Establishing the Foundations The Laws of Motion of Society On this fifth and final page of the foundations section of this web site, I would like to narrow the focus a little, and look at the science of omniology in terms of the development of the human race as a whole, most particularly where evolution is leading us to in such a frantic hurry. A series of cosmologies While the cosmology that I am presenting here is not set within any existing culture of either the East or the West, it has nevertheless evolved out of the Western culture into which I was born. I can best explain how this has come about through the process of abstraction. Although many scientists and spiritual seekers seem to have an aversion to abstract ideas, I make no apology for this approach. For abstraction is key to human learning. When we learn to distinguish mother from father and table from chair as children, we are using a process of abstraction. And when we later learn the concepts of dog, mammal, and animal, we are learning concepts at higher and higher levels of abstraction. This process of abstraction has a phylogenetic dimension as well as an ontogenetic one. For example, early theorems in mathematics catered only for the positive integers. Then these were successively generalized to accommodate the negative integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers. Mathematicians then went on to create theorems about even more general objects, mostly only known to themselves. In the evolution of science, we have also seen a movement to higher and higher levels of abstraction. Today, modern computer science is leading the way in this regard. I would not be able to write these words on my computer and send them out on the Internet if the designers and programmers of the products that I am using had not learnt to think in a highly abstract fashion. It is this process of abstraction that can lead materialistic science out of its cage into the wide open spaces beyond. I can best explain this by looking at the major cosmologies that have been developed during the past five hundred years. We can see a series of four distinct terms. Each term in this series has introduced a quite new way of looking at the Universe by unifying and transcending the apparent conflict of opposites: Isaac Newton developed his laws of motion of physical bodies by unifying the terrestrial and nonterrestrial forces known in his day through the then strange concept of gravitation, or action at a distance. Albert Einstein then developed the special theory of relativity by reconciling the incompatibilities between the principle of relativity, which states that natural phenomena run their course relative to different co-ordinate systems according to the same general laws, and the observed constancy of the speed of light. Einstein did this by replacing Newton's absolute framework of space with a relativistic space-time continuum, in which the notion of simultaneity is relativistic. In the general theory of relativity, Einstein then went on to show the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass during acceleration and in so doing abandoned the Euclidean-Cartesian model of space-time, replacing it with the view that space-time is curved. Of course, relativity theory was not the only theory about the physical universe to emerge in the twentieth century; the strange phenomena of quantum effects also needed to be explained. Strange, because these were incompatible with the characteristics of the theory of relativity. This has the properties of locality, causality, and continuity, while the distinguishing properties of quantum theory are nonlocality, noncausality, and noncontinuity. In the latter part of this century, David Bohm has shown how to reconcile these incompatibilities through the theory of the implicate order. This shows that relativity and quantum theories need to be viewed as abstractions of a deeper, underlying reality, a view that includes consciousness in its domain. Of course, this fourth term is not yet accepted by mainstream science. They are attempting to reconcile the apparent incompatibilities between the theories of relativity and quantum theory using the concept of superstrings and the most arcane mathematics. For example, in Brian Greene's recent book, The Elegant Universe, in which he attempts to show how the physicists are on the threshold of developing "a theory capable of describing nature's forces within a single, all-encompassing, coherent framework", there is no mention of David Bohm or his theory of the implicate order. This is not really surprising, because mainstream physicists only recognize four fundamental forces of nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nucleic forces. Science therefore does not yet recognize the existence of nonphysical energies, in particular, that consciousness is causal, indeed is the primary source of energy. Despite the lack of recognition of David Bohm's work, I am, nevertheless, attempting to introduce a fifth and final term in this short series. Omniology, and its system of co-ordinates, relational logic, provides the means of not only unifying the physical and nonphysical energies in the Universe, it also unifies all opposites through the principle of duality. It thus provides a theory capable of describing nature's forces within a single, all-encompassing, coherent framework, just as the physicists are attempting to do. And it is not necessary to understand anything about physics or mathematics to understand this science of everything; it is so very, very simple. The reason why I make a distinction between the fourth and fifth terms is best illustrated by a question that I asked David Bohm, when I first met him in November 1980, just six months after leaving the business world for the first time. As I was uncertain at that time where the nonphysical energies that I was investigating were coming from, I asked him the simple question, "What is the source of energy?" He replied, "Energy does not have a source; it is contained within structure". As I now know, this statement is only partially true. While energy is a characteristic of structures, whether they be physical or nonphysical in nature, the ultimate source of all energy is the Absolute. Yet David Bohm did not find any necessity for including the Absolute Whole in his cosmology, even though he called his seminal work Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Rather, he regarded reality as a process, along the lines of Heraclitus in ancient times, and