Welcome
Whatever our beliefs and assumptions
about what it means to be a human being, each and every one of us is
the product of some twelve to fifteen billion years of evolution. If
Life had not unfolded just the way that it did during all these aeons,
none of us, either as individuals or a species, would be where we are
today.
This means, of course, that the
exponential rate of change that we are experiencing in the world today
is just the latest manifestation of evolution. So if we are to understand
where we have come from and where we are all heading in such a frantic
rush, we each need to develop a model of our own learning process, free
from our anthropocentric, cultural, and personal conditioning. For our
learning is an evolutionary process, following the same principles as
the evolution of the species.
And, of course, such a model is
itself a natural manifestation of the unfolding of Life. So there is
nothing any of us can do to reach such an understanding. If this understanding
arises within us, it happens, whether we wish it or not. For as the
spiritual master, Ramana Maharshi, said, "What is not meant to happen
will not happen, however much you wish it. What is meant to happen will
happen, no matter what you do to prevent it. This is certain."
But how is such an understanding
possible? How is it that Julian Huxley was able to say, "in modern scientific
man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself"?
Well, in one respect, we human
beings are no different from any other species. We are not in control
of our destiny any more than an ant or an elephant is. But in one key
way we differ from all the other species. As Erich Fromm pointed out
in Man for Himself, we human beings are the least instinctive
of all the animals. Virtually all our behaviour is learned. Using the
metaphor of the computer, very little of our behaviour is 'hard-wired'.
We are essentially programmed to behave in the way that we do.
Now in order for us to discover
how we learn and why we behave as we do, Life
has given us human beings a reflective intelligence, which gives us
the potential to see our inner and outer worlds as one coherent whole,
and ultimately to see how the Universe is designed. Indeed, when we
look at human development over the millennia, we can see that our reflective
intelligence has been leading us towards a greater and greater understanding
of who we truly are, about our place in the Universe, and about our
relationship to God, an understanding that has been accelerating faster
and faster during the latter half of the twentieth century.
It was this reflective intelligence
that led the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
to write his enlightening book, The Phenomenon of Man,
in the 1930s, although it was only published posthumously in 1955. In
this visionary book, Teilhard saw that evolution as a whole progresses
through a process of differentiation and integration, of divergence
and convergence.
Extrapolating this process into
the future, he saw that one day all the diverse strands of evolution
would converge into one great megasynthesis, which would lead humanity
to the end of evolution, what he called the Omega point. And when this
happens, there will be the most extraordinary awakening of consciousness.
For as Teilhard observed,
the greater the complexity of the structures that have evolved during
the past several billion years, the greater the consciousness, an observation
he called the law of complexity-consciousness.
Indeed, the very root of the word
consciousness reflects this fundamental law of evolution. For
consciousness comes from the Latin words cum meaning 'with'
or 'together' and scire meaning 'to know', a word that is cognate
with science. So the more we learn to integrate and synthesize
our knowledge into a unified, coherent whole, the greater the consciousness
that naturally arises. And when we learn how to integrate all
knowledge in all disciplines and cultures at all times,
past, present, and future, a state of cosmic consciousness is a natural
concomitant.
Now Teilhard made one significant
mistake in his prophecy. Despite his great vision, he did not seem to
have an understanding of the exponential rate of evolutionary change.
He therefore thought that the megasynthesis that he saw evolution heading
towards would not happen for many thousands of years.
To correct this error, we need
to make a radical change to the way that we view time. What
we tend to do today is use our own lifespans as a measuring stick for
time. In this way, we can have some understanding of the past few hundred
years or even of a thousand or two. But it is not easy to have a feeling
for a billion years of evolution from our anthropocentric perspective.
Today, with the discovery of complexity
theory, we are able to get a much better feeling for the exponential
rate of evolutionary change, and thus make a more accurate prediction
than Teilhard was able to make. The key point here is to note that evolution
has not developed at a constant rate over the aeons. There have been
many periods when there has been comparatively little growth, punctuated
by shorter periods, when growth has been explosive in character, a phenomenon
well illustrated by the familiar S-shape of the growth or learning curve,
as Stephen Jay Gould points out in Ever Since Darwin.
So just as there are clearly distinguishable
levels in human phylogeny and ontogeny, as Ken
Wilber describes in Up from Eden and The Atman
Project, respectively, there are also major turning points in
evolution, when viewed as a whole. And because the rate of evolutionary
change is exponential, the time periods between these major turning
points become shorter and shorter, eventually diminishing to zero.
Now if we take an infinite number
of these rapidly diminishing time periods and add them together, the
result is not infinity; it is a finite number. For instance, the sum
of this series is not infinity, but two:
To see how this relates to evolution,
we can look at evolution as a progression of self-organizing systems.
This is what Nick Hoggard of Holma College in Sweden has done in an
unpublished book called SuperEvolution. This book has,
in turn, been inspired by another unpublished book by Carl Johan Calleman
of Dalarna University, also in Sweden, called boldly The Theory
of Everything, which looks at evolution in the context of the
Mayan calendar.
What Nick has observed in his book
is that the time periods between the major turning points in evolution
are diminishing by a factor that is very close to the Feigenbaum constant
in complexity theory: 4.669. Each of these significant turning points
has introduced a new, faster way of generating evolutionary solutions,
as Nick points out. So we can see a series of events, starting with
the big bang and then progressing through the birth of self-reproducing
forms of life and sexual reproduction, to the birth of the noosphere,
the industrial revolution, and the invention of the programmable computer.
Now in complexity theory, the series
of discrete terms in systems development, called bifurcation points,
has a finite limit, at what is called the point of accumulation. After
this, systems are no longer periodic in nature, but display chaotic
characteristics. For example, a dripping tap, as it is turned on, goes
through a series of bifurcations before it becomes a continuous flow,
which is regarded as chaotic by systems theorists.
