Author: Paul

Evolution is blind. So said Richard Dawkins in 1986 in The Blind Watchmaker, driven without design by the blind laws of physics. We can see the results of this blindness in the chaos the world is in today, as few understand our evolutionary inheritance and hence why we behave as we do.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as Julian Huxley pointed out in a five-page essay published in 1957 in New Bottles for New Wine. As the result of fourteen billion years of evolution since the most recent big bang, “the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future.”

This is a statement that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin particularly liked because he had realized in the 1920s that we can only understand our evolutionary inheritance and our future potential by studying the human phenomenon, principally through self-inquiry.

Looking first at the outer manifestations of evolution, one example of evolution becoming conscious of itself is a comprehensive model of evolution based on the logistic map in non-linear systems dynamics, which Nick Hoggard, a software developer, presented in 2000 at a gathering in Sweden of the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN).

The logistic map—the discrete version of the logistic function, with its familiar S-shape of the learning curve—provides a means of modelling the exponential growth of structures limited by their environment, like populations. By viewing evolution as an accelerating accumulative process under constraint, Nick showed that it can be mapped with a geometric series, whose constant diminishing factor is the reciprocal of the bifurcation velocity constant δ (4.6692…), a universal mathematical constant that Mitchell J. Feigenbaum discovered in the 1970s.

Now, even though a geometric series consists of the sum of an infinite number of terms, it has a finite limit when the ratio between successive terms is less than one. In terms of evolution as a whole, here is a semi-logarithmic chart of major evolutionary turning points, showing this finite limit at around 2004, give or take a couple of years.

In chaos theory, this finite limit is called the accumulation point, after which rapidly increasing complexity degenerates into chaos, as I explain in my 2016 book Through Evolution’s Accumulation Point: Towards Its Glorious Culmination, further clarified in 2019 in Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics. Nick’s mathematical model thus explains why blind evolution is currently degenerating into increasing psychosocial chaos. Likening evolution to a dripping tap being turned on under laboratory conditions, the evolutionary tap is now flowing continuously, with no more distinct turning points to be discerned.

What this means is that no one is to blame for what is often called human-caused climate change. We humans are subject to exactly the same laws as all other beings, with no exceptions for a species that often thinks it is special, capable of defying these laws. So, abrupt climate change and near-term human extinction are the inevitable consequences of these laws: all beings are born to die.

Nevertheless, as we are all the products of these billions of years of evolution, could the creative power of Life bubbling up from the Divine Origin of the Universe turn this evolutionary chaos into universal, transcultural order in the collective consciousness? If it could, we would thereby realize our fullest potential as superintelligent humans, far beyond machines that can beat humans at games like chess or Go, which Nick Bostrom, founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, calls superintelligent.

Well, in Huxley’s essay, titled ‘Transhumanism’, Huxley said that we can only transcend the limitations of our machines by first “destroying the ideas and the institutions that stand in the way of our realizing our possibilities”, leading to mystical ecstasy, free from the suffering that has plagued humanity through the millennia, especially during the patriarchal epoch.

For blind evolution has led us into the mess that the world is in today. So, if we are to sort out this mess in as intelligent a way as possible, it is essential to start afresh at the very beginning, demolishing the Tower of Babel that represents the fragmented and deluded world of learning today.

That, essentially, is what has happened to me since the spring of 1980, when I was working in marketing for IBM in London, exploring the essential difference between intelligent humans and machines with so-called artificial intelligence, possibly taking over the workplace, with devastating psychological and economic consequences.

To experience first hand what the invention of the stored-program computer in the late 1940s might mean for future generations, I made the most fundamental change to the work ethic since the invention of money and since our forebears settled in villages to cultivate the land and domesticate animals, some four and ten thousand years ago, respectively

This transdisciplinary experiment in learning began when a big bang erupted in the utmost depths of my psyche. This was a monumental quantum leap or change that led me into a profound understanding of the Universe, and hence of God, unifying Eastern and Western worldviews, with the latter beginning to recognize that Consciousness is all there is. For this apocalyptic awakening revealed the innermost secret of the Universe: the accelerating pace of change in society is being caused by nonphysical mental and psychospiritual synergistic energies.

