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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000

PART 2: Religion

JUNE 1995

It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out if the universe, time and space would be lift. According to the relativity theory, however, time and space would disappear together with the things. -- Albert Einstein

Front dust to flesh, from flesh to estrus, from estrus to eros, from eros to love, from love to self-revelation ...

This might be the evolution matter is being forced into by the mind, the inventor of love.

This is the content of Religion.

Grassroots evolution is the methodology adopted by the Religion Hypothesis. The mandate-from-above methodology imposed by all theologies is not considered valid or useful.

All the beaches, all the mountains, all the galaxies of the cosmos do not feel an ounce of anxiety, but Mind, the beholder, will eventually feel a limitless anguish for such an immense presence denied of love, compassion, joy ...

The transfiguration of such limitless anguish into radiance via matter becoming Mind is the context of the esthetogenesis of reality and is the task of Religion. The puny human phenomenon, carrier of the mind, is at the core of the process.

***

Mistakenly called religions, theological fires are again burning hot in many spots on the planet. Cruelty and blood-spilling, which are inseparable from them, are here as well. The forebodings are even more distressing. What is developing now might just be positioning theologies of different shades for the coming of the main event, persecutions going critical.

Theologies go hand in hand with intolerance and the violence it generates. Wait and see.

Beside the well-seated, ever present, but rarely acknowledged motivations that result from ignorance, fear, bigotry, and intolerance are new driving motivations resulting from the shallow conduct of current societies. Greed and hedonism, now rampant with the "haves" and seeking their place with the "have-nots," are, with those other motivations, conjuring a sort of powerful, materialistic, planetary wave.

The virtues of equity, tolerance, fair play, honesty, dignity, and generosity, not to mention compassion, grace, and mindful pursuits, are becoming rare and anemic. But while ethics and values are perishing, people do not find a secular alternative way of conduct worth the name. "Anything goes, because nothing is worth anything anymore," the thinking goes. It ought to be possible, perhaps imperative and necessary, to present an alternative to this unholy alliance of religious vestiges, this theological salvation of many shades, and the actual, not virtual, ethical void. The pantheistic alternative, at least in its modern garment, will not do. The pantheistic concoctions of various flavors are as static and transfixed as the minds of the believers who are transfixed by the presupposed benevolence of a reality vibrating and groping after deliverance.

The agnostic and/or atheistic alternatives will not do either, perhaps because at last both are unduly, certainly discouragingly, pessimistic to the core. Both views say we had better take resignation and withdrawal as the only true wisdom and virtue. The most ethical standards of these alternatives and the most virtuous conduct practiced by proponents will not have impact or recognition. Nor will they bring the Garden of Eden. The pantheist and the atheist will have to satisfy themselves, the best of them, by being noble, desperately noble.

No serious consideration should be given to the "magic" but catastrophic technocratic materialistic pseudo-alternative.

I propose Religion, binding, as an alternative to the perniciousness of the theological fabrications and to the bleakness of noble self-immolation to no avail. But Religion's ultimate virtue and glory will come at a truly immense cost, the price demanded by a total cosmic metamorphosis engendered by Mind. It is an immense price because it is evolutionary, truly creational, and, to our still enormously limited knowledge and wisdom, astonishing.

This essay is an attempt to outline Religion, an eschatology. The hypercritical importance of this eschatology would be in the very fact of witnessing matter slowly, over 20-30 eons, "self-effacing" and leaving in its own wake the radiance of Mind, Duration. This is an ephemeralization to the point of "self-annihilation" produced by Miniaturization and Complexification carried out to "infinity," with the parallel emergence of an infinitely knowing post-space-time condition, Duration.

In this evolution, the hyperdense matter of the origin, the Big Bang, would be ephemeralized in a hyper-radiant Mind of the conclusion, robbing the Big Crunch of its probabilistic, deterministic "fate."

Such an astonishing conclusion would be imperative because of the investment life would be making in order to compel matter into a self-revelatory process. It is a process saturated with joy and suffering of unimaginable depth, a process clamoring for its own Second Coming so as to partake in the grace that only such an end can generate.

As contributors we all are means to a possible end. As participants we all must eventually be ends among ends ... or else. We are both authors and actors in the Becoming. We ought to be there at the End where Becoming ceases and Beingness is the self-revelation of the whole.

This matter-to-Mind journey is RELIGION, binding, no longer in need of theological constructions and simulations.

Premise One

Mind is the most important event developing within the Becoming of reality.

Mind, springing from self-consciousness, is the agent that could also make the whole of reality self-conscious. It could generate a self-revelation of reality in its own evolutionary totality from the first Big Bang moment to its possible Big Crunch last moment. In the absence of this virtue of binding all to all, reality will never become conscious of itself and will thus remain on the whole nonsensical.

Now we know that a physical event, let's say sand that becomes flesh and flesh that becomes mind, introduces within reality an absolutely novel and original presence impregnated with previously unheard of manifestations that are prodigious, suffered, and transfigurative.

Reality does not suffer before the emergence of life, and, since it does not suffer, neither can it enjoy, desire, or love.

The immense smallness of the mind within the immensity and the indifference of the Becoming, that is, the evolution of reality, gives the mind itself a tragic and heroic character from beginning to end. As soon as reality becomes conscious of the endless road to be traveled, the whole of it might become joyful, loving and esthetic. It is a journey of billions of years to the end of space-time, "at the end of time."

What will reality be: genesis or nemesis?

If the mind will be able to take reality to the self-revelational moment, then reality in toto will find the fullness of knowing itself and the fullness of love and beauty, an esthetogenesis.

If the mind is unable to take reality to the point of self-revelation, then reality will be a blind fury of self-annihilation. In such a nemesis there will be nothing before the beginning, the Big Bang; nothing after the end, the Big Crunch; and between those two extremes there will be a bottomless chasm of suffering lost to any hope.

Premise Two

Reality is a closed reality. It has a beginning, the Big Bang, and, presumably, an end, the Big Crunch.

The emerging of Mind reaching to the "four corners of the universe" with an anticipated self-revelation only possible at the very end of space-time would be impossible if reality were open ended. The resurrection that self-revelation is would then be impossible, as impossible as the realization of the state of grace or Esthequity in full.

Ignorance, suffering, and cruelty would remain and would permeate a reality that is breaking up. Such a reality would be intrinsically nonreligious; it would be against the binding of everything to everything that is by definition a truly religious reality. Religion and eschatology go hand in hand. The eschatological aim is the success of a reality that is totally religious. A "religion" incapable of such cosmic binding is a religion eschatologically wanting and thus a religion of cosmic desperation with no end in sight.

Reality, matter that becomes mind, is matter that "suffers" such an implicit metamorphosis. If such suffering is incapable of producing self-revelation and with it the transcendence of suffering into "grace," then all suffering has no meaning. It is a senseless curse, total and bottomless; the glass is empty until it overflows.

Premise Three

By definition, the future does not exist. An existing future is no longer a future. The present is, instant after instant, a creational event.

The past is the Being generated by the Becoming.

The present is like a diaphragm renewing itself ad infinitum. It is the thinnest of all conceivable diaphragms. Such a diaphragm at the edge of chaos, at the "edge" of the nonexisting future, unrelentingly builds reality, that is, the past. Such building is creational and is the Becoming.

Reality can create the past only by way of memory:

the physical memory of matter,

the genetic memory of life,

the cultural memory of the mind.

The collapse of memory would mean the end of Becoming. The Becoming is the fruit of memory operating on matter (mass-energy) by way of space-time. Thus the Becoming, present after present, creates Being, the past. By transforming matter through the work of space-time, space-time gives matter the space to make the transformation and the time to do so.

The past is the only reality, and it is not erasable.

Succinctly, here are some of the necessary premises to the Religion Hypothesis presented:

• Reality has a beginning and will have an end, the Big Bang and the Big Crunch.

• There are no original intents or reasons intrinsic to the alternative between existence and nonexistence. The fact is that there is existence.

• Such existence, Being, is the product of Becoming. Reality Becomes from the very beginning at the Big Bang to the very end at the Big Crunch.

• The Becoming of reality is "registered" cumulatively in the past. In fact, the past is what reality becomes moment after moment.

• The past cannot be erased and is what reality becomes by way of space-time acting upon matter (mass-energy).

• The past is Being, the only unique Being.

• Space-time is the "mechanism" that from the very first moment has transformed the original Beingness into Becoming, the evolution of reality.

• The n1.ind, itself generating from the Becoming, could and perhaps ought to bring reality to the point of self-revelation of the complete memory of the Becoming in its totality, of all the past.

• There is not a "before" the beginning at the Big Bang, as there will not be an "after" the end at the Big Crunch.

• If there are other realities, one or a nonfinite number of them, those realities are by definition, indecipherable and for all purposes irrelevant.

The Hypotheses

Theological: The certainty of God
Religious: The imperative of total binding
Eschatological: The imperative of a conclusion

The Theological Hypothesis

For the theologian, the existence of the divine is incontrovertible. The nature of the divine is the subject of the theologies invented during the development of consciousness, of knowledge, of love and of willfulness, of all human inventions and creations. With the invention of the divine comes its investiture with many qualifications. One could propose that the notions of omnipotence, justice, knowledge, wisdom, love, and everlastingness are common to all theologies.

The theological groups prevailing now, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have been subject to controversy, fractures, and sectarianism from their inception. Schisms, alliances, divisions, persecutions, excommunications, condemnation, punishment, torture, and death are ambiguous and peripatetic parts of the theological scenario.

Such experiences are powerful, but the inclusion of extremes of violence, martyrdom, and death put in doubt the sincerity and the love of believers and perpetrators.

One thing seems certain, the impulses toward compassion, justice, grace, and binding, religio in Latin, are buried, or at least dangerously weakened, by those same theologies whose purpose should be precisely the strengthening and the vitality of those same" disciplines." This is why they are theologies, the worship of divinity, but not Religion, the quest for a cosmic "binding," for religio.

Why does it have to be so? Hypotheses generated from premises unhinged from reality are necessarily plagued by all sorts of conflicts. It follows that a dogmatic premise on the existence and the nature of the absolute inevitably causes a dogmatic penchant toward the entropy of knowledge.

The Religious Hypothesis

The theological structures we have come to refer to as religions have developed within animistic hypotheses. For instance, the a priori existence of divine anima and consequently the notion of reentering or of dissolution into the original "grace," Nirvana, are at the core of the major theologies.

