Alpha and Omega

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.

A tantalizing puzzle

The Universe is designed so that its innermost secrets can be revealed to human beings invoking innate Self-reflective Divine Intelligence, as members of the species known as Homo sapiens ‘wise human’.

It seems that I am the first human on Earth to be so privileged, fulfilling a dream I had as a seven-year-old. By starting afresh at the very beginning when I was 38 in 1980 in an apocalyptic death-and-rebirth process, the fundamental law of the Universe has been revealed to me, known to Heraclitus as the Hidden Harmony.

By then generalizing the transcultural, transdisciplinary modelling methods underlying the Internet, the creative power of Life has healed my fragmented mind in Wholeness, enabling me to solve the ultimate problem of human learning by constructing a coherent body of knowledge that corresponds to all our experiences, from the mystical to the mundane.

When I set out on this experiment in learning, by understanding how the Universe is designed, I thought that it would be possible to redesign society according to the same universal principles, enabling us live in Love, Peace, and harmony with each other for as long as there are humans dwelling on Earth.

Such a Utopian vision is theoretically possible by recognizing that Consciousness is all there is, abandoning the concept of Universe as consisting of just matter, space, and time, and by managing our business affairs through the abstract modelling methods of information systems architects, rather than the divisive financial modelling methods of economists, investment bankers, and management accountants.

However, In the event, redesigning the education and economic systems has proved to be impractical. The principal reason is that most cultures in the world teach us that we are experientially and cognitively separate from the Ineffable, Immortal Absolute, leading to split psyches, out of touch with Reality, a sickness that humans have been suffering from for thousands of years.

Yes, mystics and spiritual seekers know, in their own experience, that this cultural conditioning is delusional. However, in general, they do not use this understanding to directly question the religious, economic, scientific, and mathematical beliefs of the prevailing culture.

Indeed, while I have described what the Universe is and how it is intelligently designed in many books, articles, and web pages, few even seem to have the curiosity to learn how this miracle has come about.

This is very strange, for what I have to offer humanity is simple commonsense, that which we can all know in the utmost depth and breadth of being, recognizing that none of us is ever separate from any other being, including the Supreme Being.

So why on earth is the Universe designed in such a tantalizing manner? Just beyond reach, unable to be fully grasped except by the tiniest minority, engaged in mapping the Cosmic Psyche.

I have long imagined that on another planet in another galaxy in another physical universe in the multiverse of such universes, Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’ understanding could spread through the population. But, with the sixth mass extinction of the species currently engulfing us all, such a liberated awakening looks most unlikely on our beautiful planet Earth, itself destined to die in a few billion years time, just a blink of an eye on the infinite Cosmic timescale.

Everything must change

The above Observer cartoon appeared on 28th March 2020, with the comment, “This pandemic has thrown our world into confusion. We need a new beginning.”

Yes, indeed! However, because of the way that the Universe is designed—building on tradition and the evolutionary past in an accumulative fashion—almost no one is yet ready to let it all go and start afresh at the very beginning, awakening to Total Revolution.

For by doing so, the seven pillars of unwisdom that underlie Western civilization become transformed into the seven pillars of wisdom underlying the eschatological Age of Light. Such a radical transformation of consciousness and awakening of intelligence is quite possible, as I know from my own experience.

Sadly, however, it seems that people’s cultural and personal conditioning is so deeply engrained in the psyche that it is virtually impossible to break free of restrictive social structures without a gigantic apocalyptic awakening, revealing the fundamental law of the Universe, which John of Patmos expressed in these words in the book of Revelation: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”

Such an awakening would be truly wonderful, for we would then realize the Utopian vision that Love is the Divine Essence we all share, enabling us to live in peace and harmony in community with each other for our last few remaining years on Earth. For community is cognate with Sanskrit maitreya ‘friendly, benevolent’, from Latin commūnis, originally in sense ‘sharing burdens’.

Practicing Self-Inquiry

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?

Healing our sick society

Western civilization is based on delusion, with a false conception of the Universe, as the Totality of Existence. This psychological disturbance affects ever aspect of our lives, from the classroom to the boardroom and the bedroom.

Erich Fromm was one of the first to point out that we live in a sick society in the 1940s and 50s in The Fear of Freedom (Escape from Freedom in the USA) and The Sane Society. In the latter, the titles of the first two chapters were, “Are we Sane?” and “Can a Society be Sick?” answering them with a resounding ‘NO!’ and ‘YES!’, respectively.

Then in his greatest masterpiece To Have or To Be? in 1976, inspired by the Buddha and Meister Eckhart, Fromm said that if humanity is to avoid psychological and economic catastrophe, we need a holistic art and science of humanity as the basis of social reconstruction.

