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#2092 -
"Paragonian ... denotes the
essence of Advaita..."
http://www.paragonian.org/foundation.shtml
The Paragonian Manifesto
Preface
This book is the manifesto for the Paragonian Society and the
Sharing Economy, which, if we can all work harmoniously together
with a common vision, will come into being as the global economy
self-destructs between 2009 and 2014.
The major reason why no government or business corporation is
yet prepared for this evolutionary inevitability is that Western
civilization, which dominates the world through the global
economy, is a culture living in a fantasy world, far removed from
Reality. The situation we face in the world today is rather like
the Dark Ages prior to the great scientific revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduced through Nicolaus
Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton.
Despite the great increase in creature comfort that has been
provided by scientific discoveries since then, in some ways we
are even further in the dark, less enlightened, than so-called
primitive, indigenous societies. For no civilization in human
history has been more separate from the Truth than the West is
today. So nothing less than a collapse of the system that brings
us our daily bread will be enough to bring us all back to our
senses. Otherwise, we shall be driven to extinction before we
have returned Home to Wholeness, the glorious culmination of
evolution.
Of course, many people base their sense of security and
identity in life on the global economy. So the imminent breakdown
of capitalism might seem rather frightening, bringing up
existential fears. But these fears arise from the delusions under
which the West is living: from the sense of separation we feel
from God, from Nature, and from each other.
As a consequence, the West is a culture in denial, the denial
of death. Yet we cannot be fully alive if we are afraid of death,
for life and death are just two sides of the same coin. The
forthcoming end of civilization as we know it is not something to
fear. On the contrary, it is the only chance the children born in
this millennium have of growing old enough to have children of
their own.
And this can only come about through the power of Love, which
is our true Essence, realized when we are free of the fear of
death. For God is Love: true, impersonal Love, which has no
opposite. Through the power of Love and Life, we thus have the
golden opportunity at this critical time in human history for a
renaissance, the creation of a peaceful, vibrant society that
gives everyone on this planet the chance to realize their fullest
potential as human beings.
To denote such a loving, fearless society, which has long been
the dream of humanity, the word paragonian derives from
the Greek words para, ‘beyond’, and agon,
‘contest’ or ‘conflict’, which is also the
root of agony and antagonistic. Paragonian
thus means ‘beyond conflict and suffering’, a healthy,
liberated, and awakened way of being that we can realize when we
are both unified with the Divine and integrated with the Cosmos;
when we base our lives firmly and squarely on our immortal Ground
of Being. Paragonian thus denotes the essence of Advaita
(‘not-two’) in a word with a Western etymology.
The word manifesto derives from the Latin manufestus,
literally ‘struck with the hand’, meaning ‘clearly
apprehensible’. So the purpose of this manifesto, which is
based on the principles of conceptual clarity, simplicity,
consistency, and integrity, is to make quite clear the central
issues facing the human race today, free of any assumptions,
beliefs, and conditioning that have been passed on to us by our
less than fully conscious forebears. This book is called a
manifesto because it is intended as a nondualistic, spiritual
response to The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, shortly before the great
revolution in
‘Being natural’ is the motto of the Paragonian
Society. Being is in contrast to becoming and having,
inspired by Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be? The
word natural derives from the Latin word nasci,
‘to be born’. Since everything in the relativistic
world of form is born from our divine Source, to be natural is to
live in union with the Divine, free from the beliefs and
inhibitions that prevent us from realizing our true Essence.
This is the natural innocence of Adam and Eve, who were naked
but not ashamed in the mythical Garden of Eden. So when we live
naturally, we have the inner strength to be utterly naked and
vulnerable, free of the armour-plating we use to protect
ourselves from supposed danger. Even our language reflects the
fact that we are all hiding from each other and ourselves, for
the word person derives from the Latin persona,
meaning ‘actor’s mask’. Being natural is also the
innocence of childhood before Intelligence, our essential nature,
is stifled by our parents, priests, and teachers. For, as the
Sufi poet, Rumi, has said, “Love is the sea where the
intellect drowns.”
I am fortunate in this respect, because ever since I was eight
years of age, in 1950, I have known that if we human beings were
ever to live in love and peace with each other, we would need to
end the war that has been raging between science and religion for
the past few hundred years. Now the words God and Universe
both mean ‘Wholeness’ in some sense. But there is
nothing in the world of learning today that shows how these
fundamental contextual concepts can be reconciled. And without an
overall interpretative context for our lives, how can we ever
know whether what we are being taught is true or not?
