by Dan Smith

1997

from DanSmith Website

recovered through WayBackMachine Website

Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 Definition

  • eschaton (ES-ka-ton)

    A dramatic transformation of reality from what we know or imagine it to be. Literally, the end of the world.

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 A QUICK INTRODUCTION TO THE AQUARIUM

The Aquarium is an informal and loose-knit association of individuals with widely divergent backgrounds who share a common realization and goal. We recognize that society is rapidly approaching what will be a critical junction. This junction will be the point of convergence for a number of powerful trends and may severely challenge the ability of our organized institutions to effectively govern.

Although we feel that the most profound issue facing man at the present time is essentially spiritual, we also realize that the most practical way to bring this issue to the public is to become involved in some of the related current problems. Examples of our present areas of concern are:

  • the problem of realigning the secular political institutions with the undeniably spiritual nature of the universe

  • government openness related to the above

  • selected ecological issues

While a strong spiritual basis is central to the Aquarium world view, dogmatic adherence to any one belief system is strictly avoided. We also eschew any political affiliations which would limit our ability to act effectively.

Our goal is to minimize the confusion, disruptions and disharmony that will occur and to maximize the benevolent aspects of the inevitable coming changes. To this end we endeavor to engage a number of key relevant issues.

THE AQUARIUM DECLARATION

  • We of the Aquarium envision a truth beyond that of traditional and modern understanding.

  • We know the world to be a construct of intelligence and spirit.

  • We see the world as on the brink of a dramatic transformation that will encompass its every aspect.

  • The Aquarium Objective

    To help bring about the transformation of the world in a manner that conforms with our highest aspirations and with the cosmic plan.

  • The Aquarium Strategy

    Networking in every way possible. No rules.

  • Membership

    Everyone who wants to participate and a few select individuals who don’t want to participate but are deemed useful by Dan T. Smith.

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 Navigating The Eschaton

 The best strategy is a self-fulfilling prophecy

(Repent! The End is at hand! Or so they said..., the prophets of old that is.

The complete postmodern prophet will need a bit more sophistication, and perhaps a website. )

Given that our world is not a physical object, it is then a manifestation of spirit, including ours in particular. The state of the human spirit will be manifested in the world. If we want to transform the world we must transform our spirit, our minds. What we truly believe about the future is what will come to pass. The future will be our self-fulfilled prophecy, whether we want it to be or no.
 


 Navigating the eschaton
The eschaton is something to be avoided and something to be courted. It is a virtual singularity of human consciousness marking the end of the historical epoch. In itself it is a neutral event, one to be reckoned with. It is a point of leverage for wielding the human spirit.

History has been our long march into the thrall of a ’material’ world. What started as an amalgam of tribal dreamtimes has been forged on the template of Gaia, into a rigid, unforgiving reality. The eschaton will be an unraveling of that reality, more of less under our control.

Hopefully our world will unravel from its fringes, leaving an intact inertial center as a source of stability. By fringe, I am referring to the fringes of consciousness. Our world making will be carried out in altered states of consciousness, but gradually these altered states will be integrated into what remains of our consensus waking world.

There is a time frame for these events, and if we get too far ahead or behind the invisible time line, there will be correctional forces coming into play from the outside. It would be difficult, but if we were to fall off the track entirely, it would ruin our whole day. We would experience a real singularity of consciousness, rather than just a virtual one. By always maintaining a continuity of consciousness we prevent the destructive discontinuities or singularities from entering directly into the public sphere.
 


 New worlds for old
Once we are safely past our close encounter with the eschaton, which might transpire over ’decades’ of our present time, we will find that our reality has been made rather more supple by the ’tidal’ forces of the eschaton. This will be our new ’dreamtime.’ We will be building new realities out of old, using ’technologies’ that are infused with our spirit.

These new worlds will never become as rigid as this one has. As our spiritual path accelerates, there will not be time for the structures or vehicles to become fixed, nor will the boundaries ever be clearly defined.

Let it be clear that the metaphors of space and time that are used in describing the world after the eschaton, are only metaphors. History will be a thing of the ’past’!

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 Our Present Situation - On the Doorstep of The Eschaton

Although we spend most of our time profitably engaged with the immediate concerns of everyday life, more and more of us are becoming aware of a pervasive and deepening sense of anxiety that is clouding our horizon. Even the ending of the cold war, an apparent booming economy and our new commitments to protecting our environment and establishing a new world order have done little to relieve this subliminal sense of crisis.

