Establishing the Foundations The Discipline of Omniology This section is divided into five parts, the middle three of which outline relational logic itself. As fully understanding these pages requires the abandonment of everything that you ever learnt about at home, in school, university, church, or business, or from your peers or the media, you might find it easier to skip these more radical pages at first reading, or perhaps, just browse through them. The Discipline of Omniology Relational Logic The Principle of Duality Returning Home to Wholeness The Laws of Motion of Society The origin of this project The logical place to start laying down the foundations for the Paragonian Society is at the very beginning, with the Absolute, with Consciousness, the Source of Life, and the Ground of Being. However, this is not where I consciously began my studies into what it truly means to be a human being in contrast to our machines nearly twenty years ago. I didn't then have the understanding that I have today. I have been led back to the origin of the Universe by my inquiries. I have returned home to Wholeness, to the pathless land. For as I now know, from the depths of my being, the Absolute Whole is the Alpha and Omega of the Universe. Under these circumstances, I feel that it is more meaningful to begin laying down the foundations by describing a little of the process I have been through. For while the cosmology that I am describing on this web site is the product of some twelve to fifteen billion years of evolution, the project that led to this all-inclusive world-view had a clear starting point within my own life as an individual. In the late 1970s, being deeply concerned about our ignorance about the long-term psychological and economic effects of information technology, I was puzzling over two fundamental questions: What is causing the pace of scientific discovery and technological invention to accelerate exponentially? While science can tell us much about the causes of change in the physical universe, it cannot tell us the root causes of change and transformation, and most particularly why it, itself, is changing so very fast, a very strange situation. What are intelligence and thinking and what are their relationships to the programs in a computer? Most particularly, I was interested in the long-term implications of the computer on employment. For instance, would a computer, one day, be able to do the job of a computer programmer or an information systems designer? If not, why not? The second of these questions was of major concern. For if the aims of the artificial intelligence community--to simulate every aspect of human intelligence in a machine--are realizable, then it is quite clear that the assumption that human beings are both producers and consumers in the economy will no longer hold. This principle lies at the foundation of modern economic theory as the very first paragraph of Adam Smith's seminal book, The Wealth of Nations, indicates: The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consists always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. So in an economy where machines provide the predominant source of labour, the cycle between human beings as both producers and consumers would be broken. So what would human beings do to occupy themselves and how would they establish their value to their fellow human beings? If, on the other hand, it is not possible for machines to reach and exceed the level of human intelligence, this must mean that technology is limited in some way. So the assumptions that technological growth will continue indefinitely and that technology can solve all the world's problems cannot be true. So it does not matter whether the goal of artificial intelligence is achievable or not. Either way, the assumptions that underpin both capitalism and communism are false. As no system that is not based on the Truth can survive indefinitely, it is thus quite clear that we need to develop a radically new way of managing our business affairs before the whole house of cards collapses around us. This revelation put me in quite a dilemma. I could see that my colleagues in IBM (UK), where I was working at the time, did not share my insights. Indeed, how could they, for they, like me, were dependent for their livelihood on information technology. So to be told that something on which they based their sense of identity and security was not as secure as they believed it was, was unlikely to be accepted. For the mind has a wonderful way of ignoring what it does not want to see and hear. In my innocence, I saw only one way out of this dilemma. I live in the age of science. So I thought that if I could find a sound scientific explanation for my essentially intuitive insights expressed in the language of science, mathematics, then perhaps there was a slight chance that we could avert the disaster that our ignorance was quite clearly driving us towards. This was especially important. People, like Marx and others, had been predicting the collapse of capitalism for 150 years or more. It was therefore unlikely that I would be listened to unless I could 'prove' this scientifically. The great breakthrough came at 11:30 on 27th April 1980 as I was strolling across Wimbledon Common in London, about a mile from the famous tennis courts. As the exponential rate of change in society is being caused by the mental abilities of scientists and technologists--both the intellect and knowledge--then these characteristics of the mind, and their analogous features in the computer--programs and data--must be types of energy. There are thus nonphysical energies at work in the Universe in addition to the physical energies that I learnt about at school. This was such an obvious idea, I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before, or why