Since we can only live in peace and harmony with each other by
unifying the concepts of God and Universe, I have spent a
lifetime asking awkward questions, like a child, questioning all
the scientific, religious, and economic assumptions of the
culture I was born into. I could therefore learn very little at
school and university, because my intuition told me that what I
was being taught would not lead me to Wholeness and the Truth,
and hence to Love and Peace and Life and Freedom. As a result, I
have retained the innocence of childhood throughout my life;
nearly everything I have learnt about myself and the world I live
in I have learnt since I was thirty-eight years of age.
To cut a very long story short, I now realize that the
concepts of God and the Universe can be unified in Consciousness.
For Consciousness is all there is, as the Advaita sage and former
President of the Bank of India, Ramesh S. Balsekar, reiterates
many times in Consciousness Speaks. This means that
everything in the relativistic world of form is just an
appearance in or abstraction from Consciousness. The hard problem
of consciousness studies, first identified by David Chalmers in
1995 (How is it that consciousness arises from the brain?), is
not a difficult problem to solve; it is impossible.
The essence of the revolution in human consciousness and human
culture that such organizations as What Is Enlightenment?
magazine are promoting today is thus to establish the scientific
truth that the physical universe is an epiphenomenon of
Consciousness, rather than the other way around. In the West, the
tail is wagging the dog; the cart is before the horse. So the
fundamental challenge of our times is to turn the West inside
out, to put it back onto its feet, for today it is standing on
its head. In this way, we can unify the rationality of the West
with the mysticism of the East and thus get the benefit of both
worlds.
To establish the scientific truth that Consciousness is the
primary reality, indeed the only true Reality, we need to solve
the ultimate problem in science: to create a coherent body of
knowledge that describes all the forces in Nature (both physical
and nonphysical) within a single, all-encompassing framework.
This book provides an introduction to this Theory of Everything,
the framework for which is a holographic, nonaxiomatic,
self-reflective system of thought, which has evolved from the
semantic modelling methods used by information systems architects
in business.
In order to distinguish this comprehensive synthesis of all
know-ledge from the partial theories of everything being
developed by such people as Stephen W. Hawking and Ken Wilber, I
call the Theory of Everything panosophy, from the Greek
word pansophos, meaning ‘all-wise’. Panosophy
is not a new word. The Oxford English Dictionary records
that it was used as early as 1642, albeit with a slightly
different spelling, to mean “universal or cyclopædic
knowledge; a scheme or cyclopædic work embracing the whole body
of human knowledge”.
Panosophy is thus the Ultimate Cosmic Vision revealed to
Arjuna by
It is important to recognize that panosophy is not science,
philosophy, or religion, in the sense that these words are
understood today. Panosophy is the discipline of learning that
unifies all the religions, philosophies, and sciences in all
cultures in both East and West. So panosophy is science,
philosophy, and theology; all three: there is no separation
between them, no ‘No Man’s Land’ between science
and theology, which delimited the domain for what Bertrand
Russell called ‘philosophy’ in History of Western
Philosophy. Panosophy thus embraces theosophy,
anthroposophy, and all the other osophies, ologies, and isms.
To think of panosophy as just another discipline of learning
is a fundamental category mistake, to use Gilbert Ryle’s
term. Ryle used the concept of
As none of us is omniscient, to bring all knowledge into
universal order we need a framework, rather like Descartes’
system of coordinates for Euclidean space. The framework for this
synthesis of all knowledge is called relational logic
because it has arisen through the action of what Heraclitus, the
mystical philosopher of change, called ‘the Logos’, the
rational organizing principle of the Universe, and because it has
evolved from the relational model of data introduced by Ted Codd
of IBM in 1970, augmented by object-oriented modelling methods.
It is the purpose of this book to introduce panosophy and
relational logic and to show how they can be used to rebuild the
infrastructure of society on Love and Peace, Life and Freedom,
Wholeness and the Truth, Consciousness and Intelligence, and
Stillness and Emptiness, all these words being capitalized to
denote union with the Divine, with the Absolute.