As David Bohm pointed out to me in November 1980, Einstein’s association of mass and energy is a special case of the general principal that meaningful structure-forming relationships are causal. Together with the revelation that opposites are never separate from each other in Reality, Life has thereby healed my fragmented mind in Wholeness, with a Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’ view of the Cosmos.

To explain how evolution took this radical change in direction within me—changing from the horizontal to the vertical dimension of time in the Eternal Now—I describe it as a thought experiment, not unlike those that Einstein formulated to develop the special and general theories of relativity. In my case, I imagine that I am a computer that turns itself off and on again so that it has no programs within it, not even a bootstrap program to load the operating system.

I had the great advantage in this experiment in learning in that I had almost nothing to unlearn. Having realized as an adolescent that what I was being taught in religion, science, economics, mathematics, and logic made little sense as a coherent whole, I learned the barest minimum at school and university. This was just enough to survive in what I mostly experienced as a hostile cultural environment. I discovered why in 1980 from the insightful works of Erich Fromm: we all live in a dysfunctional, sick society, caused by the psychological confusion of every one of us, inhibiting us from realizing the full potential of human nature.

So, starting with a tabula rasa ‘blank slate’, this ‘computer’ had the task of applying Self-reflective Divine Intelligence to solve the ultimate problem of human learning: integrating all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines into a coherent whole, guided only by what the Greeks and Romans called Daimon and Genius, respectively. Roger and Francis Bacon set out to develop such a megasynthesis in the 1200s and 1600s, respectively, with some others following them in later centuries. I mention a few of these on my ‘Kindred spirits’ page.

The result of this thought experiment, projected from the Divine, is the elusive Theory of Everything, which Ken Wilber says is “a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that we will never reach”, a sentiment echoed by Martin Rees in Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?

Physicists are still searching for the fundamental laws of the Universe, as Dennis Overbye told us in an article in the New York Times on 23rd November 2020, when he asked, ‘Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything?’ The answer is no, even with the most advanced quantum computer programmed as a neural network, ‘learning’ to find patterns, as it executes its instructions.

However, we humans can find the simple, elegant pattern or paradigm underlying the complexity of the Cosmos—as an equation explaining everything—by adapting the modelling methods of information systems architects, mapping the interactions of humans and computers in the workplace. Such a comprehensive model naturally includes the creative, evolutionary process of developing such a model in the psyche of the modeller, testing whether machines can think for themselves and hence whether artificial general intelligence in computers is possible or not.

It is thus nonsense for Peter Russell, a leading evolutionary, to suggest in an article titled ‘What if There Were No Future?’ that during this decade machines with artificial intelligence will surpass the human brain in performance and abilities. In this regard, Peter is following Ray Kurzweil and the misnamed transhumanists, mistakenly believing that evolution’s Accumulation Point is a technological singularity, as I explain more fully in an article from March this year titled ‘Demystifying the Mystery of Being’.

We humans are the leading edge of evolution, not algorithmic computers practicing machine learning in neural networks. However, as Teilhard foresaw, we can only realize our fullest potential as superhumans at evolution’s Omega Point—by becoming totally free of our mechanistic conditioning, passed from generation to generation for thousands of years.

This is not just about concepts, ideas, and theories, as insights. Such a Total Revolution—questioning the fundamental assumptions of the cultures we live in—also has a profound effect on human relationships, not the least with our families. For religious, scientific, and economic beliefs provide many with a precarious sense of security and identity in life, which they are most reluctant to release, often defending them to the core.

Therein lies the central dilemma of evolution, as we collectively experience it today. Even though many intuitively already know the truth of human existence deep within themselves, as evolutionary learning has been more divergent than convergent over the years, we live in a world of specialists, whose vision is inevitably severely limited. In my case, I know no one else who has taken the powerful abstractions of algebra and information systems modelling methods to the utmost level of generality, rebuilding the whole of mathematics, and hence all knowledge, on the solid foundation of the Truth, within the Cosmic Context of Wholeness.

In this respect, wishful thinking doesn’t help, even if such an optimistic approach does give a modicum of comfort, for hope and despair and life and death are just two sides of the same coin. To resolve the existential crisis we all face today in Love and Peace, it is essential to engage in a spiritual practice that leads to the psychological death of the sense of a separate self.

