Santa arrived on our street yesterday spewing considerable exhaust while riding atop a parade of firetrucks and vans, floodlit like a nativity display at night, full sirens and blaring Christmas carols competing for my Fetal Alcohol daughter’s rapt attention.
Santa rolls at stately parade pace, while ever more impatiently my troubled daughter jumps and eagerly awaits to pounce.
For me, much too soon, Santa spots her leaning out our screen door, disembarks with great royal dignitary pace to walk the long quest for prey on our front porch.
As I feared, after an unconvincing HoHoHo? Without waiting for introductions, Santa goes straight to his task at hand: What do you want for Christmas, little girl?
I don’t know Haven’t thought about it. I’m sure it’s not a stinky and loud Santa parade. Anyway, I’m still working on what I’m giving for Christmas.
That’s awesome. I don’t hear a lot of that.
It’s not awesome! It’s complicated! My dad said I should only give gifts that by giving them I will also receive gifts.
I’m not sure I have any gifts like that. Last year you asked for an American Girl doll.
Yes, but this year I’m working on giving American Princess me, instead of settling for your plastic dolls.
Won’t you need costuming and make-up to become the All American princess?
You would think so, but my dad says they don’t meet his gift-it-forward rule to recycle and receive back.
So what do you think you’re going to get, or give, or both, I guess? although Santa’s feeling red about green co-redemptive gifts, and I do still have far to go.
And you left your diesel-fueled truck idling. I’m leaning toward kindness, ’cause princesses are always kind, but my dad is asking for greater wisdom, which is something he actually does need. And I know you don’t have any to offer or you wouldn’t begin and end Christmas by asking people what they want, instead of asking us what we have to give that might make life feel a little less snarky come New Year’s Day, while your truck continues to stink up the neighborhood.
Santa returned to his royal red firetruck somewhat faster than he had arrived on my wise American princess daughter’s green front porch.
A happy healthy and wealth-integrated indigenously pleasing/displeasing RightBrain grows maturely peaceful as a calm winter night, content to allow LeftBrain to ego-chatter away debating further cooperative win/win plans for Earth’s and Elder RootBrain’s and, most immediately and satisfyingly therapeutic, newer CrownBrain’s best beloved belonging day.
In an evolutionary historical sense, we are each and all, WesternDominant and EasternRecessive bicameral moving NorthernMind and SouthernBody bi-hemispheres, RightBrain embedded in EarthMother’s yin-flowing regenerative yang-stengthening emergently extending love’s warm universal womb
Before enlightening exposure to Either/Or deductive springs of AnthroPrivileged bilateral Both/And cobinary intelligence
Bringing newborn eumemic trust in One GodSun’s ethotic crowning truth experienced through GaiaEarth’s erotic rooted beauty
Passion and Pleasure reborn light of FatherSun’s democratically radiant trust in what is MidWay warm co-empowering Earth’s green caste not too zealously condemning red hot and not too silently victimized blue cold.
This integratively cooperative and nurturing economy of RightBrain’s root erotic chakra, listens to deep ecologically learn, regenerate, remember LeftBrain’s ethotic crown co-investment chakra, with both wise yang opportunities and overly reductive dis-yintegrative risks.
Yintegral Wisdom RightBrain deep flowing Yang’s polypathic bicameral imagination toward spacious/timeless capital-invested 1(0)-cobinary belonging, void of any cognitive v affective ethotic v erotic crown v root remaining upper v lower caste dissonance
Resistance to Yang/Yin cooperative ecopolitical contentment within this silence of a warm winter night’s co-redemptive womb, becoming evolution’s further revolution of not said not silent ethos/eros co-empathic passion/pleasure bliss
Multiculturing hope in bicamerally co-arising nonduality of ecological empowerment through winter’s contenting hibernation
Calm before more fractured convergence storms of 20/20 perception/reception co-passionate laughter, remembering how unSage LeftBrain has been to not see RightBrain’s muzzled Muse health in AnthroPrivileged co-empathic song and dance cooperatively mediated cobinary SunFather/EarthMother crown enlightened ethos-telling root empowering eros-swelling wealth.
I’m reading The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, by Czikszentmihalyi, and How the West [sadly] Came To Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisanciogla at the same time.
Czikszentmihalyi (C) wears academic labels of Positive Psychology, interested in why and when and where our neurosystemic psyche’s do cooperatively flow best, and when our upper-caste preserving ego identities are more likely to get in the way of resilient mental happiness, a poly-empathic cobinary bliss zone.
Anievas and Nisconciogla (A&N), well, it’s complicated, but Anievas wears a political scientist label, and is interested in why and when and where differentiated economic and political forces are more competitively successful, winning intercontinental history’s weaponized ecosystemic trauma, triggering further violent dispassionate unpleasant and monotheistically unfortunate anthropocentrism.
This ecopolitical irreligious story unfolds unevenly empowered by resilient polycultural resonance, regenerative communications between healthy land and prospering human associations favoring multiculturally curious eumemically (inter-religiously) positive neuro-normative passion/pleasure mind/body integrity
At least within our more Earth-matriarchal/Anthro-child positive-associative healthcare home front of transgenerational inter-religious development, formation
Here, international power relations are less likely to grow up and blow up to become the proud military-capital invested parents of our own internal winner v loser prodigal children, human-caste elites stuck in preserving defensive evolution, resisting neuro-offensive win v lose chronic devolution, against synergetic wealth of non-elite sentient beings.