Applying these general characteristics
of self-organizing systems to evolution as a whole, Nick has calculated
that the evolutionary point of accumulation will occur around the years
2001 and 2004. Thus within the next few years, evolution is destined
to go through the most fundamental change in its twelve to fifteen billion
years history. What Niles
Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould call "punctuated equilibrium"
is about to give way to a continuous, unstoppable flow of energy.
The effect on both human phylogeny
and ontogeny will be far reaching. It means that humanity will be carried
into an eschatological epoch of quite exquisite beauty, much as Teilhard
prophesied. It will be a 'super' epoch, which Teilhard, himself, called
superlife, and Ken Wilber calls superconscious. It will be an epoch
of Freedom, based on nondual Love, Consciousness, Intelligence, and
Truth, in which all the wars that have bedevilled human affairs for
the past few millennia will have come to an end. Peace, at long last,
will reign over our troubled planet.
Not that everyone, as individuals,
will pass through the evolutionary point of accumulation (EPA) at the
same time. We can illustrate this with a simple analogy. When a pot
of water is put on a burner, we can predict that eventually all the
molecules in the water will evaporate as steam. But we cannot predict
in which sequence the molecules will escape from the pot. Paradoxically,
random effects at the micro level lead to a phenomenon that we can predict
at the macro level.
So it is with evolution. We cannot
say which individuals will pass through the EPA and when they will do
so. However, what we can predict is that a significant proportion of
humanity is destined to pass through the EPA, to return home to Wholeness,
in the next decade or two. This is an evolutionary inevitability, that
none of us has the power to prevent, no matter how much we might try.
In
my case, I have been passing through through the evolutionary point
of accumulation during the past twenty years, experiencing all the diverse
strands of evolution converging within me, much as Teilhard prophesied.
I am therefore setting up this web site to help those who might be interested
in understanding what is causing the exponential rate of change in the
world today, where we have all come from, and where we are all heading
in such a hurry.
As I have said, we are able to
see where evolution is carrying us as a species because we human beings,
unlike all the other animals, have a reflective intelligence. We therefore
all have the potential to see how the Universe is designed, to see the
Big Picture.
But we cannot make sense of it
all by pointing telescopes at the night sky. If we are to see the Big
Picture, we need to follow the adage inscribed on the temple of Apollo
at Delphi, "Know thyself".
Now we cannot learn to know ourselves
through minds conditioned by religious, scientific, or economic beliefs.
For as Krishnamurti said in Education and the Significance of Life,
"[unconditioned] intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential,
the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others,
is education".
It is thus vital that we learn
to create a loving, caring space where it is acceptable to question
all the fixed beliefs and assumptions of whatever culture or subculture
we belong to. For unless we do this, "humanity is not a viable
species", as David Bohm pointed out in an interview in 1986 to
discuss Krishnamurti's approach to education.
Today, there are a growing number
of people who are courageously questioning the traditional beliefs of
the cultures they live in. However, there is still a widespread taboo
on questioning our economic and monetary beliefs.
This puts us all in a pretty perilous
predicament. Our obsession
for money is like a pernicious cancer eating away at the very fabric
of society, causing severe psychological and ecological damage. Yet
money provides many with their sense of identity and security in life.
It is thus highly probable that
the global crisis that many are concerned about today will get far more
painful before Life enables us to heal our grievously sick society,
before we, as a species, return home to Wholeness. For unless the pain
of not changing is greater than the pain of changing, nothing really
changes.
For this reason, it is the children
born in the latter part of the last century and in this who will carry
evolution to its great denouement. For as Max Planck wrote in his autobiography,
"a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually
die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it".
So even though we, as parents and
grandparents, may not ourselves consciously return home to Wholeness,
it is nevertheless up to us to
make our descendants' path through life as smooth as possible. With
the accelerating rate of change in the world, there is little point
in educating our children to live in the world that exists today. It
is vitally important that we do our best to prepare them to live in
the world that will exist when they reach maturity.
I trust, therefore, that this
web site, and the book that will grow from it, can give some insight
into where our species is heading. In this respect, I feel that it is
better to begin with the goal than look at how we might all reach Wholeness.
For Wholeness is what we all share in common; it is the Ground of Being
of our pluralistic society. But how we return home to Wholeness is unique
to each and every one as individuals.
So what does Wholeness mean? Well,
in essence, Wholeness is the union of all opposites, called yoga in
the East. This means that Wholeness is beyond compare. To compare one
individual's sense of Wholeness with another's is a violation of Wholeness.
For it is only fragments that can be compared in the relativistic world
of form.
By the same token, it is not possible
to communicate Wholeness as a message from one individual to another.
For it is only fragments that can be communicated. In Wholeness, there
is neither a sender nor a receiver.
Wholeness--the Absolute Whole--has
no opposite. Wholeness is thus nondual, embracing the most fundamental
of all opposites, those of nonduality and duality. In the language of
the East, Wholeness is Advaita, meaning 'not two'. This means that Wholeness
in not holistic; Wholeness embraces and unifies both holism and reductionism,
which cause so much argument and conflict in dualistic science today.
Wholeness is therefore not a paradigm
or even what Peter Russell calls a 'metaparadigm' in his splendid new
book From Science to God. For paradigm comes from a Greek
word meaning 'pattern'. And Wholeness is a limitless, seamless continuum,
with no divisions or borders within it, beyond all patterns.
In Wholeness, the sense of a separate
self thus disappears. There is therefore no 'other' in Wholeness, and
thus no fear or suffering. In
particular, the fear of death disappears. For when all opposites are
unified, past and future merge into the eternal now. There is thus no
birth or death in Wholeness; no reincarnation, for there is nothing
to reincarnate, and no everlasting life after death.
Furthermore, when we look deeply
into the question "Who am I?", after Ramana Maharshi and his
Advaita successors, we find there is no entity in the Universe that
can be said to do or own anything; not our own bodies, and certainly
not money. It is the egoic
mind that is the great claimer, as Vijai Shankar points out in his satsangs.
