UPTM #7 | Conclusion: On Meaning & Re-Imagining Modernity
A Luminous Thread Through Nature, Humanity, And Myth: The Cosmic Co-Creative Dance Luring the Universe Towards Ever-Greater Beauty, Complexity, and Meaning
|| 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
7.1 On Unifying Resonance Between Nature, Man, and Myth
As we integrate the foregoing interdisciplinary odyssey, a luminous thread is unmistakable through nature, man, and myth. By tracing a process of existential involution and conscious evolution - we have uncovered a rhythm of a creatively unfolding cosmos that progresses from undifferentiated unity to constrained multiplicity back to integrated wholeness. A breathtakingly elegant coherence between Nature, Man, and Bible.
This process is not random but exhibits a purposive direction. The universe seems to be striving towards beauty, consciousness and meaning through a dynamic and co-creative interplay. Meaning arises from recognizing and embodying our integral role in this unfolding epic - crafting life stories that attune our human nature to nature itself to resonantly incarnate this cosmic song.
While we spent the time providing complexity and process philosophical foundations of ancient wisdom, our work at heart looks to invites a pragmatic transformative realization. We are microcosms of the macrocosm, and by consciously weaving our developmental journeys in harmonic resonance with nature’s teleological score, we can discover the tremendous meaning and purpose suffusing existence. Our lives become essential subplots advancing the universe’s overarching adventure.
Myth - now interpreted through the latest understanding of cognition - can provide the participatory languages for experientially aligning the human psyche with these deep orders of creation. They serve as cultural technologies for attuning individual and collective narratives to the music of an ever-evolving nature.
This re-enchanted, meta-modern imaginary offers an integrative meta-narrative that rejoins myth and science, wisdom and knowledge. It provides an empirically- grounded yet poetically-compelling answer to postmodern disenchantment, illuminating the ontological profundity woven into the fabric of nature. The perennial quest for meaning finds its fulfillment in celebrating and perpetuating the everlasting blooming of emergent evolutionary order through our own self- creation.
By recognizing the common archetypal patterns beneath disparate domains and getting both the analytical and artistic sense of meaning, we re-situate our post- modern meaning crisis within a larger unfolding story. The traditional ideals of Love, Truth, Beauty and Goodness - found within the Biblical narrative that sits firmly at the center of our Western culture that can now be further interpreted as empirically reflecting the living organism of humanity - re-emerge as the natural teleological attractors of an interconnected, open-ended evolutionary process in which mind and nature are harmoniously continuous rather than dualistically divided, mending our Cartesian tear.
7.2 The Final Crescendo - Our Interpretation of Meaning
We can now finally look to answer the question that began this journey: what is meaning? Is meaning 42 - per Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Or maybe it's 1/137, discretized into some fine structure constant of the universe. Or is it simply an arbitrary human invention, open to whimsical definition based on the cultural zeitgeist of the time? Is there even an answer to such a difficult and amorphous question?
Based on our thesis, we believe there is an answer. Meaning is not an arbitrary cultural construct - per Nietzsche - but rather a fundamental feature of a teleologically driven cosmos in which we have a unique participatory role.
Meaning is the living fruit of resonance between man and nature, mind and cosmos, microcosm and macrocosm, myth and life story, or heaven and earth. It represents the alignment between an entity's existential narrative and the transcendent archetypal patterns driving existence’s evolutionary unfolding.
Meaning arises when the story of one's life coheres with and personifies the deepest purposive currents and value gradients pervading the cosmos. It reflects the felt sense of profoundly participating in and composing a chapter within the great metaphysical symphony - one's unique experiential path harmonizing with the universal poesis.
Meaning signifies recognition of one's role within the larger integrative pattern that imbues all particulars with direction and significance in the universe's co-creative evolutionary unfolding. It involves thematic arcs of self-transcendence, where individual dramas become subplots advancing the wider meta-narrative currents navigating toward ever-higher unities of integrated wholeness.
Meaning is when heaven and earth meet, whether called a turn in process philosophy, true feature vector in predictive coding, tabernacle in theology, manifestation of a goal in psychology, or a love story in our daily lives. When actualizing lives achieve dramatic consonance with the primal creative liturgies, the feeling of profound Meaning arises - an affirming sense of one's purposive place within the universal score. Meaning is life itself.
Our framework is, at heart, a vision of the deep meaningfulness of existence - an affirmation that beneath the sound and fury of a seemingly random world, an abiding coherence and beauty can still be found. To authentically create and discover meaning is to experientially realize one’s place in the fractal patterning of the whole - to attune one’s own creative unfolding to the evolutionary grain of the universe.
7.3 Implications for Secular Modernity
If our hypothesis holds true, that the perennial insights concerning existence’s fundamental process architectures remain faithfully encoded across nature, man, and myth - then the implications for secular modernity are nothing short of cataclysmic.
At its core, it would confirm that humanity’s ancient wisdom and visionary knowledge sources remain urgently relevant as indispensable wellsprings for guiding the path toward genuine existential coherence amidst our technological might. The secularization trajectories prizing science and technology while dismissing the narrative reservoirs as mere cultural contingencies, would reveal themselves as tragic avenues of self-imposed existential contraction and alienation from our deepest ontological moorings.
