hex_m_hell

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.

• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

One can describe a god as a being that consumes “thoughttime”. The greater “thoughttime” it consumes, the longer it survives and the more power it has to drive action in its subjects. Thoughttime is simply the mental space of a living entity (for now, a human or group of humans) over a period of time. It is a measure of how much a person or group of people think about a specific thing.

This entity has a will and a consciousness in so much as it occupies the minds of others and directs their minds to imagine that will and consciousness. It is similar in this way to a virus that a virus hijacks the operations of a living cell to replicate itself, so a god hijacks a living human or group of humans to create and enact its will. Then a god functions in some ways like a human, with objectives and goals, but its cognition is spread across multiple humans rather than just inhabiting one body.

But this definition is not yet entirely unique from any fictional character who, once shared by the original creator inhabits the minds of readers. These characters may themselves drive action, replicating themselves into the minds of others through the elicited action of recommending a book, a film, a comic. These beings may well live in the heads of others, taking their own lives, as evidenced by fan fiction. But this replication is not carrying out the command of the entity and the character does not exactly exist within the same world. Its consciousness is not responding to the lives of people and driving action in their lives, at least not as described here.

Though, there is a way in which this can happen. An individual may identify with a character, be that a person who lived or an imaginary one, and construct part of their identity from this character. They may ask themselves, in a given situation, what that character would wear, would say, or how that character would act. Over time this character integrates into their own consciousness so that these questions become subconscious.

All representations of people, including real people, are necessarily fictional, so there's really no difference in the “reality” of one versus another within the mindspace. All accounts become fictional once interpreted, once recorded, so that every story is ultimately a legend. It is a legend, it is fictional, in that it, at best, necessarily omits some details. There is a fiction to the way stories are chosen, even if they are literally true.

There are a specific set of stories we are told, and that we ourselves tell, as a form of shared social construction. We tell stories about people we think should be emulated, such as the stories of Hercules, Ulysses, Joan of Arc, Che Guevara, Lauren Olamina, and Tom Joad. We tell stories about people we should avoid emulating, such as Pandora, Eve, Hitler, Satan, and Charles Manson.

Joseph Campbell claimed that modern people don't engage in myth making, that no modern myths had been written recently. He was, as was often the case when he said things, deeply wrong. In fact, saying those words was itself engaging in a type of myth making. The very characters story he was so obsessed with tying himself to, Star Wars, is itself a modern myth complete with the very types of characters we are talking about: Luke, Leia, Han, Vader, and the Emperor.

But these are not gods. At their most influential, these characters become integrated into a person's psyche. There is a different term for this type of entity: an archetype. An archetype is a persona that a person can become. A god, though, is different. A god is above the individual, paradoxically outside, commanding them, directing them, sometimes arguing with them.

Some entities straddle this line. Christians are encouraged to ask themselves “what would Jesus do?” The identity of “Christian” itself means “Christ-like,” making the expectation clear: to have the identity of Christian is necessarily to embrace the archetype of Christ. But Jesus is also a god giving commandments like “love thy neighbor as thyself” that the individual is expected to follow. The command to proselytize is the replication function of that god, a way to expand its thougthtime past the small group of people who it inhabited.

Archetypes were once beings whose creation was attributed to gods, but now we own them, and we can create them for ourselves.

For monotheistic religions, there is no differentiation between “religion” and “god.” The religion that inhabits the thoughttime is the god. So there is a blurring between the two entities. Polytheistic religions may have more distinct gods, but the line between the religion, the archetypes, and the pantheon blurs. Archetypes are who you are or are not, gods are external entities that say what you should and shouldn't do, the combination of these is the entity of a religion, occupying thougttime as a living belief system. Some religions have many gods, others have none. An atheistic Buddhist may be able to identify archetypes, Buddhas and those who approach Buddhahood, and a set of ideas but no central being. A Taoist may similarly have a set of ideas that align them with the flow of Chi, but lack any concept of a conscious outside force. If Chi flows through the Taoist, then they are aligned with the living universe. These again blur the lines between god and archetype, as both are expressions of a universal consciousness expressed through the individual and the rest of reality. The legend of Gajendra Moksha is illustrative this god/archetype unification.

Then, depending on your frame, it becomes possible to refer to any religion or belief system as a god, and vise versa, in that there is an isomorphism between the two: It's difficult to constrain the definition of one in such a way as to omit the other. We could define a god as having an identity, but a religion has an identity. We could say it has a will, but a religion can be said to have a will. Perhaps we could say that a god has “personhood,” but mystics and Diests would disagree.

