VIII

the Problem with Eternity

If this is starting to sound like the modern world, far from it. This history had been told many times over by the time of Achilles or the Old Testament. There are many different directions the story can go in from here, though none of them have a happy ending. Each competing mass-mind strives for dominance and eternity until it goes too far out on a limb to defend its fundamentals and collapses of its own weight. Of course, this isn’t the only way a civilization can be destroyed. There are organic causes like earthquakes, disease and famine, but a mentally healthy society can often bull through these.  The internal conceptual convolutions of a post golden age society are a more serious long term threat to themselves and each other than natural disasters. Nuclear war is a recent example.

At many moments in our history, there were generations of us that lived in unique third stage mass-minds that were our equal in complexity. All of them were constructed with impressive creativity and imagination. To call the ancient ones “primitive” does not do them justice. Most of us can’t explain our advanced technology any better than most of them could explain theirs. I sure that they would have been satisfied with nothing less than as complete and detailed a picture of the world as we expect. Those pictures are gone and our efforts to conjure them up from the stuff they left behind depends on us being able to depart from our own conscious recreation of our world. Like us, their experience included a variety of both second and third stage mentalities. What we all have in common is that all of us experienced much of our lives with our identity vested in a shared conscious world where everyone is given an ego. This becomes a new identity that is one’s passport to the world of the mass-consciousness and a vital survival tool for life in the big city. Civilization’s whole history is our struggle with the integration of  third stage mentality into our lives, both as individuals and as a society.

This has been a generic social history so far, and one that can be told over and over as if societies were bumps on a road. It wasn’t  a  linear progression that led from cavemen to us. Consciousness is an ability humans would gain and lose over and over as each society had its Golden Age. Many ancient cultures went through this process several times, with later generations building whole new conscious worlds out of the bits of the old ones that their ancestors wouldn’t recognize. Sometimes cultures get passed on intact to people with no genetic connection to their predecessors. All these competing mass-minds induce the people who think  they’re living in them to risk their lives in the conquest of other mass-minds. The winning culture is the one that can consume, absorb or destroy all the others. This creates a mass-mind that hovers like a presence over the land. More real than the dirt it hovers over, and requiring a very specialized consciousness that was deeply embedded in the world as we had better know it. Sort of like having a software monopoly. Great Leaders measured their worth by the scale of their organizations. Just knowing that, a thousand miles away, people were being forced to use a fork must of made them feel like, no, picture themselves as living in a really big world in which they are the really big shit.

Now and then, someone would put together a vast empire that allowed the organizing of vast resources into vast economies. Trade and a stable currency would, on the hole, raise the standard of living for the successful and eventually everyone else. Everyone who’s left. Trade and war can accelerate the process of conscious assimilation by presenting a barrage of new things for your conscious mind to do or defend itself from. Each day becomes a scramble to create a conscious world in your mind that can keep up with it all. Which is exactly how it works. The way an Empire spreads is by making more people’s day to day survival dependent on being conscious and conscious of it. If possible, making everyone’s entire waking life consumed with concerns about things so complex that they require constant consciousness just to be concerned about them. We cooperate in this endeavor by supervising ourselves self-consciously (minding our p’s and q’s). This can leave little time for one’s organic life except the unavoidable need for food, and what goes on behind bedroom and bathroom doors. By requiring a particular method of organizing everyone’s conscious minds, and making the same conscious world every day, the Empire(mass-mind) becomes something that anyone who lives in it would tell you is actually there. The end result is a vast continuous common experience. Except that we’re not the ones having it.

 

You get you, and it gets the world you think you live in. As an Empire grows, an increasing number of humans are generating third stage mental organizations and experience only half of them. Our self-conscious experience is contained within the borders that surround the bit that the mass-mind says is you. All those other halves become the same kind of opportunity for experience as you conscious self. You do all the work, and it gets half the fun.

                Fun? Here is where you can see the living energy of the mass-mind. You can see it in the choices and actions we take. I’ve already described how our organic selves can default to original factory settings like instincts which are choices made by our evolutionary ancestors and not us. However, in matters of social organization, which for us are in our arti-physical world, the mass-mind takes the place of God and makes the choices that control the actions of groups or individuals. This is not about being conscious of your choices, but about being what is conscious of your choices. If it is not where you have vested your identity, then the mass-mind will assume the role of what is making choices. So, when you’re not directly involved, outside forces will choose or control the actions of your physical body and your social presence in the mass-mind. This time, it’s not called following your instincts. This is getting sucked into the fever of the mob.

