Understanding ourselves

As we humans know less about what it means to be human than almost anything else, such as music, computers, or the material universe, I have written a 12-page article on my understanding of what is currently happening to humanity, titled ‘Understanding Ourselves’.

At the heart of this understanding is the recognition of the existence of a vast nonmaterial domain, which I call the Cosmic Psyche, inaccessible to our physical senses of eyesight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. For, by giving a name to what humans have intuitively sensed within and around themselves for thousands of years, many of the ineffable mysteries of life and being can be solved.

Most significantly, understanding ourselves helps us to understand why the accelerating pace of evolution and climate change is driving humankind to near-term extinction, perhaps stimulating us to compassionately support each other at these end times we live in, knowing that Love is the Divine Essence we all share.

Awakening collectively

After half a century of self-inquiry, searching for a language in which to express my evolving experience of what it means to be human, compared to machines with so-called artificial intelligence (AI), I have written a harmonious quartet of two-page articles summarizing my understanding, as my previous blog post announces.

The primary reason why we don’t teach our children what it means to be human is that parents and teachers don’t know, because, in turn, their parents and teachers did not know, back through the generations. So, we live in ignorance of what is causing scientists and technologists to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological development at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration.

This is like driving along the highway faster and faster with our eyes closed, at best partially open, not very sensible. We can awaken to what is happening to humanity at the present time by acknowledging that the Totality of Existence consists of two inseparable regions, a material domain, which is mistakenly called universe, and a vastly more extensive nonmaterial realm, which is inaccessible to our physical senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.

This I call the Cosmic Psyche, containing the cognitive maps and mathematical structures that build our institutions and guide our daily lives. But, at present, these maps are deeply fragmented and so do not answer the fundamental questions of human existence, such as Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going? So, it is not surprising that we are a species that has lost its way, as the popular spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle pointed out in A New Earth.

However, no teachers can tell us what it means to be human, which we can only learn through creative self-inquiry, complementing our traditional spiritual practices. For we are all unique beings, following our own particular paths in life, much influenced by our relationships with families, friends, and associates. So, if we are to awaken in our communities, we need to do so en masse, generating the synergy of relationships we need to be free of the constraints on our learning imposed on us by the cultures within which we were born and live today.

For my part, I have spent many years developing a coherent Glossary of terms that we could use to communicate to each other in the eschatological Age of Light. The Glossary traces the etymology of words back to their Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots as much as possible. It does so at the suggestion of David Bohm, my principal scientific mentor, who aptly called such studies the archaeology of language.

Most significantly, the Glossary unifies God and universe, denoting the contextual concepts for theology and science, respectively, in the beautiful Sanskrit word Satchitānanda ‘Bliss of Absolute Truth and Consciousness’. With such a Cosmic understanding, grounded in union with the Divine, we then discover that our forebears lived much closer to Nature and Reality than most are able to do today.

However, the website that contained this hyperlinked lexicon was hacked in April 2024, and I do not have the skills or resources to rebuild it. So, if I am to communicate what I have learnt about the psychodynamics of society over the years, I would appreciate some assistance from Drupal web developers in reconstructing the Glossary, revising it as necessary, as we collectively awaken to our True Nature as humans.

A harmonious quartet

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.

The final frontier of human learning

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.

The art and science of humanity

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 NowLife 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.

Wholeness Speaks

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.

Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday

To celebrate fulfilling a major purpose of my life, I have written a 12-page memoir, titled ‘Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday’. This has been inspired by Bertrand Russell, who had similar objects in life and who also wrote an essay with this title when he reached his eighties. On the day that the Russians celebrated the end of the Second World War in Europe, I then wrote a short piece titled ‘What Has Happened to Us?’ to answer a question that a physician friend posed in a poem. Inspired by feedback I received from these pieces, I have written another one-sheet article titled ‘Gnostic Psychology: The Primary Science’, as a succinct summary of where I am coming from.

However, a Jungian psychologist has told me that with so many cooks stirring the broth, it is difficult to find a way through the language and argument each of them uses. I have attempted to resolve this dilemma with the incomplete Glossary on my other website, acting like an information systems architect, focusing on universal generalities, rather than the particulars of specialists. But such an endeavour is unlikely to succeed. For changing the meanings of words can only be based on the radical transformation of consciousness that arises from profound Gnostic understanding. So, to emphasize that I am still content with ‘what is’, despite such misunderstandings, I have written two final monographs titled ‘Enjoying Wholeness’ and ‘Being a Pioneer’.

Maintaining Inner Peace

As winter turns to spring here in Sweden, to maintain Inner Peace while Vladimir Putin orders brutal Russian troops to invade Ukraine, I have written five one-sheet monographs. They reflect a synthesis of occult and rational mentalities, consummating the sacred marriage of science and spirituality, being titled ‘Revealing the Truth’, Our Quest for World Peace’, ‘A Holoramic Vision’, ‘The Mathematical Universe’, and ‘Describing the Ineffable’. They are available on the 2022-publications page of the website for the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics, yet to be born.

For, although we cannot prevent the near-term extinction of our species, no matter how awakened we might become, with a deeper understanding of what is happening to us all as a species, I still feel that more could transcend hope and despair, acknowledging that Love is the Divine Essence we all share.

Memoir on Humankind

In response to the great existential crisis facing humanity today, I have written a memoir on my life’s journey titled ‘Humankind: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we heading?

This monograph is more an expression of the Ineffability of my inner being than an exercise in communications. For the True Nature of all humans is Wholeness, as the Totality of Existence, beyond compare. There is thus no other in Wholeness, no one to communicate with.

In contrast, for the most part we are taught that we are fragments and that we must fight our fellow humans for a slice of the finite monetary pie, falling far short of realizing our Infinite Potential, the title of F. David Peat’s biography of David Bohm’s own search for Wholeness in the Implicate Order.

Nevertheless, throughout the ages mystics have realized that humans are never separate from the Divine. So, as we increasingly bring our deepest inner experiences into science and business, there is still a possibility that we could go beyond narrow, one-sided views of human life, awakening to Total Revolution, as Vimala Thakar encouraged us all to do in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach.

Looking inwards

To mark the first flowers of spring in Sweden, I have written an eight-page monograph on how the creative power of Life has revealed a hidden world to me by guiding me to look inwards, as many spiritual seekers are doing today.

This piece is the seventh reflective monograph I have written this year as an introduction to my book Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics: To Reveal Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth, the first three chapters and the fourth of which are available on my website for the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics.

By starting at the end and ending at the beginning, the principal purpose of this book is to show how we can end the long-running war between reason and religion and spirituality and science.

For unifying mysticism and mathematics in our practical, everyday lives is essential if we are to live intelligently and consciously at the end of time, free of the fear of death.