Author: Paul

I look at the Universe through the eyes of its fundamental law, which states Wholeness is the union of all opposites. One consequence of this law, which is called the Principle of Unity, is that all beings in the relativistic world of form emerge from the Formless Absolute and return there at the end of their lifespans.

So, while the Absolute is Immortal, no forms or structures are. As Shakyamuni Buddha said on his death bed, “Behold, O monks, this is my last advice to you. All component things in the world are perishable. They are not lasting. Strive on with diligence.”

This fundamental life-and-death principle applies as much to Homo sapiens as our own bodies. Our species is not immortal. One day a generation of children will be born who will not grow old enough to have children of their own.

With the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Polar Science Centre projecting that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2018 or 2019, as this chart of the exponential trend indicates, it looks as if that generation has already been born.

To see what effects these projections could have on climate change in the immediate future, this chart shows the way that the concentration of three principal greenhouse gases have increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, around 1750. Now there are between 500 and 5,000 gigatons of methane frozen in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, north of Russia, compared to just 5 gigatons currently in the atmosphere. And methane is 150 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide during its first ten years in the atmosphere.

So if just one per cent of the minimum estimate of methane trapped in the Arctic were released into the atmosphere, this would double its parts per billion, having the effect of an increase of 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide, an increase of 75%, far beyond the 410 ppm in April 2018. As planet Earth warms, methane is likely to be released into the atmosphere at ever-increasing exponential rates through a positive feedback loop.

One consequence of this is that governmental attempts to keep the average temperature on Earth below two degrees above pre-industrial levels and predictions that temperatures could actually rise by four or five degrees by 2100, making the Earth uninhabitable by then, are way off the mark, as Guy McPherson and many others have been saying during the past few years.

For studies done by Sam Carana suggest that temperatures could rise even faster in the next few years because of huge eruptions of methane from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean and many other factors. So there is a high probability that Homo sapiens could be extinct by the middle of the 2020s, with our ability to grow corn for baking our daily bread being lost by 2020.

It is vitally important not to blame humans for this critical situation. Even if our lives are awarely (consciously and intelligently) guided by the Principle of Unity, enabling us to live in love, peace, and harmony with each other and our environment, we are all the products of some 13.8 billion years of evolution and don’t have the power or free wlll to defy the fundamental law of the Universe, through changes in lifestyle, geoengineering, or whatever.

For myself, my psychospiritual practice has been inwardly preparing me for this inevitability since 1982, while seeking to complete the final revolution in science by explaining what is causing scientists and technologists to drive the pace of evolutionary change at unprecedented rates of exponential acceleration.

Although my initial vision of human extinction in two or three centuries has become just a few years, I continue to pursue my life’s purpose to consummate the sacred marriage of science and spirituality, unifying mysticism and mathematics. We could thereby establish Consciousness as Ultimate Reality, showing that we are all interconnected, that none of us is ever separate from any other being, including the Supreme Being.

For I cannot defy my guiding spirit, which the Greeks and Romans called Daimon and Genius, respectively. In my experience the best way to face death is to come fully alive as a superhuman being, free of the mechanistic constraints on our learning imposed on us by our cultural and personal conditioning. For as the scientific mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said in The Human Phenomenon:

The way out for the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman, will not open ahead to some privileged few, or to a single people, elect among all peoples. They will yield only to the thrust of all together in the direction where all can rejoin and complete one another in a spiritual renewal of the Earth.

Although I’ve been studying the many existential risks threatening the survival of Homo sapiens for many years, not the least from scientific discovery and technological invention, recent scientific discoveries are making one particular issue more critical and urgent than all the others.

There is growing evidence today that the accelerating pace of climate change could bring about our extinction as early as the 2020s, much earlier than official prognoses, which climate-change deniers ignore. This critical situation is leading me to make a radical reassessment of how to live at Peace in the Eternal Now for the remaining few months and years of my life.

Ever since I had the idea in April 1980 that the exponential rate of scientific discovery and technological invention is being driven by synergistic psychospiritual energies not recognized by materialistic, mechanistic science, I have thought that my life’s purpose is to complete the final revolution in science, just as Isaac Newton completed the first with Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687.

