transhuman

Sex Futurism, Erotic Mysticism, and Transhuman Separatism

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Preparing to launch our redesigned website in the next few weeks, we have been testing alternate tag lines for our banner head, looking for the most accurate way to define our work in less than a half dozen words.

This evening (8/3), VenusPlusX hosted a book party in our home for sexologist Gloria Brame PhD, with Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance. Dr. Brame is the keynote speaker at the Alternative Sexualities Conference  in DC (sponsored by the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities). A few days ago, when Gloria announced the event on Bilerico, she happened to characterize VenusPlusX as “sex futurists,” which  strikes us as a very succinct and accurate description of much of our program, captured amazingly in just two words. Gloria is good with words. Read her new book and see just how good.

Another phrase I’ve grown fond of is “erotic mysticism” to describe the exploration of sex and gender cooperatively with the higher levels of the mind, also a key column of our work. Another is “transhuman separatism” implying a person who has become transhuman through conscious and deliberate modification of body, mind, or spirit to the point they no longer fully identify with non-transhumans because of radical differences in life experience that are difficult to communicate in words.

VenusPlusX is about a lot of things—social justice, faith in an ecology of gradually perfecting perfection, and making life better and more meaningful for everyone. We posit that erotic repression (repression of the free expression of sex and gender spanning the entirety of known or assumed human history) is the foundational cause of the evils that have been designed and embedded into society to enslave us. This is why we are passionate and committed to educate all who will listen to the true nature of reality, and the immediately available and powerful tools for beginning the necessary social transformation in the collective human understanding of reality, starting with sex futurism, erotic mysticism, and transhuman separatism. That’s a lot of -isms for a movement that wants to get rid of useless -isms. But these -isms (OUR -isms) are SPECIAL because ours are new and revolutionary breaks with the assumed legacies of the past in all the areas of sex, religion, and social relationships. Let’s examine each one.

Sex Futurism

Sex Futurism: We are activists focused on changing the future course of human social development by anticipating and leading the adoption of the most advanced, most liberating explorations of sex and gender. We use the term Transgender Transhumans to more specifically characterize where things are currently headed.

Erotic Mysticism: We are mystics in that we have had personal experiences with the higher levels of mind that combine all aspects of body and intellectual/philosophical mind on behalf of a more universally accessible and shared reality, often indescribable in words. By its nature it leads to a total personal integration in the erotic. Mystics are people who are engaged in experiencing the personal presence of a concept greater than themselves. Erotic mystics worship by having sex and enhancing erotic pleasure through dedication to this acknowledged higher power. We are determined advocates for the sanctification of all expressions of sex and gender towards increasing manifestations of universal love, truth, goodness, and beauty.

Transhuman Separatism: We were introduced to this concept by our friend, the irrepressible Rachel Haywire. We have freely appropriated the term, using it to designate the meme of emerging Transhumans, as distinguished from the remainder of pre-transhuman-humankind.

VenusPlusX wants to extinguish the entire worldwide subtext of hostility towards and oppression of all forms of erotic expression. We affirm the essential goodness and inspirational power of the erotic senses, while showing how such power may be used to better oneself and one’s world.

VenusPlusX offers a heady brew of these adventurous ideas. We invite all to drink deep, feel the rush, and join us in eventuating the world as it should be, a real future that is everyone’s for the taking.

—Dan Massey

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 03 Aug 2011 0 comments

The Crowned and Conquering Child–Transhuman Lord of the New Age

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Throughout all human history, those who understood the central mysteries of sacred sexuality and gender variation as keys to inner joy and outward satisfaction have hidden away their knowledge of such matters. Why did they conceal this marvelous knowledge, now freely available to all?

First, these mysteries are the most direct way to open the inner gates between the purely sensory and the transcendent spiritual experience of the individual. And this inner attainment enables the individual to break free from unfactual and untrue beliefs and habits acquired from the social environment. Once set free, the individual can cast off all sex and gender oppression and refuse any longer to be intimidated by the ignorant braying of the masses. A critical mass of such free people will overthrow the false religious, social, and economic structures of the past. Conservative forces will forever oppose such growth because of their investment in the dead cultures of our pastfathers. Human religions are deliberately designed to thwart such social maturation and at the same time deliberately deface, hide, and twist all past revelations of truth to conform to a false consistency within the foolish myths of human history.

Prophet of the New Age

The second cause of this earlier secrecy stemmed from a real fear of ruthless oppression by powerful social elites who derive their existence from mass ignorance. People are educated to question and resist integrating the evidence of their own eyes, senses, and erotic experiences. They are told that any internal personal experience is a delusion unless sanctified by a self-appointed middle-man  who presumes hypocritically to place himself between the individual and deity.