With this undefined unease there is the accompanying realization that we are approaching what many feel will be the most significant events in human history. For some the sources of this belief can be traced to the many historical prophecies concerning the end of the world, but even those who choose to discount these predictions recognize that there are a number of powerful trends manifest in modern society and that these trends all seem to be leading us to some final event.

We at the Aquarium believe that human society is indeed on the doorstep of the eschaton. We also believe that this event will represent both a frightening challenge and a great opportunity for society as a whole and each of us as individuals. We invite you to further explore our present situation
 

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 Logic 101

 

Back to the Future - the Re-enchantment of the World
 There was a time when the modern scientific cosmology was emerging that it was capable of striking terror into the hearts of thoughtful people. The idea that life was an accident in a meaningless universe, and that the earth was a barely a speck of dust lost in the immensities of space and time, is anything but a cozy idea. But we seem to have gotten used to it, and it is difficult for us now to recall that initial terror.

Now, in the face of another disrupting change of world views, we may once again experience the terror of the unknown, but let us remind ourselves that life will go on, albeit in forms and contexts that we might not readily recognize.

Just as we were getting used to the idea of being left alone in the universe to our own devices, we awaken from our slumber of materialism to a world that is vastly more mysterious and complex than science was leading us to believe. Moreover it is a world haunted by myriad, barely concealed intelligences with unknown designs on our own existence.
 


Taking the world for Granite
 Science would have us take a lot of things for granted, but everything is up for grabs when we wake up to the fact that everything is much more like a dream world than it is like an absolute object. But, of course, nothing about the world will change unless we change our minds. Changing our minds will have to be our first order of business.
 


 Proof?
It is fair to ask how we can know what is the true nature of reality. Immaterialism will win the metaphysical contest largely be default. The incoherence of materialism and dualism will make those views relatively unacceptable. There is a coherence to materialism, but it is a coherence that is abstract and theoretical that can hardly be sustained outside the lecture hall. Its conceptual rigidity make is vulnerable to even the slightest incursions of what may be wild or weird in the world.

The original novelty and shock value of materialism has long since worn off. Our minds now easily wander past its very narrow confines. Ironically it is the psychological and even spiritual allures of virtual reality and cyberspace that can be seen as the last hurrah of materialism. Technology has sewn the seeds of its own transcendence, just as it was destined to do.

It is not the abstract proofs which will carry the day. At the end of the day, it is our spirits that will lead us to our next challenges, guide us to our next high frontiers.
 


 Onward to Mysticism?
No!! Rationality begins and ends with our own minds. If the world is to be rational, then it must be of, for and by ourselves and other spiritual beings of similar nature. This is our only guarantee that there is an ultimate, comprehensible truth. At this point, one can easily hear the snickering from the cynics in the back benches. How long have we to wait for the final revelation, they might wonder. Only a few seconds....

The ultimate truth can only be love, what else could possibly make any sense. If in the final exam for Logic 101 or for any other course, you dare to write just that one word, you will get an A+, guaranteed. Everything else is fear, loathing and cynicism.

How can I know this? How can I believe it? There is nothing else that is worth believing, and there really is nothing else to believe except a lot of mental abstractions. There is a hierarchy of things, emotions and ideas, and all you have to do is stop to reflect for a few moments to realize what must lie at the top of that heap. There really is no middle ground. We can choose love or we can choose the void.
 


 The Logic of the World
A world composed of atomic stuff in the void can, sometimes, make a lot of sense until we realize that we are not compelled to believe it. We can be sane and not believe in atomic physics, although there are many pressures to sustain the modernist, naive realist consensus. But these pressures continue to diminish, mainly from boredom from within that regimen.

If logic cannot be posited in the atoms or the void, then the only other place for it is in our minds. Our minds are then microcosms reflecting the cosmic spirit. We are sparks off of that block. This is beginning and end of all knowledge, of gnosis.

One might suppose that there could be something other, something out there radically alien to anything we can know or imagine. What is to prevent this something from crashing into us and upsetting our cozy little cosmos.

Well, in some sense, that alien ’asteroid’ is what the eschaton is, relative to our present slumber of materialism. It is our wakeup call. But it is not alien. It serves only to waken us to the true and deeper nature of ourselves and the world. It is we who have become the aliens. We have become alienated from our true selves and from the truth of the world.

