CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MYTHOLOGY OF PROGRESS

There is no mythology that pervades and permeates the consciousness of modern man more completely than the mythology of progress. 

It is so pervasive because it refuses to identify itself. It reinvents itself over and over: its modus operandi is to deny or negate its own ancestry, through its own imagined hierarchy. The mythology of progress posits that history is marching forward, and humanity’s flaws and failings are impediments to achieving a collective utopia, the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Workers’ Paradise, et al. The purveyors of the mythology claim to hold the keys to removing the impediments posed by this corrupted species. Theirs is the only correct critique of the past, which must be seen through their lens. The future is theirs.

Or so they believe.

Millenarianism, Manifest Destiny, Futurism, Progressivism, Darwinism, Messianism, Utopianism, Transhumanism, Scientism, Posthumanism- these are just a few names of seemingly disparate but philosophically conjoined offshoots of this upward and outward facing Tree. 

Some offshoots are religious. Some are materialist and atheistic, less are agnostic. All are Transcendent in nature.

For example, Posthumanism requires a pre-existing idea of what a human is and an idea of how the Universe works in order to usher in a (religious) Golden Age of Data and Machines, the Singularity. The embrace of Posthumanism by humans requires e level of martyrdom, self-negation and self hatred that would put Catholic saints to shame.

Some of these offshoots are locked in a dialectical controlled opposition with each other. These polarities are real and their struggles have real world implications, but when we fail to realize the basic similarity of these philosophical egregores rather than myopically immersing ourselves in the false dichotomies, we lose and largely ignore an entire spectrum of philosophical and metaphorical being.

This lost spectrum is the Immanent. That which is cyclical yet does not change, that which happens over and over like the tides ingressing and regressing; that which changes sometimes subtly and sometimes violently, but does not progress; that which is Essential. 

This is an archetypal level of existence from which we do not escape. 

We are the fruits of seeds planted by our ancestors, and yet we are not them. We are ancestors to the future, our time here is unique and fleeting yet entirely essential: we are planting the seeds of the future through our conscious presence. None of our thoughts or actions are meaningless or cast away, even if we wish they could be. We are living out the ideas and wishes of those from whom we inherit the very cells of our bodies, no matter how long ago or how recent. We are also living out their trauma.

Yet our consciousness is unique. Our individuation is requisite to move the world forward. 

Progress is demonstrably real, in a sense, yet is also fallacious if it does not account for the immanent. 

We put ourselves in extraordinary danger when we fail to realize that Consciousness is the Essential Fabric of our Universe. Matter is conscious and partakes of consciousness, it is not random- it is our willful ignorance of cosmological patterns that allows us to indulge in purely materialistic fantasies. Not only does Observation influence and change matter at its most basic level, Cogitation changes matter and matter changes Cogitation- they’re enmeshed and intertwined. Thought itself has ancestry and consequence. It does not come from nowhere nor does it disappear into nothing. 

There is an unconscious realm that weaves in and out of available consciousness. The dream worlds, the imaginal worlds, the semiotic worlds all operate with impunity around and within us. 

The human who does not sleep soon dies. This realm does not allow for non-participation.

The ocean may appear to the the same ocean each time you look at it, but the individual water molecules are in constant flux. The light that shimmers on the surface of the lake carries the essence of the Sun and the Moon and is permeated and changed by them in ways we can never track or document- yet we know what is happening in essence. 

The ocean does not become more perfectly ocean-like. It does not progress, but our relationship to it can progress, as we become conscious in our dealing with it.