Alfred North Whitehead in the twentieth century, the ground of which he called holomovement. Everything that exists can then be seen as an abstraction from this undivided wholeness, which he likened to a flowing stream. "On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such." What I call the ocean of Consciousness is a natural extension and generalization of David Bohm's concept of the holomovement. Everything that exists in the manifest world of form, including space and time, is an abstraction from this vast and limitless Whole. Despite the similarities between the ocean of Consciousness and the holomovement, the differences are sufficiently great to regard omniology as significantly different from the theory of the implicate order. These differences led us to go our separate ways in the mid 1980s, although I don't think either was fully conscious of the reason at the time. So when we met for the last time in June 1992, a few months before David's death, at a conference in Prague organized by the International Transpersonal Association called 'Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis', we did not share the same sense of Wholeness. We therefore did not have a common ground or context to have a really deep dialogue about the subject of the conference. But that is in the nature of evolutionary progress. Each of us in our own individual lives can take evolution only so far. It is up to each generation to take up the thread of its predecessors and carry it forward. Now each term in this series of cosmologies has introduced a view of the Universe that was difficult to understand in terms of the preceding terms. It is only when we look backwards in time that this series makes sense. So it is with the cosmology that I am describing on these pages. It is not possible to understand this fifth world-view in terms of any preceding cosmology, of either the West or the East, for Consciousness, the overall context for this cosmology, embraces all other cosmologies. In essence, omniology is a cosmology of cosmologies and relational logic is a taxonomy of taxonomies. Not surprising therefore that when this way of viewing the totality of existence is assimilated into Consciousness, it is not too difficult to see how evolution has brought us to the position we are in today, and what is more, where it is carrying us in the future. Meaning and energy Omniology, therefore, provides us with the foundation for the laws of motion of society, just as Newton discovered the laws of motion of physical bodies some three hundred years ago. And just as Newton completed the Copernican revolution with his three-part book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy published in just twenty-four copies in 1687, omniology completes what Willis Harman, the late president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences called the "New Copernican Revolution" some twenty-five years ago. Now, under the influence of Georg Hegel, Karl Marx claimed that he had discovered the scientific laws of motion of society with his principle of dialectical materialism. But Marx lived before the rise of psychology, consciousness studies, computer science, and the present-day spiritual renaissance, and thus made many mistakes in his philosophy, even though his goal--the wholeness of the human being--was the same as mine. It is those mistakes that omniology, the science of everything, rectifies. However, there is still another hurdle to be jumped before the laws of motion of society are accepted by society as a whole. Karl Popper, arguably the leading philosopher of science in the twentieth century, asserted in The Poverty of Historicism: The hope … that we may one day find the 'laws of motion of society', just as Newton found the laws of motion of physical bodies, is nothing but the result of these [holistic] misunderstandings. Since there is no motion of society in any sense analogous to the motion of physical bodies, there can be no such laws. When I read this proclamation in the early years of this project, I was reminded of a children's encyclopaedia that I read in the 1950s, which said that travelling into space would be impossible, because we could never build a rocket to travel faster than the escape velocity needed to leave the influence of the Earth's gravitational pull. How many similar statements have been made in the past? What we seem to fail to recognize is that until we reach the end of all evolutionary processes on this planet, we cannot know what possibilities can be realized in the future. It is only when we view the Whole in its entirety that we can see the whole of human history in perspective. It is then that we can create a coherent body of knowledge that unifies all opposites, including the physical and nonphysical universes. The unifying concept of this science of everything is that energy is a property of form, structure, and relationships. This must be so because there is nothing else in the manifest universe other than relationships that form structures. The capability of these forms to effect change is dependent on their relevance or significance in the context in which they are acting. This capability is not necessarily a quantitative issue. It is first and foremost a qualitative property of forms. It is a function of the meaning of the forms in any particular situation. I can simply illustrate this with a screwdriver. Carpenters, electricians, and watchmakers use screwdrivers of widely varying sizes. But a larger size does not mean more energy, greater effectiveness. The screwdrivers used by carpenters and electricians are quite useless to watchmakers, and vice versa. Similarly, when cooking, more heat does not necessarily mean a more tasty meal. Indeed, it is very likely to mean the opposite; the food could quite easily get burnt if too much heat is applied. Different dishes require different quantities of heat at different times to achieve optimum results. Sometimes, the form of energy itself is critical. For instance, the electricity that enters my apartment is quite useless to me as electricity. Indeed, it could kill me if I touch the bare wires. However, when this electricity is transformed into heat and light by various types of device, then I am able to live in comparative comfort. Certainly far more comfortably than the Vikings who used to live in these parts. These forms of energy are reasonably familiar to us because they are accepted by the scientists. However, what is not accepted as energy are the multitude of forms in the