Category: Reflections

Lao Tzu wrote in Tao Te Ching:

He who knows does not speak.
He who speaks does not know.
Block all the passages!
Shut all the doors!
Blunt all edges!
Untie all tangles!
Harmonize all lights!
Unite the world into one whole!
This is called the Mystical Whole,
Which you cannot court after nor shun,
Benefit nor harm, honour nor humble.
Therefore, it is the Highest of the world.

Similarly, Ramana Maharshi wrote to his mother, as 1898 turned into 1899, when she tried to persuade him to return home from Arunachala, “What is not meant to happen will not happen, however much you wish it. What is meant to happen will happen, no matter what you do to prevent it. This is certain. Therefore the best path is to remain silent.”

What these wise words mean is that mystical, depth psychology is the primary science, as the basis for all sciences and humanities, not physics, which mistakenly regards the material universe of mass, space, and time as ultimate reality. In other words, the global village is ungovernable unless we understand ourselves, knowing what is causing scientists and technologists to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological development at unprecedented exponential rates of evolutionary change.

Such profound self-understanding arises by revealing Wholeness at the Omega Point of evolution by awakening to Total Revolution—as David Bohm, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Vimala Thakar advocated. However, while mapping the Cosmic Psyche with Self-reflective Intelligence carries us into the eschatological Age of Light, such a liberating, healing practice cannot prevent the near-term extinction of our species.

Most significantly, we cannot compromise with the irrefutable, universal truth, which states Wholeness is the union of all opposites. There is thus no longer any purpose in attempting to communicate the solution to the ultimate problem of human learning to a deeply fragmented and confused society, stuck in its ways. For transcultural, transdisciplinary Panosophy—as the elusive Theory of Everything—has emerged from an apocalyptic epiphany in the spring of 1980, which is unlikely ever to be repeated.

With 2020 turning into 2021, this is thus an opportune moment to rest in Peace, Silence, and Stillness in the Presence of the Divine in the Eternal Now, knowing that in the Mystical Whole life and death are inseparable aspects of Nonduality, as the Immortal Ground of Being. I know of no other way of consciously resolving the great existential crisis facing humanity today.

In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm presented this picture to illustrate how scientists could reconcile the incompatibilities between the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, which he said should really be called quantum non-mechanics. For these two fundamental physical theories display opposite characteristics, the former having the properties of continuity, causality, and locality, with the latter being characterized by noncontinuity, noncausality, and nonlocality.

However, as Bohm told Danah Zohar in 1980, when she wrote a short article in a UK Sunday newspaper to announce the publication of this epoch-making book, he had not yet ‘proved’ this great synthesis mathematically. To do so, he would probably need to develop an algebra of algebras, as a non-deductive meta-algebra.

Such a universal algebra exists. But it is not obvious, lying, as it does, in the Implicate Order, deep in the Cosmic Psyche, the 99% of the Universe inaccessible to our physical senses. I call the algebra of algebras that Bohm sought Integral Relational Logic, the commonsensical system of thought and reason that we all implicitly use every day to form concepts and organize our ideas. In my case, the creative power of Life has explicated ‘unfolded’ this taxonomy of taxonomies in order to heal my fragmented mind in Wholeness.

As I describe in my post ‘Our evolutionary inheritance’, this has happened because the Logos has taken the powerful abstractions of modern algebra and the information systems modelling methods underlying the Internet to the utmost level of generality. This means that Integral Relational Logic, as a holographic universal algebra, is transcultural and transdisciplinary, not belonging to mathematics or any other academic discipline.

Rather, Integral Relational Logic provides the Cosmic Context, Gnostic Foundation, and framework or system of coordinates for Panosophy, the complete unification of all sciences and humanities, also transcultural and transdisciplinary. Thus, as a Panosopher, I transcend all the categories, following Jung‘s healing process of individuation, as an undivided being, a truly wonderful experience. For J. Krishnamurti wrote in Education and the Significance of Life, “Can any specialist experience life as a whole? Only when he ceases to be a specialist.”