The Religious Hypothesis has little to do with the invention and the worship of divinity. It is dealing with the discovery of and coherence with the evolutionary process within which the continuous creation of reality, one present after another, proposes. Part of this is the focality of human life in particular and the progressive animation of the originally nonanimated reality in general.

Such focality is, in fact, an axiality, since space-time is operating without breaks upon reality itself.

It is in this axiality, not created or preordained a priori by God or gods, but emerging from the progression of Becoming, that the religious imperative develops and grows, giving shape to what eventually becomes the convergence of reality toward a special point, the singularity of self-revelation, that is, the "resurrection" of reality in toto.

But this special point of self-revelation is the opposite of the God-creator of theologies. It is instead the very creature generated by the evolution of reality.

Thus the causa prima of theologies, God or gods, is instead the final binding effects of Religion. This final effect is necessarily realized at the end of space-time, and it is the Omega Seed.

The Eschatological Hypothesis

Reality, that is, mass-energy to which space-time allows spatial extension and time to do so, does not contain at the origin meaning or knowledge. Reality is a Becoming that "necessarily" follows the rules intrinsic to its nature.

In this universe those rules seem controlled in the subparticle domain, by quanta, by probabilism, while in the macro and mega domains such probabilism gives room for deterministic and statistical sidelines. The living phenomenon injects in this probabilistic, deterministic, statistical reality a disconcerting novelty: opportunism and willfulness. With those comes a first indication of "axis," an intent soon to be tangled in the emergence of good and evil, of the graceful and the beautiful.

Anthropos, the human phenomenon, "traumatizes" the probabilistic, deterministic, statistical reality with the opportunistic and willful inventions that have the potential of transforming matter in a new unheard of reality: Mind.

If there is an "alchemy" in the process of matter Becoming Mind or spirit, this alchemy is in the action of Miniaturization and Complexification always working in tandem .. These in turn generate Duration, a reality unhinged from mass-energy space-time.

Here is why.

The evolution of reality, necessary if not sufficient, is achieved through the application of a paradigm with three voices: Miniaturization, Complexification, and Duration. In Miniaturization, Complexification, and Duration, the third voice, Duration, is the "product" of the first two, Miniaturization and Complexification.

Complexity, the content, needs an optimal container in which to be and to grow. Such a container must be the smallest of all possible so as not to be a prison but an indispensable support, a self-effacing grid. Ideally, this grid should be physically dimensionless, thus the imperative of Miniaturization.

Perhaps in the realm of mathematics, Complexity could do without Miniaturization if it weren't for the fact that mathematics, like memory, and thus Duration, is in the domain of "infinite" Miniaturization, the obliteration of space-time consequent to the absence of the physical container, so to speak.

The fact is that Complexity is not separable from Miniaturization for the same reason that the mind cannot be deprived of the body.

Miniaturization and Complexity together seem to be the only agency capable of generating life and consciousness. Without Miniaturization and Complexity working together, the human brain, a superb exemplar of Miniaturization and Complexity in working order, does not come about. Without the brain, the mind does not exist, and the paragon of sensitivity, reflection, knowledge, love, beauty, etc., cannot emerge from the food chain's fireworks.

The jewel of Miniaturization and Complexity is Duration. Duration is reality, actually fragments of reality up until now, so impregnated with Miniaturization and Complexity as to extrude itself from space-time. Memory is made of Duration fragments. A no-longer-fragmented Duration is the self-revelation of reality, the revelation of itself to itself, or resurrection, which is the same thing. This is reality decanted of matter in the sense of metamorphosis of matter into Mind, the Omega Seed.

MCD is Religion.

Duration is what allows the past to extend itself unremittingly by way of all the successive diaphragms of present after present, diaphragms without thickness. It is an extension that is necessarily in its own domain, the domain untied and freed from space-time. It is the same space-time that is active and is indispensable for the Becoming. Duration is Being.

Duration in its totality, at the end of space-time, is the total memory, the complete remembering, that reality has of itself. As pointed out previously, it is as if the whole past were "defrosted" of its space-time bind.

One could say that reality wasn't prepared for the degree of Miniaturization and Complexity necessary for the emergence of life. It is that very Miniaturization and Complexity that must have "appeared" as a contradiction, a rebellion against the probabilism of the immensely small, the quanta, and of the determinism of the subatomic, atomic, and molecular.

It wasn't prepared then, 4.5 or so eons ago, and perhaps never will be. Religion is an imposition upon reality. Without the will of the mind, reality would never become Duration. It would remain unrecognizable to itself and consequently would remain senseless.

To explain again the notion of Miniaturization- Complexity-Duration as Religion, I suggest a sort of loose analogy -- the canary and the jumbo jet. Assume that:

• each "byte" of information/work, in reference to the canary and to the jumbo jet, is separately located contiguously on a surface;

• each byte is represented by one square centimeter;

• for a working jumbo jet, 1 million of those information- work bytes (squares) are needed;

• for the living canary 1 trillion of such bytes (squares) are needed.

This means that, if it were not for the "magic" of Miniaturization and Complexity, a canary "born" from jumbo jet technology in this representation would be, let's say, 1 million times bigger than it is.

One can immediately visualize and appreciate the immense and critical importance of Miniaturization and Complexity. I am assuming that in this scenario, the MC present in the canary is 1 million times greater than that in the jumbo jet. Only with the "compression" of Miniaturization million times greater could the jumbo jet reach the Complexity of the canary.

In other words, 1 million jumbo jets would be needed to approximate the amount of information/work, the applied knowledge, of a canary, though even this applies only if such a gigantic fleet of jumbo jets is not made up of 1 million clones, but of 1 million jumbo jets each with a specific "persona," as it is with canaries.

Naturally, this means that there would not be canaries or any other living organisms if it were not for the Miniaturization-Complexity "miracle of binding." In time, with Miniaturization and Complexification comes Duration, that is, memory-consciousness.

In the canary, MCD refers to both knowledge and productivity. Once more this reiterates the imperative of Miniaturization-Complexity-Duration for the Becoming of the living reality.

The Mind as the Efficient Memory of the Past

Reality at a certain evolutionary moment, five or so eons ago, began to define an inclination toward the "direction of the mind." At first, this premonition of axiality was extremely weak, belonging to a reality of finite dimension. All we may hope for is that this movement toward mind might lead us to an evolution directed toward Esthequity.

Matter is the immense turmoil in which the esthetic and the equitable, far from being naive cliches, are pivotal agencies. One step at a time, matter itself is transcended.

This means that at the final moment reality will have made itself into Esthequity. But such perfection would not be saturating the whole evolutionary body constituting the past as a whole. If such an a posteriori saturation of the past is not present, then an ultimate perfection would be of a bottomless cruelty because it would be the consequence of a purely instrumental bottomless bloodbath.

All theologies have attempted to remedy the malediction intrinsic to a final justice rooted in an endemic injustice, the cause of limitless suffering. Thus redemption is promised via reincarnation, resurrection, Nirvana, paradise, etc. By way of those, all the means, all the authors and actors of such final perfection, evolution and life within it, would reappear as ends in themselves, a Second Coming.

The resurrection proposed by the Religion Hypothesis of the Omega Seed is less messy, more coherent, more "elegant," and, according to some scientific thinking, in the realm of the feasible. This resurrection simply states that with the "draining" of space-time from the whole of reality, from the entire past, the whole past becomes present. This past becoming present, "purified" from space-time in its "frozen state," is Duration, the seed Omega of the Good and the Beautiful.

The feasibility of such a remote and hypothetical conclusion depends on the power of Mind, now only embryonically formed, to intervene in the Becoming and all pulsations of space-time in a way that compels matter to transfigure into Mind. The "magic" mechanism of this transfiguration-metamorphosis is lodged in the MCD paradigm. Without its active presence, matter remains matter. With the action of Miniaturization, Complexification, and Duration upon the Becoming, it is as if the mind were the efficient memory of the past. The mind would then be Duration itself.

When the efficient memory of the past becomes total, the whole evolution of reality registered within the past is "remembered" in the pure Duration of Omega Seed. This is the "Second Coming" of all, Fido, his ticks, and myself included. This is reality in the conclusive act of self-revelation, not of reinvention. This act, which turns out to be a binding of all to all, this Religion of reality, is Esthequity finally contemplated, in fact it is the Good and the Beautiful relived by all and everything.

***

Not God the Creator, but God the desirable creature. At the end, God would be the verb.

Throughout the cosmos, the parallel processes of self-creation and self-revelation made possible by the durational progression engendered by Miniaturization and Complexification define the Religious, religio, context.

This is the Religion of

Miniaturization

Complexity

Duration.

It is the Omega Seed Hypothesis.

This hypothesis defines a process that moves reality from the fragmented to the binding.

The Miniaturization and Complexity of single organisms is superbly high, as in the canary, but the Miniaturization and Complexity present in species, cultures, and populations is desperately low. For a long time, such "collective primitivism" will be the primary obstacle toward the emerging of Duration as a major force in the metamorphosis of matter into Mind.

The evolution of reality toward Esthequity is hindered by such crude and structurally inefficient work. The consequence is that the binding, the religio, manifests itself in what are often cruel banalities, pitting the high MC of the single organism against the low Miniaturization and Complexity of populations. But in the development of the food chain the appearance of individuality, with its ego and other attributes, was indispensable to the emergence of consciousness and of Mind.

It is the mind's task to produce conditions that will extend the immense Miniaturization and Complexity of single organisms to the infrastructures connecting and separating organisms front organisms. This includes all the institutions of societies, cultures, and civilizations, from the productive to the organizational. It is like moving toward the animation of the very means that deliver the ways of survival and development. The means will become animated to best serve the ends.

Nanotechnology, which will construct systems one atom at a time, points the way toward such transformations. It goes without saying that this is a gigantic step toward Miniaturization and thus toward Complexity and Duration.

The hope for a fully achieved condition of Esthequity can be serious only if reality is "forced" into the filter-lens of MCD. Because of this MCD is Religion. If things don't go this way, reality will end in the annihilation of the Big Crunch, at that point unavoidable since reality had not been transfigured by the storm of the mind.

Theologies contain elements of religiosity, but Religion denounces theological structures as simulations generated by mental anguish.