Two years later, I became aware that evolution had carried me to its Omega Point in a gigantic, mind-shattering burst of creative energy, not unlike a prophecy that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had made for humanity as a whole in The Human Phenomenon, published posthumously in 1955. This revelation led me to see that Homo sapiens is not immortal. One day a generation of children will be born who will not grow old enough to have children of their own.

However, inspired by Teilhard’s four-stage model of evolution and Ken Wilber’s three-stage model of human development, I initially hoped that our inevitable demise could be delayed for several generations, albeit fewer than ten. Having great faith in humanity’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances despite our entrenched cultural conditioning, I surmised that the transition period between the third and fourth stages of Teilhard’s model would take about a hundred years between 1960 and 2060.

This would then give a fully awakened population the wonderful opportunity to live in Love and Peace in the Age of Light for two or three hundred years. Nevertheless, this would be a shorter period into the future than the period since the first scientific revolution, which led to the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century.

Despite some doubts, this was still the vision I had in the summer of 2017, when I set up this eponymous website, attempting to get active support for setting up the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics, necessary to integrate Eastern mysticism and Western rational thought into a coherent whole, completing the final revolution in science.

The Alliance would be a nurturing social environment where it is safe to question the cultural beliefs and assumptions that inhibit us from realizing our fullest potential as superintelligent, superhuman beings, far beyond superhuman algorithmic machines with so-called artificial intelligence, able to beat humans at games like chess and Go.

Sadly, however, despite some interest in what I am offering, the support that I need has not been forthcoming. The changes we need to make in the way that we look at our economic affairs and humanity’s relationship to God and the Universe are too overwhelming for most to contemplate. In practical terms, our families, jobs, and other projects leave little time and energy for making the change to the work ethic that is necessary to intelligently and consciously adapt to the most momentous turning point in fourteen billion years of evolution.

Under these circumstances, the focus of my attention is now turning more towards involution than evolution, to passing through the psychological death of the sense of a separate self before the inevitable deaths of my body and our species. In my experience, it is only when our sense of identity and security is based on the Immortal Ground of Being that we all share that we can face death with equanimity.

Most significantly, as Shakyamuni Buddha and Ramana Maharshi taught, if I desire something to happen that is not meant to happen, I am bound to suffer in unhappiness. Being aware of the Principle of Unity—the fundamental law of the Universe—can still help here. As opposites are never separate from each other in Reality, life and death are just two sides of the same coin, as Taoists and alchemists were aware. So are Brahman and Atman in Advaita and Nirvāna ‘extinction of the separate self’ and samsāra ‘journeying through the vicissitudes of life’ in Mahāyāna Buddhism.

So while few might be destined to become generalists rather than specialists, healing their fragmented minds at evolution’s glorious culmination in Wholeness, at these end times we live in we can still follow the ancient wisdom of the mystics, healing our split minds in Oneness. For as the Sufi poet Rumi said, “Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns.”

The Hidden Harmony—the fundamental law of the Universe, which guides every moment of our lives—is just that: hidden. Heraclitus of Ephesus did not explicitly define the term in the few fragments of his writings that have survived. He simply said, “The Hidden Harmony is better than the obvious,” and “Opposition brings concord; out of discord comes the fairest harmony.” Then, to emphasize the hiddenness of the Hidden Harmony, he said, “People do not understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself.”

Similarly, Lao Tzu said in Tao Te Ching, “When all the world recognizes beauty as beauty, this in itself is ugliness. When all the world recognizes good as good, this in itself is evil.” He continued, “The Tao is the hidden Reservoir of all things,” and “My words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice: But the world cannot understand them nor practice them.”

So what exactly is the Hidden Harmony, why has it been hidden from the vast majority of humans for thousands of years, and what can we do today to bring it out into the open in order to heal our fragmented, split minds and hence help bring about peaceful harmony to our troubled society?

Well, the Hidden Harmony simply denotes that opposites, polarities, or dualities, whether they be complementary or contradictory, are never separate from each other in Reality. As such, the Hidden Harmony is familiar to many in the Chinese concepts of yin and yang—despite the esoteric nature of the Tao—as inseparable dark and light, moon and sun, female and male, etc., and the classic T’ai-chi-t’u symbol, or ‘Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate’.