Invoking Self-reflective Intelligence and using my skills as an information systems architect, computer scientist, and mathematician, I have spent the last forty years developing the necessary self-awareness to be free of the delusions that so grievously affect the society I live in.

Life, bubbling up from the Divine Origin of the Universe, experienced as Consciousness, has healed my fragmented mind in Wholeness, as the union of all opposites. However, to reach the understanding I have today, I have needed to pass through an apocalyptic awakening, revealing the Universe’s innermost secrets: how it is intelligently designed and what it truly means to be human compared to computers with so-called artificial intelligence.

Furthermore, I have needed to adopt the most radical change in the work ethic since the invention of money some 4,000 years ago. Money is the primary immortality symbol, providing citizens with a precarious sense of security and identity in life because Western civilization teaches that humanity is separate from Divinity, as the Immortal Ground of Being that we all share.

This division is another symptom of our sick society, which we can best call schizophrenia ‘split mind’, out of touch with Reality. Not the least, we are taught from an early age that we must fight and compete with our fellow human beings for a slice of the finite monetary cake, causing much suffering and catastrophic ecological damage today.

So even though some know that Consciousness is all there is and Love is our Divine Essence, I live mostly in solitude, wondering if I could make a worthwhile contribution to society as a wise elder before our inevitable demise during the sixth mass extinction of the species on Earth.

To explain the dilemma I face in life, I have recently written a short piece on ‘The Meaning of Life’, answering the question, “What is the meaning of life?” that Nicolae Tanase, known as ‘Excellence Reporter’, asked me, as a contribution to his Encyclopedia of Life.

I have followed this up with a two-page monologue answering another Big Question of human existence, as I experience it, “Who are we?” This is available on my website for the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics, with the motto ‘Harmonizing evolutionary convergence’.

A few have acknowledged the potential contribution that I could make to society, as a new Acknowledgements page on this website describes. However, we are, as yet, lacking the liberating cooperation that we need to collectively awaken to Total Revolution, as Vimala Thakar urged us to do in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach in 1984.

The Cosmic Equation

To clarify my previous post, the Cosmic Equation is not a part of mathematics, for it lies beneath the foundations of all knowledge, including mathematics. I dress up the fundamental law of the Universe in the notation of mathematical logic in order to shake the very foundations of Western civilization.

For we are not educating our children, glued to their smartphones, to live in the world today, never mind the world that could exist when they come to have children of their own. The entire traditional world of learning, which our parents and teachers pass on to us, needs to be demolished so that we humans could have the opportunity to thrive and survive for as long as possible.

Digital devices connecting to social media exist today because underlying the Internet is a universal structure applicable in all cultures, disciplines, and industries, defined as a multidimensional network of hierarchical relationships. If this self-similar structure did not exist, the Internet could neither exist nor expand at hyperexponential rates of change.

So if we are to intelligently manage our business affairs with full awareness of what we are doing, we need to bring this holographic structure into consciousness so that it can be examined in the brilliant light of day with Self-reflective Intelligence.

Then we see that we do not reason linearly, as Aristotle and Euclid taught, from axioms or assumed truths. Rather, unlike the sequential way computers execute instructions, human thought is nonlinear and nondeductive, as Ted Codd, a fellow alumnus of IBM, pointed out in 1970 in his seminal paper ‘A Relational Model of Data’.

This paper, which founded the multibillion-dollar database industry, thus enables us to bring paradoxes into our reasoning, essential if we are to be free of our mechanistic conditioning. For we live in a paradoxical world, so if we reject self-contradictions from our reasoning—as is done in mathematical proof systems—the conceptual models that guide our lives will lead us dangerously astray. To be free of delusion, the only axiom we need is the Cosmic Equation, emerging directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe.

Most significantly, we then discover that the Universe is not just the physical universe of matter, space, and time, a conception we have inherited from the Babylonians in Mesopotamia, who focused much of their attention on the skies, seeking patterns in the mechanical movements they perceived, enabling them to make predictions of solar and lunar eclipses.

At about the same period in human history, the Rishis in the Indus Valley would have had a similar pristine view of the night sky, unsullied by the light pollution most of us suffer from today. But they looked inwards, discovering that the Universe is Consciousness, called Satchitānanda in Sanskrit, the ‘bliss of Absolute Truth and Consciousness’.

It is thus through introspection that we bring the ancient wisdom of the East into awakening communities, enabling us to live in Love, Peace, and Stillness in the Presence of the Divine at the end of time. Nothing is more beautiful.

Being Wholeness

Ever since I was seven years of age, I have had one interest in life: to understand the relationships between humanity, God, and the Universe. Today, nearly seventy years later, I have realized in the depth and breadth of my being that these three entities are not separate from each other; they are one and the same being.

