On Infrastructure & Action

Being, Integrity, and Creativity in the Universe
This issue was a surprise. It’s title comes from a fictional book I mentioned in The Breaking Dawn, and I rather eagerly waited for an opportunity to devote an issue of FMP to it. It was an intriguing subject to me. Somehow I knew that the real text of such a book would be different than I had portrayed it, but I hadn’t grasped that it would be this different.
And so this issue came out in a way I hadn’t planned… in a way that I wouldn’t have planned. As odd as it sounds, once I actually began writing, I found that the issue wanted to come out this way. I struggled with some of the more sensitive terminology, but I think that’s because we don’t have proper words for some of these things.
Writing this was a strange and difficult process, and it took me some time to get back to normal afterward. But I am pleased with it.
And so, here you have this month’s issue. This is a strange issue to publish, but it’s “the way it wanted to be,” and I’ve learned not to frustrate such things.

1) Humankind is not an Earth species. Our ultimate connections and flows are of the greater universe, not of a single planet.

Earth has been our cradle: a place for us to form, before we stepped into the larger universe.
The universe and the noble beings in it are waiting for us to open our eyes, to recognize our unlimited nature, and to believe what we see. This, at present, is our over-arching vocation.
That the universe is, is self-evident.
That we exist is self-evident.
What we are able to be is also self-evident, once we clear our eyes and see ourselves as we are.
All Earth’s creatures have innate abilities; man has the ability to create abilities.
Life is recognized by its ability to reverse entropy.
Trees take in gases, light, water and minerals. They organize, concentrate, and harmonize them, producing fruit.
Animals take the nutrients of the world and become majestic creatures. And yet the lion cannot bring forth fruits and the tree cannot run. Each is what they are, and no more.
Man, however, can reverse entropy in infinite ways. And his reversal of entropy is chosen, directed and willful.
Man, if and when he wills it, creates. And to this creative ability there is no fundamental limit.
And so humankind is, by its nature, a species of the universe, not merely of a planet. It is necessary for us to begin seeing ourselves that way.

2) Humankind… Man… has his being in the creator, not in the created.

To be, for members of a Universe species, is of a different type than the being of lesser creatures.
A creature of Universe – a creature of Creator – carries a secret connection, often barely known to themselves. But at moments it becomes their focal point, lifting them to their true level, as beings joined, even if by a thin thread, to Universe and Creator.
(Our words and understandings are insufficient for explaining Universe or Creator, and perhaps even Man. Pure understandings will come, overtime, through the thread of connection between them. Until then we describe them only in part.)
To hazard one’s fragile existence for the sake of the good is the action of a being in connection to Universe. In that moment he or she does not calculate and reason; he or she acts because it is right, and that “right” is grasped by communion with divinity.
In crisis, humans pull up every resource, every forgotten image, whatever can quicken us and bring forward our power. And so we defend and reveal the transcendent part of ourselves… our being.
To experience wonder and awe, to attain to rapture, to perceive the essence of beauty… these things are experienced through the connection to Universe. To know them is to transcend mere matter and the concerns associated with it. It is to sense and grasp something ineffable yet real, something of infinite value. It is to be, above and beyond simply existing.
Beings, as distinct from simpler creatures, carry an inherent dignity. They stand not only as what they appear to be, but, even if occasionally and remotely, as something tinged by divinity.
The consciousness of a Universe being is more than brain or even mind. He or she is able to grasp, at least sometimes and in part, the nature of the divine: to sense seeds of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to sense the eternal in both the awe-inspiring and in stillness.
Even the purest creation of mind, mathematics, must stand upon axioms that it cannot prove and which cannot be reduced to its logic scheme. The consciousness of the Universe being, however limitedly and imperfectly, touches that which lies beyond it.
Humankind, then, is a species of the creator, not merely the created. He is, properly, a being.

3) Man’s present plight is that he finds himself a Universe being in a lesser world.