Sex and gender freedom, erotic freedom, is the foundation of all personal rights and interpersonal fairness. When a bigoted bully or other psychic degenerate (who might be a priest, a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a physician, an enemy, a peer, a “lover,” or just about anyone) convinces you to surrender your total personal erotic sovreignty in any way, they have gained unearned, unjust, and unwarranted control over your most basic physical being and made you their slave. Today’s slaves do not understand they are slaves or how they have been enslaved.

In late 19th century England the recovery of lost knowledge became an interest of Rosicrucian scholars who founded a secret order known, for short, as the Golden Dawn. Well-know cultural and social figures, such as William Butler Yeats were active members. Aleister Crowley, another member, most clearly enunciated the ideal of a New Age. He claimed to have received a direct revelation of the opening of the New Age, the Age of Aquarius, at the vernal equinox of 1904, through a supernatural contact. Crowley published his three-day revelation as “The Book of the Law” and built much of his career with occult and secret societies around this text.

Transhuman Lord of the New Age

One of the key ideas that emerges from the book and Crowley’s interpretive writings is “The Crowned and Conquering Child,” who is the deity of the New Age. Superficially, the term stands for the idea that the spirit of the people of the oncoming age will be fresh and open like a child. Child-like, but not childish. And such people will be free of the fears that turn the human heart from the truth. They will truly know the truth and the truth will truly set them free. It is a more complete expression of the concept, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” When one inquires into the esoteric significance of these ideas, a richer, though speculative, picture emerges with grand prophetic connotations. I love it!

Crowley associated the Crowned and Conquering Child with the deity Harpocrates, the God Horus as a child. Much as Sturgeon speculated inVenus Plus X, Crowley visualized the new age wherein the child-like becomes divine, god-like. This new order of being will be distinguished by having an unbiased will to live truth and by staying uncorrupted by impositions of false formalities, responding solely to the truth of each occasion. Thus we see that the Child is also the emerging Transhuman identity, free from the encumbrances of mythic belief, ready to perceive what is, and act constructively on those perceptions.

The Crowned and Conquering Child is not a single special person or even a single expression of personal freedom. The Child stands for the complete action of the new people of the new age, who embrace the future willingly and openly to create happiness and joy. The Child consciousness appears violent to anyone who holds to false ideas because it reveres nothing and is the sworn enemy of all such rubbish. The Child consciousness quickly rejects and overturns systems based on false premises, bullying, and forcible exploitation of others. Once the Child has fully emerged, the overthrow of status quo is intense, rapid, and trusting the pieces will all fall where they belong. In the words of Crowley:

The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers—by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work—is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN?

The course of the New Age is determined by the actions of the Crowned and Conquering Child. Nothing that does not fit eir plans survives from the past.

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 02 Aug 2011 1 comments

Transgender Transhumans! Are you headed to Venus Plus X?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español Depending on how you space it, VenusPlusX or Venus Plus X, it’s no accident that you may have stumbled over a novel by Theodore Sturgeon of the same name. Since first reading Venus Plus X in 1960, it has invoked a strong resonance with my own inner truth even though it was Sturgeon’s creative imagination, a perhaps fantasy. It is our namesake because it stands as the earliest and still clearest exposition of the world’s essential ideas and ideals in the world of sex and gender, and guides the our work as advocates, educators, and activists.

In the novel, a 1950’s human male, Charlie, is transported through time to a distant future where the surviving population of earth is a people called the Ledom (that’s model spelled backwards). The Ledom are fully functional androgynes, being capable of mutual impregnation and of resulting individual pregnancy. Most of the novel is focused on exploring the emotional and dramatic situational differences between normative human bi-gender society (envisioned through time flashbacks) and the behaviors of the Ledom, who are free of all sex and gender inequalities and limitations.

Throughout most of the novel the reader is led to think that the Ledom are some natural product of human evolution or genetic reengineering. Near the end, after Charlie has become friends with some Ledom and given them some feedback on their society vs. primitive human society (1950s), they give him a rather detailed explanation of how they view the society from which he came and how that view has come to shape their own. This is Philo’s Manifesto, which is an authoritative debunking of human history, philosophy, religion, and pretty much everything else, while showing the way to a vastly higher and transcendent body of truth. This short statement it is a must read for every person on earth.

Although Philo’s Manifesto is surely one of the most remarkable and complete syntheses of rational human knowledge of a subject normally considered too exotic to be open to intelligent, unbigoted, unbiased discussion, the final reality of the Ledom is even more remarkable. While the directed biological redesign of the human race into the Ledom is surely enough to be called Transhuman, in the final chapters of the story it is revealed that Ledom reproduction is not entirely biological, but involves a complex symbiosis from conception to adulthood with elaborate medical machinery that continually reshapes the “natural” human biology of development into a series of stages that lead to reproductively mature Ledom. That is truly a Transhumanist idea and far ahead of its time!