The ego makes claims of doership and ownership that it is not its to
claim. Conversely, the ego blames others for what it does not wish to
claim or complains about situations it finds itself in. Claiming, blaming,
and complaining are three of the most obvious symptoms of our sick society
today.
Another word for Wholeness is Consciousness.
But Wholeness is not a state of consciousness. For Consciousness
embraces and contains all states of consciousness, whatever they might
be. Wholeness is therefore not an altered or nonordinary state of consciousness.
You cannot detect Wholeness on an EEG machine. Wholeness
is our natural being, who we truly are. There
are thus no degrees of Wholeness, no levels of Consciousness. Wholeness
is Wholeness, Consciousness is Consciousness, plain and simple.
I use two metaphors for Consciousness.
The first is light. But not the diffuse light of the sun or a light
bulb. The light of Consciousness is coherent, like a laser. The coherent
light of Consciousness thus enables us to look at the Cosmos holographically.
Every part of the Universe has the property of self-similarity, like
fractals. As William Blake beautifully expressed it:
To see a world in a Grain
of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
Intelligence is the eyesight of
Consciousness. It is unconditioned, divine Intelligence, which we all
share, that enables us to view the totality of existence as a coherent
whole. Our divine Intelligence is thus what many spiritual teachers
call the Witness.
The other metaphor for Consciousness
I use is an ocean. The waves and currents of this vast ocean of Consciousness
have no independent existence as such; they are all merely abstractions
from Consciousness. This metaphor is a nonlinear extension of David
Bohm's notion of the holomovement, a concept he introduced in his theory
of the implicate order to unify the incompatibilities between the theory
of relativity and quantum theory.
Reality is another synonym
for Wholeness. What we call the real world of our physical senses is
not Real. Everything in the relativistic world of form, from big bangs
and black holes to the most subtle nuances of consciousness, is just
waves and currents in the ocean of Consciousness, what is called maya
in the East; a delusion. These waves and currents are nothing more than
the play of the Divine, called leela in the East.
This play of the Divine is similar
to what Christians call God the Creator. This is Life itself, arising
from Wholeness. Life arises as what Heraclitus called the Logos, the
primary organizing principle of the Universe, giving us all the potential
to see the Cosmos as a unified, harmonious Whole.
A further word for Wholeness is
Love, which again has no opposite. This means that in Love there
is no object of devotion. For in Love there is no 'other' to love or
to hate; Love is complete in itself. This is something that the dualistic
mind cannot understand. For in the words of the Sufi poet, Rumi, "Love
is the sea where the intellect drowns".
Love, then, is a sense of well-being,
free from all conflict, both inner and outer. When evolution carries
us all home to Wholeness, all the wars that have bedevilled human affairs
for the past few thousand years will have come to an end: holy wars
(wars about the Whole), national wars, territorial wars, political wars,
economic wars, business wars, racial wars, ideological wars, academic
wars, battles of the sexes, and so on and so forth.
Yet another aspect of Wholeness
is Truth. In the words of Krishnamurti, "Truth is a pathless land".
This pathless land is rather like the summit of a mountain. When we
are on the top of a mountain, we can see the whole, all the paths that
might have led us there, including the one we actually took.
Throughout human history, individuals
have discovered many different paths to the pathless land, which they
have expressed in a wide variety of languages appropriate for their
times. But it is important to recognize that these expressions are not
the pathless land, not the Truth.
For Wholeness, the Truth, is ineffable.
Wholeness cannot satisfactorily be expressed in the words of any language.
All we can do, after Shakyamuni Buddha, is use words like a finger pointing
to the moon.
Underlying all these pointers is
one central motif: Wholeness is the union of all opposites. So
if I say A is B, and you say A is not-B, then the union of these two
statements is Wholeness. There is thus no conflict, argument, or controversy
about Wholeness. Wholeness is perfect, the union of perfection and imperfection.
There is nothing more wonderful in the whole of existence.
While there are many paths to the
Truth, so far I know of only one to Wholeness. This consists of three
steps: disidentification, transcendence, and union. The first of these
is key. To realize Wholeness, we need to disidentify with everything
in the world of form, including all religions, nationalities, economic
ideologies, business corporations, academic disciplines, political parties,
niches in the world, status symbols, spiritual practices, relationships,
deep traumatic memories, the colour of our skin, our sex, and even the
anthropocentric notion that we are human beings.
Now, in order to disidentify with
everything in the world of form, I have needed to investigate and practice
many psychotherapeutic and spiritual techniques, and I suspect anyone
else seeking Wholeness needs to do the same. But then, we need to give
up all these techniques and just meditate on the union of all opposites.
No effort is required here, for any wanting takes us away from the goal
of Wholeness.
Today, despite many counter-indications,
there is considerable evidence that humanity is collectively poised
to return home to Wholeness, discovering what it truly means to be a
human being, free from all anthropocentric, cultural, and personal conditioning.
Some of these indications are:
- Many people today are turning
to the East for spiritual fulfillment, even though there is a risk
of spiritual materialism, as Chögyam Trungpa observed.
- Many others, sometimes the same
individuals, are engaged in self-development, although it must be
admitted that there is often a strong narcissistic element here, as
Ken Wilber is increasingly
pointing out in his writings.
- There are a growing number of
people who are seeking to heal the great schism between science and
spirituality and between the East and the West, even though the emphasis
is still more on finding parallels between science and spirituality
rather than unifying them.
- Even the globalization of society,
in which we are all seen as interdependent of each other, is a sign
that all the diverse streams of evolution are converging into a coherent
whole.
For myself, I have been led by
Life to develop what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called a megasynthesis,
as I have mentioned. This
synthesis of everything has evolved naturally from my 36-year business
career in the information technology industry, mostly with IBM in sales,
marketing, and software development.
In the late 1970s, I began to be
deeply concerned about our ignorance of the long-term economic and psychological
implications of our growing dependency on the programmable computer.
Before that, I had thought that I was making a worthwhile contribution
to my fellow human beings. For by helping to automate repetitive jobs
in business, I thought I was helping to free people from drudgery so
that they could be more creative in their work activities.