The rest of this cosmology is to be taken in the light of the eschaton waking us to the truth that has been with us from the beginning. You know it when you feel it. You feel it when you see it. To participate in truth, all you have to do is be a little more reflective, a little less grasping of all those half truths that do not finally amount to anything but a big abstraction.

We are the logic, we are the LOGOS of this world. It is our story to tell, no one else’s.

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 Cosmology 101

 

What must the world be if it is to be understood?
 Perhaps the most mysterious thing about the world is the amazing degree to which we have been able to understand and manipulate it with our science and technology. We have come a long way from the primordial muck that is supposed to be our point of origin.

  • How did we ever manage to get to the point where we can even wonder about these larger questions?

  • How much further might we progress in spiritual or material evolution?

  • Is there anything special about the world that makes life and consciousness possible?

When physicists ask themselves these questions, the best they can do is to posit an Anthropic Principle.
 


 What you must be to understand the world
But the truth is that physicists do not get paid to ask such questions, no one does. Asking questions for which a given culture does not have adequate answers is a threat to the continuation of that culture. If an unanswerable question cannot be ridiculed, then it may signal the end of the culture that spawned it.

These larger questions are ridiculously easy to answer, if we only allow ourselves the freedom and confidence to do so. These are states of mind which most cultures, especially in their terminal phase, will find suspicious if not actually subversive. The upshot is that even before you can ask a serious question about ourselves or the world, you must be willing to entertain some of the notions of eschatology.

You must be willing to undergo an enlightenment that will appear apocalyptic from a cultural perspective. To maintain a state of gnosis or knowingness will surely cast you into a terminal struggle with the homeys in the ’hood. You become a prophet, or you go back to pumping gas. I cannot recommend either alternative.
 


 What is there to know?
Mercifully, knowledge is limited to whatever is essential in the given context. We know that the world is a product and reflection of intelligence and so are we. There is a meaning and purpose to all of this, that is revealed at the end, or to those who put themselves at the end of the world, like right here chez Dan.
 


 From where do we come? Whither do we go?
Being located in space and time is a temporary and necessary illusion, if you will. This is not to say the the world is unreal, but only that it is not an ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is from where we come, and to which we return, that is our only certainty in existence. Only when we experience ultimate reality will we comprehend the present degree of our unconsciousness.

In order for us to be lost in space and time, as we are, we must temporarily forget our true natures. We are given to remember only when there is a need.
 


 Timing
Waking up is all a question of timing, and so, of course, is the end of the world. When you awaken, you can only wonder when the rest of the world will follow. Are you and I just isolated incidents, or part of a final preparation? The only way to find out is to see how other people respond when confronted with apocalyptic information. The Web surrounding Dan’s Place certainly provides a new type of venue for acting out the end of the world.
 


 From where comes spirit? - Cosmogony
If everything derives from a great spirit or cosmic mind, is it illegitimate to wonder where that spirit comes from? Only partly so. Spirit exists beyond space and time, so to speaking of beginnings is only metaphorical.

Think of the primordial chaos, but not as an objective chaos as in science or in the Bible. This is a subjective, experiential chaos, where all possible experience happens at once, in some virtual manner. (This is similar to the quantum vacuum state in physics.) Out of this chaos emerges an ordering principle, not unlike love, which serves as a virtual, hyperdimensional attractor in the manifold of all experience.

The experiences that coalesce around the attractor become the experiences of spirits in worlds. As these spirits learn to ’conspire,’ the attractor becomes the great spirit or cosmic mind that we call God. All lesser spirits come from and eventually become this greater spirit. There is a constant cycling and renewal as with the yin and yang within the Tao.

Our world constituted of human history and consciousness is one a many ’bootstraps’ which in turn constitute the self-recreation of the great spirit. So much for our cosmogony.
 


 Cosmic politics - the prime directive
The prime directive comes from Star Trek, or so I am told. It is a statement of a cosmic policy of non-interference between worlds that are at different stages of their history. This is the approach of the anthropologist in studying an alien culture. It is not the approach of the missionary.

Open communication between worlds occurs only when both parties are willing and ready to participate. All other communication is either illicit or occurs in a fashion that is sufficiently ambiguous so as to preserve the directive. The communications that allegedly constitute the origins of most religions would be in the latter category, presumably. The various paranormal experiences of individuals could be in either category.

