AXIOM N. 1
There is no creation without imagination.
Human life is an emergent property of biological life, that has created itself over millions and millions of years.
It was created because someone, at some point during planet Earth’s history, first imagined it, then they thought about it and then they realized it.
It was possible to create it, because during the first two billion years that the terrestrial crust existed, billions and billions of bacteria imagined and created photosynthesis, the ability to have a genetic code, the ability to breathe, the ability to move, the ability to come together to form multi-cellular organisms, etc., etc.. This is just to name a few of the most extraordinary inventions that came before human beings appeared, and before the biosphere formed.
Without imagination there is no creation nor can there be, and already bacteria were endowed with imagination.
Bacteria imagine, think and create.
Humans imagined for centuries the ability to fly, and now we can fly.
Science fiction is the result of human imagination, and it was most certainly very helpful towards the creation of space flight, both those that are now possible and the ones that will be possible in the future. All human inventions arise from imagination.
The same thing is true if now, with the Cosmo-Art myth, we imagine that it is possible to create an immortal life for humanity, something that has been imagined by humanity in thousands of different ways. If we do this, we are most certainly continuing to create the groundwork so that one day immortality can come forth as an emergent property of human life.
Who was it that first imagined human beings? There was not just one cause, but many causes fused together over a very long period of time.
Perhaps it was already the eukaryotic cells to do so, when they decided to make multi-cellular life emerge from unicellular life.
Whomever it was that imagined the existence of God or the existence of karma or the existence of the Tao, created the concept of God, the concept of karma and the concept of a path. Then they created a belief in one or the other, and without these beliefs the emergent property of humanity’s moral life would not have been created.
Now that this moral life is going through a great crisis in the West, we must imagine something different so we can recreate it, and give it a completely new definition that is broader than the previous one.
Cosmo-Art has imagined the possibility to be able to create secondary beauty and the immortality that this type of beauty contains.
It has also imagined the plurality of worlds, which is something that Giordano Bruno and many others have already imagined.
What is specific to Cosmo-Art is the possibility for human beings to travel from one universe to another, infinitely, once the living synthesis of four fundamental values that are opposites has been created. These values are: truth, freedom, love and beauty.
The problem that Cosmo-Art poses is this: is it possible that human beings have fewer capablities than bacteria? Then we must stimulate our imagination just like they did, and even more so than they did. Because without imagination, there is no creation.
AXIOM N. 2
Art is unlimited and continuous progress.
Humanity has always been divided into two parties: conservatives and progressives.
Human life has always been developed by being preserved in the uterus and by being pushed out of the uterus, in a continuous progression.
Religion has always been conservative and not progressive.
Science has always had supporters who are conservative and supporters who are progressive.
Art, by its very nature, has always been progressive, but it often encounters determined opposition along its way when it proposes a new qualitative leap forward.
Cosmo-Art is an emergent property of art and of the human being’s artistic dimension, and as such it is infinite progress.
Cosmo-Art, by its very nature, requires that human beings completely leave the maternal womb and the cosmic womb. This is not possible without a dialectical artistic journey that entails many deaths and rebirths within every human life.
The birth of a human being from any uterus is a continual progression and it cannot be completed with only biological birth, because every time we lose one uterus we immediately create another one.
We must undergo continuous births, and the Fetal I¸ which is always present and active within the Adult I¸ tenaciously opposes the goal of the Adult I to be born, to grow and to evolve.
This is a truth that we must always keep in mind.
Cosmo-Art and also Sophia-Art are existential arts.
The goal of Sophia-Art is to help people become artists of their lives.
The goal of Cosmo-Art is to help people become artists of the life of the universe.
Sophia-Art creates ecstatic beauty. Cosmo-Art creates secondary beauty.
Just as at one time the martial arts were developed in the Orient and today they are widely diffused in the West as well, we now want to imagine that the time has come to affirm the existential arts and to begin spreading them in the East and in the West.
This is already happening in India, in Russia and in the Baltic Countries thanks to the work of the IPAE (Istituto di Psicoterapia Analitica Esistenziale – Institute of Existential Analytical Psychotherapy) in Ascoli Piceno and its director Gabriella Sorgi, and it is happening in Europe thanks to the work of the SUR Institutes and of the Cosmo-Art Group at Rome’s IAPE (Istituto di Antropologia Personalistica Esistenziale – Institute of Existential Personalistic Anthropology).