Without the medical machines, Ledom infants would be ordinary human infants. The creation of the Ledom is a deliberate act of human creativity, expressed in biomedical technology. This is a transformation of a very basic human character as all members of society enter into this reproductive symbiosis with the machine as a way to perfect their society. They have diagnosed the problems of humanity and conclude they all begin with sexual dimorphism and the resulting bi-genderism that rises from ignorance and refusal to examine reality carefully. Their reproductive symbiosis with the machines allows each to mature into androgynes indistinguishable in hermaphroditic sexual function and completely without gender.

Like Sturgeon’s Ledom, we examine many of the problems of humanity. Like Sturgeon, we feel many of the problems would not exist if humans were perfectly androgynous; however, we see many technological alternatives to the “brute force” approach in the novel (remember that DNA had been discovered only a few years before the novel was written, and nothing was known of its detailed structure and function). For example, a simple reduction in the expression of secondary sexual characteristics and the adoption of extracorporeal fertilization and gestation could achieve similar objectives.

Thus, unlike the Ledom, we do not expect to abolish sexual dimorphism. Rather, we seek to encourage health and longevity by discouraging extreme dimorphism that causes the incorrect and unproductive bi-gender model, and encourage either biosex to develop as symmetrically as possible to enjoy the full range of psychosexual and gender experience available to the human nervous system.

Extracorporeal gestation remains a distant technological objective, although planned fertilization is now part of the culture.

Today, as we learn to accommodate the needs of consciously transgender pre-pubescent children, we know that even crude pharmacological intervention at puberty can greatly enhance the experience of androgyny for the matured adult.

The technology foreseen by Venus Plus X is still in the distant future and may never be developed as an option for directed human reproductive evolution. On the other hand, the social changes envisioned in the novel are ready to move ahead today, since they depend only on changing human hearts and minds, and that means education and socialization, not biology. At VenusPlusX.org, we know how quickly such changes can occur in individuals and in groups, once a successful meme has been sufficiently distributed. While we support research into the technology of androgyny, we understand that the time is here today to empower the Transgender Transhuman community to assume leadership in the revolution for full sex and gender freedom and equality.

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom / Transunity & Transleadership  by 27 Jul 2011 0 comments

Transreligion—An Inspirational Framework for Transgender Transhumans

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Religious myth has only degraded and inhibited human progress. Essentially all contemporary religions are myth based. Christianity fails the test of worth when it relies on Hebrew racial myth (the old testament) and Greek philosophical myth (the concept of the Christos and related ideas) as absolute truths. We know that nothing that draws on such ancient Sci-Fi can be either true, good, or beautiful, except by accident, and thus stands forever opposed to the power of love in the world.

Paul Henri Thiry (click)

There are, fortunately, many people (now and in the past 2000 years) who love others, serve others, do good to others, and make our world more beautiful by their efforts. Some of these people call themselves Christians or Jews or Muslims or Atheists or something else, which is their choice, but their lives have taken inspiration from the universal powers of love and truth in the human mind, not from religious myth or dogma.

Transhumanists continue to debate the appropriateness of any kind of religious faith or behavior as a component of Transhuman life. My own post-transition perspective illuminates many ethical and moral concerns of the Transhumanists. Foremost, if we are to foster the emergence of a genuine Transhuman philosophy of life, we need to create an inspirational framework that justifies and motivates rational behavior. We should evaluate candidate inspirational frameworks according to their individual ability to satisfy essential requirements that must be met by any proposed framework.

In my view, a satisfactory transhuman rationally religious world view ought to address five basic requirements that bridge the gaps of sex and gender and merge the physical, psychic, and inspirational elements of joy into a total personal and socially transforming experience of reality. At the same time, we recognize that a genuinely operational inspirational framework, a true transreligion, can only emerge from the collective unification of individual joyful experience. This list is just a starting point for further thought and discussion.

1) Assure complete freedom from reliance on any myth or backstory. Our beliefs are based on plain observational knowledge and insights of personal wisdom.

2) Demonstrate open and informed attitudes, viewpoints, and experiential training for all of the many dimensions of sex and gender.

3) Practice group communion for collective psychic inspiration and empowerment, through the exploration and experience of sex and gender as acts of communion.

4) Fellowship every transhuman living on this planet. Empower them to know the joy of living, showing how love finds expression in true service to others by doing good and making beauty.

5) Be open to alliance with any cosmic government that may make its presence or influence felt in human affairs, with a willingness to facilitate transhuman emergence. In the meantime dedicate your life to the highest principles of love, truth, goodness, and beauty.

To summarize, we help one another by starting with baldfaced mythless truth and showing each other the joy that is really important and gives meaning to life. A universal acknowledgment of the possibility that some external force will intervene keeps us mutually focused on progression towards our ideals of truth and love, regardless of what the future brings. And our intent to combine free and open acceptance of all forms of sex and gender expression with equally free and open communion, joy, and fellowship guarantees our ability to lead the destined evolution of human affairs.