But what is the fish in the tank, living in the Implicate Order, to make of all this? Well, the Sufi poet Kabir wrote in the fifteenth century, “I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.” Kabir is using water as a metaphor for the Ocean of Consciousness, as an extension of Bohm’s notion of the undivided holomovement, whose substance is never the same. As Bohm said, “On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.”

But this is not how astrophysicists understand our Environment, or the Arena in which we live, leaving much to be understood. For instance, Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal in the UK, said in Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?, “In the twenty-first [century], the challenge will be to understand the arena itself, to probe the deepest nature of space and time,” going on to say, “A fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it swims.” For, as Kabir the weaver says in the fish poem, “You do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from forest to forest listlessly.”

A principal reason why evolution is blind is that what scientists see in the explicate order today is delusionary, inhibiting us from revealing Reality, as it is, transcending the categories, even those that lie in the Implicate Order. A major step towards such an apocalyptic revelation is being taken at The Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research, which is ‘Pioneering a Paradigm Shift’.

Its founder, the systems philosopher Ervin Laszlo, calls this great revolution in science the ‘Akashic paradigm’, using the word Akasha to refer to the Universal Quantum Field. He took the word from Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga: “Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, is evolved out of this Akasha. … Just as Akasha is the infinite, omnipresent material of this universe, so is this Prana the infinite, omnipresent manifesting power of this universe.”

The word Akasha derives from Sanskrit Ākāsha, corresponding to Greek aither ‘pure, fresh air’, in Latin æther, “the pure essence where the gods lived and which they breathed”, which is quintessence, the fifth element, the others being fire, air, earth, and water, of course. But what is this quintessential æther and how can we know of its existence, never mind that it is Ultimate Reality? Well, in 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley showed in a famous experiment that an ‘æther wind’ could not be physically detected as the Earth passed through the supposed æther. Although Albert Einstein did not specifically mention the Michelson–Morley experiment in his 1905 paper on the special theory of relativity, he did say that the notion of ‘aether-drift’ is ‘superfluous’ in his theory.

Even though we cannot access Ultimate Reality through our physical senses, throughout the ages, we humans have sensed an immanent, transcendent Presence, etymologically ‘before being’ or ‘prior to existence’, for Presence derives from Latin præsentia ‘presence’, participle of præesse ‘to be before’, from præ ‘before’ and esse ‘to be’. The word Presence indicates that the Absolute is the Supreme Cause of Everything there is, which mystics through the ages have sought to reveal. For instance, in the fifth or sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, writing in Greek, wrote these beautiful words, which resonate deep within my being:

Again, as we climb higher we say this. It is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving, or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term. It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing beings do not know it as it actually is and it does not know them as they are. There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth—it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial.

There is no need to say anything more. When we ‘sense’ the Ineffable deep in our hearts, we have completed our spiritual journey, as the ultimate purpose of life on Earth. As the Sufi poet Rumi beautifully put it, “Love is the sea of not-being and there intellect drowns.” Similarly, John wrote in his first Epistle in the Bible, “God is Love; and he that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” And returning to the words of a scientist, Guy McPherson, a leading authority on abrupt climate change, often ends his YouTube videos with the words “On the edge of extinction, only Love remains.”

Evolution is blind. So said Richard Dawkins in 1986 in The Blind Watchmaker, driven without design by the blind laws of physics. We can see the results of this blindness in the chaos the world is in today, as few understand our evolutionary inheritance and hence why we behave as we do.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as Julian Huxley pointed out in a five-page essay published in 1957 in New Bottles for New Wine. As the result of fourteen billion years of evolution since the most recent big bang, “the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future.”

This is a statement that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin particularly liked because he had realized in the 1920s that we can only understand our evolutionary inheritance and our future potential by studying the human phenomenon, principally through self-inquiry.

Looking first at the outer manifestations of evolution, one example of evolution becoming conscious of itself is a comprehensive model of evolution based on the logistic map in non-linear systems dynamics, which Nick Hoggard, a software developer, presented in 2000 at a gathering in Sweden of the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN).