nobody else had thought of it either, as far as I knew. After all, the word energy derives from the Greek word ergon meaning 'work'; and the work that most of us do is not dependent on our weight or physical strength, or on our 'magnetism'. And we often use the word energy in the vernacular in a sense that is quite different from its formal scientific definition. There would thus appear to be two meanings of energy, a scientific one, which can be measured in terms of joules, and a nonscientific, everyday meaning, which cannot. So is it possible to create a unified concept of energy that can embrace both these meanings in a coherent, scientific fashion? Well, that, in essence, is what I have dedicated my life to doing for the past nineteen years. Within three weeks of my life-changing 'Eureka' experience, I resigned from my marketing job with IBM (UK) and set out to create a coherent body of knowledge that would synthesize the nonphysical energies that I had 'discovered' with the traditional energies of physics. Actually, this is not quite accurate. I soon realized that creating a cosmology that would synthesize these contrasting energies was just a special case of a more general problem: how to create an organized body of knowledge that would integrate and unify all opposites, whatever they might be, in a completely consistent fashion. Accordingly, I set out to create a form of reasoning, a universal logic, that would do just that. In other words, the aim of the project on which I embarked was to create a synthesis of all knowledge of all disciplines and cultures in all times that would heal the great schism between science and religion and between East and West. I was quite sure that nothing less would give us the solid foundation on which to base a life-enhancing, ecologically sustainable economy that existed to serve the innate physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of all human beings everywhere. This means that what I am doing is not multidisciplinary or multicultural in scope, it is both transdisciplinary and transcultural. This project therefore does not fit into any category of knowledge that exists today in either the sciences or the humanities. Rather, it is the other round. A synthesis of everything, if it is to be all-inclusive, must embrace and encompass all disciplines and cultures, including itself. This means that we need to see that the barriers that we erect between the East and the West and between science-mathematics, philosophy-psychology, religion-mysticism, and economics-business do not exist in Reality. These are human constructions that greatly inhibit us from seeing the Whole, that prevent us from managing our business affairs and personal lives with full consciousness and understanding. Communicating with each other This immediately brings us to the thorny question: "How can we communicate with each other?" The reason I ask this question is that the cosmology that I am outlining on these pages cannot be understood in the context of the cultural landscape that exists in the world today. A radically new way of looking at ourselves and the Universe we live in is needed if we are to see the totality of existence as one undivided, seamless Whole. So what language can we use to communicate with each other? Within our fragmented world, the language we use to communicate with each other within a particular culture reflects the beliefs and customs of that culture. For example, in the West, there are the languages of science, philosophy, religion, business, and economics, and in the East, the languages of Vedanta and Hinduism, Taoism, the various schools of Buddhism, and Zen predominate. But how can we communicate with each other transculturally and transdisciplinarily? No language yet exists in the world by which we can communicate across cultures and disciplines. Systems architects in business attempting to create an integrated model of all the disparate information systems in the organization face a similar problem. For example, finance, marketing, and distribution departments may well have different views of the meaning of the concept of customer. Similarly, a salesperson and a production manager may have quite a different perspective on what a backlog is. A salesperson usually regards a backlog as an order that has not yet been delivered to a customer, while for a production manager, a backlog is work that is behind schedule. These differences in the meaning of backlog are also reflected in the way that the Americans and British use this word. They use the word rather like the salesperson and production manager, respectively, as my British-American dictionary tells me. And if a theatre production on Broadway bombs, this means that it was a flop. On the other hand, if a play in London's West End is a bomb, it is a great success. It is little wonder that George Bernard Shaw is attributed with saying, "England and America are two countries divided by a common language". Under these circumstances, how are we to find our common ground, that which we all share, beyond all our cultural, national, and personal differences? Well, the way I begin to approach this question is to create a few new words, as I mentioned in in my introductory page. The first of these is omniology, the science or study of everything. I call it a science, but this could well be confusing. Because when one studies omniology, science as we know it today looks quite different. Omniology does not fit into science as it is defined today. Rather, it is the other way round. The physical sciences are just a subset of all the different ways of learning embraced by omniology. That is why the subtitle of this page is "The Discipline of Omniology" and not "The Science of Omniology". I don't wish to be misunderstood before I have had a chance to explain