But just over twenty years ago,
I saw that this was not happening at all. We were becoming slaves to
our machines and to an economic system that regards economic growth
and technological development to be more important than the awakening
of human consciousness and intelligence. This insight showed me that
both the materialistic economies of capitalism and communism are incompatible
with the Information Age that we were entering around 1980, and would
most likely collapse within thirty years, before my children reached
the age that I was then.
In the event, communism has collapsed
in Eastern Europe and it cannot now be long before capitalism follows
suit. But why do we behave in this way? Why is evolution blindly driving
our society to what many would regard as a catastrophe? Why is it that
we prefer ignorance, what is called avidya in the East, to facing
the truth of life on Earth? Why
is it that so few are interested in investigating the underlying causes
of the accelerating rate of change that we are experiencing in the world
today, where we human beings have come from, and where we are all heading
in such a frantic rush?
In 1980, I decided to find out, to answer
these and many other questions that had arisen within me since I was
eight years of age, when I began to wonder about who I am and about
my relationship to God and the Universe. I therefore resigned from my
job marketing management information systems for IBM (UK), and set out
to develop a model of my own learning process.
After all, as I was a technologist helping
to cause the rate of change in society to accelerate exponentially,
there must be some energies within me that were causing me (and my colleagues)
to act in this way. But these energies were obviously quite different
from the energies that I had learnt about in physics at school. So it
became clear to me that there must be nonphysical energies at work in
the Universe, energies not then (and still not today) recognized by
science.
I therefore set out to develop a comprehensive
science that would unify the nonphysical energies that I had 'discovered'
with traditional physical energies. I knew that I could not do this
within the context of conventional science. So I started afresh at the
very beginning; I embarked on an experiment in learning de novo,
rather like René Descartes, some 350 years earlier.
What I have been particularly focused
on is discovering the essential differences and similarities between
us human beings and our machines. As
the result of this great adventure in self-discovery, I have been led
to develop an all-inclusive, limitless science called omniology,
and a non-Aristotelian, nondualistic logic called relational logic.
This might seem rather strange. How on
earth can science and logic be concerned with self-inquiry? Aren't our
inner journeys a spiritual quest? And isn't science concerned with investigating
only our external, physical world, so-called objective reality? So what
has spirituality got to do with science and logic?
Actually, everything. We cannot possibly
know whether our reasoning is truly logical without freeing ourselves
of the hidden assumptions and preconceptions that we have inherited
from our forebears. We cannot know what it truly means to be a human
being, in contrast to our machines, if we look at ourselves and the
world we live in through habitual, mechanistic systems of thought.
So to fully understand ourselves and what
is happening to our species at the present time, we need to turn science
inwards. Specifically, as my background is in mathematics and the information
technology industry, I have turned the business modelling techniques
used by information systems architects inwards, as I explain in more
detail later on this page, on this web site, and in the book that I
am writing.
By turning a thoroughly methodical approach
to learning inwards in this way, our external world looks quite different
from what is taught in schools and universities today. Indeed, we can
then see that Western civilization is upside down. By attempting to
understand the inner in terms of the outer rather than the other way
round, it is standing on its head instead of its feet.
Western civilization is standing on its
head because it does not have a sound foundation. Because we in the
West have become separate from our divine Source there is nothing else
we can do; otherwise we would fall over. The East, on the other hand,
is soundly based on the Ground of Being, but it has comparatively little
interest in the practical world of affairs. So while Eastern world-views
are considerably closer to the Truth than Western, neither East nor
West is Whole in itself.
To unify East and West and spirituality
and science we need to turn Western science, in particular, up the other
way so that its head is in its natural position. But this, in itself,
is not sufficient to be Whole. The East, as it stands today, is not
ready to receive an inverted West. The East needs to free itself from
its spiritual conditioning to become fully integrated with the West
free from its mechanistic and materialistic conditioning.
The principal reason why I have needed
to coin a new word to denote my studies is because I am more a generalist
than a specialist. Historically, through the division of labour, we
have divided the world of work into a multitude of specialities, a fragmentation
that has prevented any of us from seeing the Big Picture. It is the
task of an omniologist to rectify this situation.
But what is this strange thing called
omniology? Well, omniology is a comprehensive scientific method, a systematic
approach to learning, that produces a coherent body of knowledge corresponding
to all human experience, both inner and outer, from mystical, through
mental, to somatic and physical. By knowledge here, I do not
just mean that which can be represented by symbols on paper or in a
computer. I also include our deep inner knowing, which, for me, is inseparable
from formal, symbolic knowledge.
Omniology is not at the frontiers of science.
It is science without divisions, limits, or frontiers. Everything is
possible within omniology; nothing is excluded. Furthermore, omniology
is not a science, like physics, chemistry, or biology. Rather,
omniology is science. What purports to be science today, with
all its constraints and rigid, built-in prejudices, cannot possibly
produce a coherent body of knowledge that truly reflects the ever-changing,
limitless Universe we live in.
What then does it mean to be an omniologist?
This is not an easy question to answer for, unlike all other occupations,
from monks to medical practitioners, omniologists are invisible to the
categorizing mind. Omniologists work in a transcultural and transdisciplinary
manner in the context of the Whole. This means that it is only possible
to know what it means to be an omniologist by studying omniology. In
a similar manner, we can only know what it is really like to be a concert
pianist or a brain surgeon by practising these professions. There is
no substitute for direct experience.
Nevertheless, we can have some intuition
about what it might be like to be a concert pianist or a brain surgeon
from the latent energies that are present in every one of us. I am sure
that a similar situation exists for omniologists. Being able to see
the totality of existence as a coherent whole is a potential within
us all. It is now just a matter of time before this potential becomes
manifest throughout society, before humanity as a whole passes through
the evolutionary point of accumulation.
Now, as I have said, Wholeness is the
union of all opposites. So if omniologists are to be whole, they need
specialities to balance the generalizing effects of omniology. In my
case, I have worked in many different specialities during my business
career in the information technology industry. Collectively, I can integrate
all these occupations into one, which I call an information systems
architect, a person who can see the big picture, how all the parts of
a system fit together to form a coherent whole.
