Easter, The Second Coming, and The Human Singularity
“As we lift up our consciousness, our world reshapes itself in harmony with the level to which we have risen.” — Neville Goddard
Religion and Human Unity
All religions differ one from another, and within every religion there are separate denominations and sects that are different one from another. For the postmodernist and metamoderninst secular generations, religious beliefs have lost meaning, significance, or relevance, yet they too have their own secular or even “spiritual” beliefs that are their versions of “religions”. At the level of beliefs, not of real knowledge and understanding, atheism is as much a religion as theism.
People can be converted from one belief system to another but they cannot be converted to the understanding of reality. Real understanding requires the critical intelligence that wonders and questions, which the believing mind lacks or even denies. A system of belief that is uncritically accepted without being critically examined and thought-through is not a body of knowledge based on authentic understanding. It is a mere brief.
All belief systems, so long as they remain at the level of mere beliefs, are qualitatively different from real knowledge and true understanding. Real knowledge and true understanding liberates your mind to question further and delights your spirit in wonderment, while a mere belief only confines your mind and diminishes your spirit. Thus, real knowledge and true understanding is liberation and freedom; a mere belief, confinement and enslavement.
“The most difficult thing [in the pursuit of knowledge] is to know what we do know and what we do not know.” —Peter D. Ouspensky1
“To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know at all. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But, in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much.” ― George I. Gurdjieff2
At the level of knowledge and understanding, beyond their variegated mythologies, cosmologies, theologies, and philosophies, authentic religions, in their revelational essence, contain a set of timeless wisdom that can unite humanity across diverse religions and philosophies. And if it is understood inside a comprehensive metareligious, metaphysical, reality-theoretical framework and formulated in a metaparadigmatic linguistic context that integrates scientific knowledge, that timeless wisdom can reach the mind of rational, freethinking, science-oriented agnostics as well.
Easter reveals and represents one essential aspect of such sempiternal spiritual wisdom, which corresponds with the esoteric wisdom of the Second Coming of Christ, both of which, if properly understood, constitute an essential philosophical wisdom of the metareligious consciousness that can usher in what Chris Langan calls the “Human Singularity”—the mass awakening of human consciousness, the mass attainment of ‘high wisdom’, and the mass realization of the expansive spiritual identity of humanity.3
Metareligious Significance of Easter
The “Easter” celebrated every year by the Christians is in fact a pre-Christian tradition celebrated by many religions other than Christianity. The fact that Easter is on a variable date, different each year, is proof that it is not an anniversary.
Around this time, the Persians celebrated the death of their savior, Mithra, the Egyptians theirs, Osiris; the Greeks mourned for their slain Adonis, the Babylonians for their Tammuz (son of Ishtar, whose name, some scholars speculate, may be the origin of the term “Easter”). Even the Christ-rejecting Jews celebrated around this time, for originally their Passover and the Christian Easter were observed concurrently, until it became forbidden with the penalty of death by the Emperor Theodosius (347-395 AD).
In the geographically and culturally distant Mesoamerica, in present-day Mexico, the Aztecs had their version of Easter, a festival called Toxcatl, in which they celebrated the death of the god of gods, Tezcatlicopa, which was immediately followed by the divine resurrection. Further back in time, the Phrygians (an ancient Indo-European people, initially dwelling in the southern Balkans starting around the eighth century BC) celebrated the resurrection of their god, which was hailed by the people as the promise that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave, namely, the physical death. This divine resurrection the people celebrated on March 25th, reckoned as the vernal equinox by them. (Not coincidentally, according to Lucius Lactantius (c. 250 - c. 325 AD), the early Christian scholar-author who served as an advisor to the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine I, the Christ was crucified on March 23rd and resurrected on March 25th.)
Therefore, Jesus Christ was not the only divine figure to die and then resurrect, nor was he the first to offer the promise of immortality. In ancient Egypt, for example, at funeral services the following was recited to the dead: “Thou hast not gone dying to Osiris, thou hast gone living. As Osiris lives forevermore, so shall he also live; as Osiris died not, so shall he also not die; as Osiris perished not, so shall he also not perish.”