what I mean. The word discipline derives from a Latin word discere, meaning 'to learn', as Krishnamurti would often point out. So omniology is a way of learning that integrates all knowledge into a coherent whole. For me, there isn't scientific, philosophical, and religious knowledge, or Western and Eastern knowledge. There is only deep inner knowing, inseparable from experience, which is then expressed in the external world as symbolic knowledge in language of various forms. This deep inner knowing is something we all share, albeit covered up in many cases by layer upon layer of cultural and personal conditioning. From time to time, a gap appears in this conditioning, like clouds dissolving in the sky, revealing the blazing light of Consciousness behind. In these beautiful moments, when only Love is present, we can share this common ground in wordless communication. But then the magic is broken, the clouds return, and we separate and go our different way to face the vicissitudes of daily life. Somehow, we are unable to build on our shared experience of the Divine. We are pulled away by the past, by traditional, fragmented interpretations of our common ground. It is thus clear that if we are to build on our shared experience of oneness and wholeness to heal our divided and suffering world, we need a common language that transcends all our cultural differences. That is the purpose of the language of omniology. As well as creating a few new words in this language, my second approach is to study the etymology of words, to look at what David Bohm, faced with a similar problem, called "the archeology of language". It is illuminating to see how the original meanings of words have become distorted and corrupted over the centuries to fit our materialistic and mechanistic world-view, as Western civilization has moved further and further away from Reality. However, studying the archeology of language does not always reveal the underlying meaning of words. For instance, the word physics has a Greek root phusis, meaning 'nature'. Nature, in turn, has a Latin root, nasci meaning 'to be born'. As a consequence, physics was known as natural philosophy in Newton's time, and it is a branch of natural science today. But physics, in particular, and natural science, in general, do not study the birth process itself. For everything that arises in the manifest world of the senses is born of Spirit, a principle that lies outside science as it is conceived today. So the belief that the physical universe is the primary reality lies deep in the roots of Western languages. In this case, the truth is not revealed by studying the archeology of language. So what are the root meanings of science, philosophy, and religion? Well, science comes from a Latin word scire, meaning 'to know'. There is nothing in the root meaning of this word that restricts it just to knowledge that we learn through the physical senses. Science applies equally to what we learn about ourselves by looking inwards, as many spiritual teachers have observed. Indeed, unless we have a deep understanding of the way our psyches function, none of our knowledge can truly be called scientific. For without such insights, we cannot possibly know to what extent our beliefs and assumptions affect our inquiries and hence obscure our understanding. Philosophy, coined by Pythagoras, I believe, means 'the love of wisdom', from the Greek words philos, meaning 'loving' and sophos, 'wise'. Now wisdom does not come about through speculative conjecture. It arises through direct and immediate knowledge of the Absolute. So the true meaning of philosophy has little to do with philosophy as it is practised in academic circles today. For this reason, I prefer to use the term, perennial wisdom to perennial philosophy, the inner knowing that underlies all religious traditions. There is some debate about the root meaning of religion. One view is that it comes from the Latin religare, meaning 'to bind fast', the prefix having an intensifying effect. But a religious life is not one that is bound fast to dogma and scripture handed down by the authorities over the centuries. To be truly religious means to be bound fast to the Truth, to the immediate knowledge of God. Writing a paragraph or two when I want to borrow words from Western tradition to be used in omniology is a rather time consuming business. So, in this web site, at least, I'll endeavour to keep this transformation of the existing meanings of words down to a minimum. All I need to say at this stage is that in the discipline of omniology, science, philosophy, and religion, in the meanings I am using, merge into one coherent and seamless whole. Omniology is thus like the confluence of three rivers as they merge into one, flowing stream. To use another metaphor, when we combine hydrogen and oxygen to form water, or sodium and chlorine to form common salt, the resulting whole has properties that are quite unlike the constituent parts. So it is with omniology. If you try to understand omniology from the perspective of science, philosophy, or religion, as practised today, or in Western or Eastern terms, this is rather like trying to understand the properties of cooking salt by studying the characteristics of chlorine, a poisonous gas, or sodium, a highly reactive substance in water, if I remember rightly from my chemistry lessons at school. A vantage point from which to view the Whole Having described the scope of the discipline of omniology, we now need to establish a vantage point from which we can view the totality of existence, including our own lives as both individuals and as a species. Normally, here on Earth, if we want to take a broader view of our surroundings, we can go to the top of a tall building, such as a medieval cathedral or a modern television tower, if such edifices