Religion is a bouleversement of theologies in the sense that what is at the origin of theology, the verb, is, in the eschatological hypothesis of Religion, at the end.

In addition, theologies have a triggering event of "unbinding," the fall from innocence and grace followed by a search, a posteriori, for a rebinding. The whole, in an anthropocentric medium, is unconcerned about the dismissal of a grand reality. Theologies put Creator and creatures in a simulated and Utopian reality instead of allowing for an operating, evolving reality, the Becoming.

Religion is not capable of true religio, of binding, as long as reality remains split into two classes, means and ends. To put it bluntly, if 80 kilograms of "matter" can become organism and Mind, the matter of all the world should, or, better put, ought to be able to become Mind, producing the prodigious luminosity of a reality finally and totally conscious of itself.

The "demiurgy" of such transcendence is hidden in the MCD that the anguish of the mind "forces" into matter not yet transfigured.

Evolution, if wisely guided by the mind, would have the task of relentlessly conducting this march toward the metamorphosis of matter Becoming Mind, Becoming spirit. It is a task of unimaginable proportion. In space-time this is a task of terrifying profundity. It represents a quest and desire for knowledge the fire of which can only be timidly conjectured.

Facing this desirable and even possible Becoming, there is no escape from either an intense exhilaration or an anguish of cosmic size, the anguish now nested in all consciences.

God as the End Creature

The Religion Hypothesis proposes God not as Creator, but God as creature.

This not only invests mankind with dignity; it offers her inner self a sense of the prodigious while demanding an immense responsibility: the responsibility to create the Divine using everything from a reality originally deprived of even a pale intimation of divinity.

Many eons had to pass on this planet for an infinitesimal amount of matter to become Mind. This creation, if generated in and by the Becoming, will not take hundreds, thousands, or millions of years; it will take billions of years. This creation is a sort of darkly anguished continuum only occasionally radiant from fragments of Esthequity, but habitually immersed in ignorance, doubt, desperation, pessimism, cynicism, the fatigue of sufferance, and the exhaustion of hope since at last and for an "eternity" reality is and remains indifferent.

One could say this oppressive indifference is a cruelty without sin. It is innocent, yet it is constitutional to the tide of the Becoming, which uses matter "magically" operated upon by space-time as its n1.ediunl.

At the same time, only the Becoming can let the mind emerge from itself. With it, the will is obscurely hoping that at a critical point the Becoming will be able to reveal to one and all the meaning of itself by reaching for grace, the equitable and the esthetic, by reaching the self-revelational conclusion.

Esthetogenesis

I like to define this Becoming as the esthetogenesis of reality because the esthetic object, of all the products of the mind, in sound, voice, form, structure, color, etc., is the "conclusive" one, the one independent from meanings, functions, attributions, idiosyncrasies, etc.

The so-called work of art, uniquely among all "products," is an end in itself. Attributions, goals, meanings, declarations, and so on can from time to time be legitimate and significant, but in all instances they are peripheral. It is this rare self-validation of being ends in themselves and not means that confers to the esthetic objectivism a unique position, a privileged one, in fact, a holy one because the esthetic objects are fragments of the "Divine."

If Mind will have the power to guide reality not just toward an end in a journey in which Mind would not have a voice, but toward a specific and directed end, then the supreme nobility of the esthetic event will prevail as an esthetogenesis of all the Becoming.

When the truly esthetic is born from the conscious or unconscious anguish that the mind cannot escape, it is an indication of its originality and of the profound and possibly absolute value of the esthetic object. The very nature of the esthetic is this anguish transfigured and made perennial in the esthetic work.

The Depth of Space-Time

Naturally, it is all but impossible to conceive the nature and the behavior of reality in space-times so remote. The Religion Hypothesis can only suggest that eons from now the mind of those times, incarnated in the deepest mystery, will be predominant and prodigiously radiant. The carbon cycle, the flesh, will possibly be abandoned for the sake of an evolution of immense complexities contained within systems immensely miniaturized with memories vivid beyond human comprehension, Duration. It was once said that "no human can behold divinity and survive."

All of this will be in a space-time transgressing the current rules in a reality shaken by the terrifying voice of the emerging Word and finally the emerging of Omega Seed radiant in equity and beauty.

Resurrection will not be the occasion to restart from where one left off at death one minute or one eon ago. Sisyphus has no voice in such a matter. Resurrection is the total experience of all things "now" bound in the whole to Being, whose Becoming is finally revealed in full, down to the last speck. It will be an experience prodigious beyond comprehension, more so than for a bacterium to conceive the nature of mind. In this case, it will mean comprehending the creatures of all Becoming made, a posteriori, so to speak, into the creators.

All our hypotheses about the existence and the nature of God or gods, the nature of paradise, Nirvana, nothingness, resurrection of the flesh, reincarnation, and sitting to the left or to the right of God are innocent fantasies in the presence of a reality that "beyond all times" simply discovers, knows, and recognizes itself, all of itself. The joy of discovering what has been generated or created is then "infinite."

These agencies must not be viewed as components of a sort of evolutionary soup in the universal pot of the Becoming, present after present, but instead they must be seen as the registers of absolute fidelity, which the past is from beginning to end. The Becoming of this grape, for instance, develops from nothing, ripens, juicy and original, and is the berry among berries. This is the "obvious" consequence that flows from each present into the past. Reality must register all and everything, including the droplet of ink from this pen writing this word.

There is no power within reality that can destroy the past. That which happens has happened forever, be it a quark or a broken fingernail. In this frame of things, the I at the end of the long night that is billions of years long is the same I of the Second Coming, the I for which waiting does not exist since subjective time does not exist in the objective time interval between death and resurrection. The instant of death coincides with the moment of resurrection with the condition that such resurrection is made possible by a reality that evolution has transformed into pure Mind by way of Miniaturization-CompIexity-Duration.

When personal Becoming ceases at death, "merging" with the Being outside of space-time, the past, the I is subtracted from the pulsations of space-time. For this reason, if resurrection were to come, it would come only at the end of space-time, and such resurrection would then come at the "moment" of death. The eons passed to reach the Omega Seed would pass only in the Becoming; "time" would not pass in the Being.

Being, the whole past, is then nothing but the detailed memory of the Becoming, a perfect registration of the whole of it. Being is "outside" of space-time. Being is a sort of animate suspension ready to be animated when space-time ends at "the end of time," as the saying goes.

While there are many theologies with their faiths and their dogmas, there is only one Religion and it is the process that binds, religio. For all theologies the subject is the understanding of the gods, which the faith of the believers says exists, and redemption and salvation in his/her name. With faith defaulting, God ceases to exist and becomes food for thought. For the tree or the tiger, which has no faith, God does not exist. There isn't the god of the cats or the god of mushrooms, though for a mindful resolution of reality there would be their entelechy in the Omega Seed.

The eschatological resolution is Religion at its completion. It is the Omega Seed outside of space-time that is by then "consumed." The binding is Religion itself; there isn't a Religion and the binding in its name. Religion is binding and vice versa. But Religion does not exist without knowledge. Only knowledge can truly bind things to things. The maximal religiosity coincides with the maximal knowledge. Such totality is the Omega Seed.

My Contribution

God is not the creator; God could be the creature. This is the eschatological genesis of divinity through binding, through religio, made possible by MCD.

This Religion is not the invention or the theology of Paolo Soleri in the twentieth century for the simple reason that it has "always" existed. The MCD methodology has been operative for four or five eons. It has existed in protoliving reality as a potentiality. It has existed in the living reality of the food chain as a powerful normative guideline. It exists in the human mind as causative of self-consciousness, of love, and therefore of equity and beauty, the esthetic. Then, far from being the founder of another theology, of another version of a hypothetical, original divinity based on arbitrary, anthropocentric, nondemonstrable premises, I would instead be a person who modestly tries to put into words that which is going on under our eyes and ought to go on within the structure of reality.

The imperative hidden in "ought to" is the imperative of equity, of compassionate justice, and of beauty, of the esthetic event; they both depend on knowledge. Without the momentous "invention" of love expressing itself in eros, compassion, altruism, generosity, and tolerance, the constructions of the mind, the knowing will be destined to sterility, squalor, and incoherence. This entropic alternative defines, ab eternum, an indifferent reality that for the mind translates into a dark desperation with no resolution, an "infinite" anguish ... of no value. This anguish is an ontological cruelty negating the very self, and if the universe turns out to be open, without a beginning and by definition without an end and therefore without the End, such negation is the unredeemable fate of consciousness, love, and beauty.

I would find myself in disgrace if I were to be seen as the founder of a new theology. "New" theologies are a dime a dozen. Instead, the task is to find words, even if I am not up to the task, for the description of the methodology of the ever-operative Becoming reality. This methodology could also explain the unavoidable violence of reality and can propose a possible resolution into absolute Grace at the end of time. This Grace is finally created in the very act of self-revelation of the whole of reality and from its nobility throughout the immense evolution from indifference at the Big Bang into love at the Omega Seed.

This is not another theology, the quest of God the Creator; it is Religion, the anticipation of God as totalizing, self-creating creature: The Omega Seed.

13. Hypothesis 5

NOVEMBER 1989

For the "Western" mind and for centuries of its history, the consequence of a life often wretched has been the need for transcendence: the "afterlife" is a mode of transcendence.

Thus in parallel with the hopeless mindset is the redemptive mindset. For the first there is black despair with the closing of all hopes for deliverance. For the second there is a quasi-trancelike trust in a process that will eventually pull the individual from the bottom of the well of fear and suffering and thrust him into the divine light of love and felicity ab eternum.

The "Eastern" mind is guided by the notion that the tangible is at last deceptive, is indeed deception. As long as the self remains paramount along and among other things, all of them deceptions, the self (the individual) is denied access to that which is real and permanent: Brahma-Nirvana.

As for the "Westerners," the resolution is to return to the father but not the dissolvent in him (it); for the "Easterner" the resolution is the dissolution of the self into the non being of Brahma (the void).

That for centuries and for billions of people those cognitions have designed and redesigned the human condition, the human emotions, and the planet indicates the importance and the impact they have had and continue to have on reality. Those cognitions have one thing in common: the seeking if foreverness.

Unable to accept any of the three: (a) meaninglessness, (b) within the glory of God, (c) reabsorbed in the void and totally adverse, and unimpressed by (d) the notion that we come and go and that is it (meaningless reality), I had to search for a fifth way. I found it, this new hypothesis, not in my senile seventies prodded into and deceived by fear and decay, but in my fifties, in the prime of mental energy.