Further, the term “Lent” stems from the old English “lencten,” which means “spring”. In esoteric cosmologies of the ancient origin, spring signifies “the spring of the cosmos (in its cosmic cycle)”. The death of the divine being signifies the final stage of materialization of the Spirit, which is the completion of the genetic involutionary cycle of Creation; while the resurrection signifies the new beginning of the epigenetic evolutionary cycle of Creation in which matter becomes increasingly more spiritualized. Thus, the cosmological genetic-epigenetic, involutionary-evolutionary cycle and the ontological stratification of reality was observed and intuitively grasped by the ancient peoples.
The 40 weekdays of Lent preceding Easter signifies the four cyclic planes of cosmic involution through which the Spirit becomes materialized (which, for instance, was recast as Olamot or the “Four Worlds” in Kabbalah wherein the Spirit was named Adam Kadmon), which also foretells or “divines” the advent of the four cyclic planes of cosmic evolution. Translated to the individual human term, the death signifies not the physical but the spiritual death—the death of the limited delusive-illusive self and the ending of its identification with and attachment to the body and the material world.
The crucifixion symbolizes the spiritual death on the cross of humanity, which in turn represents the bifurcational human destinies ever-present between the vertical axis of spiritual resurrection-ascension and the horizontal axis of incarnational karmic repetition (saṃsāra), as well as the ever-present diametrical tension existing on the vertical axis between the possibilities of ascent and descent in human consciousness. The resurrection signifies the re-birth (‘born anew from above’) of the divine self that is our authentic higher self which is in syndiffeonesis (difference-in-sameness)4 with God. The resurrection thus signifies the awakening and the transformational unfoldment of the divine self within.
Therefore, Easter is a supremely happy occasion for celebration not only because it is the day of the resurrection of Christ for the Christians but also because it signifies the possibility of a life that is spiritually transformed through the emancipation from the identification with the limited delusive-illusive self that imprisons us in the world of delusion-illusion-collusion: “The Matrix”, the world of simulacra conjured up by the collective and collectivized human mind, programmed to self-reinforce and self-replicate, which was dramatized as a giant machine intelligence in the movie of the same name.
Easter is the day of acknowledging and celebrating the common human evolutionary possibility of spiritual liberation towards the life triumphant, imbued with the life divine and aligned with the Divine teleology and entelechy of the Universe. You do not need to be “Jesus” or “Neo” but be your authentic self. God Self-Realizes through your self-realization. You complete His work.
. . . God revealed a sublime truth to the world, when He sang, “I am made whole by your life. Each soul, each soul completes me.” — Hafiz5
Therefore, Easter is the day of celebrating our participation in the ever-renewing and eternally regenerative “Infinite Game”6 of creational evolution which is the very life and eternal telos of the Universe.
The Esoteric Meaning of The Second Coming
Esoterically understood, Easter is coequal in meaning and significance with the Second Coming of Christ. The Second Coming is the eschatological concept in Christianity, but similar concepts exist not only in other Abrahamic religions that see time as linear but also in Dharmic religions which see time as cyclic. For instance, Buddhism, a nontheistic Dharmic religion with a cyclic time conception, has an eschatological concept of the appearance of the future Buddha Maitreya.
There exist different interpretations of the eschatology relative to the Second Coming of Christ. My own interpretation is similar to those of Max Heindel (1865—1919), Padmahansa Yogananda (1893—1952), Neville Goddard (1905—1972) and some other esotericists, although independently reached.
Esoterically interpreted, the inner meaning of the Second Coming of Christ, or of the Coming of Maitreya (‘Second Coming of Buddha’), is the Regeneration of Christ’s Divine Consciousness, or the Reawakening of Buddha’s Nirvanic Consciousness, experienced (or rather ‘imperienced’) by the individual human being.
We humans are all spiritual beings born out of mother’s physical womb into the womb (matrix) that is the material world (mater/materium) in the state of psychcoma (soul-sleep) but with the potential for spiritual awakening and rebirth. The initial birth is the birth from below in the material world, while the second birth or rebirth is the new birth from above in the spiritual world. This spiritual rebirth or reawakening of the individual human being is therefore what the Second Coming of Christ or Maitreya Buddha signifies.