Conversely, if specialists are to be whole,
they need omniology as a balance. So, one day, as our society becomes
more and more integrated, I envisage that everyone will be both an omniologist
as well as specialists in some particular fields. This will come about
because children will learn relational logic at school just as they
learn their multiplication tables.
This, in itself, will bring about major
changes in how we educate our children. For a specialist is someone
who learns more and more about less and less, eventually knowing everything
about nothing. An omniologist, on the other hand, is someone who, in
the extreme, knows nothing about everything. Being an omniologist is
therefore not so much about learning as about forgetting, unlearning.
So an omniologist is not omniscient. Far
from it. The deeper my studies of everything have taken me over the
years, the less I have felt the need to learn anything in particular,
other than to deal with the practicalities of daily life or to have
some fun. For Wholeness is complete in itself. From
the perspective of Wholeness, from the summit of the mountain of all
knowledge, not only are the details irrelevant, they actually get in
the way.
From an evolutionary perspective, the
scientific method that has dominated human learning for the past few
centuries has reached a dead-end in its development. The unprecedented
global crisis facing humanity today requires an unprecedented solution.
For as Einstein said, "no problem can be solved from the same consciousness
that created it".
The only practical way forward is to start
afresh at the very beginning, free from our mechanistic and materialistic
ways and beliefs. In other words, we can neither understand what is
happening to our species at the present time nor reach our final destination
starting from where we are today. A radically new, life-enhancing approach
to human learning is urgently needed. We need to widen the horizons
of our visions so that these illusory limits dissolve into the infinite
beyond.
When we learn to adopt such an unfettered
approach to learning, to ground science on Spirit, we return to the
origin of the Universe, to the beginning of Life, to the still Source
of all energy. And then a remarkable thing happens: we discover that
our common Source is also our final destination; we have returned home
to Wholeness. And even more extraordinary, we realize that we have never
left home. Throughout our lives as individuals and as a species we have
never, at any moment, been separate from God, the formless, timeless
Ground of Being, despite what is taught to us in our culture today.
Another word for the Source, Life, God,
and the Ground of Being is Consciousness, as I said earlier.
As Consciousness is Wholeness, it is limitless and has no divisions,
borders, or boundaries within it. Consciousness both embraces the totality
of existence and also lies within everything that exists. It is both
transcendent and immanent.
Consciousness is thus the primary reality,
and not the physical universe as is believed by many scientists today.
To see this, we need to stop looking at the Universe in terms of space,
time, matter, and energy, but rather look at it in terms of form, structure,
relationships, and meaning. From this perspective, the Cosmos is not
what is studied by the astronomers. Rather, the Cosmos is like a vast
ocean of Consciousness, where the surface is the physical universe of
our external senses, the depths are the psyche, and the floor of this
great ocean is the nondual Ground of Being.
When we experience this wonderful oceanic
feeling, we can see that Western civilization, which today dominates
the world through the global economy, is based on a set of false beliefs
or delusions about God, the Universe, Life, money, and what it means
to be a human being.
Western civilization is thus not based
on the ineffable Truth. That is why this great civilization, which has
done so much for the material well-being of its people over the centuries,
is now dying. Western civilization has nothing to offer the world by
way of spiritual well-being, when all fears die. It is thus giving way
to a new civilization, which is based soundly on Love, Peace, Consciousness,
Spirit, and the Truth.
Now the amazing thing is that we human
beings can see this at all. Never before in the course of human history
have the participants in the death of one civilization and the birth
of another been able to see what was happening to them. The fact that
we can do so today is the result of many studies undertaken by scholars
and enlightened spiritual teachers during the twentieth century.
However, not everyone can see the great
social transformation that is taking place in the world today. Although
there are many signs of a new light dawning, for the most part we are
still living in the dark, not unlike the dark ages before the Copernican
revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Arthur Koestler brilliantly chronicled
the period prior to the first great Scientific Revolution in The
Sleepwalkers. Today, we are not so much sleepwalkers as sleeprunners,
or even sleepdrivers, blindly driving our cars down the highway at ever-increasing
speeds, having little understanding of what we are doing and why we
are doing it.
Now as is well-known, it was the Scientific
Revolution that led to the great schism between science and religion,
between reason and spirituality. However, what is not widely recognized
and acknowledged is that the Scientific Revolution merely widened the
gulf that had appeared between God and humanity a few thousand years
earlier, a split that remains today within the major monotheistic religions.
To say that one is in union with God, which is more than acceptable
in the East, has long been regarded as blasphemy by Jews, Christians,
and Muslims, alike.
So if we are to wake up before our blindness
leads us all into catastrophe, we need to end the separation between
God and humanity that the egoic mind opened up some four or five thousand
years ago, a happening that is mythologically represented by the Fall
in the Garden of Eden. By healing this deep wound in the human psyche,
we can then uncover the innocence of Consciousness, which we lost both
as individuals and as a species when the mind came to dominate the psyche.
On this solid gnostic foundation, we can
then complete the new Copernican revolution that has been taking place
during the past few decades, just as Newton completed the first heliocentric
revolution with his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
In other words, we need a comprehensive
cosmology of cosmologies that puts the coherent light of Consciousness
at the centre of the Universe and which unifies all opposites, the inner
and the outer, science and religion, mysticism and metamathematics,
physical and nonphysical energies, life and death, and so on and so
forth, just as Newton unified the terrestrial and nonterrestrial forces
known at his time.
In doing this, nothing really changes.
When Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton showed that the sun is
the centre of the solar system, the Earth did not suddenly start to
circle the sun. It had done so since the formation of the solar system.
Similarly, regarding Consciousness as the primary reality does not mean
that this change comes about in Reality. Consciousness has always provided
the overall context for our lives. It is just that what is happening
now in very many people is that the clouds that have prevented the full
brilliance of the coherent light of Consciousness from reaching us are
being blown away. That is the new heliocentric revolution we are engaged
in.