are available. Alternatively, we can take a trip in a helicopter or a balloon to give ourselves a bird's-eye view. Climbing mountains is another most satisfying way of getting a broad perspective on our surroundings, provided the clouds hold off, of course. The astronauts who travelled to the moon had an even better perspective. They were able to see the Earth as a unity, where all the divisions that we create between the nations, religions, races, businesses, and so on no longer existed. One of these, Edgar Mitchell, was so moved by the "sense of universal connectedness" that arose from his journey that, when he returned, he set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences to initiate research into consciousness and human potential. So if we want to see the totality of existence as one coherent whole, with no divisions within it, does this mean that we need to wait for a spaceship to take us to the outermost reaches of the physical universe? Or failing this, will it help us to see the Whole by sending up multi-billion dollar telescopes to look for the origin of the Universe? Actually, it doesn't help at all. There is a much simpler and cheaper way of viewing the Whole, for the origin of the Universe is within each and every one of us. So all we need to do is to look inside, and there we can find a vantage point from which to view the Whole. It is only from this vantage point that the witnessing Intelligence can function with full clarity, free from all anthropological hopes and fears. The key, therefore, is to "Know thyself", as was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi some 2,500 years ago. As well as transcending space, we also need to transcend time if we are to take a Cosmic view of our lives and the Universe we live in. When we take an egocentric or anthropocentric view of our lives, we tend to use time as we experience it in everyday life or the duration of our lives as a unit of measure. From this perspective, we can perhaps understand what a few hundred years is, or even a few thousand. But when we go beyond this, what is a million or a billion years in our experience? These durations feel like eternity, quite beyond our experience. Yet these numbers are really quite tiny. If we measure time in yoctoseconds or heptillionths of a second (10-24), the shortest unit of temporal measure that I am aware of, the time since the big bang is of the order of 1042 yoctoseconds, if my calculation is correct. Even this number is quite minuscule. The largest number that has been given a name, more in jest than seriousness, is the googolplex, which is 10googol. A googol, in turn, is 10100. Yet a googolplex is still a finite number, and there are an infinite number of finite numbers larger than this one. Furthermore, mathematicians have discovered that there is not just one infinite cardinal, but an infinite number of them, although which infinite cardinal enumerates the infinities is not clear to me. So when people seek eternal life after death, do they mean living for an infinite duration, and, if so, which infinity are they referring to? For me, these notions arise out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Reality, a misunderstanding that arises when the mind, influenced by the fear of death, tries to make sense of our experiences from an anthropocentric perspective. But when we take a Cosmic view of the Universe, eternity is not infinite or endless time. Eternity does not have a duration, it is timeless. Similarly, now is not zero time; it too is timeless. And it is from the eternal now that we need to view the totality of existence if we are to understand what it truly means to be a human being. The key point here is that the mind can structure anything in the world of form, even something as abstract as infinity. The mind can even structure the higher reaches of human consciousness, as Barry Long describes in The Origins of Man and the Universe, and as Ken Wilber illustrates in The Spectrum of Consciousness and later works. If we are to discover who we truly are, we need to transcend all these categories. In this way, there is no longer any difference between an objective and subjective viewpoint. These opposites, like all other dualities, merge into unity when we take a Cosmic vantage point. If you find taking a God's eye view of humanity a little strange and mystical, you might find it easier to imagine that you are an extraterrestrial being on a visit to our beautiful planet. Such a being, of course, knows nothing of human history and the three pillars of unwisdom that support Western civilization and the global economy. So, as an extraterrestrial, you are able to take a completely objective view of humanity's situation, free from our human conditioning. And, as a human, you are naturally free from any conditioning that the extraterrestrial might bring. So you are able to view the totality of existence just as it is, free from delusion. This is vitally important. For if we are to understand what it truly means to be a human being, we need to free ourselves from our anthropocentric and geocentric perspectives. But this is not easy. Virtually the whole of humanity is governed by anthropocentric considerations. Even Shakyamuni Buddha's teaching is anthropocentric. He was concerned with one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering. Of course, it is highly desirable to be happy and joyful. But in the search for the Truth, you will make discoveries that might well make you most uncomfortable. In my case, my own search for Wholeness and the Truth has at once been most exciting and excruciatingly painful. I have been far from happy during many periods during this process. For the plain fact is that until we learn to realize the Truth, the truth hurts. So as you learn to take an extraterrestrial