The term “eschatology” etymologically stems from the Latinized form of Greek eskhatos, which means ‘last, furthest, uttermost, extreme, most remote (in time, space, or degree)’. The esoteric meaning of eskhatos of “eschatology” hence implies the furthest reach of consciousness or being attained in the most evolved stage of the individual’s inner spiritual development.
The eskhatos, the spiritual rebirth, also implies the “end of time”, because you re-enter the Eternal Reality that is unbound by and transcendental to time and space—i.e., ontologically prior to and epistemologically transcendent of time and space. Thus, this eschatological knowledge contains the understanding of what Jakob Böhme termed Ungrund7 or what Chris Langan terms Unbound Telesis4, which is Absolute Freedom as the divine origin of the Cosmic Creation, as the groundless groundstate of both cosmogony and theogony, and as the infinite source of free will.
Time ends. History ends. Personal, human, and cosmic time and history ends in the Realization of the Eternal Reality. This ending of time is at once Nirvāṇa (absolute cessation and extinction) and Mokṣa (absolute liberation and freedom). Such Realization of the Eternal, of the ending of time, is possible for all of us humans, and the Second Coming and Easter are symbolic representations of that possibility.
To attain Christ Consciousness or Nirvanic Awareness is not only our divine privilege as human beings but also our cosmic responsibility to fulfill as our soulful expression of gratitude for being given the gift of life and the privilege of being human.
The Human Singularity
The societal and civilizational meaning of eschatology is the expansive spiritual reawakening and rebirth of the critical mass of humanity: the Human Singularity3. The conception of the Human Singularity transcends not only the exoteric concept of eschatology or “The Great Awakening” (of the 18th-century pre-Revolution America and England, which was nothing more than a revival of “true-believer” fundamentalist Christian fanaticism) but also the sophisticated insights such as that which Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm developed in their dialogue in The Ending of Time.8
The Human Singularity implies the possible beginning of a new evolutionary timeline for humanity, imbued with the intellectually and spiritually awakened geist and conceived as a Metareligion, metaphysically integrating all basic religious, philosophic, and scientific knowledge, formulated in a unified metalinguistic language with a coherent metalogical logic.3,4
Today humanity faces an unprecedent challenge of change. Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. c. 500 BC), the “philosopher of change”, is credited with the saying: “The only constant [in nature or reality] is change.” What is different and singular about this “constant” today is the super-exponential rate of change taking place within a highly and increasingly complex system that is our world, resulting in the change in the very nature of change itself.
Change is the process-state of becoming but in this becoming the defining identity of the being remains invariant. When X0 changes to and becomes X1, it retains the defining identity of X0: X. That is, X1 (or any Xn) is a variant of X0 with the defining identity X. This is how one’s identity is retained and recognized as invariant despite all the vicissitudes that one goes through in life. Hence, a “John Smith” who is having his 80th birthday today is the same “John” who was born 80 years ago on this day.
However, the change that is taking place at present is different: X transforms or transmutes to Y wherein X becomes a sub-identity of Y but is no longer a variant of X as the primary defining identity. The more general and universal hitherto unrecognized and unidentified and yet ever-present being-identity becomes consciously recognized and identified, and the more general and comprehensive being-identity Y is actualized and becomes manifest as the primary defining identity, while the former identity X becomes a secondary identity, being integrated into the new expansive primary identity Y.
The hitherto unrecognized and unactualized potential identity becomes actualized as ‘I AM’ from the future through the telic movement of Eternity as the telic momentum of Eternity. This is what George I. Gurdjieff implied when he said: Life is real only then, when ‘I AM’—which is also the title of the third book of his three-part series: All and Everything.9 This ‘I AM’ is what comes into being in conscious awareness as the Self when one is “reborn (born from above)” or, to use an alchemical metaphor, transmuted from the base-metal (“lead”) state of consciousness to the noble-metal (“gold”) state of consciousness.