For unifying the mystical and mundane—living simultaneously in these two worlds—is the final stage of the spiritual journey, as Joseph Campbell described in his popular book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. However, with most focused on their families and making a living, it is uncertain to what extent we shall be able to compassionately support each other to realize our True Nature, free of our blind evolutionary inheritance, in the few years we have available to us for this Great Awakening.

In 1931, Albert Einstein wrote in a piece commemorating the centenary of James Clerk Maxwell’s birth, “The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In my experience, the Totality of Existence, in both nonphysical and physical form, emerges from the Formless, Nondual Datum of the Universe, projected through the Cosmic Psyche.

Thus, the world we live in is a projection of the Divine, via our cognitive maps and conceptual models, which govern the way we live our lives, mostly sub- and unconsciously. The word projection derives from Latin proiectionem (nominative proiectio) ‘a throwing forward, a stretching out’, from the past participle of proicere ‘to throw forth’, from pro– ‘forth’ and iacere ‘to throw, cast, hurl’.

The Romans constructed many words from jacere, mostly in a physical sense, but sometimes using them mentally or psychologically. Here is a list of Latin prefixes, all of which have led to English words, with a wide variety of meanings: ab– ‘away’, con– ‘together’, de– ‘down’, e– ‘out’, in– ‘in’, ob– ‘against’, pro– ‘forth’, re– ‘back’, sub– ‘under’, and tra– ‘across’.

As the laws of the Universe—viewed as a meaningful information system—apply equally to the psychospiritual realm and materialistic domain, we could use these –ject and –jection words to shed much light on the psychodynamics of society, answering the fundamental questions of human existence: Where have we come from? Who or what are we? and Where are we going? This was the title of the troubled Paul Gauguin’s paradisal masterpiece, painted in Tahiti in 1897.

These propelling words indicate that we are all constantly throwing ideas, opinions, and beliefs around in a rather chaotic manner, especially projecting them into the institutions that lay down the rules that govern our lives and onto others as a form of defence mechanism. So, if the creative power of Life is to heal our sick society, cocreating institutions that are in harmony with the fundamental laws of the Universe, this can only happen through open-hearted and open-minded self-inquiry, free of the delusions that mostly govern our lives today.

A good starting point for this thought experiment is to methodically throw ideas together in an all-inclusive Conjecture, from Latin coniectūra ‘a guess, inference; divination, soothsaying’. I call this rational, taxonomic, and holographic method Integral Relational Logic, which has evolved from the transcultural and transdisciplinary modelling methods underlying the Internet through the creative power of Life, being ejected directly by and from the Source.

In turn, this commonsensical system of thought provides the Cosmic Context, Gnostic Foundation, and framework or system of coordinates for the Conjecture, validated through the blissful and joyful experience of Wholeness. This Divination is the much sought-for Theory of Everything, which I call the Unified Relationships Theory or Panosophy, the complete unification of science, philosophy, and religion and hence of all sciences and humanities. For, as Einstein wrote in 1946 in the New York Times Magazine, “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.”

Sadly, however, such a Cosmology—as an all-encompassing way of looking at the world we live in—tends to be rejected ‘thrown back’, as we also see in polarizing politics. This is mainly because a harmonious, bipartisan, both-and approach to life does not fit into any of the fragmented social structures that most feel that they belong to. Hence, ending the war between science and spirituality and mysticism and mathematics, which is essential to realize Inner Peace, is often objected to or ignored by those still attached to and conditioned by traditional, cultural conventions.

So, whether Life will collectively conject ‘throw together’ all the divergent streams of evolution at its glorious culmination—as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin foresaw in The Human Phenomenon—looks a most unlikely project. This is despite the fact that Panosophy supersedes Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection—by solving the ultimate problem in human learning with Self-reflective Intelligence. For Darwin’s theory of evolution neither explains the origin of species nor what has caused species to evolve into Homo sapiens ‘wise human’, now on the brink of extinction, sometimes leading to dejection ‘a lowering of spirits’ or ‘casting down’.

Yet, if we could recognize the limitations and distortions of axiomatic mathematical logic, of materialistic and mechanistic science, and of monetary economics, that technology cannot save us, and that Love is the Divine Essence we all share, a miracle could still happen in collective consciousness, revealing the innermost secrets of the Cosmos in the most magnificent apocalyptic awakening, already glimpsed by some intrepid, curious explorers.