Transhumans may find something like this just fine as the basis for a way of life and be finally able to leave the god talk to the past. But a religion, the social expression of a community of individuals who share common ideals, is not designed, so much as grown through the social customs of the community. Setting aside old, incorrect beliefs, the inherent truth of principles like these will emerge and cause focused will actions. Through trial and error, the community will gradually discover convenient and innovative ways of serving these principles to more and more people. And that will be the emergence of true Transreligion.

Now is the time for a new inspirational framework to replace the outdated and overly interpreted ideas of our pastfathers. I do not know what will emerge, but I trust that it will necessarily be true to ideals and principles such as those stated here.

—Dan Massey

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom / Transunity & Transleadership  by 09 Jul 2011 2 comments

Why the United States Government is Damaged Goods (Part 2 of 2)

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

On January 21, 2010, the 235-year lifetime of the first North American federal republic, which once called itself the United States of America, came to an abrupt end. On this date the Supreme Court of the nation issued an irrational and false ruling, in the so-called “Citizens United” case, born of a lack of any valid national visionary focus that effectively recognized and bestowed on every organized collective entity the full rights and privileges of a singular citizen. Our national constitution was designed to provide a process for managing collectives and overarching rights to limit their operation against the individual and personal choice. By according individual citizen rights to collectives, the court destroyed this balance. The result was the creation of an irremediable failure within the foundation of balanced decision making in the Constitution, resulting in the final destruction of any voice from the people at the ballot box.

Kenneth Arrow

Collectives are not and can never be functionally equivalent to individuals. The critical difference is in the quality of decision making. Individuals make choices based on their own sense of truth and their will to act upon it (or not). Collectives aggregate the opinions, true and untrue, fantastic and incomplete, of their members by various means, but never as an individual. The essential unfairness of this was conclusively demonstrated in the 40’s by Kenneth Arrow, in a PhD thesis that foreshadowed a lifetime of work for which he later received the Nobel Prize in Economics. In brief, Arrow showed that, given a group of three or more people, all expressing preferences according to their own desires, there was no possible way to combine their individual judgments to achieve a collective decision that would be non-dictatorial, representative, decisive, and fair, among necessary qualities. The main difference is that the individual decides, but the group decision making process, even conducted with perfect transparency, necessarily diffuses the inevitably illogical and irrational way the conclusion was reached, protecting the guilty within the group by spreading moral responsibility across the whole body of participants, both innocent and guilty. Of course, Arrow’s Paradox may also be taken as a proof of the inevitable inadequacy of any collective form of government to achieve all the ideals one might reasonably expect of it.

Today we already see our dead nation rotting away as a direct result of the single decision in Citizens United; however, a great many of the foundations of our nationhood had already been undermined or had never been implemented at all, as I noted yesterday in comparing the colonial treatment of the black man, who could be enslaved, to the treatment of the red man, who lost both life and society to avoid enslavement. Equality of opportunity and social redress for the injustices of slavery seem to have slowly, painfully advanced. The survivors of the great North American Genocide for the most part languish in poverty without social services or infrastructure, though some have won the proverbial jackpot by having control of petroleum sources or legalized gambling. The privilege gap between the Mashantucket Peqod, a tiny tribe that operates the vast Foxwoods Casino complex in Connecticut, and the Hopi inhabitants of Third Mesa in dry, red rocky, desolate, Arizona is now as vast as the income inequality of our nation as a whole, if not more so.

The Constitution elaborates a mechanical government and gives it force, while the Bill of Rights offers a set of vague and unenforceable promises to protect the individual from the depredations of government and the mob or horde. What can we possibly do to rescue our communities from the global plan of legalized slavery that is now sliding into place with the surety born of an alien invasion of overwhelming might? Old-style humans increasingly organize to own and control all property and, since property is essential to life, all living things as well. They have conspired to take control of all aspects of government, including the ability to define what government is and is to be. They have announced loudly their intention to make our presently oppressive government a refined instrument of total social and economic control, to accelerate the attrition of the weak by deliberately increasing the death rate through destruction of social and medical services and infrastructure, and to trap a planet in their incredible solipsistic delusions of personal grandeur. Such is the legacy of our pastfathers.

For over two centuries the worst of such bullies progressively gained greater control over the Federal government, the US military, and the know-nothing cults displaying their self-generated delusions and ignorance under false-flag Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which, as “religions of the book,” are peculiarly susceptible to such spiritual derailment when subjected to ignorant literal reading of their largely irrelevant and obsolete texts.

And what has all this social terrorism of the meek and powerless achieved for our nation? I refer you to the table “American Shame” from the New York Times, where you will find the US has the poorest performance among all “advanced economies” in income inequality, food insecurity, prison population, and mathematics education. At the same time, US life expectancy at birth is significantly worse than all advanced nations except Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Our unemployment rate is higher than every country but Slovenia, Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

Monday, July 4, we celebrate our nation’s birthday and honor the vision of what our nation might have been had we been a truer and wiser people, less inclined to reliance on imagined history and other myths of the past, and more willing to replace fear with love. Now that we have witnessed the cycle of our old nation, like Greece, Rome, and other false social constructs, cycling to an ignominious end in a convulsion of greed, bullying, and imperialism, we know better for the future. It is now our task to build new ways of living on the remaining working parts and reusable structures of that which we now transcend.