The clash between being and the lesser world is fundamental: they are of differing types, of differing sources. And at the present stage, this clash is painful.
The netherweeds of humankind’s physical inheritance tend to choke-off the connection to Universe and Creator, slowing or stopping their development into the beings they are structured to be.
It is animal level blockages that restrain the Creator consciousness from filling our world.
Fear, status and shame are entropy incarnate, making humankind vulnerable to many errors. These, and their variants, drive men and women to seek safety in a collective… as members of a mass entity rather than standing on their own.
Standing alone means to accept the responsibilities that come with consciousness. Many humans, then, would prefer not to see.
If man chooses not to see, he becomes, increasingly, a creature of the lesser world. His or her consciousness picks up fewer impulses of the divine, losing key aspects of its effectiveness. Within this condition, humans tend to give up control of themselves and to labor in entropy rather than the reversal of entropy.
The persistent fear of blows from above – from the upper layers of hierarchies that back their orders with punishments – makes the acceptance of consciousness, sight and responsibility frightening.
To become a fuller being, then, requires a willingness to accept intimidations, slanders and a variety of vulnerabilities. To bear these requires a belief in the connection to Creator: that it is real, and that it is of overriding importance.
Lacking faith in the potency of being, humans tend to find a passable place and to cling to it. Lacking belief in transcendence, there is no reason to accept risk: eat, drink, grasp what can be grasped, and die.
Groups of humans who fail to feel after the thread of being, then, embody entropy and instill it in others. The surpassing being is, to them, a condemnation, and is soon enough despised.
Consciousness organizes itself into minimal sustainable units; into maximum sustainable concentrations. And so collective grouping alters the operation of consciousness, diluting or devolving it.
The more individual the unit, the greater the ability of its consciousness. This finds its apex in the individual, which is also the unit that connects to Universe. Only the individual is a being.
Language is a mixed blessing to humankind. It is a necessary infrastructure for communication at present, but it is also the medium through which intimidations, deceptions and even self-deceptions operate.
Communication via the thread of being is other than word-denominated.

4) We must discern how we see and hear. Because how we perceive determines how we will develop. Ultimately it determines our fitness to partake in better situations and better worlds.

In man’s present state – only partly developed and residing in an often contrary world – substitutes for seeing can be appealing. And in fact they are very often chosen.
These substitutes for seeing require that men and women be somehow subsumed or insulated.
Mankind has never gained actual safety this way, but they have obtained promises of safety, and since seeing less or less directly was felt to be necessary, attractive promises were adopted: They were pleasant enough to serve as objects of faith, after which further deliberation felt unpleasant.
Progress has never come to mankind this way. The progress of mankind has come through advances spawned by individuals, and only later adopted by the promisers of safety and collectors of sacrifices.
It is from the most concentrated points of consciousness – from individual humans – that leaps forward take shape.
And so, how we see ourselves and how we see the world determines our creative output.
If we focus upon the terrors of the world, we focus also on our vulnerability as an isolated individual. Over time we see that it’s attractive to associate with some great one, whose show of confidence makes us feel safer and less insecure.
Safety under the great one is mainly an illusion, but one that soothes our unfortunate emotional biases. And so, great ones have continually stepped forward to be followed.
By seeing the root of their safety and comfort in an idol, followers defend their idol’s reputation at great length.
But in a world of great ones and worshipers, primary and potent beings do not fit. They are isolated, abused, ignored and pushed out of sight.
By seeing the world as hierarchy and power, people fit themselves into certain slots within one or more hierarchies.
In this condition, people see their roles as their true selves. They compare new ideas, not against reality, but against their roles and against their hierarchies. And if a new idea clashes with their role or hierarchy, they must find ways to eject it… either that or face their edifice of safety crumbling.
A woman or man locked into a role is substantially cut off from higher ambitions.
If we see safety in the crowd, we dim our consciousness and limit ourselves to the values, aims and development level of the crowd.
If we see ourselves within a tradition, we set hard limits to our development. Even the best tradition becomes a ceiling above us, through which we dare not pass.
These errors of focus produce civilizations embodying entropy, with low levels of forgiveness and reconciliation.
To play a role, to cling to a great one, to hold to a tradition… all are substitutes for being.
How we see determines what we become.