Hypothesis 5 did not generate from anxiety or ponderous thinking or from leaps of imagination triggered by hypermentation. It came very plainly as a coherent conclusion to the Complexity-Miniaturization-Duration paradigm (CMD) I wrote of in the early '60s.

The ultimate consequence and strength of CMD is that if at the origin of reality there is a "point of light" Big Bang, which I label "mineral," an end of reality could be in the cards. Such an end, the Big Crunch, could be an altogether different kind of point light. I label it" Mind," a mindfull point of light.

It seemed to me then, as now, that there is a logic and an elegance to the hypothesis, with entropy being possibly the only theoretical block to its remote advent.

What is more, within Hypothesis 5 the four others would find a more desirable and convincing resolution. Suffice it to mention a more plausible interpretation of things accompanied by more extensive, indeed satisfactory (to each and all things) conditions of equity and beauty.

Resurrection (Judeo-Christian-Muslim), reincarnation (Hindu), dissolution (Buddhism), and the disposal of meaninglessness are" cared for" by Omega Seed.

For instance, in Omega Seed there isn't such a thing as the act and the judgment of the act. The act is self-judging. But it can only be so a posteriori, in the light of Omega Seed, since judgment, self-judgment included, is imperatively in need of all the existential parameters. That necessitates that the fitting of the act, any act, is exact and total -- that is, in its own circumstances that by the paradigm of self-sufficiency reverberate quasi-ad infinitum into the past and into the future of it.

At the hypothetical day of recall, Omega Seed, there won't be a reckoning, selection, or partition between elected and damned (or the void): There will be self-elevation into the exact niche, and for every niche there will be an immense milieu of knowledge-understanding.

This makes Omega Seed so much more rigorous and disengaged from the opinionated.

The (numerous) conditions are set up by the mineral-to- Mind process that best empowers reality to self-evaluate. In such light, the equity paradigm will finally find satisfaction, and with it the esthetic absolute will be.

14. Rio: An Observer's Snapshot after the UN Conference on the Environment

RIO DE JANEIRO, MARCH 1992

The engine propelling the Rio event has three components:

1. animism and its corollary of a divine power;

2. Mother Nature and its sacredness;

3. the Love Project: us and our history.

As human inventions (we use the word "revelation" to unload self-responsibility), the three have a field day in the good-and-evil scenario.

In (1), we take the invention not as a hypothesis but as the truth. Idols are then easily generated and idolatry fills the history of the species. Idolatry is alive and kicking.

In (2), to see mothering and fathering where there is just and only probabilism and opportunism is to commit the greatest sin of self-deception. In (3), the Love Project is a true noble undertaking of which (1) and (2) are unnecessary, burdensome, fellow travelers.

The nonliving domain that animism says is God's creation is a probabilistic-deterministic "project" -- the cosmos. The living domain that animism says is God's creation is an opportunistic "project" -- the operative food chain. The human domain, consciousness-mind, that animism says is God's most cherished creation, is the Love Project -- a human invention-creation.

Reasons and facts seem to suggest that the very bulk of reality, the cosmos, is driven by probabilism imbued with determinism. No God is needed for such "cool" management of particles, subparticles, weak forces, strong forces, mass-energy, space-time. The animated part of reality, as far as we can conjecture, a puny, puny part of it, is driven by opportunism -- the food chain testifies to it.

Probabilism, determinism, opportunism -- the unloving, the fatherless, the motherless are not love and compassion agencies. Love and compassion are a "yet to come" dimension that only consciousness and reflection can generate. Social Darwinism and technocracy should be aware of this. But the animistic tradition is an enormous obstacle.

The Love Project is the greatest of human inventions. Given the embryonic stage it is in, 3 million years vis-a-vis 10 to 15 billion years of probabilism and 3.5 eons of opportunism, it is fragile, naive, demanding, desperately in need of care and passion.

So Rio will be a gigantic quicksand kettle where self-deception, fantasizing, self-hatred, frustration, fanaticism, idolatry, and fraud will have a large representation. False premises, as those listed above, in the long run can only cause devastation and squalor.

If Rio turns out to be an animistic bordello, even the most benign, well-meant results -- and there will be many -- will be flawed at the core and therefore in the long run pernicious. Reality cannot be understood and worked with on false premises. And the presence of something, the cosmos, does not make it sacred. Not by a light year!

Why is it imperative that the premises be true or truer than the animistic ones? Because with animism we are bartering the power of a probabilistic-deterministic cosmos and the splendor of an opportunistic, "living" reality for an at best murky simulation in which we might find a degree of reassurance for the human condition.

This wish, innocent, perhaps even noble, is a powerful mover. It has shaped human history, but beware of its incoherence. Animism turns out to be (as proposed more than once) the great opiate for the human soul. It renders opaque the splendid but harsh coherence of reality. Its prodigious evolution is trashed away because we, occasional lovers, want it that way.

We should instead be rightly ablaze in our Love Project because in its light the whole of reality could become self-aware, self-recognizing, "Divine."

Last ought to be the Verb!

Where should the Rio engine take us? To a more sensible state of affairs where nature and we can interact reasonably, wisely, and respectfully. But reason, wisdom, and respect demand an understanding of what the participants are, or at least of what they are not. Therefore the first realistic step would be to "clear out" the territory, and this is where Rio will not be up to the task. Too much wishful thinking, fantasizing, not enough practice of realism.

The strangeness of all is that only through an altogether anthropocentric take on reality can we come up with the benevolent Creator and the caring Mother Nature stuff. These are in the eye of the beholder, us, and in nothing else: Seeking the right action from dreaming is anthropocentrism to the core, the species as the master. The very pitfall we accuse ourselves of not being able to dispose of!! Apparently we are not.

So much of what we are doing in Rio will have the substance of rain dancing. A demeaning fact if you think about it. It implies the belief that such a majestic and ruthless thing reality is would bend to our toe tapping and pious asking?! Rain dancing as emblematic of our presumed, pretentious, voided-of-proof dialogue with the gods. Celebration of life yes, transformation of weather, what a come-on!

15. Hannover Expo 2000: The Millennium of the Zebra

MARCH 1992

Intent and Content

Will Expo 2000 be a testimonial? A guide? Will it advocate a plan?

The key to relevance is the right anticipation of what the condition of man will be by then, eight years from now, and what the condition will offer worth encouraging and what ought to be refuted or reconstructed. We are thus dealing with "prophecy" in the context of the golden rule of the practical: the practice of realism.

What is realism?

The country I live in, the USA, is practicing a dream, the American Dream. This practice is bankrupting the country. Given its size and power, the USA, the ruin, is overflowing and overtaking the world at large. What will be the effects of such dreaming by the year 2000?

• The secular community seems to be hesitant, if not unwilling, to move from dreaming into reality: a move that will entail a "change of mind."

• The religious community is cast in a different, but perhaps as pernicious, dreaming.

Expo 2000 might well be primarily faced with such a dilemma. Will realism prevail or will the dream continue? Once a dream is sought and sold as the Garden of Eden in the making, the dream is in for a nightmarish turn of events: Reality is constitutionally that which cannot deliver the Garden of Eden. No matter how clear our practicality, voided of the practice of realism, we will not generate the fairness, that is, equity/well-being, the power of transcendence that only the practice of realism has a chance to generate.

What is Expo 2000 to do? Document the progression of catastrophe? It might help to attempt a sort of consensus about the key agencies to be dealt with realistically:

1. the biosphere's limited capacity

2. demographic pressure

3. technological transformism

4. consumption unlimited

5. equity and its remoteness

In slower times, in more predictable times, in less litigious times, in less greedy times, an eight-year anticipation would have been easier. In what reciprocal position will the environmentalist, the scientist, the politician, the technocrat, the economist, the artist, the theologian, the teacher, the social scientist, the humanist, etc., be? Which will have frozen into a monolith opaque to all but his or her own passion, which will have fragmented into a paralyzing diaspora, and which will be vibrant with life and anticipation? It would be hard luck indeed if Expo 2000 found itself out of tune, if not out of breath, because of lame anticipatory thinking (and doing).

Every initiative is in need of a backbone. Backbones can be multiple. Icons are emblematic of backboneness. Indications of the state of a country can be traced to its own icons. The USA seems to have, among others, the following:

• Home Sweet Home -- the single-family house: consumption unlimited

• Automobile "mobility": pleasure and status

• The gun: a sort of self-reliance regardless (see the "peacekeepers" of the Pentagon)

• Walt Disney: simulation, escape, nostalgia

• Show biz: fun, shallowness, societal mediocrity

Walt Disney is important for us because it is in the business of our task, Expo 2000. Walt Disney's main devices are simulation, nostalgia, fantasizing. International initiatives like ours are part simulation (the "instead of the real thing"), part show biz, part advertising-propaganda, part path-finding, part testimonial, part advocacy. From the preliminary planning encounters, it would seem that the last three should be in evidence. The structure of the content will define the structure of the organization.

The Zebra Proposition

The Zebra proposition is the intentional development of already ongoing processes. It is the channeling of the propensity of vocational communities to expand beyond national boundaries toward the adoption of the best features they are nurturing (in a transnational context) and doing this at the expense of less desirable and often strong power plays and exclusionary penchants.

Vocational communities (VC), the guilds of old so to speak, would slowly supersede the national identities destined to fade away by being assimilated into the transnational VC where passions become fruitful. All the VCs would be contained and kept within constructive boundaries by the VC of information with the responsibility of keeping a coherent whole, entrusted to an international arbitration court. Expo 2000 would be an optimal testing ground for this new set of agencies, the transnational VC.

DO NOT BUILD NATIONAL PAVILIONS -- THE LEOPARD LANDSCAPE.

"BUILD" THE VOCATIONAL COMMUNITIES PAVILIONS -- THE ZEBRA LANDSCAPE. Not by nations but by guilds: Cut down nationalism, xenophobia, bureaucracy, centuries-old taboos, racism, segregational thinking all in one swoop.

A sampling of VC's

Pedagogy Agriculture Demography Social Sciences Arts Politics Physical Sciences Philosophy Religion Nutrition Technology Health Economy Astronomy Architecture Engineering Logistics

Each VC, in transnational mode, could show where it has been, where it is, where it ought to go.