From an economic perspective, the basic reason why neither
Marx’s materialism, in particular, nor the West’s
materialism, in general, is appropriate for our times is the
invention of the stored-program computer in the middle of the
last century. While the computer might be made from sand and bits
of metal, it is essentially a tool of thought. The computer
extends our mental abilities, in contrast to the many
tools we have developed over the millennia to extend our rather
limited physical abilities, such as the flint axe, the
wheel, the steam engine, the telephone, and the aeroplane. So no
science based on physics can possibly help us understand what it
truly means to be a human being in contrast to our machines. This
has been acknowledged by Stephen W. Hawking, who said in his
multimillion best-seller, A Brief History of Time,
perhaps with tongue in cheek, “we have, as yet, had little
success in predicting human behaviour from mathematical
equations!”
Even though Marx was concerned with the development of the
whole person, what panosophy reveals is that neither capitalism
nor communism is appropriate for the Information Age we are now
in. In particular, neither ideology reflects a nondualistic,
spiritual society living in love, peace, and harmony with itself
and its environment. Neither is adapting to the accelerating rate
of evolutionary change that we are experiencing today. And no
species that does not adapt to its changing environment can
expect to survive for very long. So we need a radically new way
of managing our business affairs, which we can call the Sharing
Economy, the means of conducting business in the Paragonian
Society.
Panosophy shows that it is not true that technological
development can drive economic growth indefinitely, the basic
assumption of capitalism. All evolutionary growth processes
follow an S-shape, as has been observed by scientists from D’Arcy
Wentworth Thompson, through C. H. Waddington and Stephen Jay
Gould, to Peter Russell. Growth begins slowly, then accelerates
exponentially, eventually coming to a limit, at which point
growth slows down and reverses. In particular, in contrast to
human potential, we cannot continue developing both hardware and
software indefinitely. They have a limit, which will be reached
within the next ten years. Reaching this limit, together with the
growing oil crisis, will be quite enough to bring the global
economy crashing around our ears.
But how are we to make the transition from the viciously
competitive global economy to the cooperative Sharing Economy?
Well, to develop a manifesto and strategy appropriate for our
rapidly changing times, we must obviously challenge Marx’s
view of social change. As a communist, Marx was a dualistic
materialist at war with capitalism, a dualistic, materialistic
economic ideology. Influenced by Hegel’s dialectical
materialism, Marx believed that social change comes about through
conflict, specifically, in his case, through class warfare
between the proletariat and the ruling capitalistic authorities.
He thought that this theory of social change was the basis for
the laws of motion of society, just as Newton had published the
laws of motion of physical bodies in 1687 with the Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy.
But Marx was writing before Darwin’s theory of evolution,
before the revolution in psychological understanding begun by
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, before the invention of the
stored-program computer, before David Bohm’s reconciliation
of relativity and quantum theories in his path-breaking theory of
the implicate order, and before a large number of people in the
West turned to the East for spiritual fulfilment. So Marx’s
claim was ill-founded. But this does not mean that it is not
possible to develop the laws of motion of society, as Karl Popper
asserted in The Poverty of Historicism.
To develop the laws of motion of society, we can first turn to
Newton, who showed with his famous equation F=ma,
which many of us learned at school, that if a body in motion is
to accelerate, a force must be applied to it. So are there any
forces that are causing the pace of evolutionary change to
accelerate exponentially? Indeed, there are. But they are
nonphysical, ultimately emanating from our divine Source, from
what Christians call God the Creator.
So if we are to manage our business affairs with full
consciousness and intelligence of what we are doing, it is of the
utmost importance that we develop a radically new science that
can unify these nonphysical energies, whether they be mental,
psychic, subtle, spiritual, or whatever, with the four forces
recognized by the physicists: gravitational, electromagnetic, and
weak and strong nucleic forces. Otherwise we shall just continue
running our business lives blindfold, rather like driving our
cars down the highway with our eyes closed at ever-increasing
speeds, a situation that can only lead to disaster.
By creating this synthesis of all the energies at work in the
Universe, evolution is becoming fully conscious of itself, as
Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin observed. Panosophy
includes a comprehensive science of evolutionary change, able to
explain where we human beings have come from and where we are all
heading in such a frantic rush. It thus describes the laws of
motion of society that Marx mistakenly thought he had found. And
this understanding will bring about a revolution in consciousness
that will lead to a cultural revolution even more radical than
Marx or any of his successors envisaged.
To understand what is happening to the human race today, we
need to recognize that each of us is the product of some fourteen
billion years of evolution. If all the atoms, molecules, cells,
plants, animals, species, and cultures had not evolved over all
these years, none of us would be where we are today, living in
the way we do. So we do not have the free will to control our
destiny or even our lives, either as individuals or as a species.