This symbol depicts the cyclic nature of the Universe. For example, day turns into night, which then turns back to day. The dots in the middle of the two main shapes indicate the potential of the opposite to arise when one side is dominant in any particular situation. The key point here is that when the Universe is viewed as a Whole, both opposites co-exist; to reject one in favour of the other does not lead to Wholeness, Peace, and tranquillity.

But there is more to polarities than is depicted here. In the spring of 1980, when setting out to develop a cosmology of cosmologies that would integrate the psychospiritual energies within us with the four basic forces recognized by physicists, I realized that there is often a primary-secondary relationship between opposites. As I have since discovered, this was not a new idea. It is present in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Fichte, and in the triadic architectonic of Charles Sanders Peirce, for instance.

At the time, seeking to find a starting point for developing a comprehensive, self-inclusive map of the Universe—as a taxonomy of taxonomies—I was playing around with sets and the principle of duality in projective geometry and Boolean algebra, which I had studied as an undergraduate in mathematics in the early 1960s.

Using David Bohm’s method for bringing about order in quantum physics, by the autumn of 1983 the Principle of Duality in the Universal Method had enabled me to form the concept of the Formless Absolute in exactly the same way as I form the concept of a triangle or a rose, for instance. Then, twenty years later, God became a rational, scientific concept in the mountains and forests of Norway and Sweden. I knew the Ineffable Truth with absolute certainty, both experientially and cognitively.

Today, I encapsulate this fundamental law of the Universe in the Principle of Unity, which simply states Wholeness is the union of all opposites, intuitively revealed to me through a great awakening in the early 1980s. In other words, the Hidden Harmony cannot be deduced from any axioms, as assumed or self-evident truths, or previous conceptual structures; it emerges directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe, fresh and innocent, like an infant.

But is the Principle of Unity, as a proposition, true? Well, Aristotle, the founder of Western linear systems of thought, did not think so, saying in Metaphysics: “It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation, … as some imagine Heraclitus says.” This statement is known as the Law of Contradiction today, lying at the starting point of mechanistic processes of deductive logic and mathematic proof. For if assumptions and axioms are contradictory, you can prove anything from them.

So we can regard conventional logicians and mathematicians, who deny the truth of the Hidden Harmony, to be opposite to mystics and psychologists, who affirm its veracity, thereby showing that the Principle of Unity is a universal, irrefutable truth. Accepting this is absolutely essential, for the world we live in is full of paradoxical situations. So if we reject self-contradictions from our reasoning—like “This sentence is false”—our maps of the world we live in will be incomplete, leading us dangerously astray, both in our business affairs and personal relationships. In contrast, the best way to avoid conflict and delusion in our thinking is to follow E. F. Schumacher’s maxim for holistic mapmaking, “Accept everything; reject nothing.”

In diagrammatic form, the Principle of Unity, as a modern expression of the Hidden Harmony, looks like this, using the primary-secondary relationship between the Formless Absolute and the relativistic world of form to illustrate the general principle. Applying Hegelian logic, although Hegel never used these terms, if A is the thesis and not-A the antithesis, then A is the synthesis, a primary-secondary relationship that is ubiquitous. It is even possible to express the Principle of Unity in the notation of mathematical logic, called the Cosmic Equation, where A is any being, W is any whole, ∪ is union, and ¬ is not:

This is the simple, elegant equation that reveals the innermost secrets of the Universe, potentially explaining everything, which Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking long sought for at the core of their unified field theory and theory of everything, respectively.

To see why it is quite legitimate to include paradoxes in rational thought, we need to dive beneath the self-contradictions in the foundations of mathematics, since they have been understood since 1900. From the vantage point of the Immortal Ground of Being, we can then look at mathematics as a generative science of patterns and relationships, emerging directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe.

It is in this natural, creative way that we could consummate the sacred marriage of science and spirituality, completing the final revolution in science, just as Isaac Newton completed the first with Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687. However, as the mathematics involved is rather advanced, taking the abstractions of modern algebra to the utmost level of generality, it is not appropriate to explore this further in this blog post, which is intended for inquisitive general readers, whatever their background.

All I need to say is that linear systems of thought have led to the invention of the stored-program computer, executing linear sequences of instructions, albeit in many parallel threads in modern multi-headed central processing units, collectively collaborating in networks, such as the Internet, as a whole.