Our own transhuman destiny calls those of us who understand and have experienced the full dimensions of complete freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity to accept our role as teachers and leaders in the founding of a new social order. From this day we shall move forward in time with the future, at last to build that great and fabulous society of which we have always dreamed.

Our own celebration this year might be viewed as a “Launch Party” for the “New Age,” which we eagerly look forward to helping to create. There’s mighty work afoot. Let us begin to prepare for the second great North American federal republic—the nation that is to be, that will realize the ambitions of humanity to be safe and at peace, where all can grow into the fullness of their abilities.

Hail, Columbia!

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 06 Jul 2011 0 comments

Where Did All This F*cking Evil Sh%t Come From?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español It is undeniable that there is often a lot of pain and suffering in a human lifetime. While individual experiences vary widely, over the course of a lifetime most people will experience instances when they are confronted with the reality of an apparently genuine evil. And this inevitably starts the discussion, “Why me? What did I do to deserve this? If God loves me, why is he doing this to me? How can we love a God that would let something like this happen to anybody (not just me)? I refuse to accept the religious proposition that there is a God because I see only evidence of universal randomness, filled with constant strife between good and evil partisans! And even if there were one single personal God of the universe, he’d be way too busy to pay attention to the crap going on down here.”

But there are fundamental assumptions in this line of questioning that often go unappreciated. First and foremost are the implied assumptions about the nature of God. If one assumes that the God referenced is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent throughout time and space, then why isn’t the universe perfect? Surely a universe under the total control of a God of Love would never tolerate the amount of human misery and grief that surrounds us on all sides. Therefore, since the observed world does not match my prediction of what the world would be like if there were an omni-cube God, either such a God does not exist or my predictive method about what the world should be like is wrong. Sounds bad for my predictive methods—what man dare attempt to compass the purpose of God? Well, men have minds that, if you are God-oriented, are surely gifts of God. And my mind tells me that simplistic faith contrary to reason is most definitely NOT what any God I could personally respect would ever require of me. Therefore, if I believe the workings in my mind are True, I must perforce reject the concept of the omni-cube God. There simply is no such deity active anywhere I’ve been in the universe because his existence is refuted by the reality of my own experience.

And from this line of reasoning flows the faith of many devout atheists. It’s not so much that they reject the general idea of some sort of Supreme Being, but they can’t figure out what it would be good for because it doesn’t seem to even try to put things right in the world around us. If it’s out there, we obviously mean nothing more to it than an ant does to the automobile that ran over it in the road. Let’s try looking at this situation from a very different and more hopeful viewpoint.

Suppose that the universe is destined to be a perfect place of light and life—a universe of continuous unbridled joy in loving service, living truth, doing good, and making beauty. By our actions, our relationships, we are building small parts of this great universe of constructed perfection. But the perfect universe is not here today. Only portions are in evidence—the areas where love predominates over the primal emptiness of original space-time—where evil is merely the region into which love has yet to penetrate. Evil is not itself a reality. Rather, it is the absence of meaningful reality.

So evil is not something inflicted on us by an angry God, who abandons us to the vacuum of space-time devoid of Love. Rather, evil is the state of being where there is a weakened or nonexistent presence of Love. Since we are the creatures in the universe who are equipped with the ability to sense the presence or absence of Love, and with the tools of Truth guided reason that enable our will to effectively direct our loving actions, it is necessarily our responsibility to fill the gaps in finite reality where Love does not adequately penetrate.

The response of the finite universe to the force of destiny, the necessity of evolution towards a perfect state of light and life, requires the participation of many beings working together and dedicated to the ideals of Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

If you see evil in the world and have sufficient resources of Love, you can make the repair yourself. Our planet seems to have been shortchanged on loving service in the past, so we have a lot of gaps in our Love coverage. Many of these will require the cooperation of many people of goodwill, even entire communities and nations, to bridge vast gaps of lost communication and long misunderstanding.

So let’s get with it. Is there evil in the world? Then let’s work together in Unity to Love it out of existence. It’s our job to do this and this is how destiny is realized. Fear not to act. With Love and Truth you can only do Good and make Beauty.

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 28 Jun 2011 3 comments

Can I Transition to be a Transhuman?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español Of course you can. On a normal world, with decent human lifetimes, it would happen naturally as your personality developed; however, the social structures of present-day human society are intentionally organized and maintained to inhibit such personal growth, assuring a docile attitude to the social bullies who manipulate unearned privilege to enslave the masses through religion, government, and business. But these are easy to override if you are serious about realizing your destiny.

But would you really want to be a Transhuman? Becoming Transhuman carries with it the personal assumption of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It implies that you love and serve every person as you are loved and served by others. It implies that you are committed to the realization of a supremely perfected society throughout the universe by vigorous development and ethical exploitation of human technical and artifactual ingenuity on all levels of literal reality—physical, mental, and motivational.