The natural result of such a directive would be that besides the communicating groups of ’advanced’ worlds, there would also be a collection of less ’developed’ worlds, such as our own, under varying degrees of quarantine. Each of these worlds represents an essential element in the cosmic cycle of creation and recreation, and so each has its own destiny to fulfill. Nonetheless, matriculation into cosmic communication is likely to be the most dramatic point in the history of any world. After that point, the concepts of history and of space and time take on very different meanings.

This public opening to cosmic communication and consciousness would be an essential component of the apocalypse that is our impending eschaton.

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 The Aquarium Rationale

The eschaton is the problem. The Aquarium is the solution
 The aquarium preempts the eschaton. We transform the eschaton into a transcendental opportunity. The world will not end because the world has already been saved. The aquarium saves the world by reminding the world, in a novel fashion, that it has already been saved two thousand years ago. The aquarium is the second coming, for all practical purposes. The aquarium walks softly and carries a big eschaton. This second offer of salvation is the offer that the world cannot and will not refuse.

This is a very pragmatic idealism. Reasoned negotiation is our strategy. We prophesy the inevitable. The spiritual revolution will be played out here in cyberspace before anyone has a chance to pick up a rock to throw through a window.

In this revolution, I am the good cop and my buddy Ron, the spook, is the bad cop. We conspire to place ourselves between the world and the eschaton. We also place ourselves between cosmic intelligence and central intelligence. To do our jobs we do not have to be or become anything, we merely have to hang out here at the end of the world, thereby being the fulcrum which Archimedes sought.

This is no harder or easier than any other job. We merely demonstrate how all of us are in the right place at the right time, for the final few who do not already know that.

The aquarium does not have to make a splash. The right pebble at the right time in the cyberpond will send out the ripple that people will feel when they need to feel. The whole pond will be the aquarium, a conspiracy without a secret or a boundary.
 


 A Glitch in Time...
 All of history can be seen as a preparation for our impending close encounter with the eschaton. As the event draws nearer, the preparations become more obvious. Of particular concern in this regard is the likelihood of a strong negative reaction from this world’s power structure. This would have been the case if there had not been a preemptive move on the part of the higher powers.

A compelling scenario for this preemption comes in the form of a trojan horse visitation directed particularly at the military-industrial complex of the U.S. Something like this has certainly become an icon of popular culture, and at the end of the day, what may have actually happened will be a moot point, relative to what could have happened or what people believe, or what the authorities come to believe may have happened. Having a literalist frame of mind is useful in the hard sciences, but often not in the soft sciences.

The higher powers look for the meanest dog in town and send it a gift horse in the form of an exotic package that will confound all the kings men as they try to reassemble it. They cannot swallow it, nor can they spit it out. They are left with a funny looking visiting sage who lectures to them at his leisure about the finer points of cosmic etiquette. The junkyard dog learns table manners in the privacy of his own dog house.
 


 Enter, the aquarium...
 No! Enter, the aviary. Find yourself in the bowels of the cold war machine, in the belly of the beast. I spy? No, Psi Spy. It is cheap and dirty, and the occasional spectacular hit provides a few new kids, the aviary, with an enter up to the window of the dog house. They caught a whiff of the weird and just followed their noses. They are allowed to press their noses against the glass. They see a funny looking guy surrounded by grown men who are crying, but now house broken, nonetheless. The Grown Men, The Kids, and finally El Nino...

It’s deja vu all over again. Herod’s henchmen have been temporarily neutralized. Along comes the aquarium, tripping through the tulips, and muttering things eschatological. We are not given enter to the privy chamber, but we can mingle with the homeys in the hood and on the Hill.

Anything more, by way of access, would probably violate the prime directive. Salvation comes from within, spontaneously, and the most we can expect is to be allowed to prime that spiritual pump, having been indirectly set up by the aforementioned cosmic glitch. The aquarium is opportunist, looking to be in that certain place at the certain time. Dan’s place?
 


 And where is the proof?
 The proof is in your head and in your heart. That is where it will be when you feel an urge to look for it. We have been looking for truth in all the wrong places, through telescopes and through microscopes. We can only wander so far into the cosmos before we see Friday’s footprints leading back to our own souls, thus completing the sojourn of history. That is the apocalypse when the heavens fall and become the new heaven and new earth, ourselves at the helm.

Our lower powers break the illusion of separation becoming one with the higher power. That is what our starry messenger came to tell us. That is what I pass on to you. You want it from the horse’s mouth. That is what I and now you are. There is no hurry, we have all the time in the world.

