The Dogmas of Actualized

[Oeaohoo]

I posted this a couple of days ago but the crash removed it!

These are the ideas that I see as having the greatest potential to become dogma within Actualized. It is not that they are necessarily intended to be dogma but because they are (to me at least) partial and one-sided truths which lay claim to absolute reality, they are ripe to become so.

I partly post this because in my younger life I was very dogmatic and the teachings expressed around here were part of that dogma! If anyone has any suggestions of other potential dogmas or thinks some of these shouldn’t be included I would be interested to hear it.

1. The path to a good life is “the work” of self-actualisation conceived in terms of growth, personal development and the myth of the self-made man. 
2. All concepts are socially constructed and invented by humans.
3. Existence is entirely made up of perspective and subjectivity and there is no objective world outside of direct experience.
4. Mankind and the whole universe is constantly progressing and evolving. The “left-wing” are therefore more advanced than the “right-wing”.
5. There is no ultimate purpose to human existence. We are just here to “enjoy the ride”.
6. Your life is whatever you want and make it to be. You determine who you are and who you want to be.
7. Life should be neatly divided into sub-domains which, whilst they might bolster and enhance each other, are to be approached separately.
8. There is a duality between Truth/Love/Consciousness and “survival”.
9. From the Absolute perspective all distinctions vanish. No preference is ultimately more valid than any other. It is almost like there is no truth from this perspective?

It might not be immediately clear why these ideas are one-sided so here are possible counter-dogmas for each of the things I have listed above:

1. The path to a good life is to fulfil one’s Dharma: to abide by the super-ordained law of one’s society and creatively express one’s natural traits within that.
2. The Logos is an intrinsic aspect of existence. The human intellect is designed so that it can align itself with truth. Even profane and secular concepts therefore have a glimmer of the Logos itself within them.
3. Existence is made up of subjectivity and objectivity. This is the original duality of existence, Purusha (consciousness) and Prakriti (substance), and the “first” thing in a non-temporal sense to arise out of the infinite unity of God.
4. History is a progressive loss of spiritual potency at the cost of material triumph. In an Abrahamic context this is the Fall of Man, Original Sin and ultimate Redemption and Salvation during the apocalypse and the last judgement, in the Hindu, Buddhist and Greco-Roman context the descending Four Ages of Man (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron).
5. The ultimate purpose of human existence is to align oneself with reality, which is comprised of Truth (Logos or Law) and Love (Eros or Nature). Joy comes from being in alignment with reality.
6. Meaning is not just a human creation but part of God’s creation. You have been born with a nature and your purpose is to express and fulfil that nature.
7. Every part of human society should be ordered around a superordinate principle: in the Christian Middle Ages God, in the Hindu and Buddhist world Dharma, in Confucian China Tao. This principle contains all the subordinate fields of creativity within itself and so these are understood as partial expressions of ultimate Reality which are never really separable.
8. There is no conflict between survival and Reality. Survival is an expression of Truth/Love and Consciousness. To survive requires that you be in alignment with these things.
9. From the absolute perspective all distinctions are transcended and included. There is no difference between anything precisely because all differences are contained within God as Truth.

I think it’s also worth noting that many of these might be entirely appropriate to teach today but still one-sided from the perspective of pure truth. For example, society, which is supposed to be an incarnation of the divine Law, that exists today is not going to teach and encourage you to express and fulfil your true nature but to mislead and exploit you in whatever way it can. Therefore, the self-help dogmas #1, #5 and #6 are necessary. Additionally, emphasising direct experience can be appropriate simply because many people (particularly worshipers at the alter of Logic and Science who have unconsciously absorbed “Stage Orange” materialism and positivism) are very obsessed with the “external” and objective world. Then again, parts of “stage Green” radically overemphasise the subjective dimension: truth is a social construct, I am whatever I identify as, and so on; it is interesting that a couple of the ideas listed above, particularly #2 and #4, are basically these premises taken to their extreme conclusion.

[Carl-Richard]

I think the most problematic dogma or mode of thinking is naive skepticism, i.e. the unnuanced dismissal or shutdown of intellectual thought and collective wisdom (rationality & science, tradition & myth). It's related to the narcissistic tendencies of (post)modern spirituality and self-help in that it's fundamentally separated from any underlying tradition or principles, and that everybody has to reconstruct the basics from scratch ("the religion of the self"). In this setting, where nobody knows what the fuck is going on, skepticism is the safest bet.

[Oeaohoo]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

I think the most problematic dogma or mode of thinking is naive skepticism, i.e. the unnuanced dismissal or shutdown of intellectual thought and collective wisdom (rationality & science, tradition & myth).

This sounds like the dogma of anti-dogma! One of the things I find fascinating is the way that new dogmas emerge on the other side of the bridge of skepticism. For example, to a certain extent faith in God was a dogma, then there was a phase of skeptical free thought which esteemed positivistic hypotheses and empirical inquiry above all else, and then finally atheism became the new dogma!

