Author: Paul

Inspired by conversations with friends this month, I have written a harmonious quartet of two-page articles, summarizing my life’s journey during the last 83 years.

The first, written last, is titled ‘Being Human’, answering some of the fundamental questions of human existence, such as Who are we? Where have we come from? and Where are we going?

Secondly, ‘The Power of Creativity’ describes why we need to break with the traditions of our parents and teachers in childhood and adolescence if we are to cocreate universal order from the psychosocial chaos the world is in today.

Thirdly, ‘Integrating All Knowledge into a Coherent Whole’ outlines the Method that has enabled me realize Inner Peace by ending the long-running wars between science and theology and all the religions.

The fourth, written first, marks the apotheosis of human learning in ‘The Indivisibility of Wholeness’, much influenced by Carl Gustav Jung’s healing process of individuation and David Bohm’s theory of the Implicate Order.

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.

During the last eight months, the creative power of Life has given me a quite new way of presenting the art and science of humanity that I have been developing with Self-reflective Intelligence during the past 43 years, since resigning from my innovative marketing job with IBM in London. It is based more on what we could become, rather than on how human nature has evolved during the 5,000 years of the conflict-ridden patriarchal epoch.

Most notably, we cannot get to where we are going by starting where we are today. For, as Vimala Thakar wisely said in the opening paragraph of Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach in 1984, “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.”

Making such a radical change to the way we live our lives is of the utmost simplicity. All we need to do is adopt an integral, both-and approach to human reasoning, which Heraclitus of Ephesus aptly called the ‘Hidden Harmony’. Aristotle rejected Heraclitus, favouring a divisive, either-or logic, which has sent Western thought into the evolutionary cul-de-sac it finds itself in today. For, as Carl Jung said, “One-sidedness … is a mark of barbarism,” whereas balancing opposites is “a sign of high culture”.

Having been educated as a mathematician in the early 1960s, Life made this life-changing switch within me in an irrepressible burst of creative energy during eight weeks in the spring of 1980, enabling evolution to become fully conscious of itself, much as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Julian Huxley foretold in the 1950s.

To describe what this holotropic, apocalyptic transformation could mean for the future of humanity, I have studied the history of human learning through etymology, going back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots of words wherever possible. The result of what David Bohm aptly called the ‘archaeology of language’ is an evolving hyperlinked Glossary of terms that I use to describe a theory of evolution that starts at the Divine Origin of the Universe, which Charles Darwin omitted to mention in On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Sadly, however, even awakening to our True Nature in Wholeness cannot ensure the survival of our species indefinitely. For humankind is not special. While humanity has the transfinite potential to develop far beyond machines with so-called artificial intelligence, we are subject to exactly the same laws of the Universe as all other beings in the manifest world of form. All structures emerging from the Formless Source are born to die, as we can see with what Tim Freke calls paralogical thinking, recognizing that opposites are never separate from each other in Reality. So, one day it is inevitable that a generation of children will be born who will not grow old enough to have children of their own.

When I first had this insight in Kuwait in the spring of 1982, I ingenuously thought that by admitting synergistic psychospiritual energies into science, humanity could thrive for a few more generations in the eschatological Age of Light, perhaps until the 23rd century. By developing a mathematical model of the exponential rate of evolutionary change, we could complete the final revolution in science, not unlike the way that Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton had completed the first in the 1600s.

However, when I met Guy McPherson for lunch in Oslo in December 2017, I realized that I had been far too optimistic. Guy, Emeritus Professor of Natural Resources at Arizona University, told me that the pollution of industrial society is slowing down the rate of global heating through global dimming, also called the aerosol-masking effect. So, no matter what changes we might be able to make in our lives, we are now well past the critical tipping point. Abrupt, irreversible climate change is likely to lead to human extinction within the next decade or three, when separative financial institutions, which attempt to govern and constrain our lives, will also disappear.

Some forty years of profound self-inquiry have well prepared me for this inevitability, especially since attending a life-changing retreat in the Altai Mountains in 2008 in Russia, the original home of the Shamans. However, meditative, psychospiritual practices, such as Jñāna yoga, eventually break the most fundamental taboo of Western civilization, revealing that we humans are never separate from Nonduality, as the Immortal Ground of Being, for an instant.

As a Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’ visionary, I am well aware that transcultural evolutionary studies that unify the powerful abstractions of mysticism and mathematics are not readily understandable and culturally acceptable to those educated and earning a living in the conventional manner. So, even though we are all deeply interconnected, my spiritual practice has taught me to enjoy living in the solitude of Wholeness, exquisitely encapsulated in the Sanskrit word Satchitānanda, as the ‘Bliss of Absolute Truth and Consciousness’.

Nevertheless, as evolution has carried me to its glorious culmination in the Eternal Now, Life is guiding me to do whatever I can to help at these troubled times we live in. For, no matter where our individual journeys in life might take us, we all share the Divine Essence of Love.

As a rider, the website on which the Glossary is being constructed was designed in Drupal in 2013 by a friend in Sweden, who has since died. So, I am seeking someone who could help me repair the front page and the navigation flaws that have since emerged. Also, that website needs to be redesigned, perhaps with the domain name WholenessNow, if it is to be attractive to those seeking Inner Peace by answering the fundamental questions of human existence: Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going?

Furthermore, this eponymous website was designed with a standard WordPress theme. I feel that it would be much improved if I could find someone to help me develop a more elegant theme, reflecting the sense of Wholeness on which it is based. Also, I would much appreciate some assistance to convert these HTTP websites into a secure implementation of HTTPS.

To address the great existential crisis we all face today with as much understanding and equanimity as possible, I have written an 18-page article titled ‘Wholeness Speaks’, inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s Stillness Speaks, Ramesh S. Balsekar‘s Consciousness Speaks, and Vimala Thakar’s Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach. So, I am now writing more for spiritual seekers interested in social action than academics, still much constrained by the infrastructure of their profession.