What is unique about the collective transformation taking place today is that a radical quantitative increase of complexity—the super-exponential change—is causing a fundamental qualitative change or transformation in the primary defining identity of what it means to be human on a mass scale.
That which used to be the individual ‘I AM’ is becoming the ‘Singular Sovereign WE’ as the expansive spiritual identity without the individual ever losing his or her ‘I AM’ or sovereign individuality. Thus, the ever-increasing number of sovereign individuals are spontaneously and self-organizingly gathering and forming the ‘Sovereign Integrals’, locally and non-locally (globally), in an ever- increasing magnitude. The Human Singularity designates this collective transformation or ‘trans-identification’ of humanity on a critical mass scale.
The Human Singularity is also the urgent evolutionary imperative for humanity in this age of the techno singularity. The Human Singularity is the evolutionary counterforce that will balance the force of the techno singularity in which the elite power structure of the world is heavily invested.
The techno singularity is the hypothetical future point in time at which all exponential technological advancements will converge to bring about a radical systemic break from the known past, ushering in a high-tech transhumanist age wherein machine intelligence (AI/AGI) will merge with and dominate human intelligence with its superior computational capabilities.
Humanity is at a historic crossroad, a destinal bifurcation point, between two possible future destinies: a destiny driven by the techno singularity and guided by the programmed algorithms of machine intelligence or a destiny that will unfold with the Human Singularity and be directed by the imaginational human intelligence.
For the future, the Human Singularity represents the omnicentric even distribution of spiritual, intellectual, and material resources over the whole of humanity, whereas the techno singularity represents the concentric uneven concentration of all resources in the hands of only those who can afford full access to the most advanced technology. The Human Singularity also represents the symmetrical distribution of the capacity for effective governance, corresponding to a social order based on individual freedom and responsibility, whereas the techno singularity represents the asymmetrical concentering of the power and the means of governance, corresponding to a social structure based on centralized control.
In short, the Human Singularity portends liberty and freedom, whereas the techno singularity portends tyranny and autocracy (“technocracy”).
There exists a widespread fear due to the super-exponential growth of machine intelligence and the seemingly inexorable movement towards the techno singularity. However, this fear is based more on fearmongering than on reality. People unconsciously anthropomorphize and uncritically overestimate machine intelligence, while mechanizing and underestimating human intelligence.
We must know that machine intelligence is categorically different from human intelligence. In fact, these two intelligences differ so fundamentally that the meaning of “intelligence” as such substantially differ one from another. If we understand the difference, we will also understand that machine intelligence can never surpass human intelligence in term of its capacity as the algorithmically simulated human intelligence.
The difference between these two “intelligences” is categorical. Firstly, human intelligence is fundamentally the organic capacity for asking questions, whereas machine intelligence is basically the mechanistic capacity for answering questions. Therefore, the most intelligent human being is the one who has the most questions, whereas the most intelligent AI is the one that has the most answers.
That is to say, human intelligence is an organism. An organism is an indivisible wholeness of which the whole precedes its parts in its development, whereas a mechanism is a divisible aggregate of which the parts precede the whole in its construction. Furthermore, an organism is autopoietic, meaning, it is self-generative and self-organizing, whereas a mechanism is allopoietic, meaning, it is constructed by something other than itself.
Secondly, as an organism, human intelligence is a holistic system, consisting of computational, intellectional, intuitional, imaginational, and spiritual intelligences, combined with bio-emotional and physio-kinetic intelligences, existing as a unified whole. In contrast, machine intelligence is the algorithmically simulated specialized intelligence of only one aspect of human intelligence: computational intelligence, constructed apart and away from the whole system of holistic human intelligence.
Machine intelligence indeed has a far greater computational capability than human intelligence for memory, mimesis, data-indexing, data-processing, and information-accumulation. Yet, it is not capable of understanding in the sense of authentic knowing and knowledge, and therefore it is not capable of wisdom—the highest form of understanding.
Understanding requires the imagination (working integrally with other component functions of the holistic intelligence), which is a non-computational component of human intelligence. Also, because of our imaginational intelligence, we humans wonder and ask self-originating original questions, which machine intelligence does not do and can not do.
