Further to my latest blog post, to relate the Universal Method, called Integral Relational Logic, to contemporary culture, Ken Wilber, known as the Einstein of consciousness studies, calls his AQAL-IOS (All Quadrants, All Levels-Integral Operating System) a Superhuman Operating System.
In his Superhuman OS training programme, currently being rebroadcast on the Internet, Ken describes seven levels of human development, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, labelled with various colours, the highest being turquoise, a second-tier level named Integral, consisting of some 5% of the population.
He says that no matter what culture we are born into, we all go through these various levels from birth, but having reached one level, we are not aware of the higher levels. It is only at our current level that we can see the levels we have progressed through.
For instance, during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, a large section of society moved from amber to orange, from fundamentalist religious beliefs to a more rational scientific approach, which led to the abolition of slavery. However, there is currently a culture war between these two levels, with amber not being experientially aware of the orange level.
Now those currently being trained to live at the supposedly all-inclusive Integral level of development can only be aware of this level if they are intuitively standing at a higher level, which Ken does not name in the training. Indeed, no matter how many higher levels there might be, we can see them all by standing outside ourselves, the motto of this website, looking at ourselves through the eyes of the Divine, from which we are never separate.
This is how the Universal Method embraces all levels of development, at the highest possible level, as a general-purpose mapmaking method, rather than a map, per se. Specifically, AQAL does not map my own ontogeny, explaining why scientists and technologists are driving the pace of development in society at exponential rates of acceleration.
To do so, Integral Relational Logic has emerged in consciousness through a thought experiment, in which I imagined that I am a computer that switches itself off and on again, so that it has no programs within it, not even a bootstrap program to load the operating system.
Integral Relational Logic, as the Universal Method, is thus a Superhuman Operating System, which can execute all integral operating systems, including itself and AQAL. It is more like IBM’s Virtual Machine (VM), which I first saw running in 1972 when working as a systems engineer in an IBM sales office, than MacOS, Windows, or Linux, which run applications, not operating systems.
However, it is only possible to lift oneself up by one’s bootstraps with the assistance of the creative power of Life emanating directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe. The Method cannot therefore be taught. It emerges in consciousness through an apocalyptic, kundalini-like awakening, first unlearning everything we humans have ever learnt throughout our history.
Furthermore, by starting afresh at the Alpha Point of evolution and by then applying this taxonomy of taxonomies to the Totality of Existence, we can bring universal order to our lives, healing our fragmented world in Wholeness. Practitioners are thereby carried to the Omega Point of evolution, along the lines that the scientific mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin prophesied, for these two points are never separate in Reality.
Evolution does not therefore continue indefinitely, as Ken and other leading evolutionaries assert. Evolution completes its fourteen billion-year journey at its glorious culmination in the Superhuman, beyond so-called superhuman computers with so-called artificial intelligence, able to beat humans playing chess, Go, and other games.
It is at the Omega Point that evolution becomes fully conscious of itself, able to see with Self-reflective Intelligence that it has transcended all previous levels of development in Wholeness, standing at a Holoramic ‘Whole-seeing’ vantage point, beyond space and time.
As Wholeness and Oneness are two sides of the same coin, those following an involutionary spiritual path of unlearning and undevelopment, can intuitively understand where I, like everyone else, am coming from, even though we live at unprecedented times, as evolution passes through the most momentous turning point in its fourteen billion-year history.
Returning to the Nonmanifest, recapitulating the Cosmogonic Cycle, is absolutely essential at these end times we live in, for we are on the threshold of the inevitable extinction of our species, most probably to be caused by abrupt climate change, as has happened before, as studies of the Greenland ice sheet tell us.
But rather than despairing, we now have the wonderful opportunity of using the Universal Method, as a Superhuman Operating System, to realize our fullest potential as a species in what Ken calls Greatness, answering many unanswered questions in inner and outer science, which cannot be answered by traditional systems of thought and worldviews. For as Einstein famously said, you cannot solve problems with the mindsets that create them.
Great fun!