Relational Consciousness And The Beginnings of Civilization

Our human mind is created by a point counterpoint structure, interweaving biological function with human semiosis, our every thought has a bodily component (point) and our thinking, reflective part (counterpoint).

Notice this quality, as each thought moves from reflected to embodied thought, back and forth, as each new perception frames and composes a different response from the thinking mind, from the position of a feeling mind.

This is the basic backbone of our conscious process, and each part is an emergent property, something ontologically real, which exists as the 'end point' of a neurological and biosemiotic series of a manifold of structural transformations. Each thought constitutes a 'teleo', or purpose, which reflexively erupts from the midbrain, which generates a 'reaction' against itself at the cortical level, and so, the two part process is paralleled by the mid-brain and frontal cortex.



The thing about brain growth is that the most important parts - the beginnings - are under the control of the people around us. As embodied and intrinsically reflexive creatures, our perceptual systems become entrained to those environmental objects which induce enlivenment. The facial features and vocal qualities, or the essential 'gestalt' which results in enlivenment, becomes internalized in the early infants brain, which means, in effect, that the structure of the brain is always perfectly 'fitted' to the faces and voices of its lived environment

Such correlation between inner and outer reveals the essential physical nature of the human body: we are designed so that we know one another reflexively, and to a degree that could almost erase the difference between us if we sought to deeply develop it.

Yet, of course, the mission of the elite appears to be directed towards preventing any such possibility. However wise and understanding these people believe themselves to be, they are still nevertheless, and in the end, merely expressing the cause-effect logic inherent to the very beginnings of human civilization, some 12,000 years ago (the Bible is thus half-way off; but as narrativizing creatures, we can't help but to enact, it appears, a good vs. evil historical dialectic) where the synchronous and symmetrical coincidences of living in the forests, where we naturally experienced one another as great friends, and probably had an inner freedom paralleling the movie "trolls". In short, before civilization began, we gave up easy going consciousness, with an openness and pleasure in our own ability to partake in the meaning-creating of the cosmos i.e. "subjective magic", for a process of "squaring the circle" - the dream of "making better" the evident failure of the creator.

Squaring the Circle

Its amazing - and a tad amusing - how human beings self-organize according to the external modes and visual metaphors of its lived environment.

“Domestication of food sources also domesticated people. The formation of states as a highly competitive form of organization established steep hierarchies of power and coercive force that skewed access to income and wealth. Political inequality reinforced and amplified economic inequality. For most of the agrarian period, the state enriched the few at the expense of the many: gains from pay and benefactions for public service often paled next to those from corruption, extortion, and plunder. As a result, many premodern societies grew to be as unequal as they could possibly be, probing the limits of surplus appropriation by small elites under conditions of low per-capita output and minimal growth.” – Walter Scheidel, The Greater Leveler, pg. 5, Princeton, 2017 – Walter Scheidel, The Greater Leveler, pg. 5, Princeton, 2017

Clearly, such conditions foster belief systems and self-narratives that counter the effects produced by such a social asymmetry; to have more than others entails a certain way of feeling yourself, which emerges largely as a counter-response (remember point, counterpoint) to the sense of injustice in others at your having a certain power over them.

Nevertheless, it would seem to be naïve to eliminate from this equation the matter of subjective-magick, by which I mean, it is a mistake to equate the subjective influence on reality of our own species specific self-structuring, for a real, bone-fide, objectively understood expression of what is real about the universe around us.

The reason for this prohibition is understood by anyone with a scientific attitude towards knowledge acquisition. The issue, inasmuch as science is a methodology first and foremost, is about clarity, and the what clarity, or clearness, means. And what is that? Clarity is accessibility. Something is only properly known when it is accessible to the others to whom we make the claim. It's a correlation process. If my mind can see something, you can see it to, so long as you and I share the same references to the object in question (point, counterpoint).

Theres also a fundamental equality, and so, respect, that exists in this form of knowledge. The laws of nature established by Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, etc constitute theories of nature that are so reasonable i.e. accessible to any reasonable human being, that they last the test of time, precisely because they are coherent with the observable facts. The representation in the mind-brain, in other words, is consonant with the ontological nature of the observed reality (i.e. gravity, electromagnetism, light etc).

Since human beings are made of the same point counterpoint dynamic that animates all meaning-making beings (aka living organisms) it makes a lot of sense that the philosophy and belief system of the higher class is nothing more than a plausible just-so story, made up to satisfy the emotional and affective conditions from going so squarely against the circular laws of their own self-organization.

