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MANIFESTO
(the essay)

 
This is a time of terrible danger and great hope. Across our planet there is pain and resistance, people looking backwards, people hating and killing. All around there is ugliness and hurting: people destroying their lives and the lives of each other. Easy to find are the forms of no-saying: hatred and jealousy, pain and fear. All across our planet people turn from the future and slash at the light that holds us as one.
Across our planet there is a coming together, a spread of understanding, a nascent justice. All around there is astonishing beauty: in faces and nature and the things people build. Easy to find is love between friends, easy to find is love within families. If the love that holds two people together were a thread of gold and silver light, the world would be a shining sphere as bright as any star, the world would be a star growing brighter day by day.
On Earth life is difficult, our birth has not been easy. We have struggled to pull ourselves from the jungle of our beginnings: a world where violent death was almost every animal's fate, where suffering was everywhere, life hard. Our laws of nature are cruel - the emergence of life has cost much pain. We do not know the sentience of invertebrates, but we see images of suffering there to equal our most infernal imaginings. We do know our own sentience, and we know that when love came into the world so did despair (love seeing that which was loved destroyed) - in our world, the greatest gift has brought the greatest pain. We can imagine worlds where this is not true: we can imagine a heaven, in which all is love, and joy in that love, and we can imagine a hell, where all is hate and pain and despair. But our astonishing world is a mixture, it is as if it contradicts itself: we see what is good, what ought to be, and we see its destruction, its no longer being - such seeing drives us mad. In our world, that which is good, which is of a love that unites, that which is of joy and compassion and giving, is besieged by hate and forces of destruction. Children are torn from the arms of their parents by poverty and disease and war. Lovers are forced apart. Friends become enemies. All around is corruption by power and the obscenity of greed. All around is the wrong that we do or do not prevent when we could. Our capacity for evil is terrifying. The things we have done, the things we are doing, would be almost unbelievable were it not that each of us, when we look, can see potential for such evil within ourselves. Meditate on this evil to learn the danger that we face. Our world can become what we will it - we can move towards heaven or move towards hell.
We are growing. Dragging ourselves from the thorn beds of our creation, we wipe away the blood. As we grow, as our understanding spreads out, our compassion and wisdom grow. The West, the children of the European Enlightenment wherever in the world they are, should be proud: where torture was accepted, it is now abhorred; where punishment sought pain, it now seeks reform; where birth determined fortune, now there is merit; where those who were weaker or different were oppressed, now they demand freedom. The West should be ashamed: our extravagant wealth rests on terrible poverty and our supporting regimes that we loathe; we have not stopped evil when we could; we have not spread our message as we should. But that message is good, have no doubt: eschewing the authority of the church and tradition, we look forward. Looking forward with love and truth in our hearts our values are those of Enlightenment - movement towards a world of joy and freedom, a world where people make the most of what they are, a world that looks to this life - 'humanity's escape from self-imposed servitude'. We should be proud; but we must also feel shame, for the things that shame us are the things we must fight: unfairness, oppression, pain. Our knowledge grows and our power grows, our wisdom must grow as well. Humanity now can do vastly more: for good or for evil we shape our world.
The last century was an extraordinary century - never have such great deeds been done, never has there been such horror. What we can do has grown very large, what we can do will grow much larger. We are coming together into one thing across our world. A creature that talks to itself across the lands, throu' the skies, under the oceans, and out into space. For the first time we can talk and listen to each other, for the first time we can agree. We have never been here before, a place where we have the ability to choose and the power to realize that choice. We have never had such responsibility, for we can make of this world heaven or hell. This is the time of choice.
Our universe is struggle between order and khaos. Khaos is the ground of existence, the primordial sea from which all comes, the beginning of everything. It is existence without structure, the causeless churning of being, the crazed fusion of creation and destruction where every moment is both, where everything is instantaneous and leads to nowhere and nothing, forming and unforming with neither rhyme nor reason, shapes being made and unmade without connection - it is time without flow, not eternity (the stretching of every moment of an ordered time into infinity, taking a line and making a plane) but time without structure, every moment alone and unjoined.
