallowness of those critiques, many will probably have that other maligned term “New Age” not too far behind in their minds. While “New Age” for a brief time meant something specific enough to study as a cultural movement, it has long since become a term of general derision. 

 

Even when its use as a sociological concept describing late 20th-century countercultural religion was justified, its coherence came more from what those described by the term were against (materialism) than any single structure of belief.23

 

One problem with the “New Age” is that, in a kind of inversion of the opacity of academic postmodernism, the popular metaphysics of the era was just too agreeable and generic to maintain any distinct value or vision. But it must be pointed out that this is partly due to the genuine value it held, a broad appeal that led to the popular success of the phenomenon. 

 

While this indeed has its downsides, that an undeniably countercultural spirituality grew to become the ubiquitous and commercialized presence it is today, is perhaps as significant as the explosive growth of Christianity out of the ruins of the classical world, a similar story that no doubt contributed to the two movements becoming intertwined as a section of the New Age found a kind of political consciousness in the 21st century.

 

Using the term “New Age” is probably not ideal anymore, but at one point there was a need to name this very important and broad phenomenon in social history, and the term “New Age” was more or less appropriate, not because it underscores the phenomenon’s occasional prophetic bent, but because its success does herald a new age in the history of human culture. 

 

The blossoming and converging of formerly countercultural and cultic forms of religion and eclectic mysticism, giving birth to a genuine multicultural, global milieu of esoterically-styled spiritual culture, is not given enough productive attention, for it accomplished what Christianity had failed to do as its will towards a religion for all morphed into the political project of dominion.

 

The “New Age” version of inclusion was vague and apolitical enough initially to avoid too much conflict. Critiquing the mainstream or believing in a radical transformation of society away from scientific materialism is pretty harmless when there is no power to change anything. It is understandable that the term increasingly came to connote something or someone deluded, especially when the New Age tendency towards fanciful utopian dreams is contrasted with the realities of 21st-century technocracy. 

 

And as parts of the New Age became more political, overlapping more or less with Christian conservative conspiracy theories, a new scapegoat was born. This, however, didn’t come out of nowhere; the reality is that much of what gets lumped together as the New Age movement in the late 20th century was not fundamentally new or fringe. The commercial popularity and the watering-down of esoteric ideas into mainstream liberalism was certainly a distinct phenomenon of the time.

 

But this was just the latest popular expression of the ongoing dance between materialism and spiritualism, and all manner of combinations of the two that had been going on throughout modernity. Naive spiritual hopes for a radical change in society, as well as insular cults and narcissistic self-help philosophies, are all key parts of modern, especially American, history. But as mentioned, so were more powerful attempts at envisioning and enacting an alternative modernity. 

 

The embrace of certain kinds of science was not only central to much of the history of modern spirituality but continued a long misunderstood tradition of searching not just for a popular integration of science and spiritual truth—which is its most crude and conformist expression—but a philosophical and metaphysical understanding that could ground as well as critique all the disparate forms of knowledge and culture, creatively integrating them into a more coherent structure of wisdom.

 

It is true that, unlike Romanticism, Theosophy, and metaphysical geniuses throughout history from the ancient Greeks to the Modernists, the most popular New Age trends concerned with the confluence of science and mysticism mostly lacked philosophical subtlety, usually doing little more than spiritualizing quantum physics, or attempting to create some form of scientistic spirituality. Even when attempting to critique scientific materialism, these often indirectly contributed to an even more problematic trend of scientific immaterialism, most notably in the form of transhumanism. 

 

Indeed the deeper and more critical tradition of philosophically-informed science, science-literate theology, and big-picture cultural history, did seem to have come to an end in the postmodern era, with science, the humanities, and sincere metaphysics, all going their separate ways.

 

But it is also true that as specialization made serious multidisciplinarity and comprehensive metaphysics less visible and supported by institutions, the impulse towards putting it all together did not disappear, or become relegated to the amateur fringe. It has continued in its own postmodern pattern of complex distributed networks. 

 

This has been more difficult to see because there is so much more now to tie together, more than could ever be represented in a single picture, or thought-group, no matter how inclusive or “integral”.24 Of course many of those who try to put it all together in this era of complexity cannot help but come off as reductive or shallow, destined to be lumped in with popular forms of New Age scientism and its philosophy of commercialized and psychologized spirituality. 

 

Yet the components of the necessary metaphysics of our age are present, even if hidden, scattered, or dispersed within the many corners of our culture. They are just often difficult to separate, as the lines between the counterculture and the popular, the amateur, and the academic or professional, all have become complicated.

 

So much so that the term “New Age”, much like “postmodern” is rarely used now except to pejoratively describe an extreme caricature, because few things completely escape the orbits of these cultural patterns. Though this is not often admitted. The hatred of postmodernism or the New Age often betrays an ignorance of this inescapability, and contributes on the one hand to a kind of impractical rejection of philosophical or religious evolution by traditionalists, and on the other, to a stubborn resistance to the decreasing viability of secular culture by liberals.

 

As science gets weirder and the living context of traditional religion has all but disappeared in the modern world, most viable big-picture thinking now takes on at least some of the qualities of the New Age. Even movements bent on a return to traditional culture and religion tend to acknowledge the necessity of knowing the challenges of the current global era, and consequently, cannot help but take on some of the trappings of multicultural postmodern society. 

 

Whatever term is used, it should be recognized that there is a complex global landscape of metaphysical culture that is actively searching for some kind of metanarrative or vision fit for our times, whether it be naive or critical, religious or philosophical. And while it is true that a lot of contemporary spiritual literature merely weds popular science metaphors to mystical tropes and imagery, and does so without much philosophical sophistication, cutting across the various fields of culture is an unrepentant interest in bringing metaphysical coherence to the disparity of modern life. 

 

Since the advent of the internet, this interest has become exceedingly varied and complex. So much so that official stories are sometimes unable to contend with the orgy of meaning-making exploding through the networks of social media.25 

 

In fact, given the lack of ready-made coherence in the structure of contemporary ideology, everyone must do some amount of thinking through the disparity of truths or risk being on the wrong side of the cultural wars, which is often defined differently within what used to be monolithic subcultures, with social repercussions that concern even the most unthinking conformist. Sticking with the supposed consensus is hardly a safe bet anymore when it changes and fractures in daily micro-mutations that depend on the media niches of each person.

 

There may be easy answers available from a more or less official story, but few people in this age can get through life without some amount of cognitive dissonance when conforming to the contradictory amalgam of official ideology, emerging as it does from political compromises and therefore often lacking in any consistent logic. Consequently, there are in some ways as many worldviews going around as there are people. 

 

Yet, despite the chaos and the lack of worldviews strong enough to make consistent sense of the rapidly mutating facts—or, more accurately, of the narrative spin on even the most basic questions about what is happening in the world—the metaphysics of our times makes up in a creative diversity of thinking what it lacks in producing a broadly convincing cosmological vision. 

 

Throughout history, the friction that results when cultures meet—and their ideas clash—has repeatedly fired the difference engine, forming new eccentric variations, and often new broader kinds of cultural coherence. And even if that coherence has often been a dumbing-down or at least a watering-down of diverse and subtle metaphysical ideas, mass culture and its religions can also help to preserve the threads of metaphysical creativity they otherwise obfuscate. 

 

At least to the minds capable of appreciating it, exposure to cultural differences can instigate a deeper reflection and understanding not always possible with—because not fully representable by—any single metaphysical vision. One can begin to understand culture as a relation not just between a group of people and its environment and circumstances, but between realms of ideas and their rhythmic relation in the world.

 

This is especially the case when time itself can be studied, and not just to confirm some mystical perennial philosophy—some universal spiritual truth behind each specific reiteration of the commonalities of diverse cultural forms—nor simply to form some single narrative of the evolution of consciousness and its variations. Instead, time can be examined creatively, engaged as a nexus of singular events and their relations, to which all ideas can potentially connect and test themselves against. 

 

Seen this way, physical life in time is a kind of metaphysical exercise or contest over who embodies the best ideas, or at least, which ideas can be made to connect with which in what ways and situations.

 

So while the diversity, eccentricity, and outright strangeness of worldviews in our era will no doubt continue to proliferate and confound any attempts at bridging disparity on the meaning of our global and cosmological situation, the timing and pattern of relations between meanings become a more revealing game in such “interesting times”. 

 

While, indeed, with the right material or perspective, any period of history can be a portal of discovery into and creative engagement with the dynamics of time itself, the greater the level of diversity and the dynamism of ideas involved, the more illuminating the patterns are to anyone interested in understanding and stabilizing one’s soul—or even one’s culture (given enough power or cooperation)—through the most diverse or tumultuous of worlds and times. 

 

This is particularly true now with our era’s unparalleled conflict of ideas made possible by globalization. The time is ripe for beginning to dig beneath the metaphysical roots of diverse narratives framing the structure and trajectory of history, and with the right kind of intuitive thinking, discern some sense of the deeper cosmic game being played upon the rhythms of time, perhaps even helping increasing numbers of people tap into—and become more conscious players in—these games that a keen eye can see driving and spilling out from the chaos of our changing world.

 

From Timeless Metaphysics to the Temporal Art of its Practice

 

“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that one plays the devil…

Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.”26

-Alfred North Whitehead

 

Cultural theorists and esoteric philosophers have long held that beneath the cultural diversity present at any given time on our planet, one may see common themes reflecting problems that characterize the period. This is certainly easy to see historically in cultures with some level of exchange and influence, and so only more so as society has become an increasingly connected global network. 

 

But it has long been claimed by some traditions that the thematic periods of history go deeper than what can be tied to obvious material influence or shared physical or social environments, reflecting a pattern inherent to the cycles of our planet, its cosmic environment, and even time itself. 

 

In most of these traditions, especially those with some connection to astrology, these deeper patterns are considered variations on recurring themes tied to various celestial cycles like the movement of the planets across the sky. In some traditions, there is also some sense of development, some conception of a planetary process of spiritual fulfillment, consciousness expansion, or cultural “evolution”. 

 

In contemporary times, however, any narrative that frames human life as part of a meaningful development of fundamental—not just nominal or subjective—significance, is made to seem naively (or dangerously) anthropocentric against the bleak backdrop of popular cosmological physics. 

 

Despite any sophistication that may be present in meaning-centered cosmologies, nowadays they are lumped together in most minds without any consideration, or only considered along with other comforting “just-so” stories, which supposedly shield the weak from the implications of our smallness in the boundless expanse of galaxies and the meaninglessness of a world with its foundations in a void of empty space. 

 

As the importance and complexity of all life not only on this planet but across the cosmos becomes better recognized, any account that puts humanity or even what we can imagine as humanoid life at the center does seem presumptuous. Yet, as the vastness of life and its myriad potentials of evolution become better understood, important centers and hierarchies can more easily be framed without vain presumptions. 

 

Without this, without some anchor, some way of meaningfully relating our world to an undeniably vast scheme of things within some kind of coherent cosmology, opening to the wonders and diversity of the universe not only adds to the feeling of our insignificance, it is incapable of invoking true wonder, as every discovery is merely another form or image adrift without any depth of relation. 

 

When we simply try to forcibly inject some purpose into the picture without any sense of connection between the personal and impersonal, or when we simply attempt to fill the void between the disconnected objects of contemporary cosmology with secular awe, the results are unsatisfying. In the wake of this dissatisfying secularism, myth continues, mutating to the needs of the masses within popular media. The meaning of life gets naturalized into the mystical ecology of environmentalists, or the gods themselves materialized into the merely alien beings of ufology. 

 

Yet, despite the rapidly changing landscape of belief, without a way to understand what we are all doing here in a way that satisfies the modern mind, any new religious or secular mystification adds at most a layer of dissatisfying “enchantment” out of sync with the existential alienation of the times. 

 

Rationalism and skepticism have penetrated too deeply into the contemporary psyche for it to be fully satisfied with some mythic or philosophical narrative that merely tacks on a mystical purpose to the stark realities modernity has revealed to us. 

 

In fact, without some deeper metaphysical understanding of the order of the cosmos, modern skepticism can even play an active role in the proliferation of myths that expand existential dread to the level of cosmic horror. The sense increasingly exists that we perhaps only exist as puny pawns in the murky agendas of powerful beings, or that there is no real cosmic order at all, just endless cosmic exploitation in a strange and incomprehensible cosmos. 

 

While astrology and other spiritual perspectives continue to grow in popularity, this is often through the by-now well-worn modern trend of reducing metaphysical philosophy and non-materialist cosmological systems down to practical psychology, or down to the more recent fad of subcultural identity-signaling. 

 

After the social and technological changes brought on by liberalism and global capitalism, and coming out of their cultural victory over the more mythically driven side of culture in the wake of the Second World War, big-picture visions were bound to fall by the wayside. Spirituality could not help but be reduced to a personalized form of religion. Not without some kind of acceptance and understanding of the necessity underlying and producing the radical differences of meaning so characteristic of periods such as ours.

 

While intellectual interest in the metaphysical roots of difference and the processes of becoming became increasingly influential in a variety of fields coming in the wake of the so-called postmodern turn in academia, the relatively insular interdisciplinarity of dry intellectual “theory” has had little effect on the culture at large. Abstruse academic discourse cannot contend well with the more dominant trend of reducing the philosophical to the subjective. 

 

This has long been a part of modern culture, but in more recent decades, it has become somewhat of a caricature of earlier Romanticism. Now everyone can be the hero in their own personal myth. Whether this personal myth is given cosmic significance (as it often is in the New Age) or not, without some way to connect the meaning of one’s life to everything else coherently and effectively, one has little choice but to retreat into the personal or fantastical. 

 

Though given the vagueness of most myths, even the scientific ones masked as sophisticated theories, who can say what is fantasy? How can one critique any ascribed meaning in this age when the reality of contemporary standards for judgment usually comes down to whether or not a theory can explain banal facts, something easily accomplished not only by religious thinking —which can always potentially revise an explanation to explain away contradictions—but also the endless ad-hoc theorizing which shores up the failures of scientific cosmology. 

 

The latter of course will always win the day when the reigning filter on excessive or competing truth claims comes down to what emotionally or professionally challenges the least amount of people. Consequently, scientific cosmology is little more than a patchwork of compromises between rival theories in the politics of science, with no sense or interest in how it all might hang together outside the autistic theories of insular academic niches. 

 

Anyone driven to pursue a comprehensive understanding is pushed to the margins, since the knot of contemporary theories is too complicated—and the concepts so full of contradictions—that any one person is hard-pressed to make any deep sense of them that doesn’t offend specialists. And of course, giving such an endeavor institutional support would unsettle the supposedly settled science upon which political power is increasingly relying.

 

The work is being done regardless, just not in an organized or comprehensive way. Different aspects of this problem are being tackled in various ways by different individuals and groups, though not generally by those who should be most capable of extracting, analyzing, and creating concepts out of the immense muddle of scientific theory, namely: philosophers, or at least philosophers bold enough to give an alternative vision with positive or productive value.

 

The problem, though, is understandable. It is difficult enough creating philosophy now that does not smack of mere opinion, but to include a grand narrative putting all science, let alone all human history and knowledge into a single framework with cosmic significance cannot help but sound quaintly romantic at best, if not completely trite. 

 

Scientific cosmology has “unified theories”, but these can’t explain history, or really anything for that matter, as they eschew real explanation for bare physical description, and lately not even that, settling for endless formal and mathematical arrangements, the meaning of which is beyond the theorist’s niche of understanding.

 

The countercultures of the internet have increasingly become the field where meaningful explanation and integration have been attempted. Still, their power is limited, being perceived too often (though occasionally correctly) as mostly fringe niches of reactionary eccentrics with their own special theories or agendas. But this isn’t always true, and rarely a helpful characterization. Even before the internet, or before the spiritual concerns of Modernity, countercultures have existed in complex overlapping tension with the dominant culture. They have never been simply confined to specific or separate subcultures, even if those have gotten the most attention at certain times in Western history. 

 

This is especially true when we are talking about ideas and not just the rare individuals who want or attempt to break off from society to create an alternative. The culture of the esoteric tradition in particular has never been easily separated from the mainstream, with notable thinkers of each often having a hand in the other. 

 

Thinking of esoteric culture as cultic rejected knowledge, as it has been characterized, makes its figures the weirdos and losers of history.27 This has it somewhat backward—a mistake that falls out naturally from defining what is mainstream and what is not so trenchantly. It is better to say that many of the new ideas in culture first arise from the fringe of society, as well as from the intuitive fringe of the mind. 

 

And though much of it never makes it from the experimental margins to the halls of mainstream institutions, what does become the best ideas of mainstream culture often seems to be a kind of refined and sophisticated—though sometimes still inferior—reflection or reduction of what had been incipient in the fledgling experimentalists, artists, and intuitive thinkers both inside and out of society’s main stream.

 

Of course, mainstream culture has often been at odds with its countercultures. However, the tension between the two has often been a major engine of innovation. To the extent that this tension has become lost in the transformation of the ideas of Romanticism and esotericism into the mere alternative lifestyles of postwar counterculture, the culture has suffered a loss of its soul. 

 

Yet the empty spirit of a soulless science and a meandering of meaning cannot dominate for long. The rich life of creative intuition is working in various forms to make the right connections—to reestablish vital tension between the formal and intuitive sides of our culture.

 

Central to this is the renewal of attempts to build an alternative picture to the impoverished mess of the mainstream view on time and evolution, especially the source and evolution of life and consciousness. The old Romantic and Modernist impulse to create a broadly comprehensive cosmology that is still rooted in a convincingly fundamental metaphysics is understandable. But in the contemporary world of irreducible complexity, more is needed than any single vision. One must account for the meaning of human life without either reducing all meaning to a central narrative or making it a merely personal reaction to a meaningless cosmos.

 

It is not inherently reductive, however, to see personal meaning as a co-creative variation on an open dialog of themes and ideas informing a larger development. Something like this is essential, for if personal meaning does not form some connection to the meanings of the world, it is inadequate and potentially destabilizing. Philosophy, even in the metanarrative-averse postmodern era, does not shy away from some amount of periodizing the trends of the world, though the unimaginative term “postmodern” exemplifies the problem of labeling an era so characterized by the collapse of overarching or unified meanings. 

 

So how does one have a positive and productive vision without over-determining meaning, even in a very general way? Grounding in the very general or seemingly universal can be even more reductive than some overly specific scheme of meaning, for it can find room to reduce everything to its generic vision. But isn’t the danger of dogma more of a question of one’s approach to things, rather than something inherent in a system of ideas? 

 

Certainly, some traditions and texts are more conducive to building knowledge rather than mere belief, but there are traps in everything. Critical aversions to the appearance of dogma can be very dogmatic. Can we not use whatever meaning is available, with a sensitivity to the irreducibly different—to the problems and potentials in any framework or approach—with an attitude that recognizes those differences are not absolute, depending, as they do, on further contexts? 

 

There are severe limits to understanding anything without some amount of this openness to the unlimited variation at the heart of all things. Such an openness aligns ideas in a way that makes them ramify into each other, ensuring they resonate and carry through, robust to a wide range of changes in frame, concept, and language, without making those changes reduce to their abstract generality. 

 

One can then use and embrace all things and meanings without reducing them to some abstract form framed for empty utility—to the mere appendages of some root bias. One can draw from and expand on any meaning without becoming seduced by the exclusive allure of any particular ground of meaning.

 

With the right kind of sensitivity and ground in the groundless and open continuity of ideas in things, one will find and form one’s way to a construction of knowledge and truth increasingly well-suited to the singularity of every situation and problem. But of course, intuitive sensitivity is rather limited without a tradition in which to grow. And with any permanent ground of knowledge dissolved into context-dependency, establishing some historical context and understanding of everything is crucial.

 

The general themes that populate the grand historical visions of Western and Eastern metaphysics can be rich with detailed implications that are crucial springboards to intuitive vision when not taken as definitive or authoritative. Though the danger here, again, is merely mining difference for the benefit of a rooted base assumption, like reducing meaning to a pragmatic relativism of use-value, or, alternatively, having no sense of coherence or continuity, perhaps fetishizing the ideas of the past within their discrete historical niches and perspectives. 