In the oft-repeated words of Ramesh S. Balsekar and many other
spiritual teachers, there is no doership, no separate entity,
including the Divine, that can be said to be doing anything. So
we can see that the Universe is designed, but there is no
designer thereof.
Nevertheless, the more we understand about the evolutionary
processes that govern our learning, and hence our behaviour, the
more we can live in love, peace, and harmony with each other and
our environment. That essentially is what is happening to the
human race today, although you would not know it from reading the
newspapers or watching television. Even though the people working
in the media long for Wholeness and the Truth as much as anyone
else, they seem to delight in telling us about the wars raging
around the world, whether the weapons are guns, money, or
concepts, largely ignoring and even ridiculing the efforts of
those attempting to live in Love and Peace, free from conflict
and suffering.
This means that if the human race is to survive the collapse
of the global economy, this can only happen through what might
look like a miracle viewed from today’s world. But from the
perspective of panosophy, it is not a miracle at all. What is due
to happen is that a gigantic earthquake is going to erupt in the
depths of the ocean of Consciousness, which will emerge on the
surface as a tsunami, a great wave that will sweep away all
delusions before it. This is the only way to avoid extinction
before the human race as a whole has reached its highest
potential as a species.
The transition to the Paragonian Society and the Sharing
Economy will thus be as much revolutionary as evolutionary in
character. Humanity is set to pass through a discontinuity in
evolution; to take a great leap in consciousness, a vision that
Peter Russell, in particular, has been promoting for many years.
This is essential if we are to reach what Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin called the Omega point of evolution at the end of time,
when all the diverse strands of evolution converge in one great
megasynthesis.
So what is it like to live at the Omega point of evolution,
and how do we get there? To answer the second question first, we
cannot get there from here, from where most of us live our lives
today. This is because the ultimate destiny of evolution is not
anything in the world of form: it is Wholeness, ineffable,
nondual Wholeness, the union of all opposites. It is therefore
not the purpose of our lives to have successful careers, to
become leaders of our countries, religions, universities, or
businesses, to become famous film stars or singers, or to win
Olympic gold medals, for instance, or even to bring up a family.
The purpose of life is to unify all opposites. This is the
ultimate yoga, for the Sanskrit word yoga, which is
cognate with the English words yoke and join,
means ‘union’.
Living at the Omega point of evolution is exquisitely
beautiful, for we see and feel a world of the utmost simplicity
and elegance, encapsulated in the sentence Wholeness is the
union of all opposites. We have reached Home and realize
that at no instant in our lives have we ever left Home, a
realization expressed in these words of John the Divine: “I
am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the
last.” We thus know the ineffable Truth with absolute
certainty, when all doubts and fears disappear.
Furthermore, we do not belong anywhere, to any particular
planet, species, religion, race, nation, business enterprise, or
sex. Rather, we belong everywhere. This is because our own
individual consciousness has become so deep and broad that it is
coterminous with Consciousness itself. But this does not mean
that learning stops, for Consciousness has no limits or borders
within it. It simply means that we realize that there is actually
nothing to learn, for the Universe is, in essence, empty: what
the Buddhists call shunyata. So what we do
learn is Wholeness begetting Wholeness of ever greater depth.
This is what the architect Christopher Alexander calls ‘the
quality without a name’ in The Timeless Way of Building,
a wonderfully wise book that, together with A Pattern
Language, is having a profound effect on information systems
development in business today. For when wholes beget wholes, our
creative processes mimic Nature, like the growth of our own
bodies. It is in this way that we can build the Sharing Economy
when the cut-throat global economy self-destructs around the turn
of this decade.
The moral imperative of our times is therefore to live in
union with all opposites, including the most fundamental
opposites of all, nonduality and duality. Failure to do this is a
violation of the basic design principle of the Universe and
inevitably leads to conflict and suffering. So the cultural
transformation that we are engaged in today cannot come about by
fighting, as Marx believed, and many others still do.
For instance, the war between al-Qa’eda and the Christian
capitalists, the street battles between the globalization
protesters and the police, and the acrimonious arguments between
political parties are all expressions of dualism, and cannot
possibly lead to the nondualistic Paragonian Society. All these
conflicts indicate that the participants are not yet grounded in
the Truth, for ‘Truth fears no questions’, an aphorism
I saw printed on a man’s T-shirt on the train from Stockholm
to Gothenburg in the spring of 2004.
