Resplendence is an innovative concept and nascent social movement, complementing science with the wisdom of conscious insight and motivation, to reflower the planet as a living paradise, abundantly resilient over evolutionary time, and ultimately, to reach to the stars. Press play for the music!
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Symbiotic Existential Cosmology
In June 2021, after a seven year break due to acute closed angle glaucoma, which threatened immediate blindness if my pupils became dilated, I broke my sacred mushroom fast in a quantum change experience of iconic union with the "mind at large" as Aldous Huxley termed it. Several weeks ensued in which I had to symbiotically reconstruct my world view of the relationship between conscious existence and the universe, arriving at the core principles of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology. This was something I had always understood intuitively and underlies all my writing, but produced a totally unexpected creative synthesis, resulting in the definitive creative commons monograph in the ensuing months.
A key aspect of this discovery is reaffirming human subjectively conscious volition over the physical universe, which in turn has implications for panpsychism and animisim and the foundations of religious belief, complementing the science of quantum cosmology and its interactive developments in biogeneis and biological evolution, leading to conscious organisms. This effectively turns both the scientific and religious world views inside out inverting the Copernican principle in the process.
I intend to tenaciously communicate this discovery as a quantum chaos dynamicist should, turning the tables on exploitation and expendience, to facilitate saving the biodiversity of planet Earth before mindless human misadventure precipitates a full blown mass-extinction of life, which will inevitably damage the prospects of humanity to survive in evolutionary time and very likely cause our extinction as a species.
Saving the Diversity of Life from Mass Extinction
The central purpose of symbiotic existential cosmology is not just to reveal the cosmology of the universe in which we consciously exist, but to save the diversity of life on Earth from a human-induced mass extinction (Leakey & Lewin 1995, Kolbert 2014, Dawson 2016). It sets out a cosmology which shows humanity that our central and sacred purpose in existence is protecting and unfolding the diversity of conscious life.
The Conscious Universe
Symbiotic Existential Cosmology transcends both materialism and theism because it complements quantum cosmology with conscious volition. It has three core cosmological principles, biogenic, panpsychic and symbiotic. Life exists in the universe because the laws of nature arising from cosmic symmetry-breaking are fractal, giving rise to living systems as an interactive climax. It is consistent with empirical neuroscience but says that subjectively conscious physical volition is real, and this implies some matter – our brains – have physically efficacious subjectivity and hence all matter, because brains obey the same laws and forces as other normal matter. Primitive subjectivity thus occurs in quanta and butterfly effect systems which amplify quanta, like storms, and in bacteria and archaea. But a discrete emergent transition occurs with the eucaryote endosymbiosis between archaea and bacteria, with the sequestering of respiration in the mitochondria freeing up the cell membrane for excitable sentience and social signalling, when consciousness arises in the first single-celled amoebo-flagellates, forming societies communicating by neurotransmitter molecules such as serotonin. This form of sentience evolved into our conscious brains as societies of 1010 tightly coupled amoeboid cells communicating by the same processes.
The inclusion of subjectivity opens up the spectres of panpsychism, animism and the spiritual/religious impulse in the physical universe, because these are all cosmological views, in which conscious volition is fundamental. But life is symbiotic, because natural selection occurs in the biosphere and all species depend on it for survival, so it's a case of survival of the fittest biospheric symbionts, not species dominance. Instead of going to hell in a basket towards a human extinction, as we are now as a dominant species violating biospheric symbiosis, by regaining symbiosis over evolutionary time scales, humanity ends up inheriting its true cosmological meaning and purpose to protect life immortal, to ensure our own evolutionary survival, regaining the perennially immortal future of our 3.5 billion year tenure in the universe.
This is the Weltanshauung of Immortality, which flips the Copernican principle of science, because the privileged view of the universe is conscious life in paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time, not the Sun-centred cosmos or the flat earth with firmaments of Theistic fame. But it also flips religion inside out because the sacred purpose of existence is to protect the diversity of life throughout our generations forever, so that conscious life can flower to the point where the universe becomes fully conscious of its own existence through the living biota that form its interactive climax.
