Seeing Cosmic Evolution in the Pattern of the Week
This blog is jointly authored by Professor Gregg Henriques, founder of UTOK, and Marcia Gralha, MA, his partner in UTOK and in life.
Happy God-Moon Day! Wait, you didn’t know Sunday was God-Moon Day? No worries, it’s not an official holiday — it’s a tradition in our home, where Sunday is a day to celebrate philosophy and the transcendent. Tomorrow, Monday, is dedicated to honoring darkness and the void. In other words, today is the peak of the universe, but tomorrow it will die and return to nothingness.
This blog explains how the days of the week serve as a template for living the worldview that grounds UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge. For the past two years, we have engaged in the daily practice of acknowledging the day, and using that to reflect on where we are in the evolution of the cosmos. To do so, we connect each day with a layer of being in the world, a mantra, and an academic discipline. We have found doing this provides us with a practical, embodied way to bring UTOK alive.
To start to see what we mean, consider the following “creation story”:
In the beginning, there was only darkness and the void. Then, approximately 14 billion years ago, there was the first substance, an Energy-Information seed, out of which the universe sprung forth with a bang! With that Bang, the foundational forces in that primordial seed exploded into the Matter-Object plane of existence, which is made up of particles, atoms, and molecules and stretching across scales, from the subatomic realm to the entire universe. Ten billion years later, the Life-Organism plane of existence emerged, consisting of genes, cells, and multi-celled organisms across all the various environmental ecologies. Three billion years later, the Mind-Animal plane of existence appeared, ultimately including creatures like flies, crows, and elephants, with their brains and complex active bodies moving through the world. Finally, within the last half million years, the Culture-Person plane emerged, giving rise to fully self-conscious agents who can exchange ideas, self-reflect, and provide reasons for why we do what we do. Finally, there is the imaginal realm above us, the world of future possibilities, and what we orient to when we experience the transcendent.
This is the creation story that natural science has given us for our origins. And it is nicely mapped by UTOK’s Tree of Knowledge System. Although it may seem commonsensical in some ways, this stratification of nature challenges the prevailing worldview brought forth by modern science in the Enlightenment. The reason is that many conflate “science” for “physical,” and think that science deals with things that are “just physical.” This misleading idea results in confusion about how things like mental and social phenomena are also real things.
UTOK calls the struggle getting the right picture of the world and our place in it the Enlightenment Gap. A core mission of UTOK is to help overcome the Enlightenment Gap and help everyone see how we can develop a science-congruent, holistic worldview that orients us toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The UTOK theory of the week is a simple way to bring this vision alive. Below, we describe each day, which, as shown above, corresponds to a different domain on the ToK System.
We have also included UTOK mugs, as we think it would be cool to have a mug set that brings it alive*.
Monday is Void Darkness Day, and it represents nothingness, the void, as well as destruction and loss. To honor these elements of existence, on Mondays we abstain from alcohol, weed, and sex, and often fast. We also are more open to experiencing our darker emotions on Monday, allowing life’s disappointments and frustrations to be more readily acknowledged than on other days. On the UTOK Credo, there is the belief, “I believe in the void, darkness, and negative events,” and we usually choose that belief to represent the day. The discipline for the day is mathematics.
The core mantra for Monday is Negative one plus one equals zero, which points to forms and formlessness and the dialectic between something and nothing. In addition, as UTOK insiders know, is a way to represent the Radical Mathematical Humanistic Equation, which is the key to the formal path to understanding UTOK. Thus, inside the darkness of Monday is also the seed of potential. That potential is realized at midnight.
Tuesday is Energy-Information Day. According to UTOK, there is an ontological layer beneath the Matter-Object plane of existence called the Energy-Information Implicate Order. In a nutshell, this places Energy and Information at the ground floor of UTOK’s ontological structure. This means that we can think of energy and information as the ultimate common denominator underlying the four planes of existence. This insight is one of the things that affords clarity in how UTOK achieves its coherent, naturalistic ontology. On Tuesdays, we celebrate this unity, cherish new beginnings, and attend to the shift from darkness into light. Physics is the discipline of the day.
The core mantra for Tuesday is I am an Energy Information Singularity. It captures both the ontological continuity from the bottom and, when seen through the lens of the iQuad Coin, allows us to connect this with mathematical and scientific forms from the vantage point of a reflective human psyche.