Look at how much effort we put into maintaining our society. I don’t mean taxes, I mean effort. Everything we do that is not related to maintaining a comfy experience for ourselves is work we do to create a social organization that we intend to use as a tool for our physical survival and prosperity. Once we experience our lives as an ego in the conscious world, we become the tool of society’s survival and prosperity. As long as we remain ascended in our egos, society will remain the greater organization than ourselves for which we would sacrifice and delay gratification. Sure, it offers prosperity and a greatly enhanced experience, but we have developed a greatly enhanced dependency on it.

Economics is our creation of an equation to enable the consumption or standard of living desired by society’s participants. If they loose control of it, that can make the participants become part of the equation. Absorbed into the quest for rationality and efficiency and reduced to a concept, the consumer becomes sublimated to the needs of the system itself, assimilated by the mass-mind. Using the self-interest of the leisure class to enforce its presence and harness, for themselves and it, the energy of the greater population that is the primary source of its power. The sort of energy that went into building the pyramids, cathedrals or monuments was expended in the arti-physical world where it reinforced the existence and cohesion of society in every participant’s mind. This was also the destiny of all of the massive efforts expended on warfare and conquest. Left unchecked, such a world could grow into such a magnificent and lofty creation that it grows beyond what the participants can afford to maintain.

That’s the mass-mind’s idea of economics. Only a fraction of our productive output goes toward actually making our lives better. It mostly goes toward improving or expanding the experience of the mass-mind and those few who its system protects. A successful empire will enjoy its own Golden Age and then face the same crises that all type B’s face. It is still controlled by the Leisure Class who depend on maintaining age-old fundamentals that include their existence, which means dragging along a lot of ideas that experience and discovery has reduced to cultural deadweight.  Many no longer believe in the old ideas. Most no longer lead lives that depend on them being true. Soon, the lives of its subjects will grow in complexity faster than the society can be adapted and modified by the current generation of elites to accommodate everyone. People will grow from trying to understand the world to wondering why it doesn’t understand them. For the boys in charge, here is where some slow, imperceptible social flexibility can act as a pressure release as they slowly repaint the picture while distracting us with images of angels dancing on the heads of pins or knuckles being crushed with clamps. And they can always blame their predecessors for screwing up and not getting things the way they were always supernaturally intended.

 

But what happens when even that’s not enough to keep up? When there is no way Great Leader’s world can ever catch up and encompass the expanding diversity of its people? When one too many fundamentals are eroded to justify the continued maintenance of the leisure class who no longer maintain consciousness, but just defend their place in society? How long do you think that will work until the consumers/peasants pick up pitchforks and find Great Leader and his friends and kill them? Hadn’t anyone noticed the increasing drain on our resources of maintaining the separateness of the power structure and their security from the public? Is that really cost effective? If the system breaks, it’s a long way down. We lead lives where absolutely everything we do relies on something having already been done by our ancestors. Take all that away and we would be starting from scratch.

 The rules of the old order become burdensome formalities, and can eventual consume all of a society’s energy trying to enforce them. Sometimes even progressive social change can destroy a society. It may look like progress, but new concepts of what and where we are can erode our most fundamental social agreements like justice or property, creating conflict and disharmony. Worst case, this erosion can wash away a culture so suddenly as to all but erase it in a few generations.

There are a handful of cultures in our history that managed to press on for centuries, and some of them only as a memory. What distinguishes these cultures is that when the moment of crises came, rather than carry on normal until it’s too late, someone, or lots of someones, got the wild idea of trying to sort out for themselves what the problem was. The first thing that someone might notice is how much harder it has become to justify the predefined roles that divided society into classes. The explanations are no longer self-evident. No one remembers how consciousness began with haves and have-nots. The People have acquired parity with the elite in leading the same conscious lives that they do. All that prevents a more egalitarian distribution of the leisure is logic. Old logic that now has to defend itself because everyone can imagine new logics based on new ideas. New ideas that still seek a connection to some Fundamental Truth or other in order to claim some supernatural anointing, which is still what The Truth is suppose to look like.

If this new logic doesn’t include an explanation for the lofty status of the Leisure Class, that can mean trouble for Great Leader and his friends. Sometimes, this kind of change happens like an eruption. The quickest way to get rid of the old logic is to kill everyone who thinks with it. The snag with that plan is that even after the old logic is snuffed out, it creates a climate of violence that begins to look like the best way for different new ideas to deal with each other. Trapped in a cycle of snuffing, competing New Ways destroy the society they want to lead to paradise. This situation may allow anyone or anything to come along that offers a less deadly alternative. Even a brutally enforced dictatorship might offer a brighter future to a population with low expectations. Being killed in an organized predictable system of terror could be preferable to randomly getting in the way of all the avenging.