As I have mentioned, I call just such
a cosmology of cosmologies omniology, meaning the science or study of
everything. Omniology provides a way of organizing and integrating all
knowledge in all cultures and disciplines at all times, past, present,
and future, into a coherent whole. Omniology can thus be seen as the
Theory of Everything that some mainstream physicists have been seeking
for the past few decades. But rather than calling this grand unified
theory a unified field theory as Einstein posited in 1925, I call it
a unified relationships theory, because fields are just a special case
of relationships, and it is relationships that make the world go round.
It is vitally important to recognize here
that as Consciousness is the primary reality, we cannot expect the physicists
to tell us how the Universe is designed. Today some of them are attempting
to develop a comprehensive theory that can explain all of nature's forces
within a single framework. But this endeavour cannot possibly succeed
because physicists recognize only four basic physical forces: gravitational,
electromagnetic, and the weak and strong nucleic forces. They do not
recognize the existence of the multitude of nonphysical energies at
work in the Universe, most particularly the many different types of
energy present in the human psyche.
This means that we need to free ourselves
from the association between energy and matter, expressed in Einstein's
famous equation E=mc2. In omniology,
I associate energy with meaning. This might seem a strange notion at
first sight. But this relationship arises quite naturally when we learn
to develop a coherent semantic model of all our experiences.
As omniology is the science of everything,
it naturally embraces the science of Consciousness that many scientists
and philosophers are searching for today. Indeed, as Consciousness is
all there is--as Consciousness is the totality of existence--we can
also say that omniology is the science of Consciousness.
But it is quite different from what most
researchers envisage such a science to be. Today consciousness studies
are mainly conducted on the assumption that consciousness is a property
of the brain, leading to the so-called 'hard problem': how can matter
give rise to consciousness? This is not a hard question to answer; it
is impossible. The whole world of form, including mind and matter, arises
from Consciousness, not the other way round.
This all-embracing view of Consciousness
is not unlike what some are calling Ken Wilber's
unified field theory of consciousness--"a synthesis and interpretation
of the world's great psychological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions".
Yet despite the breadth and depth of this great synthesis, it nevertheless
falls short of a comprehensive model of all human experience. Most particularly,
as it stands today, it does not satisfactorily model my own ontogeny.
I can only make sense of what has happened to me during my life through
a unified relationships theory of consciousness, by studying
omniology.
Furthermore, because omniology unifies
all opposites it is not just a theory. As omniology is based solely
on one's learning experience, and not on the arcane mathematical models
of the physicists and financiers, it also addresses the practical issues
that face us in this time of accelerating change, from the way we relate
to each other as individuals to the way we manage our business affairs.
Relational logic provides the framework
or system of coordinates for this synthesis of everything. Relational
logic is so called because it has arisen through the action of the Logos,
called Dharma, Rita, and Tao in Eastern cultures, and because it has
evolved from the relational model of data, introduced by Ted Codd in
1970 when he was working for IBM in one of its research laboratories.
This synthesizing relational model of data had, in turn, evolved from
the mathematical theory of relations and first-order predicate logic.
Relational logic is a nonaxiomatic, nonlinear
logic, which can also be seen as a generalization of the semantic modelling
methods that information systems architects use in business to build
a coherent picture of the underlying structure of organizations and
software systems. Relational logic thus manifests the underlying, unifying
structure of the Universe, which can simply be described as an infinitely
dimensional network of hierarchical relationships.
It is important to note that although
omniology has evolved from mathematics and computer science, it does
not belong to the cultural landscape that exists in the world today.
Omniology is simple common sense, that which we all share, regardless
of background. It is thus transdisciplinary and transcultural, belonging
neither to the East nor the West. The discipline of omniology is therefore
not science, philosophy, or religion in the sense that these words are
understood today. Science-mathematics, philosophy-psychology, and religion-mysticism
are divisions of knowledge that have no meaning in Reality.
Like all previous scientific revolutions
that have involved a radically new way of looking at the Universe and
humanity's place in it, omniology is not easy to understand at first
sight. Putting Western civilization back on its feet after so many centuries
and millennia standing on its head is not a task that can be completed
in a day. It takes time for old, rigid structures to break up and die
so that fresh, vibrant forms of life can emerge and blossom. A period
of confusion and uncertainty, which can be quite painful, is thus necessary
for universal order to become manifest. Breakdown nearly always precedes
breakthrough.
As the way that I look at business modelling
methods is unfamiliar even to my colleagues in the information technology
industry, I must briefly describe the immediate progenitor of relational
logic. In essence, business modelling methods today are used prior to
decisions about which processes in the organization are to be automated
by machine, and which will continue to be performed by human beings
in the workplace. However, there is one inherent weakness of all business
modelling methods at present: they do not model the process of creating
the business model in the first place.
Relational logic has emerged in my consciousness
to correct this omission. It does this by turning these business modelling
techniques inwards. Instead of using modelling methods to design information
and software systems in our external world, as is conventional, relational
logic models the inner learning process of the modeller her- or himself.
In this way, it becomes possible to model all the processes of an organization,
including the modelling process itself, whether it be a commercial business,
government, university, medical institution, religious institution,
or whatever.
I have taken this approach to determine
to what extent the jobs performed by human beings in the workplace can
be automated. For if the mechanistic assumptions of modern science are
true, it must be possible to use the techniques of computer science
to automate all the jobs in an organization, such as professors of physics,
computer science, and philosophy, the 'jobs' of the students learning
in the university, and computer programmers and modellers working in
business.
Relational logic shows that this is impossible.
The way that this has emerged in me is that I set up an experiment in
learning that assumed that I was a machine and nothing but a machine.
This machine then had the task of learning how to develop a modelling
method that could model this learning process and so organize all knowledge
into a coherent whole, rather like some envisage the Internet becoming.