Humanity and the Biosphere
Humans evolved to be an environmentally destructive dominant species, because of our evolving Machiavellian social intelligence, after a long period of increasingly rich evolution to climax diversity following the Tertiary-Cretaceous extinction. This shaped our minds to be strongly egotistical to succeed against one-another. In the gatherer-hunter phase, this tendency was moderated by two factors: (1) the mating mind – astute female reproductive choice for smart resourceful entertaining and protective males who can do good sex to demonstrate genuine indicators of fitness and sensitivity and (2) original virtue – the evolution of verifiable trust through long-term personal judgment of good character. However, with the growth of large urban societies, this became overthrown by the imposition of patriarchal domination of woman and nature. Humanity is thus still a dominant species wrecking the biosphere through egotistical tragedy of the commons. Moreover gene-culture coevolution, with the emergence of language, religion, commerce and science hasn't resolved this, because cultural evolution is even more rapid than genetic evolution and has produced no stabilising factors. Only a cosmology in which gene-culture-biosphere co-evolution is complete can resolve this.
Enter the biospheric response. The same climax period gave rise to plant and fungal species 'salting' the Earth with variants of neurotransmitter molecules which tweak key pathways modulating human mood and survival. In particular, the serotonin analogues called psychedelics – "psyche-revealing" – paradoxically cause (1) a sensory flood, in which the brain begins to develop an internal model of its own processing and (2) quantum change experiences in which the default mode goes silent, resulting in ego loss and the experience of either God or "ultimate reality", leading to alleviation of mortal angst in terminal illness and a deep sense of integration with life and nature in the healthy. Hence these are critical to planetary survival, along with other forms of nature meditation and conservation activism.
The planet is in an acute emerging climate, habitat and biological sustainability crisis caused by global human impact, which is seriously threatening the survival of biological diversity and the future of the human species:
Planetary Biocrisis
A Real Time Research Documentary on Mass Extinction and an urgent Call for Action on Climate, Habitat and Biodiversity
Resplendence is the comprehensive antidote to existential planetary biocrisis. Resplendence is both a revolutionary, world-transforming concept and a nascent social movement to reflower the planet. If you like the above cosmology or this presentation, you are invited to make contact at the e-mail address.
Resplendence complements the knowledge of nature and the universe provided by science and the powers provided by advanced technology with the conscious wisdom of what to do for the future, so that all the living generations of humanity and the diversity of life can continue to prosper, and in the process discover our true calling as guardians and experiencers of conscious life in the universe.
The discoveries of science have unveiled a story of our origin and future far more challenging and exicting than any archaic tales of God's creation. We know the universe is vastly more inscrutable and confounding than simple ideas of creation by God's breath, manufacture, or verbal command. We also know the universe is capable of supporting stars and planets and that the gas clouds around young solar systems contain the very molecules of life that we find have spawned life on our planet. We now know beyond all doubt from molecular genetics that life has evolved from single celled species to bootstrap itself into conscious organisms, who in our case can ponder our fates and wonder at the enormity and sheer depth in complexity of the universe of which we are a part.
Science deals with the discovery process of how nature and the universe work, resplendence provides the conscious wisdom to enable us to creatively express this knowledge, in reflowering paradise on Earth - the ultimate manifestation of wisdom in action. Resplendence is both an attitude of mind – of subjective agency over the phsycial universe and a social dynamic attuned to bringing Earth back to a state of full and abundant resplendence, sustainable and resilient over evolutionary time scales, to ensure our own survival and the survival of the diversity of life.