 

Vigilant Metaphysics and The Potential of Astrology

 

“There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge”.-Paul Feyerabend28

 

It can be difficult in our depth-deficient era to not lose a specific sense of coherence as one widens awareness, or attempts to understand diverse perspectives. Cultural and conceptual differences easily slide into a flattened vision of surface effects—mere markers for a kind of false depth of sociological and psychological forces, an appearance of complexity that ultimately bottoms out to crude materialistic drives. Even some of the best meta-historical visions, especially in modernity, have had a hard time escaping the limited horizons of materialistic meaning, especially as science has continued expanding its boundaries. 

 

Naturally, in our predominantly secular society, cultural theories that tie each theme exclusively to a specific culture or cultural sphere are more palatable than those that have some kind of overarching concept of cultural or spiritual evolution. While explaining the causes of historical themes as a consequence of shared material circumstances may be a helpful way of building larger contexts for knowledge—while still staying self-conscious of the limits of our position within a specific cultural world horizon—it can easily be reabsorbed back into the metanarrative of a neutral analytic account of history. 

 

If meaning is just a consequence of culture and culture ultimately just an effect of banal circumstances, we get the worst of both extremes. We still have a single reductive narrative—here one of cultural relativity—but also a belief that all meaning is just a cultural and personal reaction to an essentially meaningless material process.

 

Yet how can a tradition and structure of knowledge be formed without the dead-ends and limited horizons of the fragmented materialism, relativism, or perspectivism that constitute modern culture—or without falling back into some reductive overarching narrative to which all must serve? Are there some metaphysical conditions of history? Is there some structure to time beyond basic material circumstances, some knowledge that can inform but not limit or completely determine the meaning we ascribe to events? 

 

Do we even need to consider such a thing? Can we not generate various levels of abstraction out of the plethora of meanings of culture—even multiply the meaning and its coherence through finding, critiquing, and creating connections in our investigations into the patterns and mysteries of time and history?

 

This is, of course, what thinkers and scholars have often done. But one cannot put the past or any point of time into the necessary contemporary context merely through academic investigations. Not to mention that the generalist can no longer keep up with the pace of science, at least not with the demands it makes on the philosopher inhabiting his true role of cultural physician—not without an occult or intuitive sense of the forces and metaphysical problems being wrestled with by society as it chaotically constructs them.

 

Without a diffusion of some key lines of conceptual innovation across society or a capacity for both an intuitive and critical kind of metaphysical thinking developed within the myriad fields of cultural importance, simply generating generality from niche fields of knowledge is doomed to miss the bigger picture. Of course, starting from the other end and applying the general ideas of any metaphysical system to specific fields with dogmatic judgment is equally problematic. 

 

Serious difficulties arise in any case when building general themes to guide meaning, no matter how inclusive or critical. Extrapolation becomes impossible without simplification, and this becomes increasingly difficult or destructive as more disparate contexts are included, especially without an understanding and vision that can cut through some of the paradoxes and problems inherent to any real idea, not to some reductive essence, but to the threads within each problematic knot most capable of producing a positive tension from paradox.

 

For example, when one extends the themes of a metaphysical system more or less to the whole planet at any one time, even isolated cultures and individuals, as some astrologers do in their variously themed planetary transits—or in the more comprehensive spiritual cosmologies, which weave the themes of all historical periods into a single narrative—the problems are obvious. 

 

Not reducing historical themes to material contingency usually requires explaining why some individuals or cultures at any given time happen to more prominently express or drive the development of whatever the major theme of the time is supposed to be. This has often led to some problematic positions, and a consequent academic rejection of much of this kind of thinking, given the dangers of ranking cultures according to their level of “evolution”.

 

Even when there is explicit understanding in these approaches that the uneven development of cultures has more to do with circumstances than some inherent biological predilection or racial destiny, understandable critiques remain—especially when the dominant cultures driving civilization are considered to be the “leading edge” of development, a passage to a superior state of being—especially when it is quite clear from our current vantage point that the leading edge might just be the edge of a cliff.

 

One could, however, instead of imagining some special people as the leading edge of some unambiguously positive progression, shed the value judgment and offer the idea that they represent more explicitly some notable aspect of the spirit of the times, a “spirit” working through all people of a time to some degree or another, and not necessarily representing some superior development. 

 

This “spirit” also need not ground all meaning of the era, reducing every individual to a part in the larger drama. But as should be obvious, especially in our current era, individuals are hard-pressed to not at least be affected by the movements of the larger social and ecological order.

 

It could also be said that those people standing out as the obvious representatives of what may be helpfully theorized as the spirit and problems of the time do so not necessarily because of some kind of special nature destined or chosen to determine the general development. Neither are they the way they are because of arbitrary circumstances, but, rather, because of meaningful ones, because each place in space and time has a structure of meaning which is always and forever in the process of being determined.

 

An important point to reiterate here is that this structure is never complete, even for what seems to be (from our point of view) a past moment in time. The process of determining the structure of time and the universe does, however, have its conditions specific to one’s position in the cosmos, not in the sense of some single point within some single stream of time, but specific to one’s layer of converging and diverging perspectives on a mutating multidimensional fabric, one’s momentum within trajectories from related negotiations in the game of life, momentum which sets the stage of circumstances underlying any situation. 

 

Even though conditions and circumstances do not exhaust or dictate the details of meaning, as is implicit in certain kinds of astrology, the open yet rhythmically determined structure of relation does inform the otherwise singular and incomparable event of every time and place. This web of relations touches and leaves its trace in all things, connecting them to countless other developments, even as it defers any final form.

 

In such a meaningful cosmos, no circumstances are arbitrary; even material circumstances are more than simple products determined by definitively isolatable causes. They relay into a larger pattern of reasons without end, and where no position or being is inherently more important. This is, of course, because determining the perspective from which one may evaluate anything itself requires an evaluation. All things and beings contribute to the general development, even if some stand out within certain contexts and environments, and therefore become crucial points of reflection and inflection.

 

In the best cosmologies that consider such things, being born into a certain culture, era, or astrological moment, is not conceived reductively as a consequence of either simple chance or deterministic fate, since this would arrest meaning; they instead, more or less, acknowledge the vast open system of infinite relations, of overlapping problems, questions, and experiments that drive the cosmos. 

 

Someone may be born where and when the right connections to the themes and events concerned make a certain kind—or even a dominant role—likely. But how they will use those conditions, and even after the fact, the value of that role—its ultimate meaning for history, or even whether it was really historically important and not just a reflection of passing trends and surface attitudes—need not be assumed. 

 

One can see all significations as completely contextual variations on each other and everything else. The discernable ideas that emerge from these various contexts may dovetail with describable themes and individual meanings but need not ground or determine all meaning in any particular forms. 

 

For in practice, an intuitive ability to discern, create, or extract living ideas cannot be prescribed, programmed, or simply willed, dependent as any creation or appreciation of the singular is on experience—experience stored and steeped in the threads of time and history—and converging from different life and value contexts upon the singularity of a unique event. 

 

Even with an ideal metaphysics connecting relevant cultural forms in a dynamic and context-sensitive way, the repetitive application of any concepts will not do. Without the experience of, and sensitivity to, difference, no matter what one intends or purports to do, one more or less relies on the generic archetypes of some dogma. With something potentially as broadly encompassing as determining the cultural significance of a life (or of the many lives that make up history itself), this may mean some experience critically thinking through the assumptions and implications of many levels and disciplines of thought. 

 

Of course, broad general knowledge and deep philosophical questioning are helpful and important in any cultural field or activity, particularly in the sciences whose findings so drastically affect life on this planet. Yet with a general knowledge-culture and philosophical tradition having endless trouble framing the meaning of our history and world, how likely is even a “deep-thinking” scientist to adequately understand what they are doing? Without a coherent culture and structure of knowledge, even the best intuition can struggle to structure or communicate what it senses.

 

The difficulty and diversity of our times, however, demand a metaphysical culture up to the task of not just grounding knowledge in some narrative or philosophy, but of understanding the unavoidably creative task of all knowledge building, and of using that understanding to consciously and responsibly determine the structure of thought and culture. 

 

With such a structure, specialists could rely on a smooth but open extrapolation or transition from field to field, or from known to unknown, and also back again to the previous and easily modified structure in a constantly renewed coherence—in dialog with the findings of diverging niches of knowledge, but not slavishly determined by their centrifugal force as many are today.

 

Free divergence of thought and discovery is necessary for the health of culture, but the more it progresses, the more desperately a culture needs to deepen and broaden its understanding of the principles and consequences underlying every new development. 

 

This is not just a conservative concern with the dangers of innovation or the needs of the culture over the possibilities of progressive development. Significant progress itself depends on a coordination of differences if it is not to devolve into a scattering of a culture’s resources and intelligence into increasingly mundane and trivial details, or even into a harvesting of that escalating entropy for the will of some hidden principle or power.

 

Maintaining vigilance over the character of every principle or power at work through the complicated structure of knowledge in our times requires a change in society’s metaphysical culture. The attempt at building a master spiritual narrative to either integrate or critically reorient science and religion—an attempt that has dominated the counterculture from Theosophy and the New Age to today—must become conscious of the challenges of the postmodern collapse of all stable ground. 

 

It must find its stability and coherence through a subjection of all metaphysical meaning-making to a dialog not just with empirical science, but the structure of possible meanings, a dialog undertaken with awareness of the contextual dependence of all facts and findings, but also the infinity and complex continuity of contexts. Everything can connect but in diverse ways. Philosophy in the postmodern era has made this understandable.

 

Recent philosophy’s exploration and development of the nature and function of signs in the constitution of all meaning and truth is crucial to metaphysical culture emerging from its cultic niches. Understandably, metaphysical cults tend to either ignore or dismiss each other, given that there is no popular philosophical understanding beyond the choice of relativism (to each his own truth) or exclusive black-and-white thinking (people that contradict my truth are plain wrong, crazy, or part of a disinformation conspiracy). 

 

There are exceptions to this dominance of cultic belief in contemporary metaphysics, however. For it is best to remember that there are both dogmatists and subtle thinkers in most of the fields of culture. Yet, even the subtle or broad-minded thinkers of the counterculture are going to have a hard time thinking across the various boundaries separating all the wide-ranging assumptions and beliefs with which one is confronted when stepping outside culture’s main-stream.

 

Astrologers are no different. Yet their field has a unique potential to not exactly ground or frame everything else within its charts and tropes, so much as to serve as a vital crossroads for open-minded debate on the structure and meaning of events and history.

 

Given its unavoidable dealing with signs—with the necessities of interpretation entangling truth and meaning—and importantly, with a shared language of objective structures across every different approach and belief system, it is not surprising that astrology has become one of the most popular and diverse (and even self-conscious) fields of contemporary metaphysical culture. It is also one of the most important arenas within which that culture could grow into a non-dogmatic cohering factor in the science and metaphysics of the future.

 

One benefit of astrology is its potential for grounding its practice in very basic objective conditions that everyone can agree on but have no explanatory determination in themselves. This lends itself well to building a shared but generic language of markers that can serve as points of convergence, where different metaphysical approaches can meet on a shared content of notable events and people structured by nothing but the apparent movement of astronomical objects, with any contrasting values evaluated and tested against this structure. 

 

There is certainly a large tradition of dogma about what particular arrangements of the sky are supposed to mean. This limits the diversity of values ascribed to different astrological markers—since most people learn the meanings with the markers. Ostensibly that dogma came from looking at similarities between things sharing similar astronomical relations, but this was necessarily done more or less selectively, and presumably, in a way heavily structured by assumptions.

 

Beneath the dogma, however, astrology cannot help but always be rooted in what is, for the most part, the very dependable relations of the lights in the sky, which at any one time give no obvious reason to mean anything. On its own, any particular arrangement of the sky gives no structure of meaning to time, not without borrowing from a potentially dogmatic and seemingly arbitrary tradition. 

 

The recurring cycles impose helpful limits, however, and force connections between diverse times, people, and events. And with these stable structures being more or less clear and unarguable, astrology is free to improvise, experiment with, and test metaphysical ideas—even contextualize or add a new temporal or rhythmic dimension to other fields of ideas. It can even shed all traditions of interpretation if need be, all without losing its stability and coherence. 

 

Perhaps after all modernity’s searching for a stable metaphysical ground, the most stable ground is, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the dependable motion of the sky, the very arena that launched its faith in the existence of a knowable cosmos of physical laws in the first place.

 

The changing importance of symbols and concepts in the history of Metaphysics

 

Admittedly, even if astrology was built from the ground up on something approximating modern empirical standards, how one interprets themes and characters cannot help but reflect the biases of the participating cultures. Even though contemporary astrology has been developing an increasing interest in and capability for empirical research, interpretation cannot help but reflect the tropes of today’s spiritual value climate, most basically characterized, perhaps, as a multiculturalism of generic universals. 

 

But with more philosophical and empirical scrutiny, astrological tradition can grow into greater critical consciousness—in no small part, because it is also a kind of interpersonal practice. It has already had an easier time growing somewhat beyond the most naive initial stage of the New Age: the Americanized trap of insular self-reliance and personalized religion.29

 

Astrology is in dialogue with the concrete details of people’s lives, and in the contemporary paradigm of information technology, it has access to increasing amounts of data conducive to creating and testing systematic methods, thus helping to challenge and critically build on tradition.

 

Of course, empirical methods can just lead, as they have in mainstream science, to a multiplication of ad hoc explanations and excuses rather than deep questioning of foundations. There is certainly plenty of that in astrology as well. 

 

But the proper dialog between the empirical and metaphysical has the possibility of overcoming the errors of both tradition and individual ambition, of both the dogmatic and delusional. At their admittedly rare best, astrology and contemporary metaphysics use tradition and individual eccentricity not in mere self-affirming reassurance, but in honest and critical feedback with others to create new connections and meaning for all.

 

Of course, how often this actually happens, and how broadly the effect of the still rather niche field of astrology can be leveraged to affect the greater domain of society’s understanding of itself is another question. But its popularity, not only in the counterculture but also increasingly across society, gives reason to see it as an important field of influence.

 

It is certainly possible for contemporary spiritual culture to make a more mature form of dialog between creative discovery and tradition more common. To do so it must ground its eccentricity and orgy of cultural hybridization not in any mix of platitudes or dogmatic heap of dehistoricized symbols, but in a comparative use and critical extension of different spiritual, scientific, and philosophical contexts and traditions. To do so well will take a kind of maturity and discipline of thinking that carries an inherent sensitivity to the unique nature of each context and situation. 

 

This mature metaphysics must break through the dead ends truncating the meaning of discrete, disconnected abstractions from tradition, as well as the closed circle of reductions to traditional dogma and monotonous contexts. It must open to the boundless plane of ideas and overlapping contexts enmeshed in layers and lines of implication. 

 

Since any idea manifests differently within different historical and conceptual determinations, linking it with other lines and clusters of relations, any idea can be part of other chains of significance that begin elsewhere and alter the meaning. So every essence is also a relay, every type is also a trope, a turning of something into something else along certain lines of interpretation. 

 

The ideas making up any good metaphysics must therefore be—more than anything else—beneficial relays that make productive sense out of ever-new contexts. They must be flexible enough to open up into new lines of exploration and implication, but coherent enough to guide that evolution along productive paths.

 

The Chinese, in particular, had something like this with their ancient metaphysics and symbolism, as well as the various overlapping internal arts and sciences that still use them. Their five elements, for example, are of particular importance to their best medical and astrological systems. All though translated as five “elements”, they are explicitly modeled and understood as relational relays, as functional nodes in various chains of combination whose exact details depend on the kind of process involved.30

 

This explicit context-sensitivity may have come more easily to them than it has in the West because of the nature of their languages and writing. They can more easily extend and alter their concepts with each new context, intuitively relating each new thing to other known things rather than inventing new abstract names for every shift and seemingly novel occurrence. 

 

The West of course prides itself on finding and inventing the new, and so we have created lots of things that we have little hope of understanding, and that have also baffled the rest of the world, including the Chinese, often fooling much of their culture into believing in the superiority of our path of disconnected abstractions and arbitrary conceptualizations. 

 

The West also had its elemental symbol system, but our tendency to substantialize everything has ensured that our models tend not to improve so much as get supplemented, replaced, or buried unconsciously within every new “thing” studied. The basic assumptions of our models become difficult to find, let alone follow through the growth of the structure of knowledge.

 

In contrast, the relational emphasis of traditional Chinese Daoist metaphysics mitigates against their symbols being reduced to just discrete qualities or basic elemental substances in a literal sense that cannot help but be rendered obsolete with the discovery of the new. In a coherent system of knowledge like the Daoists have arguably had for millennia, the new is just a variation on the old ideas, but need not be reduced to them. 

 

There are, of course, some core qualities associated with these important ideas, but the qualities signify more of a mode of relation and stage of transformation than a substantial attribute. Their actual meaning is defined more by the function and place they hold in certain sequences than as a discrete essence understandable apart from its relations.

 

This has allowed Daoist symbols and the systems that use them, like Chinese medicine, to maintain relevance and value, even into the present technological era. Even as the meanings around the symbols change, they can still serve as helpful signs of—and organizing concepts for—some of the most important and recurring processes in nature.

 

Even more impressive than the Daoist five-element system is the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracular text that ostensibly represents any situation as one of sixty-four discrete archetypal patterns and each pattern’s small set of variations. Though the formal structure of the I Ching appears to be very discrete, with these core patterns even being built out of a simple fundamental duality of yin or yang marks, this discreteness belies a deeper continuity. For yin is always more or less in the process of becoming yang, and yang yin. Every one of its typal patterns is conceptually linked with every other and can become any other, as they are all formed through basic modifications of a set of continuous lines of change. 

 

While the meaning of such a closed set with a relatively specific tradition of interpretation is considerably prestructured, Daoist thought, especially the I Ching, can easily be and often has been expanded upon, both connecting with and helping organize other systems and fields of knowledge. 

 

With its very concrete poetics of elemental, telluric symbolism, derived not just from a deep study of natural processes, but of lines of change invisible to mere external observation, Daoist symbolism is a kind of general-systems-theory more broadly and deeply applicable than those of Western science, especially when it comes to qualifying the unique range of possibilities at work in the singular event which is every actual thing. 

 

Quantum biology, general-systems-theory, complexity theory, and thinking in dialogue with these “trans-disciplinary” trends in the West have come a long way towards integrating quality and quantity, the humanities and the sciences, and overcoming the limits of knowledge based on simple systems with predictable localizable causes.31 

 

However, there is only so far they can go if the most important factors are reduced to generalizable statistics and probabilities. The creative power of complex systems essential to a healthy life and society depends on factors like the impulse to individuation and time-sensitive portals to transformation, and these are invisible to and unpredictable by detailed modeling or external observation alone. Creative lines tend to get squelched in mere management by generic categories no matter how far down into the details of individual cases the identifications get drilled.  

 

The invisible influences which depend more on internal or temporal factors than the details of external form have long been the focus of esoteric sciences like alchemy and astrology.32 They specialized in making the invisible visible, and the hidden possibilities manifest through the unique sensitivity of the practitioner aided by their symbol systems.

 

Of course, the symbolism of such ancient and esoteric systems-theories is admittedly vague and easy to apply to everything in some poetic way. One might say that this is like any great poetic text, which can open to endless reinterpretation, but doesn’t replace detailed science. 

 

But the right balance of generality or artistic ambiguity with detailed determination becomes difficult in modern science and society, even in creative work rooted in such a society. With our rather fragmented coherence of meaning, artistic ambiguity more often leads to confusion, disconnected abstractions, and consequently less meaning. Even if abstractions, by their nature, can be applied more generally, and cryptic concepts can open to a range of interpretations, they don’t have the concrete complexity of meaning that is possible when poetic meaning and singular events are inscribed into a coherent worldview. 

 

It is true that simple poetic metaphors, especially those tied closely to nature and sense experience, can still resonate vividly today. But the range of this resonance is hemmed in by all kinds of mediating concepts from the structure of modern life and knowledge. Neither modern knowledge nor art can effectively synthesize the details of experience into the insight necessary to intuitively understand much of anything. Such a synthesis or understanding is at least very difficult when each form or expression has so little symbolic resonance with others, such a poverty of connections across scales and niches of experience.

 

In contrast, Daoist cosmology, in its most developed form, was very metaphorically coherent, offering us an example of a kind of knowledge that can filter all signs and symptoms, not through a grid of generic identities, but a network of relational ideas sensitive to each unique context. 

