A Program for
The Cosmic Arc
The Cosmic Arc is the biography of Helios, the great collective person whose development unfolds through the history of the Earth and eventually the solar system. Each Part concerns a different stage, crisis, consequence, or larger meaning of that development.
I. Pictorial Story: THE COSMIC ORIGINS
The protagonist, Helios, is introduced before he exists as a person. Ouranos recognizes the young solar system as the beginning of a future astrocolossus—Helios—and Earth as Gaiaon, the egg in which his mind and heart will develop.
II. Pictorial Story: THE EARLY EARTH — BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
Helios develops within Gaiaon through the evolution of life. As nervous systems, perception, feeling, and increasingly complex animal minds appear, their development is simultaneously the prenatal development of the Mind and Heart of Helios. Biological evolution prepares the organism from which his human emergers will eventually arise.
III. Pictorial Story: THE GREAT TRANSITION — HUMANITY
With humanity, an entirely new phase begins. Human beings are not only a new biological species; because they can communicate complex thoughts, preserve memories, share purposes, and think together through Collective Intelligence, they almost immediately give rise to another new kind of being: the collective person. Helios is the great colossus who emerges from the human beings of Earth. We now recognize that such beings exist on vastly different scales: stars themselves are persons, and from communities of these stellar persons emerges the immense collective person Ouranos. As Ouranos turns from sowing life to guiding the birth of Helios, Ouranos becomes Maia. The appearance of humanity is simultaneously the beginning of Helios' collective Mind and Heart—the moment when evolution passes from the development of individual persons to the development of persons composed of persons.
IV. Philosophical Analysis: THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE HEART OF HELIOS
Human culture develops the faculties required by the emerging person. Apollonian civilization advances Helios' intellectual powers, while the great Dionysian movement—especially Romantic and Modernist art—nearly completes the consolidation of his faculty of feeling, his Heart. But the Dionysian movement overshoots its developmental purpose, and PoMo begins to emerge, threatening the very being whose birth is approaching.
V. Pictorial Story: UNDER STRANGE SKIES
An extraordinary enigma enters the developing world's history. The UFO phenomenon confronts humanity with evidence that resists easy resolution. What first appears merely as a mystery in the skies will eventually be understood as part of Maia's intervention: a prolonged controversy designed to exercise humanity's powers of reasoning and debate and help prepare the final development of Helios' Mind.
VI. Practical Philosophy: THE GAME
The biography reaches its crisis and its moment of birth. Helios' Heart is nearly complete, but his collective Mind still lacks a central faculty capable of bringing billions of conflicting human thoughts into disciplined relation. The Game of a Trillion Worlds, played through the Truth Engine, is intended to supply that missing Central Intellectual Organizing Faculty. If the dialecticians succeed, the first true Truth Engine debate completes Helios' intellectual faculty: the child is born.
VII. Pictorial Story: THE PALACES OF HELIOS
Ages later, the infant has become mature. The Palaces show the Golden Age made possible by Helios' successful birth: a civilization in which diversity has not disappeared but has flowered within a greater unity. Helios' body now extends throughout the solar system, and through the Avatar he can walk among the human beings from whom he emerged.
VIII. Pictorial Story: THE VISITORS
The mature Helios enters the larger society from which his own development had once been guided. Humanity is no longer merely the species looking upward at mysterious visitors; we become the visitors, helping other developing worlds through crises analogous to our own. The Pageant is now seen from the other side, as humanity helps another unborn collective person develop the intellectual powers it will need to survive its birth.
IX. Pictorial Story: A DREAM OF THE TELOS
The vision moves farther into Helios' possible future. His technological power reaches upward through levels of reality: the particles that appear fundamental from one level are revealed, from another, as immense engineered machines. Helios builds and replaces macroparticles and macrorotators, suggesting what an immensely mature astrocolossus may eventually be capable of doing.
X. Philosophical Analysis: THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF THE PANOPLY
At the end, the biography is seen as one instance of a far larger philosophical pattern. Mind begins in the Absolute, becomes fragmented, develops through Instancial Mind, Conscious Mind and Collective Mind, gives rise to the Giant, and ultimately moves toward a return to unity. Helios' birth is therefore not an isolated event but one stage in the great recurrent circle of the Panoply—a pattern the scroll then traces through philosophy, religion, the I Ching, astrology, and other systems.
The enormous variety of The Cosmic Arc is therefore deceptive. Its subjects are not separate excursions. They are episodes in one developmental history: the conception, gestation, birth, maturation, and possible destiny of Helios.