Transhumans serve humanity in this way because their reasons for being and acting are completely removed from typical human concerns. The characteristic difference between a human and a Transhuman viewpoint is that, in contrast to the human, whose behavior is based on mythic memes imparted by family and society, the Transhuman sets aside all such myth in favor of direct engagement with reality guided by personal dedication to the realization of love.

It is hard for a human to understand how Transhuman behavior is controlled and directed. Without hard and fast rules of response to each social situation, how can anyone expect to have a coherent social experience, without the markers of privilege and dominance so beloved by the apes? The answer is quite simple. The Transhuman abandons all mythic systems in favor of a solid belief in and behavior towards a transcendent ethical system constructed from Transhuman actions in support of the finalization of destiny.

The guide to such living action, as well as the test of the validity of experience, is summarized in each Transhuman’s personal attitude towards the four supreme realities of existence in service to destiny. Love is the desire to do good to others. We Transhumans express the supreme values of reality when we demonstrate Love by living Truth, doing Good, and making Beauty. We reject all acts that do not contribute positively to the expression of one or more of these supreme values.

Humans transitioning to become Transhumans often experience conflict between the fixed attitudes of their old beast and their cosmic vision of personal destiny. For example, they may easily abandon religious myth, while adhering strongly to equally silly beliefs in philosophy or science. The challenge before humanity today is not to meet endlessly around a table to hammer out some foolish patch on a failed social model, but to abandon the cause of the confusion—the myths of our pastfathers, which never really had any value for us, no matter how we tried to breathe energy into their dead patterns. We may take inspiration from the motivation they displayed in their service to Love without being bound by the limitations of their acts and vision.

Humans who increasingly dedicate themselves to the honest demonstration of loyalty to supreme values in their lives are transitioning to a Transhuman state, and this is the fundamental connection that allows the human mind to interface with the cosmos and become part of the emerging collective consciousness of a joyful universe.

–Dan Massey

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 10 Jun 2011 0 comments

Transhumans Have Pastfathers

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Human language attempts to encapsulate how and what we think about a subject and assign a word symbol to that specific encapsulation. Often, however, the more or less random choice of an exact word symbol, either in naming or translation, will change the implicit attitude of the reader to the subject being referenced.

We address such a challenge when contemplating the persons who have lived before us under the generic name forefathers. The meaning is, of course, those who have come before us in time.

As Transhumans, however, our lives are motivated and controlled by our commitment to ever respond to the force of destiny, to be guided by future opportunity. We see time as a dimension stretching into the indefinite future, which gives us time enough to experience love while perfecting ourselves and our universe. We are leading the way for our generation on this planet, while those who came before us, lie in our past not our future.

But if we Transhumans are to truly take the promise of the future as our guide, we must transcend the mythic elements of our heritage from the past. In doing so we recognize that these people, dead symbols of ideas frozen in time, could at best be called our pastfathers.

FM-2030

By this change of term we do not mean to diminish or disrespect the valid contributions of the past to human welfare today. On the other hand, we emphasize that our actions today look forward to imaginative visions of the future, rather than being constrained by the foolish myths of the past. And this is in fact how the living bridge of a true collective human motivational bridge is achieved through joyful experience.

What actually is happening? The past is powerless to control the future except within the physical realms of material causation. Myths laid down in human consciousness across the millennia may have sustained an uncivilized society for a time, but are now seen to be valueless. Humans have ever erred by dreaming of the past. Though Transhumans may be physically constrained by the past, their ideas and ideals, their thoughts and visions, their dreams are the myths of the future—ways in which destiny might be realized.

True stories of the future are the proper replacement for mythic reality. The past can only disclose specific facts, whereas truth must be lived in the moment.

Join me in embracing a joyous and fabulous collective future as the Transhuman fellowship of affinity and obligation builds a better world.

–Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 09 Jun 2011 0 comments

Can Atheism be True, Good, Beautiful, and Loving?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Of course it can. But first you have to sort out all the funny things about atheism. For example, there are as many varieties of self-proclaimed “atheism” and/or “agnosticism” as there are varieties of any other dogmatic religion.  Certainly atheism deserves to be considered and recognized as a religion in most of its varieties. Only a solipsistic denier of the sensory world could be considered a fully developed atheist, and that state is hardly viable for life.

Ludwig Feuerbach—Anthropologist of Human Religions

One of the problems atheists have is that they associate religion with belief in deity; they recognize that human religions define deity according to their own fantasies based on silly myths and seek to indoctrinate that concept into their communicants. On the other hand, few would have considered that this is a mentally disordered and invalid way of approaching the motivation of human behavior and is the prime cause of the failure of human society on this planet.