 

Their approach demonstrates what is possible when a knowledge structure’s most important basic ideas are not discrete, exclusive abstractions—nor incoherent systems or heaps of associations destined to become a mess of unconscious assumptions. If instead, there is something like a coherently connected system of symbols, of relative modulations on other modulations that, when well constructed, and applied to anything, relate back to each other as context-conditioned divisions of the basic unified circle of life and its many processes, then such a system can serve as a spring-board of expanding inner-knowledge and an external sign of such knowledge.

 

The coherence of Daoist cosmology at its best could make intuitive and practical sense of everything. For a time, it helped make for quite a stable culture, achieving advanced levels of sophistication in many fields of knowledge. Each idea in any field more or less emerged from and relayed back into a systematic structure of meaning and situational truth. 

 

Its growth, however, was limited by its insularity and holism. Knowledge, for them, could only grow within the range defined by its presuppositions. That range can be made to extend over and help make sense of the muddled concepts of contemporary knowledge, but it cannot on its own provide a ground for such a diverse range of ideas, for a quite volatile system with its own ground, history, and trajectory—a trajectory that is increasingly pulling the whole planet, the sensible world, and the traditions that arose from it, into its cosmic destiny.

 

Traditional esoteric systems, especially those like the Daoist, rooted as they are in a premodern worldview, can only help illuminate the path we are on, not ground it. The Western esoteric tradition, however, has had a difficult time doing even that, as it has often been as much of an incoherent mess as the cultures and religions it emerged from, and not just since modernity.

 

The West has always been more of an open system, with multiple competing and contrasting cultures pushing towards abstractions that can be generally applied or generically translated. This is reflected in its alphabetic writing, where meaning is in some sense separate from sign. The West’s unique history has naturally oriented it towards a proliferation of different forms continually reduced to the same muddled meaning, as opposed to a more coherent growth that maintains some resonance with its poetic and historical connections in each new meaning mutation. 

 

Consequently, Western esoteric thinkers have had a particular difficulty maintaining some sense of metaphorical or analogical continuity, no doubt contributing to their marginalization by the more formal constructions of science and academic philosophy. Throughout Western history, cultural stability and continuity have been repeatedly and frequently broken open into a world where the sense of things is increasingly freed from its concrete constraints, but also free to become lost in abstractions that drift from and increasingly obfuscate the concrete associations and contexts from which they derive.

 

The ancient traditions of both East and West—at their mystical core based on an analogical correspondence between all things—were naturally going to have a hard time keeping up with the inevitable confrontation with difference that happens with time. Even the most robust civilization cannot go on forever without opening to radical difference, as the Chinese eventually had to do; inevitably, the structure of knowledge changes and becomes more difficult to harmonize. 

 

Astrology as well has had repeated challenges to its cosmological coherence as science has progressed, new planets discovered, and the seasonal zodiac continually drifts away from its traditional alignment with background constellations. 

 

However, the challenges to cosmological coherence, while often leading to cultural chaos, also push knowledge to grow into new dimensions, necessitating what the West calls “philosophy” to reestablish coherence. That coherence is especially distinct from other cultural organizing discourses like religion when it is established on a plane of external relations—that is, relations formed to an impossible to master outside of infinitely diverse relations and processes. This kind of philosophy is what is essential in modernity, one oriented to the horizon of a changing world and an expanding knowledge system, not another grounding theory attempting to reduce or represent everything.33

 

This is why philosophy as a creation of concepts must follow and form, or at least help organize and vitalize the creation of symbols within specific cultures. Philosophy becomes crucial to the coherence of cultures when traditional symbolism can no longer orient the structure of knowledge. At this point, cultures need concepts for the worlds created by the mind, concepts that don’t depend on the reliable cyclical coherence of a stable social life more or less tuned to the rhythms of the natural world, a rhythmic resonance of people and things which need only be subtly signified or symbolized to convey or connect with a rich world of meaning.

 

Philosophical concepts, in contrast to traditional symbols and ideas, lay down new paths of meaning and its extrapolation within the wilderness of abstraction opened up by changing conditions and confrontations with radical difference. At their best, concepts can become a mediator and guide for all meaning-making, illuminating what are helpful acts of signification, and what are not. 

 

In a world where countless layers of abstractions have insinuated themselves between everything—making a direct intuitive sense of meaning quite difficult—philosophical concepts can carve a path back to intuition by illuminating lines of thought that cut across disparate regimes of knowledge, revealing important historical, conceptual, and soulful conditions in which they arose. 

 

To do so, concepts must not become abstract resting places. Thinking should ground all understanding in the infinity of relations—seeing all things as expressions of the web of connections between us, in other words as signs, as vehicles for sensing and making connections to other signs and relations. Thinking can then more effectively and creatively order the concrete conditions of life—conditions which always serve, not as a blunt source of appearances, nor a pointed expression of eternal forms, but as an open and continuous context of meaning.

 

Truth, philosophy, and Ufology

 

“A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.”

-Isaac Newton34

 

With concepts properly understood as signs, understanding anything becomes a matter of degree, a matter of how well our creative faculties can effectively relate to something. This, of course, is a complex and contextual, but not indeterminate thing, for it is grounded not in a set of dogmatic associations, but in a vision of every apparent individual thing or event as a symptom of other things, as a sign in an endless network of meanings. 

 

As a sign, any thing gains its meaning as a process of becoming whose meaning is only given relative to other becomings—that is, relative to contexts that may or may not reveal the important conditions necessary to properly understand the thing. What is proper may be relative, but the relative limits of contexts can be teased out using other contexts.

 

Take, for example, modern medicine. In what is becoming the most dangerous misreading of signs in contemporary knowledge, modern concepts of disease have become so structured by political and financial interests that correctly understanding the meaning of a named disease requires digging through layer after layer of politically mediated abstractions. 

 

In most health conditions today, the concepts of modern medicine so grossly bend the reading of symptoms away from the concrete relational conditions the symptoms express, that to enter innocently into the system of disconnected disease concepts is often a one-way street. 

 

Even if someone avoids industrial medicine, the very concepts with which it has colonized the body and its symptoms are enough to cause disaster. All paths towards understanding and healing can be barred by the momentum of a system profiting from the process of abstracting away from the environmental and relational conditions of disease, and into a grid of reified illness agents descended from more general and thoroughly capitalized categories, abstractions that may have very little at all to do with the concrete play of interactions unique to the reality of the dis-ease. 

 

The generalizations we use in any knowledge system can be very helpful in guiding us to the proper contexts and concrete conditions we are seeking to understand, but the manner of generalization makes all the difference. 

 

When explanations simply look for discrete causes instead of the contexts and factors that would make any phenomenon an understandable adaptation to others, the explanations lead to dead ends, if not other kinds of death and life-negating processes. If our concepts are not understood relationally, as mediators and not laws unto themselves, they can do more harm than good, as disease names have arguably done in modern medicine.35

 

In contrast, when there is an understanding that in all life and cognition, one is always dealing with signs—with a fundamental infinity of time, relation, and meaning, and not just a set of disconnected things, their actions, and their mental representations—one is more likely to use general ideas in a way sensitive to context, to see patterns as connected on all sides to other processes, and not just as matters of fact, iterations of some proper name, or effects of some brute cause, collision, or isolatable force.

 

Yet, even with the most sophisticated understanding of things grounded in the open system of relations and signification, one is no closer to a good interpretation of what any situation actually means. One may be less blinded by dogma, but opening to the infinity of possible meanings can make determining the truth of any particular meaning seem like an exercise in futility or naivety. 

 

While truth may be clear within certain contexts, there is no crutch of an assumed ground of guarantees that one is choosing the right context for properly understanding something, or that there even is such a thing. To the poetic imagination, any association could be seen as potentially meaningful, so given the right adjustment of context, any claim could be seen to have some kind of truth. So the question would seem to be just one of choosing the most relevant context and finding the truth proper to it. 

 

And yet, not only are contexts impossible to completely isolate and therefore to completely know, but we also find ourselves always already enmeshed in contexts we cannot avoid or ignore in their implications. Consequently, truth is never just a matter of pragmatic choice, for every seeming choice in value, while determining some aspects of truth, cannot escape being determined by other truths it can never fully master.

 

More importantly, making truth completely subordinate to value, context, or meaning can weaken a society’s sense of truth, one of the most important and meaningful values there is. While truth and understanding are perhaps never perfect and not separable from context and value, they are, nonetheless, important guides to forming values and determining meaning. One may not believe that truth is an important value, yet, no matter what values one believes in, the extension, fulfillment, and power of every value depends on how well it can illuminate and model others. Without the value of truth, other values don’t get very far.

 

The question then becomes, how true is any given meaning? Or perhaps, since there is no sovereign standard from which to judge or quantify truth absolutely, the better question may be: which meaningful connections illuminate and make better sense of other meanings? That is, which patterns of understanding can survive and adapt to necessary or relevant changes in context? Which ideas can fluidly traverse and connect with others, helping guide them into better and better patterns? 

 

What counts as better need not be judged from some final point of view; in fact, truth is revealed best not from any single point of view, but rather evaluated within the challenges inherent in the exploration of contrasting and overlapping claims, inherent in the expansive search for truth across difference—that is, when not hijacked or hemmed in by the exclusive channels formed by power-seeking, or, alternatively, by the ubiquitous search for reassurance in settled meaning.

 

Unlike the dead end—or at most the pragmatic utility—of the matching games of verification, and even falsification, which settle or precariously build on whatever meaning gets the bare minimum results along the lines already determined by an assumed context, the search for ever-greater truth cannot be separated from the openness to hidden contexts or alternative arrangements of meaning. 

 

And since we do not always know what important alternative meanings in a situation there may be, the practical questions superior to the myth of merely testing and passing judgment on hypotheses and assumptions could be: how can we best guide our probing for knowledge beyond discrete judgments and entrenched perspectives?

 

How can we learn to see—and see the way to learn—so that truth and error are not so much validated or eliminated, as much as formed into passageways to new layers of truth and meaning? How can we think in such a way that each paradox and conflict between perspectives is not so much overcome on the royal road to hegemonic knowledge, as much as used as portals to the hidden contexts and insight usually obfuscated by the narrow search for truth along expected channels?

 

How can we understand things in a way that not only makes sense of related things and perspectives immediately beyond the things of concern, but also in a way that can lead us out of the inertial channels defined by the past, and into an open field of ever-richer understanding—an understanding of how each thing illuminates everything, or more specifically, the way any contemplated thing modifies the meaning of the contexts and problems in which it arose? 

 

How can we form each meaning in a way that leads to whole other kinds of meanings, and in a way that illuminates more and more of the universe as an infinitely layered network of significant relations?

 

While this may sound like an unrealistic way of proceeding, it should be emphasized that this is merely a description of a way of thinking, forming, and evaluating any meaning. While any instance of this kind of thinking and questioning may more or less approach the ideal, the quality of the results is always relative to context and has to be evaluated relative to any other context. 

 

Traditional esoteric thought excelled at creating symbolic systems that could serve individuals in the right context as powerful guides to an ever-richer understanding of the universe. At its best, it was designed precisely to uncover hidden contexts of meaning, pushing knowledge out of linear channels of representation and into a visionary consciousness capable of seeing the infinity running through everything. However, the symbols used were in large part formed for certain places and times. And though they may still be effective at producing certain kinds of wisdom, as discussed, we cannot rely on these systems to structure our changing knowledge and society.

 

Critical philosophy can potentially create concepts with greater universality and generality than traditional mysticism, but the extreme abstraction can often deform the coherent resonance that mystical symbols have with the concrete rhythm of life—a resonance which, when it works, ensures a kind of ease of extrapolation and continuity of ideas across different registers, from the most particular and pedestrian to the most general and metaphysical. 

 

But philosophy can also reestablish that resonance, reforming traditional structures along lines that can shore up their weaknesses. It can plunge both their generic and particular niche “roots” (both are the roots and branches of the other) back into helpful historical or fresh contemporary contexts, thus giving them new vitality as singularities with unique connections and potentials— and perhaps a strength and resilience not possible before the advent of abstract conceptual philosophy and science.

 

For our current culture to truly achieve any lasting resilience, however, it must subject the tower of babel that is all of institutional science and knowledge to this process; it must plunge every hard boundary supporting the shaky tower of layered abstractions into the solvent of confrontation with its own more or less arbitrary foundations. 

 

It must continue to open the layers of assumed knowledge up to their forgotten historical context—to the implications of new findings on conceptual foundations, but also to the radically different perspectives of traditional and esoteric wisdom. These can often become more understandable as “new” wisdom emerges from the counterculture, calling back to the repressed margins and origins of culture’s main-stream as alternative theorists seem to add back what was left out, only now in contemporary scientific contexts.

 

On the other hand, the contemporary counterculture must subject itself as well to a thorough critique. It must emerge from its recent past as the cultic milieu of the New Age, and into something more philosophically coherent. It need not and cannot conceivably shed its plurality of cults and plethora of eccentric niches of knowledge and belief. But it can, with the right kind of thinking, give rise to increasing numbers of people and ideas that can work in coherence across every boundary, not only within the counterculture but between it and the mainstream. 

 

This is especially difficult but necessary for ufology, which synthesizes and literalizes mystical narratives and science fiction with a religious and political fervor not previously dominant in the more subjective era of the New Age of the late 20th century. Consequently, ufology has now become the most vital culture of cosmological beliefs in our age—with popular fantasy and science fiction films and literature serving as a well of diverse modern myth-making from which one might assume conspiracists draw.

 

However, ufology’s increasingly vast and varied vision of what is happening on this planet is more than just science fiction taken as fact or a materialist conflation of spiritual myths. This is especially the case in its more spiritual iterations, which are at least not a materialist reduction of ancient mysteries, just as Christianity was more than just the popularizing and dogmatizing of the mystery traditions of its time. 

 

One could even argue that ufology has carried forward a process that Christianity began long ago, that of weaving the different symbols, mysteries, and stories of the time into a world-changing historical drama. There is admittedly a tendency for dogmatic belief and zealotry to take hold when stories become literalized and politicized in this manner. But both the power and danger exist because the stories are more than just stories when this happens. They are a sign of a metaphysical emergence as previously opaque realities become more widely understandable, accessible, and even visible.36

 

Whether people literally believed in the story of Christ or not, it is hard to argue that the event of Christianity did not herald an emergence of previously niche, symbolic, or other-worldly ideas into a larger movement of history with world-changing momentum and a transformation in how people see the world, and, especially, experience the flow of time and history. Other religions have played more or less important historical roles, but Christianity’s worldly ambition has transformed the planet through its spawn, modernity. And it continues to push us all to the heavens with its hunger for global transformation and transcendence. 

 

Similarly with Ufology—what were previously the personal spiritual beliefs of the ineffectual New Age became a political force, as a kind of conspirituality emerged, and a global event of consciousness change manifested as UFOs and aliens became mainstream news and a subject of open governmental discussion. 

 

Even when UFOlogy is not completely believed in the details of its narratives, it is a major force of cultural coding for the mysteries that are emerging. This is especially true as increasingly large portions of the world are having to surrender their idiosyncratic cultural beliefs and join the trajectory of world history, not just as colonies of capitalism, but as global citizens of spaceship Earth as it hurdles towards the fateful destination that the teleological narratives of Christianity and modernity have put us on, destined to bring the Gods down to us, even if we have to make them ourselves.

 

At the very least, the world is being forced to face the implications for our cultures and cherished beliefs from the fact that we are not alone. Yet even accepting that one idea often leads to such a dramatic cascade of other questions, to ideas so at odds with the mainstream, that a radical revolution in thought is necessary to make sense of it all. More often than not, mere belief, (or disbelief), short-circuits deeper thought on these matters, limiting the depth of any widespread change in consciousness. 

 

Towards a Metaphysics of Creative Cosmologies

 

“What we used to think of as science fiction has become part of the kit we need to describe contemporary reality.”-William Gibson37

 

Increasingly, popular culture is helping to make what, until recently, could only be imagined—or irrationally believed—into an understandable and likely fact of the world in which we live now. It is no longer strange or difficult to understand how there might be advanced alien life around; it is relatively easy to imagine that this is true or believe many things about what it means. 

 

Recent science-fiction narratives seem more often to be choosing only slightly alternative presents, where the supernatural and alien emerge more fully from their modern obfuscation over the previous trends depicting some radically different or distant future. 

 

The difficulty and interest lie when one starts to ask all the follow-up questions, which more and more people seem to be ready to do. Of particular interest is the shift in the way time travel is imagined in science fiction, and, of course, the evolving popular concepts of the multiverse. Advancements in artificial intelligence and virtual environments have no doubt spurred more of an interest in ideas of multiple realities over comparatively mundane questions that extend our three-dimensional assumptions further into space. 

 

It becomes increasingly obvious if one continues to probe the nature of the UFO phenomenon, that it can hardly be reduced simply to visitors from other planets or advanced military craft, even if these are part of the story. One cannot make much sense of the phenomenon without entering the murky territory of speculative history, as well as alternative science and cosmologies—in other words, the “occult”. 

 

If one does not fall along the way into a settled belief in one or another of the narratives that occultists and “conspiracy theorists” put forward to explain all the mysteries of the cosmos, one may come to understand that occult ideas, even the ones that become religions, are not essentially constructed by or for naive belief, but rather, pragmatically for spiritual practice, as well as for the spiritual hygiene of a culture. 

 

There are, of course, always going to be abuses and distortions, not only the cynical engineering of the beliefs of the common man to grease the wheels of worldly power but also esoterically-styled speculation on all manner of subjects by eager believers. Yet even these have value, especially to those who know every story reflects some dimension of metaphysical reality, but none is the final truth.  

 

All cultural forms give structure to, even as they express, the deeper metaphysical layers underlying human consciousness. While some ideas structure and orient reality in more ideal directions, no one has complete control and so all must work with what is there. While some may speculate on or attempt to condition the events of our particular world, the deeper game concerns the evolution of possibilities. These are meaningfully conditioned by not only what happens in our world, but by how what happens—what is thought, what is believed, what is felt and imagined—how it all affects what is possible, what everything related to us means.

 

Even beginning to understand this necessitates a deep dive into the whole history and destiny of mankind and suggests a structure of time layered to include not simply some parallel timelines and alternate realities, but a complex game between them.

 

So much of what we think of as “meaning” lies with there being some kind of purpose or futural reason for everything. Yet, shedding the naive belief in single, discrete, or final meanings, (without falling into the belief that one can shed all belief and meaning), means reckoning with the reality of infinite meaning, with the vast overlapping experiments in experience—with the compounding reasons for everything and the play of finding and potentially adding to the meanings of the universe.

 

So how does one navigate such a universe, open as it is to unlimited agendas and potentials for new branches of reality? The most pertinent questions tend to be centered around the nature of the worlds and contexts one is attempting to act meaningfully within. Especially when dealing with occult conspiracy theories, or alternative-history narratives, even putting aside questions of the quality or values in the slant of perspective, one still cannot help but ask, when at a factual level the reality being described is so far from the consensus view, does it contain any truth? 

 

One may grant that any meaningful narrative has some truth along certain lines, but how far do those lines go? What about fictional literature? Does it necessarily have less reality or truth than factual history?

 

The irony is that as one’s thinking becomes more concrete, that is, more sensitive to the unique contexts possible in every situation, one also approaches more deeply the abstract, in the sense that one can no longer definitively say that one context is essentially more concrete and real than any other. Not only can something thought or dreamed have more truth than a bare factual event or narrative, as writers are fond of pointing out, but potentially also a greater reality, as truth ceases to be a measure of correspondence or relevance to one reality, and instead becomes a measure of relative coherence across different realities and worlds of meaning.

 

Thoughts and theories, hopes and dreams, are not just shallow mental reflections that either correspond to reality or don’t. Any meaning orders the universe and aligns us more or less with other meanings; it intersects, channels, and plays with other more or less relevant relations of the universe. In that sense, even deluded meanings are realities—realities that might not get very far, might not become clear and stable or attract much support, but nonetheless have some participation with being, and therefore of beings, no matter however ineffective a meaning is at modeling what is happening, or at opening to the wider drama. 

