UPTM #6 | Revisiting the Transcendental Ideals

The Final Desert Aperatif: The Underlying Telos of the Cosmos

Chalice of Love by Salvador Dali

|| UPTM Table of Contents || Prelude | Part 1: 21st Century Paradigm | Part 2: Nature | Part 3: Man | Part 4: Bible | Part 5: Organic-Computational Theology | Part 6: Transcendental Ideals | Part 7: Re-Imagining Modernity | Full Research PDF

Lastly, we’ll touch on transcendental ideals themselves - the Platonic Forms and underlying telos encapsulating the primordial unified archetypes which preside over and permeate existence’s diversifying manifestations. This is the rarified realm of the loftiest abstraction.

More of a poetic exercise re-interpreting the Platonic ideals in light of our process and complexity themes. Consider this a final dessert aperitif post our analytical breakdown we’ve conducted throughout the thesis. While we can often find ourselves referring to these, the goal here is to establish definitions at a finer level of precision. Let’s go through and shed some color on them:

6.1 Goodness

Goodness denotes the metaphysical imperative toward ever-increasing integration and wholeness. It represents the proactive balancing of polarities, purposive life-orienting tendencies, and teleological prioritization of long-term trajectories favoring evolution toward higher-levels of individual & collective self- transcendence.

Goodness is the attractor drawing existence along paths of sustainable development, win-win conflict resolutions (i.e. the wolf living with the lamb per Isaiah 11:6 or the Tyger & The Lamb poem by Blake), productive values hierarchies, and ethical action policies optimizing for long-range flourishing amidst complexities. It is the principle that drives making integrative-level sacrifices to cultivate greater future potencies from present finitudes.

Goodness manifests through finite entities aligning their goal-oriented behaviors with existence’s widest enveloping self-transcendent patterns at successively ascending scope. It involves continual adjudication between present constraints and unfolding evolutionary currents favoring evermore encompassing creative unions.

6.2 Evil

The opposite of an ideal but worth defining Evil - simply the absence of Goodness. It represents a privation or absence of integration, wholeness and harmonious order. It manifests as tendencies toward fragmentation, disorder and dissolution of coherent patterns. In modern terms we can think about this as entropy. Evil signifies a breaking apart or disintegration of unities into alienated isolates - a movement away from the Source’s primordial oneness toward maximum multiplicity, disconnection and existential estrangement.

Evil dynamics prioritize immediate, narrow self-interest over long-term holistic flourishing. It favors exploitative, zero-sum interactions that preclude mutually enriching relational consummations. Evil is the failure to sacrifice regressive surface satisfactions for the cultivation of deeper, self-transcending creative unions. It is marked by the inability to adjudicate polarities and re-harmonize conflicts for maximal collective wellbeing.

6.3 Life

Life represents the principle of creative self-organization, emergent order and self-directed unfolding toward higher unities. It is characterized by autonomous dynamism, interior subjectivity and purposive self-animation orienting toward richer future potentialities. Life signifies the capacity for spontaneous, adaptive self-regulation amidst fluctuating environmental conditions.

Life exemplifies the progressive arc of emanation returning toward the Source by re-integrating multiplicitous components into greater coherent synthesized wholes. It is the ascending force of evolution, negentropy and complexification striving to retrieve ever-widening scopes of fragmented actualities back into harmonic resonance with the eternal ideals of Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Love.

The mark of life is the presence of goals, values, and purposive trajectories aimed at optimizing overall systemic functioning and resilience. Living processes prioritize sustainable development, relational symbiosis, and actualizing unrealized creative potentials through iterated cycles of interactive feedback with their embedding contexts.

6.4 Beauty

Beauty is the aesthetic patternings, organic complexities, dynamic harmonies and integration of diverse multiplicities into renewed synthesized wholes of maximal unity-in-diversity. It reflects the metaphysical priority of order transcendently arising from chaos through spontaneous emergence and self-organizational dynamics.

Beauty emerges from the dialectical interplay between the polarities of order and chaos, familiarity and novelty, symmetry and asymmetry. It requires a delicate and ever-shifting balance - too much regularity breeds monotony and stagnation, while excessive disorder collapses into overwhelming entropy. The hallmark of Beauty is the masterful attunement of these complementary forces into aesthetically compelling syntheses that ceaselessly engender new gestalts of meaning.

The experience of Beauty involves the progressive reintegration of differentiated elements into higher-order holistic configuration. It flows through cycles of expectation-disruption and resolution, dissonance and consonance, tension and release. These undulating rhythms of emergent coherence provide the signature a emotion contours of all great artworks - the delightful frisson of novelty seamlessly transitioning into blissful catharsis as the mind beholds a new integrated pattern subsuming the prior discord.

