On Society

We will know we have 'arrived' as a society when we have a government whose highest priority is to pleasure its citizens.

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Awareness of connectedness may be a luxury we can only afford when our survival is secure. To give everyone access to connectedness we must also give them security.

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Architectively, you influence the world by directing your energies to a specific purpose or outcome. You influence the world connectively by having your behaviour in harmony with the cosmic holism, whatever that may require.

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You cannot have a cohesive society of more than 2 based on connective relationships only. Some coercion is necessary to ensure any sort of uniform behaviour. That coercion, however, need only take the form of boundaries to acceptable behaviour rather than exact specifications of acceptable behaviour. The wider the boundaries the more liberal the society, but you cannot have a cohesive society without them.

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Anyone reading Physical Spirituality would come away with the understanding that ceremony and ritual have spiritual value in an architective sense only, such as demonstrating one's subservience to an architective deity or in attempts to invoke the intervention of an architective deity in one's affairs. Ceremony and ritual are connectively meaningless - the Cosmic Deity, for example, would be blind to their purpose.

I do not want to imply that ritual and ceremony are valueless. Appeasing our hierarchical and processional deities is necessary at times. But ritual and ceremony are also of value in terms of human sociality, for they encapsulate the standards and ideals of behaviour that all members of a society are willing to adhere to in order to function as a coherent society. Our rituals and ceremonies demonstrate to our children the behaviours that will allow them to become active contributors to our society. And indeed, it is only when they have mastered these rituals that they are accepted as adults. Part of growing up is demonstrating, to oneself and to others, that one is able to stand on one's own ceremonially correct feet.