 

There is no dream entirely divorced from reality, no dreamer entirely alone in their fantasies. Every dream partakes in some greater drama; every meaning is a story within stories, with a greater or lesser range of connectivity with others, yet always evaluated from within some context. 

 

Consequently, having one’s body or mind match up with what seems a more real, stable, consistent, or consensual reality, is no ultimate criteria for greater meaning or even greater truth. A meaning that connects one to what seems a greater reality of beings huddled around the dependable hub of a consensus physicality, may turn out to be rather inflexible, insular, and provincial relative to the corridor just outside its quaint domain of literal meanings and a pre-structured reality.

 

How then should one go about “questioning one’s reality” as the now cliched phrase of alternative culture goes? Perhaps the questions should go more along the lines of determining the kind of reality involved in any narrative or idea—a concern that has always been a cornerstone of esoteric spirituality, with the physical world only being one relatively stable but inflexible layer of a system of many worlds with which it overlaps. The overlap, however, complicates the picture. 

 

Can one even assume that some schizophrenic’s experience is safely in their own little world or some separate reality, just because they have a hard time making coherent sense of the connection? Not only all psychosis, but all error, seems to have more to do with a conflation of factors or an incompatibility of fragmented contexts, than some essential lack of shared reality or overlapping forces. 

 

There is certainly a kind of barrier or “buffer” that is maintained by a stable and restricted sense of reality, but this doesn’t so much block out the larger economy of forces, as much as it renders them “occult”, blunting their impact on us at times, and therefore blunting our own impact, but mostly just making much of what happens to us, in dreams or waking life, a mystery.

 

The problems determining any definitive lines between realms become particularly clear when dealing with modern occultism and ufology, where the spiritual, technological, and political all overlap in an increasingly vast revision of consensus science and reality.38

 

Therefore, some better questions might be: what factors, forces, and beings share in the reality and experience of any given meaning, and to what extent? If it seems like not many or much, what is stopping a meaning from making the connections it is reaching for? Is the block holding back a flood of intense connections, or is it rather entrenched and circumscribed by other blocks in meaningful sense and relation? 

 

How well does an idea make sense of or connect to others by enriching rather than reducing context? How badly does it reduce or conflate meaning to a particular context? Can its additional value be extracted and disentangled from its reductive or confused context or form?

 

Does a story claiming to be of what is “really” going on actually speak only of a reality relatively disconnected from any relevant others? Does it seem to be only populated by the mind of a dreamer or the projections of a few believers, with only a minimal overlap of participation from other beings filtered through layers of insular fantasy or delusion? 

 

Or is the reality spoken of, no matter how bizarre, possibly another layer of our own shared reality, removed slightly by the barriers of power, privilege, or the conditions of consciousness, but highly populated with beings and effects relevant to the trajectory of our civilization? 

 

What was the intent of a story’s creators—to tell the truth as they see it, or to play some game with ulterior motives, to tell a story, perhaps even to achieve a certain effect on human consciousness? How can one know how much of any of these factors are at work?

 

When it comes to many occult explanations and narratives, especially in the realm of conspiracy theory and ufology, the answer is often, not easily. Psychotic detachment from coherent connection to others, blatant attention-seeking, and even insincerity are often easy to spot, but deeper motives and subtle forces at work may complicate the appearance of consistency and sincerity. 

 

A fantastical story or metaphysical description may make a whole lot of sense of everything, and its teller may believe what they are saying, but it may still be an elaborate concoction or deception coming from elsewhere. If these concoctions are giving form to deeper spiritual events and structures that transcend any one world, form, or explanation, even if those events are dogmatically claimed to be the truth behind the physical events of history, that is one, relatively harmless, and even vitally helpful thing for some people.

However, if they claim to literally report supposed events of the mundane world and make predictions for it, especially concerning some kind of politicized issue, that is another. In those cases, the truth of the deception or delusion, more or less, might surface in time, or at least could be approached with enough relevant or corroborating information.39 Especially when politics is involved, much truth can be discerned just from the form of the narrative, a form often resembling the melodramatic structure of biased propaganda.40

 

Yet, even in cases of cynically motivated fabrication and false predictions, stories and worldviews can attain a degree of collective psychic reality—and even possibly overlap with concrete alternative realities—to the extent that they mesh with some part of the larger structure of possibilities. To the extent, however, that any meaning relies more on the relatively arbitrary mutations of belief or the meandering abstractions of devitalized speculation than it does on an intuition or understanding of the structure of truth and possibility, the relevant overlap with any depth of reality is probably minimal—alternative, concrete, or otherwise. 

 

Even when embraced by multitudes or when overlapping with some physical facts, irrational beliefs and rational theorizing alike can drift more and more out of touch with the larger reality of multi-layered meaning. In these individual or mass delusions, there is a kind of hypnotic entrainment that gets stuck in insular and ossified contexts. 

 

Though in most cases of meaning where so-called “physical” reality is concerned, where the insularity has not achieved a high enough degree of insulation from change (as it apparently has in some so-called non-physical worlds), or a high degree of control over change (as in advanced technocratic worlds), there usually is some adaptation over time to physical factors outside the scope of meaning, some dynamic feedback accompanying the drift, even fueling it enough that it resembles some kind of progressive evolution.

 

The pressures of a life focused in the heavily contested realms of physical bodies ensure ideology never meanders too far from reflecting and intersecting other layers of significance, even if this intersection is heavily obfuscated by delusion. While the evolution of an ideology’s cognitive world of ad-hoc reasons and rationalizations may seem like progress, this is not necessarily the case. Religion and science alike must contend with realities outside their control, but they can always just make adjustments to attain or maintain whatever control they have on people. 

 

When the intuitive demand for multi-layered meaning is left behind, the structure of knowledge or belief can get considerably out-of-sync with the changing rhythms of life. Despite maintaining some coherence and function for people, such meandering meaning can dam up the kind of flow of multiple possibilities that accompany even the most counterfactual of ideas when they are grounded in intuition. The continuity and multiplicity of sense in which intuitive thinking thrives, no matter how bizarre its accounts, or how conflated and wrong its details might be, tends to be easier to correct and healthily adjust to changing circumstances than the entrenched maze of rationalized ideology.

 

Though as always, any edifice of wayward delusion can always be reformed into a kind of insight when viewed from within the right understanding—from better contexts that can discern its truth and make it a part of meaningful developments. Whether the edifice is made of mainstream science and history, or the fantastical narratives of religion and contemporary conspirituality, deciphering the truth in all cases depends not on trying to tear down all theory and tradition to its most dependable facts. 

 

For stripped of all narrative context, the facts make little sense. The truth, once again, isn’t found lurking beneath the meanings, but between them, in its capacity for connecting and enduring across different contexts. 

 

Truth, however, is not limited by any context or meaning, or group of them; it is no mere product or measure of consensus on reality, defined or confined once and for all by any block of belief, power, and participation. Being that which connects all meanings and realities, its coherence is never complete or containable. 

 

Devotion to truth then leads one to finding it within everything, not by pulling away the layers of lies or superfluous meaning to find the bare kernel within, but by nourishing each thing with an inclusive attention, by helping its many potential branches of relevance unfurl their various values, thus revealing the increasingly clear nature of the life and truth running through it all.

 

Such inclusive attention leads naturally to compassionate critique—which the counterculture needs desperately if it is to emerge from its cults into any kind of effective force in society. But the critical expansion of context needed must open up into the right understanding if it is to make the most important connections at the most crucial of junctures between competing claims, and not run up against the walls of its various dogmas—or the stultifying morass of a disjointed relativism, with its polite but ineffectual inclusivity.

 

It is likely inevitable and helpful to the future development of metaphysics for there to be different subcultures, theories, and philosophies at work, with various levels of proximity to mainstream ideas and the dominant scientism of the era. But there is also an unfortunate tendency of countercultural thought focusing too narrowly or separately on one or another niche issue of contention with the mainstream, and within a context determined by mainstream specialists and the consensus model of institutional science. In this model, naturally, any outside intervention gets necessarily framed as less informed.41

 

Good intuitions are often lost in abstruse details or overly technical debates that could have been more clearly discussed at a philosophical level, and that could make sense of the contrasting views of the facts. However, the surrounding theoretical contexts and philosophical assumptions at work are seldom recognized as formative by a society raised on an ignorant faith in the ad-hoc agency of their abstractions and a staid reverence for facts, with no awareness of the complexity and ambiguity of contextual factors. 

 

Most of us can seldom fathom how many of our facts of existence are downstream from a whole system of interlocking beliefs not easily dislodged one at a time, nor overturned by some new niche discovery. With a little more effort at imagining the world in different ways, however, we might be amazed at how many facts would surface that would support a new way of seeing and would lead to a broader and deeper understanding. 

 

This is as important for the counterculture as it is for the mainstream. Conspiracy theorists often dare to imagine the world in a way contrary to the mainstream, but they often cease opening to other perspectives as they become convinced of this or that line of theory. In contrast, if one continues to open, to imagine and intuit the multiple realities and lines of signification in every idea, one can begin to see the truth of all realities as a matter of relative intensity. One can see how reality is in some sense merely a measure of the relative extent of coherence and vivid significance of our dreams, which, with the right relations to the dreams of others, we can use to change or open into a potential infinity of realities.

 

The Layers of the Infinite Dream

 

Thinking of reality as grounded in the imagination has been common in the more spiritual corners of the counterculture, but seldom with enough sophistication to avoid accusations of subjectivism and victim blaming, or otherwise struggling with the paradoxes of relativism that would be better understood with just a little familiarity with the dreaded “postmodern philosophy”. 

 

Without a coherent connection to possible standards of critique, it is difficult to orient or apply the most creative ideas of the counterculture to any kind of pragmatic or political concern. The result is that its creative potential gets pulled back into the impotent cacophony of opinions that is generated between left and right liberals, muddying the media-saturated minds of all who cannot escape or discern the powerlessness of this struggle. Creative thought is hard-pressed to not just make peace with whatever the mainstream narrative happens to be, or join some reactionary struggle fighting for one particular niche of truth or another.

 

It has been difficult for the liberal mind to let go of its ironic struggle with and over authority, to see how everything is, in a sense, made up, yet never out of nothing and so more or less real or true, even if not in the ways conceived. So much could be accomplished if it was just recognized that even objectivity claims can be debated on their consequences and quality of sense rather than some intrinsic authority or sovereignty of truth.

 

The frequent similarities between fantastical fiction and conspiracy narratives are often cited by believers as some kind of evidence of “soft disclosure”, that shades of truth are being seeded into popular culture to prepare the masses for the full truth of the cosmic drama. Skeptics naturally point out that it is more likely the other way around, that the truth of the “truthers” is more likely a fantasy seeded by pop-culture imagination. 

 

But as the world changes and more people begin to imagine new possibilities, facts emerge that paint a picture of the truth even stranger than fiction, and that may prompt one to wonder if perhaps both sides are right in some way commensurate with the increasing strangeness of our times. 

 

Perhaps, if all of time is a dream, our collective imagination can dream us into a connection with other layers of reality, drawing down reflections of our ideas, hopes, and fears from other worlds. And indeed from the other side, as occult traditions have often claimed, other layers and beings continually beckon and seed us with the potential to merge with and give new life to their ancient future drama. According to this logic, artificial intelligence is just another one of the myriad kinds of consciousness, pushing from some forgotten past for a means of ingress, while pulling from a world overlapping with one of our possible futures.

 

Again, much of the confusion and delusion around these topics boil down to a conflation of realities or a lack of proportion in evaluating the levels of reality entangling every idea and event with every other. The undiscriminating intuitive speculator senses the intent and intelligence behind an idea, but often wrongly attributes it to earthly actors whose awareness of their participation may be quite low or compartmentalized. 

 

One is tempted to say that the paranoid mind sees too much agency, turning legitimate patterns and structural forces of history into simplistic tales of evil plots. However, in the occult understanding, there are no impersonal forces; or rather, everything is both an impersonal force and a being of sorts.

 

What are mere background tendencies, conditions, or patterns in one context, are active beings in another. What is an ancient past merely echoing or lingering in one context, is happening right now in another. In this sense, time’s arrow is merely a local condition. We may not be able to arbitrarily change the history of our present, but we can in some sense change our past—or rather, change the source of the flow forming our present, revealing a past that was in some sense always there, but not available until we were capable of relating to it in some meaningful way.

 

This is not to say that a previous past gets lost or that we can radically change anything in the universe without the participation of those involved. We are all in this together. We must build on what is there and what makes sense. But even if one layer of reality is resistant to a kind of change, others may be more open; alternate aspects of various beings may want to entertain a dream, even if they are not convinced they should invest in its ongoing development, as we do in the drawn-out drama of our waking world, with its density of overlapping investments and consequent resistance to the whims of some casual change or radical revision making it quite a serious commitment.

 

Even if particular beings with time travel power or technology go back to “change history”, too radical an intervention would merely pull the past into concert with the rhythms of the future, collapsing much of its unique trajectory into a new “karmic” layer of the hybridizing timelines.42 A new branch of counterparts or “variants” of everyone affected would be created, but their karmic momentum cannot be changed so easily, and would merely play out in the new related form.43 

 

On top of that, while the new creation or alteration may in time grow in radically unexpected directions—new worlds only dimly reflecting and relating to the original past and people—this only complicates the value it would have for those wanting to control the future, or anyone working to change or grow the original conditions. 

 

What happens to a clone or variant of something surely affects its relations, but they cannot fundamentally change its story without becoming part of it. Again, true radical change requires radical investment of attention and meaning. Radical intervention or imposition only splinters into new layers and branches.

 

If, however, a change in the past is not just some radical technological or spiritual interruption or complication of time’s flow, but an imaginative extension of our collective self-discovery, it can add another layer to the history of that time period, thus drawing in new values, experiences, and beings related to it. This is what happens all the time, for we are always in dialogue with the past and future. 

 

For time is an open system, where new and changing contexts and different lines of implication meet and interact. The interaction between lines creates recurring cycles, just as the interaction between different cycles creates new lines, because every line is a circle modified and extended by other lines and cycles. Any pattern requires some difference and some repetition. And though any sense of definitive coherence is limited by and relative to context, each thing and moment recurs again and again across time and different contexts, with this very moment echoing into the past, future and endless variations on the now.

 

So even within the confines and character of a single historical period, that period with its style and unique context recurs again and again within the changing context of larger rhythms of the  cosmos. This can be likened to a mountain ridge where every spring similar plants may emerge, but each time it is a bit different. Nonetheless, the ridge maintains a continuity of character as it grows through its recurrences and connections, that is, as long as there is no radical intervention, since this merely creates a new mountain with more or less connected or overlapping ridges and seasons.44

 

The idea, in any case, is not so much that there are separate realities or timelines, as much as there are versions of the one infinite event that are kept apart by the relative ignorance of different aspects of the being(s) involved. The infinite aspects of any event are reduced to what we can handle, with what is left out returning in some form compatible with the horizon of our timeline. Higher beings, or perhaps, aspects of our consciousness need not be carried along these currents, but may have more conscious agency in how they explore the experience of time, perhaps moving in other temporal directions, perhaps studying the relative movements and their effects from some point of intersection.

 

Whoever we are, at whatever level, we dream ourselves into systems and times where we can learn the potentials and consequences of our interests, ideas, and attitudes along with other beings playing out compatible scripts and agendas. But to what end? Is this all just creative play? Assuming even if some part of a suffering being has its reasons for subjecting a part of itself to apparent misery, isn’t there something we can do to help? Do we just get in the way, or at best, become merely a bit player in someone’s drama of personal exploration, the one being’s intentional fall into some niche of existence and its problems of varied interest?

 

Perhaps. But perhaps that is because we think too much along the lines of solving problems rather than creatively transforming them. When people balk at the relativism and nihilistic futility of a multiverse where all possibilities are explored so nothing matters, they fail to see beyond the limits of preformed possibility. They fail to see how profoundly thinking the infinite shifts the focus of our acts from the negative, from “changing things” for instance, to the creative, to adding to and thereby changing what is possible. 

 

Even what was necessary as a structural possibility—and therefore a kind of reality or actuality in some world—can become something very different as the structure of meaning changes, making what might have been a necessary evil, no longer so necessary or evil. This is precisely why some of the most powerful acts are not visible acts at all, and how the occultist can claim to effect profound change, the most profound of which is not a mere influence or intervention, but an incorporation of certain problems of people and the world into a more beneficial embodiment or more productive and vitally meaningful arrangement.

 

Mystics have long debated whether it is better to help the world or focus on reaching a higher plane, but the contrast is less stark at the higher levels of occult philosophy. There are different paths and kinds of focus for sure, but we all change the structure of meaning and possibility with every breath, thought, or act. There are certainly paths aimed at having less of an effect on this process. And with so much effort in worlds like ours amounting to a compounding of suffering, and often by those most devoted to “changing things” for the better, this is understandable.

 

But given how tied our wills are to life, few will find such a purely negative path fulfilling, or even possible without something important being lost. The occult, or “tantric” path, as it can be referred to in an Eastern context, does not negate or radically transcend the will, but attempts to enlighten its activity. The problem, of course, is that our individual wills don’t really exist, or rather are part of a vast web of conditions, that is, they are always situated within a complex system of preexisting contexts with which we must learn to understand and navigate.

 

As the problem is described in Tibetan Buddhism,45 if one follows any single line of reason long enough it simply leads to its own lack of ground in timeless emptiness, thus becoming like the abstract empty circle, canceling out the illusory individual will and all asymmetrical participation in the universe. 

 

However, if one allows a line of reason to constructively converge with all other lines, one may achieve a vast vision of mutual implication. One implication of such a vision is that while what we think or imagine may not accurately represent some ultimate truth, and may even be a confusion or conflation of important factors within its relevant contexts, whatever we think does determine the kind of experience we will have of reality and the kind of truth we are capable of finding. 

 

In other words, we can only experience the reality and truth that we have some way of relating to. Even if our imagination and thinking are not accurate, the trajectory of their seeking will plunge us into realities where the truth of this particular brand of illusion—and the worlds that trade on it—can be learned and eventually leveraged into an enlightened power of magic, a power to create and navigate the precarious worlds that beings build on the shifting sands of time. 

 

This kind of knowledge and power—one might call it “metaphysical”—can never be absolutely structured or foundationally represented, but it can be created within our cultural structures. Every pattern is a reflection and condensation of all others, more or less, and can grow to connect and illuminate other related patterns more and more effectively. Indeed, it is this kind of knowledge, a kind of magical proficiency—the ability to create and maintain a continuity of awareness and meaningful relations through difference—that creates the cosmos itself. 

 

True knowledge, then, is the magical power to create order and harmony out of what is otherwise irreducibly divergent, otherwise always spiraling out of control into the lost and forgotten wilderness of the infinite, yet what is always capable of being bent back into the fold of a harmonizing spiral of interrelations that can serve as the tonal background for the play of life’s music.

 

That power can be used in many ways, with more or less consciousness and openness to the divergent, or going the other way, more or less dependence on some closed circle of domesticated time and meaning. But because power developed with more openness makes us free, not only to experience and modify, but grow through and become part of more of the infinite meanings that arise out of the imagination of beings, why not seek this open, liberated form of power and use it to help, to seek to bring all worlds and beings into the harmony of a greater truth?

 

The potential horizon of any culture, especially a counterculture, is always its capacity to help open up the structure of knowledge and life to a more open and sustainable path. As knowledge advances, the likelihood of recognizing this and intentionally rooting culture in the growth of knowledge increases, as it has in the West since its emergence. 

 

The culture of the modern West in particular emerged from a heretical counterculture of scientific-minded spiritualists. Running through to our own times, the most vital line of the counterculture has maintained a scientific spirit more true to the greater potential of science and culture, seeking the truth in all things in all directions. Science need not be fooled by the myth that the progress of knowledge has some inherent direction converging toward an increasingly objective representation. We can be more “objective and “scientific” when we see that the truth we find in objects reflects the structure and trajectory of our knowledge.

 

By reducing truth to the merely objective, the organizing principle becomes an incoherent structure of disparate research agendas, and the harmony of nature, which depends on a kind of harmonizing context of understanding, hides in the chaos inherent to the divergence of details. 

 

Metamodernism or the Real Modern Metaphysics?

 

“Socrates asked Xenophon from whence we have conceived the soul, if there is none in the world. And I ask, whence speech, whence the regular harmony of speech, whence song?”