human psyche, which determine our behaviour. Yet all these drives, impulses, inhibitions, wants, skills, desires, emotions, longings, beliefs, yearnings, associations, wishes, concepts, cravings, needs, and so on are all forms of energy. But not as far as mainstream science is concerned. For, as Stephen Hawking says in A Short History of Time, perhaps with tongue in cheek, "we have, as yet, had little success in predicting human behavior from mathematical equations!" So in order to accommodate the psychodynamics of humanity in a coherent world-view, we need to give up the association between cosmology and the physical universe, which the astronomers make today. It is quite impossible to create a comprehensive world-view that embraces both our somatic and spiritual experiences from within physics using mathematical methods. To capture the concept of energy as meaning we need semantic modelling methods, as I am endeavouring to show on these pages. So what form of energy does this web site contain? Well, this is obviously dependent on what meaning the words and pictures on these pages convey. And that very much depends on the ability of my readers to learn to see a new gestalt in familiar situations, which is the essence of scientific revolutions, as Thomas S. Kuhn observes in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Of course, the energy to see Consciousness as the primary reality, and not the physical universe, cannot come from any external source; it can only come from within, through the power of Life acting through us as individuals. All we can do as relatively autonomous beings is provide a mirror to each other. If what I am writing reflects a deep truth in my readers, then these words might well have sufficient energy to bring us together; to bring about the scientific and cultural revolution that is so urgently needed in society today. Synergy and relationships Whether humanity can make a smooth transition from the mental-egoic age into the Age of Spirit or not will depend very much on the synergy that we can generate. Although the word synergy is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as far back as 1660, it is only in recent years that it has come into common usage. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of words in current usage did not include it until its sixth edition published in 1976. Since then, the word has come into regular use in the business world, but it is a word that is still little used in science. The reason is not hard to find. Synergy comes from Greek words meaning 'working together'. Now when two forms work together, they create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. This comes about through the relationships that are formed between the parts. This phenomenon is simply illustrated with a one dollar bill. If you tear a dollar note in half and take each half to a different bank, you will not get fifty cents for each half. The halves, on their own, are worth nothing. But if you tape the two halves together again, you could well receive a brand new note from your bank. Like magic, 0 + 0 = 1. Of course, such an equation is nonsense in mathematics as it is defined today. That is why I have developed relational logic. For, as its name implies, the purpose of relational logic is to represent the relationships between entities as they form ever greater wholes. The importance of including relationships in our learning is well illustrated by the word interesting, whose root comes from the Latin words inter, meaning 'between' and esse, meaning 'to be'. So when reductionist scientists discard the relationships between entities in their search for a fundamental particle as the building block of the Universe, they are throwing the interesting parts away! Relationships are fun. They are what makes the world go round. That is why genealogy has become a major industry in recent years. It is a pleasurable activity to make connections and links between relations and to learn a little about what has made us what we are. Of course, if the records went back far enough, we would discover that we are all cousins to each other, many times over. But sadly, we are still very far from all living together as one happy family. We are the cruellest animal ever to have inhabited this planet, and there is only a glimmer of a sign that this situation is beginning to change today. The learning or growth curve Now, for this to happen, one of the most important things we need to learn is what is causing the pace of change in the world today to accelerate exponentially. A key point here is that this is not a new phenomenon; the whole of evolution on this planet evolves in this way. For me, this was simple demonstrated by David Attenborough's enthralling television series Life on Earth, and in his book of this name, back in 1979. It is now some 3.5 billion years since the first self-reproducing forms of life appeared on this planet. So if we consider 10 million years to be a day, we can map the whole of evolution on this planet to the days of the year. This model was made very real to me when I took my children to the Natural History Museum in London in the early 1980s. For the first two exhibits we saw there were a fossilized tree trunk, some 300 million years old, in the grounds, and a dinosaur skeleton, in the entrance hall. Using David Attenborough's model, if we are now at midnight on December 31st, these two exhibits were alive at the beginning of December and during the week before Christmas. Human beings evolved in the early evening, the early farming communities began to settle about one and half minutes ago, and nearly all the knowledge that we have discovered about ourselves and the world we live in has been learnt in the past second or two. The computer age began less than half a second ago. What is causing this exponential rate of change is the synergy of structures as they form wholes of ever increasing complexity. At any one point in time, the energy provided by the relationships between forms serves as the basis for forming further structures in an accumulating manner. However, this process has not progressed at a steady pace during the past few billion years. Evolution has progressed by fits and starts. There have been many periods of rapid growth, followed by periods of comparatively little change. Also, evolution has sometimes needed to backtrack on itself, when a particular line of development reached a dead end. This changing rate of change is well illustrated by the familiar S-shape of the learning or growth curve. Although we often refer to the learning curve in everyday conversation, comparatively few scientists have studied this, the most fundamental of curves. The primary exceptions to this that I am aware of are the biologists, C. H. Waddington and Stephen Jay Gould, Peter Russell and Erich Jantsch, and, most notably, the authors of Limits to Growth, a study into the human predicament sponsored by the Club of Rome. The reason for the neglect of this key phenomenon in Nature is that, with a few notable exceptions, the effects of the growth curve cannot be measured quantitatively. The belief in the primacy of quantitative measure still dominates so much scientific thinking, as is reflected by Lord Kelvin's maxim "when you can measure what you are speaking of and express it in numbers, you know that on which you are discoursing, but when you cannot measure it and express it in number, your knowledge is of a very meagre and unsatisfactory kind". Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. It is not until you have a sound conceptual model of the domain under study that you can possibly begin to quantify phenomena in any meaningful way. Over and over again, we see the paucity of traditional scientific thinking. Why, oh why does society allow itself to be beguiled in this way? So, what does the growth curve tell us about the future of the human race? Well, as you can see, it consists of three phases. During the first phase, from A to B, growth is comparatively slow as structures gradually become manifest in the world of form. This is when so many give up learning a new skill; we get comparatively little feedback about our progress. The second phase begins when the various parts in the new structure begin to become co-ordinated, to work together in harmony. I therefore call point B the co-ordination point of the growth curve. After this, growth then displays the exponential effects that we are witnessing in the world today. However, such exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely. There is a limit to all growth processes when all relevant relationships between the parts of structures have been developed. I therefore call the point C the saturation point. After this, growth evens out, which is a situation we see in athletics events. Top performers, in seeking to create new world records, are working on part C to D of the growth curve. Now when we are engaged in a learning activity, it is not always easy to see the whole curve. When in phases AB or BC, we tend to extrapolate the rate of learning as this diagram indicates. This is what is happening in society today. There is a widespread belief that technological and economic growth will continue indefinitely. This belief is nowhere more explicitly displayed than on the front cover of Bill Gates's book The Road Ahead. For those who haven't seen this cover, this depicts a straight road crossing a sparse landscape and extending all the way to the horizon, apparently without end. This is Bill Gates's view of technological development. But nothing could be further from the truth. Technological growth cannot continue forever. One day, it will reach its limits, like all other structures in the Universe. Of course, Bill Gates is not alone in thinking that technological and economic growth with continue indefinitely. Many millions of people think along similar lines. And he is not alone in believing that technology will solve all human woes. For instance, Lou Gerstner, Chairman and CEO of IBM, said in the company's 1995 annual report "if managed properly, these technologies, rather than creating new problems, can solve centuries-old problems for people and societies". I'm not sure what centuries-old problems Lou is talking about here. For me, the central problem that has bedevilled the human race for the past several millennia is the fear of death. While technology can serve as an entertainment, thus helping to alleviate the pain of our fears, technology cannot tell us the underlying cause of our suffering. This is only possible by looking deeply within. It is only through self-knowledge that we can heal ourselves as individuals and so help to heal our grievously sick society. Nevertheless, technology does have a significant part to play in the transition from the mental-egoic era to the Age of Spirit "if managed properly". But to do this we need to understand the laws of motion of society, about what is causing us to behave in the way that we do today. Otherwise, we cannot possibly manage our business affairs 'properly'. For without this understanding, fear and ignorance will continue to dominate human learning and behaviour, not Love, Consciousness, and the Truth. The life and death curve So what happens when a growth curve reaches saturation point and levels off at the top? Well, two things can happen. Some other growth process can take over from the limited one, thus giving the effect of continuous growth. This is what we have often seen in technological growth, especially in the communications and transport industries. When one particular technology has reached the limits of its development, another technology has often appeared to take over from where the obsolete technology left off. Today, there are some signs that some areas of technological development are approaching their limits. I do not foresee that word processing software, for instance, will continue developing at an exponential rate for very much longer. Indeed, I have noticed a number of new versions of established software products being announced recently that have comparatively little new function, despite the marketing hype to the contrary. This is a sure sign that these particular technologies are approaching point C on the growth curve. Nevertheless, in other fields, there appears no lessening of the pace of technological development. Most particularly in scientists' ability to effect changes in biological organisms, including human beings. In a lecture entitled The Future of Science on 12th March 1999, Stephen Hawking said that as the result of the human genome project, "whether we like it or not, genetic engineering of people is likely in the next millennium". He went to say, "someone will redesign and improve human beings somewhere". To see whether these and his other forecasts will ever be realized, we need to stand back and look at the bigger picture of what is happening in the world today. When we look at this, we can see that many millions of individuals are improving themselves, not through