The "umbrella" would be the one chosen by Expo 2000: Nature, Man, and Technology -- that is, each decision, program, and development in each VC would be accountable to nature, to man, and to a truly realistic evolution of the power of transformation that technology offers us.

Expo 2000 would initiate a systemic collection of data as they refer to each VC. The process, eight years of it, would be crucial per se and for the product.

Some random consequences of such work: The physician of Berlin would be "side by side" with the shaman of Africa; the astronomer of India "side by side" with the stargazer of Tibet; agribusiness USA "side by side" with the farmer from Borneo ... Such programs would automatically arch above national barriers by outgrowing them via the people dedicated to their vocations while calling on their loyalty to the needs of nature and humanity and for their adoption of those technologies coherent with such needs.

Instead of looking at ten versions of potato peelers presented by each of 100 participating countries, that is, 1,000 peeling instruments -- the sledgehammer approach to mosquito killing -- the visitors would be offered the "evolution" of the relation potato-Hominidae that the Nutrition VC will exhibit inclusive of potato processing.

Expo 2000 would principally be a lens-filter that in seven years, 1993-2000, would develop the wherewithal for the emergence of VC "globally driven" and with normative indicators for what lies ahead that will make them responsible to all the other VC's, all irradiated, so to speak, by nature, humanity, and technology.

The years following Expo 2000 would be dedicated to the further development of the transition nations -- VC's inching closer to the notion of one world and a coherent evolution into it. THIS PHASE COULD BE A KEYSTONE STRUCTURE IN THE VERY EVOLUTION OF HANNOVER.

A sampling of difficulties and obstacles

• criteria for selecting the VC;

• how to call upon institutions and individuals (e.g., is the Colombian government to designate this or that farmer, or is that done by the VC farmers?);

• direct responsibility (how much) vis-a-vis nationalistic, bureaucratic, power-driven, xenophobic screens;

• how best to make tangible the 40,000 children per day victims of famine, malnutrition, destitution, by which VC, and how best to proceed to diminish the tragedy;

• ridiculing a VC is easier than ridiculing a nation "gone critical."

The Zebra Noosphere

The spotted-hide leopard becoming the striped-hide zebra. The leopard hide symbolizing in its dark dots city-states and nations. The zebra hide symbolizing vocational communities in their stripes (transnational reach) that in truth should crisscross each other. The snake pit would be an unappealing metaphor, and how true it would become if the destructive aspects of the leopard segregation were to take root in the zebra interpenetration.

In the Logistics VC (transportation), the automobile would be the spottedness (leopard) that would fuse in the stripedness (zebra) of super-trains and maglev cradles.

The Health Care VC stripe-network is made of spots, physicians or health organizations bound by professional loyalty and the national spottedness overlaid by international health care guarantees (ruled by an up-to-date Hippocratic oath).

History might show that on at least some occasions guilds were instrumental in alleviating the tragic conditions of some section of society when city-states or nations were at war by reaching beyond the confines of local despotism. The bookprinting guilds of Europe were, in toto, instrumental in uniting the communities of learning. The route-stripes made by nomads of learning, students and savants alike, from all corners of Europe were instrumental in the diffusion of knowledge.

A new global logistical network based on maglev and superconductivity could become the device upon which the VC's of the world could be overlaid, not a coincidence naturally but a resonance with coincidental heights. The paradigm shift toward urban linear cities "piggy-backed" on lean, frugal, speedy, city-friendly, wasteless, pollutionless maglev-superconductivity super-cradle services could almost tangibly present the apt stripe-world that does not recognize the artificial boundaries of historically exhausted nations. The leopard-spotted world superseded by the zebra-striped world.

The movement of workers from one vocation to another does not dispose of the VC; it only makes them permeable to the advantages of all. Japanese and American car builders are closer to each other than farmers and teachers in a single country. This is so because the VC remains intact even when the personnel shift from one country to another. This is a good dissolver of xenophobic, isolationist, confrontational nationalisms. Why not adopt and sustain the already built-in tendency to "zebra-dize" the human family?

If the universe is a string universe, maybe the Earth zebra string could resonate from it, beautifully undergirded by the maglev-superconductivity logistics network. Each VC viewed as a force field performing throughout the roundness of the planet to weave the living basket of the noosphere. If the not-so- whimsical cosmos is going about things in string fashion, perhaps the suggested zebra-biosphere is not so off-target after all. One might propose the interweaving of species as the interweaving of biosocial vocational communities on which we overlay the zebra noosphere made up of "cultural species." Couldn't one speak of plankton loyalty, of spore loyalty, of termite loyalty, of tree loyalty, of elk loyalty, etc., etc.? Biological guilds of a sort. To those genetic loyalties, mankind is overlaying cultural loyalties.

Nations are moving toward explosive deadlocks. By injecting the fluid of VC we might be able to unlock the energies of individuals and institutions and transform explosive stresses into constructive processes.

WHAT BETTER WAY THAN AN INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION TO MAKE THE CONSCIOUS STEP IN THAT DIRECTION?

As suggested at the initial meeting, it might be far easier to connect the New York surgeon with the Sorbonne professor, the home gardener of Mexico City with the agro-industrialist of Arizona via the vocational channels and the passion sustaining them. There is the potential for solidarity that could find ways of offering, for instance, the coca farmer of Colombia a way out of his life-and-death dilemma. What politicians seem unable to do, farmers' loyalty empowered by an international endorsement and support could.

The astronomers' community is a living example of a VC, a zebra reality in the making. Astronomers from the four corners of the world coming together in the extraordinary environments of astronomic observatories.

The high-tech placebo prescription side by side with psychiatrist, confessor, medicine man, all part of a Health VC trading secrets and ambiguities, finding a less ambiguous place in the search for well-being. As long as we manufacture as many illnesses as we do cures, such clearing of the air will never come too soon.

It would be calming for the troubled spirit of contemporary society to identify honest loyalties and work with them in greater awareness.

The third millennium will be the Millennium of the Zebra, in which the love for oneself and others will tend to constrict itself into narrow and intense bands of "dedication." This will be made necessary in part by the immense proliferation of information, producing in minds a sense of loss and futility. For many, this condition will be fatal in the sense of causing a breakdown of the faculties of true learning and coherence (and for some it will be sloth and boredom influenced by information overload). But for others it will be the adoption of internal focusing favored by some innate genetic tendencies toward a passion for only some of the numberless quests available to human curiosity. Those are the VC candidates.

The millennium of the vocational communities not bound by geography will be a constructive, perhaps passionate, response to the quasi-uncontrollable onslaught of often contradictory agents, in constant and often chameleonlike action. To be the best one can to one's own calling will be again the greatest challenge and will induce a healthier "Love Project," the project our species is bound to pursue not by default but rather by dedication and intensification.

The medical community, the scientific community, the agricultural community, the pedagogical community, the arts community, the technology community ... will define boundaries of loyalty in the nature of porous, transparent, living membranes, boundaries of identification within which to perform at the full throttle permitted by the sustaining milieu.

Sticks and stones, mud and leaves, steel and concrete, plastics and fibers, and "intangible" materials will be the building blocks in the raw landscape of the present for the builders to operate its transformation: the Builders' Vocation Community.

16. Expo 2000: The Seville Compromise

OCTOBER 1992

It turned out that nations would call the shots, not the people. That is to say, the "zebra" notion was buried deep enough to be made inoffensive. Given the nature of the beast, it would have been naive to expect a different (tentative) conclusion.

How do we empower the people without "offending" the nations?

That seems to me to be a crucial question if we still want to produce a truly original and, more important perhaps, more germinative Expo 2000.

If Expo 2000 wants to be a sort of historical watershed: 5,000 millennia of Homo faber accomplishments landing (crash-landing?) upon the third millennium (Christian calendar) a presentation in zebra terms -- that is, the transformation of the earthly reality via the mind-hands-will of people -- might be the most true and poignant:

"This is how we got here, year 2000. Where do we go from here?"

In purely logistical terms and within the space-time allotted, the logistics of ideas, interdependence, synergy, authority, power, means, and things -- not to mention politico-financial-xenophobic power plays -- the difficulties would be staggering, but nothing could produce a comparable shift, producing a coherent connection with the reality of Homo faber -- Homo sapiens. Consider for one the nature of the Expo 2000 language in "zebra mode." It would be ecological, biospherical in the true sense because it would not find the barriers and the diaphragms nations put up out of their own very nature and purposes. It could mean a first and persuasive step in a natural dissolution process of boundaries and it could be done in the domain of action and performance under the eye of the whole world.

The breaking (or weakening) of national boundaries would be as invaluable for the constructive aspects and the perhaps necessary presence of nations as it would be for the vocational communities (VC's) and the participating individuals. In place of a passive presentation of the up-to-date state of nations, the Zebra mode would define a first step toward the reformation of a historically tested way of letting the thrift and industriousness of people run on the whole planet by force of "merit."

Chances are that the world will be unrecognizable within three to four generations. If so, to keep abreast of history as it is developing via our activities and the biosphere inertial flywheel, we might want to do the only realistic thing: Given the enormous stresses generated by generations of the American Dream -- like thinking and doing, the real thing to do is to be "revolutionary" in order to be evolutionary. If we shy away from such boldness, history might well pass us by, that is, history as evolution.

That (the nature of) nations may remain cast in the mold of today is part of the non evolutionary thinking with a prognosis of a dim future. In fact, under pressure of the xenophobic kind, nations might well clone themselves in even more pernicious copies -- see the Yugoslavia syndrome. On the other hand, if a more equitable Family of Man is auspicious and eventually implementable, the nations have to give way to better "animals."

My Millennium of the Zebra proposition is a crude attempt to reconfigure the structure of societies by encouraging people to participate in that kind of pattern (the zebra stripe) which would respond warmly and sensitively to the vocations of the person. Such a response, which can be engendered only if the majority of us can act upon the inclination toward definable activities -- in the guild mode, so to speak -- could transform the mood of whole societies and move the main effort from the confrontational theater to the cooperative theater. Not the "me against you," not the "us against them," but the parallel and at times symbiotic, synergistic working of vocational entities between themselves with room for true passionate skills to develop. A win-win proposition.

Nations would not necessarily fade away. They could eventually take on a sort of gossamer character. Such character could be strong but not stifling, containing but not confining, original but not parochial, willful but not xenophobic ...

