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.”