Cosmo-Art is not a science and it is not a religion, it is an artistic movement that is open to anyone who wishes to be part of it.
AXIOM N. 3
Every birth that the I undergoes has many different dimensions. The highest dimension is the one that brings us to the creation of secondary beauty.
Homer, the author of the Odyssey, knows how painful it is to be born and to be born completely.
This is why he imagined his hero Ulysses, almost completely different from the one found in the Iliad, and he called him “the man of a thousand woes” many times throughout the poem.
When Ulysses faces new pain it is a new death and a new birth that he is facing.
Every new birth has at least three dimensions:
1) it is a birth from the maternal womb
2) it is a birth of the Adult I from the Fetal I
3) it is a birth from the intracosmic uterus towards an ultracosmic world, by means of the energy field that is secondary beauty.
The Odyssey is a cult book for Cosmo-Art and it must be read not only as a poem that narrates the adventurous return of Ulysses to Ithaca (see A.M.: Hypotheses on Ulysses). It must instead be read as a book of wisdom that holds within it treasures of wisdom equal to those written by the Hindu, Buddhist and Chinese poets in their sacred poems, written in more or less the same epoch (VII Century B.C.E.).
The pact for beauty, the pact that brought the Achaeans to Troy, was a pact for primary beauty.
Troy was taken by storm and Helen was re-conquered, after the blood of many lives was shed.
Ulysses made another pact after Troy fell, urged on by Athena and Zeus, the pact of secondary beauty. This is what brought him back to Ithaca, the island of secondary beauty, after a long, tormented odyssey, where it is not the blood that is shed that is important, but rather what counts is the I’s continuous transmutation through death and rebirth.
There is a huge difference between primary and secondary beauty.
Helen represents primary beauty, the type of beauty that is subject to the damage of time and of physical death.
Penelope represents secondary beauty, the type of beauty that is no longer subject to death and is the result of the fusion of yin and yang.
Primary beauty is an emergent property of nature and of cosmic life (a beautiful face, a beautiful panorama, a beautiful sunset, the starry sky, etc. ..); secondary beauty is an emergent property of human life and cosmic life fused together.
The creation of this fusion was Ulysses’ true task, and this fusion is not possible without going through a thousand woes.
The Fifth Theorem states that an emergent property is always the result of a network of subsystems that fuse together to form a greater system.
An emergent property in itself belongs to the greater system, and not to any one of the subsystems taken singularly.
Secondary beauty can emerge from a Choral Group SELF but it never will be able to emerge from a Personal SELF that does not fuse with other Personal SELVES to create a Choral Group SELF together.
AXIOM N. 4
Not every immortality is happiness.
In the wake of Plato, the Christian and the Muslim religions believe that the soul is immortal, but to guarantee their believers a happy immortality they associated moral perfection with immortality.
In both the East and the West, humanity has no chance to happily enjoy immortality without searching for moral perfection.
The search for artistic perfection often assures artists an immortal life, but it does not guarantee them a happy immortality. This is because their immortality belongs to the works in which the I of the artist lives. This I, however, enjoys no happiness after death. It is the I of the works’ audiences that has some enjoyment.
Cosmo-Art’s ambition is to reach a type of immortality based on the creation of secondary beauty, through a new type of artistic perfection. Also, it wants that every I that incarnates in first a Choral Group SELF and then in the energy field that is specific to the secondary beauty produced by the Choral Group SELF, can experience the enjoyment of this beauty.
Since secondary beauty is immortal and it lives forever, and the I has become one with it, this beauty can contemplate itself forever, and enjoy itself fully.
The type of artistic perfection that Cosmo-Art strives for is made up of the synthesis of contributions coming from the most different types of perfection that have been accomplished by humanity up until this time, but which now are stripped of their traditional definitions. Their final goals are transformed as well.
We are no longer interested in a linear type of moral perfection, where, according to traditional criteria, there is no room for the presence of evil, whether it be small or great or only imagined, or only thought of and acted upon much later.
This type of perfection created the Saints, but it also created an infinite number of alienated beings and hypocrites, who, just because they think they are perfect, this makes it enough for them to pretend to be so.