The logistic map—the discrete version of the logistic function, with its familiar S-shape of the learning curve—provides a means of modelling the exponential growth of structures limited by their environment, like populations. By viewing evolution as an accelerating accumulative process under constraint, Nick showed that it can be mapped with a geometric series, whose constant diminishing factor is the reciprocal of the bifurcation velocity constant δ (4.6692…), a universal mathematical constant that Mitchell J. Feigenbaum discovered in the 1970s.

Now, even though a geometric series consists of the sum of an infinite number of terms, it has a finite limit when the ratio between successive terms is less than one. In terms of evolution as a whole, here is a semi-logarithmic chart of major evolutionary turning points, showing this finite limit at around 2004, give or take a couple of years.

In chaos theory, this finite limit is called the accumulation point, after which rapidly increasing complexity degenerates into chaos, as I explain in my 2016 book Through Evolution’s Accumulation Point: Towards Its Glorious Culmination, further clarified in 2019 in Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics. Nick’s mathematical model thus explains why blind evolution is currently degenerating into increasing psychosocial chaos. Likening evolution to a dripping tap being turned on under laboratory conditions, the evolutionary tap is now flowing continuously, with no more distinct turning points to be discerned.

What this means is that no one is to blame for what is often called human-caused climate change. We humans are subject to exactly the same laws as all other beings, with no exceptions for a species that often thinks it is special, capable of defying these laws. So, abrupt climate change and near-term human extinction are the inevitable consequences of these laws: all beings are born to die.

Nevertheless, as we are all the products of these billions of years of evolution, could the creative power of Life bubbling up from the Divine Origin of the Universe turn this evolutionary chaos into universal, transcultural order in the collective consciousness? If it could, we would thereby realize our fullest potential as superintelligent humans, far beyond machines that can beat humans at games like chess or Go, which Nick Bostrom, founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, calls superintelligent.

Well, in Huxley’s essay, titled ‘Transhumanism’, Huxley said that we can only transcend the limitations of our machines by first “destroying the ideas and the institutions that stand in the way of our realizing our possibilities”, leading to mystical ecstasy, free from the suffering that has plagued humanity through the millennia, especially during the patriarchal epoch.

For blind evolution has led us into the mess that the world is in today. So, if we are to sort out this mess in as intelligent a way as possible, it is essential to start afresh at the very beginning, demolishing the Tower of Babel that represents the fragmented and deluded world of learning today.

That, essentially, is what has happened to me since the spring of 1980, when I was working in marketing for IBM in London, exploring the essential difference between intelligent humans and machines with so-called artificial intelligence, possibly taking over the workplace, with devastating psychological and economic consequences.

To experience first hand what the invention of the stored-program computer in the late 1940s might mean for future generations, I made the most fundamental change to the work ethic since the invention of money and since our forebears settled in villages to cultivate the land and domesticate animals, some four and ten thousand years ago, respectively

This transdisciplinary experiment in learning began when a big bang erupted in the utmost depths of my psyche. This was a monumental quantum leap or change that led me into a profound understanding of the Universe, and hence of God, unifying Eastern and Western worldviews, with the latter beginning to recognize that Consciousness is all there is. For this apocalyptic awakening revealed the innermost secret of the Universe: the accelerating pace of change in society is being caused by nonphysical mental and psychospiritual synergistic energies.

As David Bohm pointed out to me in November 1980, Einstein’s association of mass and energy is a special case of the general principal that meaningful structure-forming relationships are causal. Together with the revelation that opposites are never separate from each other in Reality, Life has thereby healed my fragmented mind in Wholeness, with a Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’ view of the Cosmos.

To explain how evolution took this radical change in direction within me—changing from the horizontal to the vertical dimension of time in the Eternal Now—I describe it as a thought experiment, not unlike those that Einstein formulated to develop the special and general theories of relativity. In my case, I imagine that I am a computer that turns itself off and on again so that it has no programs within it, not even a bootstrap program to load the operating system.

