To help people relate to me as an ordinary human being, rather than as a revolutionary, seeking Peace on Earth, I have written a two-page bio note titled ‘Dwelling Blissfully in Wholeness’. It illustrates a story of triumph over adversity.
However, as I am Wholeness, with nothing and no one outside me, it is difficult for people educated and earning a living in the conventional manner to see and experience the True Nature that we all share as intelligent, conscious humans.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that despite people’s lack of understanding of humanity’s place within the overall scheme of things, it is still possible to complete the psychological revolution in science that William James called for in 1892. At the time, he saw psychology as:
A string of raw facts, a little gossip and wrangle about opinions, a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced. We don’t even know the terms between which the elementary laws would obtain if we had them. This is no science, it is only the hope of science.
But at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. The Galileo and the Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come, as come they some day surely will.
Meanwhile the best way in which we can facilitate their advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope, and never to forget that the natural-science assumptions with which we started are provisional and revisable things.
During the first half of the century, Carl Gustav Jung took up the challenge of turning psychology into a science through his therapeutic practice of individuation, as the development of an undivided being, illustrated by mandalas, such as this one by one of Jung’s patients.
Jung was much influenced by the Daoists and alchemists, who understood that opposites are never separate from each other in Reality. Heraclitus and Nicholas of Cusa called this fundamental law of the Universe the Hidden Harmony and Coincidentia Oppositorum, respectively.
However, progress was slow. In 1935, Jung was bold enough to call psychology the ‘science of consciousness’ in the first of a series of five lectures he gave on the theory and practice of analytical psychology to the Institute of Medical Psychology (Tavistock Clinic). He added, “[Psychology] is the science of what we call the unconscious psyche,” a science, he said, that had not yet left the cradle.
Then in 1976, inspired by the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, Erich Fromm said that if we are to avoid psychological and economic catastrophe, “We need a Humanistic Science of Man as the basis for the Applied Science and Art of Social Reconstruction.” For unless we understand the root cause of our suffering, we cannot apply the remedy.
However, Fromm was not optimistic that we could become free of materialism and mechanism in science. He said that he saw only a two percent chance of success, a goal that no business executive or politician would regard as worthwhile pursuing.
Nevertheless, he went on to say, “If a sick person has even the barest chance of survival, no responsible physician will say, ‘Let’s give up the effort,’ or will use only palliatives. On the contrary, everything conceivable is done to save the sick person’s life. Certainly, a sick society cannot expect anything less.”
Stanislav Grof picked up the baton in 1985, by proposing a holotropic model of the psyche in contrast to hylotropic, neurophysiological models of the brain. His book inspired David Lorimer at the Scientific and Medical Network to host a series of conferences titled ‘Beyond the Brain’, seeking to answer the question “Does consciousness extend beyond the physical brain?”
At the turn of the millennium, Stan then wrote Psychology of the Future, based on several decades of consciousness research through the use of holotropic breathwork and psychedelic substances. These techniques reveal a glorious world beyond the constraints of our cultural conditioning, which inhibit us from experiencing that Consciousness is all there is, which is quite normal, not a nonordinary state of Consciousness.
As Stan said in a short YouTube video titled ‘The Root Cause of the Global Crisis’, such a holotropic psychology is essential for the survival of the human species. For holotropic can mean both ‘turning towards Wholeness’ and ‘transforming the Whole’, as Consciousness. For conscious has a Latin root meaning ‘knowing together’ in Wholeness.
However, a cognitive understanding of what causes us humans to behave as we do is not sufficient. For, as the Sufi poet Rumi beautifully expressed our shared Divine Essence, “Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns.” Love is Agapē in ancient Greek, used 116 times in the Christian Bible.
We therefore need to recognize the primacy of human experience, as R. D. Laing and Rupert Spira did in The Voice of Experience and The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience in 1982 and 2008, respectively. More recently, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, have advocated a similar approach in The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.
To shine light into our inherited blind spots, Life needs to stimulate our innate Self-reflective Intelligence, illuminated by the radiant Light of Consciousness, emerging from a black hole at the centre of the Cosmos.
However, we need to remember that humankind is not immortal and so we have little time to awaken to what is happening to us all as a species before our inevitable demise, much sooner than most are ready to contemplate.
Nevertheless, it is still possible for us to release so much life-enhancing synergy, hidden in the sub- and unconscious, that miracles could happen. For, as we are all interconnected, the only intelligent thing we could do at the end of time, as members of Homo sapiens ‘wise human’, is to compassionately pool our skills and resources for the benefit of us all.