Beauty represents the principle of maximal experiential intensity, vitality, and richness of participatory immersion in the universal pattern that joins beings in felt bodily rapport with existence’s own creative sprouting. It is the aesthetic force facilitating new integrated gestalts birthed from the interplay of ordered symmetries with generative flows of novelty. Beauty perceives and resonates the qualitative “dreamings” of the cosmic poesis itself - the felt harmonies, vibrant pulsations of dynamical unfolding - into physically embodied sensual pleasures of bodily realization finding fulfillment in participatory alignment with it’s primordial creative principles.

6.5 Love

Love is the supreme formative cause and binding force which endlessly yokes all finite particulars back toward ultimate reunion with the unbounded Wholeness from which they emerged. Love manifests as the relational co-inheritance ubiquitously pervading all beings and upholding the universal pattern resonances amidst the perpetual flux of impermanence. It is the supreme metaphysical connective tissue facilitating the interweaving harmonies and unitive resonances between multiplicitous instantiations.

Love manifests as the dynamism continually drawing finite beings back toward reintegration with their primordial Source and the undifferentiated plenitude of the One. It impels the reconnection of individuals with the transcendent ideals, allowing each entity to maximally participate in and personify the inexhaustible infinitudes despite their outward determinate constraints. Ultimately, Love serves as the formative cause underlying all spontaneous tendencies toward order, coherence, synthesis and the making of new integrated wholes from prior differentiations. It is the generative power of relationship itself - the connective tissue of the pluriverse.

6.6 Purpose

Purpose represents the overarching orientation and driving force that imbues human existence with meaning, direction, and value amidst the constant flux of change. It encapsulates the fundamental reason for being and the aspirational ideals that guide an individual’s growth, relationships, and contributions to the world. Purpose aligns one with the deepest values and highest potentials of human existence, drawing them into sustainable trajectories of development that harmonize with the broader currents of cultural evolution and the timeless quest for wisdom, compassion, and self-transcendence.

Discovering and embodying one’s unique purpose is the key to actualizing the fullest potential and making the most meaningful impact. It involves discerning the specific talents, passions, and callings that can be leveraged in service of something greater than oneself. By clarifying and refining their purpose, individuals participate most fully in the universal human drive toward increasing complexity, integration, and flourishing. Purpose acts as an inner compass, constantly reorienting one toward their authentic nature and the eternal ideals of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity.

While the specific contours of an individual’s purpose are unique, they are ultimately grounded in these universal human values. By aligning with these ideals, one taps into the deepest sources of meaning and motivation, contributing to the ongoing evolution of human consciousness and culture. Living an authentic purpose naturally connects individuals with others who share similar aspirations, giving rise to purpose-driven communities and organizations united around a shared vision of human potential. These collective purpose elds amplify the impact of individual efforts, creating a powerful resonance that attracts others to join in the common cause.

6.7 Oneness

Oneness symbolizes the primordial, utterly simple and seamless source origin preceding all multiplicity - the indivisible plenitude of unlimited potential prior to any self-determination into discrete actualities. It represents the immaterial undifferentiated whole in which the unlimited creative potencies for generating Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Love remain enfolded in their original unified state prior to the emanative self-determination of discrete particulars.

Oneness stands as the fully-integrated & complete conceptual whole that is greater than the sum amalgamation of all differentiated finite parts and fragmented perspectives. It is the utterly coherent, self-contained perfection of self-identity. One = One. I am that I am. The infinite cosmic self-evidencing Markov blanket.

Oneness serves as the unifying attractor drawing the totality of actualizations back toward reintegrated concrescence. All self-transcending journeys of individual particulars - of which themselves are fractal reflections of the One - aim at retrieval of identification with the Source’s original unity amidst multiplicities.

6.8 Truth

Truth denotes that which is invariant to time & space - the logically coherent intelligibility underlying existence’s patterned regularities and invariant laws. It encompasses the objective ontological blueprints, logical self-consistencies and harmonies of systematic order that rationally permeate all scales of manifestation. Truth represents the realm of pure abstract form, symmetry, and formally codeable principles independent of any particular concrete instantiation. It is the logos or universal reason substanding the cosmos, articulated through mathematics, geometry, and science capturing nature’s essences.

6.9 Creativity

More Whiteheadian in nature but worth touching on. Creativity stands as the primordial generative power ceaselessly birthing novel integrated wholes and complexities from the interplay of order and chaos. As the universal dynamism of existence’s own self-creating process, it represents the inexhaustible fecundity of the Source - the unlimited potencies for perpetual self-renewal and open-ended ontological blossoming.