It remains unclear whether these Western Winners might have chosen to optimize more inclusive West/East and North/South bihemispheric meta-strategic Win/Wins by leading with cooperative ecopolitical co-empathic trust in interdependent organic safety and sacred GaiaMother’s inter-religious web of pronoia life co-operative neuro/eco-systemic belonging
Just as this is often unclear within our day-to-day anthro-family feuds, or even the egoLeft-ecoRight bicameral battles written across each ethotic-erotic thought-safe/felt-belonging Peace Warrior human heart.
I start wondering if C’s co-arising forces of Me v We ego-differentiation within SafeSelf-with-BelongingOther pronoia flow win/win strategic health-system opulence could, on a wider, more geopolitical, scale, be dynamically equivalent to A&N’s uneven Us v Them geo-political maturation within potentially integral polyculturally associative win/win pronoia strategic polyculturing inter-religious prosperity, ebbing and flowing internationally enlightened and intercontinentally empowering trends toward democratic-rich caste-abolishing nurturance.
Appositional cobinary nondualism is at work in Yang force midway appositional balancing, rather than oppositionally opposing, Yintegral pronoia flow, NorthWest monopolistic caste-preservation patriarchal dominance reserved for neurosystemic anthro-survival strategies within ecosystemic normative thrival of SouthEast polytheistic polyculturing polyamorous caste-transformation regenerating GaiaMother’s empowering Whole Open EcoSystemic compassionate neuro-communication strategies
Personal LeftVerbal-Cognition/RightNonVerbal-Intuition bicameral cobinary integrity re-evaluates anthro-history of NorthWest v SouthEast bi-hemispheric eco-survivalism within AnthroForce monoculturing history win/winning GaiaFlow polyamorous mystery neuro-pronoia caste-transformative thrivalism geo-political resilience transformative long-term universal/unitarian health/wealth compassionate communication inter-religious win/win Gaia-womanist neuro-strategic positive eumemic international democracy intercontinental pronoia compassionate communications cobinary ethoticYang/eroticYin co-intelligent peace development.
RightBrain felt multisensory intuition could be an important resource for Positive NeuroPsychology’s health-nurturing flow patterns and resonant belonging rhythms toward AnthroMe/EarthTribe-We sacred/organic ethotic/erotic safe-purpose/deep-belong-meaning co-redemptive symbiosis, co-empathic healthy-ethos/loving-eros trust extending ecopolitically warm unconditionally democratic wealth.
In this time of urgent need to improve climate health, rather than adding further pathological Yang LeftDominant NorthWestern monotheistic aggressions, Gaia Hypothesis evolution’s positive eumemic development i invites healing through Yin-integrative resource flow, reconnecting neuro/eco-therapeutic interdependent networks, revolving our ego v eco inside-anthro v outside-EarthTribe deep multigenerational learning YangEgo humility to more fully sustain Yin’s eco-climate flow tranquility.
Another approach, also ending in whatever outside, but not caste-under, “eco” means to you, whether outside ego or home or Rome or religion or party or even anthropocentric worship of capital-engorged purpose itself, is to notice that anthro-dissociative history, decontextualized from GaianEarth associative mystery, is inside-Yang dominant
And Yin-RightBrain feels only through dialects of relationship. The search for Yang/Yin balance is, in this sense, a search for ecopolitical domestic Left/Right cobinary eco-justice with neuro-peace flow harmony
Intergenerationally learned and resonantly sustained by the daily non-event miracles of nonhistory’s matriotically integral evolutions of sustained revolving climate health continuing to struggle with monocultural AnthroSentient upper-caste negative militaristic and competing capitalistic Win v Lose ethos-egoMind v eros-ecoBody eumemic wrongs of Anthropocene-Monotheistic Western climatic caste-preserving pathology.
This does not say, nor imply, that gender dissociative climates and racial dissociative climates and weaponized aggression climates and economic competition climates are all the same caste difference. Nor does this suggest one is more desecrating than the other. That would be a YangDominant process of construct differentiation.
Needed now, for multicultural polypathic deep learning, are Yintegrity’s climate-transforming solidarities regeneratively guiding AnthroCulture/EarthClimate inter-religiously interdependent health away from upper v lower caste pathologies, both neuro-psychological and geo-political.
I’m a fairly active charter member of Connecticut’s Medical Marijuana Program, qualifying because I’m also one of the oldest HIV+ survivors in the U.S.
In fact, not a single cell within my entire organism would have been brought to you today without the miracles of chemistry.
So blame Big Pharma, you would not be the first but perhaps could become the last. You never know
We might recreate a cooperative bottom-line engaging an international profiting me corporation prepared to listen to prophetic angry people as if we might become wealthier prescribers for healthier climates and cultures, rather than mere consumers of contentious therapies.
Anyway, I’ve been sick off and on, mostly on, since the beginning of November so I’ve also been pretty much stoned.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, I’m not sure Probably both. I’m also may be the oldest HIV+ Taoist survivor and Taoists annoyingly need to pretend both sides of the mirror might have worthwhile reflective potential.
WuWei quasi-fortunately, rather than being too sick to get stoned, I’m too stoned to imagine I’m sick.
