Religious endeavour is often couched in a dichotomy between spirituality and materiality, where the defining element of spirituality is the absence of material substance. The great religions variously describe spiritual deities living in a separate non-material world with the power to intercede in our material world, and it is to such a non-material world that we might proceed after death. The esoteric religious sects remove the separation and say that the spiritual world is coincident with the material world and is directly accessible by the living. This book suggests that the spiritual world is neither separate nor non-material, just hidden.

The esoteric sects, in their search for direct spiritual experience, tend to overshoot the mark. They teach that the human psyche is swamped by material distraction to the point that we are unable to perceive the spiritual world. They promote techniques that assist devotees to recognize their attachment to these distractions, which gives the devotee the power to see through them. Their ultimate aim being to eliminate all material distraction until one cannot but perceive the spiritual world. In deeper and deeper self examination, the devotee reveals and overcomes his/her attachments to wealth, pleasure, status, family, ego and even life itself, in pursuit of freedom from materiality. These techniques for overcoming material distraction are well suited for overcoming architective distraction as well. However, not all material experience is architective. Overcoming the architective distractions of wealth, status and identity are indeed helpful in bringing connective experience into consciousness, but denying connective sensation, pleasure and life itself is to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Relinquishing expectations of graduating to a separate non-material world after death does not necessarily imply an absence of post-mortal spiritual participation. The material world hosts pattern and serial meaning in vast profundity whether we are alive or dead. As living beings we are both architective processional organisms and visages of the cosmic connective system, enjoying both architective and connective meaning in materiality (though our connective appreciation is largely eclipsed by the architective dominion). Our bodily deaths (and those of every architective organism) involve only the end of our personal architective narratives and sentience, while our connective participation and sentience may continue, free of the architective dominion, as a visage of the cosmic connective system.

On Transcendental and Creator Gods

The ideas I have outlined allow the human spiritual ambition to be satisfied by emergent material concepts such as the Cosmic and our Planetary Deity without resorting to transcendental influences on reality. We can approach spirituality without having to countenance the source of material existence, whether it be a Creator-God, a first cause, or a physical Theory of Everything.

I am not saying that we should abandon our search for these, only that they are not necessary to our spiritual endeavour. In looking towards the transcendental for spiritual relief we are looking in the wrong place. From the perspective of this book, our deities are of this world and parameterized by the same physical principles that we are. They, like us, are players, albeit grander players, in the natural free-for-all that is the universe.

Propositions of all-powerful and all-knowing deities can be seen to be misleading. A Cosmic Deity, universal as it may be, would be limited by its incapacity to comprehend architective serial meaning. Furthermore, a purely connective deity could influence but not control outcomes, and the apprehension of a holistic deity would be significantly weaker than any competing architective powers. Connectively unimodal deities, cosmic or otherwise, would be riders of change much as we are, adventuring in an uncertain universe. Connectively unimodal deities, cosmic or otherwise, would be neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

Hierarchical deities, on the other hand, could well be omnipotent, but only within their hierarchies. Processional deities, even those at the top of their processing architectures, only have organizational influence so they too could not be omnipotent. No architective deities can be omniscient either, for there is a world of connectivity beyond their comprehension - and beyond their reach.

Autonomous, conscious organisms such as humans, though subject to architective control and organization, may be rebellious. We may have opportunities to switch from one hierarchy to another, say by changing religions. Perhaps more significantly, we may choose a connective activity over an architective one and thereby disregard a primary objective of our Planetary Deity. So architective deities too, would be riders of uncertainty, but reluctant ones. They'd rather constrain the world to the certainty of their control and to the wishful certainty of their own permanence.

From the perspective of this book, a creator of the universe is a contradiction in terms. The creative process by which new objects emerge into existence is an architective one and therefore limited in both scale and scope to isolated occurrences.

While the idea of a universal (but non-creator) God is feasible from the perspective of this book, it is not feasible as an all-encompassing Godhead (even as advanced by proponents of non-duality), since a godhead that is universal would necessarily be purely connective and therefore not encompass architective meaning.

From the perspective of this book, any idea of an omnipotent all-encompassing Godhead or a Creator of the universe is a myth. No God, no human, no anything, could create a galaxy in the shape of a chair and maintain it in that shape. (Hence the cover illustration of this book.)