Further to my recent post on ‘Transcending polarizing fragmentation’, those engaged in a bipartisan, both-and approach to governance, for the benefit of all, look like enemies to those who prefer divisive, either-or policies, favouring one particular group in society, with a tribal identity and mentality.

That is the great paradox of living in a dualistic world, where seeking to live in Wholeness and Peace, unifying all opposites, is regarded as antisocial, not fitting in to any particular social grouping. Such divisiveness, eschewing bipartisanship, has a long history.

For instance, Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics, “It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation, … as some imagine Heraclitus says.” This is known as the Law of Contradiction, acting as the implicit axiom for deductive mathematical and logical reasoning and inductive scientific method, and hence for politics and economics, in which we are instructed to fight each other for a slice of the finite monetary cake. It is not surprising therefore that Erich Fromm pointed out in The Sane Society that the normal behaviour of humans in society is pathological.

In contrast to Aristotle, Heraclitus, the mystical philosopher of change, said, “The Hidden Harmony is better than the obvious,” and “Opposition brings concord; out of discord comes the fairest harmony.” However, he knew how few of his fellow citizens followed a harmonious, both-and approach to life, saying, “People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself.” Being an outsider to the society Heraclitus lived in, his contemporaries called him ‘The Obscure’.

We can see that some ancients were intuitively aware that the Hidden Harmony—which I call the Principle of Unity or Cosmic Equation—is the universal generating power from Janus, one of the oldest gods in the Roman pantheon. Also, a two-faced god appeared repeatedly in Babylonian art. As the god of beginnings, Janus has given his name to January, at the beginning of the year. Janus is also the god of transitions, such as the global transition process that humanity needs to pass through, from pathogenic either-or ways of thinking and living, to a healthy both-and approach to life and reasoning. 

Sadly, however, Aristotle’s Law of Contradiction still holds sway throughout society, as Carl Gustav Jung pointed out in 1929 in his Commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower: “The Chinese have never failed to recognize the paradoxes and the polarity inherent in all life. The opposites always balance on the scales—a sign of high culture. Onesideness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.”

Such barbaric behaviour is evident from the way that two-faced means ‘insincere, deceitful’. In this respect, those who engage in a bipartisan approach, constantly attempting to reconcile warring political factions, can appear weak and indecisive. Clearly, if this perception is to disappear, the rules of the game need to change, for playing the same dirty game as severely psychologically disturbed politicians unwilling even to compromise is bound to fail. Furthermore, how can we say that those who vote for such narcissistic demagogic populists to represent their apparent interests are sane?

Among my contemporaries, Tim Freke, a spiritual philosopher, coined the word paralogical to actively promote a harmonious both-and approach to life, recognizing that we live in an inherently paradoxical world. In The Mystery Experience: A Revolutionary Approach to Spiritual Awakening, he says, “We see the paradoxity of something when we understand it from two opposite perspectives at once.” Tim aptly uses the simple word WOW to denote such an awakened state of being, for there is nothing more wonderful in human existence. Not surprising, this is something “everyone is searching for,” as he says.

Yet, very few are yet ready to awaken to Total Revolution in the manner that Vimala Thakar described, despite Eckhart Tolle saying in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, “We are a species that has lost its way.” Earlier, he said in Stillness Speaks: Whispers of Now, a beautiful book of aphorisms:

The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals, but a necessity if humanity is not to destroy itself. At the present time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating. Paradoxically, things are getting worse and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent because it makes so much ‘noise’.

This is just what we are witnessing today in the aftermath of the recent polarizing presidential election in the USA. Yet, this apparent battle between partisanship and bipartisanship doesn’t really address the needs of humanity, as a whole, for even national party politics is based on divisive, either-or thinking. So, for democracies to be viable, individualism, based on the false belief that humans are independent, autonomous agents, needs to be transformed into what Jung called individuation, the development of an undivided being, living in Wholeness.

