With global headlines declaring that machines with so-called artificial intelligence are about to take over our lives, and with abrupt, irreversible climate change about to drive humankind to near-term extinction, I am making one final attempt to bring systemic conceptual clarity to our much-perplexed society. For my lifelong quest for Peace has led Life to heal my fragmented mind in indivisible, Nondual Wholeness, albeit in a most unconventional way, unifying mysticism and mathematics, and hence science and spirituality.
Despite working in solitude for many years, I am still following the strategy that I adopted after meeting David Bohm for the first time in London in November 1980, six months after I exuberantly resigned from my innovative marketing job with IBM to investigate what it truly means to be a creative human, free from cultural constraints, which William Blake aptly called our ‘mind-forg’d manacles’.
I set out on this great adventure because I could see that the global economy holds the seeds of its own destruction within it and that my children were not being educated to live in the world that they would be living in when they came to be bringing up children of their own. Sensing in childhood and adolescence that science and religion are not based on the Truth, my thoroughgoing researches during the second half of my life have given me much satisfaction, as a freethinking autodidact. For, by developing and using the universal, holographic art and science of reason hidden within all of us, I have learnt what I was unable to learn during my formal education.
After passing through a revelatory death-and-rebirth process, I have been invoking our innate Self-reflective Intelligence to generalize Bohm’s theory of the Implicate Order so that it can be applied to the study of the psychodynamics of society within the context of evolution as a whole. By allowing the one-dimensional holomovement to flow into the multidimensional Ocean of Consciousness, evolution has become fully aware of itself, as Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin foresaw in the 1950s.
By thus unifying science and mysticism, I have been able to bring the Divine Origin of the Universe into the theory of evolution—which Charles Darwin refrained from doing in On the Origin of Species in 1859—thereby gently guiding immaterial causality into rational thought, confirmed scientifically through wide-ranging spiritual practices, psychosomatic experiments, and quintessential commonsense.
But first, I needed to establish Bohm’s groundbreaking theory as sound science—experientially, conceptually, and mathematically—thereby completing the final revolution in science, which Willis Harman and Fritjof Capra set out to do in 1985 at a New Paradigm conference, just as Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton completed the first in the 1600s.
Such a holotropic, whole-systems transformation of the way we look at the world is essential to answer the most critical unanswered question in science: What is causing scientists and technologists, aided and abetted by data-processing systems in computers, to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological invention at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration?
Without going into further details in this blog post, I have written a two-page piece titled ‘The Final Frontier of Human Learning’, highlighting why mechanistic, deep-learning algorithms can tell us little about creativity. For, the creative power of Life—as the vertical vital impulse, bubbling up from the Formless Absolute, like a sparkling fountain—has led me to develop the Method we need to integrate all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines into a coherent whole. The guiding principle here is E. F. Schumacher’s mapmaking maxim in A Guide for the Perplexed: “Accept everything; reject nothing.”
Not only is this motto the means to the end of our spiritual journeys, it also enables us to develop the elusive Theory of Everything, which is contained within the Cosmic Psyche, as a holistic map of the Totality of Existence. For Bohm pointed out that a theory is a form of insight, revealed through profound self-inquiry. By thus being carried to evolution’s glorious culmination in the Eternal Now, I have used the skills of information systems architects in business to comprehensively model Inner Space, as the final frontier of human learning. For, studying inner science with Gnosis greatly enhances the profundity of human experience, giving much meaning and enjoyment to our lives.
I have come to this level of Self-realization as the result of 74 years questioning the misguided assumptions of the culture I was born in—in the spirit of Bohm’s process of Dialogue—and nearly half a century of self-inquiry—begun when I was appointed a systems-engineering manager in an IBM sales office. To heal a cataclysmic prenatal trauma, these inquiries have revealed the transfinite potential of humanity and hence the root cause of conflict and suffering during the patriarchal epoch, since the dawn of history, some 5,000 years ago.
For, as Albert 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.” We cannot reveal Inner Peace with specialist mindsets and partisan identities, which lead to wars, including those in academia and economics. We could only cocreate World Peace by standing outside ourselves, viewing our unique lives together from a Nondual perspective, free of attachment to the divisive force of money.
However, the accelerating pace of climate change is likely to drive Homo sapiens ‘wise human’ into extinction within a decade or three through dozens of self-reinforcing feedback loops, as Guy McPherson frequently points out on his YouTube channel ‘Nature Bats Last’. So, we no longer have the opportunity to apply the solution to the ultimate problem in human learning to rebuild the education and economic systems on the Truth, as I ingenuously envisaged when I abandoned my burgeoning business career 43 years ago.
Nevertheless, should my pioneering journey and latest writings pique your curiosity, I would be delighted to explore how we might generate the synergistic relationships we need to collectively heal the experiential and cognitive split between humanity and our Immortal Ground of Being, from which we are never separate. For, by acting as pristine mirrors for each other, like brilliant jewels in Indra’s Net in Huayan ‘Flower Garland’ Buddhism, we could harmoniously resolve the great existential crisis that our species is facing today, exquisitely experiencing Love as the Divine Essence we all share in our hearts.
Note. Like my previous blog post on ‘The art and science of humanity’, most of the links in this one are to entries in a hyperlinked Glossary I am developing to trace the entire history of human learning through etymology, going back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots of words as much as possible. For what Bohm aptly described as the ‘archaeology of language’ reveals the true sense and original meanings of words, free of the distortions of modern languages, which grievously mislead our lives today.
On a ‘personal’ note, I have used the letter I, standing for Identity, to refer to the supposed author of this email, as a transpersonal, transhuman pronoun. I thus denotes that Paul, like all of us, is never separate from the Divine for an instant. As there is only one I in the Universe, as Barry Long pointed out in his seminars, I feel that using P as a third-person pronoun to denote myself would create separation. J. Krishnamurti, for instance, did not avoid this problem by using K to refer to himself in his discourses.