Paradigm Explorer 147 Summer 2925 1

Paradigm Explorer

SMN Calendar 2025

Upcoming talks

Monday May 26 UA P Series with Àlex Gómez-Marín – Anna Brady-Estevez

Wednesday May 28 Dr A nnine van der Meer – Mary Magdalene, Egypt and the Hermetic Tradition

Wednesday June 4 Joseph Selbie – The Physics of Miraculous Healing

Wednesday June 11 Dr Shelli Joye – Exploring the Metaverse: Mapping the Hidden Dimensions of Consciousness

Wednesday June 18 Ca itlin Matthews – Dream Incubation in the Celtic World

Monday June 23 UA P Series with Alex Gomez-Ma rin – Diane Pasulka

June 27-29 Network Annual Gathering at Latimer Place

Wednesday July 2 Dr Nick Spencer – Magisteria: The Confluence of Science and Religion

Wednesday July 9 Paul Cudenec – Organic Radicalism: Rediscovering Anarcho-Perennialism

Wednesday July 16 Dr Susan Plunket – Transcendent Experiences in Consciousness, 3 Perspectives: Jung, Vedanta and Quantum Physics

Monday July 21 UA P Series with Àlex Gómez-Marín – Beatriz Villarroel

Wednesday July 23 Dr Jack Hunter – Deep Weird: High Strangeness, Boggle Thresholds and Damned Data in Academic Research on Extraordinary Experience

Wednesday July 30 Ga ry Lachman – Challenge and Response: The Goldilocks Theory of History

Monday August 25 UA P Series with Àlex Gómez-Marín – Chrissy Newton

Consciousness Perspectives Forum

Webinars from 19:30-21:30pm (London) exploring science, spirituality, consciousness and human experience. Presentations by experts in their field, offering the opportunity to question, comment and interact in the second hour of the meeting.

Organiser: CLAUDIA NIELSEN – To get monthly updates, please email claudia@scimednet.org.

Upcoming Events

May

Monday 12th Prof Dana Sawyer – What if Aldous Huxley was spot on? Current psychedelic research supports Huxley’s ‘Perennial Philosophy’ as deeply relevant

June

Monday 16th Dr Shantena Sabbadini – Life as Act of Creation

July

Monday 14th Dr L ennert Gesterkamp – Dao Fa Ziran: Daoism and the Meaning of Life

September

Monday 8th Prof John Barton – A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths

2 Reclaiming Holism in a Fragmented Age

3 The Deep Law of the Living Cosmos

Freya Mathews

7 The Paradise of the Mother’s Voice – Notes on Science, Mysticism, and Mescalin

Mattias Desmet

11 The False Religion of Transhum(A)n(I)sm Àlex Gómez-Marín

14 SPECIAL REPORT: Does AI accurately capture the latest science on Consciousness and Spirituality?

Researched and written by Anders Bolling

Edited by Liza Horan

18 Do AI Bots Have Some Degree of Self-Reflection?

Bernard Beitman

20 Dismantling the Myths of Materialism

Tim Wyatt

23 Quantum Panpsychism and the Conscious Brain

Emmanuel Ransford

24 A Special Day

Larry Culliford

25 Fever Dreaming

Rob Williams

26 Galileo Commission Synchronicity Summits X & XI

Sue Lewis

30 How Open-minded Can Mainstream Scientists Be? Mona Sobhani, PhD & Allison Paradise

31 Creating a Wave of Exponential Collaboration Jill Robinson

32 Creative Bridges Follow-Up Remo Eerma

Network News

Consciousness Perspectives Forum

54 E cology/Politics

56

Paradigm Explorer 147

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ISSN 1362-1211 | No 147 | 2025/1

Photo credits:

Cover: Jim Pascoe, Winchester College 9, 21: Mary Pearson 12: David Lorimer - Sunset in Fife 15: Shelli Joye 24: Larry Culliford Back cover: Michael Worden on Unsplash

Reclaiming Holism in a Fragmented Age

JOAN WALTON

It is with pleasure that I write in the first of a new layout of Paradigm Explorer courtesy of Andrea Barbieri, who also designed the 50 th Anniversary Publication. We hope you like it!