But this is not how we humans think and organize our ideas, as we can see in the data types or categories used to actually design programs and databases at higher levels of conceptual modelling. For these are nonlinear, having both hierarchical and nonhierarchical structures, a huge semantic gap from the binary logic gates in computers. It is therefore quite rational and justifiable to welcome paradoxes into the Universal Method, as Integral Relational Logic, which has evolved from the information systems modelling methods underlying the Internet.

This rational, scientific approach is quite sufficient to admit the Principle of Unity into consciousness. However, there are also a host of psychospiritual reasons why the Hidden Harmony has been concealed from human thought for thousands of years. Carl Gustav Jung highlighted the central issue in his Commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower: “The Chinese have never failed to recognize the paradoxes and the polarity inherent in all life. The opposites always balance on the scales—a sign of high culture. Onesideness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.”

Onesideness, accepting one opposite in a pair, rejecting the other, is closely related to one’s sense of identity, which derives from Latin idem ‘same’. What is the same has two dimensions: the Divine, Cosmic Identity we share with all other beings and our unique personality types as humans, which are generally regarded to remain the same throughout our lives. Regarding the former, our Genuine Identity has two dimensions, depth and breadth.

In terms of the former, through the ages mystics and spiritual seekers have discovered their True Nature or Authentic Self in union with the Divine by looking inwards. However, as the Abrahamic religions have long regarded such blissful, profound experiences as heretical, our restrictive cultural conditioning has tended to inhibit the evolution of our cognitive intelligence to its utmost breadth, embracing the Totality of Existence within Consciousness as a coherent whole.

So the many developmental models that Ken Wilber has synthesized in his Superhuman Operating System tell us much about our evolutionary history but little about our fullest evolutionary potential as superintelligent beings. His Superhuman OS training, being rebroadcast this winter, stops at the Integral level in what he calls the second tier, a giant leap from the egocentric and ethnocentric levels, where 95% of the population live their lives.

Ken does not seem to be fully aware of what third-tier cognitive development might be, although admitting that there is such a possibility. For, as he says, at any one level of development, it is only possible to see earlier stages of evolution, not later ones, gloriously culminating in evolution’s Omega Point. So those being consciously guided in their lives by the Hidden Harmony are effectively invisible to those who lack cognitive awareness of the fundamental law of the Universe.

Nevertheless, Ken and Andrew Cohen said in an article in the What is Enlightenment? magazine in 2007, the third tier, called Kosmocentric, means “an identification with all life and consciousness, human or otherwise, and a deeply felt responsibility for the evolutionary process as a whole … an emergent capacity, rarely seen anywhere”.

To see how evolution could become fully conscious of itself in the third tier of cognitive development, Ken mentions Julian Huxley, who observed in a 1957 visionary essay titled ‘Transhumanism’ that by “destroying the ideas and the institutions that stand in the way of our realizing our possibilities”, we could understand human nature, what it truly means to be a human being. As Huxley continued, we could thereby transcend our limitations, fulfilling our highest potential as spiritual beings, living in mystical ecstasy, free from the suffering that has plagued humanity through the millennia.

Mystical awareness is thus the true starting point for evolutionary development, a line that Andrew Cohen and Thomas Hübl, two of Ken’s colleagues, have been pursuing in recent years. However, as evolutionary leaders do not generally have a background as an information systems architect in business, exploring the relative capabilities of humans and computers in the workplace, it seems that few have so far realized or observed humanity’s fullest evolutionary potential in either themselves or others. So what it truly means to be a human being—in contrast to machines—remains a mystery, as the theme of the Science and Nonduality (SAND) conference in 2018 indicates: ‘The Mystery of Being Human’.

As it is necessary for the Principle of Unity to become explicit in consciousness in order for cognitive development to broaden in the third tier, culminating in Wholeness and Cosmic Consciousness, embracing Oneness and Unity Consciousness with undivided Supermind, is it possible for the Hidden Harmony to be revealed to more than a few intrepid explorers of what Abraham Maslow called The Farther Reaches of Human Nature in a posthumous book with this title?

Well, Maslow highlighted the central issue in Chapter 2 titled ‘Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth’, writing, “We have the impulse toward full development of humanness. Then why is it that it doesn’t happen more often? What blocks it?” This is normalcy, which Maslow says is a “kind of sickness or crippling or stunting that we share with everyone else and therefore don’t notice”.