 

With any luck, something like a democracy or republic might emerge which so far has been the best way for a society to cope with rapid change and new ideas without flying apart. But democracy requires conceding a lot. Mainly for the Leisure Class, who found themselves with only one way out. What social privileges, like staying alive, did they desire so much that they were willing to grant them to everyone else? Rights become a social compromise instead of a state-granted privilege. Government becomes a commodities market for rights and social status. Industry finds no profit in sticking to traditional class distinctions and sets about creating a new set of its own. Progress builds momentum and change happens before anyone can inquire of its Sacred Anointing. Once the money comes in, we usually stop asking. Forget his bloodline, can he make trains run? Damn the fundamentals if they don’t help the GDP. The fundamentals simply aren’t fast enough. This actually protects the old structure by making it largely irrelevant. Now only distant, abstract concepts hold anointings and they’re kept safely in a church or museum and well away from the business. The mass-mind is now run by a flexible consensus of consumer demand- what we want and a way to get without getting on our knees. People live in a market driven system that is driven to actually look out for everyone’s needs (really). The fundamentals can sort themselves out on PBS, or TBN.

That’s not as naïve as it sounds, for this is what the arti-physical world is capable of doing for us. Classical Greece and modern America are examples of societies based on no anointing whatsoever. Here, Great Leader has to convince you that he lives in the world you think you’re living in. This is Mass-Mind Type C,  where at least presumptively, all participants are the Leisure Class. Which makes the distinction meaningless. Type C means equality and fraternity in an open society of citizens who are the self-dictators of their lives and mutual creators of their world. This popular utopian ideal faces an uphill battle, because by the time a type C  begins to emerge, both the mass-mind and its inhabitants are insane. Conscious society has reached its final form and most critical moment. Now the issue becomes consciousness itself, which has become the single greatest threat to our survival. It’s come down to a struggle for the whole conscious enchilada between the self and the mass-mind. To the mass-mind, type C is a further step on its path of identity that goes beyond its (and our) own other half of consciousness, where we think society is, to the self half, where we think we are. This is what happens when we believe we are what the mass-mind says we are. Identity is sublimated to ‘other’ and becomes an opportunity for experience for the mass-mind and not us. Our highest level of organization has been shared out to become part of a greater organization.

If unable to grapple with the new egalitarian logic, society retreats into its idealized, stylized recreation. Either as a fascist dictatorship, where the State is conscious of every choice in the life of its citizens in a controlled world built for soulless automatons, or its economic counterpart, free-market consumerism, where Corporate is conscious of every consumer’s need in a sanitized dreamland of plastic people. These social structures ostracize their organic selves and choke out any organic community. These communities may thrive in the arti-physical world, but can simultaneously destroy their means of survival in the physical world.  

Societies will assume many ancient priorities and assumptions even if no one living can really explain them. All there has to be is an agreement that those are the priorities and their explanation is a slam dunk that we don’t need to trouble ourselves about. That might include agreeing to do things that would have no reason to be done if that culture didn’t exist. If that agreement sounds almost democratic, that’s because the essence of democracy has been there since the beginning of civilization. Mass-minds are very democratic, whether it’s observed or not. In order for them to survive, we all have to agree that it’s there. One way or the other, by vote or violence, coercion or convincing.

 

The continued primacy of consciousness and the world it’s conscious of can blind the populace to matters of its own physical survival in the physical world. They continue to conger an inherited conceptual world that is headed for an eventual crises once too many fundamentals have been undermined. Generations will come that are not able to inspire their convictions in their descendants. Nearly all of society’s energy now goes to maintaining our lives in the arti-physical world. Which has become so full of reasons why lots of things need to be destroyed, or protected from being destroyed, that our creative output is rendered too cumbersome to use. Society fragments and physical resources are squandered in the conceptual destruction.