2017 Video talk Transcript with live links and corrections
Music: "But a Piece of What was to Be" 1999 Rohan King (composition, piano) Chris King (dulcimer)
Since the dawn of history, we have needed to develop both practical knowledge of the natural world - which plants are safe to eat, or medicinal and which are poisonous, how to make arrow poisons, to master fire and toolmaking. We also have a deep need to make sense of our conscious existence to give us the confidence to approach the world with a sense of meaning and purpose - a sense of not believing but of mutual affirmation of our agency and affirmations of th eliving universe from the world around us.
The practical knowedge, which we have to treat sceptically, to make sure we get it right and survive, became science. Humanity's founding viewpointof animism that evolved into traditional religion has sought to complement our practical knowledge in human history with a sense of meaning and existential purpose. But in the form of prescriptive religion, this has done so at the cost of a heritage of enforced doctrines, moral imperatives, subjugation of women and scorched-Earth attitudes, in which nature can be discarded for the false promises of celestial realms, amid dire threats of hellfire for disobediance to the religious path. Subjective conscious experiences, both of the world around us, and of the inner realities of dreaming and visionary states, are integral to the spiritual quest of who and what we are as sentient beings, but religion has tended to distort this discovery process, by asserting fearful and incorrect descriptions of our existential condition, designed to make us subject to the religious imperative.
Resplendence transcends religion, by providing untramelled direct first-person avenues towards enlightenment and realisation, complementing the objective science of the physical world with the subjective conscience and prescience of conscious discovery – a true discovery process of subjectively conscious meaning and existence, so that human society can discover the deeper inner dimensions of our conscious experience, and that of the universe as a whole, fully exploring the conscious realms that religions aspire to in a way we can verify in the first person, by empirical experience, in our own discoveries, engaging meditative and contemplative vigils and the agency of entheogenic species to make a voyage of discovery together, complementing scientific discovery of the physical world, with a living account of our evolving collective experience, without depending on second or third-hand religious doctrines to distort the nature and integrity of the first-person contemplative condition.
In this process we shall come to fulfill the central hope of the true existential quest, in the flowering and deepening of sentient consciousness in the universe. Just as the scientific world view has shown us a vastly more complex and challenging view of the universe than religious creaton myths, so the collective exploration of the conscious condition unfettered by social taboo can lead to conscious experiences, utterly different from, and vastly transcending, those of traditional religious doctrines.
The word resplendence means many things. We usually think of it as a state of glorious natural splendour, but its root meaning re-splendere is to "shine brightly" or "shine again". It is thus both the overflowing abundance of paradise shining forth in splendour, and as a global consciousness, it is the illumination of our conscious discoveries into an enlightenment gained in the regeneration of the living world.
But it has a deeper meaning, as the immortal condition of humanity and is hence the natural paradigm successor to religion, whose name re-ligio means to bind together, thus inducing social compliance with bondage to the established order and its obediance to doctrine.
Instead of leading to the social dominion and physically unrealizable imaginary scenarios of religions, such as heaven, hell and a triage in the the day of judgment, resplendence leads to a real and positively awesome outcome - the immortal reflowering of Earth in natural abundance, through a democratic culture empowered by climax technology, medicine and science, based on principles of ecosystemic diversity.
We all want to find meaning in life and want it to have a meaning that extends beyond our own lifetime. We also want the security that we are living in a world that has a viable future for our offspring and the future generations. The critical source of our angst that many of us turn to religion to alleviate, is that we are living in a world which is not only teeming with injustice, violent conflicts and weapons of mass destruction, but is lurching towards an uncertain future as a result of human impacts on the world's living habitats, climate and resources which could take us to an irreversible tipping point, undermining the future of unborn generations. These are problems we need to deal with and heal in this life to have a sense of fulfillment, not just pass them on to future generations, or to an imagined afterlife.
We already have a good understanding of how the universe comes into being, of how the forces of nature are shaped, how they can produce atoms and molecules and the complex structures making up cell organelles and the tissues of living organisms. We are discovering the neuroscience of consciousness. But this is not the end of the road. We urgently need to act as good guardians of the planet, so that consciousness can continue to flower and new horizons can be discovered by future generations, so that the consciousness of human culture becomes a great tapestry - a living brocade over space time.