5) Humankind is a species of self-creating beings.

Physical inheritance affects humans, as does early experience, but the turning points in a human life are the choices a person makes. ## These channel the forces and experiences of the individual, slowly creating their future being.
To him that chooses poorly, worse choices follow. To him that chooses well, better choices follow.
The fact that humans are self-creating makes external standards of behavior contrary to their core mechanism, which is a self-forming being.
The locus of our decisions – the point at which they are made – must be internal to us, if we wish them to improve us internally.
Humans accept external standards because they feel insecure, unable and afraid. They hesitate to take responsibility upon themselves. The external standard saves them from having to judge each circumstance for themselves. Obedience means that someone else will stand as the responsible party.
Made-by-others rulesets stand in place of self-judgment. They route around the being-level processes that create forward development.
And by accepting that they must meet external standards, humans doom themselves to an eternal chase, never quite reaching a verdict of “righteous.” By conceding that they are insufficient at the outset, there is no possibility of emergence.
The model of external rules treats the human as a mechanism that either meets certain criteria or does not. It sets a mechanized perfection as the standard and the slightest deviation becomes a failure.
Man, however, is an organism, not a machine. The mechanical model is unnatural to him and will always generate entropy.
Humans, because of their limited development, and particularly because of their susceptibility to fears, are easy prey to a fast, easy, external and idolized framework of right and wrong, rooted in primitive impulses.
And again this leads toward a world built of idols and worshipers, in which primary and potent beings don’t fit.
Man, if seeing himself as a fundamentally self-creating being, bases his development upon the thread of being, upon his or her own judgment, and upon benefits or harms caused in the real world.

6) All of mankind’s best moral teachers have arrived at one version or another of what is called the Golden Rule:

That we should do unto others as we would have done to ourselves, or at least that we should not do to others what we wouldn’t like done to ourselves.
No other human standard for morality is remotely as useful as the Golden Rule, and the Golden Rule is being-centered.
“Do unto others as you’d have them do to you,” appeals directly and entirely to self-reference. It does not appeal, in any way, to external rulesets. And because it is being-centered, it leads humans forward.
While external rules lead humanity into diluted consciousness and to the belief that they are derivative rather than primary beings, the Golden Rule leads humans toward a well-developed and well-aggregated consciousness.
Being by nature self-referential, humans judge themselves every time they act.
Treating others as they wish to be treated, they define themselves as beneficial. Treating others in ways they wouldn’t like, they define themselves as hazards. There is no escape from this arrangement, though men attempt it by ceding their judgment to others, as when following rules.
Self-reference produces all the authentic goodness and creativity in the world.
By displacing their judgment with rules, humans displace the satisfaction and happiness that would come with being-centered development.
Obeying mere rules, humans do service to an inferior morality and sow entropy into the world.
Rules and obedience are ill-suited to beings.
The virtue created by the Golden Rule is called integrity. It is the joining of fundamental beliefs and actions, which generates harmony in man’s inner nature.
The good man or woman is a sincere being: self-honest, open and biased toward kindness. Such people eschew playing roles and tend to see the world with the fresh eyes of a child.
Children have do not naturally look at the world through lenses of hierarchy, status, and their various effects. They see the world open-eyed, trying only to make sense of it. Proper development would involve the improvement and extension of this beginning, not its displacement.
Integrity requires a belief in one’s innermost nature, including a reliance upon our thread of being. In the present world, that can be a dangerous faith.
Most people innately fear the wrath of high status individuals, feeling, at some level, that daring to be, without permission, will be treated as a serious offense.
Openly and defiantly grasping responsibility is also discomforting to those who have laid down their own judgment and found comfort in life as a derivative. And if the contrast is great enough, those who have made bad choices may be forced to see.
Forcing people to see what they’ve long avoided can lead to explosive consequences.
Humans, at present, are not fully developed beings, additionally carrying some unfortunate tendencies. And for such beings, the Golden Rule is path forward.
External commands cannot improve our internal machinery, but facing and judging ourselves does improve us internally.
Even after choosing wrongly, facing the results of those choices – taking rather than evading responsibility – refines, harmonizes and improves us. Our subsequent choices will be better. Not only will actual results and their reasons be recorded in us, but the parts and forces that led to the bad choices will be revealed. This leads toward improvements in our internal parts.
And so, paying the cost of consciousness prevents further expenses of the same type, as well as making us better beings.
The Golden Rule, if not displaced, would spawn consciousness organized around our abilities and loves. And that, by extension, would spawn a world built around our abilities and our loves.
In such a world, we will see the suppression of talent as a fundamental error and curiosity as something sacred. We’ll also come to see in the errors of others, not offenses, but virtues that are as yet undeveloped.