This might convince everyone to submit to any enforceable structure that can keep us organized enough to keep our economy/culture running and believed in. To be the cork that contains the destructive forces even if it means pretending to like it. This can be fair trade off, especially to a generation that sees its own standard of living threatened or lost. This is where a society might invite a new elite, with a new explanation of how the past led to the present, to take control. Or take control first, and fudge the explanation later. This appears, once again, as fascism, with the anointing of blood and law, or corporate, with the anointing of wealth. Either way, every act of life becomes a predetermined conscious decision of the State or the Great Registered Trademark. This is called Mass-Mind Type C Run Amok. In either form, this is the final surrender of ourselves to our conscious minds. As if society were a bus full of passengers who created the bus but have no idea who is driving or where they are going. The bus begins to drive itself as best it can. If it’s not built very well, it can lead a culture over the brink. People may accept and defend a conceptual whackyland that may have little regard for their own physical survival. In order to defend these mental creations, we might have to physically destroy its creators, which is us. This is because we always feel beholden to these mass mental organizations even though we create them and we hold their fate in our minds. The logic is self-contained. The mass-mind is a greater organization of our selves, so our selves must be lesser parts of it individually, which means it’s the boss if those selves want to participate in thinking they live there. In the struggle for our souls, we lose.

This gives type C  its frightening Orwellian reputation of an incompetent society held together by thought police and fear of pain or humiliation while it does one stupid or brutal thing after another. Recent history is full of examples of societies trying to reach some conceptual paradise through physical self-destruction, from totalitarianism to communism to consumerism. In each case the problem is believing that the state or marketplace or whatever was actually there and a part of the physical world and its desires and needs were synonymous with nature’s. . Because no culture has ever made that vital distinction between the physical and the arti-physical, social destruction means structural destruction. Eventually, that society will raise a generation for whom the McWorld they inherit is not where anyone wants to think they are and they will kill it, along with its social infrastructure and any economy that can support large populations. Even when societies manage to achieve some success in living with nature, that contrast still needs to be discovered.

When our real needs and desires can’t be met within the system we’ve designed for ourselves, some of us might start looking beyond the boundaries of the system. Either to past systems that once met those needs or to new systems that meet them in new ways. Often, a society would have so many deeply entrenched ideas about the physical world that its outcasts would have nowhere to go but spirituality.

 

This summary of civilization seems to have ignored the spiritual world, but it simply hasn’t entered the story yet. I’ve already asserted that all the trappings of ancient and tribal religions, where shamans and such would go through supernatural transformations and everyone would engage in strange and magical rituals, were all the varied ways that people just like us used to acquire the conscious state of mind that we wake up with everyday and take for granted. Granted, many of those “schools of thought” would eventually became much more, but all of them had their origins as third stage ascension rituals. Later, when a society begins to turn into a solidly conscious type B, the trappings of these rituals and the cosmologies behind them remain as mysterious procedures and beliefs that suggest a lost ancient knowledge or something. We assume that they’re not telling us something that we already know, nor how to do something that we’re already doing. If all this sounds like I’m dismissing religion as simply the process that developed consciousness, that’s not quite right. I’m not referring to anyone’s personal spiritual experience, just the ritual activities and the explanations behind them. Religion as we know it is what’s left of the process. It’s just a shadow of what was once necessary for our ancestors to survive as a large, technically advanced, authoritarian society.

For those societies, spirituality becomes a handy, loosely-designed word for a broad and ghostly context that includes any explanation of life that differs with the dominant fundamentals which have their own word, religion. For the keepers of the mass-consciousness, spirituality is a versatile and vast storage compartment where other worlds are kept in an other world. The current dominant mass-mind is the undeniable reality. Rival religious entities were expelled to the unspatialized  unreality of the supernatural or far out, or way out there. Once corralled, these rival mass-minds lie in wait for any sign of loss of vitality in their jailers. But for the citizenry, it is still too convincing that their survival as a person depends on staying within the boundaries of the system, and denying or ignoring the inconsistencies. This results in a life that is deeply imbedded in the arti-physical world as if it were a fortress. A comfortable high tech, highly organized life of mass insanity where all are faithful sentries guarding a world that isn’t there. Those who choose to look outside the way things need to be are cast as rebels and systems are created to suppress rebellion and reinforce denial. Further and further measures are taken to confine these free thinkers and to beef up the barricades at the borders of the system.

 

 Religion still has an important role in raising conscious children by placing conscious limits on their behavior. Christianity, for example, would tell them that their eternal survival or suffering is depending on things only their conscious minds can do. Much attention must be paid to one’s temptations and transgressions. You may have to report them later. With eternal survival at stake, the conscious ego-self must take charge and overrule impulses and desires experienced by its original mind… while thinking it’s itself doing it for it’s own good (“hey! I said so!”) . Now a strange duality arrives between one’s needs and desires and a secondary part that’s bent on protecting you from them. Both are convinced that the second part is the real you, and the first part is your sinful nature. There’s a wonderful afterlife as a reward for successfully “staying on top of yourself” and consciously regulating your life. Which bit of ourselves do you figure gets to go to heaven? Shouldn’t it be the conscious mind? That’s the bit that did all the work.

