To help people relate to me as an ordinary human being, rather than as a visionary, 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.
Nevertheless, being Wholeness, free from my cultural conditioning, gives me insights into what is happening to humanity at the present time, which are only partially seen by people educated and earning a living in the conventional manner.
For we all share one True Nature as intelligent, conscious humans, so often occluded by beliefs that machines have artificial intelligence (AI) and could think creatively for themselves, independently of humans.
So, to shed light into what it means to be human and hence our origin and destiny as a species, I am seeking co-workers to help 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.
Comparing East to West, Jung wrote in 1929, “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.”
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.
Of course, human experience is not universal or static. We interpret our experiences of Ultimate Reality in different ways, often influenced by the cultures we live in, and throughout our lives.
Accordingly, to reveal the Immortal Ground of Being that we all share, 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, even though we could shine light into our inherited blind spots, 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.
At the very least, it is of vital importance for humanity to understand the root causes of the Metacrisis we face today, and so face death with as much equanimity as possible.
So, as Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the mindset that created it, we need to trust that it is still possible for us to release so much life-enhancing synergy, hidden in the sub- and unconscious, that miracles could happen.
In practical terms, 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.
However, even Panosophy cannot prevent the imminent death of humankind in the middle of the eighth mass extinction of land animals during the past half a billion years. Most notably, sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has reached its lowest ever maximum for this time of year. It is rapidly decreasing, having far-reaching effects on the planet because the ice helps regulate Earth’s climate, influences global weather patterns, and affects ocean circulations.
Because of the accumulative effect of self-reinforcing feedback loops, it is now clear that the coordination point at the bottom of the S-shape of the growth curve has now been reached in this regard. So, we can expect the extent of the ice in the Arctic to diminish exponentially, leading to an ‘ice-free’ Arctic within a few years. Soon after, the climate will be so hot, our global habitat with no longer be able to provide us with the food and water we need to survive.