7) Humans are creatures that can be either divided against themselves or true to themselves.

Being divided against themselves, humans dismember themselves. Being true to themselves, they build, clarify and improve themselves.
Humans are also creatures that observe themselves, and by observing form opinions of themselves. And so humans… healthy humans… are inherently moral beings that cannot transgress against others without damaging themselves.
Since humans are beings of individual consciousness, cooperation between them can either respect individual consciousness or oppress it; and rarely is there an in-between.
All hierarchy involves the suppression of individuals, unless it be temporary, freely chosen, and entail zero cost of withdrawal.
Authority (which, along with threat and pain, is a pillar of enforced hierarchy) requires the suppression of individual choice… of individual will.
To suppress individual will, by structure, damages all beings within that structure. Those imposed upon are diminished; those imposing are internally deformed.
The acceptance of authority requires women and men to accept executive entities above themselves, thereby demoting and diminishing their own executive faculties. By this their consciousness is diluted.
For those who hold it, authority is a type of drug… an addictive and damaging drug.
Within hierarchy, humans are treated as derivatives of the hierarchy, and come to see themselves as derivatives of the hierarchy. Over time, they identify with the structure and are emotionally moved by tales of their hierarchy’s greatness.
Natural human interactions are very rich. Upon considering the words of a friend, a woman or man will refer to detailed and informative images they hold of this person. This clarifies communication as well as strengthening warm bonds between the two individuals.
Communication with a hierarchy is stripped almost bare every time it passes vertically, and often as it passes horizontally. It not only reduces the scope of the information, but it dehumanizes it. In particular, it strips out the human references that the Golden Rule relies upon.
And so communications inside hierarchy are contrary to natural human processes; they require reference to rules and forbid reference to human concerns. They are binary, requiring dominant-submissive relationships.
Free and open cooperation sits near the center of human thriving, certainly in the present era. None of us have time enough to smelt our own metals, make our own shingles and cut our own lumber, not to mention formulating medicines.
The worst and sadly most common means of human interaction is one whose primary operating statement is this: Do what we say or we’ll hurt you. That is a clearly counter-cooperative statement, and has empowered barbaric rulership over peaceful people, to the detriment of posterity, as well as those suffering through it.
The truth of humans is that if you force them together, they become irritable and clannish.
If, on the other hand, you leave humans separated, they begin seeking each other.
Thus liberty is the condition that breeds willful and even joyful cooperation. Unforced groupings are synergistic and useful to all who choose to be part of them. (If not, they would simply withdraw.)
A proper model of interaction between humans is one that that works with human nature rather than against it; a model of interaction that takes human consciousness a primary, not a derivative.
Human cooperation, if it is to be effective and enduring, must enable humans to be true to themselves, rather than divided against themselves.

8) Life, if it does not act, ceases to exist.

