The UTOK Theory of the Week
By Marcia Gralha, MA.
What is your experience of the week like? I don’t mean your life as it unfolds throughout the course of your week — but the very architecture of your week. Does it feel like a linear succession of continuous workdays and yearned-for weekends? Does it feel like it officially starts on a business Monday or on a holy Sunday? What about your felt sense of the shift from the end of a week to the start of a new one? Does it have a specific shape, color, climate, feel, or impression? Do you ever assign any meaning to specific days of the week, or are they just defined by the activities you have planned?
As Gregg and I have co-constructed our embodiment of UTOK in the UTOK Monastery over the past year (as shared at the Consilience Conference, Gralha & Henriques, 2023), our experience of the week has changed dramatically. In particular, UTOK has found its way into the fabric of our weeks, providing meaning to each day and to the weekly pattern as a whole. In this blog, I want to open our doors and let you enter this special 7-day space where UTOK meets our structure of time.
Birthing the UTOK Week
I was never purposely aware of the day of the week in any way beyond how that day fit into my already programmed life. The week was just an implicit structure that I took for granted, and any meaning it took up was solely pragmatic. For example, when I was a kid, I had dance class on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and had to attend mass with my family on Sunday mornings (followed by the mandatory post-church ice cream). This continued throughout the years with a similar feel through my adolescence into adulthood. It was not until the past six months that the week structure took on a meaning of its own. In our calling to embody UTOK, we birthed a new structure for the week that has fundamentally shifted our relationship with our days, and with time itself.
Since Gregg and I have started our partnership, sharing our lives also meant sharing in UTOK. The system’s pervasive profundity seeped into our day-to-day moments, coloring our perspectives, our conversations, our reflections about the world, and our activities. One day during a walk in the fall, as we reflected on the cosmological wave of complexification “from Big Bang to the concept of God,” we saw a fun correspondence emerge between the marked points of complexification in the Universe and the days of the week.
What followed was a joint “lightbulb moment” of associations that fed our hunger for weaving UTOK into our daily lived experience. The UTOK Theory of the Week was born later that day.
The general structure of the Theory of the Week is informed by UTOK’s approach to the unfolding of behavioral patterns in nature. In UTOK, behavior is a central concept in science that frames entities, fields, and change. The Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System shows how the Universe starts in a state of “pure energy information” and from that extends into material behavior and then into living behavior into minded behavior and into cultural behavior.
The Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System
The key insight is to align the five essences of 1) Energy-Information; 2) Matter-Object; 3) Life-Organism; 4) Mind-Animal; and 5) Culture-Person with the progression of the days of the week. Of course, there are only five essences, but there are seven days in the week. This led to a realization that completed the alignment: we needed a place for the “nothingness” that resides outside of the known Universe, before the emergence of any instance of existence, and, on the other end, we needed a place for the imagined good and for our potential future.
These two concepts, nothingness and the concept of God, served as perfect bookends, and the UTOK Theory of the Week was born. Below is a table that emerged once this alignment was found.
The UTOK Week
As shown, in the Theory of the Week there is a correspondence between the classic days of the week and UTOK’s essences of Energy, Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture, which frames Tuesday through Saturday. Then we have Sunday as God Moon Day, and Monday as Void Darkness Day.
The table starts with Monday, and thus the pattern of the week tracks the evolution of complexification, ending on the ultimate imaginal concept of God. In the third column, you can see the icons we came to associate with the days of the week. The icons represent different ideas in UTOK that speak to the thematic of the particular day. The fourth column lists mantras associated with the day, and are either descriptive (e.g., “I am an Energy Information Singularity”) or value-oriented (e.g., “Plant Seeds, Grow Trees”). Finally, as shown in the fifth column, each UTOK Day of the Week is associated with a discipline, such as Matter Object Day being linked to Chemistry. Below I describe each day in a bit more detail so you have a better feel for how the days of the week are for us.
The UTOK Days of the Week
Void Darkness Day (Monday)
What lies before and beyond the first glimpse of existence in our known Universe? Before time, space, and the standard laws of physical forces were at play? Far from attempting to answer those questions, we find a comfortable space of wonder, awe, and enthrall in relation to that nothingness. The mysterious dark space of absence, chaos, and “no-thingness” before the first impetus of order emerged in the Universe is where the UTOK week starts.
When we were formulating our UTOK week, we noticed that honoring existing emergent properties without attending to where existence itself emerged from felt incomplete. Thus, we decided to dedicate our Mondays to honoring the chaotic darkness of the unknown fabric of our Universe that preceded the start of it all.
