Philosophea: Solutions (Preface)

This book is a solution: a suspended combination of fields, all interrelated and interdependent. The problems of our world need answers, and this book is about answers: solutions for our time, not a suggestion for how we should have or could have in a previous time, but how we must, in this time, solve our most serious and ubiquitous problems.
Philosophia is the origin of the word philosophy, and means the love of wisdom. In order to love oneself, the knowledge of self preservation comes first, is essential, and then comes procreation (the love of another). And similarly, in order to be “enlightened,” the love of truth comes first, and then comes a truly beautiful spirituality, beyond the limitations of logic and formality. Philosophea, with the suffix ea, could mean the love of wisdom and flow, or the love of wisdom and life force depending upon the etymology of either English or Hawaiian culture respectively. This book is the author’s attempt to share his love of wisdom with the world, and in the process infect his ken with their own unique love of wisdom, flow, and life force.
In the course of writing this book, the author drew from various sources throughout various fields. Part I, dealing with a new moral code, took influences from such deceased characters as Yeshua Ben Hur (otherwise known as Jesus of Nazareth), Jiddu Krishnamurti, Buckminster Fuller, Lao Tsu, &c., and such living characters as Ken Wilber, Tom Campbell, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi among others. By bringing their distinct and seemingly different ideas together, it can be said that this book is complex—in that we have differentiated and integrated a variety of ideas together in harmony. However, if we were to sum up part I into one sentence or idiomatic phrase, we would boil it down to the platinum rule: Treat others as they would like to be treated. Many of the ideas expressed in this book are not solely that of the author, but rather express the mentality of a new paradigm that has been emerging more rapidly since the dawn of the new millennium, but which has always been present in the hearts and minds of great visionaries throughout history—in one way or another, in one shade or variation. In other words, both this book and its author are a product of our uniquely promising yet perilous times.
Misguided as many great leaders are, they have always attempted to create the perfect society, through eugenics and eumemics. Eugenics is the control of genes, and eumemics is the control of memes. Memes are any pattern in matter or information that has been produced by human intention. Between the control of genes and memes, most attempts by leaders throughout history have been negative: genocide, infanticide, fratricide, book burnings, religious inquisitions, and military conquests between cultures. Because of these morally corrupt forms of eugenics and eumemics, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction with the premise that everyone has a right to reproduce. And while we might, in our heart of hearts, wish that this was for the best, perhaps we should step back for a moment, and consider the truth: specifically we are all different, some more disposed to taking care of children than others. Cultural norms previously condoned marital relationships as a requirement for reproduction, but today this requirement no longer holds water, and the baby has been dumped out along with the bathwater with the emergence of liberal democracy. What is liberation in the context of empire?
Today, women are practically rewarded for being promiscuous in the United States, provided with tax cuts and supplementary income—and in some cases this is a good and just thing, but in the long run could it be harming our culture and society? The rate of single motherhood has increased dramatically over the past decades, and there does not seem to be any reduction of those rates. Without fathers, government has taken up the responsibility of father figure, and because most of these single mothers cannot give the necessary attention to the child they have, let alone the numerous children they may end up having, the state has become the new parental figure for most of the impoverished world. Schools have become nanny services for parents; and for single parents, the relationship is reversed: they are the nanny, and the state is the parent. Welcome to a brave new world! Aldous Huxley would be proud.
And while Part I is about, as Aldous put it, opening the Doors of Perception and exploring our antipodes, our exotic and uncharted territories (of the mind and our reality), what we are presenting in book II is a new paradigm, which, if applied, would constitute a form of passive, noninvasive, positive eugenics, which, for the purposes of differentiation, we will be calling eugenesis, in which no direct manipulation of the genetic material is necessary, only the application of consciousness to the process of evolution—in regards to both genes and memes. Eugenesis, eu “good, well” and genesis “origin, generation, nativity” thus means “good origin.” The source of this concept is first, recognizing where life originated, where it generated from, and second, by recognizing its potential.