Despite being retired, and increasingly tired, I don’t have time to be sick anyway, in large part because my youngest of four kids is a girl with wicked Oppositional Defiant disorders; a label she defies
Not because she’s opposed to orderly labels, but because she thinks she is perfectly ordered when the rest of us losers get with her program.
She likes President Trump’s redness and orangeness and the whole MAGA culture because he looks and sounds familiar enough to eat
Like red meat grabby economic sinners and prehensile political leaders make the greatest bottom feeders.
For my young teenage daughter, defiance is not a disorder, it is a counter-cultural religion (practiced at Make America White Again rallies by evangelical nationalists) into which she was baptized by Fetal Alcohol full immersion at a first trimester young embryonic age.
From her I have learned there fortunately is no wimpy God, but we do have one hell of a fire-breathing feminist Goddess when we refuse to help her clean her nightmare she calls her imperial White House, but I call what’s left of her bedroom.
I tried to point out the inconsistency of supporting a President who refuses to help us clean our planet, or even avoid mutually terrorizing civility destruction, but this, apparently, is like the voice of a wimpy God who does not, and should not, keep on defying the Fire Goddess right might hand of your life doesn’t matter much.
This morning I was helping her get ready for school, combing out her spiky hair. She’s part dark porcupine. We were standing in front of a large wood-framed, beveled mirror that looks, perhaps only because I’m stoned, like something out of Snow White, associated with her StepMom, the witchy queen with Make Me Great Again oppositional defiant disorder.
My daughter appreciates Snow White, probably because she bossed around the seven dwarfs in their own domestically peaceful home, (a politically incorrect position we might best not even think of trying to get away with) and forced them to listen to her own crappy music preferences at a full amphitheater range of ear-splitting volume.
Be that as it too loudly may, I asked her if she ever talks to her mirror, asking, Who is the fairest of them all?
Yes.
And, does the mirror talk back?
Yes. It says, You need to fix them!
That’s strange. My mirror has been saying the same thing ever since the last oppositionally defiant election.
Herein, this evolutionary positive psychologist’s voice is not that of +1 ethos enlightening Source dominating +/-(0) eros empowering Resource
Positive neuropsychological progression does not support monotheistic ethos +1 overpowering +/-(0) panentheistic eros original dispassionate sin preservation
Dissociative anti-pantheistic eros bias leaning toward the anthro-ethos privileged side, while bodhisattva ecologicians balance +1 ethos = +/-(0) eros symbiotically equi-valent choice
In which neurosystemic organisms virtuously integrate our health-caring cobinary best to play Win/Win +1 CrownEthos MonoCulturing safe and belonging within +/-(0) RootEros PolyCulturing caste-abolishing co-redemption.
MisBehavior Management: The safest AnthroCrown enlightened survival strategy requires relearning to mind ethotic +1 mono-humanistic consciousness
AND
Compassionate Communication EcoTherapy: Our most resilient EarthRoot empowering thrival strategy regenerates embodied +/-(0) erotic pan/en-theistic felt awareness
Ethos requires a discipline that often sees a seizing mindless ritual to acquire integrative eros flow, at first climax feeling overwhelming joy rich with amusing nuanced truths, senses, expressions, analogies, integrity, vibrancy, androgyny, buoyancy, bliss, even peak crown-rooting loss of clear-cut ego boundaries.
Together, these CrownEthos with RootEros conversations, about ecologically healthy love, slow-grow uniting integrity
Deductive-vertical crown-mind enlightening root-body bi-lateral oppositional thoughts and Inductive-horizontal root-body empowering crown-mind to recognize, and appreciate, elder right bi-cameral appositional feelings
As each maturing person learns to fluidly refocus Here/Now universal compassion, we can, together, co-redeem bodhisattva resilient pleasure
And, as we all learn, through ecologically healthy relationships to fluidly focus and verbally communicate Crown/Root harmonic ethos/eros win/win wokeness, our Anthropocene challenges will turn EarthTribe’s flowing tide toward universally resonant compassion uniting integrally resilient peaceful pleasure within our shared interdependent Crown/Root climatic web of love-life healthy flow
CrownPassion v RootPleasure business as anthro-privileged usual continues severance of economically dispassionate ethos from politically dissociative eros
Nor will we know how to positively progress evolution toward greater polyculturing complexity unless our ethotic consciousness becomes more pleasure co-empathic
Nor will we polypathically feel how to therapeutically flow toward greater regenerative depolarization away from greater degenerative polarization without comprehensively engaging our crown/root co-energetic balance to become more integratively extended ethos strong Sages favoring eros flow Muses
Wu-wei dancing safe midway belonging love songs.
As monotheistic anthropocentric individuals we can less easily advocate a certain preference for complexity or accommodate discontinuous opportunities to help healthy and wealthy evolution along
As panentheistic interdependent neurosystemic organisms we can more fully occupy our regenerative cooperative AnthroCrown/EarthRoot transformative polypathy
Transforming primal cobinary relations in-between neurological compassionate minds within ecological embodied pleasure in universal love ethos and unitarian health eros
Note: Some positive psychology statements are drawn from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as is the title of this piece, pp 169-170, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, 1993. With deep ecological appreciation.
A caste preservationist favors separation of White from NonWhite races.