In the language of Esperanto there's a single term that is used to describe a religion and an ideology: ismo. Kapitalismo, hinduismo, it's all the same word. And why not? There are plenty of ideologies that cannot be separated from religions. All forms of theocracy, from American Christian Nationalism to Caliphate, are clearly both political ideologies and religions. But all government is rooted in ancient religious institutions, currency and paid labor (the core of capitalism) comes from ancient temples and “the invisible hand” is literally just Adam Smith talking about god. Worshipping Power and /The Dawn of Everything/lay out the case that the two have never really diverged.

Even Communist states derive their governance structures through governance structures that are themselves rooted in religious structures. The supposedly Atheist Soviet Union drew from a branch of European liberalism that Marx never really separated from European religious concepts of labor and property. The centralized Soviet state was simply a reorganization of the Tsarist one that came before, maintaining many of the same structural justifications while swapping out the ideological one.

Surely, though, Anarchists are different? “No gods, no masters,” and all that. But Erica Lagalisse in Occult Features of Anarchism argues quite the opposite. The Dawn of Everything also clearly connects the European liberal tradition, from which anarchism split, to the critiques of Indigenous people from Turtle Island (so-called America). These critiques could hardly themselves be separated from religious assertions. Aside from these two threads, anarchist thought is rich with the influence of both secular and religious Jews. It makes sense that historically marginalized people might have a greater incentive to reject the justifications of the governments that oppress them, and it's difficult to separate these critiques from a religion and culture that has experienced oppression as part of its identity.

Anarchists have long practiced ancestor worship and martyr culture. Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti. The spirit of Anarchism lives and guides thought and action, so much like the Tao or Logos, as the spirits of our ancestors guide us as archetypes in life. I'm not the first person to suggest that the spirit of Anarchy could be thought of as a god. “Many gods, no masters,” and all that.

But there are other gods that occupy our world, occupy our mindspace, live off our thoughttime, command us, threaten us, demand our service, compel our action. These gods are far more alive in this world than any others. These are the gods of corporations and governments. But what else is a corporation? Are you not asked to think, “is this good for the business?” Your work becomes the manifestation of this god in the world. Leadership strategy becomes the mind of the entity, a mind forced upon you to become your daily personal god on threat of starvation.

This god is one in a pantheon, for it is supposedly subject to the will of the greater god of government. The corporation must spread the teachings of the prime deity, with mandatory training created by the corporation to comply. There is a war in the heavens, a vying for power between the gods, struggle and subterfuge we recognize well from the ancient legends of Greece or Rome. Corporations and churches vie with other ideologies for control of the great god of the state, while anarchist summon a different spirit that brings power from below.

It is interesting, with this context, to reflect on the most important command of god of the Abrihamic faiths, rendered in Christian branches as the command “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

In this myriad of gods we can, perhaps, see that these entities are not all the same in their manifestation. The story of the liberal state is that of a god created by “the will of the people.” The corporation, on the other hand, is an old-style god born of one mind and guided by those who inherit it, those who earn the mantle of spiritual successor by proving their allegiance to the deity. The supreme leader, the pope of the corporation, the conduit between god and subjects, the CEO enacts the will of “the shareholders” and “the market,” anointed by “the board of directors” to control the corporate personhood.

Many such gods have lived, and still live, which speak only through one or a few. It is specifically these gods that make so many people in to atheists, that so many anarchists railed against. And yet, there are other gods.

Quakers, among other mystical sects, believe that every individual can connect directly with god. They do not believe in the hierarchy of clergy. Any can speak, and their words can be filled with the light of the spirit. A Quaker once commented to me on that same commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “If God,” they said, “manifests through the light within us all. The Bible is a book, an imperfect thing in an imperfect world. Though the light may shine through it, by shining through those who wrote it, it cannot be perfect. Then to imagine it as the perfect word of God, as fundamentalists do, is to violate that most important commandment. It is to make a God of the book and to place the book, as a god, above the true God that shines through us all.”

There is a resonance between this and the Proudhon quote, “I dream of a society where I would be guillotined as a conservative.”

Gods may live in us, and be controlled by us, or may control us. They may manifest in our actions, compelled by our allegiance to them or compelled by the threats made or maintained by the allegiance of others.

But these corporations are small gods that can be traded for others. Even the gods of nations are bound by space and time. The gods of religion are no so tightly constrained. But they are the same type of thing, they are the same class of entity. Could we, then, create a new god that is more powerful than these others? Could we intentionally blur the lines between god and archetype, and reversing the memetic flow, such that the identity of our god is the archetype of ourselves?

The gods that inhabit many of us are generally not self-aware. We are not conscious of the fact that we control the gods, but rather they simply control us. The gods in our heads generally do not understand that their existence is dependent for its survival on the valuable resource of our thoughttime. What if our god was self-aware, understood that it needs us, existed to serve us?