We instead want a type of perfection that is dialectical¸ which includes the acceptance of the presence of good and evil during every human being’s journey, and of the conflict that arises between them. Not to eliminate them, but to transform them, and create a synthesis between them.
The values we prefer are especially four: Truth, Freedom, Love and Beauty. These values, when looked at in pairs, are opposites, even though very few people have realized this up until now. The attempt to create a synthesis between each of these pairs of values is new, and this synthesis is a work of art that requires tenacity, courage, creativity and a dialectical approach that is not admissible to the expectation of moral perfection that we have known up until today.
From the search for alchemical perfection we learned that it is necessary to continuously transmute the I, but in Cosmo-Art this transmutation is now entrusted only to an adherence to the laws of life and to an attentive listening to the Personal SELF and the Choral Group SELF, rather than to the alchemical criteria that only a few chosen adepts were allowed to learn.
From the systematic and cooperative way with which Nature and the Cosmos search for perfection, we learned that it is necessary to look for a choral group perfection. This type of choral perfection requires the creation of a single living organism, which is made up of parts that before were unknown to each other, and that then become all connected to each other by means of a complex, continual circular causality.
Summing up, the type of artistic perfection that Cosmo-Art searches for is made up of a synthesis of various types of perfection all fused together. This is a dynamic, not static, type of perfection; it is perfection that together is and together is becoming.
It is a synthesis of types of moral perfection (because it includes a search for values that are opposites: love, freedom, truth and beauty), together with a synthesis of alchemical perfection (because it requires the continual transmutation of the I, beginning from the embryonic or Fetal I), a synthesis of artistic perfection (because it requires the creation of a work of art, such as life as a work of art and the creation of secondary beauty¸ and art requires perfection), a synthesis of choral group perfection (because it requires the creation of a single living organism, made up of people that were hitherto unknown to each other), and a synthesis of natural perfection¸ of human perfection and of cosmic perfection, which will encourage the development of human potential that we are not yet aware of and that will be revealed only in the future.
This synthesis, that is a network of syntheses of various systems, has never been proposed before by anyone, and if we look at it closely we can see that it is indeed very arduous. It is not a goal that any individual can reach alone.
What do we mean when we talk about “perfection”?
For Occidental religions, perfection is a state of the soul, and to reach it we must reach the complete purification of the soul of every type of culpability, great or small. For the Oriental religions, perfection consists of the complete detachment from the Ego and from the mind and from the presence of any type of Karma that dirties the soul or makes it impure. For the religions, the soul is immortal by its very nature and we have one either because God created it, or because it has existed as a monad since the beginning of time.
For Buddhism, neither God nor the soul exist, but for many Buddhists this last question is very controversial. Buddhism arose in 600 B.C.E., and over the course of the millennia, it has been interpreted by its followers in many different ways. Perfection consists in reaching Nirvana or Illumination.
For alchemists, perfection consists in knowing how to pass through all the states that are necessary to reach the creation of the opus (= the transformation of lead into gold), from the black stage to the white one, and from there on to the red (nigredo, albedo, rubedo).
The coniunctio oppositorum and the mystical wedding between the king and queen are other ways of describing the accomplishment of alchemical perfection.
For artists, perfection means knowing how to reach a complete harmony of parts in their works: to know how to enclose the universal in the individual; to know how to transmute the essence and the existence of things; to know how to create a form of life that does not exist in nature, a form of life to be incarnated in the work of art, which, once incarnated, is no longer subject to death, unlike every other form of life that exists on this planet and in this universe.
For nature, we could say that perfection consists of the ability to assemble the most disparate things and to make them capable of completely cooperating, so they can create living organisms that are able to evolve and advance towards an ever greater complexity.
For Cosmo-Art, perfection consists of the ability of the I to know how to create the synthesis of opposites in its own life, as they present themselves; of the ability to create a fusion of values that are opposites and in this manner create an immortal soul; of the ability of the I to know how to completely participate in a dialectical process, after it has freed itself of the infernal cage of the mind that knows only linear processes.
It consists of the ability of the I to know how to transmute its own essence and existence, bringing it from an inferior identity to a superior one, from a known identity to an unknown one, following the indications of the SELF and of the laws of life to arrive at creating secondary beauty, the type of beauty that never dies.