The Central Enigma of Life, the Universe and Everything
How the brain gives rise to subjective consciousness remains the deepest and most confounding enigma in the scientific description of reality and our existential quest. The sentient universe is a fundamental complementarity between objective and subjective aspects, with our subjective consciousness and our physical world description forming our own intimate representation of this complementation. Although we depend on the physical world for our survival as an organism, all our experiences of it come exclusively through our subjective experience. This complementarity has a multi-fold manifestation in the world too - wave-particle, boson-fermion, ovum-sperm, female-male, etc. as the molecular fractal complexity of life explodes, and abstractly in chaos-order, calculus-algebra, discrete-continuous and defection vs cooperation in the prisoners' dilemma -- all forming a Tao, or Tantra, as the Eastern traditions describe it.
This means that even trying to think of the "hard problem" of consciousness research -- how the brain gives rise to the subjective mind -- as such, is a misrepresentation of a complementarity which can be understood only in terms of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology. The physical description of the physical universe, for all its astounding discoveries, is purely a model of the behaviour of physical entities, such as photons and molecules and the structures they form. This means we think of consciousness as associated only with the physical brain and with higher brain functions which we don't fully understand, but imagine can somehow bridge this gap mechanistically in terms of collective neural oscillations. The trouble is that subjective experiences are so different from the physical description that no conceivable brain function model can bridge the gap.
By contrast, symbiotic exisential cosmology proposes that the fundamental constituents of the universe -- i.e. quanta -- have both a subjective existence and objective behaviour. We can't see this existence or "isness" directly, just as we have difficulty seeing one another's consciousness directly, so objective behaviour becomes the default core description. However we know that the quantum wave function shapes where each particle ends up in a way which remains unpredictable for a single quantum and only becomes determined in the average, in terms of the probability (amplitude squared) of the wave function. We have also discovered that quantum entanglement between particles is both critical and universal to how the universe works.
The brain inherited the dynamics to make our form of subjective consciousness possible long before multi-celled organisms evolved. LECA the founding single-celled eucaryote already possessed the G-protein linked receptors found in the brain, and going even deeper -- LUCA the last common ancestor of all life, possessed a chemi-osmotic excitable membrane, enabling chaotic sensitivity in the butterfly effect during bursting and beating. In the context of animal brains, these in turn, lead to phase-front processing, which forms a representation of the same dynamics involved in quantum measurement, bringing in quantum entanglement into the dynamics, driven by self-organized criticality at tipping points running from individual ion channels to whole brain dynamics.
This means that the universe is a sentient cosmos, evolving to make possible a fully intimate connection between subjective and objective aspects of reality, in which existential "isness" and objective behaviour reach a consummation in the sentient brain in conscious perception and subjective intentional will we call volition. Consciousness can then intentionally affect the physical universe, just as we experience it to do, by collapsing the wave function of the "multiverse" of quantum probabilities into the line of cosmic history we experience, through Schrodinger's cat paradox. This is what we experience as conscious decision-making, affecting the world around us, for better or worse.
This in turn means that, as a consummating manifestation of cosmic sentience, we have a personal and collective responsibility to fulfil this emergent quest and to preserve and unfold the diversity of life in the universe and this is what the meaning and purpose of life is all about. It is we ourselves, the universe's sentient beings, who form the consummating manifestation of the interactive catastrophe set off by symmetry-breaking in the cosmic origin and it is we who must needs protect and unfold the diversity of life so that the process can reach ultimate fulfillment. The buck stops with us and the fate of the universe and life within it becomes our personal responsibility to protect, rather than exploit.