Erich Fromm said much the same thing in The Sane Society, whose first two chapters are, “Are We Sane?” and “Can a Society be Sick?”, answering these questions with a resounding ‘NO’ and ‘YES’, respectively. What is regarded as the normal behaviour of a society can be considered to be pathological.

Maslow called this human malaise the Jonah Complex or Syndrome, which has a long history, as the story of Jonah in the Bible indicates. Sometimes when we let loose the unlimited potential energy within us, the effect can be overwhelming, leading to what Christina and Stanislav Grof call a spiritual emergency, when Spirit emerges faster than the organism can handle.

We can even fear success, even fear God, in whatever way we view Ultimate Reality, ranging from Buddhist Emptiness (Shunyata) to the Supreme Being of the Christians. As Ernest Becker writes in The Denial of Death, “It all boils down to a simple lack of strength to bear the superlative, to open oneself to the totality of experience.”

It was not only the writers of the Old Testament who were aware of the Jonah syndrome. Arjuna had a similar experience, recorded in the Bhagavad Gita. When Krishna showed him the Ultimate Cosmic Vision—“all the manifold forms of the universe united as one”—Arjuna said, “I rejoice in seeing you as you have never been seen before, yet I am filled with fear by this vision of you as the abode of the universe.”

Elaine Pagels makes a similar point in Beyond Belief, the quotation in this passage coming from the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas:

Discovering the divine light within is more than a matter of being told that it is there, for such a vision shatters one’s identity: “When you see your likeness [in a mirror] you are pleased; but when you see your images, which have come into being before you, how much will you have to bear!” Instead of self-gratification, one finds the terror of annihilation. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke gives a similar warning about encountering the divine, for “every angel is terrifying.”

However, the Jonah Syndrome does not only inhibit individuals from reaching their fullest potential as Superhumans. Society as a whole has a tendency to inhibit people’s awakening, which Maslow called ‘counter-valuing’, seeking to maintain traditional ways of looking at the world and managing our affairs, which are becoming increasingly dysfunctional. So if we are to bring universal order to our chaotic world, we need to start afresh at the very beginning, as Huxley indicated.

For myself, the fundamental law of the Universe has been consciously guiding my life since midsummer 1980—half my lifetime. So the Hidden Harmony is second nature to me in its modern expressions as the Principle of Unity and Cosmic Equation. But I still live in solitude, unable to communicate the Hidden Harmony to anyone else, for this can only be revealed through a miracle, through the direct action of the Divine.

Specifically, to intelligently adapt to the unprecedented rate of evolutionary change, flowing freely with the creative power of Life, we need to let go of egoic attachment to everything in the relativistic world of form, as Shakyamuni Buddha taught. This is especially the case with money, the most divisive force on the planet, which provides many with a precarious sense of security and identity in life.

If this miracle could happen, we would collectively enter the exquisite Age of Light before our inevitable demise as a species in the next few decades. It looks most unlikely. Nevertheless, all I can do as an individuated being living in Wholeness is follow my inner guru at every moment, enjoying the beauteous wonders that have been revealed to me with deepest gratitude.

Further to my latest blog post, to relate the Universal Method, called Integral Relational Logic, to contemporary culture, Ken Wilber, known as the Einstein of consciousness studies, calls his AQAL-IOS (All Quadrants, All Levels-Integral Operating System) a Superhuman Operating System.

In his Superhuman OS training programme, currently being rebroadcast on the Internet, Ken describes seven levels of human development, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, labelled with various colours, the highest being turquoise, a second-tier level named Integral, consisting of some 5% of the population.

He says that no matter what culture we are born into, we all go through these various levels from birth, but having reached one level, we are not aware of the higher levels. It is only at our current level that we can see the levels we have progressed through.

For instance, during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, a large section of society moved from amber to orange, from fundamentalist religious beliefs to a more rational scientific approach, which led to the abolition of slavery. However, there is currently a culture war between these two levels, with amber not being experientially aware of the orange level.

