Brendan,

 

  This is a lovely piece of work. It honors and illuminates and inspires. I found the description in the email to be powerful and on point. (If you will, please allow me to make one minor point about nomenclature…the Tree of Knowledge is abbreviated “ToK,” because when capitalized in the UTOK language system, TOK stands for “Theory Of Knowledge,” as in the TOK Society (not ToK Society) and UTOK itself).  In addition, I found the poem to be moving and alluring and imaginative and generative.

 

  I will share a couple of points in response to Lee’s helpful comments. I agree with Lee that simplicity is often something to strive for, especially if we are to take an “engineering mind” approach to helping ease folks into understanding the reality mapped by a science oriented toward wisdom. And, Lee, this is what I see you do so well.

 

  At the same time, the cultural place Brendan is adopting, at least as far as I am following him, is a mytho-poetic epic narrative structure to pull on the power of the arts and related theological imaginal structures to inspire and cultivate meaning in this time of the meaning and mental health crisis. Ala Vervaeke’s work, the gap from the Enlightenment can be framed as a massive chasm between science and spirituality, whereby the latter refers to a mythos that orients our souls toward the transcendent (represented in UTOK, as the Garden). As I see it, Brendan’s work is placed to bridge and transcend that gap toward a metamodern scientific spiritual sensibility. As such, his proper use of the term “complexification” seems well justified to me. Complexification refers to the coming together of differentiated parts to form an integrated functional, patterned whole. The ToK System affords us a scientifically grounded big history map of the complexification trail across the levels and dimensions of nature that affords us the capacity to understand the integrated networks of energy-information that enable us to connect in this exchange and collectively imagine the Omega.

 

I hope you don’t mind, Brendan, but I took the liberty of taking some of the art work that you did with the four rings and added Christian Gross’s updated iQuad Coin to the middle (which has UTOK’s “ultimate justification”, which be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity, on the gold trim, along with a sun representing the Elephant Sun God, which is an icon of the ultimate good/true/beautiful, away from evil).

 

 

To be clear, in UTOK, the iQuad Coin can be thought of as representing the point at which the psyche, mathematics, logic, and physics, along with the one and the many, and the past, present and future are joined in a nondual empirical experience of onto-epistemological awareness (to use some of Nik L.’s language from his nondual empiricist frame).

 

I see this epic from Brendan as helping us to be and become oriented toward the Omega under the light of the Elephant Sun God. As such, I thank you for this emerging work with a deep sense of gratitude.

 

Best,
Gregg

 

 

 

From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Brandon Norgaard
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 12:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK and A New Mythology for the 21st Century

 

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Thanks Brendan – you have an amazing imagination and you are quite inspirational!

 

Also really a minor point but just to clarify for the other members here, Mr. Dempsey’s name is spelled Brendan.  It read that while the names Brendan and Brandon are spelled and pronounced quite similarly, they have entirely different etymologies.  Brendan, I understand, means raven in Irish Gaelic, while Brandon means sword in Old English. 

 

😊

Brandon

 

From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of lee simplyquality.org
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2022 6:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK and A New Mythology for the 21st Century

 

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Brandon,

Thanks for this; your writing style is beautiful. I too look forward to reading the next chapter.

 

I dare to offer a few comments.

You describe this as a myth, which is generally considered not to be objectively true. 

I understand it is your goal to describe reality as it is, not to fantasize about what we don’t know, nor to reject what we do know.

I encourage you to describe this as something other than a myth. Perhaps as a saga, or a history, or an autobiography, or some newly-coined term.

I don’t know of any more fascinating story than an accurate description of reality as it is. 

(Dawkins wrote a book called “The Greatest Show on Earth” to describe evolution as it is.)

 

Also, although I acknowledge the remarkable complexity of the real world, I value simplicity over complexity. (Note, for example my email address!)

I avoid the word “complexification” because it suggests to me an effort toward making things more complex (and obscure) than they need to be.

I suggest using the phrase “adding detail” rather than complexification. You are not adding complexity to the real world, you are avoiding a simplistic description by describing existing levels of detail.

 

Coincidentally, the course I recently developed on Finding Common Ground is as appeal to align our worldviews with reality.

Your writing style is much more beautiful, but our messages may be similar.

 

I hope this musing has been helpful.

 

Good luck with this.

 

Lee Beaumont 

 

 

 

On Mar 21, 2022, at 1:31 PM, Waldemar Schmidt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

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Brendan: thank you.  I look forward to more.

 

Best regards,

 

Waldemar

 

On Mar 21, 2022, at 8:46 AM, Brendan Graham Dempsey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

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Hi all,

 

As a poet and artist passionate about metatheory and concerned about the "meaning crisis," I've been keen to find a way to articulate the immensely beautiful and inspiring metanarrative of emergence and complexification (as expressed by TOK, for instance) into the symbolic language of myth. The urgent need for such a metanarrative is probably clear to many in this group. Gregg succinctly states in his book, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, "Currently the worldviews--the large-scale justification systems--that guide human action are in a state of 'fragmented pluralism,' meaning that they are fundamentally contradictory and incompatible. Fragmented pluralism does not seem like an ideal state of affairs," he adds, and one might provide a host of evidence for this very valid conclusion (p. 26). The importance of a "post-postmodern grand meta-narrative" (p. 24) such as UTOK is that it "provides the ultimate map of the general background structure that can coherently frame but not imprison the infinite variety of human experience" (p. 28). 

 

Such a coherent frame can, I think, provide the salutary edifice that so many people currently lack, who are currently suffering the psychological anguish of nihilism, depression, and despair as a result of the insufficiency of the dominant narratives on offer. To the degree that such value nihilism is a principal driver of society's short-sighted and selfish habits of over-consumption and destructive exploitation, such a narrative might even "save the world" (so to speak). Less dramatically, to the degree that such a narrative is simply true and factual but at present largely inaccessible and so unknown to vast swathes of the population, its dissemination through more easily accessible modes would be inherently valuable.  

 

Towards these ends, I have begun a work that I hope can effectively convey the above-mentioned "post-postmodern grand meta-narrative" to a broad audience in a symbolic, mythic register. The work I am calling simply Ω (Omega), which I summarize this way:

 

Ω is the story of everything. It is an attempt to render the metanarrative of metamodernity mythopoeically, relating the complexification of the universe and the evolution of consciousness through the domains of Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture.

 

You can read more about the project and view the first 6 pages here:

 

I will continue to serially publish pages as I complete them. I welcome any and all feedback.

 

Cheers,

Brendan 

 

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