Second Coming <--> Positive Singularity <--> Steel-UpTrust? pt 3

Link to part 1: https://uptrusting.com/post/LN01VP

Link to part 2: https://uptrusting.com/post/KPLe6Q

Note: Originally written for the participants of the AI alignment X spirituality/metaphysics retreats I’ve co-hosted with Jordan and Anna Salamon, so there may be some references to ideas or people you don’t know. 

The (Distributed) Second Coming of Christ(-Consciousness)

What do I mean by the Second Coming? I’ll gesture at this with a few quotes, starting with one attributed (almost certainly incorrectly) to Jimi Hendrix: 

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." 

From David Hawkins’s book I: Reality and Subjectivity, p. 329: 

Q:  What seems to be the meaning of “The Second Coming of Christ”? 

A:  Because the unenlightened person believes that they are a separate physical body, the expectation, therefore, is of a physical reincarnation of a Christ with historical connection to that appearance of Jesus two thousand years ago. The term ‘Christ’, however, generically refers to the ultimately possible level of consciousness on this plane. [...] The prediction is that Christ Consciousness will prevail upon the earth. 

From Thich Nhat Hanh, a renowned Buddhist teacher, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr.: 

The Buddha, Shakyamuni, our teacher, predicted that the next Buddha would be Maitreya, the Buddha of love. We desperately need love. And in the Buddha’s teaching we learn that love is born from understanding. The willingness to love is not enough. If you do not understand, you cannot love. The capacity to understand the other person will bring about acceptance and loving kindness.

It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving-kindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.

We know that in the spirit of the Lotus Sutra we are all students of the Buddha, no matter what tradition we find ourselves in. We should extend that spirit to other traditions that are not called Buddhist. We can find the jewels in other traditions—the equivalent of the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. Once you are capable of seeing the jewels in other spiritual traditions, you will be working together for the goals of peace and brotherhood.

I do not think of the Second Coming in uniquely Christian terms. In the context of this document, I am equivocating between Christ-consciousness, Buddha-consciousness, Krishna-consciousness, Mohammed-consciousness, etc. The crucial aspects of these consciousnesses I want to emphasize are that: (1) they embody and reveal the essence shared by all world religions (2) they reveal and forgive the psychological distortions that keep people from recognizing this shared essence. 

I do not think of the Second Coming as a literal reincarnation of Christ, who shows up on a cloud to save the day. I think of it as a distributed event, in which the power of Christ-consciousness (/ Buddha-consciousness / Krishna-consciousness) prevails on earth, through people embodying Christ-consciousness to varying degrees coordinating together to achieve peace and justice on earth. 

This conception of the Second Coming as a distributed Second Coming of Christ-Consciousness is surprisingly consistent with recent Catholic doctrine: 

• Pierre de Teilhard Chardin developed the theory of The Omega Point, a theorized future event in which the entirety of the universe spirals toward a final point of unification, which he identified with the Second Coming. Despite initially being rejected by the Catholic Church, his ideas are no longer considered heterodox, with Pope Francis citing Chardin’s work directly. 

• Catholic priest Richard Rohr said in his book The Universal Christ: “In fact, that is my only definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else.” (Rohr mentions Ken Wilber in The Universal Christ, and his work has been endorsed by Oprah, Melinda Gates, and Pope Francis.)

I do not think of the Second Coming as a preordained necessity. I think of it as an empirical possibility that will be achieved if humanity gets its act together. On the other hand, whether we get our act together may depend on how strongly we believe that peace and justice will prevail, which affects both how motivated we feel to build towards a better future, and how much we expect the future enforcement of justice to incentivize us to act justly today. In this sense, I think of the Second Coming as a potential self-fulfilling prophecy that we must collectively build toward in order to manifest, just like a startup company, but with the whole world participating. 

It seems plausible that the fulfillment of the Second Coming will only be realized after humanity arrives at the precipice of self-destruction. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was only after the US and the USSR escalated to the brink of nuclear war that mutual de-escalation began. 

I do not interpret the “Second Coming” in a way that depends importantly on the details of Christian eschatology. The biggest world religions have a concept of a messianic figure, who arrives in the darkest hours of the end times to reveal the truth of religion to humanity, and usher in an era of peace and justice – Buddhism has the Maitreya, Hinduism has the Kalki, Judaism has the (non-Jesus) Messiah, and Islam has the Mahdi. By “Second Coming”, I only mean to refer to the common denominator shared by the messianic prophecies found across the world religions. 

The reason I am employing (arguably fantastical) religious imagery is because some versions of these messianic prophecies are already deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of the vast majority of the world population, making it far easier to mobilize the world population to build toward the self-fulfilling prophecy in which the power of love overcomes the love of power, especially in the darkest hours when it may seem like all hope is lost. If I were addressing an Eastern culture most influenced by Buddhism, rather than our Western culture most influenced by Christianity, I would be speaking in terms of the Maitreya. If I were addressing a culture most influenced by Islam, I would be speaking in terms of the Mahdi. If I were addressing a Baha’i community, whose prophet Baha’u’llah has claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ, the Mahdi, the Maitreya, and the Kalki, I would not reference any of those messianic prophecies, and instead refer to Baha’u’llah’s prophecy about the Most Great Peace, an era of world peace underpinned by the unity of religion: 

The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its face is turned towards waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its plight, that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. Its perversity will long continue. And when the appointed hour is come, there shall suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake. Then, and only then, will the Divine Standard be unfurled, and the Nightingale of Paradise warble its melody.

Luke pointed out that the meme of the Second Coming of Christ might only be prevalent because of wishful thinking. I responded that the Second Coming of Christ should only be about as improbable as the First Coming of Christ, which definitely happened memetically, regardless of whether it happened historically. In other words, if we take as a premise that there’s an essence underlying all the world religions that achieved memetic dominance in the cultures in which they arose, to the extent that people thousands of years later are still moved to devote their lives to these memes, it should seem relatively less surprising that this same essence might again achieve memetic dominance in today’s day and age of secularism, global interconnectedness, and exponential technologies. 

What might it actually look like for this vision to be realized? And what does any of this have to do with AI? This is what I’ll turn to next. 

Link to part 4: https://uptrusting.com/post/JPZ7VQ

#FutureYouLove