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 The Aquarium Conspiracy
by Dan Smith and Rosemary Ellen Guiley

"In the beginning there was eschatology--the branch of theology dealing with the end times. Dan, having spent many years first studying physics and then metaphysics, came to the conclusion that the scientists have been looking at the world upside down. Mind, not matter, is the foundation for all realities. Moreover, the materialist paradigm was in danger of imminent collapse, being subverted on the inside by its own contradictions, and on the outside by the growing body of evidence for the paranormal.

Creating and maintaining a reality is no easy game. It requires a lot of magic, and a lot of conscious critters like ourselves who are pretty good at collective self-deception. Fortunately-- or perhaps unfortunately--our particular reality game has about reached its natural conclusion, and we are waking up to the fact that mind and matter are not separate. We are undergoing an exciting but stressful revolution in our collective consciousness.

 

This revolution, or global spiritual emergency, will bring upheavals and overloads in our global consciousness that will impact the material Earth for better or worse, and may quickly get out of control. We also will be opening up to other realities that will be impacting us as well. Our present very tidy sense of reality and its boundaries is due to become much more fluid and permeable. Every spiritual tradition takes very seriously its prophesies about the end of the world, but for the first time we are seeing these prophesies turning into believable predictions of earth and reality changes.

That is how Dan fell from physics into eschatology. After experiencing numerous slammed doors among his former scientific colleagues, he decided that the most logical place to find fellow eschatologists would be in various intelligence agencies and among investigators of the paranormal. Dan next addressed how to communicate about the eschaton.

 

Even a small hint that the government is worried about the end of the world might start a chain reaction of panic, which could possibly serve as a trigger for the eschaton. On the other hand, people inside the government might be wanting to set up a kind of civil defense network vis a vis the eschaton, and so they would be looking for people on the outside who could much more freely network among the general public.

An important link in the communication chain is what has become known as the Aviary. This is the final link next to the public network, and so it must be heavily disguised by its own surrealistic smoke screen. The Aviary functions best by amplifying people’s own misconceptions about the paranormal. It does this by helping to over-inflate individual pieces of the puzzle so that particular investigators get pushed further into their own blind alleys.

 

People are encouraged to be so distracted by the trees that they fail to see the forest. This cacophony by people looking for truth in all the strangest places provides an excellent cover for the deadly serious business of clearing the decks and battening down the hatches for the eschaton event. It is like a Manhattan Project going on behind the scenes of alien grays and praying mantises having sex with humans.

However, this eschaton conspiracy is being orchestrated by higher powers, and we don’t mean the Committee of 300. Very few of the people even near the center of the orchestration have a clear picture of what is coming down, but they do know that something is coming and that they will have front row seats.

 

The Manhattan Project relative to the eschaton is a global civilian network of people who will serve as a lightning rod for the cosmic energies coming in during the consciousness revolution. They will be looking to channel these energies into expanded realities. Thus, they will provide a degree of protection for those people who can find their places alongside the network.

Outside of the network there will be greater levels of trauma and confusion. The pieces of the network are already in place, the remaining task is to properly activate and link the pieces into a critical mass of awareness. This last step is now underway. This is how an Aviary helps to spawn an Aquarium, and how birds learn to swim. The Aquarium is our business, and we are working to reach people who are ready to be activated in the consciousness revolution."

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 Synopses of some Basic Concepts

  • Anthropic Principle
    This really just describes the intuition that our world is special in a way that makes our existence possible. There might have been no world, or it might have been different in a way that would have made life or consciousness impossible. When physicists look at this world, they are impressed by the fact that even slight variations in otherwise arbitrary physical laws would radically alter the attributes of the world. It seems either obvious or likely that most of those alternative worlds would not be amenable to any for of life.

    Thus in modern physics, we are being pushed to once again consider the problem of design or teleology, that was supposed to have been put to rest by the Theory of Evolution. Not!!
     

  • Cosmology
    The Big Bang and Unified Field theories will remain as a convenient way to systematize the physical appearance of the world. At a deeper level, we will come to understand that these ’physical’ appearances were a logical way for the cosmic intelligence to separate and conceal itself from us creatures. As scientists do their theorizing and ’discovering’ they are actually participating in the manifestation of the cosmic template that is also embedded in the microcosms of our individual minds.