Racists come in two varieties, but both behaviorally support White privileged apartheid, if not in what we liberally say about capitalism’s free and irresponsible speech marketing way then in what we conservatively do
Too comfortable with neighbor-hooded apartheid school and patriarchal church historical monoculturing segregation practicing our habitual systemic trauma combative politics of xenophobic mistrust.
Racists favor separation of positive light v negative dark eumemic cultures to perpetuate economic and political partisan praxis of ChosenPeople irreligious superiority
An ongoing “upper-self” v “lower-othered” disempowering unenlightened “winner” v “loser” systemic trauma narrative.
There is no authentic empowerment side of love in this history of racist segregation because we are all apartheid losers when we prefer to fly apart
And stronger when we fly together more polyculturally inter-religious deep listening enriched
By our choices for inclusive community investment, when and where we seek divine empowerment of MotherNature’s cooperative multicultured purse? rather than monotheistic business as win v lose 0-sum northern light v southern dark anthro-privileged bipolar oppositionally defiant caste-preserving usual
Competing to defend birthright v birthwrong long separated standing in life’s lesser survivalist v greater thrivalist apartheid pecking order
A dull monoculturing defensive position within Win v Lose strategic oppositions, entirely inappropriate for organic Gaia’s WinAnthroWealth/WinEarthHealth polyculturing positive eumemic pronoia
Healthier and wealthier and wiser resonant opportunities together than dissonantly risky xenophobic paranoid behavior caste apart.
2025 Congregational Study Action Issue, Unitarian Universalist Association
When democratic gratitude performs with politically positive caste-transformative attitude
Then autocratic certitude and kleptocratic magnitude do not negatively deform with unenlightened and disempowering caste-preserving platitudes.
The U.S. inter-religious sector seeks caste-abolishing strategies through deep embodied listening and multicultural learning experiences. This inter-religious theological reflection intentionally includes, and gives deferential voice, to Earth’s dissociated constituents, acutely targeted, and chronically triggered, by caste-preserving harm.
These trauma-informed relationships have led many people of faith to believe our global religious associations must be transformed, not merely reformed, by dismantling systemic trauma endemic to an upper-caste dissociative “prison-industrial complex.” To this progressively resilient end, humanity actively hopes for a caste-abolishing, compassionately communicating, “more perfect union.”
Those wounded by “lesser-than” trauma histories challenge the inter-religious sector’s integrity. Sacred ecology invites democratizing intention to transform caste-preserving trauma with caste-abolishing compassionate communication strategies; words and ways to restore universal Earth Justice, and unitarian anthropocentric peace.
What is our theology of sin and redemption? Of repentance and repair?
The Gaia Hypothesis proposes that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth form a self-regulating, complex system that maintains conditions for life. (Wikipedia.org)
Original sin, like a crack bifurcating the Taoist symbol of sacred synergy, severs Gaia’s Original Yang/Yin symbiotic relationship, thereby dividing what composed Gaia’s therapeutic co-redeeming system. Wounded womb pain and loss, loneliness and dissociation, dissonance and chaos, present negative feelings of dispassion. So too, pleasure and gain, belonging and association, resonance and polycultural complexity present positive feelings. Together, these dark negatives and light positives potentially balance sacred Gaia-regulating ecological and neurological compassion, reconnection, revival, re-ligion, re-associative healing.
Throughout indigenous wisdom Origin Stories, original sin is iconically represented by disempowering risks of a traumatically severing crack, and enlightened opportunity in co-redemptive Prime CoBinary Relationship. Light and dark, full and empty, top and bottom, iconic in the Taoist bihemispheric black/white symbol. Both of these, survival risk and thrival opportunity, held paradoxically together within a cosmic GaiaMother’s nurturing, yet nutritionally wounded, egg-womb.
With dispassioned, unpleasant risks of losing healthy interdependence comes integrity’s reverse compassioned, pleasing potential. Symbiotic Gaia reweaves, restores, redeems cosmic cobinary balance, Yang/Yin synergy. This regenerative double-bind restores wellbeing to a fragmented bipolar, anthropological v ecological, crack. This primordial “crack” was pantheistically perceived through experiencing regenerative fertility, and degenerative futility.
These two, caste apart competition and caste together cooperation, present a multisensory co-arising trauma-cause v therapy-effect reiteratively unresolved communication cycle. Caste together as a dipolar prime relationship (e.g. Taoism’s YangMountain and YinValley), each re-associative worldview encompasses, but is not limited to, a felt awareness of risk aversion. Averting risky feelings anticipates opportunity conversion; exhaling dis-formation to inhale transformation. Caste-abolition strategies engage co-redemptive ideations.
PassionateMind/PleasureBody symbiotic transformative consciousness articulates nondualistic Buddha “I-I”, expanding outward to include nonviolent Sangha “We,” AnthroMind/EarthBody engages verbal-Crown/nonverbal-Root communing Dharma.
Definitions: Monotheism–the belief that there is only one God and humanity was created in His image Polytheism–belief in more than one god Pantheism–belief that “god” does not refer to a person, place, or thing; and does refer to all interdependent relationships within a self-regulating universe Panentheism–belief that “god” transcends a polyculturally regulated natural universe (e.g. Gaia) and also immanently includes interdependent relationships within this self-regulating universe Animism–belief that all regenerative life-systems are interdependently produced by a synergetic spiritual (metaphysical) intent that empowers physical interdependent relationships. Animism and Panentheism are commensurable belief systems. Humanism–belief that human nature, dignity, intelligence, and metaphysical ideals are sufficient for self-regulation, without recourse to theistic supernaturalism. This often includes the belief that “God” was created in an anthropocentric image.