Jung’s healing process of individuation goes much further than Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis, apparently with a similar purpose. For Assagioli, the purpose of personal psychosynthesis—unifying the unconscious and conscious, like Jung—is to make patients harmonious individuals, “well adjusted both within themselves and with the community to which they belong and in which they play a useful part”. Assagioli went further, seeing the need for spiritual psychosynthesis, a ‘psychosynthesis of religions’, by which he meant understanding and appreciating religions as they are, inheriting fears and beliefs laid down hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Yet, is this really a viable approach to the existential crisis facing humanity today? For, as J. Krishnamurti wisely said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Today, some say that we should build bridges between the old society and the new one that they see emerging. But if a bridge spanning a river is to serve its purpose, the pillars on the two banks must be built on solid foundations. Yet Western civilization is built on shifting sands, on the denial of the fundamental law of the Universe, from which there is no escape: opposites are never separate from each other. We can never compromise with this irrefutable, universal truth. So, without awarely experiencing the foundations, as the Immortal Ground of Being that we all share, even basic human decency and compassion are not enough to awaken in the Age of Light.

Rather, the only viable bipartisan system of governance is one based on the single pillar of Nonduality in the Eternal Now, guided by Integral Relational Logic, the commonsensical system of reason that we all implicitly use every day to form concepts and organize our ideas. Yet, as this generalization of the transcultural and transdisciplinary modelling methods underlying the Internet is not yet understood and accepted, most live in ignorance of the answer to the most critical unanswered question in science: “What is causing scientists and technologists, aided and abetted by computer technology, to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological development at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration?”

For myself, I have been guided to develop a comprehensive model of the psychodynamics of humanity in the context of evolution, as a whole, by an apocalyptic death-and-rebirth process I went through in the spring of 1980. This life-changing event led me to abandon my business career with IBM in order to study the long-term psychological and economic implications of humanity’s growing dependency on information technology. However, until others engage in similar self-inquiry, free of anthropocentric preconceptions about what it truly means to be human, it seems that I must paradoxically continue to live in isolation, knowing that none of us is ever separate from any other being, including the Supreme Being, for an instant.

As divisive, either-or democratic elections indicate, the human race is suffering from a pandemic of polarized fragmentation, caused by cognitive evolution being more divergent than convergent during the five thousand years of the patriarchal epoch, at least.

We are thus mostly ignorant of the fundamental law of the Universe: Wholeness is the union of all opposites. Denial of this irrefutable, universal truth, which I call the Principle of Unity, leads to delusion, making society ungovernable, as fourteen billion years of evolution pass through its Accumulation Point into chaos. This is despite the worthy attempts of progressive liberal and social democrats to unify our differences as unique beings.

For no human agent, such as a physician, psychotherapist, or spiritual teacher, can heal our wounds. Such a miracle can only come about through Self-reflective Divine Intelligence, which is the eyesight of Consciousness, which provides the radiant, coherent light that enables us to map the Cosmic Psyche holographically. At best, all we can actually do is mirror each other’s inner beings, whether these be Gnostic, egoic, something in between, or even both.

Historically, transcending the categories of our polarized, dualistic minds has been more common than healing our fragmented, specialist minds, as transcultural, transdisciplinary Panosophers. We can see this from the Nondual experiences of mystics through the ages, sometimes presenting an attractive serene demeanour. Yet, as Advaita sages teach, there is no doership, for none of us is ever separate from the Absolute for an instant. Self-actualization and -realization are gifts of God—as the Datum of the Universe, ‘that which gives and causes’, from Latin dare ‘to give; cause’.

The pre-eminent Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, after whom the celebrity spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has named himself, described what it means to have inseparable Divine and human identities, with a primary-secondary relationship between them, when he said, “The eye with which I see God is the same as that with which he sees me.”

To denote such an all-encompassing perspective—mapping the psychodynamics of society, as a whole—I have coined Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’, from Greek holos ‘whole’ and horāma ‘sight, view’, modelled on panoramic. The word Holoramic is intended to emphasise that taking the more customary anthropocentric point of view puts the cart before the horse, greatly inhibiting us from understanding what it truly means to be human—with the defining characteristic of Self-reflective Intelligence—in contrast to machines with so-called artificial intelligence.