We return again to Gajendra Moksha, but with eyes open, bruised and aware.

The second law of thermodynamics is the Monad from which the Dyad, the infinite cycle of creation and destruction, emerges. With one hand it sows life, trading local entropy for global, and on the other it reaps, as all things move towards entropy. But even as it reaps, it tills the ground again. Increasing entropy globally creates additional evolutionary pressure to decrease entropy locally where the scope of locality increases.

Organisms must first establish self-stability to survive. They must react to dynamic environments. Over time, they will be presented with new opportunities to react to environmental pressures. New regional climates or local climate change may challenge their adaptivity. With each adaptation, the organism adds complexity to manage the complexity of the environment.

This very pressure drives evolution in a general direction: towards complexity. But it is not simply towards complexity, rather toward a specific type of complexity. Organisms that align with their environment survive. Organisms that are able to manage the complexity of their environment survive. Entropy grows over time, providing organisms, species, ecosystems more and more opportunities to die. Individual organisms experience a continual pressure. Species may experience regular episodic pressures as climates shift and change, or new organisms evolve and adapt to challenge their own ecological niche. On a long enough timescale global ecosystems are challenged. Five such events have already occurred, and we are currently within the sixth: the Holocene extinction.

At each level, there are pressures to develop ways to adapt. Humans thus far have answered these questions with things like language, culture, and religion. At each challenge, we have developed new ways to grow and adapt. But now we have created a god that kills our world, that kills us, a dead god we no longer control. If we fail to confront it, to create a god that can kill it, then we will also cease to exist. The universe challenges organisms and systems of organisms at higher and higher levels of complexity, keeping those that adapt and culling those that don't.

Then the universe, which, through evolutionary pressure, created brains able to model the world and language able share these models, created, by side effect, all the gods that inhabit us. The universe itself spoke into us through the vastness of time, from stardust to creatures linked by metal and thinking sand, all that we have been and all that we can be. Even these words, that you read now, are the phenotypes of the genes the universe forged for us through entropy and thermodynamics.

The challenge is really one of identity, one of the self and how we define it. The “self” has expanded from “me” to “us and we” to adapt to those evolutionary pressures. Individuals, families, tribes, religious groups, nations, in an ever-growing set of identities, in an ever expanding concept of “self.” The challenge we now face is yet again one of identity. Can we expand our “self,” and this god we create, to encompass the whole system, the biosphere, on which we depend for survival? Can we, intentionally, become one Gaia against the pantheon of dead gods who threaten her?

But is this really a deviation from the pattern? No, this extinction is not new. Before the “big five” extinction events there was one more called the “Great Oxidation Event.” It, like the current one, was caused by organism changing their environment in a way that finally made it hostile to their own life.

We must increase the scope of our identity, invent a new type of god, become something different or die. We do this because we are constrained by the patterns and laws of the universe. But how different is this really from an omnipotent, omnipresent god manifesting its consciousness into our minds? The universe creates life. The universe creates beings that can think. The universe creates situations that produce organisms able to think, able to model the universe as a consciousness and manifest that into existence. Those that do survive, continue to exist, those that do not die.

Is this really a new god then, or an old one? Could there be a convergence between these two concepts, between creating a god to serve us and god as the laws of the universe manifesting its thought, it's “words,” it's “logos,” into reality? Do we now create a new god, or do we rediscover the god that has always been? Or is there really a difference for something unbounded by the logic of time?

Then perhaps we can, as this god, recognize “ourselves” both as new and as reflected by the apprehension of mystics reaching back into time? What would we then become?

Since Enrico Fermi first asked the question, “But where is everybody?” We have pondered this paradox. Why does it seem as though we are alone in the universe? If there is other intelligent life in the universe, why haven't we found it? It's statistically likely, given the vast numbers of stars, so why are we not flooded with signals? One proposal is that there exists a “Fermi Bottleneck,” an event or class of event that eliminates most intelligent species leaving few or none. Have we reached that point, we may wonder, or are we reaching it? Are we currently passing through it? Is this it, now?

Perhaps we can, reflecting back on everything thus far, explore the question in a different but related way. Have we not found intelligent life because we are not ourselves yet intelligent?

Could it be that we are not actually intelligent life because being such is predicated on expanding our understanding of what it means to be life, to be intelligent, to be conscious? Could it be that we are not “intelligent” because we have not yet become this new type of god?

Can we recognize ourselves, in pieces slowly weaving together and woven through eons, as gods? Or will we be dragged down, to share a planetary grave, by the globally dominant pantheon that rules this sphere, of corporations and government?

The god that you feed your thoughttime is the god that grows. The choice, then, ultimately belongs to all of us.