2. How does centering love ask us to respond to a public theology that is based on punishment, revenge, violence, coercion, and dehumanization?
An anthropomorphic SunFather God, creator of Man, is made in His own, monotheistic, upper-caste Chosen People image. By cosmological comparison, a pantheistic EarthMother Gaia compassionately pleases SunFather’s universally cooperative enlightenment. Yang-God’s transcendent orthodoxy prevailing upon indigenous Yin-Gaia’s indigenous orthopraxis.
Reflecting on this question’s list of stressful, anxious, depressing trauma triggers, these fear- and/or anger-embodied strategies defend YangSelf v YinOther dispassion and non-communication. I feel anxious, neurologically ‘bad’ experiences that happen to at-risk Us v in-power Them,” multigenerational historic remembering. This multigenerational re-connecting engages strategies to avoid unhealthy, unloving, dissociative wants and dispassionate needs. Dispassionate intent, as evinced by anthropocentric history, contributes to perpetuating Winner-Us v Loser-Them systemic trauma. Transgenerational experiences of inward-neurosystemic and outward-ecosystemic trauma further disintegrate therapeutic hope for transformative love reconnections. Mindful commitment to pantheistically polyamorous association experiences transforms upper v lower, lighter v darker caste dissociative ideation. Sacred EarthTribe communion experiences restore polyculturally healthy communication and organically felt belonging.
Picture the Taoist Yang/Yin circle, with Yang on your right, caste in enlightening White, and Yin caste on your left, in empowering Black. Notice that Yang is crown-upper dominant and Yin is root-lower prominent.
A bi-polarized win v lose, monotheistic caste-preserving, Yang-Crown orthodox chakra oppositionally competes against a dipolar win/win, panentheistic caste-abolishing Yin-Root orthopraxis chakra. In reverse turn, our pantheistic awareness of safe MotherGaia belonging is appositionally unopposed to a cobinary symbiotic relationship with FatherSun, as two-dimensionally pictured above.
Robust compassion unconditionally extends warm panentheistic feelings of organically belonging together. Organic root-bodies with sacred crown-minds co-redemptively respond to caste-preserving displeasure/dispassion trauma. This systemic trauma includes past neurosystemically felt unsafe and unwoke “lesser-than” harm, scapegoating. Sacred Us v Sinner Them political views derive from irreligious dissociation, paranoia, conspiracy theories, rabidity, fear-anger-freeze dissonant miscommunications. From a monotheistically universal view, Anthropocene caste preservation is necessarily anti-polytheistic, anti-polycultural belonging, anti-healthy multicultural democracy, anti-holistic wellbeing. Light CrownPassion v Dark RootPleasure repeats a binary caste-segregating original dissociative sin.
3. How do we live our covenant declaration that “every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion?”
David Bohm, in On Dialogue, concerned with “We” (Sangha) practices observes, “the world is in the dire state it is because of too much self-centered, fractured, fragmented thinking, and a new way of thinking [communicating?], driven by dialogue, where we suspend assumptions and judgments, participate honestly and transparently, and stay connected, would open the door to more authentic, real, creative thinking [regenerative living?] capable of dealing with the world crisis.” (Wilbur, The Religion of Tomorrow, p. 617)
Natural law and natural order values expressed by authentically religious (reconnecting) declarations universally agree that every individual sentient organism flourishes in loving and compassionate relationships. The reverse corollary, no individual sentient organism can optimally flourish in unloving and dispassionate absence of healthy interdependent relationships.
Our most ancient indigenous wisdom, including universal-yangMind and unitarian-yinBody Taoism, supports this religiously held experience, that each individual sentient organism (person, being), lives spiritual-mind/natural-body values when we communicate, verbally and nonverbally, on the side of loving, compassionately listening, co-empathic interrelationships. All individual sentient beings and species voice and act unnatural and dispassionate disvalues when we dis-communicate on the “upper” caste-preserving side, triggering fear, anger, chronic stress, heightened anxiety, neurosystemic and ecosystemic bipolarizing rabidity.
By systemic theological extension, monotheistic HumanNature concepts are antithetical to polyamorous DivineSpirit “worthy” cognitive voices. By contrast, pantheistically inclusive, intuitive Me/We body choices (cobinary root-pleasure) reconcile cooperatively interdependent “woke-hope” persons.
Stepping into a panentheistic sacred ecology worldview, we might ask how we can heal “upper” mind-caste v “lower” body-caste competitive dissociation, personally and politically. This felt need for integrity invokes indigenous desire to effectively and profusely reconnect RootBody v CrownMind Original Sin perennial issues. Upper v lower, winner v loser, caste-segregation. Neuro-sensory reproductive organisms normatively experience a universal need for belonging, a unitarian want to feel health safety.
We might imagine, and continuously re-imagine, a more expansively resonant, thriving caste-abolishing covenant. We might remember our constitutional commitment to a more inclusively democratic crown/root re-association. We could regenerate YangPassion/YinPleasure, enlightening and empowering win/win inter-religious strategies. These are pantheistic nonviolent communications reviving, thriving, flourishing, dignifying an internal health-climate of love, and an environmental wealth-culture of compassionate belonging.