The idea that the universe is evolving with the purpose of coming to know itself (and in which human intelligence plays a prominent part) must be criticized, since 'knowing' is an architective construct. Rather, a universal consciousness, being connective, is experiencing or being itself in a purely connective manner. A connective human consciousness constellated to the consciousness of the Cosmic Deity would be participating in that experience while making its own connective experience available to the Cosmic Deity. The Cosmic Deity would be seeing through our eyes at such times (and perhaps gasping at the glory of our vision) but it would still not comprehend architective serial meaning.

Even if we were to take universality out of the equation and restrict the scope of the discussion to our planet alone (or any other planet on its own), such that the idea of a singular architective Godhead becomes feasible and we might validly regard the arrangement of objects on our planet, the evolution of life and the drama of human history to have been organized by our Planetary Deity, such a singular Creator would still be uncomprehending of connective meaning and be connectively powerless (other than having a capacity to contain or constrain connectivity) and so still be neither absolutely omniscient nor omnipotent.

There is also a huge moral conundrum associated with the idea of a creator God preceding the creation of the world, namely the existence of evil. Why would evil have been intentionally stitched into the fabric of life? Did God make a mistake in its construction? Is evil here to test us? To keep the riffraff out of heaven? A God that would intentionally create evil, even as a necessary price of Creation, is not benign. The problem of evil also tests the idea of panpsychism, for if materiality springs from a base of consciousness then that base consciousness must include the element of evil.

To a universal god that does not encompass architective meaning, the concept of specificity and exact enumeration is meaningless. Our human urge to a unitary spirituality while following a multiplicity of different religions can be better understood when seen in terms of a number-less cosmic holistic spirit coexisting with a number-full multiplicity of planetary architective spirits.

Connective spirituality has remained so thoroughly mysterious because holistic spirits are so deeply hidden. We are also blinded to it by our thrall to the architective dominion. The question of spiritual mystery can of course be dismissed by regarding spirituality as hallucinatory or an intellectual misconception. Such dismissal is generally based on the absence of exact and repeatable proof. But we have seen that in the connective mode of serial meaning the concepts of definiteness and exact reproduction are meaningless, so a denial of spirituality based on the absence of repeatable proof really values only the architective mode of serial meaning.

The Human Privilege

So what roles might humans play on the spiritual stage? Of course we have a role in terms of our own spiritual agendas to become aware of our spiritual context, and we are significant contributors to the purposes of our architective deities, but do we have any role on the cosmic stage?

I mentioned the capacity for humans to be a means for a universal connective consciousness to experience itself (in a purely connective sense) by constellating our consciousness with the Cosmic Deity. But we are also a means for a universal connective consciousness to manage (though not comprehend) the architective aspects of material reality through our ability to comprehend and operate both modes of serial meaning. We, and all living organisms to varying degrees, can actively harness architectivity to initiate, promote and control connective harmonies so as to increase the profundity of the cosmos and thus deepen the gratification of the Cosmic Deity. We have an enormous architective toolkit at our disposal that the Cosmic Deity does not have. We can make music and make love. We can intentionally amplify connective harmonies and intentionally prevent their terminations.

I also suspect that we can play a role in reconciling our unimodal Deities. Since we are able to comprehend and operate both modes of serial meaning, we are in a position to act as intermediaries between them. Even though the Cosmic and Planetary Deities are blind to each other they can learn to navigate around each other utilizing our dual sentiences. More so, since we manifest the ambitions of both Deities, they could also negotiate their desires through us. Were we aware of playing these roles, we might make ourselves more adroit in both modes rather than confining our attention to the architective. I also suspect that were we sufficiently skillful we could act as translators between the modal languages, in that when we witness events in one mode we might understand the consequences for the other mode and make this understanding available to the relevant Deity.

While we bear the pain and discomfort of our figurate frailty we are also able to enjoy the pleasures it holds for us, both architective and connective. Our unimodal Deities are not so endowed, for each can only enjoy the pleasures of its own mode. This privilege is compounded by the fact that we can enjoy both modes successively or even simultaneously (though one consciously and the other subconsciously). We can even have one mode feed off the other, for example by having architective beauty impassion our connective expressions, or vice versa. While our Deities may only enjoy the pleasures of their own modes, our capacities to cross-fertilize and intensify our own pleasures may feed into theirs.

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