Creativity manifests as the spontaneous emergence of new organizational wholes greater than the sum of their parts. It enables the full personification and imaginative enactment of first principles through inventive conceptual design and active aesthetic composition, opening participatory portals to the Source’s own generative powers.

As a transcendent archetype, Creativity reflects the eternal newness of the Absolute - the supreme freedom of self-determinacy by which the Source generates its own content and endlessly multiplies its forms. It drives the romance of evolution itself, luring forth the latent potencies of matter into self-organizing forms of ever-greater complexity, consciousness, and beauty.

At its highest pitch, Creativity inspires the inception of original gestalts and daring reconfigurations of conceptual relationships that disclose new meanings, perspectives, and value-possibilities.Ultimately, Creativity is none other than the unfolding dream of the Source itself - the ceaseless turning of the One’s primordial plenitude into an endless revelry of self-othering through finitude.

6.10 Self-Transcendence

Self-transcendence is the inherent drive within all beings to reach beyond their current limitations and actualize ever-greater levels of creative potential in alignment with eternal ideals. It is the process by which entities strive to maximize their resonance with the principles of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Love by letting go of limiting satisfactions in favor of discovering deeper meaning, value, and purpose. This impulse manifests as the quest to achieve fuller expression of infinite potential within the constraints of finite existence, representing the unique teleological narrative of each entity as it coheres with the grander evolutionary pattern.

The self-transcendent being embodies the microcosmic refection of the macro- cosmic whole, seeking to reconcile personal, social, and cosmic dimensions into a harmonized gestalt. It transcends egoic impulses in favor of cultivating transpersonal resonance with the unitive Source. This drive propels the evolutionary journey from undifferentiated Oneness, through the experience of fragmentation, and ultimately back toward a state of enriched unity. Self-transcendence serves as the catalyst that transmutes mere occurrences into a coherent narrative by aligning individual choices with the transcendent principles that underlie the dynamism of nature.

At its core, self-transcendence represents the universal impulse to open oneself to suprapersonal currents and surrender subjective limitations to the objective imperatives of evolution. It is the ceaseless quest for ever-expanding actualizations of integrated meaning through deepening attunement with the eternal verities that compose the essence of existence. By engaging in this process of self-transcendence, beings participate in the grand unfolding of the cosmos, contributing to the ongoing realization of greater depth, complexity, and significance in the world.

6.11 Existence’s Own Epic Poem

And finally, a short poem on the evolution of existence: it’s own journey of becoming and creative unfolding.

Existence’s overall trajectory traces an epic journey of emanative self-diversification followed by an infinite recursion of self-unifying returns toward its original plenitude. As multiplicitous becoming flowers forth from the Source’s unlimited potencies, it underlying nature goes iterative evolutions laboring to retrieve and reintegrate their individual particulars back into wider resonant patterns with the metaphysical constants. This perpetual reconciliation of parts and wholes, across all scales, unfolds as an endless co-creative dynamic - with the eternal ideals providing the transpersonal attractor basins drawing existence’s striving participations into ever-deepening alignment with their transcendent norms and the deepest core pattern underlying nature.

In this model, fullness is achieved through the widest possible relational consummation of each individual’s free conceptual satisfactions - with the transient experiential actualities attaining their highest reconciliation through participatory unitive resonance with the eternal ideals. Despite manifesting constrained outward expressions, every entity remains interiorly capable of maximally personifying the inexhaustible infinitudes of Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Love by realizing concrescence with their eternal ontological priorities.

While taking on finite embodiments amidst the spatiotemporal plenum’s diversities, the eternal ideals retain their transcendent universality as the invariant ordering principles underlying and normatively orienting all concrete instantiations. As existence’s immutable perennial archetypes, they provide the logically self-coherent and aesthetically self-evident skylines conferring ultimate meaning, value, and ontological significance upon every transient particular’s endemic striving toward harmonious self-integration.

Next Section: Part 7 | Conclusion: On Meaning & Re-Imagining Modernity

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This research is preliminary and we're publishing this in the spirit of building in public. Feedback, open dialogue, and collaboration is very much encouraged! I will most certainly be wrong in places as I have developed these ideas rather independently. If you are exploring similar ideas, please reach out or expect at a DM as I plan to connect with scholars and folks more knowledgeable & experienced then myself to continue to refine & better articulate the thesis. Please also feel free to follow along or get in touch at @tomer_solomon or by subscribing to my Substack!

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