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

It's related to the narcissistic tendencies of (post)modern spirituality and self-help in that it's fundamentally separated from any underlying tradition or principles,

Yes absolutely. It’s interesting how different stages manifest this narcissism: Stage Orange denies principles and tradition in the name of the worldly self whereas Stage Green denies even the worldly self in the name of the self of subjective interiority. Even the more dogmatic types within Stage Blue tradition (that is to say, basically everybody within this category today!) often deny principles because they can only believe in the principles of their own tradition; for example, Allah, God and Brahman are all the same metaphysical principle but this is often not understood.

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

and that everybody has to reconstruct the basics from scratch ("the religion of the self")

This reminds me of something David Foster Wallace was always harping on: postmodern society overlooks the obvious and cynically derides what would ordinarily be basic accepted wisdom. Ideally this would create the empty space in which new forms could emerge.

[Carl-Richard]

48 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

This sounds like the dogma of anti-dogma! One of the things I find fascinating is the way that new dogmas emerge on the other side of the bridge of skepticism. For example, to a certain extent faith in God was a dogma, then there was a phase of skeptical free thought which esteemed positivistic hypotheses and empirical inquiry above all else, and then finally atheism became the new dogma!

The lesson there is that absolute skepticism or epistemic neutrality is untenable. In the act of opposing yourself to some framework, you've created just another framework.

 

48 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

Yes absolutely. It’s interesting how different stages manifest this narcissism: Stage Orange denies principles and tradition in the name of the worldly self whereas Stage Green denies even the worldly self in the name of the self of subjective interiority. Even the more dogmatic types within Stage Blue tradition (that is to say, basically everybody within this category today!) often deny principles because they can only believe in the principles of their own tradition; for example, Allah, God and Brahman are all the same metaphysical principle but this is often not understood.

That is why religion became irrelevant in the modern world. It became an ossified, literalist and moralist doctrine, rather than a source of meaning and liturgy that could evolve with the times. The individualistic spirituality arose because the collective spirituality (religion) got severely co-opted by survival constraints. This is what the modern meaning crisis is about: restoring a relevant collective spirituality.

 

48 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

This reminds me of something David Foster Wallace was always harping on: postmodern society overlooks the obvious and cynically derides what would ordinarily be basic accepted wisdom. Ideally this would create the empty space in which new forms could emerge.

It nevertheless identified the problems with the cemented and corrupted aspects of the spiritual traditions (as well as the intellectual traditions) and defined the metamodern project.

[Oeaohoo]

44 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

The lesson there is that absolute skepticism or epistemic neutrality is untenable. In the act of opposing yourself to some framework, you've created just another framework.

Absolutely!

45 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

That is why religion became irrelevant in the modern world. It became an ossified, literalist and moralist doctrine, rather than a source of meaning and liturgy that could evolve with the times. The individualistic spirituality arose because the collective spirituality (religion) got severely co-opted by survival constraints. This is what the modern meaning crisis is about: restoring a relevant collective spirituality.

That is certainly part of the explanation but it doesn’t fully encompass the reality. A new form or context can only rise to dominance when the old one has exhausted itself; however, if we zoom out and look at things from a distance, we can see that the later expressions of a given form or context are generally more chaotic and dissolute as opposed to ossified. I would say that to a certain extent they become ossified and moralistic precisely so as to protect themselves from their inner chaos and dissolution; “civilisations die from suicide, not by murder”!

For example, in Christianity the Protestant faith is notoriously comprised of an endless variety of sects and schisms. This is because it denies the authority of the Pope (going so far as to construe him as the Antichrist) and rejects the Catholic mass in favour of individual interpretation of Biblical scripture, facilitated through increased literacy and the invention of the printing press. However, to a certain extent Protestantism often goes along with biblical literalism and itself emerged out of the moralistic and ossified nature of late Catholicism so even here what you say is partly true. It is also true that (partly in reaction to this very phenomenon) in this phase you get certain extreme “reactionary” sects like the New-England Puritans and modern Evangelicals.

46 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

It nevertheless identified the problems with the cemented and corrupted aspects of the spiritual traditions (as well as the intellectual traditions) and defined the metamodern project.

What do you think are the most important problems it has identified with both of these? 

[Danioover9000]

@Oeaohoo

   ah sheet, the crash removed the original thread? I'll repost what I posted then:

   Number 10 dogma is having epic, megalomaniac interpretations of "I am God", as a justification of developing a god superiority complex.

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, Oeaohoo said:

What do you think are the most important problems it has identified with both of these? 

That the things that were previously thought of as universals and absolutes had in fact a level of relativity to them, e.g. the idea that language, cultural values and even scientific knowledge is more nuanced and complex than to give such clear-cut answers (you mentioned positivism and the contracted perspective of the traditional dogmatist). It opened up to a more pluralistic and self-aware worldview, which is a necessary step to create a greater unity (socially, spiritually and epistemically), but it then manifested at the extremes in naive skepticism, nihilism and crippling self-criticism. Those are up to the metamodernists to figure out, i.e. "granted or even despite a level of relativism, how do we proceed?"