When I set out in 1980 to systematically unify the psychospiritual energies acting through all of us with the four forces acting in the physical universe, I thought that this revolution in science would come about through the publication of a single paper, like Einstein’s on the special theory of relativity or Crick and Watson’s on the structure of DNA, or a single book, like Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, Kepler’s New Astronomy, Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
However, as I progressed, I realized that admitting nonphysical causation into science changes every aspect of our lives, from the bedroom, through the classroom, to the boardroom. So by January 2013, this book had reached 1,300 pages and was still evolving and growing, somewhat indigestible without the life experience that brought it into being. I gave it two titles, like Darwin’s book on evolution: Wholeness: The Union of All Opposites and Semantic Principles of Natural Philosophy, to indicate that its purpose is to complete the final revolution in science, just as Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy completed the first in 1687.
But when I felt deeply inside myself to look at the essence of what I wanted to say, I realized that all I needed were a few sentences, as simple expressions of the fundamental law of the Universe: Wholeness is the union of all opposites. So when my friend Pär helped me set up a website for the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics in 2014, I wrote a few simple pages describing how the entire world of learning can grow from a few basic principles. What these mean for my innermost experiences, I describe on this website.
I call this starting point the Datum of the Universe, from Latin dare ‘to give; cause’ and Presence, from Latin præesse ‘before being’ or ‘prior to existence’. To bring my life and writings into harmony with what Joseph Campbell called the Cosmogonic Cycle, during recent years, I have thus been through a total inversion of everything I have learnt in my lifetime.
This was a process I began in 1980 on Wimbledon Common in London, with another radical change of direction in 2008 following a retreat with my friend Nukunu beside Lake Teletskoye in the Altai Mountains in Russia, depicted in the header. This for me was Paradise, the original home of the shamans, not too far from Shambhala, which Chögyam Trungpa described as a mythical “place of peace and prosperity, governed by wise and compassionate rulers”, called ‘Shangri-La’ in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon.
The challenge now is to find a form of words—both written and spoken—and a wordless means of communications, that could complete the final revolution in science, if, indeed, this is what is meant to happen. For I am a Panosopher, a generalist in a world of specialists, facing a similar challenge to that of Comenius writing his magnum opus on Pansophia in the mid 1600s. Similarly, Charles Sanders Peirce spent the second half of his life making three attempts to write a comprehensive and coherent book on his triadic architectonic, which came very close to solving the ultimate problem in human learning.
I see this publishing task rather like that of René Descartes, who had a dream in 1619 of “the unification and the illumination of the whole of science, even the whole of knowledge, by one and the same method: the method of reason”. He eventually published an expression of his dream in 1637 as Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences, to give his seminal work its full title.
To illustrate how his method could be applied in practice, Descartes wrote three additional works titled Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology. His book on Geometry marked a major turning point in the history of mathematics, for it showed how geometric forms in Euclidean space could be studied algebraically, using what are today called Cartesian coordinates.
In a similar manner, Integral Relational Logic (IRL) provides the methodical system of coordinates and Cosmic Foundation for all knowledge, which we all implicitly use everyday to form concepts and organize our ideas. All my writings during this decade have been following this pattern, as I explain in a bibliographical essay that I wrote in April 2018.
Since then, I have been working primarily on my final book titled Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics: To Realize Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth, with an overview and bionote on the back cover. So far, a draft Prologue and first chapters on Business Modelling and Integral Relational Logic are available.
What I have written so far is an expansion of an essay titled ‘The Voice of Experience’ that I wrote in July 2018 for The Galileo Commission, to which I was invited as a systems architect and author. Writing in October 2018, where this might lead, I must just wait and see.