Consider again the few pointers in the Millennium of the Zebra:

• A medical vocational community in which the opaque diaphragms between the most heterogeneous kind of medical practice would be dropped, and a truly global dedication to health prevention and care would accelerate the development of universal equitable health care (from shaman to microsurgeon in synergy).

• The production, processing, distribution, and consumption of staples and crops, immensely advantaged when the barriers of tariffs, vested interests, corporate myopia, and national pride would be superseded by the unarrestable forces and dynamics of an eco-agriculture that knows no boundaries; taking advantage from a close collaboration of all the disparate empirical and scientific knowledge of diverse culture and ethnic traditions (from the barefoot farmer to the agribusiness entrepreneur).

In quasi-architectural form, one can envision a cornucopia of human industriousness, from the very modest and tentative making or thinking-the agricultural stick, the knife, the loincloth, the leaves tisane, the fertility statuette, the animistic cosmogonies, etc. -- to the variance of today's products, theories, and hypotheses. A sort of spiraling storm engrossing time-space.

The developing scenario for each "vocation" (select five to ten of them) always through the lenses of the human maker and doer. Naturally, to the human one can be added, for instance, the direct participation of the animal domain: the horse, the dog, the cow, the sheep, the pig, the fowl, etc. If I were to select eleven "vocations" among the many, this would be my tentative list: fibers, metal, clay, animal husbandry, agriculture, health, communications, logistics, habitat arts, and knowledge.

The hub of industriousness seen as the groping beginning of tool making, clothing, food processing, shelter building, medicine, astronomy, animism, etc., reaching into the wheel of industriousness now becoming an overbearing affirmation of power upon nature. A sort of panzer storm ethic of consumerism and its materialistic subtension. The cornucopia breaks down into the waste heap of consumption-unlimited unless we "frugalize" our pursuits and our immense (but perhaps short-lived) power of transformation.

How to physically present, from the perspective of the individual, the technological and mental cyclone starting from the very eye of its (modest) beginnings? The vocational community (VC) mode impersonated historically in the guilds might be the most appropriate and telling way.

How we might be able to identify the zebra landscape from the consumerist storm we are invested by might also be the key to an understandable and useful pedagogical and exciting Expo 2000.

To be successful, the cyclone may have to take the shape of a comet whose tail is a composite of the zebra stripes, and the head is the fountainhead of Mind, forging into the future (and not as the shopping center of collapsed values destined to become a black hole of futility). In it may be the real possibility for the emergence of new economic, societal, and cultural structures incorporating the ethics of diversity and uniqueness spelled out by individual passion for this or that "zebra stripe" comet tail.

Three levels of performance:

1. the level of exclusiveness the guild tends to generate;

2. the level of universality where the guild is one among many of the strands of a quilt of interdependencies. The quality of the quilt as reflective of the quality of each strand;

3. the level of interference, positive or negative, of the single strand and of the quilt upon the biosphere.

17. Tsumari Project: A Preliminary Proposal

AUGUST 1998

Tsumari is nestled in a mountainous region of Niigata, where ten to fifteen feet of snow on the ground is the norm in winter. It is blessed with many layers of natural landscapes complemented by man's practical and aesthetic addition of the terraced rice fields along the Shinano and Shibumi Rivers.

The "Tsumarigo Art Necklace Project," led by Fram Kitagawa, art director, was initiated in 1995 with the full support of the community of six municipalities. The intention is to revitalize this region, which like many other agricultural communities in rural Japan, has been facing a serious population drain for some time. The population of 92, 000 in 1980 is now reduced to about 80,000. The trend will probably continue unless some hopeful initiatives are undertaken.

The Tsumari project is centered around a triannual art event for which various "stages" are built in each of the six municipalities. The inaugural event was held in the summer of 2000. An international mixture of artists and scholars were invited to participate in a wide variety of workshops, seminars, conferences, and live performances as well as the installation of visual arts.

Soleri was initially asked to outline his ideas on Tsumari regional development. There was also talk of an architectural commission that at this point remains a possibility as part of the rural development. Soleri has visited the region several times to assess its culture and environment. His last visit was to attend the triannual conference on environment and regional development and deliver a keynote presentation.

-Tomiaki Tamura, Cosanti Foundation, December 2000

The Content

The project will be presented in two parts: the content and the container. This preliminary proposal addresses the content.

When consulted in 1992 about the World Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, I advanced the idea that, after many events like those, rather than presenting an up-to-date display of national achievements, one pavilion per nation, it could be refreshing and far more telling about Homo faber-Homo sapiens if the fairgrounds showed the fluid history of the national containers.

What I call the "leopardlike dots" of national pavilions, necessarily prone to and promoters of xenophobic plagues, would be discarded in favor of the zebralike, fluid, elongated, politically "neutral" ribbons of the guilds: birth, development, obsolescence, and their virtue of not being prisoners to the environs mandated by politicians, clergy, and small and big despots.

The Hannover proposition was a switch from the leopard-spotted pelt emphasizing the isolation of the national claims, each nation in its own pavilion/palace, to the interfacing pattern of the zebra pelt, defined by ages-long guild experiences and knowledge.

I propose for Tsumari the zebra mode, and I propose that the habitat we are searching for be representative of and work in the zebra-mode approach.

On a modest scale, I propose a zebra approach to the Tsumari initiative extended to habitat and therefore the development of all-season green ribbon towns interconnecting with one another. Given the long winters of Tsumari, we may seek by intent and through design to establish what I call the all-season cityscape that after a modest first trial may afford to the people of Tsumari a pleasant, in fact exciting, modus vivendi, a ribbon city of sorts, a well-thought-out greenhouse condition that may foster most of the domestic activities and programs suggested, sheltered from the weather vagaries.

Territorially, the towns and logistics flows coincide, thus freeing the landscape from the segregated and invasive leopardlike pattern. It is invasive because it is modeled on the exurban patterns with their unavoidable load of land degradation, waste, pollution, high energy demands, and segregation, the whole under the hyperconsumption cloak. The eventual "ring" of all-season habitat connecting the six communities of the "Tsumari art necklace project" would emerge carrying pedestrian, bicycle, and public conveyances containing vegetable gardens, orchards, garden promenades, and parks in an energy-conserving, continuous volume into which the habitat is also developed.

Zebra/Leopard Concept

In the past, the power of one, a despot, cruel and inhumane, generated misery, order, and esthetic landscapes. At present, the power of many, opportunistic and unknowing, generates detritus and puts stress on people and things.

Things are moving rapidly and accelerating. The new millennium has no molds, and it needs some in spite of the naive notion that molds are things of the past. That is where the guild notion/mold comes in handy: the zebra interfaces at the expense of the spotty dance of the leopard patterns.

The tight little fists of the leopard dots of the single-house pattern (no trespassing, private property, guns, arsenal at hand, etc.) are not just promoting the hermitage image; they are a real presence with their loads of demands on life, human and not. Think of all the invisible and hidden umbilical cords feeding the isolated enclaves, feeding from near and far the little self-righteous parasite, the American family house.

The zebra/leopard analogy is a mnemonic way to interface the facts of nature, even when casual, with the "art of living." It is a way of imprinting the mind with a "memorable" imagery: the "dotness" of hermitage (leopard) abandoned in favor of the suggested ribbon interactivity (zebra) of the ribbon city.

Tsumari is another typical instance of the brutal power of "Howness," the ability to know how to do things, scattering around its good offices and its bad deeds. Needs and wishes are inescapably expressed in the fractured, rubbled, chaotic juxtapositions of old frugal ways and ostentatious, quick-fix new ways. One hopes it is only an interim period.

We have to hold Tsumari by its fragile shoulders and gently but firmly shake it up. It can find resolution in an evolutionary coherence, certainly not in political correctness or solely in historical fitness.

There are three ways of looking at the problem of habitat:

1. The actual transformation of the beauty of nature into the esthetic by the human presence in two different ways:

a. the segregated way of the planetary hermitage and its polka-dot patterns of endless exurban planning. This is the common way.

b. the integrated way of the Urban Effect and the zebralike interfacing fiber to implement the intensity of the urban implosion along logistical ribbons within a quasi-pristine nature.

2. The transformation (Techne) and the eventual transcendence of the reality of the pristine resources of nature into the towns and cities of culture.

3. The power that the MCD "formula" expresses in its unrelenting search for the ephemeralization of reality with no end in sight, if not the end of making reality into a self-revelatory conclusion.

In view of the preceding, there are nine proposals.

1. Dolorosa-Deliziosa Proposal

The Via Dolorosa-Deliziosa Analogy

We walk or drive "over" the biosphere with no compunction. We are wearing it out. The Via Dolorosa-Deliziosa is a symbolic ribbon of life being trampled by Homo faber. The ribbon is an artwork of indefinite length that is painted in sections by artists via crews of young and old apprentices.

The Dolorosa (pain-filled) symbol translates into the Deliziosa (delightful) symbol and periodically after restoration can be transferred in sections to public places, museums, schools, galleries, etc., etc.

The analogies consist in:

A. the erasing of images by the wearing out of pigments and textures caused by walking and driving on them.

B. the imagery itself produced by the painter and the fact that such imagery is the beauty of reality filtered into the esthetic of mind. The paintings, "presentations" of vegetal and animal species, can be by many artists and can be very abstract and unspecified if so desired by the painter(s). The painted ribbon road would be a kind of documentary about species and endangered species.

C. the emblematic/symbolic side of the process actually "demonstrating" how we tend to erase ecological balances by exploiting nature's resources.

The transition from art to an environmental concern can be felt, to a degree "inspired," by the strength of the images painted by the painter(s) under the "cloud" of environmental degradation mirrored in the "degradation" of their work marched over by thousands of unaware feet and rubber wheels. The prospect of salvaging and restoring the paintings (destined for public places and exhibits) would echo a desirable salvage and environmental restoration of habitat. Making the public aware of the silent catastrophe going on can be accomplished and indelibly imprinted in their minds via the analogy mirroring nature with art.

2. Workshop Exchange Proposal

Cosanti and Arcosanti have been built by crews of young people interested in my work. Under the Tsumari umbrella the dynamics of apprenticeship with residence and work can be developed at Arcosanti and then at Tsumari with the sponsorship of large construction corporations. The exchange can become a true resource for people interested in the biosphere, agriculture, and habitat. To the orthodox techniques of concrete forming and casting we have been adding earth- and silt-casting techniques. Cosanti and Arcosanti are examples of such methods. The coming together of young people of different maturities and their immersion in the learning/doing environs of Arcosanti makes for a multifaceted, rich, informative experience.

