michael-dean-k/

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

A new prayer I wrote to loop: "Καιρὸν θεωρῶ, ἀγάπην σπερῶ.” It stands for “Kairos I behold, Agapae I will sow,” or in less Greek terms: “I recognize the moment, and will bestow love as a gift.” Each half mapped to an inhale and exhale, sort of like the Lord’s Prayer (in attempt to internalize and associate the prayer as something as automatic as breathing). The first half is on being perceptive, the second on being generative. You watch with gravity, then act with generosity.

Pronounciation:
(1) kai-RON
(2) thay-oh-RO
(3) ah-GAH-peen
(4) speh-RO

On each word:

Kairos is about seeing a particular moment in a particular way, that if acted upon, will change the course of history. It jolts me out of a passivity, about accepting things as they are, and instead to see freshly, to see everywhere the third doors. Christ’s first words in the Bible (after baptism) are, “the kairos is fulfilled."

Thay-oh-RO means to behold, to contemplate, to observe, to truly see the potential of a circumstance. It’s not a casual looking, but a penetrating sight. It’s a perspicacity of vision (an unraveling). (Note: it ties to “theory” but original this word was a way of seeing, not an abstract hypothesis.) It doesn’t mean “I’m an opportunist, but the full weight of my attention is applied to the present. There’s discipline to it, and it’s framed as a sacred rite, an act that changes you.

Agape is the highest form of love. Eros is the lowliest love, the desire to subsume the other into you, passion. Philios is a brotherly love, a reciprocal friendship, a give and take. Agape is a parental unconditional love, where you hope to nurture the other into their maximum potential. This is the origin of this prayer, because it feels like a word that can applies to everything; to mundane moments, to relationships, to creative works, etc. In many important ways, agape is a form of surrender. Agape is the defining word of Christ.

SPAY-roh is “I sow,” but  speh-ROH is “I will sow.” The future tense adds a quality, as in, now that I’ve seen the moment, I commit to sowing love. The word “sow” is specific and special, because sowing comes from spraying seeds, meaning you give love in massive volumes, with no conditional reciprocity, no expectation for return, knowing that one in a few might blossom into something. There is even a “Parable of the Sower” in the New Testament, about broadcasting generously without controlling where things land; you throw seed and trust the ground. Love is something to scatter freely, without a guarantee of return. This spray definition also ties into my latest conception of the root cosmological urge, in a working essay titled “the universe is a cumshot.” As in, God is not a craftsman with a plan, it’s more like the universe is an explosion of matter, and God is the binding force, the emergent order that fuses, harmonize two things for them to transcend to a higher phase of matter. 

Compared to the Lord’s Prayer, which is petitionary (give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us), asking for repentance and nourishment from a higher power, this one is more about our own responsibility to be like Christ, to have Christ-Conscioussness in each frame of our existence. It’s about internalizing the divine pattern. The Jesus Prayer is a devotional prayer, but this is a participatory prayer. This is “theosis,” becoming by grace what God is by nature.

Silicon Valley has cannibalized The Fountainhead and inverted its meaning. They celebrate Roark-like rhetoric—innovation, disruption, individual genius—but then go on to act like Keating: obsessed with markets, perception, appeasement, hype, status, and conformity. To be Roark is to fundamentally not care what the market thinks or wants, which goes directly against the main ethos of “build things people want.”

Roark had an unshakeable ethical core, a vision for the world that the world didn’t want, yet. He was willing to endure hardship, poverty, and hate, but didn’t despair over it; he had patience, faith in his destiny, and saw no other point than to follow his dream even if all signs pointed to it being a dead end. He stuck to his vision long enough for it to manifest in the world, and eventually others saw the transcendent beauty in it (Roark is modeled off of Frank Lloyd Wright). Roark was a force of nature, understood by no one in his life time, but everyone afterward.

In contrast, Keating is a status-chaser that plays social games. He is practical, while Roark is extremely unreasonable.

The point of Fountainhead, to me, is that Roark tolerated pain without suffering for his virtues, making him far more like a Christ-like character than a capitalist. There is no doubt, anxiety, despair, spiraling. He accepts all pain and does what he needs to; it’s the reader that experiences the pain and questions his almost inhuman reactions.

Faith is overrated, what matters is that you act like Christ. You could have all the belief in the world and go to church every week, but if you haven’t rigorously and honestly observed your own soul under a microscope, you may be missing the point.

Of all the competing instructions of Christianity, which is most important? (a) To believe in God; (b) To read the Bible; (c) To go to church; (d) To pray; (e) To live like Christ. Arguably, a-d are just delivery methods to install (e), Christ as a “moral engine.” But what if you derive your own system to do this? If you live in the light of death, understand what you have to die for, see every moment as a moral act, and forgive everyone, but you don’t believe in God, are you really not a Christian? (Claude called this “anonymous Christianity” and “implicit faith”)

"If Christianity’s ultimate aim is human transformation toward love, justice, and forgiveness, then someone achieving that transformation might be closer to Christianity’s heart than someone who believes doctrinally but doesn’t embody these values.”