4. What does Universalism–the notion that we are all saved by being reconciled with a love greater than our sins–mean in the 21st century? How do we live this part of our faith heritage?
“For the first time in history, virtually all of our truly serious and wicked problems are global in nature. Even fifty years ago, if a nation were facing seerious problems, it could take actions itself to ameliorate them. Today, most serious problems are such that actions taken by any single nation are largely worthless–almost all nationa have to participate: the problem is global, the solution must be global.” (Wilbur, The Religion of Tomorrow, p. 622)
Universal Salvation is historically, and more specifically, UU associated with the crown-jewel notion that we are all saved through reconciliation with a MONOTHEISTIC love greater than our sins. Monotheism and anthropocentrism are two faces of the “man is made in God’s image,” so it logically follows that GodTalk images a divinely inspired “upper-caste” man. This transcendent salvation position is in hierarchical contrast to all othered, “lower-caste” dissociated, organic beings. In this emergent 21st century of the Great Turning Anthropocene, original Chosen People sin more clearly stands us apart from our Whole GaiaEarth panentheistic roots, in Unitarian Co-Redemption.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our [upper-caste preservation] problems with the same thinking we used when we created [lower-caste dissociation] problems.”
Polytheistic WE integrity transforms our universal monotheistic trauma history by abolishing dissociative upper-monotheistic Us v lower-polytheistic Them. Monocultural climate trauma awakens restorative win/win polycultural opportunities. Just as natural body pleasures multigenerationally inform spiritual mind passions, so too pantheistic root chakra’s intuitive feelings preverbally inform crown chakra’s monotheistic cognitions. Unitarian felt Roots feed universal Crown dialogue; nondualistic, nonviolent, verbal/nonverbal therapeutic communication strategies.
Within UU polytheistic intention, this might feel like giving more weight to our Unitarian notion that we are bodhisattva healed through appropriately sharing peak associative-felt experiences, both public and personal, both sacred and organic, both impassioned and pleasing, both enlightened and empowering. In this unprecedented critical Anthropocene climate event, we are urgently and integrally called to primordial compassionate caste-transforming communication, and not anthropocentric “caste-preserving” dispassionate dis-communication.
5. What does it mean to proclaim a theology that no one–no matter what they have done or been accused of doing–is disposable? [without adverse neurological and ecological consequences]
If malevolent roses were blue passioned red
And malicious violets were red pleasing blue
Then contentious autocracy would have a whole lot less malgovernance to do.
Peter Morales’s essay “Religious Hospitality” (UUA of Congregations, 2006) offers a theological perspective that we are challenged to practice radically inclusive hospitality. From a bodhisattva perspective, the welfare of all sentient beings is immanent and interdependent. No one can achieve the fullness of compassion, pleasure, resilient peace, until this is the explicit therapeutic intent of everyone. The Christian gospels ask, if we only actively love those we do not perceive as our adversaries, without intent to practice radically democratic hospitality, then how are religious people fully engaging Gaia’s panentheistic potential for caste-abolishing integrity, and beauty, grace, peace–all the fruits of our Holy Nature/Spirit.
Morales describes hospitality as a spiritual discipline, verbally and nonverbally communicated with, and not against, others. Hospitality expresses spiritual health within those who feel empowered and perceive compassionately enlightened practice in host and guest (not parasite) co-empathic intelligence.
“If I feel angry, hurt, unloved, or alienated I cannot offer a[n unconditional] warm welcome. Conversely, if I am at peace, filled with joy at being alive, aware of those around me with compassion in my heart, then hospitality flows naturally and inevitably from the depths of my being.”
The challenge of resiliently and unconditionally loving those who may react against us as if we were disposable, as if our lives matter less than their own, as if irreligious, dissociative behavior and attitudes were reasonable and healthy, too often perpetuates systemic Us v Them, Winner v Loser, Upper v Lower trauma.
Compassionate communications, unlike dispassionate dis-communications, strengthen win/win caste-abolishing messages to and from interdependent persons, associations, states and nations, and species. Reaching out with co-redemptive intention “frees us from individualism and narcissism,” and evangelical nationalism, monoculturally anthropocentric capitalism, and the caste-preserving exceptionalism of our rabidly polarizing Anthropocene.
6. How do we teach children about Unitarian Universalist theological claims and work with them to embody them?
From a Taoist–UU theological perspective, we all most deeply learn, especially preverbal infants and toddlers, from embodied experience. More mature spiritual/sexual bodies, also more expansively learn from compassionately communicating with other trusted and trusting sentient beings about their own upper v lower caste dissonance, and lower/upper resonant experiences, including peak multisensory crown/root-tpanentheistic pleasures in synergetic climax experiences.
Taoist metaphysics, an indigenous wisdom tradition, is nondualistic. Paradoxical “midway” wisdom sonnets advocate Yin/Yang Win/Win co-arising dipolarity, which stands in cooperative contrast to Yang v Yin, Win-Upper v Lose-Lower co-reactive bipolar dissonance.
