The Universal Method, introduced in a recent blog post, is a way of expressing ancient wisdom—known to Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton as philosophia perennis and prisca sapientia, respectively—in a language that has evolved from science and business.
This commonsensical system of thought has healed my fragmented, split mind in Wholeness, ending the long-running war between science and religion, which I set out to accomplish as a seven-year-old in 1949, guided by the creative power of Life, emanating directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe.
To find Love and Peace by unifying all opposites, beyond life and death, the Method has evolved from the powerful abstractions of pure mathematics, computer science, information systems modelling methods underlying the Internet, and David Bohm’s theory of the Implicate Order, which resolved the incompatibilities between quantum and relativity theories.
We can see what this all-inclusive holographic cosmology means for our lives together by generalizing Bohm’s notion of the holomovement—as an undivided flowing stream—into the multidimensional Ocean of Consciousness. All our journeys in life are like waves and currents on and beneath the surface, never separate from the Ocean for an instant. We can regard the surface as the physical universe, with the 99% beneath the surface as the Cosmic Psyche.
Of all the animals, we humans are the least superficial and instinctive. Using the metaphor of a computer, very few of our thoughts and actions are physically hard-wired. Our learning—corresponding to software and data in computers—mostly determines the way that we view the world and ourselves, and hence our behaviour.
So for thousands of years of human learning, as biogenesis became noogenesis, we have been left to our own devices to try to discover with our fragmented, deluded minds what the Universe is, how it is designed, and our place in it. In the event, mystic psychologists, as true scientists, have had the most success in this endeavour, in contrast to the superficiality of Western civilization, in particular.
Living in the dual and dualistic world of form, we are being constantly buffeted in the psyche by a multiplicity of both competing and cooperating opposites, which are both complementary and contradictory. There is some respite when polarized opposites are unified in Divine lovemaking, for instance, and when we touch the Stillness of Nonduality, when all the apparent divisions in the relativistic world of form dissolve in the seamless continuum of the Formless Immortal Absolute.
However, in practical terms, we continue to struggle, as our forebears have done for millennia, with the immense complexity of conflicting opposites, sometimes projected into our relationships with the Divine and each other, egoically identifying with one side of a coin, dismissing the other.
Wherever we might be in our spiritual awakening, we are all suffering from this turmoil to some degree, in what Matthew Fox calls the dark night of our species, not fully understanding the psychodynamics of society, our evolutionary story, and how the Cosmos is ordered and designed.
As we myopically accelerate towards the inevitable extinction of our species, the Buddhist principle of compassion, which means ‘suffering together’, offers our best chance for salvation. The actual dying process is unlikely to be very pleasant, especially for children and adolescents, who will not be destined to grow old enough to have children of their own, bringing one billion years of continuous sexual reproduction to an end, at least in our species.
In Sanskrit, compassion is karunā, akin to agapē ‘love or charity’ in Christianity and Pāli mettā ‘loving-kindness’, the translation of Sanskrit maitrī, the root of maitreya ‘friendly, benevolent’. This word has the same Proto-Indo-European base as community, from Latin commūnis ‘shared, common, public’, originally in sense ‘sharing burdens’, from cum ‘together with’ and mūnus ‘office, duty; gift, present’, from mūnare ‘to give, present’.
We can thus see from the root of our collective soul that the next Buddha—as Maitreya, the ‘Loving one’—can only be a community or global sangha, practising compassionate living rather than an individual, as Thich Nhat Hanh has foreseen. And when our lives are based on Love, the Divine Essence we all share, we realize that kindness is our True Nature, for kind is the native English word for nature, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, having the same root.
It is not necessary to experience the mystical and apocalyptic origins of the Method or understand its technical details, for we all intuitively use it everyday to bring a sense of order to our lives, from the micro to the macro, from organizing the folders and files in our computers to working synergistically in teams to send humans to the Moon, for instance.
Nevertheless, if we are to intelligently face the ignorance and turbulence of the world today, we can connect the both-and heart of the Method to Ananta Kumar Giri’s principle of compassionate confrontation, akin to Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker’s Savage Grace, the oxymoronic title of a recent book confronting the great global crisis with much wisdom, compassion, and courage.
By harmonizing evolutionary convergence—in consonance with Heraclitus’ Hidden Harmony, the fundamental law of the Universe—we could live with compassion as mystic psychologists, which is absolutely essential. For in the overall scheme of things, during the twenty noughties, evolution passed through its Accumulation Point in chaos-theory terms—as the nonlinear mathematics of systems dynamics tells us—the most momentous turning point in some fourteen billion years of bifurcating evolution since the most recent big bang.
And if conscious evolution is to intelligently bring universal order to this fragmentary chaos in the Age of Light, guiding us to live joyfully in harmony with our rapidly changing world, we need to live resiliently in the dark night of the globe, as Andrew and Carolyn put it in their vitally significant book, helping us prepare with love and compassion for the inevitable death of Homo sapiens.