Spirituality is Adaptive

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Religions and spiritual tradtions exist in all world cultures and can be understood as fundamentally adaptive social technologies, especially at the scale of groups. Spiritual emotions are accessible to all and can affect human behavior in powerful ways. Religions function as behavioral protocols through which groups and communities act as cohesive units in navigating their environments.

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Art as Religion

At its best, Art is a celebration of difference and diversity. The connective tissue of culture that binds us together, mind to mind, heart to heart. In many ways, art is already acting as a contemporary secular religion (and always has). The most revelatory aesthetic experience is spiritual in nature. It is in this mode that New Peace operates as both art and spirituality.

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Climate Change:

A material problem requiring a Cultural solution at planetary scale. By harnessing the human natural propensity for spirituality, perhaps we can sow the seeds of a religion of the future that reclaims its purpose as an adaptive meaning system.

Sources of Post-Secular Sprituality

At the heart of New Peace are four possible sources of a post-secular spirituality. But rather than commandments, these are sketches, open questions, a research program open to evolution.

Undivided Ground

Everything that exists, exists as part of the one whole, undivided ground of matter, energy and information. New Peace rejects transcendent planes, or eternal essences because our universe of infinite creativity is sacred and mysterious in and of itself.

Faith in Pattern

New Peace seeks to introduce a new understanding of faith based on the inherent capacity for matter to organize and grow itself into the divinely aesthetic and diverse patterns found at every scale of our universe.

Pray to Scale

Spiritual emotionality is innate to the contemplation of scale itself. From looking over distant landscapes or contemplating the age of the light of the stars as it hits your eyes. Spiritual emotions are natural and adaptive for humans.

Purpose from Difference

Difference is the point of life and the material universe. Through the evolution of the cosmos, we are the story of matter being told to itself in infinite permutations. By recognizing this truth, the foundations of a new post-human ethics can be laid.

Spirituality of Symbiosis

Spirituality has the capacity to connect communities in a deep way. Precisely the type of connection to a greater self that we need today to have any shot at confronting the environmental crisis.

Read about New Peace:

A New Protocol
Life on this planet stands at the cusp of a great threshold. Now more than ever do we need to construct new myths and express a new sense of spirituality. A spiritual relationship with the universe of pattern, matter, and energy we call home.

Heaven Is Sick (preview excerpt)
Western culture is enaged in a war on Nature. What is necessary to change human behavior?

New Peace is a new protocol for understanding one’s place in the vastness of time and space. A radically inclusive, post-secular, faith of the real. A mysticism for the anthropocene. One that articulates a spiritual relationship with the infinite creativity of pattern, matter and energy.

Post-Secular