Now those currently being trained to live at the supposedly all-inclusive Integral level of development can only be aware of this level if they are intuitively standing at a higher level, which Ken does not name in the training. Indeed, no matter how many higher levels there might be, we can see them all by standing outside ourselves, the motto of this website, looking at ourselves through the eyes of the Divine, from which we are never separate.

This is how the Universal Method embraces all levels of development, at the highest possible level, as a general-purpose mapmaking method, rather than a map, per se. Specifically, AQAL does not map my own ontogeny, explaining why scientists and technologists are driving the pace of development in society at exponential rates of acceleration.

To do so, Integral Relational Logic has emerged in consciousness through a thought experiment, in which I imagined that I am a computer that switches itself off and on again, so that it has no programs within it, not even a bootstrap program to load the operating system.

Integral Relational Logic, as the Universal Method, is thus a Superhuman Operating System, which can execute all integral operating systems, including itself and AQAL. It is more like IBM’s Virtual Machine (VM), which I first saw running in 1972 when working as a systems engineer in an IBM sales office, than MacOS, Windows, or Linux, which run applications, not operating systems.

However, it is only possible to lift oneself up by one’s bootstraps with the assistance of the creative power of Life emanating directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe. The Method cannot therefore be taught. It emerges in consciousness through an apocalyptic, kundalini-like awakening, first unlearning everything we humans have ever learnt throughout our history.

Furthermore, by starting afresh at the Alpha Point of evolution and by then applying this taxonomy of taxonomies to the Totality of Existence, we can bring universal order to our lives, healing our fragmented world in Wholeness. Practitioners are thereby carried to the Omega Point of evolution, along the lines that the scientific mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin prophesied, for these two points are never separate in Reality.

Evolution does not therefore continue indefinitely, as Ken and other leading evolutionaries assert. Evolution completes its fourteen billion-year journey at its glorious culmination in the Superhuman, beyond so-called superhuman computers with so-called artificial intelligence, able to beat humans playing chess, Go, and other games.

It is at the Omega Point that evolution becomes fully conscious of itself, able to see with Self-reflective Intelligence that it has transcended all previous levels of development in Wholeness, standing at a Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’ vantage point, beyond space and time.

As Wholeness and Oneness are two sides of the same coin, those following an involutionary spiritual path of unlearning and undevelopment, can intuitively understand where I, like everyone else, am coming from, even though we live at unprecedented times, as evolution passes through the most momentous turning point in its fourteen billion-year history.

Returning to the Nonmanifest, recapitulating the Cosmogonic Cycle, is absolutely essential at these end times we live in, for we are on the threshold of the inevitable extinction of our species, most probably to be caused by abrupt climate change, as has happened before, as studies of the Greenland ice sheet tell us.

But rather than despairing, we now have the wonderful opportunity of using the Universal Method, as a Superhuman Operating System, to realize our fullest potential as a species in what Ken calls Greatness, answering many unanswered questions in inner and outer science, which cannot be answered by traditional systems of thought and worldviews. For as Einstein famously said, you cannot solve problems with the mindsets that create them.

Great fun!

The Universal Method, introduced in a recent blog post, is a way of expressing ancient wisdom—known to Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton as philosophia perennis and prisca sapientia, respectively—in a language that has evolved from science and business.

This commonsensical system of thought has healed my fragmented, split mind in Wholeness, ending the long-running war between science and religion, which I set out to accomplish as a seven-year-old in 1949, guided by the creative power of Life, emanating directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe.

To find Love and Peace by unifying all opposites, beyond life and death, the Method has evolved from the powerful abstractions of pure mathematics, computer science, information systems modelling methods underlying the Internet, and David Bohm’s theory of the Implicate Order, which resolved the incompatibilities between quantum and relativity theories.

We can see what this all-inclusive holographic cosmology means for our lives together by generalizing Bohm’s notion of the holomovement—as an undivided flowing stream—into the multidimensional Ocean of Consciousness. All our journeys in life are like waves and currents on and beneath the surface, never separate from the Ocean for an instant. We can regard the surface as the physical universe, with the 99% beneath the surface as the Cosmic Psyche.

Of all the animals, we humans are the least superficial and instinctive. Using the metaphor of a computer, very few of our thoughts and actions are physically hard-wired. Our learning—corresponding to software and data in computers—mostly determines the way that we view the world and ourselves, and hence our behaviour.