Standing outside ourselves, the motto of this eponymous website, is absolutely essential if we are to collectively resolve the great existential crisis we face today, accepting that Homo sapiens ‘wise human’ is not immortal. No one is to blame for the sixth mass extinction of the species on Earth. This is just the Universe inexorably following its own Cosmic law: all structures, emerging from the Divine Source of Being, are born to die.

In saying this, I am going even further than Vimala Thakar, who said in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach: “In a time when the survival of the human race is in question, continuing with the status quo is to cooperate with insanity, to contribute to chaos.” As conservatism is extremely dangerous at these rapidly changing times, she therefore asks, “Do we have the vitality to go beyond narrow, one-sided views of human life and to open ourselves to totality, wholeness?” For, as she says, “The call of the hour is to move beyond the fragmentary, to awaken to total revolution.”

Vimala’s visionary book, much inspired by J. Krishnamurti and Mohandas Gandhi, is not available on her website or on Amazon, for instance, not even second-hand. It thus seems that the creative power of Life has not yet given us the vitality to synergistically transcend polarized fragmentation, liberated from our constraining conditioning, passed from generation to generation for millennia, ever since the invention of money.

This means that no system of governance that humans have experimented with during the last five thousand years—since the dawn of history and the first civilizations—is workable in today’s computer age. Viewing the Cosmos as a meaningful information system, the only viable system of governance in the wisdom society is one managed through the modelling methods of information systems architects in business, rather than the quantitative financial modelling methods of economists, bankers, and accountants.

However, such a life-enhancing, bipartisan way of organizing our affairs, in concordance with the underlying structure of the Internet and the Universe, would only be practical in the Age of Light within a system of governance that Henryk Skolimowski called lumenarchy. This global economy would be enlightened by the coherent light of Consciousness, after the clouds of unknowing are cleared away, as an anonymous Christian English mystic taught in the fourteenth century.

As we are still mostly living in the dark, at best semi-light, the chances of these clouds being blown away soon look pretty slim. Yet, in my eightieth year since my conception, I live as if it is still possible to awaken to Total Revolution as a community of awakened souls, demystifying the mystery of life and being by consummating the final revolution in science, just as Isaac Newton completed the first in 1687 with the publication of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

It is an enormous challenge, for few yet have sufficient open-mindedness and -heartedness to break free of the shackles of their family and social environment, inwardly knowing that Love is the Divine Essence we all share. There is but one possibility: to bring the ancient wisdom of enlightened beings into mainstream consciousness, little understood by the polarized mind, preferring conflict-ridden, either-or thinking to a more harmonious, both-and approach to life.

As the illogicality of Western reason is still not recognized, this miracle has not yet happened. So, it is in solitude in the Eternal Now that my inner guru continues to guide me to write the final chapter of my final book titled ‘Universal Algebra in Practice’. This book, titled Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics: To Reveal Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth, fulfils dreams I had at 16 and 38 to transcend the materialism and mechanism of physics in order to end the long-running war between science and religion, which I set out to do as a seven-year-old.

The first three chapters on ‘Business Modelling’, ‘Integral Relational Logic’, and ‘From Zero to Transfinity’ and the fourth on ‘Sequences, Series, and Spirals’ are available on my other website for the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics, which needs to be repaired and updated if I could find a Drupal web developer who would help me to do so.

In Wholeness, the past and future do not exist. In Reality, there is only the Eternal Now, where the Immortal Alpha and Omega Points of evolution and involution reside. As humans living in Peace in this exquisite space, there is thus nothing to hope for or despair about. For life and death, as growth and decay, are just two sides of the same coin.

Such a profound understanding arises from consciously living in harmony with the fundamental law of the Universe, which Heraclitus of Ephesus called the Hidden Harmony: opposites, even contradictory ones, are never separate from each other.

Taoists and alchemists also recognize the validity of this irrefutable, universal truth, which Carl Gustav Jung took as the heart of his healing process of individuation—as an undivided being, living in Wholeness.

Traditionally, our innate sense of Wholeness is depicted in mandalas, Sanskrit for ‘circle’, such as this one constructed with particles of sand by monks who follow the Dalai Lama on his travels. Such symbols also recognize the impermanence of all structures in the relativistic world of form. For, as soon as these beautiful mandalas are finished, they are returned to dust.

