Introduction

This is essay is designed as an educational aid and guide for others who find themselves similarly baffled by the self-destructive direction our global civilisation has taken and the impotence of the current political, economic, moral and intellectual institutions to do anything realistic about it. It is also meant to throw light upon the structure and function of the process cosmology, expressed as a sort of circuit diagram that I was inspired to create in the early 1970s in my experimental cosmology department at the University of Melbourne. I hope the reader will excuse the self-centred approach taken in this essay. I realise I should hide behind a mask of disinterested objectivity to avoid upsetting the tender feelings of those who can’t live without such masks but this would be absurd in an essay titled “The Ego Unbound”.

I can only hope it is the true self that speaks and not an ethnocentric or bureaucratic self or, even worse, a social self, seeking praise, acceptability or academic promotion.

I consider it important to illustrate the major differences between evolving aspects of cultural systems before attempting to anticipate the likely future of our current and obviously doomed civilisation. I have greatly simplified the dominant characteristics of each stage and have put in a conjectural fourth stage of evolution which has already taken place in biological, behavioural and even, to some extent, social evolution. The double-dialectical Process diagrams laid out elsewhere in this publication as ideal types may help.

Human cultural evolution (or devolution) is mainly directed by dominant personalities communicating symbolically in their contemporary legitimate medium of communication. The reader will find more about my theory of evolving dominant archetypes in my essay about creating a magic portal. I will content myself here with noting that greatly influenced by feminism the current dominant archetype, to adopt the terminology of Jungian depth psychology, is shifting from the Maiden to the Wizard or wise man. This is leading to the appearance of the dominant masculine self for the first time since the start of the Agricultural Revolution. I define my role as Wizard as a non-patriarchal and non-heroic role complex deriving authority from myself as a spiritually-androgynous personality who is part of the universe as an ecosystem. I do not claim authority from any natural or supernatural source. A good way of understanding this is to quote Jaynes from his book “The Bicameral Mind and the Evolution of Consciousness”. He considered his own consciousness, like that of most other modern human beings as an analogue “I” in metaphorical mind-space. In my own theory, created to dis-embed my own personality processes from any symbolically expressed cosmology and to take consciousness further towards the evolution of a pure self, this described as “Ego Kinematics evolving from Symbol Kinematics” and is further described in my essay on Disembedding.