If panentheistic (spirit-transcendent/nature-immanent) wisdom distinguishes between sexual eros feelings and sensitive ethos thoughts, this may be an artifact of translating neurosensory nonverbal experiences into verbalizable constructs. In Origin Narratives, sexually safe and gender belonging feelings normatively integrate love-passion/health-pleasure at the sacrum-sacral core of root-chakra integrity. This win/win interdependent web of neuro-sexual spiritual life, is in remarkable nondualistic contrast to a monotheistic-anthropocentric dissociative mortal-body v immortal-mind. The Original Sin of YangCrown v YinRoot, like flawed human-nature v perfect divine-spirit, defends and preserves “lower” v “upper” caste carnality v sanctity.
In monotheistic prehistoric traditions, children were on the out-caste side of “lesser,” with women, especially unfertile women, un-sacred but sexualized capital-producing slave property, “disabled” neurodiverse people, “wild” animals, weeds, vermin, unfertile soil. Survivalist evolutionary theory forecasts a “higher”-caste hierarchy ruling-over those who are “lower”-caste. A thrivalist transformative Tao reweaves a beneficent (graced, blessed, virtuous) panentheistic ruling-with polyamorous neuro/ecotherapeutic culture.
Universal monotheism positively correlates with anthropocentric caste-privileged, stable, unchanging GodThesis orthodoxy. This transcendent messianic God is made in man’s exceptionally privileged image, and vice-versa. Prosperous patriarchy is virtuously made in God’s omnisciently pervasive, caste-conserving, entitled autocratic ruler, retributively jealous judge images.
Unitarian polytheism positively correlates with Gaia Hypothesis caste-abolishing, polyamorously fluid ecotherapeutic orthopraxis. This immanent bodhisattva Goddess gives natural/spiritual birth, and rebirth, to all organically neuro-sexsensory, sacredly synergetic, inter-religious crown/root-chakra, caste-liberating, healthy democratic, restorative healing Earth Tribes.
Compassionate communication, verbally resonant and nonverbally resilient, about cobinary nature spirituality grows polytheistically and polyculturally confluent. Passion sensitive and pleasure sensory communication integrates essential teaching and learning. Embodied spiritual connection engages humanity’s authentically religious EarthCentered unitarian life force. While talking about complex ethotic/erotic neurosensory experience, in a safe-and-belonging trust environment, is useful for sharing and expanding individual cobinary comprehension, we know from too much irreligiously dissociative experience, that talking the pleasure talk, without also walking the whole, holy, and holistic ecotherapeutic compassion walk, will not resiliently transform our upper v lower caste issues, personally or politically, locally or globally.
Those who have substantial chronic trauma histories living in the over-caste monotheistic shadow of disregard for cobinary depolarizing passion/pleasure win/win cooperative power analysis may benefit from group explorations of Yang transcendent and Yin-immanent lists.
First, explore how these concepts are often dissociated as polarizing, caste-preserving win v lose universal oppositions.
Second, discuss how these same concepts might also form a double-binding list of caste-abolishing win/win unitarian appositions.
Yang Animus Form
Yin Anima Flow
SunFather
EarthMother
1-man
0-woman
Mountain
Valley
Crown
Root
Sage-cognitive perception
Muse-intuitive reception
Heaven
Earth
Transcendent Messiah
Immanent Bodhisattva
Patriarchal enlightenment
Matriarchal empowerment
Left Hemisphere—verbal thought
Right Hemisphere—nonverbal feeling
Discontinuous articulation
Continuous integration
Monotheistic/Monoculture
Polytheistic/Polyculture
Anthropocentric
EarthCentric
Bipolar competition
Dipolar cooperation
Caste dissociation-vertical
Caste association-horizontal
Sacred-spiritual orthodoxy
Organic-natural orthopraxis
Mind Passion
Body Pleasure
God MonoThesis
Gaia HypoThesis
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 2012, First Vintage Books.
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018, W. W. Norton.
Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking, 1970, Harper and Row.
Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory, 2014, Fordham University Press.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics, 1975, MacMillan Publishing, NY.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976, First Mariner Books.
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I was in Nazareth the other day waiting for a visit with my ecotherapist.
The waiting room is minimalist-zen, I suppose. While waiting to be invited inside, rather than waiting to be disinvited outside, I took a chair with a table in front displaying two magazines, one to my left and one to my right.
The one on my religious left was about the Democrats’ ProLife Policy, advertising titles like Earth’s CoOperative PolyCulturalism, Climate Health Economic Opportunities LongTerm Public Health and Personal Safety Becoming Caste-Abolishing Organic Communities.
The magazine on my right was what appeared to be an irreligiously wrong Republican ProApartheid Position, as iconically represented by MonoPolizing Wealth as Trump-Ace cards, with titles like Aborting Future Life Preserving Stinky Air, Filthy Water, BurnedOut Soil Production Denying UnInsurable Public Health Risks Canceling Healthy Democracy.
I chose the Health Development magazine on my left because I thought it would be more consistently redundantly multiculturally ecologically regeneratively positively pro-life, while Aborting Future Life seemed more likely to just be another long advertisement for negative degenerative anti-ecological anti-Earth Sciences anti-HealthyWealthy Creation Stories of Paradise Still Becoming
Rather like a No! magazine, cancelling Earth’s future polyculturing pronoia health to conserve a monoculturally plutocratic impoverished life I suppose was being advocated in the magazine on my Right.