3. Speaking Wall Proposal

The Speaking Wall program focuses on the participatory presence of the public. Participation by making a "product" that eventually becomes part of the sections of habitat. Presence because the production is on a site (Tsumari). For an hour or so, the participants are "the builders of Tsumari."

The product is a reinforced concrete panel in the 40 x 40 centimeter range. The outer surface of the panel is embossed by the maker using a clay-concrete technique.

A time capsule is embedded in each panel. The time capsule is a brass cylinder containing the "message" of the maker: a quotation, an appeal, a poem, a letter, a prediction, a plea ...

On designated occasions one of the events would be the opening and reading of the capsules' contents with the possibility of composing them into a document, a "manifesto," or a book. The building speaks back to its "builders."

4. Ceramics Guild Proposal

Employ local materials, such as clay and silt, to establish a ceramic atelier. Recruit local skills for production and management. In addition to using the wheel, the buildup, and the clay-slip-in-plaster-mold technique, we would use the clay-slip/ silt technique we have developed at Cosanti and Arcosanti. Establish Clay-Silt Day connected with the equinox celebrations.

5. Arcology Gallery

The Cosanti Foundation has a large archival collection documenting my work, which is capable of filling several museums and galleries. Arcology is the content of the material.

6. Luce Tenebra Proposal

The Luce Tenebra shows the passage from the beautiful to the esthetic via the phases of a sapling becoming a tree, emphasizing the thresholds of growth into more and more filtered (controlled) stages to the final form where the tree is doused with water to bring to light the root structure (tenebra). The whole true organism suspended in air (with a lucite cylinder as the root tank) is exhibited.

The sapling is planted in a "glass" tank. After x years the tank is removed, and the tree is doused until the entire root system is uncovered. The tree of Luce Tenebra becomes a good subject for science and exhibits for sister cities' events: a city commissions Tsumari for a tree and at maturity the tree in its winter garment is part of a botanical-esthetic collection of the city. The tree becomes a living instrument for young, adult, and old alike to observe, admire, learn from, and talk about.

A yearly washout should be considered to document the process of growth with the attendant consumer charts: light, fertilizers, chemicals, etc.... space performing magic at its best. Intentional changes in soil composition would give more insight into the biochemistry of the tree.

Nature does it (the tree), the mind "thinks it," and parallel with the memorizing process (the past of the tree) comes the documenting of the history and often the transcendence into the esthetic domain: the inspired poem, music, painting, etc., and/ or the exhibiting of the tree itself. Bonsai art comes to mind: the master reconfigures the tree according to definite rules. The result is an "intellectual" tree of sorts in which the beautiful and the esthetic combine.

The metamorphosis of the beautiful into the esthetic would be the critical evaluation of the connectedness of the "natural" to the "mental" punctuated by the awe, the secretiveness, the anguish intrinsic to the MCD domain.

The virtual reality too can also be adopted, an enriching technique helping to reveal the "secretive" nature of the Becoming. A tree is the phenomenon observed and, beyond the factual, a series of analogies can be proposed.

Three things to be noted again:

A. the biotechnological marvel of the process going on in the light of day and in the darkness of the under ground;

B. the training of the tree and the setting it is in, producing a tree "filtered by mind." From beauty to esthetic;

C. the duality of light/ darkness, good/ evil, love/indifference resolved into the superior symbiotic synthesis of one living phenomenon, a Becoming.

The ontological-normative side in the last (C) is clear evidence that the domain of light, Luce, has to be hinged with the domain of darkness, Tenebra, in order to generate life. The duality, the opposition, and the enmity dissolve. They are exposed as a lie by the facts, in this case, of the tree, the photosynthetic process mixed into the chemistry of the soil in uninterrupted cooperative, complementary sequences called "tree."

Naturally, the Luce Tenebra project could become an earth celebration process and could hit at the core of the deforestation drama. We always see only half of the tree's true organism. The project would dramatically present the "whole truth" with great impact upon all. Good public relations, virtual reality, graphics, and written text would sell Tsumari as the Luce-Tenebra center of the world, with orders coming in and forests rejuvenated by public demand.

There should be inquiries at local universities, botanical institutes, and labs as the first resources for Luce Tenebra. And endorsements should be sought from universities, scientists, environmentalists, chemists, botanists, botanical gardens, etc.

***

The Luce Tenebra is a small corner in the quest for knowledge, but it can be of great value beyond its persuasiveness in the public awareness. It puts the public at large "one inch" away from the (vegetal) wonders of trees and forests.

7. Minds for History

Minds for History is a program that has features common to the "Wise Man Conferences." In the original four Minds for History conferences at Arcosanti, the emphasis was on eliciting from the invited scholars, artists, musicians, and scientists their own model of reality. With that as the goal, the participants take turns questioning and being questioned by one another. Some important modeling and hypotheses came out of the spirited encounters.

8. Paradox Proposal

Dangers of the Global Hermitage

The Paradox Project sprang from the initial assessment of some of the consequences stemming from the silicon cyberspace revolution.

Six paradoxes are coming into focus. It is a paradox that:

1. An ephemeralization technology, the Miniaturization- Complexity computer Techne, generates new wealth that in turn finances a new wave of materialism courtesy of the production/consumption engine. The "savior" of intellection, the noosphere, is authoring the nemesis of the biosphere.

2. Homo carbonis might be engaged in self-extinction via the Homo siliconis he is inventing, a biotechnology reaching back millions of years, made fearfully tragic by the World Wide Web.

3. An optimized communication / information technology may generate a planetary hermitage engaged in a virtual reality and a technology promoting a hypersegregated Homo sapiens.

4. A technology of learning via information can very easily turn into a technology of data inflation-constipation of information and mindless, pernicious gossip causing a sclerosis of mind.

5. A democratic technology might engender a split between the "haves" and the "have-nots," a split of unprecedented cruelty.

6. A fundamentally democratic technology, the World Wide Web, might cause a luddite revolt against technology and its overpowering presence, a technocracy.

It is important to consider these paradoxes and to consider possible reconfigurations of the cyberculture itself if so warranted by the dangers hidden in them. But if encounters on this topic are to be considered on a regular basis, then the bulk of attention would go to considering the larger question mark of consciousness and the transcendence from carbon consciousness to silicon consciousness, and how an internship developed as part of the Paradox Project can result in a constructive, in fact, exhilarating experience.

The 1997 Paradox Conference at Arcosanti opened a dialogue about carbon/silicon intelligence. The responses of the Paradox Project to the tidal wave of cyberspace may in part depend on the hypothesis that reality is, and only is, space in metamorphosis. Space is a hypersophisticated geometric game (smells Pythagorean). It is the nonanimistic posture of MCD. Physicality is on its way to mentality and in for an immense effort to move toward two nonanimistic agencies par excellence: Miniaturization and Complexity.

7. Performance and Events

Throughout the 25 years Arcosanti has been under construction, there have been a variety of special events. The largest, the 1977 Arcosanti Festival, was attended by about 3,000 people. On average, the attendance is in the 100-300 range.

One thing to consider is the celebration of seasonal changes as they relate to the nature of the zebra-leopard and the nine programs. Form, space, color, light, sounds, and how the audience / participants can produce an array of documents should all be considered.

As succinctly as I can put it, here are the critical aims of the proposals.

• With Via Dolorosa-Deliziosa we have the esthetic bridging into the beautiful and the scientific.

• With the Construction Workshop Exchange we have the persona prima experience of "Howness" with a purpose.

• With the Speaking Wall we have participatory ways of involving visitors and friends in the production of permanent and visible parts of Tsumari.

• With the Ceramics Guild we have the elementary materials, silt and clay, as mediums for artisan expression via the silt cast and other techniques.

• With the Arcology Gallery we have a document about the possible evolution of the Urban Effect.

• With Luce Tenebra we have the scientific bridging into the esthetic.

• With the Minds for History program we have a reference to the mind restlessly groping for resolution.

• With the Paradox Project we have the peering into awesome things to come.

• With events and performances the field is vast and suited for the staging of events that might relate to the nine proposals.

Summary

The projects outlined here are coherent with arcological fundamentals that may help underpin the socioeconomic growth of the Tsumari community.

Some of the ideas may be feasible in the near future if desired. Otherwise they may be considered for the future development of the region where the community undoubtedly wishes to thrive for the next century.

The Zebra-Leopard Concept is represented by Arcosanti because the project integrates diverse domains in a complex that will promote lively interactions between people who occupy the space, the Urban Effect. The application of a single ribbonlike continuous structure threaded through the Tsumari communities may be too ambitious at this point, but any developments anywhere in the future should consider the sociocultural and economic implications of how the infrastructure of a community influences the strategy to sustain the overall ecology within the given environment.

Dolorosa-Deliziosa was originally designed for the 4-kilometer access road to Arcosanti. Naturally, the idea can be translated to any environment where nature, art, and technology meet and present ecological concerns. The scope of the project can be modified to fit into the Tsumari environment if interest is found.

Workshop exchanges between Arcosanti and Tsumari will certainly introduce both to a variety of cultural and environmental experiential opportunities that will bring our communities closer for meaningful learning while exploring future collaborative ventures between them. The Arcosanti Workshop program was initiated in 1960 at Cosanti and has been active ever since at Cosanti and Arcosanti.

The Speaking Wall project at Arcosanti is an opportunity for people who are interested in a small way in the construction of a building here. Any number of the panels may be the participant contribution. Within certain limitations and criteria and including individual time capsules, the panels can be installed as a part of a building's design features. Since we are planning to design and build structures in Tsumari, the Speaking Wall panels can be a part of future facilities.

Silt and clay have been among the resources sustaining Arcosanti from the start. The techniques developed here have been applied to making wind bells and sculptures as well as to the construction of large-scale buildings.

The introduction of a ceramics studio in Tsumari can open up an opportunity to demonstrate some of the techniques, an educational opportunity, as well as to produce a line of ceramic products that would generate income for the Tsumari community.

Given the vast differences in the environments of Arcosanti and Tsumari, some modifications need to be made in facility configuration and in the operational method to produce a workable adaptation.