According to Cosmo-Art, perfection is not something to tend towards but rather is a series of events we can create. These are transformative events that are the result of a long journey and can, if the conditions are right, come about in a single instant and in a completely unpredictable way. This occurs through action that does not have a linear causality, but rather has a circular causality, and is not from one single cause but from a plurality of causes.
Sometimes one single event is enough and sometimes many events are necessary, one every time that life presents us with a crossroads and we must know how to make the right choice.
Where is happiness in this new perspective?
Life enjoys its creation while it is creating it.
Artists enjoy their creations while they are bringing them forth.
Cosmo-Artists enjoy the life they create when they create secondary beauty and they incarnate in this new life form that is both eternal and immortal. This enjoyment is both choral and individual at the same time; it is present in the time frame of this universe and also goes beyond it, when it travels from one universe to the next and passes into the time frame of other universes.
Secondary beauty is a field of energy that is created by two or more subjects fused together (the I-SELF couple, an I-You couple or the I-Others of a group). Once it is created, it lives forever and enjoys forever the new life it possesses, and the subjects that created it live within it forever, and enjoy it as well.
The I-You couple is not only the couple created by a man and a woman, it can also be the couple formed by two people who fuse together through friendship as a decision: see the characters Slide and Charlie in the movie “Scent of a Woman” , Andy and Red in “The Shawshank Redemption”, Forrester and Jamal in “Finding Forrester”, and the Cosmo-Artistic lectures on these films published in the book “I Laboratori Corali della Cosmo-Art” {The Cosmo-Art Choral Group Laboratories}, edition Sophia University of Rome, 2006
AXIOM N. 5
There can be right aims contained in wrong modalities.
Throughout the passage of time, many ways in which humanity has imagined it could reach immortality have proved themselves wrong (for example the way in which the Pharaohs imagined their immortal life).
Nevertheless, those that invented them were not wrong in one aspect: in keeping the search for immortality alive within humanity.
The same thing could happen for the way to reach immortality that Cosmo-Art proposes: it could be found to be wrong.
At this time, Cosmo-Art is a myth to be created, and is not an ascertained scientific truth.
Nevertheless, some of the things that Cosmo-Art proposes will never be wrong:
a) the mental open-mindedness towards infinite horizons yet to be imagined;
b) the evolutionary passage from art to Cosmo-Art and the new meaning given to art;
c) the preference given to certain values rather than to others, and especially to beauty, which is the value that fuses together all the others and makes them a whole;
d) the fact that it has given a meaning to pain that has never been offered before;
e) the fact that it has given a new purpose to the formation of the social I , the creation of a single living organism that is accomplished through the cooperation and the unification of many individuals who hitherto did not know each other;
f) the fact that it has given faith in the existence of their own creative artistic power to all human beings (that is no longer the exclusive prerogative of professional artists);
g) the fact that it has inserted between the I and the Cosmos circular causality as the means for the evolution of them both;
h) the fact that it has created a new cosmological vision and a new framework in which to place human life;
i) the fact that it has created a bridge between intrauterine life, intracosmic life and ultracosmic life;
j) the fact that it has given humanity a role of co-creator, together with the Universe, of a life form that without humanity the Universe cannot create.
AXIOM N. 6
When am I born? *
LIFE has existed forever, because if something exists nothingness can’t ever have existed, and it will continue to exist forever due to the principle of circular causality.
LIFE produces energy that condenses into matter, and matter that transforms into energy, in a continuous, unstoppable cycle that is also based on the principle of circular causality.
LIFE is like a river that flows incessantly. A river is generated through the circular causality that brings water to the sea and from the sea brings it up to the clouds and from the clouds brings it back to the river. The quantity of water found on Earth has always been the same. As far as I know, if we think of the glaciers as water, the quantity of water has never increased nor decreased.
Infinite forms of life develop within the river.
Every form of life is an emergent property of LIFE.
I am a form of life, therefore I am also an emergent property of LIFE, and as such, I have been contained in LIFE forever.
The fact that I appeared in my specific form during a certain moment of the history of LIFE takes nothing away from my eternal origins.
Snow originates from the water vapor that is condensed into clouds.
Snow is an emergent property of water.
