CULTURE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE GAMES OF GOD

At this period of human history (if there is such a thing) we are faced with coming times of awesome im­port. Never before - so far as we know - has a single species had access to enough power to destroy a great part of sen­tient existence, to destroy the stuff of life itself.  We have arrived at the brink of a qualitative leap. We shall leap to the stars or we shall leap back to the middle ages, or as in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, we will incur the wrath of God who just might set fire to the whole shebang, threaten the stability of our solar system to the despair of neighboring planets.  Whatever our fate, an understanding of culture, of its beauty and whimsy, of its vital role in global civilization will make the difference between going to our destiny in terror, or seeing the wonder of it all - even at the point of seeming annihilation - and being able to act in the face of destruction, or not act until the right moment.

Culture is the species' intelligence. For all our diversity we, each of us, as sentient beings, answer to the nature of a single intelligence which unites all things in a vast arena of species interplay.

Nations as well as individuals and all spurious groupings between, are cells within a larger entity - the life form of the species, a vast living breathing in­telligence at play with other species in a field of infinite form and variation. In effect, each of us are breathed by the expanding contracting nature of the larger being.  Hearts beat to the rhythm of the greater heart. All living things are motions within a single intelligence; each species has its peculiar master template or 'idea' of which its parts reflect a more or less perfect picture. All things tend to the perfection of their original ideal.

In the beginning there was no beginning and no end. There was nothing but pure inert unconscious stuff, that is, a vast sea of nothingness with infinite potential but without means of self recogni­tion, without light or  contrast; an uncarved mass without time nor space nor the contrast of opposites. Then something happened. For a brief second of ten hundred billion tril­lion years (at least) pure inert energy was able to see itself, to experience its own potential. The effect was stunning. In that ten hundred billionth trillionth of a second it de­vised a method to hold the image even at the moment of its destruction, creating a field of form and variation based on implication and repetition. Its driving force (urge),  the passion for experiencing the beauty of its own being (urge, a concentrated mass of energy moving in a finite direction, i.e., intelligence).