A superior approach for deistic religions would be to begin with a unified acceptance of deity, set aside the varied approaches people take to the subject, and work together to realize shared purposes. Such a concept of religion is not at all satisfied by what people claim to believe, but by what they DO with their time and their lives. Anyone who lives according to their highest ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness, is living a life dedicated to love, regardless of how they may name the intellectual belief system they declare publicly.

No evolved deistic human religion can afford to adopt this position, because it would nullify the vast quantity of delusional concepts to which they are committed. Rather, they persist in propagating silly mythologies, insane homilectics, and delusional hermeneutics. This program of false teaching sustains the interest of the thoughtless in supporting a socially, economically, and politically abusive organization. And the unmitigated and unworthy power thus created is then deployed to sustain this collective disorder of human thought by the illegitimate use of force—always psychological and often physical.

By comparison, full recognition of the supreme realities of un-fantasized human existence in a friendly cosmos is easily available to the intelligent atheist of good will.

There are many self-proclaimed atheist/agnostics who live lives of extraordinary service to their fellow humans while denying the existence of G-O-D. I do not believe in G-O-D. I have an inner belief system, but when I try to explain it to others, the word G-O-D is inadequate and misleading because that word carries entirely different connotations to another person. We cannot achieve better communication about transcendent ideals as long as our conversation is limited to such an overloaded symbol.

I consider myself to be a person of faith, but my faith is in the supreme values of existence—truth, beauty, goodness, and love—not in some mythical ultra-father who is presumed to be functionally omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent within the perceptible universe of time and space. My religion, if it may be called such, is living truth, doing good, and making beauty, all in the service of becoming love. This perspective vitiates all imaginary forms of human religion. One may hold mythic tenets for a time without conflict; however, as one grows in living truth, the ancient and static ideals of the legacy of human religious mythology are finally eclipsed by a transcendent personal experience of a supremely coordinated life experience.

At the same time, we see around us the most outspoken defenders of the most regressive forms of human religion claiming a mantle of moral authority that has no relevance to real life OR real people. No amount of proclaiming “the word of god” contributes to individual growth, and missionary impulses inevitably backfire on the person and organization pushing them. Such actions are the most basic way religionists (people who believe in the value of religion without understanding the idea and ideal of a life based on faith) actually “take the name of their god in vain,” for they place their opinions ahead of the inner moral judgment of others. This hideous practice of interpersonal mental bullying and abuse is most hateful when it emerges between parents/adults and children/youth, but we see it supported by the supposed three pillars of human society—religion, government, and commerce—all of which fail the test of true relevance to the human condition and continue to exist because of their unconsidered and systematic willingness to commit crimes against Love.

As the saying goes, the Religious Right is neither. They suffer from disorders of thinking that result from their willful disregard for Truth, which causes them to fail to do Good and to make Beauty. In sum total, they reject the bounty of Love across time in which they may grow towards divine perfection. Like Lot’s wife of myth, they look only backwards and are doomed by their immersion in fateful decay. Such people are true atheists who live by enacting the false tenets of their faith in the material world while rejecting the voice of inspiration. Such people can never love nor live the truth. They are already dead to everything that is important and have deliberately severed their mental connection to reality.

Atheists that affirm the supreme ideals of living

So how about it? If the most highly publicized religious behavior can be so malign and unworthy of the name, is it possible that there is a quiet atheism that seeks only to become Love, by living Truth, doing Good, and making Beauty? And cannot such atheism be that perfect model of living to which human religions aspire, but universally fail to even attempt? Cannot such secular humanism be seen to express values of Love and doing Good to others? And is not the inner person that guides this behavior more worthy than the fanatical materialistic religionist? For they know that Love is to be given, not taken; that Truth is to be lived, not spoken; that Goodness is to be given freely, not contracted; and that Beauty is to be made, not owned.

So my answer to the question, “Can Atheism be True, Good, Beautiful, and Loving?” is “Absolutely yes.” Nothing necessitates that an atheist exhibit these qualities; however, most atheists are people of goodwill, and that is the true foundation of relevant and progressive faith, which may be easier for atheists since their ideas of history and context have not been corrupted by religious mythology. And this is the legacy of backwards-looking religions, to twist the direction and action of human faith to serve the dead hand of history and tradition. Such chains of mythic belief must fall from the minds of all people of faith, enabling them to unite in advancing human development in fulfillment of our glorious personal and planetary destiny.

—Dan Massey

 

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 07 Jun 2011 1 comments

What Kind of Trans Are You?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

There is a tremendous eruption of discussion, categorization, and disagreement going on now in the Trans community. Two excellent articles were published by Jillian Weiss and Mercedes Allen on Bilerico and have garnered an astounding number of comments. This is, of course, usually the case when anyone says anything about Trans in a public forum. I have compared it to lobbing a bowling ball into a dense minefield, setting off a chain reaction far beyond anything you might have expected, as each personal expression of outrage triggers several more.