    From our mythic, dreamtime origins, it was our continued participation in this mythos that has gradually imposed the present degree of detail and constancy that is the delight of scientists. It is us creatures who have fleshed out the template of our world that resides in the mind of the universal spirit. But now we are destined to become conscious co-creators of new realities with new templates.
     

  • Dualism
    Spirit/Matter or Mind/Brain dualism was introduced by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the French philosopher. It is the view that the world is composed of two distinct substances: mind and matter. Matter is distinguished by having the attributes of spatial location and extension. Mind, on the other hand, has only the attribute of thought.


    Since the time of Descartes, science has done its utmost to eliminate the mental or subjective aspect of reality. However, within the ’Consciousness Movement’ there are now a number of scholars who are using ’quantum dualism’ to revive the Cartesian dichotomy.

    Nonetheless, history has shown Cartesian dualism to be an unworkable and incoherent compromise between the monistic philosophies of materialism and immaterialism, in my opinion.
     

  • History
    A distinction may be made between history proper and pre-history, history proper being recorded human history. The recorded history of human consciousness can be ascribed a reality greater than that of dinosaurs or the Big Bang, in my opinion. Pre-history existed as a mythic dreamtime where time and space take on a very fluid character. One does not have to draw a line of demarcation between these two epochs. The one can be seen to blend into the other.
    Another consideration is the teleology of history.

     

    The eschaton becomes the primary ordering principle of history, and is the final cause par excellence. The paradigm inversion suggests that the eschaton may replace the Big Bang as the primary ’causative’ agent in shaping our world and history. The meaning of Human History will be finally understood in the realization and the light of the eschaton.
     

  • Immaterialism & Idealism
    The history of philosophy and of ideas in general may be understood as a prolonged argument with the tendency we all have to embrace a common sense form of naive realism.


    Science also takes the world as brute object, but it is far from naive and far from decided as to what might actually be out there.

    Immaterialism is a direct inversion of the scientific and naive tendency to objectify the world as existing independent of all consciousness or intelligence.

    Idealism, in its Western, Platonic versions, tends to objectify preexistent, transcendental ideas as the ultimate source of all order in the world. In contrast, the immaterialism that I espouse is rather more pragmatic and process oriented, in the sense of A. N. Whitehead.
     

  • Paradigm Inversion
    Science could be right about all its facts, but still be wrong about the nature of reality. Instead of our minds being an epiphenomenon of a material world, it is entirely possible that our world is a construct of cosmic intelligence, of which we are an integral part.


    The practical question is whether this cosmological gestalt switch in our world view can be made without serious disorientation, particularly within the academic and religious communities. Using the internet to its utmost would be one way to both expedite and soften the impact of this Paradigm Inversion.
     

  • Teleology
    Teleology and eschatology are inseparable doctrines, in my estimation. The ’final cause’ of teleology is located in the dynamic of the eschaton of history. Teleology holds that meaning, purpose and design exist in all things. This would not be possible if human history did not have a conclusion or goal.


    History, in order to be a meaningful story must have a beginning, middle and end. This simple insight is the genius of the Western prophetic tradition.

    The idea that there is an arrow of time that moves in a linear fashion actually derives from the prophetic tradition. But it was 19th century physics that attempted to make this over into an objective abstraction transcending the phenomenon of history. The idea of an absolute, objective time and space are conceptual traps from which physics in the 20th century has been struggling to free itself.

    Next to the problem of mind, the problem of time and causality has provided metaphysicians with the greatest perplexities. For instance it is not at all clear whether time depends on causality or vice versa. This is only to say that there is plenty of room for other than initial material causes in the greater scheme of things, as long as we are willing to forego the oversimplifications of a prior century.

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 Glossary

  • Epiphenomenon - An accidental byproduct or mere symptom other more fundamental processes. Such phenomena occur without any consequences of their own.

  • eschaton (ES-ka-ton) - A dramatic transformation of reality from what we know or imagine it to be. Literally, the end of the world.

  • Naive realism - This is the usually unarticulated belief that the world exists as a brute fact, just as we naively see and think it to be.

  • Noosphere (NEW-sphere) - The present and future mental extension of the Biosphere.

  • Teilhard (TAY-yar) - Pierre Teilhard de Cardin (1881-1955). French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher/mystic. Coined the term Noosphere.

  • Teleology - The doctrine of final causes. The understanding that purpose and design exist in the natural order of things.

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