But this machine did not have an external human programmer to tell it
how to do this. It had to program itself, without even a bootstrap program
within it to get it started. In other words, it had to start afresh
at the very beginning with no memory whatsoever, rather like a tabula
rasa.
As must be obvious to everybody, if human
beings were machines and nothing but machines, this experiment would
never get off the ground. But this being that I am shows that it is
quite possible to conduct such an experiment in learning. And there
is no reason why anyone else repeating this experiment would not obtain
similar results, have a similar sense of Wholeness.
The reason why human beings can learn
relational logic and not machines working independently on their own
is that we human beings are divine creatures, constantly in connection
with the ultimate Source of all energy. Now saying this breaks possibly
the greatest taboo in Western civilization today. To say 'I am That',
meaning 'I am God', as they do in India, is a statement that is greatly
misunderstood in our culture. This is because God is regarded as 'other'
by the monotheistic religions. We are therefore taught to fear God rather
than to know that God is Love. Indeed, we have institutionalized fear.
So freeing ourselves of the mechanistic, materialistic, and dualistic
assumptions of modern science is no easy task.
As the result of studying omniology during
the past two decades, I have found satisfactory answers to every question
that I ever asked myself about God, the Universe, the meaning of life,
and what it means to be a human being. However, I cannot describe the
exquisite simplicity and elegance of the Universe any more than I can
describe a beautiful sunset in a way that you could see what I am looking
at. If you are interested in how the Universe is designed, this is something
that you must discover for yourself by looking inwards. As words are
terribly limiting, all I can do here is give some pointers to what has
been revealed to me.
As I have said, there is one pointer that
is more important than any other. This is the statement Wholeness
is the union of all opposites, which I call the principle of duality
and sometimes the principle of nonduality; it doesn't really matter
which. The principle of duality is to omniology what the equation E=mc2
is to the theory of relativity. This self-contradictory principle,
which has a more formal expression in relational logic, represents the
keystone of the Universe. Without this fundamental, foundational principle
the Universe could not exist; it could not function at all. It is the
key to everything.
But please do not try to understand the
principle of duality with the dualistic mind. For if you do, you could
well go crazy. It is only the divine Intelligence that is within us
all that can understand the principle of duality, that can see both
sides of every situation.
The principle of duality enables me to
unify the timeless, formless Absolute and the relativistic world of
time and form, the Godhead and God the creator, Consciousness-at-rest
and Consciousness-in-action, Brahman and atman, atman and anatman, the
theory of relativity and quantum theory, holism and reductionism, noumena
and phenomena, hierarchical and nonhierarchical structures, East and
West, yin and yang, masculine and feminine, past and future, happiness
and unhappiness, and so on and so forth. Not the least, the principle
of duality embraces the most basic pair of opposites: nonduality and
duality, called advaita and dvaita in Sanskrit.
The key point here is that the synthesis
of nonduality and duality is nonduality. That is, there is a primary-secondary
relationship between nonduality and duality, between advaita
and dvaita. It is for this reason that I could also call the
principle of duality the principle of nonduality.
The overall effect of this understanding
is that we can see that the nondual Absolute embraces the totality of
existence, including the conflict of all opposites in the relativistic
world of form. The result is an end to all suffering, leading to a state
of peace, perfect peace. This nondual state of being is often called
ananda in the East, generally translated as 'bliss'. It is to
this glorious state of joy that evolution is guiding us all towards,
and much sooner than most would believe to be possible given the state
of the world today.
This leads to one other key pointer that
is of vital importance. Today, we generally attempt to understand what
it means to be a human being by taking an anthropocentric view of ourselves.
But this is a very narrow perspective, which prevents us from seeing
ourselves in the context of the Whole. To do this, we really need to
take a God's eye view of the Universe.
However, as the concept of God has strong
anthropocentric associations in the West in particular, it is probably
better to imagine that you are an extraterrestrial being from another
planet in another galaxy in another universe. Such a nonhuman, impersonal
being knows nothing about Buddhism and Christianity and the other major
religions of the world, about ancient Greek philosophy, logic, and mathematics,
and about modern science, medicine, psychology, and economics. It is
from this position of total ignorance about human history, free from
crippling idealizations, that we can begin to put the human situation
in perspective.
I know full well that following these
two key pointers is far from easy given the conditioning that we have
all gone through in our early lives. In the interest of maintaining
the status quo and in turning out economic commodities, today's education
system is designed to put us into strait jackets, to stifle our natural
intelligence.
Nevertheless, in the coming years I am
sure that it will become easier and easier to study omniology as more
and more individuals experience all the diverse strands of evolution
converging within them as a coherent whole. And when this happens, the
rising tide of consciousness that we are witnessing in the world today
will become a tidal wave, accelerating at rates that we can barely imagine
today.
As a result, the superconscious Age of
Spirit that will emerge from the Information Age during the next generation
or two will be as unlike the world in the twentieth century as the patriarchal
era of recorded human history was from the matriarchal period of human
development that preceded it.
The most striking effect of this transformation
that we shall experience is that our sense of a separate self will disappear.
This can happen in two contrasting ways, which both lead to the same
point. One is that the self or ego becomes weaker and weaker, leading
eventually to emptiness, in the traditional Eastern manner. The other
is that the sense of self expands to fill the whole Cosmos, the great
ocean of Consciousness, leading to a state of fullness. Of course, in
nondual Consciousness, emptiness and fullness are just two sides of
the same coin; there is no separation between them.
Whether the sense of a separate self disappears
through dissolution or expansion, there will no longer be any separation
between the individual and the Divine, between humanity and its environment,
and between individual human beings. Attempts to exploit our environment
and each other for our own selfish interests will no longer be made.
I must emphasize here that the ego does
not actually disappear in this process, any more than the body disappears.
For practical purposes, we all live in the world of form, and, as such,
need a means of identifying ourselves to each other. It is just that
when the sense of a separate self disappears, we are able to stand outside
ourselves, no longer attached to our bodies or egoic identities and
personalities, rather like near-death, out-of-body experiences.