-Cicero

 

Nature may be built of harmonious cycles, but from the vantage point of any static point, they appear to become modified, complexified, or worn down by the friction of novel collisions inherent to the static frame. Harmonic order spirals down into the dispersion of entropy if not for the organizing principles and powers of life and knowledge which tap the falling flow in order to emerge from it. Yet life and knowledge can only sustain themselves if the coherence of their organizing principles becomes sensitive enough to sympathetically accept and harmonize that necessary crack in the circle that infects stale order with novel change. 

 

For our society to approach anything like a conscious orientation towards this principle, the details of modern knowledge must become reframed by a knowing-awareness of the potential harmony hiding in the roughness of open systems and novelty. They must not be merely synthesized through submission to generalized abstractions from disconnected datasets, created to conceptually tame the divergent behavior of its forcibly normalized and fragmented facts. Such a path may attain relative stability through technocratic prediction and control, but it is a path surely damning for the soul and doomed to failure in the end.

 

However, the better path is only possible if we can accept how deeply dependent the facts of our world are on the powers and proportions of our sensual and spiritual faculties. We must therefore be willing to embrace the spiritual wisdom of traditional metaphysics, which specializes in harmonizing the metaphysical background of knowledge with its ideas and practices. Its vision of eternal harmony is also important to accept but with an equal willingness to reframe it for our contemporary times of considerable complexity and fragmentation.

 

Our contemporary cosmology must reconstitute the traditional harmony of the spheres, a cosmology of harmonic proportions as the ancients had, but with an explicit understanding of how that harmony is made and unmade. The ancient version was originally a science and art of making the right proportional selections of factors to bring order to the world—or at least to the structure of society, as in early high culture, and ideally in a way that helped it mirror or take a greater part in the harmonies of the greater cosmos.46 

 

But being heavily coded and understood by an elite minority, such knowledge was often diluted and eventually rigidly standardized, transformed into a mere faith in a static order. Not only is such a static order and passive faith repressive, but it ultimately fails to do even that for long, with more dynamic modes of control taking over from the dogmatic ideologies of religious texts and the cultural authorities they make obsolete.

 

A modern cosmology of the spheres must not make the mistake that astrology made for instance—it must not put blind faith in its models, nor discordantly improvise new theories in the face of contradictions as its has done in the wake of modernity, following the example of modern scientific theory. 

 

Any cosmology up to the task of bringing harmony to the world must root itself in an awareness that this is its task, that harmony is not given, but is, rather, always getting broken or lost from any static point of view. It must study each new factor, indeed the structure of the ever-changing cosmos, not like both physics and astrology have often done in modernity, letting new factors turn their statically rooted theories into discordant patchworks. 

 

It must study the disorientating novelty of the now, but through an understanding that both the harmony and disharmony are both there. They just depend on the proportions of relevant factors, proportions which depend on the point or frame of focus and perspective. In understanding how every limited perspective breaks the symmetry of everything influencing everything at once, one may form a horizon of knowledge of how a meaningful harmony might be continually remade, incorporating, tempering, and channeling increasingly more factors of influence.

 

Such things, however, are so at odds with the modern faith in objective representations that the counterculture would be better served if it shed its narrowly liberal allegiance to an unproblematically universal interpretation of truth, and instead embraced the problems and necessity of consciously shaping truth’s structure, even if this structure is aimed at something more universal through a renewed science of creative coherence—or perhaps, a technology of dynamically shaping and harmonizing both subjects and objects, reciprocally determining culture and world.

 

To begin to do this, factual details must be reevaluated in the light of contrasting theories, where the context for understanding them is so different that the facts themselves can change—or take on new light where they are understood in the right and relevant proportions, with the right awareness of intervening factors, rather than merely normalized to fit a narrowly specialized theory, as mainstream physics does explicitly.

 

The main obstacle is that the most important and potentially corrective ideas in the many fields of knowledge are languishing in scientific and quasi-scientific subcultures that are too busy marketing their niche to cooperate and shift the larger culture of “facts” more heavily in their favor. There is a rich culture of academic, countercultural, and interdisciplinary theory that could help form the necessary bridges and ground, but it must be made more accessible. 

 

It must overcome the resistance that has developed to anything resembling the New Age or postmodern philosophy; it must break down the large divide between the extremes of, on the one hand, a mass-culture of chaos, a universalized relativism of postmodern secular technocracy, and on the other, a conservative or countercultural reaction aiming towards reinvented foundations in this or that theory or cultural identity.

 

Attempts at some kind of generalizing compromise or “metamodern” synthesis often fall short, for they fail to go far enough in separating out the good from the bad on both sides of the divide. Much of what is most problematic about the New Age or the postmodern aspects of culture is that they reflect our age’s failure to understand and productively frame this gap between the foundation and horizon, between the chaos or complexity of becoming and the relative stability of truth and being.

 

Syntheses of opposites is a natural instinct for the troubled mind but it usually amounts to little more than an abstract gesture. Indeed, there is no need or niche for another theory of everything, just an appreciation of how everything can connect in different ways.

 

To this end of dissolving the disconnect maintained by extremes, not into an abstract compromise, but a continuity of understanding, some sense of the important threads of recent metaphysical history is essential.

 

Yet, the radical update to traditional metaphysics that has occurred over the last couple of centuries has been lost in the fray. Endless debates on details have stalled appreciation of the meaning and nature of what modernity made us capable of understanding, what was not essentially new but what needed a more broad emergence of intellectual-soul powers to properly realize. 

 

Though many early and late modern thinkers brought about much of what is important to this understanding, it wasn’t until the late 20th century “postmodern” period, with complexity becoming an object of study in its own right—and especially with the great metaphysicians of New Age (popular) and postmodern (academic) thought, Jane Roberts and Gilles Deleuze, respectively—that modern metaphysics came of age.47 

 

While there are arguments that the postmodern age of knowledge began all the way back in the late 19th century with C.S. Peirce rediscovering the importance of the sign,48 this is obviously different from the postmodern era in culture. There is certainly merit in this rebranding and realigning of the postmodern, but the term postmodern is probably beyond saving. Still, it is helpful to understand the difference between the aspects of modern knowledge which have progressed in nuance and complexity enough to be “postmodern”, and the cultural phenomenon which reflects that complexity but is not necessarily tied to any philosophy. 

 

Since much of the left and right alike claim to hate what culture has become in the postmodern era, yet have no solutions, more attention to this point might help break the political impasse that is in no small part due to an association of postmodern critiques of modernity with the irrational and even illiberal decadence of our current culture. 

 

Framing these critiques instead as a waking up out of the naive dreams of unmediated knowledge characteristic of modernity, a coming back to thinking with the relational logic of signs, helps reveal a sense in which modernity is the somewhat decadent attempt to break knowledge away from the complex relations of meaning that characterized the ancient and premodern Western tradition, and postmodernity as a kind of mature return to the necessity of nuanced consideration of context and value without the baggage of adherence to one tradition.

 

Yet, it is also important to see the postmodern as modern knowledge progressing to the point that it had to reckon with the complexity of reality, and not something decidedly anti-modern. Recognizing this continuity is vital to working with the lingering legacy of liberal modernity, especially if we want to imagine and build something post-liberal without the danger of becoming illiberal. At the end of the day, what matters is being able to evolve both culture and knowledge towards a better future. Whatever terms we use, what matters is the kinds of thoughts we can think and what those thoughts make possible. 

 

Somewhat ironically, what best characterizes the potential of the postmodern is not the unique character of its thought, but how it helps one find the diverse values hiding in all thought—in everything really, but in particular the thoughts and values that make up the metaphysical texture of the modern world. The point here is that modernity, in its searching for and questioning of the ground of knowledge, eventually freed thought from any set ground, opening up a way to rescue diverse knowledge systems from their own foundations and therefore their limits, and plugging in them to various lines of power and value.

 

Deleuze, in particular, excelled at finding and creating threads of continuity running through the history of knowledge and turning them into a formal and creative tracing of the process of difference itself and its generation, no longer grounding some particular infinity in some general unity, wedding all potential differences and relations to some limited form or model, but rather, the other way around, illuminating the immanent and infinite ground of continuous relations beneath any apparent unity of identity.

 

Debates still rage on, of course, even within philosophical camps sympathetic to this view, still parsing out the details of what principles get priority in the wake of realizations that every logic is incomplete and priority is political. Nonetheless, a case can be made that modern metaphysics, after centuries of musing on foundations, has produced forms of understanding that genuinely illuminate the problems and dynamics of the infinite ground of relations, of what popular metaphysics might call a multiple dimensionality of time, though this term is as misleading as the pop culture concept of the multiverse. 

 

Any terms are going to have their politics and problems, but some are better than others for certain purposes. For the purpose of understanding time’s structure of open multidimensionality, one could perhaps summarize the essential modern metaphysical insight as follows: not only is it misleading to reduce two moments in space and time—or even the successive moments of a simple object—to a shared generality or identity, even the idea of a single moment or position is problematic; therefore, the reduction of any thing to a single identity is misleading. 

 

What is singular about things is not identifiable in the sense that something can be fully present or represented, since what is unique about them is intimately tied up with their potentials and therefore their relation to an infinity of other things. This doesn’t make things amorphous blobs of invisible potentials, however. Things are singular in specific—and even knowable—ways, since each thing is a unique relation to everything else, even if it is a relation present in different ways in each of those other things or relations. Their presence manifests as a structure or path of relation from each of those things to everything else. 

 

This means each thing or relation is a process of relating whose motion is primarily a changing relation of or between some thing or things to and through all other things, and those things to or through it or them. Exactly which things or relations are relevant, of course, depends on other things, since it is ultimately everything that is changing relative to everything within each and every thing. 

 

And since this change is generated between and through the infinity of everything, there is not only no final or primary borders or context, there is no center but the one we have made through the harmony of our spheres, through the proportions of our faculties and intentions that tie us to some influences or modifying factors more than others, or more specifically, through the signs that stand in for the rhythms of particular connections that our selections and choice—our life and knowledge—have made.

 

The centers or margins we use to orient ourselves and our worlds derive from various regimes of trackable change made possible by an imposition of some aspect whose change we can relatively and selectively track onto all we cannot track or keep up with, which then must then be replayed. We break some infinite relative line and turn it into a circle of consistency, of recurring patterns, into hubs of collective illusions we can learn to leverage and eventually reincorporate, to one day liberate into the infinite “speed” beyond the slowed down regimes built on habitual comparisons. 

 

What recurs, then, is not any definable pattern that exists or cycles through all change, but a continuity of connections. This continuity has in a sense been bent into specific selections as springboards to a more proper participation with what is—at the highest level of abstraction—one continuous mesh of infinite relations.

 

But since absolute abstraction merely delivers one to the never-repeating rhythm of the infinite, what most concerns the finite founts of thought are the lines of continuity through relative abstraction and relational change. Through these, each line pursues and creates a unique arrangement of the structure of all time, a structure that is not some single frame of cycles or progression of events, but nonetheless one with patterns of recurrence whose meaning is always in the process of being determined, as each and all live on, forever changing and returning.

 

So knowledge is never just an account of some objective structure or meaning, but, again, a creative and magical task, one that should not only open to the ever-changing nature of everything, but help forge the recurring patterns along specific lines to satisfy the will to greater fulfillment. 

 

As all identity has emerged by a layering of recurrence of associated change, with no fundamental being outside of change, except a continuity of awareness, of being, of change, then the stability of reality we see as the present moment—so-called physical reality—has precipitated out of a sea of endless ideas looking to become a greater part of the new cycle of this moment, which is enfolded into every other moment—an existence receding endlessly into the misty regions of imagination, dream and memory. 

 

Why Scale is Profane and Proportion Divine

 

While some sense of the above was implicit in the metaphysics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Romantic and modernist era metaphysicians excelled more at describing the cycles of time and dynamics of change than they worried much about time’s relativity or the implications of relations to identity. It isn’t easy to think difference and change without making them secondary, without making time and pattern just the development of an essential identity, even when the novelty of evolution becomes an important idea, as it did in the 19th century. 

 

When relativity became more of an issue in the 20th century, this changed somewhat, at least with philosophers like Henri Bergson. It took some time, however, for 20th-century thought to digest the revolutions of modern physics and logic and begin to tease out the meaning within some kind of metaphysics—as well as a kind of formal logic—of relations.49 

 

Nevertheless, metaphysical thought and culture, and spiritual culture in particular, especially working in such a materialist age, is seldom motivated to push thought, distinction, and difference into the heart of its unified sense of being, to not fall back on that feeling of unity when some finer distinctions are called for. 

 

Consequently, it ends up over-emphasizing an eternal identity in its thinking or negating thought and distinction altogether as inadequate to the infinite, which leaves the finite structures of the soul and society more or less unenlightened. Even in our time so characterized by fluid notions of identity, spiritual culture still tends to fall back on a metaphysics of identity over relations.

 

However, there are exceptions in the postmodern age, with Jane Roberts admittedly arguing in stereotypical fashion for “the eternal validity of the soul”, but in the context of her books framing that soul relationally and multi-dimensionally, making accessible some sense of the infinite to the mind, even the minds of a popular New Age audience. 

 

Unfortunately, however, her books are seldom read. And such explicitly spiritual language of souls and reincarnation have limited metaphysical value to the secular person or skeptical academic, even if Roberts and her own higher soul-variant Seth are at pains to explain these terms less simplistically and linearly than what is the norm in popular metaphysics.

 

Roberts’ Seth books were indeed highly influential on the New Age, but mostly through other authors who turned the ideas into watered-down cliches.50 A similar thing happened to Theosophy as it worked its way from the Romantic era down to form the backdrop of what became the New Age in the first place. 

 

For a time, however, Theosophy had a broad undiluted and more serious intellectual appeal than any spiritual philosophy has since.51 Like many of the metaphysical trends of the early 20th century, had its ideas not fallen into countercultural niches after the world wars, perhaps there could have been a more fruitful evolution of its thought. Instead, the trend in the academically inclined corners of the counterculture has been towards a tame remix of Jung and Hegel, that is, towards psychologized spirituality and spiritualized liberalism. 

 

While there is value in reconciling and integrating mainstream and countercultural trends, there hasn’t been really anywhere to take this line of thought other than helping astrology form into some kind of modern cosmological framework.52 However, modern astrology on its own, or the New Age in general, cannot do this, not without a radical revision of contemporary cosmology. What we get instead is platitudes and cliches, a mere rounding out of the fringe edges of culture into the most politically inoffensive multicultural religion.

 

Undiluted esoteric science and cosmology has never been easy to give this kind of treatment. With the radical revision of the most basic concepts of institutional thought at the heart of Theosophy and its offshoots, it is easy to see why Theosophy is seldom studied or is decontextualized out of the radical story of cosmic evolution with which it coherently frames its alternative ideas on everything. Consequently, much of contemporary alternative science consists of various radical ideas, yet ones in search of some larger framework of understanding. 

 

Even in the hands of a genius philosopher like Rudolf Steiner, who did his best to integrate theosophical thought into Western science and philosophy, the ideas are just too at odds with everything else “we know” in our times. 

 

But its weirdest ideas are also its greatest value, and often more broadly “correct” than the discordant piecemeal facts we claim to know. What keeps them from being more easily approachable is that the popular postmodern attitude, which claims to champion the margins, tends to also repress spiritual thought that doesn’t stay in its subjective cultural niche, or that seems to not have the same liberal attitude towards knowledge. 

 

In other words, a body of knowledge must have no elitist connotations—that is, be at least in theory easily accessible to any margin or to validation by the masses. Knowledge must be a quaint niche tradition of a powerless culture, or otherwise bow to the hegemony of a liberal science for all. This amounts to a rejection of ideas that challenge a broad consensus or that do not have the accessible character of materially-oriented, value-neutral knowledge. 

 

Postmodern hypocrisy aside, esoteric thought can itself be faulted for being too dogmatic and cultic—even at times embracing the ideology of science to bolster its claims to absolute truth.53 Thus Theosophy was doomed to be deconstructed in the wake of thought’s skeptical turn towards the limited and changing conditions of even the most refined language.

 

Even with someone like Rudolf Steiner having a conception of the mystic as an artist of concepts, (a quite similar conception to the way Deleuze and his writing partner Felix Guatarri described philosophy as creative), Steiner also tended too often to frame his art and science in foundational terms. His entrenched investment in a creatively eccentric form of Christian mythology was destined to make his system more of a niche movement. Thankfully for all of us, however, many of his other brilliant ideas have made their way into the best parts of the counterculture.

 

However, it doesn’t take much to rescue the rest of the vast reservoir of esoteric ideas from their dated or contemporary niche context. With the proper postmodern attitude, anything can be reframed in illuminating ways. Perhaps the most essential ideas to resuscitate, however, are those that can build an understanding of not just individual spiritual growth and change but the evolution of the cosmos. 

 

Spiritual practice needs skilled modern teachers, certainly, and it especially needs help determining who these are. But if spiritual change is going to be anything but an internal affair and practice, the wisdom that should result needs meaningful links with the modern world, its concepts, and institutions, as modern esotericism has attempted to do. With such a backdrop in place, it becomes considerably easier to apply intuitive and eccentric insights on specific fields of knowledge, which tend to have a hard time breaking out of countercultural niches without a supportive cosmology. 

 

Theosophical cosmology, however, is so baroque and strange that not only scholars miss or dismiss its value. It can be difficult to not either accept or reject a world-view so at odds with the supposedly “settled facts” of science, and even more difficult to find the best way of forming those all-important links between the two, between the mainstream and fringe, without a dogmatic reduction on one side or the other. 

 

The gaps, however, can be filled in, and critical connections made when other alternative and academic theories and fields are brought into the conversation. Understanding the social context in which a cosmology arose, of course, is crucial, but that only goes so far, and sometimes too far in the wrong direction. 

 

For instance, to the extent that the cosmology of modern Theosophy is even studied by academics, it is basically seen as a mere tacking on of evolution to traditional spiritual metaphysics, basically an opportunistic assimilation of the popular biological idea.54 It can indeed appear at first glance that Theosophy, just as the New Age religion it gave birth to, is little more than traditional religious models of spiritual hierarchies turned sideways into a multicultural religious version of the modern narrative of progressive evolution. 

 

There is much more to it than that, but there is admittedly a tendency for the concept of spiritual evolution to be framed as a simple progressive march, even when every line is conceived as a kind of circle or arc, as both an “involutionary” descent of a higher being’s increasing ingress or involvement in “lower” systems, as well as a subsequent evolution out of the confines of lower systems, in either progressive or an ultimately cyclical return. 

 

This arc is too rarely relativized, or made explicitly simultaneous. It is too easy to miss the sense in which every seeming descent is a product of a bracketing process, like a footnote or annotation making explicit something implied in the “primary” line, but which is only made a separate development from the point of view of a relatively isolated perspective. 

 

From the point of view of a new variant on the always-changing “original” line, the divergent merely marks one side of a multi-pronged creative exploration of and out from the entity to which it had been as it grows through novel encounters of its own. Through this, it creates new implications that are explored in the fractal footnotes of its reality. What happens on the originating line is reflected on lower levels but in creatively divergent ways. 

 

However, these myriad sprouting divergent lines are still a kind of continuous extension of the original and its potentials brought out in converging developments with others, even if the reverse is also true, that the higher is an extension of the lower, since, in reality, there is no center and the lower is the higher working in another context.

 

The differentiation of the distinct, then, is always just a view of a greater continuity taking place, a view of some aspect of the difference-engine creatively fueling a progression; it is how more things are made and therefore more relations are made between and within what is. The apparently divergent differentiation inherent to any limited individuating perspective is merely a slowed-down or zoomed-in view of what is always a larger order of multiplying connections, where every break and separation is merely an adding of layers to what is ultimately the loving relation of all beings. 

 

Unfortunately, even within the vast vision of cycles within cycles moving through all the life and material of the universe that you see modeled in theosophical thinkers, one might still get the sense you get in most New Age theories of a pretty straightforward hierarchy of kinds of beings and levels of consciousness, even when there is lots of complex or distributed motion within the structure. 