Anyway, I will never truly know. Just as I picked up the ProLife Left choice my ecotherapist invited me in for our appointment, during which s/he told me I should feel better for the next four years knowing I did the best I could to defend against further pathologies, and to just continue choosing Positive Health Values of ProLife MultiCulturing ReGenerators
Which are not negative disvalues of unhealthy MonoCulturing DeGenerators, pain-in-the-neck and considerably lower, condemning future potential generations to abort as an interdependent organic EarthLife species in denial of untimely death by anti-ecological Upper Caste v Lower Caste anthropocentric game players against caring for trauma-informed health resources of future babies and cubs and puppies and kittens and joeys
All the little ones that to Him/Her belong cooperative healthcare compassionate reassurance.
When you’re on top already, proclaiming King of the US Mountain
When you hope and have faith and love that you are among God’s caste-up elite in stark contrast to those sinners you would remain forever separated from, then your separatist position is also a defense-against-change position to maintain or increase your upper-caste supremacy.
Only if you were a klan of black feminist lesbians and transgender benders, and dark-skinned magnificently chiseled queers, who don’t want anything to do with you either, can you offer an authentic mission statement favoring increased separation without also taking a position of wanting to sustain and potentially strengthen lower-caste absence of supremacist over-lording intent.
Assuming you are still evangelical protesting white males under those closeted Chosen People MAGA masks, I believe you are mistaken in believing you only advocate continuing current “natural” and “spiritual” separation between light-caste v dark-caste races while falsely claiming you are not also committed to preserving your upper-caste “divinely appointed” economic and political privileges
And, conservatively speaking from your monotheistic StraightWhiteGod worldview, reversing past traumatic changes against what any polytheist pantheist indigenously wise panentheist and/or animist exercising constitutional religious rights to freedom’s compassionate speech
Recognizing and celebrating man- and woman-fest PolyCultural Creator destiny inevitably progressing toward multicultural integrity, sacred mind-full democratic compassion, and organically embodied non-violent communication pleasures
Not MAGA accessible without decreasing your upper-caste hubris with the help of TrumPublican niceties like making disenfranchised political and disempowering economic apartheid great again.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Chosen People privilege is antithetically against Jesus’s Prince of Peace intentionally born in a lower-caste manger Good News.
On the other hand, perhaps if you could recruit more broadly, diversify your Make America MonoTheistic Again Klandestine assets to include black feminist lesbians, and invite what you need to learn from transgender benders, and welcome divinely-endowed queers to receive more economic and political grace than our historically traumatic unfair share of this healthy democracy’s goods
Then polycultural wealth could help your public image in the racist-homophobic-misogynistic supremacist trauma-informed not-very-Christian BadNews Great Again MAGA cognitive dissonance unenlightened dissociative pathology department
Anticipating a world class Joyful PeaceMaking Christmas.
“Bestow a blessing on a person you’ve considered to be beneath you or alien to you.”
Donald, may your future communications engage deeper ecological listening and more widely embrace democratically cooperative economicl learning
“Who and what will you pray for as you’re making love?”
What: For this to never end Who: For whom we are erotically becoming together in this eternal moment’s flow of agapic Earth’s pronoia becoming.
“May you get what you want and still want it”
May you gain integrity you feel you need and also gain what you authentically want for all of us.
BiLateral ConVexing Systemic Formations.
“Give examples to illustrate the differences between dumb, trivial pleasure and smart, life-exalting pleasure.”
Passive perception of performance-oriented entertainments v Actively cooperative play and win/win co-engaging exchanges. Less autocratic solo performances; more democratic group sing alongs.
“Arguments with God is the only organization on the planet that specializes in the art of debating with the Creator. Our trained Prayer Warriors are standing by, ready to deliver the protests and complaints that you want to convey…. Write your first draft here.”
Hey! Straight White Patriarchal God! Why not come out of your transgenderal organisms of all Earth colors Matriarchal Goddess Closet?
“A dissident wing of the Beauty and Truth Lab (the “Uproaries”) defines happiness as ‘the state of mind that results from cultivating interesting, useful problems.’ See if you can make that definition work for you.”
AT EROTIC ROOT RISK: PolyVagal power of Win/Win CoPleasing Communication REDEFINE AGAPIC CROWN OPPORTUNITY: PolyTheistic light of NotWin and NotLose compassionate caste-abolishing sacred communion
“Do something that you will remember with pride and passion until the end of your days. Report your results here.”
Successfully defending, even cooperatively singing and dancing while cooperatively writing our political theosophy, entitled Our PolyVagal Designers’ Opera, erotically written in agapic inter-religious libretto.
“Tell about the moment you finally realized who exactly you are– or imagine the time you’ll do so in the future.”
In this eternal moment I am transubstantiating this transgenderal manifestation polyvagally win/win polyculturing neuro/ecological regenesis; so my budda-sattvaness is also our indigenous eco-sattva, now in a bit of an anthro-partisan mess.
“‘Each person is a story that the Soul of the World wants to tell to itself,’ says Michael Meade. What does the Soul of the World want to say through you?”
We are our multiculturally ecological developing world, cooperating at and into our best Golden Rule outcome performances within a Polyculture Designing Opera of collective pro-recreation indigenous stories, where panentheistic deeper is also monotheistic richer and more erotic/agapic ecological crown/root win/win mind/body yummy.
HealthCare evolution is about WinAnthro/WinEarthTribe revolution; not a caste-preserving sacred crown v organic root theory of sacred thrival and revival through organic denial and repression of desecrating devolution.
gdill52 