genetic engineering, but through self-knowledge. And this understanding is bringing about a great awakening of consciousness, which will bring Western civilization to its end in the early years of this millennium. For by the principle of duality, all growth processes eventually reverse into decay, leading inevitably to death. There is nothing permanent in the Universe, as Shakyamuni Buddha realized over 2,500 years ago. So the growth curve has a matching decay curve, as this diagram shows. I've drawn it symmetrically as an idealization, although the two halves of the curve are rarely mirror images of each other. So not only do our own bodies go through a life and death cycle, so do civilizations, as the diagram on my Vision page illustrates. It is therefore vitally important when looking at evolution to look at the whole picture. Scientists have traditionally looked primarily at the right-hand side of this diagram, at the process of decay. This is inevitable because their focus of attention has been on the surface of the ocean of Consciousness, which can be accessed through the external senses, and not on the depths within. Because of this, they have developed such notions as the second law of thermodynamics, which suggests that the energy of the Universe will eventually dissipate into what is called the heat death of the Universe. There have been some attempts by mainstream scientists in recent years to explain the growth side of this curve, how order can arise out of chaos, most notably by Ilya Prigogine. Yet unless these theories include the power of Life, which is the source of energy behind all growth processes, they cannot possibly be true. So today, what we are witnessing is the beginning of the death of Western civilization, at the peak of its life and death curve, and the beginning of a new civilization, currently in phase AB of the growth curve. In the years to come, we can expect these two curves to cross over, as this diagram adapted from the last page of Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point indicates. And when that happens, we shall be able to say that we have truly entered the Age of Spirit. We shall be working harmoniously together to free ourselves of our delusions and cultural conditioning in a process that will move faster than the speed of light. It will be the most amazing period of human history, the like of which has never been seen before. The whole Earth will be ablaze with Consciousness, Intelligence, and Love radiating out of the divine beings that we all are. Eschatological issues But what happens when we reach the peak of this growth curve, when capitalism and communism, all the organized religions of the mental-egoic period, and materialistic science are dead? What then? Well this is really a question that belongs to the age of time that we are now in, not to the timeless period that we are entering. Nevertheless, we need to look at it, for we could be led into wishful thinking if we did not. Of course, it would be nice to believe that humanity would then live happily ever after. But such a scenario is contrary to the fundamental law of the Universe, namely that everything in the world of form has an opposite. So, as the result of this basic law of life, one day the human race will die, will become an extinct species. In other words, a generation of human beings is destined to be born who will not have children of their own. So the purpose of life of Earth cannot be to have children. Neither is survival the purpose of life. So when is this eschatological event likely to happen? Well, the life and death cycle of the sun obviously sets the outer limits for the death of the human race. By comparing our sun with stars of a similar size, astronomers estimate that in a few billion years the sun will turn into a red giant and then contract into a black dwarf star about the size of the Earth. It isn't an option to jump into our space ships looking for a green and pleasant land elsewhere in the physical universe. For all galaxies and galaxies of galaxies are subject to the same fundamental law of life. Besides which, remember that the physical universe as a whole is just the froth on the surface of the ocean of Consciousness. It has no existence separate from this vast, limitless ocean. In terms of our physical existence, we are today approximately at the midpoint of the life and death cycle of our solar system. There are still billions of years of life left in planet Earth. We can breathe a little. But can we? In order to see where evolution is carrying us it is most important that we avoid two basic mistakes that we tend to make today. The first is that the next thousand, million, or billion years will be like the last thousand, million, or billion. The second mistake that we often make is to lay the arithmetical progression of our daily lives on to exponential time. Taking the last of these first, our lives go through regular patterns of minutes, hours, days, weeks, and so on that we can map on to the integers, 1, 2, 3, many. We can look back at the generations in a similar manner, parent, grandparent, great grandparent, great great grandparent, and so on. This leads us to think that our descendants will look back at us in a similar manner to the way that we look back at our ancestors. Genealogists and family historians are particularly prone to this behaviour. But it is most unlikely that our grandchildren will look at us in the way that we look at our grandparents, for our descendants will have a deep understanding of the relationship of linear time, of past, present, and future, to the eternal now. This will come about because the awakening of consciousness will happen at such an extraordinarily rapid rate in the early years of this millennium, that our descendants will live fundamentally different lives from those we live today. To see why the next thousand, million, and billion years will not be like the past we need to look at the four major phases of evolution as we view them from here on Earth. The first phase, physiogenesis, lasted ten to twelve billion years. Biogenesis took about three and half billion years to unfold. And noogenesis has taken from five to fifty thousand years to reach its culmination point, depending on when we consider this phase to have begun. So each phase is considerably shorter than its predecessor. With the accelerating pace of evolution, this will undoubtedly be true also for the eschatological Age of Spirit. It is far more likely to be measured in hundreds of years or