From khaos comes order - with the certainty of a spinning coin, that which has no structure produces structure. For within the churning, shapes are stumbled into which hold themselves, shapes in which, as with an egg and its egg cup, the parts know each other and are receptive to each other and support each other. From the churning sea of unforming forming, creation is extracted - an ordered stable pattern, the accidental forging of khaos into something which holds itself together, which changes throu' itself, its order making time. A pattern changing in a way that can be grasped, for which rules can be found from which its past can be understood and future guessed: causality.
Our universe exploded from its smallest size, our smallest possible size - unimaginably tiny, compact beyond comprehension, containing our everything, created from the collapse of our previous universe. This primal shape was a harmonious, multidimensional, oscillating pattern - a single note of extreme complexity, a binding of khaos into extraordinary form. We know nothing of the history of this shape, what countless moves might have gone into its making, perhaps a number so large that it makes the time of our universe as a tiny drop in a mighty ocean. We do know that it could not hold, that the harmony could not be maintained, that the note was false - we know that it burst apart in the great explosion that was our universe's beginning. From it came our causality, our containment of khaos in an orderly flow. But in our universe this binding is not safe, the move to greater order is struggle, the outcome open; and in our universe the binding is never perfect, there is always the unpredictable. In our universe the descent back into khaos is always possible.
It is the true opposition: order and khaos, the dynamic which underlies all our actions and all our stories, the movement which explains our universe. On the one side order - everything good from the wild dance with panpipes playing and lightning flashing from seething skies to the exquisite symmetries of a great cathedral and the solemn chanting of sacred rites. On the other side khaos - the terrible meaningless writhing of raw being, as close to nothing as existence can be. In our story we are born from the explosion of the primal shape that was our universe at its beginning, the matter particles and the particles that transmit force between them fell together into shapes that hold each other, into particles that interact throu' the forces of nature, and come together into atoms, that come together with other atoms and ever more complex force into increasingly rich forms - into molecules, and life, and love, and thought.
The dynamic holds across the range - from the simplest shapes to all of life on our planet, order and khaos are opposed. The harmony that is an atom can be destroyed, its parts can be separated and made ignorant of each other, the wrong pattern of energy will tear it apart; atoms work when they hold together and can join with others in growth, when there is harmony, when like the egg and its egg cup they know each other and the patterns of their movement fit together. The harmony that is a human mind can come apart, the movement between its parts lose their connection, self-loathing and self-mistrust, self-destruction; a human mind works when it tells itself the truth, when its parts understand and accept each other, when it wills what it knows to be right. The harmony that is a human society can break down, people can turn on each other and the world around them, murder and rape and destruction; a society works when its members trust each other and are trustworthy, when there is a sense of common purpose, of travelling together in the right direction.
All things move. All things are a binding of the meaningless movement of khaos. All things are imperfect order, formed from the explosion of our attempt at perfection. When patterns come together into new patterns, richer and bigger, when the dance grows, the ways the new pattern can be destroyed is greater than the ways of destruction before. With order, new levels of complexity emerge - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, such is the magic of dance, of things moving together. At first, natural selection is the means of their creation - they are stumbled into; and being stable, they hold (stumbled, but perhaps made for such stumbling, all being children of our failed perfection). At last, mind evolves, and with it, will - the will to survive, to procreate. The mechanism of evolution is built into our deepest being - we are the agents of order, but khaos always threatens. At every level, from the first simple shapes to the most complex structures of mind, khaos threatens, growing with every higher order of complexity. Thus it is that in our universe the highest complexity, life, can be defined as that which moves to protect itself (for such complexity needs to protect itself); and the highest order of life, the human mind, is subject to all the threats from khaos that lower life faces and to threats from khaos impossible for lower life (no other animal knows spiritual despair).
We are the highest expression of order we know of, the richest fruit of evolution. Our highest expression of order is love. It is love that brings us together in the richest patterns, it is love that produces our finest art - the most complex patterns we make, it is love that leads us to our best science - love of the world drives our discovering the complexity of its pattern, the pattern we are part of. Love is the force that wants to know and bring together - love treasures what is loved for itself, its unique individuality. Love preserves and enfolds, adding to the pattern new richness, depth, and size. Hate is the force that tears apart, that subjugates the other to its will until destruction, that reduces all to khaos.