In most religions, the soul is the essence of what you are in the here and now and the after. Your physical parts are regarded as a temporary vessel of your inner experience. Enlightenment is not for your elbow. Most would say that the mind is not the soul either. But then, what other part of your body could think about whether you’ve been good enough to go to heaven, or imagine how nice a place it must be. Which leaves the conscious mind in custodial charge of the soul and sends it off in a panic seeking its own connection to God. Here is where we do a remarkable flip-flop. Having lost its original mandate, religion was redeveloped to deal with something that the old ritual-to-consciousness processes had nothing to do with- our relationship with the spiritual world. Prior to the arrival of the ego and the mass-consciousness, mankind had a perfectly fine relationship with what we call the spiritual world, which didn’t become its own category until we moved in upstairs and noticed that this was the bit that didn’t come with us. This left an uncomfortable gap in our understanding of the world and we tried many ways to fill it.

The great beyond that we conjured up and the beings that live there and their messages are the spirit world of our minds. We maintain the same relationship with creation that we always have, which is interesting enough without the zany embellishments of consciousness. Our experience of the broader realms of creation were and still are either physical (first stage) or “unconscious” (second stage), both of which Christianity has dismissed as our primitive, sinful and imperfect nature. This disconnect from our original mentality compelled people to look elsewhere for a deeper contact with creation. Religion as we know it was born of the desire to re-incorporate this broader relationship into the arti-physical world that we are conscious of. And to do so with the bits and pieces of the processes that our ancestors originally used to become self-conscious and build the world we think we live in.

 

In a sense, this is when man was created as the Bible describes him, as an animal that considered itself as something separate from creation. The biblical Adam’s real arrival is after eating the irresistible apple of knowledge. Knowledge means everything you know, which become the building blocks of the conscious world that we think we’re living in. That’s where the story begins… with someone for whom it’s a story. Adam represents the first man with a continuous conscious self. Of course he would think the world was created the moment he became conscious of it. What came before, and who, had no place in it. The Bible’s theme is mankind’s separation from God and the quest for re-unification. In developing consciousness, we walked out on God and that part of His world that we call spiritual. We weren’t driven out. It just looked that way. The irony is that Adam never left the garden. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He no longer experiences where he was. He has chosen the experience of his third stage mentality which was a departure from the creator’s creation into a creation of his own. If you think about it, that “space” or whatever where you’re thinking about it is the only “place” for Adam or whomever to be driven “out” into. And he’s now convinced that the solution is to create the most perfect recreation of God in his mind in order to reunite with Him/Her there. But that isn’t going to happen because we have created something completely different; a separate reality that we treat as part of the physical world, but isn’t.

The conscious world is artificial, as artifact as your plastic lawn furniture. On our organic side, we are all the same. With biological diversity of course, but all are of the same creator and all ancestries connect somewhere back in time. Here we are all tied together- brotherhood of man and all that. Here all the platitudes of heart have currency and everything we do or feel is only natural. Then there is the arti-physical world of third stage organizations. None of that we are one stuff here. Mass-minds know no brotherhood or have any inherent compassion. No heartbeat, no pulse. Third stage organizations are not tied together somewhere back in time. Each of them thinks that they are the first and only and all others are secondary abominations created by lesser creators. They will kill each other or anyone who is not of their body. Which can justify a lot, including everything we call evil. Evil is what mass-minds are to each other.

Think about the phrase man’s inhumanity to man. Is that like dogs not being dog-like to other dogs? Is there an inhuman way for humans to treat each other? It suggests a second channel or an alternative dimension of interaction. Humans being something other than humans. More to the point, doing something that isn’t human, and doing it for the sake of something that isn’t human. Something like a giant mental squid with tentacles that reach into our minds. Something cold with no emotion and no feelings and no regard for flesh and blood. It’s starting to sound like our conscious minds, but that’s only half right. Not the right half, the other half that isn’t the egoself, the world the ego lives in. It has even less connection to being a human than the egoself, hence less compassion or restraint. The result is a human who chooses actions that are in the best interest of a giant evil squid. Which may include the really horrible kinds of things we’ve been known to do to each other. Not just savagery… that’s obviously a part of nature. I mean the really incredible stuff like ritual torture and execution, and total social extermination done in sterile machine-like precision. Or a social order that requires violence to maintain itself regardless of the feelings of any one involved. The worst example of man’s inhumanity to man is cruelty without any savagery at all.