Briefly, Jillian speaks for Trans and LGBT unity idealistically and Mercedes criticizes Trans unity as artificial, yet needed in some better form to make progress. As I understand it, the core issue is how concerns of surgical transsexuals are addressed under the more encompassing term, transgender. The formal distinction is whether the individual has undertaken any form of deliberate body modification to acquire the physical characteristics of the opposite chromosomal sex (biosex). Thus transsexuals are people who have modified their bodies by physical, medical, or surgical methods. In this strict sense, transgenders are people who have any erotic or physical sexual characteristic that is similar to persons of the opposite biosex or unlike persons of the same biosex.

Practical XX and XY androgyny (click)

Thus, transgender really encompasses the intersex, the transsexual, the cross-dresser, the genderqueer, the “admirer” or “tranny chaser”, the bisexual, the polyamorous, and, in some limited sense, both the gay and the straight. It is a true umbrella concept. Since gender is a social artifice, while biosex is a physical reality of human life, we should find ways to remove gender details as a matter for debate and discussion. We need to get beyond verbal battles over the exact meaning of sex and gender, and open the door to social acceptance of all orientations and presentations. All people want to get on with much more important matters. The key concept lies within the term trans-.

In English, trans- can have many effects when applied to a root word. Trans-sexual specifies a sub-attribute of sexual that has a complementary formation, cis-sexual. The same is true of trans-gender and cis-gender. On the other hand, a form like trans-it or trans-portation implies movement from one place to another. Trans- can also imply a movement toward a new viewpoint from which true unities and harmonies can be discovered and enjoyed, as in tran-scend.

Click for H+ link

One interesting modern use of trans- is in the term trans-human. The meaning of the term is quite clear—anything beyond the purely human, whatever that is taken to be by the speaker. The word may be a noun or an adjective and gives rise to the term trans-human-ism, which refers to the study (by trans-human-ists) of what it means to be or become transhuman and how that state or process might be achieved either now or in the future. There is a substantial community of human transhumanists, loosely organized as Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association), with a large number of dependent, allied, supporting, and affiliated groups focusing their efforts on different aspects of what it would / will / does mean to be transhuman either speculatively through the imagination, achievably in time, or immediately by simple direct choice from available technology.

Let us assume for the purpose of discussion that heteroerotic cisgender sexplay is, as so many humans agree, the only normative form of human sexual orientation and gender identity (SO+GI). Then transhuman SO+GI is necessarily something more than human and could potentially accommodate all degrees of variation on each dimension of SO+GI. (These dimensions are discussed in the paper I Am An Intersex Bisexual Transgender And So Are You, which presents a model for describing all forms of human erotic expression.)

Thus transhuman erotic behavior necessarily includes all possible forms of SO+GI expression and it appears that the vast transgender population is probably the majority of all transhumans on Earth. As individuals, we may or may not be transhumanists, that is, students of transhuman emergence. But we are all living transgender examples of what it means to actually be and live and love and creatively harmonize the transhuman, through our own personal transphysical, transmental, or transmotivational developments.

Collectively, we are all trans-. And specifically, we are all transhuman, because our experience and expression of the dimensions of SO+GI departs from the human norm. We should claim our place under the transhuman umbrella with many other people who are similarly transhuman because they have augmented their metabolism, nervous system, skeletal structure, mind function, or motivational consciousness by artificial means.

SO+GI is the most fundamental defining quality of our personal identity. From these dimensions of possibility flow all the unique personalities of individuals, being the instantiation of love in distinct persons. Oppressive acts of families and societies that deny the free expression of individual SO+GI fundamentally distort the growth and function of the human personality. No one has the right to tell another what SO+GI to express, and no society has the right to impose any strictures on individual or collective SO+GI expression.

Click for more on transgender / transhuman connections

Transhumans do not pursue a collective agenda. Rather, they find a few important principles on which they can agree and give everyone the freedom to work to realize these principles without uniformity of viewpoint or approach. By itself, unity without uniformity is the transcending method of conflict resolution, and those who will completely devote themselves to its honest application will find the power to achieve any true and loving purpose.

Transhumans, to be successful as a growing body of committed individuals for the indefinite future, will have to be guided, as a group, by some great vision of a transcendent goal that, once achieved, will justify the efforts of transhumans to bring it into existence.

An initial step towards such a goal is to reach towards a position of unity among all trans- that necessarily recognizes the commonality of our desire to enhance our experience of life by the rational development and utilization of scientifically based technology.

I am a transhuman. I believe the time has come for the transgender community to recognize that we are each individually transhuman ourselves. As such, we are the natural successors to the human, hence the current social and economic warfare against us by those who are scared of the consequences of accepting the human transformation. We refute the foolish myths on which much of modern society is built. But this is not an exclusive club. Anyone willing to reorder life priorities based on love rather than hate is becoming transhuman. All transfolk are transhuman by nature. Our goal should be to recognize these unifying transhuman qualities in our transgender selves and visibly express them through the example of our lives.

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 05 Jun 2011 0 comments