Water originates from a composition of hydrogen and oxygen.
Hydrogen was formed right after the Big Bang; oxygen, instead, came forth later on.
There is not one snowflake that is identical to another.
Every crystal of snow has a unique, unrepeatable shape. An American photographer named Bentley took pictures of more than six thousand snowflakes over fifty years, and they were all different from each other.
Scientists study what laws govern this phenomenon, but they remain a deep mystery.
Every human being is unique and unrepeatable. Just as a snowflake is contained in its unique, extraordinary form within the potential of water, every human being is contained in its own unique, extraordinary form within the potential of LIFE.
Our universe, scientists say, has existed for approximately 15 billion years, and they also say that it was once contained as an emergent property within the singularity that then exploded with the Big Bang.
I am part of this history of billions of years.
The universe is part of an even greater history, and so am I along with it.
AXIOM N. 7
When do I die?
Every snowflake melts under the rays of the sun and turns back into water.
Water goes back into the continual cycle of matter that becomes energy and energy that condenses into matter.
Water goes back into the cycle of LIFE without having to make any effort at all.
But if someone photographs a snowflake before it melts, that snowflake keeps on living on a celluloid or digital support.
This doesn’t happen unless someone makes the effort to prepare everything necessary for photographing a snowflake.
Can you imagine how much effort it takes to isolate one snowflake and then take a picture of it?
Every crystal is made of matter and energy. Its matter is water. Its energy is the shape of the crystal; and, it is the form that the crystal created.
Every human body that becomes a cadaver dissolves, and goes back into the cycle of biological life, without having to make any effort at all.
But a human being is not made up of just a body.
In the body there is matter that is made up of atoms, and there is energy made up of sugars. This matter and this energy are what dissolve in the biological cycle at death.
And there is also a particular energy that is the form of the I that is inherent to every single body, and that is the form created by that specific I and by that specific body.
This is where the various religions invent all kinds of things to say in their own way what this form is, and whether this form is ephemeral or immortal.
The religions that say the form is immortal and is called the soul are those that have been most popular throughout history.
It is always nice to know that we have an immortal soul, whether it is destined to go to heaven or to hell, because this means that once I am born I will never die.
According to Cosmo-Art, it is better to call the form the I , and the I is either ephemeral or immortal, depending on whether the I accepts to go to work, together with a Choral Group SELF, to create an immortal soul.
At birth, the I is endowed with a mortal soul (vegetative soul, sensitive soul, rational soul) but it is also endowed with creative energy that can, day after day, transform its mortal soul into an immortal one; a soul whose essence is made up of primary beauty transformed into secondary beauty, a beauty that never dies.
We are like painters and each of us receive a canvas. This canvas, in and of itself, is banal and mortal. There are painters who know how to transform this canvas into an immortal work of art (and no one thinks any longer about the canvas that lies below the painting) and there are painters that don’t know how to paint. Instead of painting, they only manage to dirty the canvas, and, logically, such a canvas will never become immortal. The canvas that was supposed to be used to create beauty has become a shroud that will wrap a cadaver.
This concept of a soul that, by winning over death, becomes immortal, was very carefully explored during the 1st Cosmo-Art Laboratory, where we worked with the help of the movie “Scent of a woman” by the director Martin Brest.
When do I die?
If I, together with a Choral Group SELF, create secondary beauty, I will never die. If I don’t create secondary beauty, my I will dissolve along with my body.
It’s sad, but that’s the way it is. Not all the ova and all the sperm that are created in nature end up creating a life, and not all the lives that are created develop to reach maturity and fullness.
We must get to work. This is why our lives were given to us, this is why pain was given to us, this is why knowledge, creativity, wisdom and art were given to us.
In the case that the I dies along with the body, however, the causality that was created by a human existence that was part of the vastness of the circular causality that underlies this universe (and that makes up its history) does not die. A life, therefore, with everything that it has created and destroyed, always conserves its meaning, even though it remains confined within the space-time of this universe.
But we want something more. We want the I’s immortality, and the I’s immortality is created only through secondary beauty.
LAST FINAL CONSIDERATION
What is the purpose of these axioms?
To better explain what Cosmo-Art is, and to give a personal response to the questions that human beings constantly ask themselves about death, and that are not found in the answers they found up until now