And, as J. Krishnamurti pointed out in The Awakening of
Intelligence, it does not need two to have a conflict: it
needs only one. So when we know the Truth, what Krishnamurti
aptly called a ‘pathless land’ in 1929 when dissolving
the organization that wanted to make him a world teacher, there
is no longer any need to attack or defend anything. It is the
Truth that sets us free, free from conflict and suffering, as
Jesus of Nazareth taught. We can therefore only realize our
fullest potential as individuals and as a species through the
action of Life, through nondual Love, Consciousness, and
Intelligence.
We can liken this evolutionary process to a pot of water being
put on to boil. As the heat increases, the molecules of water
become more and more agitated. Eventually one molecule escapes
from the pot as steam, to be followed by more and more molecules,
until at the end the pot boils dry. Now it is quite impossible at
the micro level to predict in which sequence the molecules of
water will turn into steam. But at the macro level, we can
predict with some certainty that all the water in the pot will
eventually evaporate.
So it is with evolution. As individuals, we are like the
molecules in the pot of water. When looking at society as a
whole, it is not possible to say which individuals will begin to
embody the principles of the emerging civilization before the
others. This is a quite arbitrary, random phenomenon. However,
what we can predict with reasonable certainty is that eventually
most individuals in society will make this cultural
transformation. For evolution as a whole is not random; it has a
final purpose: to lead us all, as a species, back to the mystical
sense of Wholeness where evolution began.
I know this because I am a molecule that has already escaped
from the pot of boiling water, even though I have to return to
the pot sometimes to supplement my pension. Between April 1980,
when I was employed marketing management information systems for
IBM in the UK, and October 1983, this being that I am passed
through a discontinuity in evolution; I took a quantum leap in
consciousness. A gigantic, apocalyptic explosion took place in my
psyche as all the diverse streams of fourteen billion years of
evolution converged within me. By conducting an experiment in
learning from the very beginning, completely free of all previous
teachings and traditions, I had returned Home to Wholeness.
It was, at once, the most exciting and scary period of my
life, which is well denoted by the word awesome, which
can mean both ‘fearful’ and ‘wonderful’. In
this respect, my experience was similar to that of Arjuna, who
said, on being shown the Ultimate Cosmic Vision, “I rejoice
in seeing you as you have never been seen before, yet I am filled
with fear by this vision of you as the abode of the universe.”
In a similar manner, nothing that I had learnt at school, at
university, or in business could explain my experiences. It has
taken over twenty years of spiritual, philosophical, and
scientific inquiry of the utmost depth and breadth to fully
understand my life experiences in the interpretative context of
Wholeness.
Nevertheless, at this early stage of my awakening, liberation,
and healing, I was sufficiently aware that I was a progenitor of
an eschatological epoch that would come into being when the
global economy collapsed as my children reached their late
thirties, about the age I was when I first had this vision in
1979. To give this nondualistic, peaceful culture a name, I
coined the word paragonian on 29th October 1984,
following several weeks spent searching Greek and Latin
dictionaries in Wimbledon library in London.
Since then, Life has taught me to integrate all knowledge in
all cultures and disciplines at all times, past, present, and
future, into a coherent whole. As a consequence, my experiences
now make complete sense. My being embraces a coherent body of
knowledge that corresponds to all my experiences from the
mystical to the mundane, which is how I define science.
When we study evolution as a whole, from beginning to end, we
can see that humanity is currently at the threshold of the most
momentous turning point in human history. As the visionaries have
prophesied, we are entering an eschatological, mystical epoch of
superconsciousness and superintelligence, based solidly on the
immortal Ground of Being.
This talk of apocalyptic end times, of an epoch of quite
exquisite beauty, might bring up thoughts of some saviour
emerging in the world at what the Christians call a ‘time of
tribulation’. Indeed, there was an extensive article on this
subject by Carter Phipps in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue of What
is Enlightenment? magazine.
As Carter tells us, the Jews expect the Messiah, the
Christians the second coming of Christ, together with the
anti-Christ, the Muslims the Mahdi, the Hindus the Kalki Avatar,
and the Buddhists Maitreya. But no such being is going to appear,
for two reasons. First, in the Paragonian Society, all these
religions, which with the notable exception of Buddhism have been
the cause of all the holy wars throughout human history, will
have disappeared. For when we are all grounded in ineffable,
nondual Wholeness, there will no longer be any need for holy
wars, wars about the Whole. And as the Advaita sage and former
medical practitioner Vijai Shankar has said, the truly religious
person is one with no religion.