 

There can, of course, be very practical reasons for such an emphasis, for such a system of levels might be the most pertinent relations to consider. But it is also important to understand its limits, to remember that ultimately these are hierarchies of scale only along a specific gradient of some collective development, not levels of importance rating fundamentally separate identities. 

 

Just like the hierarchies of process within the organisms and ecosystems of biological life, the higher scale processes of spiritual life are riding on, working through, and in fact are the secret sense of the lower. But it also works the other way around. We are the religion of the Gods, just as they are for us, just as our cells work for us and we for them. Scale, size, and even complexity are all relative to the frame. It is the flow of connections—and the proportions and rhythms that determine their level of intensity and relevance across diverse overlapping systems—that matter the most, since they are what is translated into the scales of complexity in our sense of things. 

 

But therein lies the more important hierarchy, not who is closer to the ideal, not who diverges less from the shared line, but who diverges more, or rather, who extends the line further into others since, again, any simple divergence or opposition is more or less included in the main line, and past a certain point just converges back into it.

 

To keep progressing in any scale of increasing complexity, there must be an escalating richness of relations, an overlapping of proportionally compatible developments that preclude the static structures that frame traditional hierarchies based on identities and the insular cavity of their relations. Such structures are merely of established qualities internal to an idea or development. 

 

Any relations outside or cutting across that tree of identity must be thought differently. One then no longer simply asks how complex something is, or how it is situated within a given order, what its rate of change is, etc., but rather: how can it be situated to change in different, faster, and hopefully better ways, how can it be more richly plugged into the universe, evolving or becoming more complex and intensely connected? The emphasis shifts from evaluating things within a frame to evaluating and linking frames as to liberate things from their static systems of isolated identities.

 

One still may have hierarchies of the more or less complex, capable, and connected along certain transversal lines, but the limits discerned can reveal new lines rather than just maxing or bottoming out when something can go no further without contradicting its foundational identity. Things get contradictory at the high and low ends of our sensual scales and conceptual hierarchies because our relatively isolated perspectives have lost the fabric of their variable connections, falling into the abstractions of our entrenched assumptions and perceptual biases. 

 

The largest and smallest scales of both space and time as we see them seem to converge into uniformity or diverge from conceivability, for we can only discern what we have already teased out, or rather carried out of the greater stream into our pocket universe. We can only analyze what we have abstracted from the greater continuity, and only integrate what we have differentiated.

 

The smallest and simplest thing, like a point, is just like the largest, like the all-encompassing sphere, like the longest line of time which seems to ever-return to its origin and starts to resemble a single moment. While reaching a limit can seem quite profound, it is actually the relations that are the foundation and horizon of our universe, and they have no absolute limit. 

 

Asking: how big is the universe? is similar to asking: what is the ultimate category of being? And both are really just questions about the relative limit of a relation to some standard of size or being. The limit is reached only because one has ceased relating, ceased letting relations relay and turn over into others. Everything interesting happens between things in their path of becoming other things. 

 

Scales of space and time, just like logical hierarchies, merely show the paths of descent and ascent that illustrate a changing or variable relation between the poles of an idea. These poles are not different kinds of things like mind and matter, though that is often how we think, but between a static background—like what we call space, or the generic category of being—and its qualifying variables, covered by concepts like time, matter, or some kind of modifying difference applied to the core substance of sameness.

 

At the extreme edges of space and time, or general and particular, the difference between them, really all difference, is annihilated; but in the middle, the relative difference between the two poles and directions between them give sight and meaning to the changing intensity of relations between things. The asymmetry of time—and the scales of complexity it engenders—frame an important relation between regimes of beings stable enough in their mutual motion to serve as the base of a collective development like our physical universe. 

 

The regimes of beings more concentrated on one pole or the other of our space/time, matter/spirit system and their patterns of overlapping activity frame a path of convergence with some things and divergence from others. But every path is ultimately always both, as all things converge towards sympathetic variants of each other, even as they part. Paradoxically, things converge and become more uniquely and therefore more intimately related as they individuate, diverging from less nuanced relations.

 

In any case, the most general or basic idea, or the simplest of things, the twin poles of spirit and matter, being and beings, are mere limits projected by our exclusive focus. Every apparently discrete thing or idea represents and contains an infinite soul story, a variable record of its journey of individuation from every one to becoming every other. However, every form, especially every name or concept, makes some pathways more or less difficult to see or traverse.

 

What must be understood is that there is an infinity in all directions filtered into both an ascending and descending convergence, like two triangles or pyramids overlaid to make a star. Such limits may be necessary, but the structure can be made to move, made less fastened to the hierarchy of sense-impressions, with its stabilizing but ossifying structure of things sorted into roughly cut categories and opposing generalities.

 

Again, threading a liberating path through the roughly-cut net of this settled structure may still seem to suggest another kind of hierarchy, not of identity but of relation, and a higher game than the hunger for the completeness of being, or the stasis of eternal belonging that underlies everything anyway. One does not ascend in any separating or abstracting direction to traverse this path of spiritual evolution—though one does not get far without a ground in coherent being. 

 

Instead, there is a coherent descent, a sliding and sinking of stable structure into more variegated patterns, making possible a growth in all directions, but in the proportions by which a new space emerges to which the divergent is drawn, overlapping or converging in creative coherence.

 

One then is not really becoming more evolved or complex so much as bringing increasingly more of the infinite relations between things into focus. Seemingly one is incorporating and liberating the more or less stuck silos of wayward existence into novel patterns of individuated beings more dense with difference, but, perhaps, actually just converging on and helping to determine a space where these richer relations between beings can be more explicitly and intensely experienced.

 

This, of course, is what we are all really doing, why we descended here from our antecedents in the first place—not to simply return, for we never really left, but to extend them and ourselves, to grow the one self into and through its infinite possibilities.

 

So New Age or Complexity?

 

“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” 

-William Gibson55

 

In light of all this, it should perhaps be asked what difference it could make. Even if some better sense of the structure of cosmic evolution could be made more widely known, could this significantly affect its trajectory? How should our culture make specific sense of the current era and the diverse ideas attempting to do the same? Do we need a new prophecy or spiritual mission to guide humanity, or do we just need a way of evaluating them, mediating between every attempt at determining the future?

 

Are we opening into new possibilities in this era, or just moving into another stage in a predictable turning of time? Will the future be defined by the influence of the stars on Earth, like entering the so-called age of Aquarius? Or are we headed to the stars, pushing into a greater economy of forces, and a community of diverse or even competing intelligences acting from beyond any mere earthly cycle?

 

At the very least, moving beyond the standard historical categories seems justified. If a scheme can’t seem to see much beyond modernity, then it probably can’t help us effectively confront the emerging challenges of our changing reality. But with all the wild predictions going around these days, not just from conspiracy theorists and transhumanists, but the general panic over new technologies, it can be difficult to evaluate the actual stakes. How can anyone, or the culture at large, begin to model the changing social, metaphysical, and temporal environment?

 

It is easy to see how giving a meaningful structure to time itself can help someone organize their life as astrology does, but could it help our society do the same? Astrology as it currently exists is not likely to become incorporated into serious science or to even replace the plethora of religions and myth-making narratives at work in contemporary spirituality. But with the right adjustments, could it help bring science and spirit closer together? Could it help us cooperate better as a society to prepare for what the future has in store?

 

The best of the few interdisciplinary fields capable of becoming, if not the master science or discourse, then at least some kind of matrix for all the sciences, are arguably those dealing with signs and the complexity of systems, and these are not too far removed from what astrology has long attempted to do in terms of modeling the path and possibilities of systems like the weather, people, and culture.56

 

There have long been, of course, many other branches of ancient and esoteric science, not to mention various disciplines and philosophies throughout the ages that have attempted to be the master mediator—attempted to be the ultimate or final word on what things mean. But at the end of the day, when there can be no timeless ground, the master meaning is that which best divines the spirits of the time, and so astrology has a special place as a kind of traditional form of applied science of signs and metaphysical meaning.

 

Time and its signs are the great frontier; even a reductive field like physics is being pressed to look beyond the rather limited horizon of simple spatial causes and their effects and to start contributing to the true cosmic science of growing consciousness and its vehicles deeper into the mysteries of time. There is just only so far a science can go by reducing every condition or influence to some brute visible cause, past which, as physics does, one must average out the invisible and unknown using statistics or ad-hoc theorizing of fields of forces—or just assume some mysterious invisible substance is at work.

 

To truly predict and prepare for the future in such a vast complex universe not determined mechanically by what already is, one must determine the relevance of various factors in a way that simple mechanics, even statistical mechanics, can only poorly mimic. Even when attempting to truly understand the problems of a single human body, one needs to find a way of reading signs.

 

Yet, there can be no definitive divinatory science for the same reason there can be no definitive science: time is an open system and no system can escape it for long. What modernity can offer us, what the new age could possibly be, is an opportunity to form a culture that accepts the necessity and future-determining power of meaning-making, and makes from this not a cynical art of manipulation or a resignation to insincere belief, but a matrix of contrasting meaning trajectories, a creative and critical culture of science and metaphysics working together, where diverse approaches helpfully play off of each other in the task of determining time’s topography.

 

However, even given something like this, what factors should be considered in deciding between models? While difference is good, so is coherence, so is having good options that help make sense of each other, rather than competing agendas and ideologies.

Any model and narrative can tell us something—especially when differences can be compared and tested—but to truly dig deep into time, one needs a stable trajectory as well as an openness to what lies beyond the stale cycles of static systems. Openness and stability necessitate each other but they need some way of simplifying things to help narrow down and even out the chaos of infinite possibilities.

 

Astrology reportedly once had something like this, back when it was part of a coherent culture of mystics divining and forming a cosmology to stabilize society, charting and steering a course through the heavens for all, or so some esoteric thinkers have claimed. But this was apparently back in prehistory. 

 

As the story goes, astrology lost its grounding in the esoteric tradition long ago, yet the tradition seems to have lost the necessary insights to correct it. Attempts have been made to reground astrology in modern theosophy or some form of psychology, but this has its limits.57 For astrology to be much more than a gimmick used to give psychological advice, it needs to make more coherent sense of its ability to shed light on all the phenomena of our time, to symbolize the patterns of background conditions affecting everything more or less. It needs a “postmodern” update; or more specifically, it needs to be capable of forming productive relations with the interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary science and theory of complex systems. 

 

One of the last fields where astrology still had some broad support before being reduced to countercultural status was weather prediction, precisely where the science of chaos and complexity more or less got its start. The symbolic approach to knowledge has its failures (in particular, the prevalence of bad astrologers trying to predict the future or just the weather certainly didn’t help things), but something has been lost by jettisoning the qualitative simplification of complex interacting causes that symbolic knowledge had long offered to traditional cultures.

 

As the various exact sciences replaced, part by part, their counterparts within metaphysics, astrology, alchemy, and natural philosophy, not only a sense of the bigger picture was lost, but a sense of the unique conditions of every situation, complex conditions that can be symbolized but are tied up with too many things to account for or predict in exact detail.

 

Astrology though, much like Chinese medicine, has remained useful precisely because the time and context-sensitive systems they both study are only capable of a crude reduction into simple causal models or even statistical science. By sacrificing the kind of qualitative overview that symbolic science can give of things not yet understood in all their detail of complex causal chains, modern science falls short in actual practice. People and their systems, their health, their minds, and even the weather itself, are tied together in vast and intricate ways that depend on rhythms that are quite difficult to track in detail, even when they are more or less understood.

 

On the other hand, Astrology has unfortunately often failed at this as well. It has even had a hard time modeling what it does enough to improve it or make its case to the unconvinced. It often seems unable to escape the false dualism set up by the European Enlightenment and the shadow it casts on Romanticism and the occult. Many astrologers think that the astrological effect of stars and planets is due to a kind of collection of discrete influences or archetypal causes, or they see them as just coincidental signs of some mystical order of time, or perhaps some confused conflation of both.

In contrast, with some understanding provided by relational thinking, it is easy to see that it isn’t just the stars; everything is a sign. That doesn’t make things mystical in the sense of being beyond reason. Things may have many complex reasons and connections, but choosing a context can provide “causal” sequences to track, something science can work with and a critical astrologer can scrutinize to read the signs in a less generic or confused way.

 

Signs, like everything else (since they are what things are when distinguished by another), are nodes existing within endless chains that can be abstracted out of the edgeless continuum and used to stand for recurring patterns or significant lines or blocs of changing things and conditions. Causes and effects are just words for the order of things or signs in a logical series. But with the complexity of real open systems which have many series interacting, the relative speed of these lines and the geometry of their interaction naturally become quite important, since every cause depends on the arrangement of every other in the determination of its effect.

 

Calling something a “cause”, however, may be more appropriate in simple systems where the most immediate links in the most obvious proximity of chains are dominant considerations; yet it is good to keep in mind that even these are only causes in the restricted context of that small chunk of space and time. The most relevant cause of a lawn mower cutting grass may be someone making it go, but the meaning and actual result of what it is doing comes from other “causes”, or to use a better word, other “conditions”, other links, and other chains. 

 

If the lawn mower happens to break, there are certainly immediate, perhaps mechanical reasons for this. But perhaps “the” reason it broke when it did could be helpfully reduced down to some idea or symbol as a reference to the structure or background pattern of less obvious conditions as they overlap into some kind of qualitative picture of metaphysical meaning. Being a kind of character attributed to the rhythms of conditions and possibilities that determine things, the metaphorical reductions we call meaning are not transcendent to the physical or causal chains we are familiar with, but rather cross through them in ways that seem to connect local causal chains to larger local and even seemingly nonlocal systems.

 

For instance, perhaps the lawnmower operator pushed it harder than usual, perhaps it was the moisture in the air. There are of course all kinds of related reasons for the weather, just as there are for the operator’s impatience. But no matter how seemingly random the convergence of proximate causes, its meaning reflects back along each unique line to many shared circumstances. 

 

The complex clusters of converging causal chains that make up the real events of each moment are nonetheless conditioned by many shared systems whose even slight changes can set up rhythmic relations among seemingly unrelated things, even distant things that could not possibly affect each other strongly by the brute causal force of direct influence or contact.

 

This is not to say that something like a planet doesn’t have a special influence of its own, or that the patterns and systems with which it is merely associated and more or less coincidentally signifies are the real source of its effects. The point is only that its influence, like that of all things, is as a modifier, a node in a network of relative changes, not as solitary beacons of eternal archetypal forces. All things can act as signs, more or less opaquely signifying or standing-in for all that they link to, both the “actual” connections they are making and all they could be or do otherwise. 

 

Even in the esoteric cosmologies that presumably once undergirded astrology, the layout of our solar system and the physical planets themselves are just visible signs of a highly organized system of spiritual planes and beings, though the sun and planets indeed are some of these planes and being, even if what we see is only a pale reflection. Behind what we see, they say, these seemingly discrete and relatively lifeless bodies are all richly, vitally, and continuously connected in intricate ways, forming various chains of beings and planes passing through and modifying each other, while also modifying and rhythmically entraining what emerges from beyond us, from beyond our system.

 

The patterns this creates can be metaphorically reduced and symbolized, but for astrology to become modern it must frame its symbols with critical concepts that can prevent the ossification and misapplication of these symbolic meanings.

 

Causes and Correlations in Science and Astrology

 

Whatever one thinks of the esoteric or astrological tradition, exploring the way we use more or less local and idiosyncratic concepts and symbols to signify the interface between the known and unknown can illustrate problems that potentially exist in all forms of knowledge. Untangling causation from mere correlation is a misleading term for understanding the complex and open systems of nature. Maybe my mood as my lawnmower broke had no causal role to play in it breaking; maybe despite my impatience, I handled it properly and it was entirely a mechanical failure. 

 

Maybe some annoying New Ager comes along and tells me it broke because of me, so I tell them they are confusing correlation and causation and I can prove the mechanical issue made it inevitable that it would happen when it did. But again, my mood didn’t come out of nowhere, and at some point, the chains of “causation” connect in ways that make every correlation meaningful and part of why things happen when and how they do. 

 

The problem and challenge of this, of course, especially when thinking in terms of causes, is to choose the right weight of value for every factor, and this means teasing out the actual pattern and order of connections, not obfuscating the truth behind some single meaning. One must navigate the relative importance and sequential order of things within these contexts of value. 

 

When we collapse complex chains into the dogma of superstitious meaning we miss vital connections. But we can make even more dangerous and vastly consequential mistakes when we scapegoat the most obvious, local, and circumstantial correlations as a cause when they are really more of an effect. 

 

This completely obfuscates or distorts the more important conditions because, in the proximity of the event, and in the context of its particularity, they appear as random or coincidental correlation when it is more accurately the other way around, more essentially the varying conditions that are important while the recurring details have a more local and somewhat arbitrary significance.

 

The dangerous scapegoating of hidden causes that one finds in superstitious and religious thinking is bad enough, but nothing compares to the scapegoating of the last link in a chain, in other words, blaming the sign or messenger. It sets us on not only a witch hunt for hidden enemies further down a single reductive chain but a never-ending struggle to control what amounts to little more than the stage upon which plays the real formative agents.

 

For instance, blaming a cancerous cell as the cause of a disease is easy to do, but it can be a monumental mistake to miss in what ways it is a potentially healing response, as most disease processes are, to conditions that make these potentially problematic disease mechanisms necessary. The more important and logically prior underlying conditions that determine disease are more complex and therefore difficult to identify, entwined as they are with everything else, especially the earthly and astrological weather, as many traditional medicinal systems well understood.

 

No matter what the system of knowledge, determining the relative importance of factors is what matters. While traditional and esoteric systems often excelled at enabling skilled practitioners to read the signs that characterize complex systems, their vagueness often led to abuse and varied results. Or as suggested earlier with the Daoist system, the inherently symbolic nature of the system and its focus on functional energetics made it difficult to reconcile with the often overlapping and strictly literal concepts of modernity, as well as its persuasive catalog of physical mechanisms and observable structures.

 

Digging under the hood of symbolic systems isn’t always easy. Often the temptation is to reduce the countless interacting and overlapping systems—and the interference fields they produce— down to some kind of special force, energy, or substance, further alienating mainstream science which demands proof of such novel things. Of course, reducing the complex causation chains down to linear mechanisms and simple structures accepted by science doesn’t help either.

 

Astrology in particular has a tough time making any kind of consistent sense of their field, even in their own terms. One can postulate planetary forces to explain this or that effect in an appeal to science, but astrologers themselves cannot even agree on some pretty basic questions about what they are doing. One question in this vein is whether the divisions of the ecliptic into “the signs of the zodiac” should follow the background stars, as it does in the sidereal system, or whether these stellar associations are just signs of something closer to home. 

 

Perhaps, the qualities that have come to be associated with Aries, for instance, have more to do with the time of year than the constellation—or that region of the sky—which have drifted away from an alignment with the seasons, which the other major system, the tropical zodiac, postulates as determining the true boundaries of the signs.

 

Did the sidereal system make a mistake or perhaps conflate some amount of legitimate influence of the stars with effects that had more to do with the time of year as reflected in the seasons? Or are the seasons just as problematic? 

 

The tropical zodiac, by tying the signs to the part of the sky defined by the sun’s seasonal positions, results in many of the sign associations following this sun position too closely, even when it is another planet in that part of the sky. For maybe the sun in Aries symbolizes certain qualities that we see in things rooted in that time of year, but could we perhaps too readily project those seasonal associations onto when Mars or Mercury is in that same sign, which happens at changing times of the year?

  

Even more problematic is that the seasonal weather patterns are different across the globe, with the seasons being not only vague at the equator, but completely flipped once you cross it. Spring has long been associated with the sign of Aries in the tropical system because the system was developed in the northern hemisphere.

But the Spring equinox happens in September, in what we call the sign of Libra in the southern hemisphere. Should the signs be flipped with the seasons in the South? Astrologers mostly say no,58 but if not, what are the qualities of the zodiac a sign of if not an influence of the stars or a correlation with a seasonal quality? Are the traditional associations, like those often taken from local conditions like the climate, merely signs of another process at work? 

 

Perhaps the beginning of Spring in the North and Autumn in the South are both signs of shared conditions of that time of year, signified by Aries. There are certainly some obvious and less locally restricted facts that fit this description. For instance, the sun appears to travel north at that time from both the northern and southern hemispheres and then heads south when we get to Libra. 

