Paul Hague
Autumn, for me, was the first twenty-two years of my life. During that time, the guiding religious and scientific principles of Western civilization effectively died within me, even though I did graduate in mathematics at the end of this period. Very little of what I was taught as school and university made sense to me, although, at the time, I did not know why. I didn't then have the necessary knowledge and experience to understand what was happening to me. The next sixteen years were wintertime. On the surface, all looked fine. I was married with two beautiful, intelligent children, and I was getting promoted pretty regularly in my business career. However, beneath the surface, things were not fine at all. I was spiritually dead. While superficially I was enjoying a modicum of worldly success, subconsciously this time in my life was a winter of discontent. The turning point came just before my thirty-eighth birthday. The only way that I can make sense of this life-changing happening is to look at it from a cosmic perspective. As I can see now, what happened to me in the spring of 1980 was that all the diverse strands of evolution began to converge in this being that I am. What followed was a period of hypersuperexponential growth, as spring flowers pushed their way up through the stone-hard earth of winter and as the trees blossomed and sprouted new branches and leaves. As a result, virtually everything that I have learned about myself and the Universe I live in I have learned during the past nineteen years. From this perspective, the first two seasons of my life were a time of preparation, of ploughing the earth and destroying the weeds, so that when the seed that was to produce a synthesis of everything was implanted within me in 1980, it had a well-nourished soil in which to grow and develop. Today, I feel that I am approaching the end of spring and entering summer, the final phase of my life. It will be a time of summer flowers and of mellow fruitfulness. At least, that is how I see this stage of my life unfolding. I could be wrong, of course. I might die tomorrow in an accident. But this scenario looks the most likely culmination of my ontogeny. Let me make this seasonal metaphor a little more tangible and give you a few biographical details. I was born in south-east England in 1942 and was educated principally as a mathematician. After graduating from the University of Nottingham, I followed the conventional path of getting married, bringing up a family, and pursuing a business career, in my case in the data processing industry. This was mostly with IBM (UK) in London, where I worked in a sales office in both technical and managerial roles. However, Life did not intend me to follow a career in business management, as I believed at the time. In the late seventies, when I was engaged in marketing management information systems, Life led me to see that the information society that was just then dawning was incompatible with the principles of the economic system in which I was working. Capitalism held the seeds of its own destruction within it and would inevitably collapse one day, most likely in the early years of the next millennium. Following this insight, my whole life since then has been dedicated to laying down the foundations of a life-enhancing, ecologically sustainable economy that would endure for as long as there are human beings living on this beautiful planet of ours, however long or short this might be. So that I could have the freedom for this challenging task, Life led me to get divorced and to resign from IBM, which I did in 1980. At first, I had little understanding of what was happening to me. But over the years, a coherent picture of the totality of existence emerged in my consciousness, which now enables me to see just where we have all come from and where we all heading, as I am endeavouring to describe in this web site and later in my book. In biographical terms, I was unemployed for seven years between 1980 and 1990, working only when I was able to do so, including a nine-month stint as a computer consultant in Kuwait in 1982. The most significant event during this time was that in 1986 I married a Norwegian woman who I had met at The Other Economic Summit (TOES) in London the previous year. We lived for a time in both Norway and England, before we moved to Stockholm in 1990, when I rejoined IBM at its Nordic Software Development Laboratory as a technical writer and human interface designer. However, neither my marriage nor my job was destined to last. I got divorced again in 1992, and IBM closed its laboratory as part of its reengineering and downsizing activities. As a consequence, I took early retirement from IBM in 1997, which has given me the opportunity to bring my pioneering work out to the world at large. Home | Introduction
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When I look at my life as a whole, I can see that it consists
of four main phases, each of approximately twenty years duration, which match the
four seasons. But these seasons are not in the sequence spring, summer, autumn, winter,
as you might expect. They are in the order autumn, winter, spring, and summer.