even decades rather than the millennia of the mental-egoic era. Another way of looking at this situation is to see that we are, today, rapidly approaching the pinnacle of all evolutionary processes on Earth. It is an evolutionary inevitability that in the next few decades, we, our children, and children's children will participate in the convergence of all the diverse strands of evolution. There is nothing that we can do to prevent this happening. Much as we might like to fight, compete, and argue with our fellow human beings, it is inevitable that peace and harmony will, one day, break out on this beautiful planet of ours. We shall then have reached the Omega point of evolution. We shall have such a profound and broad understanding of what it means to be a human being that all the major mysteries of life that have baffled human beings for the past few millennia will be understood. There will no longer be a mystery about mysticism, no more depths to plummet, no more mountains to climb. Provided we do not destroy ourselves in the meantime, children in the second half of the twenty-first century will thus be born into an age of superconsciousness, which will be in complete harmony with Nature. Learning will no longer be a struggle, for there will be no impediments to learning as there are in all cultures today. Our descendants will not be teaching their children the nonsense we teach our children today in school and university. For all the delusions that govern our behaviour today will be seen for what they are: false beliefs about God, the Universe, money, and what it means to be a human being. But then there will be major environmental differences to deal with, most particularly because all the fossil products that have been fuelling society for most of this century will have become exhausted. So the frantic pace of life will begin to slow down and people will see that evolution has turned the curve. It will have begun the billion-year descent to the death of the sun. So when we look at the multi-billion-year life and death cycle of life on Earth, we can see that the human race is destined to be the shortest lived of all the species. We are occupying just a short window when conditions on this planet are reasonably hospitable to us. It is not surprising that astronomers attempting to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligent beings on other planets have failed to do so. Any such beings who have reached the Omega point of evolution in their neck of the woods will undoubtedly have a similarly short life span. It is quite likely that many such beings have and will exist in the physical universe. But they will have discovered that the secrets of the Universe cannot be discovered by sending flying objects into outer space. They can only be discovered by looking inward, into the depths of the ocean of Consciousness. This view of the prospect facing future generations corresponds pretty well with John Leslie's The End of the World, although the way we have come to this conclusion is quite different. John Leslie looked at many of the major dangers facing humanity today, nuclear war, pollution, disease, genetic engineering, population growth, and asteroids and concluded that humanity has about a 70% chance of surviving for another five hundred years. I don't know what he means by 70% here, 70% of what? But I'm sure that his prognostication is reasonably accurate. The number of future generations of human beings is far more likely to be in single or perhaps double figures, than in three or four figures. However, I have no idea what actual circumstances will lead to the death of the human race any more than I know what will cause this being that I am to die. All I know that one day I shall die, as will Western civilization and the human race. There is no escaping this fundamental existential issue. Human ontogeny and phylogeny In Up from Eden, Ken Wilber tells us that Plotinus said "Mankind is poised midway between the beasts and the gods". That may have been true when Plotinus wrote these words and when Ken wrote his book, but in the coming years it will no longer be true. As all the divergent strands of evolution converge within humanity as a whole, we shall all realize that we are truly divine beings, not separate from God. The human race will then have made the transition from the mental-egoic period of human evolution into the Paragonian epoch. The implications of these phylogenetic developments for human ontogeny are far reaching, which we need to understand if the transition to the Age of Spirit is to be as smooth as possible. For me, this understanding lies at the core of the new science of humanity that we need to establish. Of course, this understanding will, in itself, help with the cultural transformation that we are being led towards at present. Developing comprehensive laws of motion of society is an integral part of human development, of the awakening of consciousness. The key point here is that if we can visualize human phylogeny from birth to death, then we can consciously recapitulate this process in our own ontogeny. But because this is a just a visualization of the whole, in actuality what is happening is that phylogeny is recapitulating ontogeny during the transition period that we are now in. The implications of this are some fundamental changes in human ontogeny as it is perceived from past experience. We need to look at three situations: human ontogeny as it has been during the patriarchal era, during the transition period, and in the Age of Spirit. The first of these is reasonably well understood, most particularly in Ken Wilber's monumental efforts to develop an integrated model of all aspects of human development, which he began with The Atman Project and Up from Eden after he had moved out of what he calls the "romantic period" of his own development. However, there are some significant constraints within this model. Most particularly, Ken's model does not adequately describe the Age of Spirit and the transition process that we need to pass through to reach the pinnacle of human development. As I see the situation from my own experience, if humanity as a whole is to enter the Age of Spirit, then first we need to heal the deep divisions in the noosphere, which cause us so much pain and suffering. This we can do by becoming omniologists, thereby integrating all knowledge into a coherent whole. This is an evolutionary process that generates the most enormous energy through the relationships that are formed between previously