vantage point of our rapidly changing world, you might well find yourself as an alien in your own land. This is inevitable at this time, when an old civilization is dying and the new civilization has not yet emerged to take its place. But this is just a temporary inconvenience. As the rising tide of consciousness surges through humanity in the years to come, more and more individuals will learn to take an extraterrestrial, God's-eye-view of the Universe, and we shall truly have entered the Paragonian Age of Spirit. As this is such an important point, let me present it in one other way. For the past few thousand years, during the mental-egoic period of human evolution, we have tended to place a number of influential figures on pedestals; we have made idols and icons of them. These figures include the authors of the Upanishads, Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. In this twentieth century, the number of figures we have turned into icons and idols is almost limitless. Yet if we are to realize our own unique potential as human beings, it is vitally important that we free ourselves as much as possible from gurus and other external influences and authorities. For it is only in this way that our innate daemon or genius can fully flourish in its uniqueness. I should emphasize here that being an anarchistic iconoclast is just a step on the way. When we are quite free of the past, we can look at our teachers with clear, fresh eyes, drawing inspiration from them as the need arises. For, as the Zen Buddhists say, "At first the mountains are mountains and streams are streams. Then the mountains are not mountains and streams are not streams. But in the end, mountains are again mountains and streams are streams again." Gnostic foundations Having established a vantage point from which to view our lives free from delusion, we are now in a position to start afresh from the very beginning. This radical approach to learning is not entirely without precedent in Western history. On 10th November 1619, a young Frenchman, René Descartes, was staying in the Bavarian village of Ulm, where he was engaged as a soldier fighting in the Thirty Years War. On that fateful night, Descartes had a dream, "a vision of the unification and the illumination of the whole of science, even of all knowledge, by one and the same method: the method of reason". Being dissatisfied with Aristotelian science, which dominated the world of learning at that time, he thereafter set out to create a complete philosophic edifice de novo, which he published eighteen years later as Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, to give his epoch-making work its full title. Of course, Descartes did not realize his vision in this work; it wasn't then the right time for such a megasynthesis to emerge in human consciousness. But that does not mean that it is not possible to unify all knowledge, as I am endeavouring to show on this web site. The great weakness of Descartes' method is that he did not start from the very beginning; he was not completely free from his past. Instead, in seeking to establish his philosophy on an experience on which he had no doubt, he began his treatise with the words, Je pense, donc je suis, in the French language he was writing in at the time, contrary to the then norm in academic circles. Descartes wrote in French because he was not writing for "the pedants in the University", who he suspected would not accept his work, but for "cultured members of society, the ladies of the 'salons'". It was only later that he translated the Discourse into Latin, the language of academia. His famous starting point has thus mistakenly become known as the cogito, from the Latin cogito, ergo sum. Being dissatisfied with the Tower of Babel, which symbolizes the fragmented, confused world of learning today, I have been broadly following Descartes' strategy. Knowing that it is most unlikely that mainstream academics will understand a synthesis of everything, I am publishing my work on the Internet. In this way, I can expect the unexpected, the best chance I have of finding others who are not only interested in Wholeness and the Truth, but are willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of these goals. However, I make one or two key departures from Descartes' approach to starting a learning process afresh, free from the cultural conventions of the time. The first is that after Descartes had completed his revolutionary Discourse, he found it necessary to insert a further chapter explaining his political and religious orthodoxy. Otherwise, he thought, his new philosophy would not be accepted. I cannot do this. I am not working within the context of Western civilization, for this great civilization is not based on the Truth and is therefore dying. The second significant departure from Descartes' way of learning is that for me, there are no certainties in the ever-changing world of form. This fundamental fact of existence has long been recognized in the East and is now becoming established in our postmodern world. The only certainty lies in the formless, timeless Absolute. It is this certain knowing of the unity of everything that is the foundation for my own experiment in learning, as it is for an increasing number of people in the world today. It is on this shared, immediate experience of God that we can lay down the gnostic foundations of the Paragonian Society. For the Absolute is what we all share in common, no matter what cultural and individual differences we might have. But first I must explain what I mean by the word gnostic. We human beings have four basic ways of acknowledging or experiencing the Absolute or God, distinctions I learned from Osho's discourses. First, we can be either theists or atheists, people who do or do not believe in God, from the Latin