As usual, there is a range of fascinating lead articles in this issue. They reminded me that, in an age dominated by reductionism and technological abstraction, we must reclaim our innate capacity for deep, conscious connection—with ourselves, each other, and the living cosmos. In a time when artificial intelligence threatens to supplant our humanity, and scientific rationalism continues to hollow out the soul of modern culture, there is an urgent call to remember who we are—not as isolated biological machines, but as threads in a living tapestry of consciousness. The first three essays gesture towards such a reclamation: a shift from separation to participation, from cold calculation to deep communion with the world around us.

Freya Mathews’ powerful essay, The Deep Law of the Living Cosmos, sets the stage for a radical re-envisioning of our place in the universe. In her view, the crisis of our civilisation stems not just from policy failures or environmental neglect, but from a foundational metaphysical error: the idea that the world is dead matter, there for the taking. Mathews proposes an alternative—Living Cosmos Panpsychism—in which the universe is not only alive, but conscious. In this model, all things are imbued with an inner life, and our role is not to dominate, but to listen, participate, and co-create.

This idea may sound foreign to many modern ears, but it’s a return to something ancient and profoundly human. What Mathews describes as “ontopoetics”—a kind of deep communication between self and cosmos—has echoes in indigenous traditions, mysticism, and even in the great religious texts. In contrast to the distanced observer of Western science, the holistic knower is vulnerable, porous, receptive. They are acted upon by the world just as they act within it. Mathews urges us to awaken to the subtle language of the universe—through rivers, trees, dreams, and synchronicities—and in so doing, align ourselves with what she calls “Deep Law” - the intrinsic pattern of harmony and accommodation found in all thriving ecosystems.

This emphasis on intimate connection also animates Mattias Desmet’s essay, The Paradise of the Mother’s Voice. He takes us further back—not just philosophically, but developmentally—to the raw sensitivity of a newborn child, whose first bond with the world is through the music of the mother’s voice. Long before meaning is assigned, language

is felt. It resonates. It vibrates through the tissues and nervous system of the infant. For Desmet, this pre-rational connection to sound and presence is a model of truth—not the data-driven “truth” of algorithms, but an embodied, emotional reality that precedes and transcends the Ego.

Desmet’s contrast between this primal, poetic mode of being and the clinical aspirations of transhumanism is as stark as it is unsettling. In the world of Neuralinks and hormone-regulated bliss, love becomes a chemical switch, and empathy a useless relic. This is not evolution, he argues, but a tragic loss of what makes us human. What Huxley glimpsed through mescalin—the ecstatic oneness of mystical union—is rebranded by today’s technocrats as a programming challenge. Paradise becomes a simulation, joy a code, and death a bug to be patched.

Àlex Gómez-Marín, in The False Religion of Transhum(A)n(I)sm, takes this critique even further. He exposes the techno-utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley as a kind of secular cult—complete with prophecies, messiahs, and a promised digital heaven. Their gospel is coded in machine learning, their sacraments are software updates. But underneath the sleek futurism lies a dangerous erasure: of soul, of mystery, of the sacred. As Gómez-Marín notes, these self-appointed stewards of human destiny see the Earth as broken and believe only their algorithms can fix it—even if it means sacrificing what remains of our humanity.

Together, these three essays offer not just a critique, but a path forward. It begins with remembering. Remembering that we are not minds trapped in machines, nor lines of code waiting to be optimised, but conscious beings embedded in a living cosmos. That our intelligence is not merely computational, but relational and intuitive. That truth is not just a matter of logic, but of resonance.

This shift is not a retreat into irrationality, but a more expansive rationality—one that includes feeling, presence, and imagination. It’s a call to deconstruct the myths of modernity and reweave a metaphysical framework in which life, in all its forms, is sacred and significant.

In this age of accelerating complexity, reclaiming a holistic worldview may seem naive or even regressive. But perhaps it is the most radical act of all. To slow down. To listen. To feel. To honour the interconnected web of being. It is here, in the spaces between theory and silence, between image and intuition, that a new civilisation might take root—one not built on domination, but on participation. The cosmos should perhaps be seen, not as a puzzle to be solved, but a song to be sung.

The Deep Law of the Living Cosmos1

FREYA MATHEWS

Part 1

It is widely recognised now that the reductive, materialist view of the world – the view that we inherited from the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and that underpins our modern, industrial civilisation – is at the root of the havoc that this civilisation is currently wreaking on the biosphere. Many thinkers are accordingly trying to construct alternatives to this worldview – trying to provide different metaphysical foundations for the way we humans collectively inhabit our Earth.