Beyond the literal dark nothingness, we also extend the meaning of Mondays to a metaphor for the dark, chaotic, painful, disorganized, evil actions and events in the world. On Mondays, we reflect on that which is outside of our conception of both reality and the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. To honor the fate of the negative, we abstain. On Mondays, we do not engage in activities that have hedonic pleasure as an end in itself, such as sex and alcohol consumption.
Starting our week cycle, every Monday comes to remind us that true appreciation of positive space comes with finding the right relation to negative space. The Radical Mathematical Humanistic Equation is the icon for Void Darkness Day, and, in a nutshell, it represents the scientific-humanistic consilience of the UTOK system.
The Radical Mathematical Humanistic Equation as depicted in the UTOK Monastery
Icon: -1 + 1 = 0 (the Radical Mathematical Humanistic Equation)
Mantra: “Negative one plus one equals zero.”
Discipline: Mathematics
Energy Information Day (Tuesday)
After a day of nodding to the darkness of the Void, we rise to the acknowledgment of the first speck of existence: the Energy-Information Singularity. As this blog lays out, UTOK frames the implicate order of our Universe as an Energy-Information Singularity (or “singular super force”) that engenders and permeates the planes of existence, from Matter to Culture. Holding Energy-Information as the ultimate common denominator among all planes is what affords UTOK its one-world monist naturalistic perspective.
On Tuesdays, we honor this oneness, we cherish new beginnings, and we attend to the shift from darkness into light, from void into existence. In a special One-Many dialectic, we link our existence as individual human persons to the Energy-Information Singularity of our Universe. Among other associations, the iQuad Coin is linked to this unity-multiplicity principle (as described here), and is the icon for our Energy Information Day.
The iQuad Coin
Icon: iQuad Coin
Mantra: “I am an Energy Information Singularity.”
Discipline: Physics
Matter Object Day (Wednesday)
When Wednesday comes along, we appreciate the second “magical” transition in the Universe following the birthing of Energy-Information by the Void: the emergence of the Matter plane of existence. From the first quarks to the formation of stars, galaxies, and rocks, the chain of physical and chemical reactions that freeze particles into material objects that go on to compose our living, minded, and cultural world is nothing short of miraculous.
On Wednesdays, we are thankful for the water we drink, and the air we breathe. We are also thankful for the porcelain cup that holds our coffee, the concrete that paves our sidewalk on our afternoon walk, and the metal and drywall that structures our home. On Wednesdays, we exercise gratitude for the bedrock of objective matter that holds the plurality of irreducible living, minded, cultural, and technological properties in our unfolding Universe.
Our Matter Object Day icon is the STEPPing Stone. The acronym stands for the Standard Theory of Elementary Particle Physics. The Stone sits in the Garden of UTOK, and it represents UTOK’s commitment to a consilient naturalistic scientific ontology.
The STEPPing Stone.
Icon: The STEPPing Stone
Mantra: “Ride the Wave of Complexification!”
Discipline: Chemistry
Life Organism Day (Thursday)
Although the biological sciences are relatively coherent, the line that dictates the precise point of emergence of living behavior in the Universe is fuzzy. Life emerges out of Matter in a near miraculous transition that inspires a thematic for the week based on interaction, reproduction, generativity, and nourishment.
On Thursdays, we admire living nature in our environment and in ourselves. We intently attend to the grass in our neighborhood’s park, we notice the fungi on tree barks, and we honor the extraordinary biological processes that maintain our aliveness. We also cultivate attentiveness and faith into how (literal and metaphorical) small seeds can germinate and create a ripple effect that eventually allows them to grow into trees, gardens, and into a whole ecology of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Following this metaphor, the icon for Life Organism Day is the UTOK Seed of Life, which sits in the UTOK Garden, beneath the Tree of Life.
The UTOK Seed of Life
The diagram below depicts the idea of planting UTOK Seeds of Life to generate wisdom.
Icon: UTOK Seed of Life
Mantra: “Plant Seeds, Grow Trees!”
Discipline: Biology
Mind Animal Day (Friday)
One of UTOK’s core insights is that there is a dimension of existence that has been forgotten in our modern knowledge systems: the Mind dimension. Minded behavior emerges with the nervous system in reacting animals and spans animal behavior all the way through to us, as talking primates. From basic neurocognitive processes, through our subjective experience of being, and into our symbolic language and self-conscious reflective processes, the structure of our minded behavior is clearly delineated in UTOK.