Religious notions of deity in the form of an all-powerful God are an imaginary externalisation of this emergent cosmic principle personalised in the form of an anthropomorphic agent, with all-too-human emotions of jealousy, wrath and compassion, giving form to tohu-va-vohu -- chaos without form or void. This leads to an abandonment of personal responsibility for the preservation of life and a root confusion between subjective and objective manifestations, in which personality, moral judgment and legislative manufacture, are perceived to have shaped a lifeless world, thus deprecating the intrinsic fecundity of the natural universe to manifest in space-time in the emergence and evolving diversity of sentient life, invoking instead the edict "let there be light" and the false notion of creationism by manufacture, or in its metamorphosis, intelligent design. At the same time, religion lays false claim to present a final account of our conscious destiny in the life hereafter beyond the mortal coil in a way which dislocates us from the natural world and its protection.
The danger is that religion disregards the very principles of evolutionary emergence of the sentient universe that are key to avoiding a critical tipping point, causing climate and ecological crisis, threatening our survival in the enclosing biosphere of planet Earth in an apocalyptic end of days. We likewise face a parallel danger from rampant objective materialism, which denies any cosmological role for consciousness, and in which any exploitative outcome is a win for the perpetrator, allowing business as usual to become predatory and personal gain to become destructive to the survival of the diversity of life.
Hence the situation is extremely urgent and a revolution of understanding of what subjective consciousness is and its role in the natural universe is essential for our survival. Among the diversity of mental states, dreaming and visionary and psychedelic experiences give us further understanding of the intrinsic nature of the subjective, to help humanity make this transition, without which it becomes all too easy for us to confuse consciousness with merely being a ghost in the machine of objective reality.
The key meaningful contribution we can make to the future comes through several avenues - the good life we bequest to our offspring, our own first-person vision quest into the mystical depths of the conscious condition, our contributions to deeper understanding in culture and society, in the humanities, science, technology, art and music, through innovations we bring to society which produce lasting benefit, though compassionate social justice, and through actually protecting the living planet through our actions to guard the diversity of life. This way we become a true perennial expression of intelligent planetary life, and find our true place in the conscious life permeating the galaxies.
As well as Symbiotic Exisential Cosmology discovered and written in 2021, which has become the foundational work supporting Respelendence, you can find some older versions of the inspiration and thrust of resplendence as a game-changing world view in the articles below. "The Diamond Oracle - Verifiable Trust and Planetary Survival sets out the "acid test" for us all to regain autonomy over the world process, to protect the planet. "The Great Dying is a Wake-Up Call: A Personal Statement" is a declaration of where I stand in terms of avoiding lethal misadventure. "Conscious Existence and the Fate of the Universe" provides an explanation of how resplendence fulfils the existential quest in a primary exploration of the conscious condition that transcends religion and complements scientific discovery. "The Origin of Sex" shows how evolution has given rise firstly to sex, then multicelled organisms and conscious brains, explaining why female reproductive choice is key to the emergence of our super-intelligence. "Planetary Ecocrisis" is a real time research reference overview of damage being done to biodiversity and the biosphere as a direct evidential call to action. It speaks for itself. Science, Resplendence and Existence gives the previous overview, with a poster and video introduction. Together these articles account how and why consciousness, sexuality and biodiversity are the three keys to the survival of the living planet. "Resplendence: A Cosmological Theory of Knowing" looks at resplendence as a subjective theory and method complementing objective science.
Symbiotic Existential Cosmology
The Covid-19 / SARS-Cov-2 Papers: A Malthusian Catastrophe Waiting to Happen
Biocosmology
Tree of Life: Tangled Roots and Sexy Shoots
Quantum Cosmology
Entheogens, the Conscious Brain and Existential Reality
Space, Time and Consciousness
The Cosmology of Conscious Mental States
Sexual Paradox
Resplendence is a concept and social movement conceived by Chris KIng, complementing science and replacing the bondage of religion with the wisdom of understanding how we can reflower the planet as a living paradise over evolutionary time and fulfill our existential quest.