Human action, and especially human creativity, is preceded by will. This is not true for animals, but it is for humans. The fundamental choice facing humans is to act in the preservation and development of themselves, or to live at the expense of others: to produce or to plunder.
Creative and beneficially-intended will is the incarnator of life: it injects life into the universe. It brings the fruits of the ineffable into the realm of the physical.
Life enters the universe and reverses entropy by the benevolent action of our wills. Humans, firstly, must survive. After that, they improve and expand themselves though willful action… action to defend and expand the best within themselves. Action becomes them and excessive inaction on their part leads to death.
If we and our world are to be improved… if life is to thrive and expand… our willful actions are required. There is no other model. We must do it, directly.
All conscious action is the expression of faith in something. Creative human action embodies faith in being… faith in the thread of connection with Creator and Universe, and the impulses we gain from it.
Willful human action is rather like a new field propagating through a vast space. This is true internally, as well. Every choice is a like a pebble dropped into the pool of our consciousness.
And since will and action are a proper vocation for humankind, each of us should hold one clear concept: The world doesn’t happen to me; I happen to the world.
Certainly we work to use the world without abusing it, but the fact is that we can, do and should use the world.
It is our job and our privilege to plant good seeds at every opportunity: to nurture honesty and goodness however we can. And that applies equally to external and internal seeds.
It is the flow of energy through an organism that gives function and shape to that organism. For man, that flow is from conception to self-reference, to will, and to action.
Since man must act to exist, his or her fundamental choice is to cultivate life or to spread entropy. That choice remains because it is built into the structure of the universe. So long as humans remain human, this is the essential choice we face.

9) Love, our hunger to bless, is perhaps the most powerful of human forces, and for a very simple reason: The desire to bless assumes that we are able to bless.

The things we assume to be true constitute our deep beliefs. As such, they focus our imaginations and direct our channels of thought. Our deepest expectations and our deepest assumptions form a kind of crucible in which our decisions are formed. Productive assumptions and expectations bless us all our days. Bad ones punish us all our days.
The assumption of love – the ability to bless – is one of potency, rising almost to the point of infinite potency. This is an assumption that the connection with Creator and Universe will be be mixed with our decisions.
The organizing principle of life is that of overcoming entropy. The principle of love runs parallel to it: Drawing upon the thread of being and injecting blessing into the world. Blessing, of course, is directly counter-entropic.
By assuming the ability to bless, humans draw upon the root of being within themselves, generating not only specific blessings but general development.
Love lies at the root of our nature and it is equally available to us all.

10) Human creativity is of the same form and flow as was the creation of the universe.

The scale of creation does not change the nature of the creative act.
Every creative conception initiates a flow of primal substance: counter-entropic, fathomless and unrestrained. When inserted into the universe by will and action, it reverses the physical order of the world. Small or large, it recreates the world.
Creativity does not descend from the creator, but rises to the creator. It is action in parallel with the acts of the creator. The harmony of these actions generates resonances, through us and into the universe.
Humans are creators. This is our natural and proper vocation. This is the light we shine into the world; elevating and cleansing it by innumerable acts of creation.
If we want to bring thriving, satisfaction and vibrance into human affairs and later into the universe itself, the creative act… the creative impulse… must abide at the center of our consciousness.
But this is more than our proper vocation: It is our destiny, because we are inherently structured for it.
Recreating ourselves and our world is what we are built for. We are, whether we feel like it or not, magnificent creatures.

11) How little difference there is between active, willful creation and divinity.

The being who reverses entropy, willfully, hungering to bless, is on an upward trajectory, rising through creation and toward Creator. Certainly we cannot speak of these things precisely, but that makes them no less true.
This is not beyond us; it is in our very structure and every healthy human has experienced it, at least in part.
When we love and create, we push entropy out of our universe: we incarnate life.
But if we incarnate entropy, we push life out of the universe, and internally we narrow the thread of being… our secret thread of connection to Universe and Creator.
We nourish ourselves by taking into ourselves those things which enrich our inner cisterns.
This enrichment is not merely to observe and appreciate works of beauty and genius, but to seek and absorb their essence… to find and grasp the seed that created them… a seed that is able to bring forth the same fruit in us.
Our faith is that we can draw from Universe and Creator, building an existence based upon our abilities and the things we love… a world geared for happiness, production and development.
Our faith, even if it must endure the difficulties of an undeveloped and contrary world, persuades us that we, nonetheless, have the seed of better things in us… that ultimately we possess the ability to create the things we love and value.
We are here to bless the world and to flower as a species of the universe.
Whosoever wills, let them come.