Since emotion isn’t something that happens to third stage mentalities, cultures can engage in acts of brutality without feeling. The sort of feelings that can prevent such acts at the second stage level. Nations can do things to each other that individuals cannot. This is the realm in which the old saw evil as a force in the universe can exist. Not that goodness and niceness couldn't exist if we chose to create it, but mostly it is the mass-mind that decides what's what and we get sucked up into its highly competitive priorities. Namely, we hate or fear other mass-minds. And why not? For a long time survival of a community meant a fierce competition for resources that required extreme measures.

Depictions of evil originated from the ritual processionals of conquered tribes. Before reaching the alter for auction or sacrifice, the captives are paraded down a long causeway of horror intended to destroy their conscious minds first. This destroys their mass-mind and leaves the raw human behind for harvesting. Some cultures would retain this practice, for tradition’s sake, long after becoming a conscious type B mass-mind. The sacrifice ritual is an easy way to differentiate a type A from a type B. A type A society will cut out your heart with the sacred knife. A type B will smash your head with the sacred club. Why? It’s where they think you are. But most retire the practice as too barbaric long before their Golden Age. Even they might become so deranged defending their imaginary world that they do horrible things that other cultures couldn’t imagine being a part of their imaginary world. This kind of twisted mentality was blended with the notion of a malevolent will behind misfortune or bad weather into one idea called good and evil. Which would remain the favorite motif of politics and religion right up to today. We have all paid a heavy price for this conceptual stumble. Blending our own nutty ideas with nature doesn’t make any sense anyway. Imagine a world without mankind in it, an earth that never spawned humans. What would evil be in such a world? Tornadoes? Animals eating each other? Forest fires? Meteors? Where in all the systems of creation would you find anything that wasn’t part of the greater whole of nature? Evil would seem to be something that is only here to benefit our conscious minds. We would seem to be the only ones who know anything about it. Like culture, evil is not God’s creation, it’s ours. A culture isn’t something we are, it’s something we do, just as consciousness is something we do.

 

In this confusion, the supernatural becomes a strange mixture of the real world and the equally real (for us) but separate world of the mass-mind. We invent seductive metaphysics and inventive paradigms to make a single explanation of two vastly different things. They need to be decisively torn apart if we are to make sense of either. On the one hand, we’ve got the physical world where all kinds of things can happen that don’t care whether or not we can understand them. The full extent of our physical lives is not available to our conscious minds. Explaining a spiritual experience is  like explaining a dream, the conscious mind will half-describe, half-destroy either. Being indescribable and beyond understanding, they are called Mysterious or Miraculous Anointings. On the other lobe, we’ve got the arti-physical world we think we’re living in where anything that we or Great Leader can dream up can happen and will be what we get to think we understand. This half of the supernatural works very differently. When we observe something unexpected with no apparent or easy fit into our conscious minds, we might say, “I don’t believe my eyes”. It takes time, but we can re-build a sufficiently complete reconstruction of the outside world that now includes these new unsettling details. This is called Enlightenment. This should clear up any confusion.

Conscious reality is ours, and exists only as long as we continue to create it. While it is based on what we perceive of the outside world, there is no limit to how far it can depart into an abstract construction with little resemblance to nature. That’s probably obvious. People of different cultures can have difficulty seeing each other’s culture through the concepts of their own. Distortion is an inevitable part of using the perceptive powers of our conscious mind. It simply works that way. It’s only a problem if this recreation fools you into believing that it is the real outside and indeterminable world. It can be whatever we want it to be. The only check on an artificial mass-mind is its survival value; how well it integrates with the organizations of creation. It can thrive or self-destruct or anything in between. And it doesn’t have any restraints of morality other than the one we create within it. The creator (God) can inspire as a “role model”, but has no direct contact or influence on anything we create in our heads using our third stage conscious mind. Only our organic selves interact with the creator  since they are a part of the creator’s creation. In our civilized state we are using sense perceptions, physical acuity  and thought processes that God developed for hunting, mating and fighting. Only we’re using them for banking, car repair and foosball. We are on our own in the arti-physical world, which should be obvious, too. 

on to Chapter X