So for thousands of years of human learning, as biogenesis became noogenesis, we have been left to our own devices to try to discover with our fragmented, deluded minds what the Universe is, how it is designed, and our place in it. In the event, mystic psychologists, as true scientists, have had the most success in this endeavour, in contrast to the superficiality of Western civilization, in particular.

Living in the dual and dualistic world of form, we are being constantly buffeted in the psyche by a multiplicity of both competing and cooperating opposites, which are both complementary and contradictory. There is some respite when polarized opposites are unified in Divine lovemaking, for instance, and when we touch the Stillness of Nonduality, when all the apparent divisions in the relativistic world of form dissolve in the seamless continuum of the Formless Immortal Absolute.

However, in practical terms, we continue to struggle, as our forebears have done for millennia, with the immense complexity of conflicting opposites, sometimes projected into our relationships with the Divine and each other, egoically identifying with one side of a coin, dismissing the other.

Wherever we might be in our spiritual awakening, we are all suffering from this turmoil to some degree, in what Matthew Fox calls the dark night of our species, not fully understanding the psychodynamics of society, our evolutionary story, and how the Cosmos is ordered and designed.

As we myopically accelerate towards the inevitable extinction of our species, the Buddhist principle of compassion, which means ‘suffering together’, offers our best chance for salvation. The actual dying process is unlikely to be very pleasant, especially for children and adolescents, who will not be destined to grow old enough to have children of their own, bringing one billion years of continuous sexual reproduction to an end, at least in our species.

In Sanskrit, compassion is karunā, akin to agapē ‘love or charity’ in Christianity and Pāli mettā ‘loving-kindness’, the translation of Sanskrit maitrī, the root of maitreya ‘friendly, benevolent’. This word has the same Proto-Indo-European base as community, 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’.

We can thus see from the root of our collective soul that the next Buddha—as Maitreya, the ‘Loving one’—can only be a community or global sangha, practising compassionate living rather than an individual, as Thich Nhat Hanh has foreseen. And when our lives are based on Love, the Divine Essence we all share, we realize that kindness is our True Nature, for kind is the native English word for nature, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, having the same root.

It is not necessary to experience the mystical and apocalyptic origins of the Method or understand its technical details, for we all intuitively use it everyday to bring a sense of order to our lives, from the micro to the macro, from organizing the folders and files in our computers to working synergistically in teams to send humans to the Moon, for instance.

Nevertheless, if we are to intelligently face the ignorance and turbulence of the world today, we can connect the both-and heart of the Method to Ananta Kumar Giri’s principle of compassionate confrontation, akin to Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker’s Savage Grace, the oxymoronic title of a recent book confronting the great global crisis with much wisdom, compassion, and courage.

By harmonizing evolutionary convergence—in consonance with Heraclitus’ Hidden Harmony, the fundamental law of the Universe—we could live with compassion as mystic psychologists, which is absolutely essential. For in the overall scheme of things, during the twenty noughties, evolution passed through its Accumulation Point in chaos-theory terms—as the nonlinear mathematics of systems dynamics tells us—the most momentous turning point in some fourteen billion years of bifurcating evolution since the most recent big bang.

And if conscious evolution is to intelligently bring universal order to this fragmentary chaos in the Age of Light, guiding us to live joyfully in harmony with our rapidly changing world, we need to live resiliently in the dark night of the globe, as Andrew and Carolyn put it in their vitally significant book, helping us prepare with love and compassion for the inevitable death of Homo sapiens.

I have recently been in touch with some academics associated with the Academy of Inner Science, founded by Thomas Hübl. These conversations have raised the question, just what is inner science? I don’t yet know what Thomas means by this term, but maybe we could look first at the scientific questions that the domain of inner science needs to answer. For sound scientific inquiry begins with asking the right questions.

For me, the most fundamental of these questions is “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?”

In my experience, this question can only be answered with Total Awareness, awakening to Total Revolution, as Vimala Thakar inspires us to do in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach, being free of attachment to the status quo at these rapidly changing times. By Awareness, I don’t just mean Consciousness, in the way that some modern mystics, like Rupert Spira, use the term.