unrelated pieces of the giant jigsaw that provides a coherent picture of the totality of existence. But this, in itself, does not take us into the nondualistic Age of Spirit. To study omniology, we need to be completely uninhibited by the constraints imposed on our learning by all the cultures in the world today. This lack of inhibitions leads to a torrent of energy that has a momentum of its own. These white-water rapids cannot be stopped by an act of will, for they are the natural product of evolution. All that we can do under these circumstances is to watch this great flow of energy with the divine Intelligence that is within us, so that eventually this energy can flow easily, without any inner or outer disturbances. This, in essence, is where I have reached today in my own ontogeny. I am still exploring, attempting to learn as much a possible about the 'process' I am now in. I say 'process', but it is not really an evolutionary process through time. In essence, what I am endeavouring to do is balance Consciousness-in-action with Consciousness-at-rest. Or rather, Life is guiding me to 'do' this. During 1999, Life has been guiding me towards the growing number of self-realized teachers who are free, to a considerable extent, of all rules and traditions. Their behaviour is guided solely by Love and Intelligence, not from some mentalistic principles. For me, those teachers from the Advaita Vedanta tradition are the closest to what I mean by a Paragonian way of life. However, the route that they have taken to the pathless land is somewhat different from the one that I have been following for many years. So let us look at what is involved in beginning to study omniology. First of all, we need to start afresh at the very beginning, to break up old inhibiting structures, and rebuild them on sound gnostic, ontological, and epistemological foundations. This process has many similarities with Ken Wilber's integrative vision. However, there are a few significant differences. The key point here is to begin with simple structures and allow them to grow in a natural evolutionary manner. Ken does not generally present his work in this way, particularly in his earlier books. He presents some extremely complex structures, leaving the reader to abstract the underlying simplicity from them, which is by no means an easy task. The essence of these books is that human development progresses, like any other evolutionary activity, through a process of differentiation and integration. However, this is not one long continuous process. Rather, human growth progresses in stages or levels. Ken uses the metaphor of a multi-storey building to illustrate this point. Each floor of the building represents a stage of human development. For much of our lives, we develop within the boundaries determined by the floor we are living on at the time. However, as consciousness expands, we grow and move up a floor. When this happens, the structures that inhibit us from making such a jump break up and are reintegrated into the next higher level. Old learning is thus not rejected; it is transcended. So it is perhaps more accurate to say, as Ken does, that human development progresses through a process of differentiation, integration, and transcendence. Now this rather ideal model of human development rarely follows such a healthy path. There is much pathology in human development. For example, the process of differentiation may not complete, when structures remain fused, undifferentiated. Alternatively, integration may not happen and differentiation becomes dissociation or alienation. Sometimes, individuals can regress to lower levels of consciousness or jump ahead to higher levels before they are ready to do so. These disturbances are very common, as the multitude of personal development and spiritual books, tapes, workshops, seminars, and so on testify. And even when growth takes a comparatively healthy path, it can be quite painful as old structures break up and die. We all experience what we call growing pains. So how many floors does this multi-storey building have? Well, in The Atman Project, Ken identifies no less than seventeen levels, which he says in the preface to the second volume of his collected works could be subdivided or combined in any number of valid ways. In pursuit of simplicity, let us combine these levels into just three. In this way, we can get a much clearer picture of human development, which would be obscured if we were bogged down with too much detail too early. As I mentioned on my Vision page, we can call these three levels body, mind, and spirit, which are apparent in both human ontogeny and phylogeny. What I am particularly interested in here is the development of our sense of self. When we are conceived, we are just one cell among billions in our mothers' bodies. Even though we are not separate from our divine Source, our sense of self essentially derives from our mother's body. Then through a process of differentiation and integration, our bodies grow and develop, initially mimicking or recapitulating the evolution of the species, as Peter Russell describes in Waking up in Time. After nine months gestation, we are born as physically separate individuals, and the development of our sense of self based on our body begins. Then, gradually through infancy and early childhood, we develop a mental, egoic sense of self, which enables us to function in the world. This is a natural part of human development, which is particularly influenced by the families we grow up in. For those born within comparatively healthy, loving families, which recognize the unique developmental needs of the growing child, the child generally has the opportunity to develop a strong sense of self-worth or self-esteem. However, for the many children brought up in dysfunctional families, it is extremely difficult to develop self-esteem. For when we are children, we do not yet have the experience and consciousness to develop our own sense of self-worth independent of those around us. If we are told over and over again by our parents, teachers, and peers that we are not acceptable, then eventually this negative feedback becomes introjected as one's own personal belief system. It is the job of the psychotherapists, in particular, to help individuals to recover from such an upbringing so that they can function in the world. But is this enough? Of course not. For whether we want to accept this or not, Western civilization itself is dysfunctional. As yet, few psychotherapists are willing to