On 2nd September 2025, Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that Beijing was willing to work with Moscow to “promote the construction of a more just and reasonable global governance system”, Putin having hailed Russia’s relationship with China at an “unprecedentedly high level”.
Yet, the very next day, these two world leaders were joined by Kim Jong Un and Masoud Pezeshkian, from North Korea and Iran, respectively, to witness a gigantic military parade along the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing. They were celebrating the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937.
These four leaders are seen as an emerging anti-American axis, as the basis of a China-led world order, counteracting Donald Trump, who seeks to Make America Great Again (MAGA), with the imposition of vindictive global tariffs, along with other divisive policies. China’s demonstration of military power followed a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which included Narendra Modi and Alexander Lukashenko from India and Belarus, respectively.
Yet, how can Xi and Putin construct a more just and reasonable global governance system? apparently solving a problem that has eluded human beings for more than 5,000 years, since the formation of the first civilizations during the patriarchal epoch.
The central problem here is that reason has traditionally been based on conflict-ridden, either-or thinking, derived from ego-, ethno-, and anthropocentric senses of identity, encapsulated in Aristotle’s laws of contradiction and exclusion. During the course of human evolution, very few communities have been based on a harmonious, both-and way of life, with the holistic ability to see both sides of any situation.
One who proposed such a peaceful way of living together some 2,500 years ago was Laozi (Lao Tzu) in China, the putative author of Tao Te Ching ‘The Book of the Way and of Virtue’, which begins, “Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Now. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name.” Unifying all opposites in Ineffable Nonduality is popularly encapsulated in the classic T’ai-chi-t’u symbol or ‘Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate’.
Another exemplar and advocate of Inner Peace was Heraclitus of Ephesus, the mystical philosopher of change, who said, “The Hidden Harmony is better than the obvious” and “Opposition brings concord; out of discord comes the fairest harmony.”
Yet, their contemporaries did not comprehend or experience what they were saying. For instance, Heraclitus said, “People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself.” Similarly, Laozi said, “My words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice: But the world cannot understand them nor practice them.”
Today, the principal impediment to the development of a harmonious system of global governance is people’s attachment to money, as the most divisive force on the planet. For many, money acts as a cultural immortality symbol, giving people a precarious sense of security. So, driven by the fear of death, the more money that individuals and nations accumulate, the safer they feel.
Accordingly, the authorities have set up a global monetary economy that demands that we fight our fellow human beings for a slice of the finite financial pie, often causing much suffering, as the dominant minority have much more money than they require for their daily needs. To protect people’s narrow, shallow senses of identity, economic ideologies, religions, and countries have fought each other throughout human history, leading to much death and destruction.
The Chinese were the first to use metallic artefacts as abstract tokens of value, such as symbols of axes, spears, knives, swords, hoes, and spades, made out of copper, bronze, and iron, illustrated here. Today, representations of money – as commodities with value – have been taken to the utmost level of abstraction, as bits of data in computer systems, increasingly replacing traditional coins and notes displaying sovereigns’ heads, as symbols of power and authority.
But in stored-program computers, such bits can also encode instructions to the central processing unit (CPU). So, could these binary digits act intelligently, creating novelty without human involvement? As I explained in my scholarly monograph ‘Revealing Humanity’s Place in the Cosmos’ in July, the answer is irrefutably NO! Whatever computers with so-called artificial intelligence (AI) are doing, this has nothing to do with intelligence—as the ability to read between the lines.
Rather, we humans have immense potential to awaken our creative intelligence far beyond machines, which I have demonstrated by using the semantic modelling methods of information systems architects in business to develop a coherent, non-deductive system of thought called Integral Relational Logic. In turn, this holographic method of reasoning provides the Contextual Foundation and coordinating framework for a transcultural, transdisciplinary megasynthesis of all knowledge, called the Unified Relationships Theory or Panosophy.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines pansophy as ‘universal or cyclopædic knowledge; a scheme or cyclopædic work embracing the whole body of human knowledge’. This word entered the English language in 1642 in A Reformation of Schooles by Jan Ámos Komenský (Comenius), who regarded it as ‘Universal Wisdom’.
Panosophy is thus the Theory of Everything, which has eluded Albert Einstein and his successors for one hundred years, because they omitted the multitude of nonmaterial energies emerging directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe from their endeavours to create a unified theory of causality.
By starting afresh at the very beginning – at the Datum of the Universe, ‘that which is given’ – the creative power of Life – bubbling up from the Source, like an effervescent fountain – could then free us of all the delusions and misconceptions that have afflicted human affairs for millennia.
In Panosophy, the Primal Axiom for all our learning is the Principle of Unity, which states Wholeness is the union of all opposites, including contradictory ones, or the Cosmic Equation, thereby unifying science and spirituality, mysticism and mathematics, and East and West:
So, by abolishing money and understanding what is causing us to behave as we do through a life-enhancing work ethic, the solution to the ultimate problem in human learning could be theoretically used to implement a meaningful global economy in harmony with this fundamental law of the Universe.
By dispersing the almost impenetrable clouds of unknowing that prevent us from understanding what it means to be human, the radiant Light of Consciousness – enlightening our innate Self-reflective Intelligence – could enable a harmonious system of global governance to emerge, which the eco-philosopher Henryk Skolimowski aptly called lumenarchy.
However, with billions of years of bifurcating evolution rapidly driving humankind to extinction – along with countless other species – there is no longer sufficient time to cocreate a Panosophical system of global governance for the benefit of us all. At best, we could compassionately come together in what Guy McPherson aptly calls a ‘planetary hospice’ to help mitigate the panic that could arise as our earthly habitat exhausts its ability to feed us all through rapid global heating, principally caused by multiple self-reinforcing feedback loops, such as the accelerating release of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
To do so, the top priority is to heal our split souls by breaking the fundamental taboo of the Abrahamic religions, which asserts that God is separate from us humans and all other forms in the manifest universe. However, such a sublime awakening cannot happen through the action of any separate agency, for, as mystics have discovered by looking deeply into themselves, we live eternally in union with the Immortal Ground of Being. For instance, the pre-eminent Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see God is the same as that with which he sees me.”
By intelligently and consciously living in union with the Divine in the Eternal Now, Life could then help us understand our evolutionary story a little better, free from our materialistic and mechanistic cultural conditioning. Although the mathematics is rather advanced, the basic picture of why the accelerating, exponential rate of accumulative evolution has recently passed into the psychosocial chaos we are witnessing today is quite simple:
Given that we are now living at the end of time, it makes little sense to continue to educate our children and conduct our business affairs in the way we have been doing for hundreds and thousands of years, not knowing that there is no future in Reality. In particular, as there will be no banks or stock markets on Earth following our imminent extinction as a species, the principal intelligent action we urgently need to take as communities is to pool our skills and resources in the support of us all.
In today’s global village, we especially need to care for the younger generations, who are destined not to grow old enough to have children of their own, or grandchildren, if they are already young parents. It will not be easy, because these youngsters have been greatly dehumanized by being educated in a grievously sick society, as The Matrix, a popular allegory of our times, graphically illustrates with its warmongering.
In contrast, community derives 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’. Community is also cognate with Sanskrit maitreya ‘friendly, benevolent’ and Pāli mettā ‘loving-kindness’, akin to Buddhist compassion (karunā) and love or charity (agapē) in Christianity.
And when our lives are based on Love, the Divine Essence we all share, we realize that kindness is our True Nature, where there are no enemies. For kind is the native English word for nature, the OED tells us, having the same root. As the Sufi poet Rumi beautifully put it, “Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns.”