theos, meaning 'God' and a-, meaning 'not'. Now, As Barry Long would often point out in his Course in Being seminars, when we believe something, we do not know it in our own immediate experience. For instance, if I look out of my window and see that it is raining, I know that it is raining through direct observation. On the other hand, I might believe that it will be sunny tomorrow, but I don't know this. So it is with the Absolute. When we say we believe in God, this must mean that we don't know God. For anyone who truly knows God in their own immediate experience would never say that they believe in God. Belief is so much weaker than direct knowing. The third group of people are agnostics, who do not know what to believe, from the Greek gnosis, meaning 'knowledge' and a-, meaning 'not'. Like the theists and atheists, agnostics are those people who are ignorant of God, who have not yet realized the Truth. Fourthly, gnostics are individuals who know God in their own direct, immediate experience. As many who have had such experiences have testified, there is no more certain knowledge than this. It is on the solid rock of this ineffable experience that we can build a society at peace both within itself and with its environment. You might think that this is hopelessly idealistic because so very few people have had such mystical experiences. But you would be wrong. David Hay, formerly director of the Alister Hardy Research Centre in Oxford, England, has undertaken some studies that indicate that 48% of British people and 43% of Americans have had such experiences. In a supposedly secular society, these are surprising statistics, which Robert Forman highlighted in the very first issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. But the question that I would like to ask is why so few? Every single human being is inseparable from God, from the Ground of Being, from the Source of Life. So why don't we all know God in our own direct experience? What is preventing us all from knowing the Truth? Why have we become separate as a civilization from our Divine Source? It is important to note here that this split is not just a product of our technological age; the split actually took place four or five thousand years ago with the Fall in the mythical Garden of Eden. For all the monotheistic religions regard God as 'other'. As F. C. Happold tells us in Mysticism, "To Jew, Christian, and Moslem, a gulf is felt to exist between God and man, Creator and created, which can never be crossed. To assert that 'Thou' art 'That' [as the Hindus do] sounds blasphemous". So the mystics of these religions have needed to be very careful about what they said if they were not to incur the wrath of the Church authorities. As Elaine Pagels tells us in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, "Even the mystics of Jewish and Christian tradition ... are careful to acknowledge the abyss that separates them from their divine Source". So when the preeminent Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart said, "The eye with which I see God is the same as that with which he sees me", he was found guilty of heresy, and would no doubt have been excommunicated or burnt at the stake if he had not died before sentence could be passed. Now when God is seen and experienced as other, it is but a short step to seeing Nature as other, to be exploited and controlled for the ego-centred desires of humankind. That, in essence, is what happened to Western civilization following the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And when Nature is other, it is but another short step to seeing our fellow human beings as other, likewise to be exploited and controlled to our bidding. It is, of course, this feeling of separation, of alienation, that leads us to fight and compete with other human beings for the precious resources of this beautiful planet of ours. This is so engrained in the collective psyche that most do not see that there is any alternative to this disharmonious behaviour. Even today, Western religious leaders are perpetuating this split between the Divine and the individual, leading inevitably to schizoid behaviour out of touch with Reality. For example, the Pope, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio published on 17th October 1998, said that if reason is to be fully true to itself, it must be grounded in the "fear of God". What nonsense is this? God is Love. And when we truly know God, when there is no other, no divisions in Consciousness, all fear disappears. Then Love, pure Love, is revealed, as the mystic poets, such as Rumi, have expressed most beautifully. But why did this great gulf open up between God and the individual? The answer is very simple: so that the priests could come between God and their parishioners making statements beginning with the words, "God says". If the people did not obey the word of God (that is of the priests), then they would suffer eternal damnation. It was because of this that the people were taught to fear God rather than to know that God is Love. That is why Meister Eckhart (and the Gnostics earlier) was such a threat to the Church authorities. If the gap closed between the individual and God, then there would no longer be any room for the priests. It was thus vitally important that the people did not discover the Truth for themselves. What would Jesus have said when he saw what was and is being done in his name? He was enlightened; he was completely free from the sense of a separate self. So he was able to say, "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free". So Christ was not a Christian, any more than the Buddha was a Buddhist. In a similar, but quite different, vein, Karl Marx wrote in a letter towards the end of his life, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist". And Carl