I had the great advantage in this experiment in learning in that I had almost nothing to unlearn. Having realized as an adolescent that what I was being taught in religion, science, economics, mathematics, and logic made little sense as a coherent whole, I learned the barest minimum at school and university. This was just enough to survive in what I mostly experienced as a hostile cultural environment. I discovered why in 1980 from the insightful works of Erich Fromm: we all live in a dysfunctional, sick society, caused by the psychological confusion of every one of us, inhibiting us from realizing the full potential of human nature.

So, starting with a tabula rasa ‘blank slate’, this ‘computer’ had the task of applying Self-reflective Divine Intelligence to solve the ultimate problem of human learning: integrating all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines into a coherent whole, guided only by what the Greeks and Romans called Daimon and Genius, respectively. Roger and Francis Bacon set out to develop such a megasynthesis in the 1200s and 1600s, respectively, with some others following them in later centuries. I mention a few of these on my ‘Kindred spirits’ page.

The result of this thought experiment, projected from the Divine, is the elusive Theory of Everything, which Ken Wilber says is “a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that we will never reach”, a sentiment echoed by Martin Rees in Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?

Physicists are still searching for the fundamental laws of the Universe, as Dennis Overbye told us in an article in the New York Times on 23rd November 2020, when he asked, ‘Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything?’ The answer is no, even with the most advanced quantum computer programmed as a neural network, ‘learning’ to find patterns, as it executes its instructions.

However, we humans can find the simple, elegant pattern or paradigm underlying the complexity of the Cosmos—as an equation explaining everything—by adapting the modelling methods of information systems architects, mapping the interactions of humans and computers in the workplace. Such a comprehensive model naturally includes the creative, evolutionary process of developing such a model in the psyche of the modeller, testing whether machines can think for themselves and hence whether artificial general intelligence in computers is possible or not.

It is thus nonsense for Peter Russell, a leading evolutionary, to suggest in an article titled ‘What if There Were No Future?’ that during this decade machines with artificial intelligence will surpass the human brain in performance and abilities. In this regard, Peter is following Ray Kurzweil and the misnamed transhumanists, mistakenly believing that evolution’s Accumulation Point is a technological singularity, as I explain more fully in an article from March this year titled ‘Demystifying the Mystery of Being’.

We humans are the leading edge of evolution, not algorithmic computers practicing machine learning in neural networks. However, as Teilhard foresaw, we can only realize our fullest potential as superhumans at evolution’s Omega Point—by becoming totally free of our mechanistic conditioning, passed from generation to generation for thousands of years.

This is not just about concepts, ideas, and theories, as insights. Such a Total Revolution—questioning the fundamental assumptions of the cultures we live in—also has a profound effect on human relationships, not the least with our families. For religious, scientific, and economic beliefs provide many with a precarious sense of security and identity in life, which they are most reluctant to release, often defending them to the core.

Therein lies the central dilemma of evolution, as we collectively experience it today. Even though many intuitively already know the truth of human existence deep within themselves, as evolutionary learning has been more divergent than convergent over the years, we live in a world of specialists, whose vision is inevitably severely limited. In my case, I know no one else who has taken the powerful abstractions of algebra and information systems modelling methods to the utmost level of generality, rebuilding the whole of mathematics, and hence all knowledge, on the solid foundation of the Truth, within the Cosmic Context of Wholeness.

In this respect, wishful thinking doesn’t help, even if such an optimistic approach does give a modicum of comfort, for hope and despair and life and death are just two sides of the same coin. To resolve the existential crisis we all face today in Love and Peace, it is essential to engage in a spiritual practice that leads to the psychological death of the sense of a separate self.

For unifying the mystical and mundane—living simultaneously in these two worlds—is the final stage of the spiritual journey, as Joseph Campbell described in his popular book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. However, with most focused on their families and making a living, it is uncertain to what extent we shall be able to compassionately support each other to realize our True Nature, free of our blind evolutionary inheritance, in the few years we have available to us for this Great Awakening.