Wednesday is Matter-Object Day. It celebrates the transition from fundamental forces and quantum fields to observable material entities. On Matter-Object day, we cultivate awareness of the water we drink, the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, and the objects that we rely on every day. The discipline of the day is Chemistry.
The mantra for Wednesday is Ride the Wave of Complexification! This represents UTOK’s conception of the universe as an unfolding wave of behavioral complexification.
The emergence of life is one of the most awe-inspiring phenomena in the universe. How do clumps of inanimate particles develop the capacity to use energy as fuel, sustain themselves, pursue goals, reproduce, and evolve? On a macro scale, this is nothing short of amazing. On Thursdays, we rise to appreciate the life around us in things like trees, flowers, fungi, as well as the biological processes that keep us alive every day. The discipline of the day is Biology.
The mantra for Thursday is Plant Seeds, Grow Trees! Framed in reference to the UTOK Garden, it represents the commitment UTOK has to spreading knowledge and wisdom across the generations.
Friday is Mind-Animal Day. A key insight in UTOK is the distinction made between what we call “mindedness” in animals and the living processes at the ToK dimension of Life as well as the human cultural dynamics at the Culture dimension. Minded animals exhibit a distinct class of behavior, which is evident when you observe, for example, a squirrel compared to the nut it holds or the tree it climbs. Animals move as unified entities toward their goals, and, according to UTOK, their minded behavior cannot be reduced to biological or physical processes.
On Fridays we appreciate the mindedness in the world and in ourselves, raising awareness to how we, as humans, are also primates who exhibit animalistic drives and motivational urges, as do our fellow nonhuman primates. Psychology is the discipline that ideally corresponds to the scientific mapping of animal minded behavior, and, thus, is the discipline of our Mind-Animal Day.
The mantra for Friday is Toggle Between Self and Awareness. This represents UTOK core approach to mindfulness and how we can find mental health and stability in the adaptive balance between these two modes, which represents a bridge between Eastern and Western approaches.
Saturday is Culture-Person Day. Whereas Friday celebrates our innate primate drives and motives, Saturday honors our unique ability to justify thoughts, feelings, and actions on the social stage. We reflect on both the positive and negative aspects of the human condition. As human beings, we aim to justify what is accurate and beneficial for ourselves and our communities, which involves a dynamic between our experiences, private thoughts, and public personas, as well as the systems of justification we adhere to.
Humanity’s capacity to justify has also enabled us to form large-scale systems of justification, leading human culture to emerge and expand exponentially into great civilizations. This is a remarkable achievement unique to humans, which must be honored. Yet, alongside humanity’s glory, it is also crucial to reflect upon the sobering realities of our impact on the planet, such as environmental degradation, sociopolitical strife, and ideological conflicts. On Culture Person Day, we honor not only the wonders of human culture but also confront the challenges it poses to our planet and our collective well-being. In addition, we honor the social sciences on Saturday.
The mantra for Saturday is Activate CALM-MO! This is UTOK’s approach to psychological mindfulness that enables us to see and reverse neurotic loops and become aware and attuned to our emotions, and be reflectively motivated toward valued states of being in the short, medium, and long term.
Sunday is God-Mood Day. This means that we associate Sunday with concept of God and embrace a spiritual orientation toward existence. This is not done in a theistic sense. UTOK is an “endo-naturalistic” system, which means it holds an agnostic position in relation to the ultimate essence of the universe.
What we are pointing to here is that the concept of God is a thing in the world, and we find that the concept is pragmatically helpful when held within a scientific naturalistic worldview, as it can function as an orienting guide toward our shared values. The moon, in UTOK, symbolizes a way to rise above, into the cosmos, and see Mother Earth as a whole. Thus, Sunday is a day to contemplate that which is transcendentally True, Good, and Beautiful, and orient our actions to move closer to those valued states. Philosophy and Theology are the disciplines of the day.
The mantra for Sunday is Cultivate Wisdom Energy, which refers to the meditative and contemplative practices of being oriented toward what is, and cultivating what ought to be.
We encourage you to try implementing the theory of the week in your home for a month and see how it feels. For us, living it for the last two years has led to a significant shift in our experience of time. What before felt linear, now seems more like a continuous cycle. This has deepened our connection to the rhythms of nature, and has brought a sense of continuity and renewal into our lives. It also gives us a concrete way to see how and why UTOK is transformative in offering us a fresh perspective the world and our place in it.
*If you would like to learn more about UTOK or would be interested in purchasing a UTOK mug, please reach out to Marcia Gralha, at marcia@utokworld.com
