It's All About the Space

In the Conclusion of her 2020 book, Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion, scientist and theologian Ilia Delio posits that space is “the knot that ties together the complex relationship of technology, personhood, and religion.”

The Wholeness of Space - In the pre-axial period, humans were part of nature rather than separate.

“In the first axial period [which originated about 800-200 BCE], the space of nature’s wholeness was contracted into the space of the individual. Consciousness began to retreat from nature and focus on self, giving rise to competing spaces, which became a basis for conflict and violence. Over a long period of time, the first axial person gradually lost a sense of space within the whole.

Religion unified space for the pre-axial person, connecting the community to the sacred ground of the cosmic order, the axis mundi... but with the rise of monotheistic religions, the connection to the divine ground became conflicted and competitive. As a result, the space of God (where God dwells) became divided among the tribes. Religious fights became political fights, and political fights became territorial.

The price of evolutionary growth and expansion in the first axial period was division, which spawned urbanization, socialization, and technological development. In a sense, the first axial person developed by unraveling the cosmic whole. One of the most significant factors in this unraveling was religion!”

Sacred/Secular Space - “By the mid-twentieth century, the world was fractured into a thousand pieces—by war, violence, hatred, nuclear weapons, and the many other tools humans invented to master the earth and one another. We ran out of space to be human; we could not breathe.”

Science conquered space and, in doing so, displaced the human person from the center of the cosmos, creating a disorientation of personal identity in space.”

The spectrum of space encompasses the cosmic and the quantum mystery and everything in between. It’s all about relationships.

Cosmic space - Science has brought new awareness of the vast expanse of the universe beyond Earth, encompassing all matter, energy, galaxies, stars, and planets, representing the entirety of existence, pointing to the universe's grandeur and mystery. Our cosmological understanding is expanding as we attempt to grasp our place in the universe.

Posthuman Space - Human interrelationships are about boundaries as we live “in the splice.... The posthuman is gender fluid, racially neutral, and interspiritual. The fluidity of boundaries and the recursive loops of ongoing identity construction mean that no category can adequately define personhood. Rather, the self is an ongoing discovery and a creative process; the soul, too, is a psychosocial process of ongoing construction. The soul as the core constitutive being of personhood emerges through growth and development of connections, as one seeks to live by the life of the whole.”

Ultrahumanism is not about perfection of being through artificial mean; rather, it is invested with evolution toward more being through interconnectedness. Material can bring about well-being, but spiritual awareness and increasing consciousness brings about more being.

The ultrahuman has consciousness of relational being and so seeks to advance that wholeness in love.

Heart Space - We live in the midst of our whole body operating together in the flow of open inter-communication and participation among our entire being. We have centers of embodied knowing and being. In our collective mystical body, there is an inter-being and interflow among us.

Interior Space - The depth of interior space of mystics is understood both as a metaphorical, internal landscape of the soul and as a physical, cultivated environment that facilitates deep spiritual contemplation and union with the divine. It is characterized by solitude, stillness, and the cultivation of an inner sanctuary that serves as a refuge from the distractions of the outer world. 

Cyberspace - “a welcome renewal of nature, a vast, extensive space, a virginal endless exploration where one could create and bring to life things hidden and things unknown, a place where life could be art again.

Artificial Intelligence - “AI is the science of nature in its chaotic, informationally driven openness to more intelligent life. It signifies that biological life stretches beyond the limits of bounded existence toward new collective wholeness.”

Quantum Entanglement - Quantum science is the study of atoms and subatomic particles, and how they interact with each other. It examines the very stuff we, and everything around us, are made of. Quantum entanglement is the idea that particles of the same origin, which were once connected, always stay connected. If something happens to one particle, it affects all the others with which it’s entangled. It is “a phenomenon in which two or more particles become correlated, enabling the transfer of quantum information without physically transporting it.

Reality is nonlocal, and nature is not composed of discrete building blocks of “matter”, but deeply entangled fields of energy. The nature of the universe is undivided wholeness, but it is constantly changing and evolving. Humans are part of the whole, and we share in this cosmic process of interdependence. Even our thoughts affect the whole.