To renew meaning in a postmodern age, we have journeyed all the way down to the deepest archetypal foundations of mind and nature, a scuba diving session into metaphysical oceans, to recover an ancient eternal truth: the rhythmic heartbeat of humanity and the cosmos are one and the same. The ever-unfolding process is at once the form of the world and the essence of the soul. Humanity’s ultimate horizon and calling is not to build colonies on Mars but internal cultivation, gardening & flourishing right here on Earth - to serve as the microcosmic flowering of the Cosmic Tree, the local ripening of the universe’s global dream.
The integrative framework outlined here is highly preliminary and surely requires elaboration, empirical validation, and expert opinion. But the sheer span of its application across so many domains suggests a compelling explanatory power. By subsuming the core insights of ancient wisdom into the revelatory matrix of modern scientific discovery, such a comprehensive process & complexity vision promises to heal our epistemic orphanhood and anchor our complex Western civilization in an even more robust & coherent historical bedrock.
The integrative metaphysics sketched here is thus no mere armchair speculation. It is a summons to realign our core cultural institutions with the telos of human flourishing as a microcosm of cosmic self-actualization.
On a personal level, by recognizing the fundamental dynamics of change and evolution in the universe, we may learn to embrace uncertainty as an opportunity for growth, fostering more adaptive and resilient mindsets both individually and collectively. Understanding the deep interplay of unity and diversity could inspire holistic approaches to various domains which balance individual expression with collective cohesion, thinking in Unity, Wholes & Gestalts once again.
In business and organizations, The seven-stage process could serve as a valuable template for guiding organizational and institutional development, helping leaders navigate the natural cycles of growth, maturity, and renewal. This could lead to more agile, resilient, and responsive institutions that can effectively adapt to changing circumstances. A process-based approach to ethics could also encourage contextual flexibility and nuanced moral reasoning, promoting dialogue and collaboration across different value systems.
And in society at large, by providing a new foundation for meaning-making and values alignment, this framework could help us create a more vibrant, ethical, and thriving society aligned with the telos of the cosmos. From education and the arts to economics and politics to science and religion, our civilization’s organs can be reimagined as vehicles for incarnating process philosophical wisdom & complexity science aligned with the deepest patterns of nature. It invites us to embrace change, seek integration, and recognize our deep interconnectedness with each other and the world around us.
Here are a few - very high-level preliminary, naive, and extremely idealistic - sketches by civilizational organ:
1. Education: In education, this would mean nurturing the whole person - mind, heart, body, and spirit - in resonance with nature’s holistic unfolding. Curriculum would be organized around interdisciplinary connectivity and an epic of evolution to bridge ancient wisdom with the latest scientific discoveries. Art education would find a revival of pre-modern art and the work of the greater masters alongside a curriculum of actively embodied and visceral creativity. The sciences would be taught alongside theology as a quest for holistic truths and disciplined striving to discern the mathematical mind of the creator in the living book of nature.
2. Politics & Economics: In politics and economics, the ideal would shift from maximizing power to optimizing the conditions for the flourishing of all life and the wider community of being. We would structure our systems to embody the process-philosophical insight that competition and cooperation, individuation and integration, are complementary phases in the cosmic dance - not irreconcilable opposites. We’d model organizations and institutions like complex organisms based on optimal architectures found in our latest computational neuroscience research. Adversarialism would yield to a politics of trust grounded in our deep ontological kinship and shared stakes as microcosms of a macrocosm in the throes of birthing itself.
3. Religion: In religion, the process perspective invites a shift from parochial dogmatism to an enlightened and experiential universalism on a personal level. By recognizing the common process principles refracted through our diverse sacred stories and practices, we move beyond interfaith dialogue to a true interspiritual realization of our profound unity. Religion become prismatic voices in a convergent symphony of praise to the Music of the Whole.
4. Science: In the sciences, learning is taught in the context of an overarching theory of everything capable of integrating insights across all fields into one coherent story of an evolving universe. Characterizing key dynamics in physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology with the common vocabulary of process philosophy allows researchers to discern the self-same patterns at play throughout the cosmos.
More research will be done to bridge this ever-so-important philosophical and pragmatic divide.
7.4 Joining the Music
Let us, then, have the courage to heed the call – to be stewards of the more enlightened future stirring in the womb of the present. By re-attuning our cultural organs to the Music of the Whole and to consciousness’s key role in the adventure of cosmogenesis, we can effect a Copernican Revolution in the 21st century mind. We can anchor a new perspective in the mythology of meaning equal to both the material crises and philosophical potential of our time.
For in doing so we will be laying the foundations for a true Renaissance – one that sets the human spirit ablaze with the fire of an integral, experiential realization. We will have finally discerned that “Love moves the sun and other stars” – the process-philosophical secret of the West, the dynamic source code of the Cosmic Dance. Meaning will be ours because we will have remembered: Meaning is not something we create, but something we are – the local flowering of a universal symphony, called to join the Music.
Part 1: UPTM #1 | A Paradigm for the 21st Century: Introducing a A Preliminary Unified Process Theory of Meaning [for meta-self-referentiality’s sake, why not]
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!
Very interesting line of thought here. Insightful stuff!
If the universe is moving towards more meaning for man, as you posit, than why are we in a meaning crisis? Are you familiar with the work of John Vervake?