acknowledge this. One that is, is Chellis Glendinning, as her book My Name is Chellis & I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization indicates. Even though Chellis appears to be falling into the pre/trans trap, this is a clear sign that the sickness of Western civilization is becoming more widely recognized. So how do we care for a sick society? How can we help such a patient to recover its sanity? Well, this is really no different from treating any other illness. It is a well recognized four-step process: Recognize the symptoms Look for the underlying cause Develop a cure Apply the remedy Erich Fromm pointed out in To Have or To Be? that these four phases of medical diagnosis and cure correspond to Buddha's four Noble Truths. But while these provide a useful guideline, as they stand, they are not fully suitable to apply to our sick Western civilization. We need to integrate all our healing experiences so that we can understand just where we are today as a species. When we do this, we can see that the underlying reason for the dysfunction of Western civilization is that as a species, we are still in the mental-egoic stage of development. I have heard spiritual teachers say that we are still swinging in the trees, like the monkeys, or that we are still in our infancy as a species. I feel that this is a little unkind; we have made far more progress than this. If we map human phylogeny from birth to death onto our own individual development, we can see that the human race as a whole is currently in adolescence, even though particular individuals have grown far beyond this comparatively early stage of development. Of course, there is nothing unhealthy about the adolescent stage of development as such. It is just a staging post on the way to full maturity and wisdom. So just as our distant ancestors were like babies in adult bodies, human beings for the past few thousand years have been like adolescents in adult bodies. What is pathological with the situation today is that such adolescent behaviour is no longer suitable for our times. Indeed, such behaviour is bringing us perilously close to extinction. It is thus time for humanity to grow up; to move up a floor in the body-mind-spirit three-storey building. But first we need to recognize the symptoms. Using Ken Wilber's model, we need to recognize that the underlying cause of our malaise is our dissociation or alienation from God, from our environment, and from each other. This pathological situation has two major causes. First, because of the specialization of work in society, the human mind has not yet become fully integrated. Our sense of self is thus based on a fragment, on identity with a particular religion, nation, race, sex, job, business, and so on. Secondly, in the West, which regards God as other, we have become separate from our Source, from the Ground of Being. As the result of this pathological dissociation, "we are the cruellest and most ruthless species that ever walked the earth", as Anthony Storr writes in Human Aggression. In a similar fashion, Erich Fromm quotes these words of Niko Tinbergen in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness: On the one hand, man is akin to many species of animals in that he fights his own species. But on the other hand, he is, among the thousands of species that fight, the only one in which fighting is disruptive ... Man is the only species that is a mass murderer, the only misfit in his own society. In such a sick, dysfunctional society, the sense of self-esteem that we develop in today's society cannot possibly be healthy. For what is the point of functioning within a society that is hell-bent on destroying itself? And as The Times of London asked in June 1999, how do you bring up boys in a culture of cruelty? The traditional solution to the problem of the mind provided by the spiritual teachers is to stop the mind functioning. "Kill the mind", as Ramana Maharshi was wont to say. But this is rather like a medical practitioner saying "kill the patient", hardly a suitable approach. We cannot kill the mind any more than we can kill the body and still function as a living human being in society. If we are to make the transition out of the mental-egoic phase of human phylogeny into the Age of Spirit, we first need to complete the process of integrating the mind. For it is really only then that we can transcend the mind and its associated ego and develop into a fully functioning, whole individual; it is only then that we can rise above the level of our machines to realize our fullest potential as human beings. This is something that each and every one of us needs to look at as an individual. For our own individual development is intrinsically linked with the development of the species. Each and every one of us is carrying the entire evolution of the human race on our shoulders alone, as Andrew Cohen urges us to recognize in Freedom Has No History. Yet we are not really alone, even though it often feels that way. Our collective learning process is interconnected through what Rupert Sheldrake calls morphic resonance. So deep down we are all moving in the same direction, even though on the surface this is far from being apparent. As a result, all the diverse strands of evolution will converge in the collective consciousness so that our sense of self will one day, in the not too distant future, break through the egocentric and anthropocentric barriers that so limit our learning today to expand to fill the whole Cosmos. There will then be no division between our own sense of consciousness, our sense of self, and Consciousness itself, beyond Self, Higher Self, Atman, or any other word that might indicate a limiting experience. In such an environment, our children will grow in a quite different way from today. The adults that guide them will no longer be adolescents, but fully mature adults, free from all delusions about God, the Universe, money, and what it means to be a human being. So children will not have their growth stunted by the limitations of their elders; they will be guided to reach their fullest potential as unique human beings. I, myself, did not have such a healthy, integrative environment to grow in as either a child or an adult. But if I can help to create such an environment for our children and children's children, then everything I have been through for the past fifty-seven years will have been well worthwhile. Home | Introduction | Vision | Economy | Book | Institute Related sites | Bibliography| Guest book | About me