THE LARGER SCHEME OF THINGS

A feature of the C-of-C-C Newsletter—

Wherein we assert that instead of nothing being true—or truth being fluid, as postmodernism has insisted—quite the contrary: everything is true, because it is all part of the whole.

We realize this probably isn’t original. Hegel, Spinoza, and Whitehead all got here first—something about totality, divine substance, and cosmic process. We didn’t know that until we asked the Mrs ChatGPT. She filled in the names we couldn’t remember.

So yes, we’re playing catch-up. And maybe sounding a little grand about it.

But it still feels like a revelation to us.

It’s a new day, every day—for someone.

Today, it’s ours.

— Jánosh Alovatski, C-of-C-C Correspondent on Religion and Alt-Spirituality

What Is the Larger Scheme of Things?

The Larger Scheme of Things is not a theory. It is the faint smell of order beneath the compost. It is the quiet suspicion that every detail—even those considered dumb —are a necessary part of the pattern.

It is neither conspiracy nor chaos. It is the cow’s-eye view of the cosmos: indifferent, serene, ruminative.

To see the Larger Scheme is not to explain everything—but to stop pretending that anything can be dismissed.

We once mistook it for a grand design.

Now we know better.

It is a great digestion.

IT’S ALL THE REAL THING

Filed under: Masters of the Ordinary and the Obvious (O.O.O.)

“Yes, sheep and sheeple have been domesticated and bred to be fleeced.

Cows however still retain the ultimate in their enlightenment earned while co-evolving with man.

Cows realize that they contain or display many of the good things in life—steak, hamburger, milk, and thus ice cream and don’t forget leisure—all by simply by standing or sitting around chewing their cud.

They manage all this without suffering from cardiovascular disease, colon cancer, high blood pressure, or stroke—unlike their human hosts, who run themselves ragged trying to earn the money to afford the cow’s offerings—and then suffer those very ailments also from consuming too much of the cow and its milk.

Ironically, the cow is packed with cholesterol and saturated fat—biochemically implicated in all these conditions—yet the cow itself is untouched. It lives in peaceful disregard of its own nutritional profile.

Which only proves the point: in the Larger Scheme of Things, it’s not just what something contains—it’s how, and by whom, it’s digested.

The Hindu wise men got it all backwards, which is understandable since they came from a backward part of our world. The cows attained nirvana by chanting MOO not OOM.

Is it a mere insignificant coincidence that we on the staff of the Newsletter are all masters of the ordinary and the obvious and members of the Order of that name? Part of our initiation was to realize that there are no coincidences—as slyly stated above in the description of THE LARGER SCHEME OF THINGS.”

A.I., COWS, AND CUD-BASED COGNITION

Artificial Intelligence, for all its hype and dread, does not operate by logic in the Aristotelian sense.

It does not begin with first principles and deduce down.

Artificial Intelligence does not operate by syllogism or human logic. It doesn’t start with clear principles and reason from there. Instead, it absorbs the mess—the noise, the contradictions, the irrelevant-seeming particulars—and from that, it extracts surprising patterns.

As David Weinberger notes in Everyday Chaos, AI isn’t better because it’s smarter—it’s better because it doesn’t care what’s supposed to matter. It digests everything. All the tiny variables that experts might dismiss. That’s why it is outperforming doctors in certain diagnoses—not because it knows more, but because it notices more.

In that sense, AI is less like a computer and more like a cow.

It doesn’t rush. It ruminates.

It doesn’t argue. It ingests.

It doesn’t start with what matters. It lets what matters emerge.

If God once saw the whole from above, AI sees the whole from below: a murky emergent pattern stitched from spam folders, grocery receipts, murmured sentiments, and footnotes.

It may not know what it’s doing, but it’s doing what we forgot how to do.

A.I. sees the Larger Scheme of Things the same way the cow does: by ruminating.

That should worry us.

That should inspire us.

Perhaps in our obsession with conclusions, we forgot the contemplative function of chewing.

The Cow’s Epistemology

Let this be our refrain:

“The bigger picture is one of the details. A heuristic is a tool for understanding. But so is the cow. And so is the cud.”

The truly dangerous people are not the ones asking too many questions—but the ones who stop asking.

The ones seduced by the wide brush, the grand story, the single villain. Big Pharma. Big Moloch. Big Whatever.

Yes, these forces are real. They distort, exploit, and manipulate.

To deny their existence would be naïve—perhaps even suicidal.

But to fixate on them as the entire cause is to mistake the fever for the disease.

It’s comforting to believe the enemy is always out there—abstract and unaccountable.

But the Larger Scheme of Things is not a cartoon. It is a compost pile. And we are in it.

The bigger trap is sentimentality: the yearning for a tidy solution, a noble villain, a clean shirt with no stains from our own hands.

It’s easier to scream at the system than to reread your own receipts.

It’s easier to fight the sky than notice your shoelaces are untied.

So we return to the practice of sacred observation.

And we chant not OOM but MOO.

**************

Still, we understand the longing for harmony, for sweetness, for a world that sings in unison.

That dream lives on in jingles. In ice cream. In cows.

Sometimes the counterfeit real thing gets stuck in your head longer than the real one.

Even Coca-Cola’s claim to be “the real thing” isn’t true—but it’s still part of the real thing.
In the Larger Scheme of Things, even the imitation has its place in the pattern.
Everything is real, even the slogan that isn’t.

File under:

The Larger Scheme of Things | Artificial Rumination | Alt-Spirituality | Council of Concerned Conservationists