Secondly, we are all the products of some fourteen billion
years of evolution. So our personal lives are inextricably
entwined with everyone else’s through what Rupert Sheldrake
calls ‘morphic resonance’. We don’t have the
autonomy that we think we have. Nevertheless, we are all
responsible, as individuals, for the evolution of our species,
for handing on to our children a world that is fit for them to
live in. As Andrew Cohen, the founder and editor-in-chief of What
is Enlightenment? magazine, has said in Freedom Has No
History, “to succeed, we must be prepared to do battle
with the powerful conditioning, conscious and unconscious, of the
whole race. That means that we have to come out of the shadows
and be seen. Like Atlas, we have to be willing to hold the whole
world on our own shoulders. It’s an awesome task.”
This means that democracy, as we know it today, will disappear
in the Paragonian Society. For ego-centred democracies are
tyrannous, as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill pointed
out some 150 years ago in Democracy in America and On
Liberty, respectively. Furthermore, when we vote in
elections for politicians to represent our fragmented and selfish
views of the world, we give away our power. Then no one is
responsible for the state of the world, neither the politicians
nor the electors, as Barry Long points out in Only Fear Dies.
To what extent we, as individuals, can already take
responsibility for the evolution of the whole human race depends
on two major factors:
1. How free are we of the religious, scientific,
economic, and personal conditioning that prevents us from seeing
our lives just as they are, that inhibits us from reaching our
fullest potential as individuals and hence as a species?
2. How far have we come in overcoming the fragmentation
of the world of learning, both East and West, and consequently
learnt to integrate all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines
at all times into a coherent whole?
The first of these two factors is a prerequisite for the
second. For we can only see what is happening to humanity at the
present time when we remove the blindfolds from our eyes. The old
has to die before the new can be born. To return Home to
Wholeness—the union of all opposites—it is necessary to
start afresh at the very beginning. In Hindu terms, Shiva the
destroyer must act before Brahma the creator can manifest a
comprehensive world-view solidly grounded in the Truth, thus
accommodating our mystical experiences.
In order for this book to appeal to as wide a readership as
possible, it contains a minimum of technical detail, without
endnotes, references, or index. For those wishing to study
panosophy, which provides the gnostic, ontological, and
epistemological foundations for the Paragonian Society and the
Sharing Economy, an 800-page work of scholarship is in
preparation. This is called Ineffable, Nondual Wholeness: The
Union of All Opposites. A draft description of relational
logic, the framework for panosophy, is available for download
from http://www.paragonian.org/wholeness.html.
During the twenty-four years that these books have been
evolving, answering questions I first raised fifty-four years
ago, I have lived predominantly in two worlds: the world of
information systems development in business, and the world of
enlightened beings teaching the truth of life on Earth. So the
union of reason and mysticism described in this book naturally
reflects this personal background.
However, the essence of this book is Love and Consciousness,
which we all share, regardless of the specialist roles that we
play in society. So I trust that if you are an academic, medical
practitioner, politician, accountant, priest, therapist, or
whatever, you will find something in this book that you can
relate to.
This is a very concentrated book, sometimes summarizing in
just a few paragraphs what might need several chapters or even
books to describe in full. Maybe, on occasion, I have
oversimplified. But I am an explorer and adventurer in the world
of learning, and it is this approach to learning that I am
attempting to convey. So while I welcome feedback on any
misconceptions and errors of fact that might have crept into my
writings, I would encourage you to explore for yourself any of
the points that particularly interest you, remembering that the
overall message of this book is ineffable, nondual Wholeness, in
which the particular words pale into insignificance.
As this book describes what is essentially an Eastern
world-view using Western scientific language, you should note
that I sometimes use words whose meanings are somewhat different
from dictionary definitions. English, like the other European
languages, reflects a dualistic, materialistic, and mechanistic
world-view that is far removed from Reality. So I have needed to
create a few new words and change the meanings of a number of
words in order to describe a world-view that is based on the
Truth. To avoid too much confusion here, my general approach is
to reveal the root meaning of words: what David Bohm called
‘the archæology of language’. It is interesting to
note that these original meanings of words are often much closer
to the Truth than modern meanings, indicating that the ancients
were closer to Nature than we are today.
http://www.paragonian.org/foundation.shtml