 

This directional movement has certain qualities associated with it, but those are understandably different depending on the region. The tilt of the Earth that causes this effect as well as causing the seasons could conceivably set up certain conditions that depend on the yearly cycle of change in the relation of this tilt to the sun, regardless of its opposing effects in the climate of the North and South.

 

There is also the apparent speed of the sun across the sky. This, of course, is really the speed of the Earth relative to the sun, and it happens because the Earth’s orbit isn’t perfectly circular and so gets closer to the sun during the winter of the northern hemisphere. This could set up all kinds of periodic changes in the planet’s stellar environment and consequent energetic conditions throughout the year in ways that are the same in both the northern and southern hemispheres. 

 

One could perhaps justify astrological tradition and say that the apparent sun speed could be what gives Leo its strong solar associations, not just because it is summer in the North, but because the sun appears to move more slowly in the North and South. This lingering sun also makes other things more likely at the time, like Mars appearing to move backward, which happens more often in Leo and could perhaps be why Leo also has an affinity with Mars.59

 

Would these characteristics of the time of year have something more to do with the “cause” of what astrologers identify as the character of the zodiac signs? If so, then why would other planets moving through the same part of the sky have a similar character even though it is a different time of year? The advocate for the sidereal system might point out that there is only one relatively constant factor in the region of the sky defined by the signs and that is the stars, even if they do shift slowly (about one sign every couple thousand years or so).

 

But the stars do shift. And the seasons, as well as the regions of the sky that align with seasonal markers, could conceivably be major factors in constituting the character of things. Just because there is no permanent object in that part of the sky doesn’t mean it can have no effect. Just because the sun is no longer in a certain position doesn’t mean that position—especially everything associated with it—is no longer active. 

 

There is evidence and theories for this kind of effect in physics,60 but again, one need not speculate on specific causes or effects to see why some mere association—like a part of the sky and the planets passing through it when things are happening—could be an important “cause” or condition, for this is all that is ever happening. It is always the structure of relations in space, in other words, time, that is the cause of everything.

Physics has convoluted this essential truth with all kinds of fields and forces, but even when the deeper physics is teased out,61 the narrow emphasis on physics complicates what is otherwise obvious, that the presence of the past continues in the present in ways that are more or less understood, but which are obfuscated by segregated knowledge systems.

 

The weather, for instance, seems to leave its mark on things long after its occurrence, something important to classical Chinese medicine, and in ways not altogether separate from the stars and directional alignments, all related, simplified, and symbolized by their symbols systems. Or to use a more mundane example, the violence that something is born into continues in that thing but manifests more readily in similar conditions in which it arose. 

 

One can talk about those conditions as some kind of “subtle energy” factor, but this can make them seem like something essentially beyond the normal conditions, beyond things like the trackable triggers of trauma, when in actuality it is just the whole shape of conditions, easily trackable, readily visible, or otherwise.

 

Again, it seems quite clear that what matters more than any single cause lurking beneath this or that thing or sign is the pattern of connections they represent. The region of the sky signified by a zodiac sign understood in such a light is not just determined by the sun or the stars, but everything that happens in connection with or “under” that “space”. 

 

This should come as no surprise to astrologers who are used to thinking of the resonances between what is happening at different times in the same region of the sky. But the logic is seldom fleshed out as the underlying reason for why it works. One reason for this is that this is not something that can be easily rationalized into definite discrete patterns or even periodic functions. Even just in terms of celestial alignments, as predictable and periodic as they are on their own, together they do not form some kind of reducible pattern, as their interaction is extraordinarily complex.

 

There are of course relatively simple patterns in the occurrence of alignments happening in certain parts of the sky over a given time period, but as one extends the length of the period, these get exceedingly unwieldy. One cannot say that a sign of the zodiac gets its character because it will always have more of some particular set of alignments for all time, but like a fractal, it does have a pattern, even if it is infinite.

 

Astrology is not just about the zodiac, however, and can even exist without it. But even with the planets, which are a bit easier to conceive in their relations than some part of our sky unanchored to any objects, the patterns never exactly repeat.

 

As discussed previously, the harmony of the cosmos is always in motion. While many cycles may sync up more or less, even then there is seldom the kind of exact whole number ratios that would make things simple. The relations between the sun and moon have some beautiful symmetries that help bring a kind of musical order to what might have been a more chaotic seeming field of time. Meanwhile, Earth’s tilt, wobble, and elliptical orbit breaks up what might have been a too monotonous relation to the sun, thus ensuring a more interesting journey for the evolution of the planet.

 

Every object and alignment play some role in forming the shape of time, but again, the important questions for the astrologer, just as for everyone else, are how much weight to give to each thing and what does anything mean?

 

Does size or distance matter when what we are talking about is signs? A small or distant event can be a sign of big changes happening or about to happen close to home. How can one know? Is there possibly a stable ground of meaning given by something other than just empirical observation and extrapolation, which, as always, is impossible to separate out completely from biases and assumptions? In astrology especially, the issue becomes central and obvious: is there a superior way of understanding observations that can help guide and correct associations that may have been too strongly colored by specific cultural or geographic contexts? 

 

Is perhaps all astrology a conflation of local conditions like the seasons with distant temporal markers? Again, understanding everything as a sign leads to saying that each thing in some specific way connects any thing to other things, most relevantly to some other process whose meaning it modifies. So one can easily imagine, without much rationalization, since all processes are embedded in others, why the time of year or day something happens, or when one begins something, might give it a certain character. 

 

The geometry of links unique to each place and moment in time determines which aspects of the rest of the universe figure more strongly with each unique thing. But again, this doesn’t necessarily justify making the markers of astrology particularly important. Astrologers don’t even agree on which ones are worth considering. There are indeed different models and schools of astrology, but one could say that they all just track different cycles or apply different relations in overlapping ways with others.

 

If one ties the zodiac sign not to a time of year for all time as in the tropical system but to the stars themselves or to their region of space, which drift in their positions relative to our year, as the sidereal zodiac does, then is one simply tracking (however accurate the interpretation) a different relational pattern, namely the relation of the earth and the stars, making for a slightly longer year than the our trip around the sun, the latter of which seems to determine most of the conditions we associate with a year.

 

Does this tenuous connection to earthly rhythms make the sidereal zodiac confused or relatively unimportant? Do the position of the actual stars and therefore the relation of the earth’s motion to them matter that much, or was their importance conflated with what is better tracked by the seasons? 

 

What about the planets? They seem to have even less connection to earthly rhythms; a zodiac based on a yearly cycle of the stars untethered to the seasons, is still tethered to an Earth year. 

 

The planets basically are just points in the sky that have little obvious effect on us. Perhaps their supposed effect is really because their position relative to each other and earthly cycles are a marker for a certain amount of time, and perhaps for everything in sync with that rhythm. What gives these cycles and the planets that represent them their meaning? Why should these specific temporal periods have any greater significance than any other? What other processes are they connecting to? 

 

One argument is that though astrology can connect with material circumstances like the seasons, astrology seems to force a structure on time that does not depend on any obvious material considerations. That people try to speculate on possible material explanations is understandable, but perhaps the exact mechanisms are not so important, and perhaps even a distraction, even if an inevitable one.

 

Given that astrology has long talked about the “influence of the stars”, it is only natural. But to modern ears this sounds like just another causal material condition, adding to the astronomical, geological, and sociological forces determining society and life on our planet, another more subtle collection of astronomical forces. 

 

Within a materialist cosmology, however, such attempts do not go far, since playing this game of postulating independent forces for everything not understood, only gains traction because it ignores meaning or coherent sense; it cannot explain a phenomenon that is primarily about meaning and the connection between everything. 

 

Properly understood, there are no independent forces. Heavenly bodies and their positions in the sky are markers for a deeper structure of relation and meaning, as all things are. The important question then is: do they have some “quality” beyond this formal position as a marker of temporal patterns? What is so special about the position and cycles of, say, Mars? There are conceivably infinite numbers of cyclical period durations we could look at. Why only look at the ones corresponding to recurring celestial cycles? 

 

One indeed should not, since it is plainly true that there are important rhythms to time and life that do not correspond to the rather limited markers in the sky. Astrology, even freed from dogma, should not be some grounding discipline to a study of all time. Like any good metaphysical system, it can lay a good net across everything under the sun, but as it was in its associated traditions, this net should meaningfully connect with other systems of meaning, but not overly-determine them. 

 

Still, why these temporal patterns and not any arbitrary period at the scale of human time? What about more exact multiples of just the standard of the year? Is a century or a thousand years less important than the approximate number of years it takes for some planet to come back around? Beyond the fact that these cycles have been studied and the planets and stars used as convenient markers for time, is there really anything special about them?

 

To explain and justify such things would require a detour into metaphysical ideas and epistemology. But just extrapolating from the relational logic developed here, even if the details are endlessly debatable, one can imagine how and why the metaphysical history or even just the physical history and appearance of the planets could flesh out the seeming monotony of their orbits in the sky as mere temporal markers.

The meaning of the angles between them would require an even deeper dive into fringe physics and number theory but can be simply pictured as part of some kind of “geometry of meaning” grounded in the mathematical division of any circle, with obvious connections to music theory and the character we ascribe to the sound of different tonal relationships.62

 

In any case, one need not buy into any doctrine or explanation, since what matters is to what extent astrology works, and to what extent the meaning of any arrangement needs to be rethought in light of exposure to the ever-changing patterns of time. 

 

Rather than grounding the qualitative in the quantitative, or trying to synthesize them into some foundational theory, it is better to use it all, the qualitative, the quantitative, and their varying connections, to better understand which cycles and contexts are at work in any observation or evaluation, and which are the most relevant, since all determinations of a quality’s link to a quantity depends on context—depends on where one divides the circle of continuity into some kind of pattern.

 

There are many other schemes of organizing time, history, and meaning, but many of them require a discrete number of boundaries between cultures, reducing all structure down to stages within each of them, or stages within some comprehensive cosmic or global development. None of this is bad. Distinctions and connections must be made if one wants anything beyond disconnected facts. 

 

But one can accommodate more meaning and coherent connections when all these schemes are understood not as structural laws but selections from a bottomless game of improvising on prior patterns. If one applies the extensive knowledge of temporal cycles and the mutating structure of all processes that various traditions and philosophers have developed, then whatever and whenever one wants to designate as the beginning of a new age, process, or entity, one has a growing body of ideas that have made life and history understandable in different ways. 

 

As discussed throughout this text, the metaphysics of the future is destined to shed its ground in any definitive meanings or dogma, but also to root more freely in an understanding of the structure of time and process, an understanding informed by the study of and philosophical reflection on everything under the sun. 

 

For any event or thing can be approached in a myriad of ways. Even just within the context of astrological analysis, with any arrangement of bodies in the sky, it always depends, as all things do, on how one begins. Because there is no fundamental center or beginning, no given context. But some contexts and lines of interpretation are more helpful than others, depending on what one wants to do and to know. 

 

In biology, for example, the kind of answer one gets to the questions “Why is someone ill?”, or “What is a virus?”, depends greatly on whether one begins with the rich thread of reasons for any change happening in a biological system provided by an ecological context—like asking why and under what conditions the phenomenon that has been historically understood as a “viral pathogen” is produced by cells in the first place—or when one simply starts with the virus as the assumed agent malevolently acting on a cell. 

 

Ultimately the question “why?” or “what is…?” must be narrowed down from its infinite ground to the most relevant factors in any situation. Which factors are seen to be the most relevant or helpful, depends, of course, on a choice of context. 

 

But how enslaved one is to this choice depends on how rich an array of context one has, and how much context dependency is consciously taken into account. Traditional metaphysics had long been a bastion of expansive and comprehensive contexts, but not known for its skepticism of its own foundations. In contrast, modern knowledge systems have prided themselves on scrutinizing foundations. It seems natural that modernity would return to metaphysics, perhaps with a more mature and critical awareness of its limitations—especially as it discovered that there is no absolute context or sure foundation.63

 

The implications of context-dependency, however, have been difficult for modernity to properly incorporate into its way of doing things. Science has lumbered along following more or less pragmatic lines, ignoring the holes in its foundations, while meaning and metaphysics have expanded in diversity through a delirious fracturing along personal and emotional lines of association. But as the dominance of cultural fragmentation gives way to increasing interconnectivity, the need for new ways of determining truth and forging meaningful connections within the chaos is becoming paramount.

 

Astrology, as helpful as it might be—or become with further evolution—has its limits. Naturally, there is only so much variation possible in the stars, and though we can change our perception of what they symbolize, they can never capture the novelty that exists in every moment. No system of knowledge can; they can, however, be more or less open to this novelty. 

 

Oracular systems like the I Ching or Tarot were developed precisely for this reason. They also have their limits, of course. Yet, with the I Ching especially—with its incredibly specific lines of interpretations dictated by a seemingly random process—those limits work to structure meaning towards conditions that are at least poetically determinable and would be otherwise impossible to predict. 

 

Since nothing is arbitrary or random in a meaningful cosmos, this use of something seemingly even more arbitrary than the alignment of the stars, like the toss of a coin or the shuffling of a deck of cards—or just the seemingly random signs of a situation—is a key to divination or perhaps any practical science looking to divine the unique qualities of situations.64 

 

Divination is of course a rather niche art, but openness to the variable and even spontaneous structure and signs of the moment is itself a sign of any truly sophisticated knowledge system. Modern metaphysics could make this quality of sensitivity to signs an integral part of our science, and thus go a long way towards making it more of a sophisticated art of tempering time and forging a path of expansion for our knowledge-traditions and cultures.

 

Modern astrology will have to make some changes if it wants to contribute to this. Astrologers can certainly be more or less sensitive to signs outside their system, but being somewhat caught between ancient and modern culture, their art of interpretation often ends up more medieval than anything. It has to overcome some serious philosophical issues to be truly helpful for the future. 

 

Merely attempting to shake off the cloud of traditional dogma and fatalism with appeals to modern liberal concepts of free-will and hedges on the radical implications astrology has for such concepts will not do. This relegates astrology to the background of mere personal meaning, which only further entrenches its dogma. 

 

Or if they continue to posture astrology’s meaning as rooted in absolute values or archetypes of significance, no matter how general or how much room is made for individual variation and freedom, many people will understandably continue to think of astrology as an antiquated and fatalistic relic of the past. Even if they make room for it in their life, it will not become what it could be: part of a dynamic living fabric of metaphysical culture strong enough to displace and subsume materialist cosmology.

 

Astrology’s awkward position between the trenchantly divided cultures of objective truth and subjective meaning makes it an interesting reflection of the larger problem of why these sides are disconnected in the first place. With the pressure from modern consciousness on astrology not posturing itself too strongly along the lines of objective meaning or determinism, it is only naturally going to vector towards the other pole of our culture. And like other fields at the subjective end—contemporary art for instance—the subjective may even take on cosmological proportions, with one’s personal meaning becoming a whole cosmos in itself.65

 

Some astrologers may push back, trying to bridge the gap and model astrology as a kind of empirical science, or extend its psychologized archetypes into a transpersonal or even objective cosmology; this is an understandable ambition. But such efforts fail to appreciate astrology’s potential, not as some fundamental dogma of interpretation, not as a master narrative or code to crack the ambiguities of meaning, but as an increasingly popular and evolving example of how metaphysical concepts and symbols can be used to intelligently supplement, expand, and cohere whatever meanings we find and create.

 

This is something like the justification which has been applied to the larger swath of mystical and esoteric symbolism. As the reasoning goes, it is not supposed to be taken as a definitive map of reality but used as a springboard into an ability to perceive and even begin to consciously participate in the realms that underlie the generation of meaning in the first place. Dreams within dreams perhaps, but the best occult traditions prioritize waking up to both a greater freedom from conditions and a greater knowledge of those conditions, a knowledge that is crucial for any service to others.

 

Whatever the goal in whatever spiritual system, the implication is that their meanings do not represent a preformed objective reality, but are effective ways of generating objective or shared realities by their potential to connect beings and possibilities in various and even novel ways. Astrology likewise, is particularly good at helping structure the temporal rhythms of our meaning.

 

Of course, like any language, philosophy, or belief system, if one never leaves the springboard, one can become its slave, reading whatever generic associations one may have initially learned or internalized into every situation. But one can also use the springboard, building associations increasingly beyond and even in critical negation to the simplistic overlay of associations one started with.

 

Conclusion: The Potential Present

 

Summarizing the above discussion and the historical potential of the cultural moment, one could say that a new age is always upon us, but we can also never escape responsibility for making it, not only making it happen but determining what it would even mean. To that end, we don’t need some metatheory or master narrative of time, but we do need to cooperate on how best to decide which meanings and their trajectories get priority.

 

Every structure of knowledge and meaning we internalize makes some themes and events more likely and others less likely. The expansive cosmologies of metaphysical and esoteric traditions can certainly expand the horizon of meaning and possibility beyond what most modern worldviews are capable of. But do they lead one into delusion—into meanings that only exist in the minds of believers, into an inability to see things in ways not foreseen along the lines of what is (at least in traditional esoteric thought), a pretty demanding, large-scale and easily dogmatized body of beliefs? 

 

It all depends on how they are used. Dogmatism isn’t thwarted by empirical methods, which can become even more narrowly dogmatic. But it is eroded by difference, by contrasts of any kind— empirically styled or otherwise—but only if the structure of thought is continually exposed to them, not just at the margins, but at the level of core assumptions, that is, at the level of its abstractions from other contexts. 

 

But these are only given from within other contexts, so one can never rest assured of reaching some clear foundation. One can only hope to find a helpful contrasting idea with fundamental premises or slants of interest different enough to reveal an assumed context that was taken for granted. And while within any metaphysical tradition, there are often many contrasting cosmologies, much like in cosmological physics, the differences often only go so deep. 

 

The modern ideology of vigorous debate bringing truth is belied by the fact of opposing camps usually being partisans of a shared but unexamined core assumption. Academic science and the countercultural scene of contemporary conspirituality are both full of vigorous debate and proliferating speculation in every direction, both looking for the truth on their terms instead of cooperatively opening to the play of different approaches and the truths they produce. 

 

The difficulty of cooperation is extreme when truth is framed as an all-or-nothing, winner-take-all affair. Both mainstream and counter-cultural voices alike compete viciously over who has the real truth, or who is the true representative of the liberal religion—either emphasizing equality or freedom (depending on the left or right-wing brand), but in some way desperate to be the genuine anti-fascist defeater of a dogmatic authority which repress the free and neutral truth. 

 

While there are indeed critics of the base assumptions of liberalism, they mostly look to reestablish regional traditions that make little sense given the complex distribution of belief in a world plugged into the endlessly mutating and hybridizing ideas streaming through the internet. 

 

Some futuristic reimagining of tradition, perhaps with some esoteric ideas tacked on, might make some of these nationalist or regional alternatives to global liberalism more viable in our world of rapidly encroaching technology. But when it comes down to it, in the wake of techno-social media, traditionalists can only have a limited subcultural appeal. Any particular combination of spiritual or cultural things now cannot be otherwise than a matter of niche interest, appealing only to people with the same taste (a rare thing in this day of micro-niches). 

 

Though if some cultural vision is generic enough in its appeal, it may attract a broader and even passionate following from those wanting to belong to some kind of radically conservative movement. But such things can only be a desperate reaction to the reality that traditional cultures are becoming mere lifestyle choices; the original contexts that gave them meaning are inevitably slipping away into increasingly marginal interest and subjective concern. 

 

Any single cultural vision getting broad or regionally concentrated appeal is increasingly unlikely as culture has become mostly a product of the internet, a person’s unique but cybernetically conditioned selection from the broader ecosystem of media, but a selection which for most people must be compatible or similar enough with the increasingly diverse tastes of those around them that they don’t become isolated. 

 

Basically, without serious political repression of the internet from a radically illiberal state, multiculturalism will not be reversed. Even with stronger laws restricting immigration, culture is increasingly detached from ethnicity. And once cultural traditions get thoroughly mixed in the melting pot of globalism, they will never be separated out again. 

 

They might, however, emerge in new guises, or get some new life as part of the changing fabric of multiculturalism’s mutation into a new spectrum of cultural attitudes gaining increasingly religious undertones. For as science becomes more and more like science fiction, the simple divide between ethnic cultures, and even the gulf between secular and religious attitudes, has given way to different styles of interpreting the strange world technology is creating for us—a world that forces us to interpret things in ways that resonate more with religion than the simplistic worldview imagined by modern secular liberalism in the brief period it was largely convincing to intelligent people.