All that we do resonates throu' our universe; everything that we do is held, stretching out thinner and thinner throu' the fabric of our world - echoes that hold the original; all will come back as our universe collapses to form our next attempt at a perfect binding, the next chapter of our being. All that we do is for order or khaos, for the dance or its destruction. Every action is of love and truth, bringing things together, enriching the pattern; or it is of hate and falsehood, pulling things apart, destroying without building. You must make your choice. There is no middle path.
We are the freedom of our universe - the free agents in the transformation that is our universe (from khaos to perfection or back to khaos). In this universe of ours the raw material of higher order is energy/matter/awareness (three facets of the same thing) - i call it texture. It is that part of our universe which is woven, and can be further woven, into self-holding shape. A quark is the simplest known binding of texture, its awareness like a speck of monochrome light; the awareness of a person, a great intricate pattern - flowing colours shining with the brilliance of a billion specks.
Texture evolves as ever more complex stable patterns are found, patterns whose complexity mirrors the world and therefore can control the world, patterns with the power to survive. These patterns and the movement between them are things and their causality. Certain patterns bind texture together in such a way that the awareness within fuses into larger awareness. Just as texture can be woven into larger stable forms of matter and energy, so can it be woven into larger stable forms of awareness. (These patterns, being texture, are also of matter and energy.) When aware patterns contain and manipulate other patterns, there is mind; to the extent that a pattern contains a pattern of itself doing this, it is self-aware.

It is from self-awareness that the wonder that is freedom comes from. Awareness is as a mirror, it reflects what it is facing. Self-awareness is a mirror facing itself, and from this comes an infinity which can free us from the past. Our history determines us (to the extent that it escapes khaos), our physical form at birth and the world we are born into, our given nature and the things that happen to us; from this comes the desire and repulsion, habit and memory, that fix our choosing. At the mercy of such determination we are slaves, but we have self-awareness and with it we can look at our choice and the forces that led to it, and decide to deny them. And this is another choice, which itself can be questioned, on and on without end - the causality from our past channelled away, into nothing, into indeterminacy, into khaos. An awareness makes patterns of the world, when a pattern contains itself (which in turn contains itself, and on without end) there is a bottomless hole that the past can be led into. From this comes the possibility of our freedom: a self-aware being has the freedom to be free. Causality is as coloured patterns of interacting light moving throu' time; things are the nodes the patterns move throu'. A being exercising their freedom adds to the light moving throu', creating new pattern (in this there is mystery).
A person fails to exercise their freedom when they do not look at themselves and so remain at the mercy of their past. But if a person exercises their freedom, with love in their heart, if they drain their past into the bottomless hole, into indeterminacy, seeing it for what it is, if they do this the choice that a person makes is free to be moved by what is yet to be, by the future (and thus khaos is used to tame itself). For when the past is eliminated there is only the future and the future calls us to build. When a person has put their past to one side, when they have seen their desires and habits for the ephemera that they are, their possible futures become the force that draws them. All their future possible selves come together, represented according to their likelihood, and are judged between, and collapse into one, which is the choice - what the person becomes. The choice is free, for it is objective - not at the whim of contingent fate, of desire and habit, for it is a judgement between separate patterns of desire and habit - the means of choice is the yes- and no-saying of each possible life, the intensity and manner that it says yes and no to itself. Holding a yes-saying form of life against a no-saying one, a person can tell which is better; holding two yes-saying forms of life against each other, a person can say which is better (or that the distinction is too fine). We choose by knowing what the forms of life are, for we know them from the inside wherein lies their value. When we choose freely, we listen to our essence, to what we are made of, not to the contingent forms that it has taken - our desires and habits.
By listening to the future we discover truth, a pattern that works, that holds together, that builds. By listening to the future we add to order, to causality: this is us as creation, freedom making structure. But as well as ignoring our freedom or embracing it with love, we can embrace it with hate and become slaves of destruction. If we fear ourselves, we fear our future, and hate takes over and we seek an ending - we becomes agents of khaos. Thus self-awareness, the highest order in our world, potentially the greatest force for order, creates the greatest threat to order - the will to hatred and destruction. Such is the nature of freedom: it is for better or for worse.