It is not lost on me that Freemasonry has the circle/square thing going on in its symbolism, and that the G in the middle, perhaps
"God/Gnosis/Geometry", their trifecta of the truth, expresses the nature of the god which they believe in.

The idea that numbers build structures, and that mathematical knowledge enables the power to "inspire" and induce "awe" upon others, became united in the first builders of cities, who used their "magic" to control the people around them, whether through the awe of their competence, their magical abilities, or their own surety in having the 'truth' about reality, as revealed to them by the mystery of the numbers.

Are numbers real? Or is the human imagination more real than numbers? How can a reality which works and functions and self-organizes its every state from a circularity, supposed to be 'made better' through numbers, the square, or technology?

Granted, I am truly impressed by the human process, at least as technology is concerned - especially the technology of our modern era. No doubt, what we have gained has made material existence more interesting and compelling, and indeed, to a certain degree, it is absolutely necessary to harbor a skepticism towards things which cannot be proven i.e. God, and so, to understand that just because reality is composed or functions in a certain way, doesn't mean we have to impose upon ourselves an official 'dogma' about what is real.

Or rather, science is 'impersonal' i.e. withdraws from the narrative-making process, or otherwise said, the frantic emotionality which makes people feel certain - and not just certain - but convicted, that they have something of tremendous importance - not just to share - but to be imposed on others.

Adulthood - if humanity can be said to reach such a state - is recognizing the bare-structure of what we are: we are dynamical beings which emerge through point-counterpoint process based in thermodynamic and symmetry generating energetic transformations. This is the 'bare stuff' of what we are - which also means, that the states we experience in our minds, whether with entities that profess some global purpose, or a deep spiritual sense of unity with everything else, constitute ranges of perception/being along the point counterpoint between the fear that started this evolutionary process, and the love which leads to what the human being fundamentally is.

Now, of course, fear is not to be religiously antagonized against i.e. treated as something "other" to the nature of being. But that said, it isn't to be worshiped, or taken as an ontologically real thing that can be good for us i.e. as in magic, because that would be to take fear seriously, as opposed to playing with fear. When we watch a scary movie, this is play. When we sneak up to scare someone we care for, we enjoy both the shock we induce in them, plus the additional fact that we were playing i.e. didn't mean to hurt them.

Differentiating play from reality is something I feel the ancients, because of the limits of their knowledge and lack of coherent organization at the scale produced by modern civilization, couldn't see things as clearly as we see things, which is to mean: we, or those with a scientific understanding of reality, are probably seeing things more truly i.e. more widely, which means, we can relax the religious stuff, because we can explain how it is, how it emerges, and how it is fundamentally consistent with a systems account of reality.

A bag of tricks full of hot, foul air that blow in all four directions.

Stop dissing my Brah...Man?

1 mind self-immolated and split itself into 2 minds creating sentience and began it all.....it takes 2 to tango and a cumulative dynamic to create a reality.....a splitting...into oppositional yet complimentary halves....a realisation of contrast is sentience.......2 sentient minds born from one source....or we are not here....nothing we know is here...we are god we are the beginning and the end......we/god self-immolated and became US......by proxy our fates are symbiotic......yes we could again self-immolate and everything is gone....no more us is no more god.....we could end ourselves by self-immolation but nothing else ever could.

Nice post! I must confess, when I read the title in the 'recent threads' list, I was a little suspicious, thinking that perhaps it was that form of woo that only a special kind of crazy can imagine..

However, I was very pleasantly surprised..


I have perceived a number of curiously synchronous events in my own 'Brain vs. Reality' saga recently, and on reading your opening post I found myself musing yet again at the marvels of Providence.. A number of aspects of your thoughts gave me pause to think more deeply about aspects of my own thinking, and its outworking, in recent days & weeks.

Thank you for sharing - I will continue reading the second post now, and I imagine that once I've gone over it all again, I will have some specific questions to raise. One question to start with - could you please let me know some of your influences, so I can have a look at theories of neurology and/or philosophy concerning the [point-counterpoint], the [biology-semiosis] & [gnosis-ontology] ideas? I would love to look into this further, it tarries quite well with my present investigations into the 'subjective/objective' magick of hypnosis..

Many thanks,



FITO.