Rather, for me Awareness is Self-reflective Divine Intelligence and Cosmic Consciousness working harmoniously together to view the Universe, as the Totality of Existence, holographically. Consciousness provides the coherent Light for Intelligence—as the eyesight of Consciousness—to function with full conceptual clarity. The more coherent and brilliant the Light—unclouded by past experiences and future expectations—the more the fragmented mind can be healed, understanding why we behave as we do.

To see how this view of inner science relates to conventional scientific perspectives, let us look at a couple of diagrams from Wikipedia. First, here is a diagram of the constituents of cognitive science, founded to explore the relationships between human intelligence and so-called artificial intelligence and between the mind and the brain. The psychologist George A. Miller proposed these constituents in 1978 under the auspices of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Now while much progress has been made since Carl Gustav Jung said in 1935 in London that the science of the unconscious psyche had not yet left the cradle, much research is still needed in cognitive science before we have a reasonable understanding of the psychodynamics of society, the most complex structure in the world, far more complex than the brain.

For instance, Uta Frith, emeritus professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, pointed out in 2015 that the Royal Society is very far from accepting inner science as a valid science, as the science of the mind and psyche is still leading “a rather shadowy existence in the hallowed halls of science”. Even though the discipline is over a hundred years old, it is far from maturity, with fewer than three per cent of fellows of this august body being specialists in psychology, or cognitive or behavioural neuroscience, as she denoted this domain.

As she said, “One reason for the currently poor reputation of psychology is the obstinate belief that we already know what goes on in our mind, and that we can explain why we do what we do. This naïve belief will be overcome by improved communication of empirical findings, and especially of those that go against ingrained folk psychology. It’s not rocket science. It’s a lot harder than that.”

One reason for the difficulty in establishing psychology as the primary science, as the inner science on which the outer sciences can be built, is that the two most fundamental sciences of the mind are hidden in this definition of the scope of cognitive science: mathematical logic, as the science of reason, and depth psychology, as the science of consciousness, including the collective unconscious.

Here is a diagram from Wikipedia in 2013 showing how the branches of science conventionally relate to each other. Although the current diagram has removed the hierarchical dependency of the life and social sciences on the laws and methodology of physics, both the original and revised diagrams show how far apart the two basic sciences of the mind are viewed today. This split has arisen most particularly from an exchange of letters between Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege in 1903. They agreed that mathematical logic has nothing to do with psychology.

The other fundamental misconception of this diagram is the cultural belief that the physical universe of mass, space, and time is the Universe. When we look deeply inside ourselves—as mystics through the ages have done—we discover a quite different Universe, one that recognizes Consciousness as fundamental, transcending space and time.

So how can we heal this fragmented way of looking at inner science? On the one hand, mathematical logic, founded by George Boole in 1854 with his Laws of Thought, traditionally provides the underpinning for all the sciences, as the diagram illustrates. On the other hand, mystical psychology, founded a few thousand years ago in the Indian subcontinent, provides the underpinning for our most profound human experiences.

Clearly, we need to find a way of bringing them together if we are to resolve the great global crisis facing humanity today. That is the purpose of the Universal Method, outlined in my previous blog post, providing the Contextual Foundation and coordinating framework for completing the final revolution in science, integrating all inner and outer sciences in Wholeness.

It is important to note that the Theory of Everything that arises from such a synthesis is a form of insight, a way of looking at the world, from Greek theoria ‘a view’, as David Bohm pointed out in Wholeness and the Implicate Order. As Albert Einstein wrote in a famous letter to Jacques Hadamard in 1945, words and mathematical signs, as expressions of scientific theories, only arise as a secondary activity.

Now while this visionary healing process can happen in an individuated being engaged in self-inquiry in solitude, it can best happen in the collective in a safe space through relationships with others, as Thomas said at the Celebrate Life Festival in 2017, when the theme was ‘Collective Trauma – Mysticism – Integration’. The theme of the Festival in 2018 at the Omega Institute in New York is “to explore restoration and healing in these times of fragmentation”.

This is a clear sign of a prophecy that the scientific mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made in The Human Phenomenon coming to fruition. As he said, one day all the divergent paths of evolution will converge at its Omega Point, enabling us to realize this vision: “The way out for the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman, will not open ahead to some privileged few, or to a single people, elect among all peoples. They will yield only to the thrust of all together in the direction where all can rejoin and complete one another in a spiritual renewal of the Earth.”