We are a source of the movement of our world, we are that part of the movement that can choose - it is our responsibility, a responsibility we cannot escape, a responsibility that is frightening. Many still dream of a mighty Parent to whom that fear can be given. A creator who watches and judges and helps, a creator who is in charge and who asks of us no more than we can do. We long to be held. But to believe anything about such a Parent (to Believe), to believe even one thing about Their nature, is to close one's eyes and leap into the dark. Once there was Authority, a person was born into a society which told them what to believe. Now there are uncountable authorities - how can we close our eyes and jump with such knowledge, how can we Believe? Thus the age of Belief is passing: now there is philosophy and we must think for ourselves - thinking for ourselves we can say nothing of a Parent; saying nothing, Belief becomes meaningless.
Free from Belief, look at the world. Do you see something built by a loving parent, or something dragging itself out of khaos with the danger of falling back? When i look, i see no signs of a loving parent - i see only a harsh birth and a harsher childhood. No loving parent would give freedom in a world like this, any more than we would give our babies poison to play with. We have been born into a terrible world and we have done terrible things - but we did not choose our evil, we were just part of our world (it is only now, spread across our world, watching ourselves watching, that we can choose). There is no original sin or burden of karma for which we are paying the price, our pain is not the necessary cost of freedom. The problem of evil cannot be answered.
There is no God the Parent, no one who watches over us, who eases the burden of responsibility; but this does not deny the godhead. It does not deny an infinite being of love and truth (a being whose infinity in relation to the rest of existence is curious: on the one hand, the infinity of the godhead seems infinitely smaller than that of khaos (as the natural numbers are to the rational), for khaos is limitless and the godhead arises out of it as drops from the ocean; on the other hand, altho' limitless, khaos has no shape, no geometry, and thus no size - whereas the infinity of the godhead is one of pure and perfect shape; perhaps one can say that each is as nothing to the other); the godhead has always existed and is always growing (for the khaos of existence is ageless and has always created universes, some of which have grown and prospered and at last formed a perfect binding of khaos, a transformation of khaos into perfect order, each binding a unique shape (for it comes from the infinite chance of khaos); each a unique note, which once struck falls, as naturally as an apple to the earth, into the infinite collection of those that have come before, to become a unique part of the song that is the godhead).
It is we, the children of our universe, who make our universe. No higher powers guide us, we are alone. If there are higher powers, they know not of our existence and our goal is to find Them, to join Them, to become Them. This is the choice we must make, for there are only two directions that lead anywhere - we can move back towards khaos, breaking up the order that we have gained, destroying ourselves and our world until it is as close to nothing as it can be. Or we can move forward into greater, more subtle, gentler and wilder and more beautiful patterns; towards perfection; towards the godhead. We tell ourselves stories that make our journey easier, but all that we know is direction - towards order or towards khaos, forwards or backwards.

Perhaps the no-sayers, the destroyers, the khaotics are right. Perhaps order cannot hold: love and truth doomed to despair and failure. Perhaps only lies can see off the pain, and in the end we are better off with nothing and non-existence. Well, if that is so, follow the principles it gives and ignore it. If order is a lie, we have nothing to lose by living it other than the transient pleasures of destruction; but if order is the true path, if it can lead to the unending eternal ever-growing all-loving godhead, then its rewards can be infinite. The termini are our dreams; our knowledge is direction and our direction holds true. The path of love and truth builds and strengthens, it produces a yes-saying which would not be exchanged, a yes-saying that understands the yes-saying of simple pleasure but rejects it, a yes-saying that is beautiful. Those who deny love and truth are on a path that will lead, when their pleasure is spent, to hatred of everything and desire for destruction. Our dreams are the poles of khaos and the godhead, our reality is movement away from or into order. Our choice is our future.
We are strong enough now to destroy our world, throu' our malice or greed or stupidity. We are weak enough still to be destroyed from outside - floating in space, we are vulnerable and unprotected; we cannot even control our own weather, the temperature of our world, we fear freezing and boiling. From within and without we face terrible danger; we can no longer sit back, confident of a Power that orders our world into justice. We are the highest power we know of, the responsibility is ours. We can attain perfection. Using reason we have developed a science which already could let us feed all of the world and protect most of us from most diseases. Soon it will be able to solve all our material problems - such is the power of reason. Our greatest danger now is ourselves, we must apply reason within as we have applied it without. We are the voice of our universe, its thinking and its conscience. Our universe can flourish or our universe can fail. Its choice is ours.