Sadly however, Aristotle rejected the wisdom of Heraclitus, favouring his divisive law of contradiction, which has sent Western civilization into a chaotic evolutionary cul-de-sac. This is both a psychological and mathematical issue, because axiomatic, linear proof systems are based on the denial of what we can also call the paradoxical Principle of Unity or Cosmic Equation.

So, to what extent we humans can be liberated from thousands of years of deluded cultural conditioning before our inevitable demise is the great unknown at present. Of course, anthropocentrically or egoically wishing humanity to awaken from its slumbers in the brilliant, eschatological Age of Light only leads to suffering.

Nevertheless, maybe there is still a possibility at this late hour that some, at least, could be free of wishful thinking, recognizing that Love is the Divine Essence that we all share in the Eternal Now. For, as John of Patmos said in the Book of Revelation, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”

Revelation is a translation of Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ‘to uncover’ or ‘to reveal’, from the prefix apo– ‘from, away’ and kaluptra ‘veil’. So apocalypse literally means ‘draw the veil away from’, indicating the disclosure of something hidden from the mass of humanity: the Hidden Harmony.

An apocalyptic awakening is thus nothing to fear. For, when Life removes the veils obstructing our innate Self-reflective Intelligence—as the eyesight of the coherent light of Consciousness—the mystery of Life and Being is no longer a mystery and the entire Cosmos is revealed in its glorious magnificence.

As a follow-on to my previous post, while traditional spiritual practices, such as meditation and yoga, can help us resolve the great existential crisis facing humanity today, if we are to fully understand what is happening to our species, we need to look inwards, practicing self-inquiry. In this way, we would be following the maxim that seven wise men inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself,” Plato tells us in Protagoras. In a similar fashion, when Neo visited the Oracle in the popular movie The Matrix, hanging on the kitchen wall was a sign saying Temet Nosce ‘Know yourself.’

Socrates highlighted the need for self-inquiry at his trial for corrupting the youth of Athens, saying, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Then, when he was given the choice of whether or not to accept the death penalty advocated by the democracy, he said, “I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.”

Therein lies the central issue of our times. Democracies, acting as tyrannous majorities—as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill pointed out in the mid 1800s—do not generally understand why they behave as they do. They mostly live in fear and ignorance.

But neither can traditional materialistic and mechanistic approaches to science and mathematics—denying the fundamental law of the Universe—help us answer the most critical of the unanswered questions in science: What is causing scientists and technologists, aided and abetted by computer technology, to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological development at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration?

We can see this most clearly in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, by Jaques Hadamard, who, in 1945, conducted a survey of some of the leading mathematicians of his day into how they develop their ideas. Hadamard published a letter from Albert Einstein about how his concepts emerge in consciousness, beginning,

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism (sic) of thought. The physical entities (sic) which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined.

Similarly, Stephen W. Hawking said in A Brief History of Time, perhaps with tongue in cheek, “we have, as yet, had little success in predicting human behaviour from mathematical equations!”

So, what to do? Well, some spiritual teachers, such as Thomas Hübl, founder of the Academy of Inner Science, is planning to lead a community gathering within the auspices of Science and Nonduality (SAND) conferences on 28th March 2020, with this theme:

We are living through a global challenge where collective trauma layers are being reactivated. It’s important that we meet this moment with presence: honouring our fear while awakening the resilience that has been transmitted from our ancestors who survived crises in the past.

We can choose to raise our awareness—to create mutual support and collaboration, find a new vision, and fully embody our potential.

I am sure that this event could help many in their healing activities. However, in itself, it doesn’t address the central issue facing us all. SAND-20 in Italy, scheduled for July, has this invitation: “Join our annual gathering in Italy for six inspiring days of exploration, experience and celebration of this mystery we call life.” However, no one in the planned programme, which may not take place because of the COVID-19 pandemic, addresses how we could demystify the mystery of life and being.

So, as the most advanced studies of inner science do not tell us how to map the Cosmic Psyche in its entirety, they cannot help us to understand what it means to be human, where we have come from, and where we are all heading at breakneck speeds. If we are thus unable to awaken to Total Revolution, as Vimala Thakar urged us to do, does this then mean that Homo sapiens ‘wise human’ is destined to become extinct in the near-term without more than a few liberated, awakened beings realizing their fullest potential as superintelligent humans?