Humanity is currently awakening from thousands of years of deep sleep, as our forebears have struggled to understand what it truly means to be a human being and our relationship to God and the Universe. What we are discovering as we wake up is the existence of a vast, wondrous Cosmos, inaccessible to our physical senses, glimpsed by many, but known to mystics over the years, engaged in self-inquiry and other spiritual practices.
In the past, such a drawing back of the blinds has been a ‘nice-to-have’, far beyond the struggles and vicissitudes of daily life, as we prioritize and engage with our jobs, families, and other projects. However, today, faced with the greatest crisis in human history, awakening to our fullest potential as a superintelligent, superconscious species becomes an urgent necessity.
Vimala Thakar highlights the challenges we face in the opening paragraph of 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.” 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.”
Many today are answering this call as Homo universalis, as mentioned in my previous post, being as open, sensitive, and vulnerable as possible to what is happening within, as evolution becomes increasingly conscious of itself. For, as Vimala said, “In truth, the inner life or the psychological life is not a private or a personal thing, it’s very much a social issue. … There is nothing that could be a source of pride or embarrassment.”
What this means, of course, is that if we are unwilling to engage in self-inquiry to discover why we think and behave as we do, we are being antisocial, potentially disturbing the harmonious functioning of society, just as much as the military murdering people and politicians fighting trade wars.
But what is this process of speciation? How do new species emerge in a quite different way from their evolutionary line? Well, in the biosphere, normally a species maintains its distinct existence by ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, when offspring mimic their parents. However, this evolutionary process is reversed when a few individuals begin to develop in a quite different direction from the herd, giving birth to a quite new species.
We see similar situations in the noosphere, as civilizations seek to maintain their existence through their education and economic systems and other cultural rituals and practices. However, during scientific revolutions, a few pioneering individuals break free of such constraints, leading to the radical transformation of traditional worldviews and paradigms, as these spread into society as a whole.
Most famously, in 1543, Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system, contrary to the geocentric beliefs of the Aristotelians and Christian Church. Something similar is happening today, as we endeavour to complete the final revolution in science, just as Newton completed the first in 1687, establishing Consciousness as Ultimate Reality and the interconnectedness of all beings.
This is essential if we are to answer the most critical unanswered question in science today: “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?”
So how can those of us engaged with such awakenings relate to a society that is generally afraid of and antagonistic to the development of our fullest potential as individuated humans? Well, in my case, this rebellious streak began in October 1941, just seven weeks after my conception, when I was a two-centimetre embryo in my mother’s womb.
For on the day that my mother had her pregnancy confirmed, her three-year-old, first-born son ran out in front of an army lorry and was killed instantly. My mother instantaneously went from ecstasy to cataclysmic trauma, emotional disturbances she passed on to me growing rapidly within her. This dichotomous event set up a couple of behaviour patterns in my psyche that it has taken me seventy-five years to understand and master.
Most significantly, what Stanislav Grof calls the ‘oceanic ecstasy’ of the nurturing womb turned into a ‘bad womb’, as, unbeknownst to my mother, my immediate surroundings felt hostile to my development. This feeling of not belonging continued after I was born, as I did not feel welcome in my family, as my parents struggled with their grief, regarding my dead brother as an angel, which, of course, I could not live up to.
Then, when I was seven years of age, when I began to think for myself, I further provoked hostility from the authorities in my life by seeking to end the long-running war between science and religion so that I could live in Love and Peace, returning to the oceanic ecstasy I had felt during the first fifty days of my existence.
However, I could not continuously question the dogmatic belief systems of my parents, priests, and teachers and survive. So at the ages of eleven, sixteen, and eighteen I learned what they wanted me to learn so that I could go to university to study the beauty of pure mathematics, with its universal, transcultural truths. But even this turned out to be very depressing, as I discovered that mathematics, as it was taught to me, could not lead to Wholeness and the Truth, which I yearned for in the very depth of my being.
After eventually graduating in mathematics, I abandoned my life-long search for Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth to get married, have a family, and pursue a business career in the information technology industry, mostly in an IBM sales office as a systems engineer and manager.
But it was not my destiny to have a successful business career, living a comfortable life with my family in the conventional manner. After twelve years being reasonably assimilated into the prevailing culture, the Universe arranged for IBM in the UK to undergo a major restructuring, retriggering a behaviour pattern induced in my psyche before I was born. My managerial business career came crashing down, leading me into a major midlife crisis.
Seeking to understand what was happening to me, I began to realize how little we technologists understood about the capabilities of the stored-program computer vis-à-vis the immense potential of human intelligence to awaken to its fullest capacity.
Most significantly, it was clear to me that the invention of the computer is incompatible with materialistic, mechanistic science and the capitalist and communist economic systems that I had felt so uncomfortable with as an adolescent. Technological development could not drive economic growth indefinitely.
It was this concern for my children’s future well-being that led me to pass through the apocalyptic, death-and-rebirth process in the early 1980s that I mentioned in my previous post, as an antidote to my prenatal trauma. At the age of thirty-eight I became an autodidact, learning what my teachers were unable to teach me in my formal education.
As I had comparatively little to unlearn, during the second half of my life, I have been enjoying the most marvellous adventure, as the innermost secrets of the Universe have been revealed to me, described in several books and many essays and articles. But this is just a beginning. If as many as possible are to awaken to Total Revolution, we need to set up a team of specialists to integrate all the fragmented branches of human learning on the same Gnostic Foundation and within the same Cosmic Context and coordinating framework we all share.
Sadly, however, as my ontogeny is so unusual, maybe never to be repeated, I still live mostly in solitude, estranged from my children and grandchildren, with just a few friends with whom I relate as an ordinary human being. I’m thus unsure whether anyone else will ever be able to see with their inner eye the abstract holographic patterns and relationships underlying the vast vistas of the Cosmos. These act as the commonsensical coordinating framework for all our learning and hence for Panosophy, as the Theory of Everything.
Yet this framework is simplicity itself. I visualize it as a self-similar, multidimensional mathematical graph, which corresponds to Indra’s Net of Jewels in Huayan Buddhism, at the heart of my meditation practice. This is how the abstractions of mathematics and mysticism have become unified within me, consummating the sacred marriage between spirituality and science, thereby fulfilling a boyhood dream.
Yet, even though this transdisciplinary framework has evolved from the transcultural, information-systems modelling methods underlying the Internet, therein lies the major difficulty with completing the final revolution in science. This is not just about mathematics and ideas printed on paper, as was the situation with Newton and Einstein’s revolutions, even though these are necessary. Rather, if evolution is to become fully conscious of itself within our psyches, this can only happen by recognizing mystical psychology as the primary science on which all disciplines of learning are based.
Furthermore, I am very well aware that presenting myself to the world as openly and honestly as I can is subject to many misinterpretations that derive from people’s cultural conditioning, which goes back thousands of years into the mists of time.
For myself, I don’t feel I should write any more on my life story for the moment, endeavouring to make a little of my inner world visible to those around me. As I can see and sense the Totality of Existence as a coherent whole, I know that in Reality there is no other—we are all one. So if people can feel some empathy for the experiences that I am describing, perhaps I could establish a function as a Panosopher, acting in the capacity of a wise elder, helping to harmonize evolutionary convergence.
That, it seems, is why my inner guru has guided me to write and publish this post as openly and humbly as I am able. Some leading evolutionaries have asserted that healing the fragmented mind in Wholeness, solving the ultimate problem of human learning, is impossible. Nevertheless, for reasons I have outlined in this post, it is quite possible to reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, awakening to the glories of Total Revolution, albeit, as yet, a rather rare occurrence.