0216 So, how did the first singularity get started?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia was the first culture to drop its hand talk. Earliest indications of the culture date to a few centuries after 6800BC. I call this time point: 0 Ubaid Zero Prime (or 0 U0\u2019 or \u201cZero Uh-oh Prime\u201d). From the point of view of the Lebenswelt that we evolved in<\/em>, this date represents the big uh-oh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around 2300 U0\u2019, the Ubaid suddenly expanded into northern Mesopotamia, colonizing key sites along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and along budding trade routes. This type of cultural event never happened before. The Ubaid exhibited unconstrained complexity. They went on to form Uruk town-chiefdoms. The Uruk period grew into the Sumerian Dynastic city-states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0217 To me, this implies that 23 centuries (or around 100 generations) of trial and error mark the transition from the start of the Ubaid to the Uruk. These generations made the transition from the Lebenswelt of hand-speech talk<\/em> to the Lebenswelt of speech-alone talk<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0218 I can imagine that the personal origin myth<\/em> is a fairy tale about this period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This transition locates the division of the person into the ego and the Self along the axis of material and immaterial<\/em>. My Self is what I evolved to be<\/em>. My ego is my persistent attempts to cope with and flourish in the social structures of the Lebenswelt of speech-alone talk<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0219 Material concerns go with the artifact-filled world of the ego<\/em>. Idreal<\/sup> responds to the symbols of the social world as if they were actual<\/em>. The superego is the normal context of that response<\/em>. The superego is the repository of meanings, presences and messages for speech-alone symbols, among other things<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Immateriality<\/em> goes with the Self<\/em>. The ego<\/em> acts in the Name of the Self<\/em>. How long does it take for the Self to realize that it has a name? The Self encounters the world as if the world was talking in gestures. The Self asks itself, \u201cWhat do I like? What do I not like?\u201d The Self is open to suggestions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0220 After one hundred generations, <\/em>the timeless gods of the Lebenswelt that we evolved in<\/em> were betrayed, buried and forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The builder gods inhabited a new – situation-level – horizon. Humans began to call on the name of the builder god<\/em>. That is all they knew. The spiritual and establishment levels were glued together. Kings and priests naively ruled the town-chiefdoms of the Uruk<\/em> in the name of the builder gods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mesopotamian city-states<\/em> followed the Uruk archaeological period<\/em>. The builder gods constructed a civilization. Each political-religious structure was stable for hundreds of years. Gods did not fall when a city-state fell. They were integrated into a new builder god mythology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0221 I claim that the origin myths of the ancient Sumerian civilization,<\/em> as well as the origin myths in the Bible,<\/em> are fairy tales<\/em> about those twenty-three centuries. For the Gnostic origin myth, I see the personal origin myth as corresponding to this period of confusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0222 Perhaps, one irony of my particular model comes from the fact that terms from modern psychoanalysis are used to fill in several slots. Does Modernism repeat, as farce, the tragedy of those 23 centuries? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The farce, of course, is that the Self<\/em> becomes a little Sophia<\/em>. We anoint ourselves as the bearers of a new age<\/em>. We hide our aborted monsters<\/em> in the clouds. Then, each monster in the cloud<\/em> takes on a life of its own<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0223 For the Gnostic cosmic origin myth,<\/em> I look to the east of the great and ancient civilization in the Tigris and Euphrates River valley<\/em>. I look to the west of the precocious and ancient civilization that formed in the Indus River valley<\/em>. I look to the Iranian highlands<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0224 What once was called \u201cPersia\u201d<\/em> consists of small river valleys, connected in ways that discourage the formation of a large single political-religious civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once speech-alone talk was adopted, one civilization would rise in one valley and another civilization would rise in another. Each would command the resources and organize the people. Each would succeed for a while. Each would fail from internal dissension or external invasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0225 The builder gods would rise, recruit sovereign and religious power, and construct artifacts demonstrating the actuality of their symbols. Then, they fell for lack of decisiveness or resources. The turnover was relentless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0226 I find it easy to imagine a figure slowly entering consciousness, over the generations. Establishment-level builder gods came and went, but this figure remained on the spiritual level. Eventually, this figure was associated to Sophia, Personified Wisdom, in the current version of the Gnostic origin myth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sophia lives while Yaltabaoth dies over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0227 Look at the image of Yaltabaoth<\/em>. The first half is lion. The second half is snake. The image depicts Yaltabaoth in time… in like a lion, out like a snake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0228 The pleroma is not what it appears to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pleroma is more than an image of a sequence of emanations of male and female pairs from the Monad, disrupted by the behavior of Sophia<\/em>. The pleroma is multiple and sequential emanations of Yaltabaoth, first as lion, then becoming snake, then uniting with Sophia as a single age as each civilization ends<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0229 In the Gnostic origin myth, Sophia seems to be making a mistake. Perhaps, she is not. She plays the role of continuity<\/em> in a repetition disorder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sophia calls the individual in community<\/em> to find a way back to the Source. She provides the individual with a path to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sophia may sap strength from the lion of Yaltabaoth<\/em>. She may lessen the benefits of the good times. But, she also quickens the death of the snake of Yaltabaoth<\/em>. She lessens the losses of the bad times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0230 If Yaltabaoth commands the material world and all its concerns<\/em>, then Yaltabaoth will be mortal. If Sophia dwells above Yaltabaoth in the spiritual world, then Personified Wisdom is immortal. The pleroma is the graveyard of her world-creating children. The Monad is her incubation of the world to come<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0231 Every religious social construction creates a charism, a counter-intuitive cognitive space that fosters human flourishing<\/em>. It creates an opportunity for coming together to construct a world. However, the actualization of the cognitive space<\/em> also opens an opportunity for social collapse, as the religious social construction fails to survive internal dissent or external threat. This pattern fits the concept of a builder god<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0232 The original formulations of the Gnostic origin myths<\/em> rendered the consequences of the first singularity<\/em> as two interrelated fairy tales, one cosmic and the other personal<\/em>. The formulations match the conditions of the Iranian plateau, making this area unique in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0233 The Gnostic family of myths<\/em> broke out from its birthplace when the great river valley civilizations<\/em> fell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the east, the Harappan civilization collapsed during the migration of proto-Indo-European speaking tribes from the north<\/em>. The same migration settled the Iranian plateau through elite dominance. The original Gnostic myths were adopted and transformed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the west, the Sumerian civilization finally disappeared in the coming of the Akkadian empires. The last gasp of the Sumerian polity was Ur III.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ur III spoke Sumerian, unrelated to any family of languages. The Akkadians spoke a Semitic language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0234 This may have been the time when the mythic Abraham lived. The ziggurat is a Sumerian invention. After Ur III, the Sumerian language was expressed only in rituals and writing. The building of a ziggurat is linked to the confounding of tongues in the Biblical story of the tower of Babel. The Genesis text mentions Abraham right after this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0235 The Gnostic origin myth portrayed by Burfeind<\/em> is a testament to the first singularity<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 0216 So, how did the first singularity get started? The Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia was the first culture to drop its hand talk. Earliest indications of the culture date to a few centuries after 6800BC. I call this time point: 0 Ubaid Zero Prime (or 0 U0\u2019 or \u201cZero Uh-oh Prime\u201d). From the point of view of the Lebenswelt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[417],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"yoast_head":"\n