However, this inner knowing, which is best called Gnosis, is Ineffable, quite impossible to put into words. Nevertheless, like any other Gnostic, I endeavour to do so, in order to share my great joy with those around me, who are also inseparable from God and the Universe, as Absolute Wholeness.

What has moved me to write these words today is that I have just finished the third chapter of my book Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics: To Realize Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth. This chapter, titled ‘From Zero to Transfinity’, marks the apotheosis of my life’s work to heal the cultural split between science and spirituality.

For, as numbers, Zero corresponds to Shūnyāta in Buddhism and another word for Transfinity in Sanskrit is Satchitānanda ‘Bliss of Absolute Truth and Consciousness’. So by learning to integrate all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines, individual consciousness deepens and expands to such an extent that it becomes coterminous with Consciousness itself.

There is then no past or future and we can deal with the great existential crisis that humanity is facing today with equanimity in the Eternal Now, free of the sense of a separate self. For this sense of separation has led to the chaos the world is in today, at the culmination of some fourteen billion years of predominantly divergent evolution.

Furthermore, Homo sapiens is not immortal and abrupt climate change is highly likely to bring about our demise in the next one to three decades. As mystics have discovered through the ages, we can only face death in all its forms through the realization of our True Absolute Nature, which is Oneness, unified with Wholeness in Wholeness.

Wholeness arises from evolutionary convergence through the irrepressible power of Life bubbling up from the Divine Origin of the Cosmos, like a bubbling fountain. Then there is just Stillness, Presence, Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth, which passes all understanding, transcending the entire world of form, including conceptual structures and their expressions in the signs and symbols of language, such as these words in this blog post. Nothing, for me, is more beautiful.

Living in two worlds

We all live in two worlds, the superficial and profound—the mundane and mystical. On the secondary surface is the physical universe, accessed through our five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Conventional scientists call this external world of outer space and time the cosmos, which is but one per cent of the Universe—the Totality of Existence turned into one whole.

In my experience, I explore the primary profundity of the Universe with self-inquiry, observed and mapped with Self-reflective Intelligence. For me, Divine Intelligence—the ability to see both sides of any situation—is the eyesight of Universal Consciousness, which provides the brilliant coherent light we need to view the Cosmic Psyche holographically.

So we can call students of the ninety-nine per cent of the Universe that is hidden from our somatic senses Cosmic Psychologists, healing deep wounds in the cultural psyche, which arise from humanity’s apparent separation from Divinity and the long-running war between materialistic, mechanistic science and the organized religions.

Having realized the mystical Eternal Truth that sets us free in direct, immediate, Gnostic experience, there is then nothing to prevent the irrepressible power of Life from helping us to cocreate the life-enhancing social institutions we need to live in Love, Peace, and harmony with each other for as long as we humans dwell on our beautiful planet Earth.

For living in two worlds at once—the final step in Joseph Campbell’s transcultural seventeen-step model of the spiritual journey—shows us that evolution has just passed through the most momentous turning point in its fourteen billion-year journey since the most recent big bang. Humanity is thus being carried to evolution’s glorious culmination in the Age of Light, much as the scientific mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin prophesied in The Human Phenomenon, despite much evidence to the contrary in the daily media.

Abrupt climate change

I look at the Universe through the eyes of its fundamental law, which states Wholeness is the union of all opposites. One consequence of this law, which is called the Principle of Unity, is that all beings in the relativistic world of form emerge from the Formless Absolute and return there at the end of their lifespans.

So, while the Absolute is Immortal, no forms or structures are. As Shakyamuni Buddha said on his death bed, “Behold, O monks, this is my last advice to you. All component things in the world are perishable. They are not lasting. Strive on with diligence.”

This fundamental life-and-death principle applies as much to Homo sapiens as our own bodies. Our species is not immortal. One day a generation of children will be born who will not grow old enough to have children of their own.

With the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Polar Science Centre projecting that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2018 or 2019, as this chart of the exponential trend indicates, it looks as if that generation has already been born.

To see what effects these projections could have on climate change in the immediate future, this chart shows the way that the concentration of three principal greenhouse gases have increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, around 1750. Now there are between 500 and 5,000 gigatons of methane frozen in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, north of Russia, compared to just 5 gigatons currently in the atmosphere. And methane is 150 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide during its first ten years in the atmosphere.

So if just one per cent of the minimum estimate of methane trapped in the Arctic were released into the atmosphere, this would double its parts per billion, having the effect of an increase of 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide, an increase of 75%, far beyond the 410 ppm in April 2018. As planet Earth warms, methane is likely to be released into the atmosphere at ever-increasing exponential rates through a positive feedback loop.

One consequence of this is that governmental attempts to keep the average temperature on Earth below two degrees above pre-industrial levels and predictions that temperatures could actually rise by four or five degrees by 2100, making the Earth uninhabitable by then, are way off the mark, as Guy McPherson and many others have been saying during the past few years.