In 1931, Albert Einstein wrote in a piece commemorating the centenary of James Clerk Maxwell’s birth, “The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In my experience, the Totality of Existence, in both nonphysical and physical form, emerges from the Formless, Nondual Datum of the Universe, projected through the Cosmic Psyche.

Thus, the world we live in is a projection of the Divine, via our cognitive maps and conceptual models, which govern the way we live our lives, mostly sub- and unconsciously. The word projection derives from Latin proiectionem (nominative proiectio) ‘a throwing forward, a stretching out’, from the past participle of proicere ‘to throw forth’, from pro– ‘forth’ and iacere ‘to throw, cast, hurl’.

The Romans constructed many words from jacere, mostly in a physical sense, but sometimes using them mentally or psychologically. Here is a list of Latin prefixes, all of which have led to English words, with a wide variety of meanings: ab– ‘away’, con– ‘together’, de– ‘down’, e– ‘out’, in– ‘in’, ob– ‘against’, pro– ‘forth’, re– ‘back’, sub– ‘under’, and tra– ‘across’.

As the laws of the Universe—viewed as a meaningful information system—apply equally to the psychospiritual realm and materialistic domain, we could use these –ject and –jection words to shed much light on the psychodynamics of society, answering the fundamental questions of human existence: Where have we come from? Who or what are we? and Where are we going? This was the title of the troubled Paul Gauguin’s paradisal masterpiece, painted in Tahiti in 1897.

These propelling words indicate that we are all constantly throwing ideas, opinions, and beliefs around in a rather chaotic manner, especially projecting them into the institutions that lay down the rules that govern our lives and onto others as a form of defence mechanism. So, if the creative power of Life is to heal our sick society, cocreating institutions that are in harmony with the fundamental laws of the Universe, this can only happen through open-hearted and open-minded self-inquiry, free of the delusions that mostly govern our lives today.

A good starting point for this thought experiment is to methodically throw ideas together in an all-inclusive Conjecture, from Latin coniectūra ‘a guess, inference; divination, soothsaying’. I call this rational, taxonomic, and holographic method Integral Relational Logic, which has evolved from the transcultural and transdisciplinary modelling methods underlying the Internet through the creative power of Life, being ejected directly by and from the Source.

In turn, this commonsensical system of thought provides the Cosmic Context, Gnostic Foundation, and framework or system of coordinates for the Conjecture, validated through the blissful and joyful experience of Wholeness. This Divination is the much sought-for Theory of Everything, which I call the Unified Relationships Theory or Panosophy, the complete unification of science, philosophy, and religion and hence of all sciences and humanities. For, as 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.”

Sadly, however, such a Cosmology—as an all-encompassing way of looking at the world we live in—tends to be rejected ‘thrown back’, as we also see in polarizing politics. This is mainly because a harmonious, bipartisan, both-and approach to life does not fit into any of the fragmented social structures that most feel that they belong to. Hence, ending the war between science and spirituality and mysticism and mathematics, which is essential to realize Inner Peace, is often objected to or ignored by those still attached to and conditioned by traditional, cultural conventions.

So, whether Life will collectively conject ‘throw together’ all the divergent streams of evolution at its glorious culmination—as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin foresaw in The Human Phenomenon—looks a most unlikely project. This is despite the fact that Panosophy supersedes Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection—by solving the ultimate problem in human learning with Self-reflective Intelligence. For Darwin’s theory of evolution neither explains the origin of species nor what has caused species to evolve into Homo sapiens ‘wise human’, now on the brink of extinction, sometimes leading to dejection ‘a lowering of spirits’ or ‘casting down’.

Yet, if we could recognize the limitations and distortions of axiomatic mathematical logic, of materialistic and mechanistic science, and of monetary economics, that technology cannot save us, and that Love is the Divine Essence we all share, a miracle could still happen in collective consciousness, revealing the innermost secrets of the Cosmos in the most magnificent apocalyptic awakening, already glimpsed by some intrepid, curious explorers.