The Arcology Gallery has been in existence in various forms for the past thirty years: in museums, exhibitions, publications (print and electronic media), and galleries at both Cosanti and Arcosanti. Tsumari will have the opportunity to have a gallery that deals with the precarious nature of human endeavors through ecological, socioeconomic, and esthetic points of view.

The gallery in Tsumari can be an exploration of ever increasing human potentials through ecological exhibitions that are coherent with evolutionary teachings.

Luce Tenebra is a part of our greenhouse design yet to be implemented. Aside from the philosophical and esthetic implications of the project, I believe the experiment has scientific and educational value. I would like to suggest that we make a first prototype at Arcosanti to test a unit, an outline of the experiment to follow.

Minds for History conferences were started at Arcosanti in 1989. They are intellectual probings of extraordinary minds that have contributed to our society. Occasional opportunities of this kind can certainly be stimulating to the Tsumari community, as they have been at Arcosanti.

The first Paradox Project seminar was held at Arcosanti in 1997. With the growth of computer-cyber technology, our uneasiness with our ability to balance our experiential, hands-on learning with employment of the cybertechnology on which we have become uncritically more and more dependent has also grown. The project suggests the development of an internship program for individuals to experience both the hands-on (physical) and cyber (mental) aspects of what Tsumari and other traditions can bring to the challenge of facing the next millennium.

One suggested type of performance is the pictograph -- environmental light and sound shows -- which were developed in the 1980s and have become an Arcosanti summer tradition. These could be translated to the Tsumari environment.

Conclusion

We belong to the same planet. The difficulties we, the population of the planet, are encountering are universal because they are at the core of the human condition.

What Tsumari is searching for is a meaningful engagement for its people in rewarding and fruitful endeavors. Endeavors that prove to be merely politically correct or historically fitting will not ultimately achieve this. Only those endeavors that are evolutionary coherent will reward the people of Tsumari.

In straightforward or oblique ways the proposed domains work toward a keener awareness, participation, and enjoyment, and they are endeavors we have been pursuing at Arcosanti.

THE PREEMINENCE OF ART AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF LIFE IS ROOTED IN THE JAPANESE ETHOS. At Arcosanti we are aware of the indispensability of the coexistence of life and the esthetic.

18. "Minds Directory" Conferences

A Proposal

1986

Conferences tend to be well-meaning waste machines. The waste is both material and mental.

Even in the best of cases the endemic problem with conferences is that what the participant hears are snapshots of mental processes. The speakers and debaters produce and vent shreds of their model of things because the conference format does not allow for more. All those mutilated notions, propositions, ideas, and paradigms fly by each other with little room for "encounters" but a lot of actual collisions. If one adds the semantic difficulties, not to mention the language barriers, the hope for true understanding and synthesis remains just that, a hope.

Adding to the problem is that speakers often work as selectors of other minds' ideas and concepts (the security blanket syndrome?) instead of offering "a piece of their mind." This adds more mutilated limbs to the collective mental space.

How can we obviate the situation, remain in the realm of the feasible, have some success at synthesis, and end up with "product"? My proposal is: DO NOT FOCUS ON A SUBJECT; FOCUS ON ONE MIND. Alternatively, DO NOT FOCUS ON SUBJECTS; FOCUS ON MINDS.

Focus on One Mind

Focus on one mind and construct, via dialogue and debate, a fairly complete image of it.

Phase one: Information flow from the selected mind.

Phase two: Analysis and clarification via panel.

Phase three: Synthesis and documentation via "biographies."

The survey of the chosen author's mind (the author, from now on) would proceed from the perspective of at least four different disciplines chosen from the following: the sciences, philosophy, theology, esthetics, economics, politics, history, and technology. One person of solid credentials would represent each discipline, and a person of solid credentials would assume the task of moderator. The core of the conference would then be constituted by the author at the center, a panel of 4-8 "investigative scholars," a moderator, and an invited audience (size to be decided) participating as listeners and questioners according to a schedule decided on in advance.

Chronology

Part 1:The author develops his "model" (1-2 hours).

Part 2: The panelists intervene for clarification and analysis (1-2 hours each).

Part 3: All participants contribute to a systematic critique and synthesis of the author's model (1-2 days).

It would seem necessary to spend at least three full days in encounters. Optimally, a week's work. The material would have to be reviewed and reedited by the author, panelists, and moderator before being incorporated into the final "product." This part would be better put together by a "professional" writer (a panel member?).

Results for Author and Panel

1. The author, who may miss some critical elements, can be effectively helped by interventions from disciplines that are not his/hers, to the advantage of his/her model.

2. The panel can benefit its members by participating in a live exchange of ideas about four or more models of thought focusing on one single-mind model.

3. The mental gymnastics the moderator has to practice speaks for itself.

4. The attention of the audience can be directed toward discovering the implications and ramifications of a thought process examined through different disciplines.

The common frustration felt at the end of even the best planned conferences would be diminished, if not canceled, by the automatic targeting built into the format.

One could envisage a cycle where all the participants and the moderator would take turns at the center as authors. To avoid congestion but retain the knowledge and understanding that would intensity via such cycles, each turn could be separated from the other by days, weeks, or longer. A new person could be a refreshing addition for each cycle.

Why a Minds Directory?

Because the conference would generate a "super-document" on the thought process as it has developed in the mind of the person (author), with all the attendant revealing pathways and mechanisms, the highs and lows, the banal, the sophisticated, the authoritative, the brittle, the insightful, the expedient, the rational, the intuitive -- this document would be a precious pedagogical tool. A collection of such Minds Biographies on video and audio tapes and in book form would constitute a unique and inestimable Minds Directory.

The Product

The Minds Directory would be a new reference instrument for any undertaking in need of specific mental resources and applicable models. Institutions of learning, governmental institutions, advocacy societies, and corporations in general would soon find it to be an indispensable device for the recruiting of those minds most needed for specific programs. But the substance would still be in the richness of each mind's biography and the role model he/she would present to students and everyone else.

If sharply structured, the Minds Directory would offer a survey of the outstanding minds living at present but often unemployed or badly underemployed, a cruel waste for all mankind. Think of the difference between the schmaltz of a "Who's Who" directory and a Minds Directory. Even a modest edition containing 10-20 authors analyzed and made intelligible, would fetch any price on the specialized and nonspecialized market. Nothing of this sort exists yet.

For an opus referring to a few hundred of the richest contemporary minds, the history of culture would acquire a new, powerful instrument, and the understanding of our age would be made a fraction less bewildering. A thread could eventually develop pointing at the "unity" of the sciences and of culture.

19. Minds for History

NOVEMBER 1992

The Minds for History conferences were designed to identify and document the processes and models of thinking employed by extraordinary individuals whose minds have generated remarkable initiatives, discoveries, achievements, and insights into our culture and society. It was our intent to enrich the Arcosanti community and the region by providing a unique intellectual and cultural event. Our inaugural program, which was widely acknowledged by the international press, included such luminaries as Warren Bennis, Murray Cell-Mann, Robert Jay Lifton, Billy Taylor, Hazel Henderson, Harvey Cox, Czeslaw Milosz, and Richard Falk. The meetings were greatly appreciated for their spirit of adventure and discovery and lively interdisciplinary exchanges. A statement by Harvey Cox captures the essence of the conferences and reflects the consensus if participants and audiences:

I cannot remember any single occasion during my life as a scholar and theologian in which I have felt more supported, stimulated, and enriched at the same time. The format is unique and highly productive. The exchange if ideas and insights evoked new thinking and clear personal reflection.

The Minds for History program was short-lived. After three conferences, all if which were critical successes and commercial failures, we had to abandon the project for lack of funding.

-- Mel Roman, Cosanti Foundation

The present Western generations are clamoring for "personalizing." They do not ask for social, cultural, economic, or ecological niches, but rather personal niches. The paramount significance of the person!

But if one tries to shed light on such personalization, one is surprised by the amount of homogenization: We real1y beg for belonging to something, sometimes to anything, even at the expense of our own identity and dignity. That easily goes for the mediocritization of culture. I guess opportunism with all its possible vagaries imprints us in a schizoid mold, and in it the icon of true freedom is a distant notion.

The fractured nature of our society could be reason enough for trying to understand how some individuals seem able to leapfrog over the anxiety and, at least occasionally, generate the nondeceptive, the tangibly extraordinary. Extraordinary minds are asked to accept probing by peers from different disciplines seeking to understand the image such minds have of reality.

That an extraordinary mind might be able to do without such an image is hardly plausible. It might well be that the image is not consciously developed, that it is ambiguous, painful ... but down deep enough, it can be found. For instance, a God-fearing mind cannot abstain from contemplating the consequence of such faith as much as a nonbeliever must contemplate the consequences of his or her disbelief.

A worthy scholarly enterprise would be to develop a "Minds Encyclopedia" in which extraordinary minds from the past would be succinctly presented from the perspective of reality's modeling. This would entail many years of work, but the acquired information could be invaluable.

More than ever, science, philosophy, religion are contending over territory that is ephemeralizing itself more and more: the cosmos and its possible meaning. Leaving aside the probability that someday the three will find themselves in the esthetic basket, the fact remains that the anxiety of the species finds no pause or real comfort in any of them, or in any kind of maladroit ecumenism.

A profound understanding of things of one's own discipline does not automatically mean that one has a coherent take on what one might wish reality to be. But if there is one thing on which science, philosophy, and religion seem in accord, it is the indivisibility of the real (whatever the real might be).

To separate, divide, and isolate for a refinement of specific and probing tools is an extremely fruitful expediency: see the scientific and technological revolution. But how do we move from expediency to realism?

If we persist in an analytical tour de force with no parallel toil toward synthesis, apprehensions, or comprehensive simulations, our minds, ordinary and extraordinary, will more and more become silt in the reservoir of knowledge and wisdom we desperately need to fill and fill with less and less detritus. The Minds for History play-conferences could make a brave contribution to reducing the silt-in.

The hologram of recent technology that carries in each fragment an (ever impoverishing) image of the whole is very telling on two scores: One is the lessening of information-knowledge each fragment is capable of containing and offering the smaller the fragment; the other is the resonance box that everything in its fragmentary way is.

One can wish that the Minds for History holographic fruit will not be too puny, though necessarily fragmentary. The Mistero Tremendo might be forever beyond human grasp, and yet ...

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