For studies done by Sam Carana suggest that temperatures could rise even faster in the next few years because of huge eruptions of methane from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean and many other factors. So there is a high probability that Homo sapiens could be extinct by the middle of the 2020s, with our ability to grow corn for baking our daily bread being lost by 2020.

It is vitally important not to blame humans for this critical situation. Even if our lives are awarely (consciously and intelligently) guided by the Principle of Unity, enabling us to live in love, peace, and harmony with each other and our environment, we are all the products of some 13.8 billion years of evolution and don’t have the power or free wlll to defy the fundamental law of the Universe, through changes in lifestyle, geoengineering, or whatever.

For myself, my psychospiritual practice has been inwardly preparing me for this inevitability since 1982, while seeking to complete the final revolution in science by explaining what is causing scientists and technologists to drive the pace of evolutionary change at unprecedented rates of exponential acceleration.

Although my initial vision of human extinction in two or three centuries has become just a few years, I continue to pursue my life’s purpose to consummate the sacred marriage of science and spirituality, unifying mysticism and mathematics. We could thereby establish Consciousness as Ultimate Reality, showing that we are all interconnected, that none of us is ever separate from any other being, including the Supreme Being.

For I cannot defy my guiding spirit, which the Greeks and Romans called Daimon and Genius, respectively. In my experience the best way to face death is to come fully alive as a superhuman being, free of the mechanistic constraints on our learning imposed on us by our cultural and personal conditioning. For as the scientific mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said in The Human Phenomenon:

The way out for the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman, will not open ahead to some privileged few, or to a single people, elect among all peoples. They will yield only to the thrust of all together in the direction where all can rejoin and complete one another in a spiritual renewal of the Earth.

Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics

After writing several books and many essays and articles on the root causes of our rapidly changing world, today I feel moved to write one final book as the apotheosis of my forty-year writing career titled Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics: To Reveal the Contextual Foundation and Framework for All Knowledge. To see the direction of my thoughts, you are most welcome to read the front and back covers that I have uploaded and a draft Prologue, updated in January 2019 with a new subtitle: To Realize Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth.

The symbol that lies at the heart of this wonderful unification is Indra’s Net of Jewels or Pearls in Huayan Buddhism, visualized as a dewy spider’s web in which every dewdrop contains the reflection of the light emanating from all the other dewdrops, like nodes in a mathematical graph.

This metaphor illustrates that it is an illusion to believe that we are separate from our fellow human beings and must fight each other for a slice of the finite monetary cake. For when we dive underneath the surface of the physical universe—to the Immanent Divine Origin of the Universe, transcending our unique bodies, minds, and souls—we discover that we are like waves and currents on and beneath the surface of the vast Ocean of Consciousness, never separate from the Ocean.

This is Ultimate Reality, the multidimensional generalization of David Bohm’s notion of the holomovement, as an undivided flowing stream, with which he unified the incompatibilities between quantum and relativity theories in 1980. From a practical psychospiritual perspective, Vimala Thakar pointed out in 1984 in Spirituality and Social Action, an inspirational book dedicated to the quest for Wholeness:

In truth, the inner life or the psychological life is not a private or a personal thing, it’s very much a social issue. The mind is a result of a collective human effort. There is not your mind and my mind, it’s a human mind. It’s a collective human mind, organized and standardized through centuries. The values, the norms, the criteria are patterns of behaviour organized in collective groups. There is nothing personal or private about them. There is nothing that could be a source of pride or embarrassment.

What this means is that what appear to be our separate psyches—incorporated in distinct bodies, badly wounded during the course of human history—are actually all manifestations of one undivided Cosmic Psyche. So if we could all help each other to heal our fragmented minds and split psyches by living in harmony with the Hidden Harmony, we would each be contributing to healing the wounded psyche we all share.

As far as I know, no one has previously expressed the ancient wisdom that underlies all the religions in the language of pure mathematics, beyond the mechanistic linearity of time. So writing this book on the elegant patterns and relationships that provide the infrastructure for the Cosmos is my pennyworth, healing both personal and cultural wounds in my psyche.

This mathematical treatise is probably necessary to complete the final revolution in science in a manner that people could accept. For it contains the algebra of algebras that Bohm sought to present his theory of the implicate order in rigorous scientific terms. However, as a generalist, I am neither a professional mathematician nor modern mystic. So any assistance that such adepts could give me would be much appreciated.

Furthermore, Vimala Thakar and David Bohm have said that if we do not awaken to Total Revolution, questioning the assumptions and beliefs of the cultures we are born in, then humanity is not a viable species. So it is vitally important that we synergistically cocreate a more conducive creative environment than that which exists in our confused society today.