Jung was similarly moved to say, "I am grateful that I am Jung and not a Jungian". Today, the danger of followers mimicking the words of a leader, rather then discovering their own unique expression of the Truth, is well known. Krishnamurti was particularly sensitive to this issue, as is Barry Long. Similarly, Advaitin teachers following in the footsteps of Ramana Maharshi are encouraged by their gurus to find their own way, sometimes to the consternation of the devotees of the older guru. Yet in a way, the behaviour of the monotheistic priests makes sense in the historical context. They, and their counterparts in the East, were living at a time before it was not possible for the great mass of humanity to know the Truth; to discover for themselves why they behave as they do. So to maintain social cohesion, it was necessary to adopt a patriarchal, authoritarian approach to restrain people in straitjackets. Given the level of consciousness at the time, this was necessary to keep society reasonably harmonious. But we live in different times today. There is a rising tide of consciousness encircling the globe, which is radically changing our society. A rapidly increasing number of enlightened beings and spiritual teachers are travelling the world, being followed by people in their hundreds and thousands. There is a great longing in many today to know the Truth, so that it can set them free from delusion and suffering. Despite these encouraging developments, the gap between the Divine and humanity opened up by the priests some three thousand years ago, has led humanity into a particularly dangerous situation. This gap has been so widened by the scientists in our secular society that the Absolute, our Ground of Being, has virtually disappeared out of sight. And today, instead of "God says ...", it is "Science says ..." that prevents many from uncovering the Truth. Under these circumstances, it is a wonder that Western civilization functions at all. To live in a society that is not based on the Truth inevitably generates much stress and hardship, as so many are experiencing today. It is only the Truth that can set us free to realize our fullest potential as human beings. For myself, I am engaged in realizing my own fullest potential by healing the great schism between religion and science in Western civilization. I therefore need a word that unifies these two great domains. The word I use for this purpose is Datum, from the Latin word datum, meaning 'that which is given'. The Datum of the Universe exists prior to any interpretation, to any attempt that I might make to distinguish forms and patterns within it. The Datum is the 'raw material' of the Universe out of which arise all forms, structures, relationships, meaning, and value. It thus exists prior to the Big Bang. But I do not mean prior in a temporal sense, for the Datum of the Universe transcends time. Time emerges from the Datum like all other forms and structures. To denote all the forms that emerge from the Datum, I use the word data, the plural of datum, as a mass noun, like water, because there is no sense that data viewed in this way is countable. William James pointed out that one of the meanings of this data, of what is given, is "direct and immediate experience", as Ken Wilber tells us in The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. So I am using a word from the data processing industry to denote what I call a gnostic experience. Another word that can help us to understand the nature of this ineffable experience is presence, from the Latin words prae, meaning 'before' and esse, 'to be'. Presence thus literally means 'before being', 'prior to existence'. I do not mean before or prior in any temporal sense here, because the continuum of data transcends time. Rather, it is the Ground of Being on which everything in the manifest world of form is based, including time. Yet another way of expressing this prior state of existence is through the Buddhist concept of essenceless. Essence is another word that derives from esse. So essenceless means 'without being', called anatman in Buddhism. The key point here is that there is no self, Self, Higher Self, ego, or any other form whatsoever prior to existence. It is utterly impersonal or transpersonal. The extraordinary thing is that we human beings, who are manifestly beings, can sense this presence or essenceless. Indeed, it is not necessary to be a mystic or to be enlightened to do so. An increasing number of people in the world today are sensing this presence, called the presence of God, the Divine, the Godhead, That, Brahman, Consciousness-at-rest, emptiness, stillness, Tathata, Shunyata, Tao, Tat, and so on. Anyone who has directly experienced the Divine, even for a few minutes, has had an experience that cannot be accommodated within the traditional religious and scientific teachings of the West. It is this experience of absolute certainty that shows that God is not other, that there is no division between the Divine and we human beings, or any other sentient beings, for that matter. On my introductory page, I said that the belief, the delusion, that God is other is the second pillar of unwisdom that supports Western civilization. But in a way it is the primary pillar. For when this pillar is demolished, the other two principal pillars also collapse, as does the whole house of cards, with all its delusions about God, the Universe, money, and what it means to be a human being. So with the Tower of Babel lying in a heap of rubble, we are now in a position to build afresh, to lay down the next layers of the foundations we shall need to create a life-enhancing, peaceful, and harmonious Paragonian Society. This I do on the next page. Home | Introduction | Vision | Economy | Book | Institute Related sites | Bibliography| Guest book | About me