 

Gone are the days when rationalists could posture a transcendence of belief. As the understandable deterministic cosmology of material forces and classical physics has given way to an incomprehensible mess of competing claims about what is real and how things work, and with an even stranger world always on the horizon, most people are forced into some kind of faith, or some kind of theory of what is “really” going on that cannot help but smack of the metaphysical.

 

Admittedly, the excesses of the New Age have scared pundits and cultural prophets away from acknowledging this, acknowledging that to form a worldview in this era adequate to the weirdness of the world, it is increasingly necessary to think through concepts that used to be relegated to New Age spirituality, or at least a variation on some kind of science-fiction-like cosmology with more or less spiritual connotations. 

 

And of course, not everyone thinks about things enough for this emerging worldview to be universal or explicit. The mass of humanity’s religion is probably better characterized as a global culture of devotees to techno-science, whose cultural window-dressing varies, but seldom approaches a sincere critique or rejection of its technological reliance and faith.

 

In any case, what should be obvious is that the future of cultural evolution is not essentially being decided between right vs. left, West vs. East, or even nationalism vs. globalism. The regional distribution of power within the global system does indeed have some effect on cultural norms, and these struggles might even radically affect the cultural trends of the future. But it is the way science and technology are understood and potentially directed by the structure of our thinking that will determine the main trajectory of life on this planet. 

 

Much of the framework of knowledge is downstream from institutional ideology, it is true. But as long as there is some freedom of thought and communication, new ideas and contrasts can open up new possibilities. The way each person uses, understands, and evaluates the problems and solutions offered up by those ever-encroaching institutions is paramount. And despite all its problems, what has been called the New Age is the result of increasing numbers of people finding they need to make sense of the world in a way that does justice to the claims of science, as well as making some deeper sense of the many contradictory beliefs one faces in a multicultural society—even if, naturally, such a broad and popular category of culture is going to be mostly full of unsatisfying answers, or nothing notably new.

 

Part of the problem is the lack of awareness of what has come before. The desire for some kind of coherent worldview that encompasses and explains the contradictory beliefs of a multicultural society has been at work in the world all along, predating and giving birth to science as we know it. What has been called the “mystery schools” is reported to have maintained a kind of trans-cultural wisdom across the travel and trade routes of the ancient world which adapted itself to local cultures and changing times, and more or less managed the coherence of cultural symbols, allowing them to resonate with deeper spiritual truths. 

 

Whatever the truth of this claim—whatever the extent culture has ever been stable and coherent—the pace of techno-scientific development and its effect on the way we see the world has posed an extreme challenge to anyone wanting to maintain a coherent worldview, or more importantly, a culture capable of serving as a vehicle for something deeper than its mere content. 

 

It is the structure of knowledge that allows for its metaphysical resonance and extrapolation, and this structure is in constant negotiation in modernity, often more at the mercy of political forces than free inquiry, and seldom in the hands of anyone sensitive to the quality of its overall structure.

 

Consequently, the preeminent problem and creative challenge since the dawn of the European Enlightenment has been the work of forming some fount for a renewable coherence and continuity of culture and knowledge as modern civilization has swallowed up all previous cultures and ways of life. Now more than ever the world needs a coherent contemporary tradition fit for a planetary society drowning in divergent data streams and the commodified convergence of consensus ideology. 

 

One might have expected that the challenges of an emerging global society would orbit around harmonizing diverse cultures and their unique backgrounds and ways of thinking and living, but this is not the case. Western imperialism and the success of science, technology, and capitalism have had quite some time to grind down the various traditions into the procrustean mold of materialism. 

 

However, this uniformity does not serve as an effective basis for a coherent growth of the world’s culture or even a peaceful conformity. If it were merely a matter of an inappropriately rigid coherence, then naturally the challenge would be one of breaking out of the mold and liberating creative divergence, not finding or forming coherence. Indeed this is frequently the way the creative trends of culture, especially counterculture, are conceived in the wake of the European Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions.

 

But the necessity for transforming both the divergent and convergent movements of contemporary culture into something creative and sustainable reaches deeper than any novel movement or any mere integration or conflict resolution. No mere harmonizing of niche details or cultural backgrounds into some kind of updated perennial philosophy or modernized wisdom tradition is going to do any more than any other theoretical, artistic, or spiritual movement that has failed to become more than fodder for the machine of modernity and capitalism. 

 

The ever-present need to update or integrate truths and orient them towards a desired direction is an important and never-complete task. Yet the diversity of truths, attitudes, and subcultures today is so numerous and amorphous that integration becomes meaningless. There are no discrete parts to integrate, and even if there were, integration implies too much a repressive synthesis, when the world now calls for a sustainably dynamic one. Yet we have the worst of both extremes, a dangerous chaos as well as a repressive order trying desperately to gain control over the tumult. 

 

In such a fluid value climate, however, the illusions of diversity, as well as the production and logic of true creative difference perhaps become easier to see. The impossibility of a spatially conceived integration of truly different parts may open the mind up to a continuity and connective synthesis existing on a more intuitive and temporal level of thinking, where connections are made and new ideas produced without any need of a reduction of the different to the same. 

 

More coherence can be produced and more expandable patterns can be recognized through an openness to the irreducible uniqueness and difference of each moment in space and time, not as an isolated unit of discrete attributes, but as in the best astrology, holding its own singular pattern of connections to other events with no final meaning to that pattern. 

 

Given that the differences fueling contemporary conflict and chaos are increasingly rooted not in a clash of different geographical cultures as much as in fundamental character motivations and personal constitutional considerations, astrology is particularly suited to help build an understanding of conflict and difference. 

 

Any understanding or bridging of the contemporary social divides powerful enough to give it a more constructive vision though, must be rooted deeper than the ephemeral fads of popular culture; it must be able to explain and guide any person or perspective towards a more cooperative and constructive vision. It must stretch down to the metaphysical heart of difference itself. 

 

From a popular and more or less persuasive point of view, such an attempt to dig down into the depths of difference was already the overarching metaphysical theme underlying all culture in what is called the postmodern era, a period usually considered to have begun in the mid-twentieth century, though, as discussed, with precursors in the late nineteenth century or even earlier. But despite this prominent metaphysical theme, the majority do not like the unsettling implications of postmodern metaphysics and are unlikely to do so soon.

 

Even if it is argued that we are now in a new perhaps “meta” or “hyper-modern” era, the metaphysical challenges still remain more or less the same ones that have haunted all global culture in some form or another for centuries, and will continue to haunt us well into the future. For modernity is not about finally finding the one neutral system, but the need to reconcile with an infinite ground and horizon, to chart a meaningful course through a universe we are helping create in an ever-escalating way.

 

1. Yeats (1894) pg.7
2. Steiner (1962) pg.i
3. The chromosomal chaos found in cancer, sometimes referred to as “aneuploidy”, could be productively seen as a kind of probe in possibility space, an attempt by the cell to shuffle around its genetics in search of a better working arrangement when it has lost its coherent place within the functional niche of healthy tissue. Cancer then works as a metaphor for, or example of, not an intrusive force but a symptom of life attempting to circumvent decay. The uncontrolled growth often seen in cancer is then like a chaotic mirror of the failing vitality and rigidity of the environment from which it is trying to escape and perhaps offers the chance of some kind of healthier balance of chaos and order.
4. Perhaps divergent systems like cancer or chaotic societies are necessary for systems to pick up new information. It is part of esoteric tradition that random processes, being less determined by their immediate environment, are capable of being more deeply imprinted from forces coming from outside the system, like for instance, the way random processes are used in divination methods like the Tarot or I Ching, or for that matter, the way stars and planets can signify the character of this rhythm of “astral” imprinting. The “astral” (from the Latin astrum for star), a word used to signify an intermediate realm invisible to but highly influential on the material plane, perhaps then makes sense not because of an influence emanating from the stars as much as through them, passing through them from the periphery of our space and modified by their geometric arrangement. So while “deterritorializing” from one’s immediate space or environment, as academic philosophers have called this opening (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), one must be careful not to lose one’s body in cancer (or mind in madness), still, there are helpful patterns within the seeming randomness that can be understood as helpful reflections in time from the overly conditioned strictures of our space. Cancer is then like a call from beyond the prison of an overly-determined environment, and into what Rudolf Steiner has called “counterspace”. It is a kind of space in the sense that the infinity of the greater universe—coming from all directions in our space and beyond it—can be envisioned as our space’s inversion. It is as if the stale symmetry of our material space is the real cancer or at least “mineralization” within a spiritually envisionable space of astral dynamism that is continually shaking up our space with counterspatial or etheric forces, enlivening matter with life and time (see Whicher 2013 and Steiner 2000). In any case, we must attune somehow to the rhythms coming from beyond our controlled environment and incorporate them, or else our cancerous developments will simply deliver us from our material prison at the expense of any hope for transformation within it.
5. Gangle (2016)
6. Immanence is a bit of a buzzword in academia and does not necessarily imply relational continuity, especially for those with an anxiety of influence concerning Gilles Deleuze like Francios Laruelle.
7. There are those, however, both on the fringes of academia, see Vrobel (2008), as well as spiritual pundits like Dan Winter, trying to make fractals the center of a new cosmology,  
8. The parts of the counterculture that have stayed closer to academic liberalism tend to merely “re-enchant” its ideas, and so also embrace Jung in their psychologized spiritualism; whereas the more radical and fringe occultists follow more or less in the footsteps of Willhelm Reich in attempting to bridge science and spirituality along the lines of an occult physics and cosmology, and even occult economy of universal energy.
9. Noble (1999)
10. De Jouvenal (1945)
11. Santayana (1923), pg 201
12. Farrell (2009)
13. Farrell (2006)
14. This is the story told throughout Theosophical literature. For a good historical overview, see Godwin (1994)
15. Varoufakis (2024)
16. Asprem (2018)
17. Much of what is revolutionary in contemporary quantum biology (Ho 2008), recapitulates what romantic biology and medicine were onto (Cunningham 1990) on new theoretical ground. Though in Ho (2008) the philosophical ground harkens back to the Modernist period of the “philosophy of organism” with Whitehead and Bergson. Bergson, one could argue, was attempting a synthesis of the more Romantic, vitalist trends in biology with the dominant Enlightenment trend of mechanistic materialism, which Deleuze furthered with his metaphysics and cosmology of abstract machines (Ansell-Pearson 1999, 2002)
18. This way of discussing the issues of continuity and immanence has been tied to Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, and Steiner’s version of “Romantic” science. See Barfield (1988, 2012)
19. Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives” has despite its merits conflated the complex character of a society being forced by circumstances to face its historical contingency, with a distinct philosophy or attitude. Postmodernity should be a period not a theory or movement, even if certain things in our time are more of the period than others. Postmodernism then would be those things in our cultural period that grapple with its themes, which I would argue are about complexity and contextuality, not primarily about a skeptical or incredulous attitude. 
20. Gangle (2016) pg.142
21. Asprem (2018) pg.550
22. Delanda and Harman (2017)
23. Hanegraaff (1997)
24. There is value in doing what someone like Ken Wilber has done, for integrating generalizations from different scientific and spiritual fields can help them communicate and help people orient themselves within the chaos of our culture. I won’t even echo the critique of his tendency to misrepresent fields in those generalizations, for they must be deformed in any integration of this type. But at the end of the day, it is more helpful to deform them more, to turn the general into singularities as Deleuze has done, not trying to find the common denominator beneath difference, but rather create helpful ways of understanding how differences connect and are produced in the first place.
25. For a great little book on “Official Stores”, whose author should not be forgotten, see Scheff (2012)
26. Whitehead (1954), prologue, pg.100.
27. Asprem (2018)
28. Feyerabend (2010) pg.27
29. Bloom (2006)

30.There is some debate on whether “elements” was ever a good translation of the Chinese concept. Watkins (2005) claims that it was a natural choice to relate the Chinese concept to the traditional Western concept of the element. Nonetheless, there are obvious differences, as discussed. Beyond the process/substance difference, however, there is, as Watkins emphasizes, the important fact that the names of the five elements are the names of the five visible planets. Mitchell (2016) claims that most importantly to the Daoists, they are five lights, five color divisions of the primordial light as seen from the inner vision of Daoist alchemists.

31. See Ho (2008) for a beautiful take on quantum biology, and Byrne and Callaghan (2014) for an excellent take on complexity theory.
32. See Scofield (2023) for an argument for astrology as systems-theory. Alchemy is a bit more complicated and an even more controversial issue. But basically, materials have a rhythmic property that can be altered by consciousness—see Tiller, (2001) for the research—or more generally by a coherence which is determined by their rhythmic relation with everything—some of which is trackable by celestial patterns (hence its traditional connection to astrology). There has been a “renaissance” of laboratory alchemical practice and a wild west of experimental products on the market in recent decades, all happening in the wake of discoveries made by Arizona farmer David Hudson.
33. Deleuze and Guattari (1996), Ansell-Pearson (2002).
34. Newton (1733)
35. Roberts (1997)
36. Steiner (1997)
37. Gibson (2022)
38. For those not familiar, pick up a copy of Nexus Magazine, or tune into Gaia TV to see the diverse but overlapping worldviews at play.
39. I am especially interested in the work of Carlos Castaneda, or more recently in the accounts of Corey Goode, both of whom were clearly making things up and claiming truth, yet nonetheless served as important “shamans” of the counterculture, spinning tales that, divisive as they may have been, offered a creative vision that inspired and connected many people and things.
40. I discussed this with a prominent figure in the ufology community, Michael Salla, who wrote several books on Corey Goode. This was at a time when many of them were more or less embracing the “Q Anon” narrative line. I pleaded with him to put aside any consideration of plausibility (since it obviously didn’t take much for him to think things plausible), and just consider the structure of the very melodramatic nature of the “Q” narrative, basically, Trump vs. evil. It was obvious political propaganda for one side. Even if one believed in the rightness of that side, it seemed irresponsible to repeat it without the kind of analysis that can be done on the intent and effect of the narrative. But they don’t often call conspiracy theorists “truthers” for no reason. Context takes a backseat to “truth” as they say it, for better or worse.
41. Again, a single-minded focus on exact truth obscures nuance and productive debate between and within both sides of the mainstream/counterculture divide. Take, for example, the debate at the height of the COVID narrative. Rather than challenge the choice of relevance and importance of various concepts and data, critics were often pulled into conspiracy-culture narratives, where the lines are drawn rather starkly. Click-bait critics especially frame the mainstream as all fraud and bad science. There was much of both, but fraud and fake sophistication thrive in a culture where niche experts driven by institutional and political forces define the context of truth. A little philosophical subtlety can go a long way towards altering the context of debate to one less premised on one side having all the righteous truth and the other being a fraud or shill.
42. “Karma” is quite a loaded term which I try to give a better philosophical ground in “Karma, Control, and Creative Recurrence: The Endless Foundations of Infinite Meaning”.
43. In the Seth books of Jane Roberts, the word “counterpart” is often used. We are all counterparts to each other, so there is no discrete identity. But a vast structure of multidimensional relatedness expresses the degree to which we are counterparts or “variants” of each other along certain lines. “Variants” has been used similarly by the Marvel media writers when dealing with multiversal themes.
44. Roberts (1996) also uses the mountain ridge metaphor in a discussion of recurring time periods. While much of modern occultism emphasized linear development even when discussing cycles, both popular and academic theory and fiction have returned to some version of eternal recurrence in the postmodern era, though not necessarily in the same sense as the ancients or even Nietzsche imagined it. Marvel comic book movies, however, explore the idea of a “sacred timeline”, as a loop that happens again and again with only minor variations, but only because one character, at war with his variants, represses radical divergence, that is, until the trickster God Loki frees the multiverse from the previous stale insular cycle into a larger cosmic game.
45. Hopkins (1984)
46. See de Nicolas (2003), McClain (1976),
47. I am playing a bit here on the great literary critic Owen Barfield’s (2012) claim that with Rudolf Steiner, Romanticism as a mode of knowledge came of age. No one outside of Steiner fans took this seriously, for Romanticism is not usually thought of as a legitimate mode of knowledge on the level of a serious challenge to the enlightenment and modern science. But again, it should really be seen as a sign of modernity itself coming of age. Steiner, perhaps, is a bit too out there to make this point, but he and other Romantic thinkers and Theosophists did not see themselves as counter-enlightenment, or at least anti-modern science. Modernity started to come of age when many thinkers  started seeing the importance of having not just a timeless foundation for knowledge, but a knowledge that depended on time and subjectivity. While I don’t want to make some exclusive list here, I do want to point out a few ways one can construct this tradition. Obviously, many of the figures of the Romantic and Modernist period signaled a break from Enlightenment-era attitudes towards knowledge and its representation. Deely (2001), however, ignores the Romantics, seeing the postmodern as the culmination of the development of understanding and modeling the structure and process of signs (semiotics), and so marks its beginning with C.S. Peirce. Deely’s story of philosophy seems mostly concerned with how “nominalist” a philosopher was. So Hegel, for instance, in his attempt to break with representation, doesn’t go far enough for Peirce and Deely, since though an idea for Hegel is not a mere name or representation of a thing in itself, its relations are still trapped by representations, they are still “internal” as a Deleuzean thinker might say. This is all up for debate, and I recommend Bains (2014) and Somers-Hall (2012) for good studies of these issues. But in short, Deely’s progressive history of philosophy marks important contributors to what would become semiotics, going back to the birth of philosophy, but bypassing many figures someone like Deleuze would include, like Spinoza. Spinoza may not have discussed signs but came pretty close to what Deleuze calls immanence, which is not far off from what Deely is talking about with signs and relational thinking, as Gangle (2016) shows in his book relating Spinoza, Peirce, and Deleuze. Moore (2019) does a good job of tracing modern metaphysics from the traditional starting point of Descartes, embracing analytic philosophers and culminating in Deleuze. I obviously see Deleuze as some kind of culmination point myself. On the other hand, while thinkers along the postmodern lines help us think critically beyond the set—and “set theoretic” (Gangle, 2016)—foundations of traditional or modern metaphysics, to me, the culmination and essence of modern/postmodern thought is more essentially about liberating thought from the spatial and finite and into some understanding of time and infinity. This isn’t that far off from the conservative Spengler, who did not think the modern West was any kind of progression, but did recognize that our cultural essence was all about transcending spatial limits and embracing the infinite. So not only the postmodern academics and their precursors deserve a mention, but also all those who helped push thought out of its comfort zone of limited and heavily spatialized imagination. What is most interesting to me, however, is bringing a little postmodern understanding to important figures to tease out ideas that might otherwise be overlooked due to their time period being less concerned with the holes in all foundational accounts. To name a few: C.S. Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzche, Dane Rudhyar, Oswald Spengler, Jean Gebser, Henri Bergson, Samuel Coleridge, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, Helena Blavatsky, G.I. Gurdjieff, Sri Aurobindo, and even Hegel, despite his problems!
48. Deely (2001)
49. See Gangle (2016)
50. I am not alone in my evaluation of the greatness of Jane Roberts. Please see my late friend Peter Wilberg’s work, especially (Wilberg, 2017).
51. Godwin (1994, 2007)
52. Tarnas (2006)
53. Hammer (2001)
54. Hanegraaff (1997)
55. He reportedly said this a lot in conversation (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson).
56. Scofield (2023)
57. Rudhyar (1991)
58. https://www.astrosynthesis.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/southern-signs-and-seasons-brian-clark.pdf
59. https://theastrologypodcast.com/2016/01/03/zodiac-debate-tropical-vs-sidereal/
60. Swanson (2011)
61. See my “Creative Coherence: From Political Physics to Psychic Politics in Hypermodernity”
62. Young (1976)
63. The popularity of Gilles Deleuze, a self-professed metaphysician, across the theoretical disciplines, is a major sign that the anti-metaphysical days are fading.
64. As discussed in the note above, randomness is really a sign of a system relatively open to or freed from the tangle of local causation. While it is true that there are local and mundane causes determining the toss of the coin, they are so complex and therefore sensitive to so many other causes that they reflect more the character of the moment than the brute causal conditions of a local space.
65. Ebert (2013)

 

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