If and or when we can recognize our eugenesis and place that source in our attention, we can then begin to care about the problems of living with the kind of affect and thinking that is necessary for proper evolution or change; rather than punishing victims, rewarding criminals, and tolerating violence, we need to heal victims, avert evil, and end all forms of violence as a means of creating change. It is only through unity consciousness -- effective differentiation and integration of thoughts, feelings, and actions -- in the context of a mental or ideal universe that we can realize and generate the proper mentality to create our own reality (high level Freemasons know this through the Kybalion, A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, and the Seven Hermetic Principles: Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender -- as well as the hidden 8th principle: The Generative Principle of Care.) and the sense of sovereignty necessary to start building it.
All too often promises of security and safety are presented in a nice suit, with a sharp knife hidden behind its back—in other words, the contents do not match the hype. More often than not the promise of freedom comes with an enemy which threatens the ideal way of life. In this book, the enemy is entropy, and the solution is complexity. And while there are many who are what would be considered guilty under our current system of laws for petty crimes, there are many also who are guilty of crimes not recognized as crimes, and they play as regular characters in the course of world events and our daily lives, if not more than drug dealers and thugs; thus, it makes no sense to claim this concept of guilt even exists in the manner in which we as a culture intend. Therefore, we must intend to seek justice, not guilt or innocence, but virtue in the pursuit of cleansing this world of its ills, and our society of its evils.
I do not intend to deceive the reader in regards to intent, packaging our ideas in Utopian paper with propaganda ribbons. However, just because it is not presented as a final solution, or as a simple cure-all to the world's ills, does not mean that it is incapable of reaching to the root of today’s problems; Similarly, just because it is not presenting a bleak outlook of apocalyptic doom does not mean that it should be relegated to the index of boring and/or posh—in contrast to insane and raving notions. In our view, despite foreseeable hardship in the form of self-development and individual responsibility, it is not a matter of should, not a matter of could but a must—if the human species is to survive the 21st century, let alone the foreseeable millennium.
Whatever form eugenesis takes, it can only be based on the idea of fractal equality: that the balance inherent in all natural inequalities gives rise to the spectrum of beauty inherent in all varieties. This is a complex idea, both differentiating and integrating the forms and functions of nature, but it is a necessary idea in our time because of its implications for our culture.
In this book, we define beauty as a symptom of rarity, complexity, and functionality. Consequently, if we did not have ugliness (common, simple, and non-functional e.g. excrement), we would not have beauty (e.g. the rose and with it the honey bee). Ugliness has its own intrinsic purpose, just as beauty. Therefore, discrimination against people and things because of their apparent ugliness is folly, and should be prevented through education. Indeed the primary method of eugenesis, as presented in this book, is education and epigenetics rather than book burning and genocide.
Having said the above, it is not lost on our author that such quaint and poetic notions are incapable of emancipating the human race from its invisible shackles, and rending the unbendable bars of the enslaved mind. Nonetheless, this book was written with the intent of inspiring people, giving them hope, and presenting a case for a more complex, more beautiful world; a world which balances utilitarian principles with humanitarian ones; a world that balances and measures its own laws according to natural ones; a world that no longer has its roots in fear and loathing, but rather in love and receptivity.
Making such a shift requires that we use ecosophy, and sociosophy--words meaning wise economy and wise society respectively. Ecosophy, or a wise economy, is defined as a coalescence of both ecology and economy, using a scientific and spiritual perspective of education to enlighten society; it is by integrating the societal and spiritual components of culture in ways that bring people together instead of dividing them that we see a sane household and society. Sociosophy, or wise society, is the perspective that society and spirituality, or issues of the psyche, are intertwined and require wisdom as a matter of course to address and remove the problems of our current unnecessarily complicated and confusing culture in decline.
On the topic of defining terms, no term could be more important than wisdom. And though we define wisdom last, it should be recognized that this has been done for emphasis. Wisdom is a combination of intelligence and intuition, science and spirituality; wisdom is open-minded skepticism, and applied knowledge; wisdom is direct experience interpreted using complexity and applicability as principles for achieving what the classical philosophers called virtue.