Friday is the day when the previously confused domain of the mental is brought to the fore with clarity, as we honor mindedness in nature, afforded to us by UTOK’s solution to the problem of psychology. By purposely observing the mental behavior of the squirrels in our backyard, of the birds on the trees, and of our own primate processes, we find grace, humility, and a connection to nature in our existence as mammals and as primates.
Friday’s mantra is a testament to the adaptive movement — or toggling — between our identification as a self with drives and motivational urges and our witnessing of the world from a viewpoint of pure awareness. The icon for Mind Animal Day is the Map of Mind, UTOK’s descriptive metaphysical map of mental processes.
Icon: Map of Mind
Mantra: “Toggle between self and awareness.”
Discipline: Psychology
Culture Person Day (Saturday)
Saturdays color our salience landscape with our self-realization as justifying primates. We are persons because we justify, and we justify because we seek to achieve a legitimate, justified state of being. Indeed, as human persons, we attempt to justify what is accurate and good for ourselves and for the groups we are embedded in. We seek alignment through the layers of our consciousness system and through the justification systems we adhere to.
While a noble quest in itself, the perennial pursuit of a justified state of being can go wrong, resulting in self-deception and other maladaptive processes in the personal and social realms. Therefore, on Saturdays, we highlight our nature as motivated justifiers, with all the joys and ailments of such processes. To adaptively observe our self-conscious processes, we shine a CALM MO flashlight onto our primate-experiential and person-justificatory layers and filters to orient our doing, being, and becoming toward valued states of being
CALM MO is about adopting Meta-Observer stance that is Curious, Accepting, Loving compassionate, Motivated toward valued states.
Icon: CALM MO
Mantra: “Activate CALM MO!”
Discipline: Sociology
God Moon Day (Sunday)
Our Sundays have a special flavor to them. We call it our God Day not because we identify with a personal God, but because after climbing through the days of the complexifying week, we find ourselves a little closer to the idea of God, simultaneously aspiring toward and conforming with this conception of divinity.
A crucial point here is that UTOK is an agnostic atheistic syntheistic system. Agnostic because it makes no absolute claims about the ultimate essence of the universe; atheist because it is without belief in a concrete, personal god; and syntheist because it believes in the concept of God. Namely, UTOK believes the concept of God exists in the world, and that a God that is socially constructed in a self-aware manner can be useful as a guiding “north star.”
In UTOK, the concept of God is represented by the icon of the Elephant Sun God (ESG). The ESG is UTOK’s placeholder for the ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, for the shared meta-values of dignity, well-being, and integrity, and for the potential for a spiritual transcendence that is grounded in naturalism. On Sundays, we orient toward the Good by working to blur the lines between ourselves and the world to find a steady stream of “wisdom energy”.
The Elephant Sun God, by Tim Adalin.
Icon: Elephant Sun God
Mantra: Cultivate Wisdom Energy
Discipline: Philosophy/Theology
The Phenomenological Shift
Gregg and I have experienced a shift in our perspectival awareness of time throughout the week. We found that we previously shared a more linear conception of time, with the transition from one week to the next giving continuity to that line. Time generally moved forth and did not reverse.
What was before a linear succession has now taken a circular shape that always cycles back to its start. The week now moves in a curved fashion back toward its beginning. Rather than a series of weeks one after another, the week is now its own entity that eternally rotates on itself.
For both of us, this has signified a closer connection to nature. Like the sun that rises and sets, the life that is born and then dies, the seasons that perpetually change, and our phase shifting moon, we also move in a circular trend with time. It has been a profound experience to find our own circular conception of time (that many existing cultures and traditions share) via the transcendent naturalism of UTOK.
A Connection with Past Traditions
As described by this Wiki entry, the seven days of the week in are derived from the names of the classical planets in Hellenistic astronomy. Of course, modern science has changed our view of the cosmos. However, the way UTOK is organized, it is structured to bridge the logos of science with ancient mythos by finding themes and cultivating a consilient scientific humanistic vision. Here we share a diagram that provides just one example of how parallels might emerge.
Overall, the feel of the week has shifted dramatically for us. The days of the week are no longer empty containers to be filled in with our lives, but they ow they hold their own inherent meaning. Our justifications gifted the days of the week with characteristic attributes that made them protrude out of the invisible, taken-for-granted space of a dry organizing structure, and into our lived experience. In so doing, the days of the week now frame our perspectival and participatory identities, rather than only being dictated by our pre-existing, procedural plans.
