Taking a break from researching and writing the final chapter of my final book on Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics, I have written a four-page monograph on ‘Communicating with Each Other’. For communications, as a field of study, derives from Latin commūnicāre ‘to share’, a critical issue at the present time with the world rapidly degenerating into chaos, not understanding what is happening to us all, as a species.
This monograph is the third I have written this year, exploring what we all share, endeavouring to shed some light in the darkness of ignorance. The others are a two-page introduction to ‘The Theory of Everything’ in January and a six-page summary of ‘The Universal Science of Reason: Generated from the Source with Self-reflective Intelligence’ in February.
Learning to communicate with each other with mutual understanding is particularly important at the present time, in the midst of the eighth mass-extinction event, although, in 1982, Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup identified only five mass extinctions of the species so far.
To clarify this situation, here is a table of seven mass extinctions of land animals that the revised fifth edition of The Times Concise Atlas of the World identified in 1990, each marking the transition from one geological epoch to another, millions of years ago (mya).
| No. | Epochal transition | Mya |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ordovician–Silurian | 438 |
| 2 | Devonian–Carboniferous | 360 |
| 3 | Permian–Triassic | 248 |
| 4 | Triassic–Jurassic | 213 |
| 5 | Jurassic–Cretaceous | 144 |
| 6 | Cretaceous–Paleogene | 65 |
| 7 | Oligocene-Miocene | 25 |
Today, some say that we are in the middle of the transition from the Holocene geological epoch, meaning ‘wholly new’, to the Anthropocene, to indicate the impact that humans are having on the Earth’s ecosystems, also an entirely new situation facing humankind.
But we should not blame humans for destroying the habitat that we need to survive. All structures, emerging from the Divine Origin of the Universe, are born to die, as the Buddha pointed out on his deathbed, when he said, “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.”
With few able and willing to accept the imminent extinction of Homo sapiens ‘wise human’, is there nevertheless a possibility for some, at least, to hearken to these words that Matthew Fox wrote in the Foreword to Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker’s Savage Grace: Living Resiliently in the Dark Night of the Globe in 2017, “Ours is a time not only for scientists and inventors but also mystics and contemplatives to join hands so that our action flows from being and from a deep place of return to the Source.”