The effect on human ontogeny of this transformation
will be far reaching. The authorities, most especially parents and teachers,
will no longer be threatened by the Truth, hiding behind a dense fog
of delusions, for they will be living the Truth. So our innate innocence,
which children today are losing at an increasingly early age, will be
maintained throughout adolescence and into adulthood. It will therefore
no longer be necessary to start afresh at the very beginning to uncover
the innocence of Consciousness. For such a creative approach to learning
will be a way of life; it will be embedded in the culture.
As the result of this deep inner transformation,
there will naturally be a radical transformation of the infrastructure
of our global society in our external world. Most particularly, those
institutions that most emphasize and reinforce our sense of separation
from God, the Earth, and each other will either disappear or be so radically
transformed that they will be unrecognizable.
For instance, all the organized religions
of the world that appeared during the mental-egoic period of human development
will eventually decay and die, leaving behind their common essence,
what is sometimes called the perennial wisdom. Other institutions that
are expressions of our fragmented minds will also disappear as these
divisions are transformed and transcended, such as political parties,
joint stock companies, joint stock banks, stock exchanges, and much
of the judiciary.
Educational and medical institutions will
no doubt still exist, but they too will be utterly transformed by the
great stream of Love and Consciousness that will pour through humanity
during the first half of the twenty-first century. Most particularly,
schools and universities will no longer pass on to our children the
delusions that have been passed from generation to generation for centuries.
Neither will medical practitioners attempt to diagnose and treat somatic
and mental disturbances solely from a physical perspective. Both educational
and medical institutions will be working within the overall context
of the great ocean of Consciousness.
While it is not too difficult to see what
is likely to happen to the human race during the next century at the
macro level, it is not possible to know the future at the micro level.
For myself, I do not know what I shall be doing tomorrow, never mind
in six months or six years time.
The reason for this is that we are all
the products of some twelve to fifteen billion years of evolution, and
it is this evolutionary power that is inevitably carrying us all forward
to our final destination. This does not mean that there is a grand plan,
in which all our individual lives are preordained. Evolution is predominantly
driven by the creative power of Life manifesting in the eternal now,
rather than the blind, mechanical forces of the past. Nothing radically
new can ever evolve from the past; it can only emerge directly from
the timeless, formless Whole, acting spontaneously in each moment.
But what this does mean is that there
is no such thing as free will, even though the egoic mind believes there
is. This is obvious when we realize that there is no division between
the source of Life and our own individual beings. There is thus no separate
agent, no I, that can be considered to have a free will. Paradoxically,
this is the greatest freedom of all. For we are no longer plagued by
delusion. We are free to use the divine Intelligence that is within
all of us to look clearly at ourselves and the world we live in just
as they are.
Paradoxically, again, it is only when
we realize that none of us is responsible for our thoughts and actions,
that there is no separate doer, that we can truly take responsibility
for our lives. It is only then that we can be free from the fearful,
egoic desires of those around us, which we have introjected into ourselves
as our conditioning.
Under these circumstances, all that any
of us as individuals can do is to look at Life free from any selfish
considerations to see where it is guiding us. For myself, I can see
that Life is guiding me to set up this web site to help me meet up with
those who are being similarly guided towards Love, Freedom, Consciousness,
Intelligence, Life, Truth, and Wholeness.
Not that I expect people to drop everything
immediately to start afresh at the very beginning. That would be quite
unrealistic. How I see the situation is that it is likely to take a
generation or two for Western civilization to die, enabling the superconscious
Age of Spirit to emerge fully. This means that it will be our children
and our children's children who will mostly embody this great transformation
within themselves. The changes that we are witnessing today in science,
economics, and spirituality are just a tiny ripple compared to the changes
that our children will find themselves making.
So what we need to do is create a safe,
trusting space for our children where they are able to question the
fundamental assumptions and beliefs of their elders. As far as I can
see at present, such a life-enhancing space does not exist today in
either mainstream or alternative scientific, economic, and business
circles, although such an empowering environment is becoming more and
more common within some spiritual communities. It is vitally important
that we show our children that it is safe to be open, naked, and vulnerable,
to jump off cliffs into the unknown leaving the familiar but inhibiting
known behind. For there is very little point in bringing children into
the world if we do not prepare them to live in the world that will exist
when they come to have children of their own.
I don't underestimate the challenge we
face. Because Western civilization has lost contact with our divine
Source, it is riddled with delusions. Dozens, hundreds of them. Yet
it is these same delusions that give the population its sense of security
and identity, leading to the belief that it is standing upright and
not on its head. So while liberating ourselves of our delusions is exhilaratingly
wonderful, it can also be pretty scary. We shall therefore need to give
each other, especially our children, as much love, compassion, and support
as we can as the rising tide of consciousness inexorably sweeps away
both our false sense of security and our false beliefs.
The introduction to this web site contains a more detailed
description of how I see the predicament of humanity at the present
time. I then go on to describe my vision in more detail and to provide a summary of
the discipline of
omniology and relational
logic, which one day will provide
the gnostic, ontological, epistemological, and scientific foundations
that we shall need to create the life-enhancing sharing
economy that will emerge from
the ashes of the dehumanizing, ecologically destructive global economy.
There are also some pages describing some
of my own plans and about how I would like to develop this, my life's
work. Specifically, I intend to complete the book
on omniology that I have been
writing for the past two decades. I also think that it will be necessary
to set up a quite new kind of institute and associated communities, ones that are
free from fixed agendas, and therefore can address all the needs of
humanity, from spirit to mind to body, in a completely liberated, integrated,
and harmonious way. But how and when these plans unfold will depend
very much on the response I receive from this initiative.
So if you find something of interest here,
you are most welcome to contact me, either through my guest book
or privately at paulh@algonet.se.
Let us then see how we might synergistically harmonize our energies
to heal ourselves and hence help to heal our grievously sick society.
Introduction
| Vision | Foundations
| Economy | Book | Institute
Related
sites | Bibliography
| Guest
book | About me
 Top
|
