Social Anxiety Disorder is ...

Tripping over your persona for the majority of an evening out with friends.

Crafting a New Cosmology

This cosmology is situated in monism. Monism is a theological concept that all is one. Vagaries aside, my ode to monism in this theology is that there is only one Being, a being which exists in higher dimensional space. This being's presence in this world and perhaps all over the universe is premised around existence. In the case of our world, existence and being are inextricably linked to time or temporality in general. And life, as biologists define it, requires self-replication through time, which allows life to be time transcendent, and through that time accumulate changes, additions, subtractions, assortments, mutations--the full playset of randomness--as a consequence of passing a vessel through an environment to which it is also inextricably linked.

Humanity can be considered a special case of existence if only because humanity is the author of its own uniqueness. Its standpoint is a latent feature of its views on life and its meaning. Humanity has a neuroplasticity, which allows it to adapt uniquely to its place and adopt, prototypically, its culture. This led Alfred Korzybski to call humans time binders, that special case of life, which has, at its disposal, a symbolic inheritance through which the past is transmitted. A professor of mine would state that while animals have instinct, we humans have culture. Culture is our instinct. The upshot of this discussion is to solidify the status of time as the substance of existence.

Existence is time. Time is a dimension of our universe. And it is through time that Being finds an inflorescence, an outpost within the dimensional space of what human's take to be reality.

As we, as a race, pine to reach out to the stars and meet other sentient beings we are all--earthling and alien--simply vessels for a being occupying a higher dimensional space whose influence upon this universe is simply a bleed-through of consciousness through rivulets of time. The basic building block of conscious existence is the reflex network. To have a nervous response to stimulus regulated by an electrical impulse is to set into temporal flow a condition for conscious occupation. Within the space of reflex time consciousness builds out of behaviors that are organized to anticipate future events. Here, in the future-imperfect space carved out by complex reflex a stable flame of existence flickers to life. This becomes the vessel, the space ship for Being in this universe.