From Modernity to After-Modernity (31)

Part 3. Divination
Introduction (continued. 4)

The future as a probabilistic outcome

The alternatives, that are shaping in the present as potential futures, are not readily visible and so the substance of the future remains invisible to the naked eye for the majority of citizens. But it is nevertheless accessible to inquiring minds. To detect these alternatives in their very early stage, I mean at the early stage of their formation as potentialities in the present, one has to entrust the subconscious by entering states of altered consciousness. It is indeed only after they have already emerged as selected future alternatives that conscious observation will possibly detect them. The fact of the matter is that the substance of these alternatives is being formatted inside the context that is shaping in the present which means that, while this context has still not been substantiated yet, future alternatives are already forming in the midst of the presently forming context. This whole process remains largely hidden to conscious observation and its visibility will only arise with its substantiation.

From Modernity to After Modernity 28

Part 3. Divination

Introduction. (1)


By confronting one’s conscious certainties with one’s subconscious visions one gets to reconcile them in a unified consciousness that is boosted at a higher level. This supplement of consciousness is then integrated within the scope of one’s conscious certainties. Mastering such a process fixes it in the mind and the resulting automatism engages an unstoppable quest for ever higher levels of consciousness. This is the path of the man of knowledge1 that opens one’s vision to what is emerging in the present as the substance of the future.

From Modernity to After-Modernity (about chapter 5)

 Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 5. About the arts

Hello to my regular readers and to everybody else,


As of my post last Friday my writing this winter already generated 560 book pages.  I started working on the last chapter, this chapter 5, but will pass this week's publication because I was exhausted and needed some time to put my ideas together. This chapter should be the culmination of this winter's writing so I feel I need to get it right.

This is how I presently envisage the architecture of this text:

From Modernity to After-Modernity (19)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 4. About societal governance and societal evolution


4.7.2.4. The Chinese empire

I mentioned in “4.7.2.3. The transition from tribes to empires. A. What is an empire?” that the word “empire” is a European construct and that the understanding of the concept in the European acceptance is not adapted to all contexts. But more to the point; the way Europeans have defined the concept around the exercise of power has no place in the Chinese context and more particularly in its early phase of unification and centralization 

Worldviews, civilizations and culture

I concluded my last post with the following words: "The European and by extension the Western civilization finds its roots in Christianity. In contrast the Chinese civilization seems to have been built directly out of its Animist societal experience". The ground where both civilizations sprouted and the roots they grew could thus not be further apart.

It is generally accepted that humans' present day form and fully grown brain potential were reached some 100,000 years ago. We have thus to assume that the earliest cultural development of humanity starts at least at that time. But recent scientific descoveries about animal societies conclude that animals have languages, societal organizations and their own cultures. Force is thus to assume that human culture goes back far earlier than the last 100,000 years.

The point here is not to engage in a scholastic debate about the time span covered by human culture. The point is simply to recognize that for well over 100,000 years humans were observing the earth and the sky and their cycles. Those observations then led them into thinking about their place in what they saw. The perception they so developed helped them to set up and adjust their early societal organization and thus emerged human culture.

I started this post writing about civilization and here I'm writing about culture and those who read me regularly know for a fact that I'm very often referrring to worldviews. But what are the differences between those concepts? Many writers use them as if they were interchangeable as if they were meaning the same thing but nothing could be further apart from the reality of their meaning. If we want to understand the evolution of human thinking, the evolution of human societal organizations, we better clarify the differences between those 3 concepts and how they relate to one another.

I'll try to clarify this question in my next 3 post.


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