We have to change ourselves and change our world - as individuals, as peoples, as humanity. As individuals we are not at peace within ourselves. We look out in horror at the monsters of the world, but we know that in each of us there is the potential for such monstrosity. For we are no more than different weavings of texture - the stuff we are made from is the same. When looking at a monster it is not 'there but for the chance of fate go i' it is 'there go i' - we are one thing. Until we feel this, until we learn to love the monsters (while hating even more the monstrous things they do), we will not learn to love the monstrous within ourselves and so be at peace. Loving outwards we will love inwards, and step by step the monstrous within us will be led into the light of forgiveness and peace and reconciliation. Only thus can we heal ourselves.
As peoples we are not at peace with ourselves. Before we had timeless precedent and the authority of elders, now our world changes before our eyes and we look to the future. Where once peoples were stable (at least sometimes) now they are ever changing; where once we knew where we were, now we are lost. We are confused about how to treat ourselves, we are confused about how to treat each other. Sex and intoxication worry us. We need a new understanding of how to behave together, manners; we need a new sense of what we are doing, purpose. For a people without manners and purpose will turn in upon themselves and destroy themselves; self-interest is not enough. We need a sense of ourselves as people moving forward; but with such a sense there can only be one people, the people that are humanity.
The peoples of the world are not at peace with each other. The wallowing rich rest on the backs of the suffering poor, different creeds and values battle each other. It is time to see ourselves as one world. Countries can regulate themselves but money flows around the world in bewildering quantities at bewildering speeds. There is no country now that can regulate money: we must come together into a single system to control the world economy, to direct the power that flows towards those who need it, towards all of us. We want a world where we can better ourselves throu' hard work and talent, but not into luxury - for in a world of such need luxury is disgusting. The rich have too much when the poor have so little, when we come together this can be made well.
First, we need to make ourselves healthy then we need to move out and grow. We'll never be safe until we are spread throu' space. We must move out into our galaxy, we must move out like a gardener into their garden - tending and nurturing and helping our world, our galaxy, our universe towards the magnificent end it can achieve. The alternative is to sink back into khaos, random seething meaningless, as near to nothing as something can be. We have a great destiny or a terrible fate.
Our path is not easy. The journey from khaos to perfect order is the hardest of all. To be good enough for that wildest of dances, that most peaceful of harmonies, is the most demanding challenge. We have come this far, far enough to see our potential; but all could slip away, all could be lost. At least we know where we are in the movement of our universe: it is young and expanding; evolution moves us forward, we may be among the first. But we have no idea of the succession of universes that precedes our own - are we moving toward khaos or moving toward the godhead? Either way, it does not matter: our universe could be a turning point for better or a turning point for worse, we must do our best.
The move from khaos to perfect order is one of love and truth, of things that move alone coming together throu' understanding and sympathy into harmonious patterns, things of beauty. We must look into ourselves with love and understanding, so that we can look out to others with love and understanding, so that we can work as one towards that wonderful end, the infinite beginning. To do this will take all that we have. The last ten thousand years have seen an extraordinary moving together, the birth of wonderful new patterns. It began with the discovery of farming and the beginning of the settled life. Large farmsteads grew into small villages, and small villages into larger ones, into towns, into cities; and humanity spread across the world - fighting and thinking and dreaming and loving. Two thousand and six hundred years ago, in a cross-roads between civilisations, philosophy was born; in a place where they could see different civilisations and the different answers they had to the great questions, they realised that we must think for ourselves, that we must doubt. With this idea humanity lurched forward: pulled by the future, held back by reaction, we stumbled to the beginning of the European Enlightenment almost five hundred years ago. Here humanity finally began to let go of faith as a means to knowledge and see that it is throu' reason that we understand. With this idea we, the children of Enlightenment, have been catapulted to the here and now, and bestride the world with a science that can seem like magic. At last, we have begun to truly grow up, to leave behind the superstitions and fears of our childhood. At last we are rediscovering faith - as attitude not Belief, stories that move us, that colour our understanding with love and hope. For the first time we can talk to ourselves across the world, for the first time we can see each other and decide together, for the first time we can act as one thing. Now is the time we can make something truly beautiful. Now is the time for our First Great Step.

© Joe Morison 2003