When the imagination comes to be sourced by the spiritual intelligence, we become “spiritually enlightened” and the human imagination attains the at-one-ment (atonement) with the Divine Imagination. What is spiritual intelligence? It is the meta-realm of human intelligence wherein the knower is the known is the knowing—wherein knowing is being and being is knowing. This is called the “Knowledge through Identity”10.
When spiritual intelligence becomes awakened or activated, and when the human imagination is sourced by the spiritual intelligence, the imaginer is the imagined is the imagining and the creator is the created is the creation, just as the Imaginer/Creator of the Universe is the Imagined/Created Universe is the Imagining/Creating of the Universe (God = Reality = Mind).
Through your spiritual enlightenment, you realize your ‘I AM’, your cosmic identity—that you are a universe, you are a monad, you are an intensive-extensive self-simulation of the Universe or Cosmic Monad. You also realize that in your cosmic consciousness all reality is your imagination. This is the awakening of the full-spectrum holistic human intelligence—the highest possibility of human intelligence, which is categorically impossible for any machine intelligence to simulate or achieve.
This awakening of the full-spectrum holistic human intelligence, especially the imaginational and spiritual intelligences, individually and collectively, bespeaks the resurrection and ascension that Easter symbolizes and praises and the Second Coming of Christ signals and prophecies. And it is the evolutionary possibility and transformational potential of the critical mass of humanity which the Human Singularity signifies and presages.
The Human Singularity is the destinal call for humanity coming from the future that arises in the Eternal Reality. To knowingly respond to this call is the highest expression of Nietzschean Will to Power and the most intelligent exercise of our own free will. Once the call is recognized and made aware in our consciousness, the telos, the cosmic destiny, of our existence becomes set—self-informatively, self-cognitively, and self-generatively—in the telic direction of ever-greater awareness, wisdom, liberty, and freedom.
Therefore, while celebrating Easter, let us look deeply into our own inner Christ, our own inner Divinity, and will it to be awakened. In your Imagination, be that ‘I AM’, be that awakened ‘I AM’, be that reborn ‘I AM’, be that resurrected ‘I AM’, who is your highest authentic Self. Also in your Imagination, being that ‘I AM’, think of the people who are suffering, and take up their cross, lift up their burden, ease up their pain, and look up to see them happy and joyous, and transformed and reborn. Then live and act as the ‘I AM’ that is who you imagine to be, which is in truth who you truly are.
We are each “the only begotten son (monogene)” of God in the microcosmic universe or monad that he or she is, within this Eternal and Infinite Uni-Multiverse of Multiplex Unity. The Human Singularity begins with each of us transforming his or her universe or monad through his or her own awakening, resurrection, and rebirth. When a sufficient number of us becomes transformed and form a critical mass, the reality of the macroworld will also be transformed and a new epoch in history will begin.
If we succeed, the Age of Imagination will come after the Age of Reason wherein science and spirituality are integrally unified through the sublation of the aesthetic poetic imagination and the logical mathematical imagination, that is, through the evolutionary efflorescence of the full-spectrum holistic human intelligence—the prophetic vision of William Blake11 as yet unrealized either in the collective human imagination or in the world but now it is possible—more possible than ever before.
Thank you.
With this brief preamble, I wish you all a Happy Easter!
Love and blessings, Yasuhiko Genku Kimura
Notes:
Peter D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1920/1981).
George I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World (1973).
Christopher M. Langan, “Metareligion as the Human Singularity”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 1, 2018.
Christopher M. Langan, The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Reality Theory (2002/2020).
Quoted from Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (2002) by Daniel Ladinsky.
James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (1986).
Jakob Böhme, The Mysterium Magnum (1623).
J. Krishnamurti & David Bohm, The Ending of Time (1985).
George I. Gurdjieff, Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ (1975).
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Transformations in Consciousness (1995).
William Blake, The Book of Urizen (1794) and The Four Zoas (1797)
Yasuhiko Genku Kimura. ©2024. All Rights Reserved.