I think it’s fair to say that most people who are engaged in this search for alternatives are looking for a more holistic understanding of things. We hear this in repeated calls to see “all things as interconnected”, and to see ourselves, as humans, as part of this interconnected, indivisible, larger whole rather than seeing the world as made up of bits and pieces that we are at liberty to take apart to suit our own convenience.

In some ways, contemporary science seems also to be heading in this holistic direction, after starting out, back in the 17th century, with an extreme form of atomism that explained physical phenomena by breaking them down into discrete constituent particles. Fundamental sciences like physics are today, by contrast, filled with fields and with ideas like quantum entanglement and nonlocality. But I think we need to be cautious in face of this apparent change in the direction of science. In the first place, science seeks to represent reality basically in quantitative, mathematical terms – this is one of its most distinguishing characteristics. But such mathematical analysis of physical phenomena relies on metrics – units of measurement. So at an explanatory level, science does still require that phenomena be ‘broken down’ into constituent units.

But the second and deeper reason we need to be cautious about regarding science as currently heading in a holistic direction is, I think, to do with its distinctive way of knowing: the scientist, as knower, positions herself at a remove from reality: she seeks understanding through theory But theory is her own construct. Theories vary of course according to the phenomenon under investigation; but in all cases the scientist is the author, the creator, of the theory. In this sense, she acts on it; but the theory does not act on her. As its author, she is not part of the theory. So insofar

as scientists see the world through the lens of theory, they remain psychologically, or as philosophers would say, phenomenologically, outside the world. This stance is reflected in external methodology: scientists position themselves as detached observers of phenomena, often acting on those phenomena through experimentation, but not themselves being acted upon. They investigate things from the outside

A truly holistic way of understanding reality would, by contrast, include the knower in the world they were seeking to know. This implies, I think, that holistic understanding must ultimately be arrived at via direct experiences of rapprochement with reality, rather than via the distancing lens of theory. The knower must make himself available to be acted upon by the world as well as acting on it. As a knower, he must be prepared to be touched by the world, subjectively moved and rearranged by it.

It surely follows that there will inevitably be many different ways of articulating a holistic alternative to the reductive scientific worldview. If holism by its nature escapes the net of quantitative, mathematical analysis then presumably it can only be glimpsed through qualitative frameworks, frameworks specific to particular cultures and philosophies. Such frameworks will always be interpretive – they will never be able to ‘nail down’ reality with the literalness and predictive power that science delivers.

Nevertheless, theorisations – scientific and otherwise –do remain important in our current crisis of civilisation because they can motivate us to experiment with new ways of being in the world. If we think there are good rational grounds for adopting a more holistic view of reality, then we might be prepared to explore new experiential practices. Should these practices result in new forms of experience, then our theories may help us to interpret these experiences and integrate them into our culture. The theories will also enable us to defend our emerging holistic perspective against the scepticism of a wider society still deeply invested in the old reductive paradigm.

Part 2

With all these qualifiers then, let me outline my own version of a holistic worldview, firstly at the level of theory,

1 Adapted from a talk presented in the Changing our Minds: Connecting to Country Conversations Series, St James Piccadilly: https:// www.sjp.org.uk/earth-justice/changing-our-minds-connecting-to-country First published in Peter Reason, Learning How Land Speaks, https://peterreason.substack.com/p/the-deep-law-of-the-living-cosmos

and then at the level of the more intuitive practices that this theoretical framework can open up. As I am a philosopher, my particular version of holism has developed within the context of (environmental) philosophy, and more particularly within the context of a conversation amongst ecophilosophers that began here in Australia several decades ago. As such, I think of my approach as in certain respects a place-based outlook – a way of understanding and participating in the cosmos that is rooted in this land – though this outlook has of course also absorbed many influences from outside Australia. In any case, the version of holism that has come together for me, over these decades and in this place, and out of a particular skein of influences, is one that I have come to call Living Cosmos Panpsychism.

To approach the idea of living cosmos panpsychism, we might start by noting that the universe at large – the universe that we can see for ourselves in the night sky and that astronomy has revealed to us – is to all appearances self-creating, self-regulating and self-renewing – in a word, self-realising: it maintains itself and increases its existence under its own steam, so to speak. Since these are properties we normally associate with living systems, let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that our universe is a living system – a unity that is so organised as to create, maintain and increase its own existence. Let us think of it not merely as an ad hoc collection of material bodies – particles, celestial bodies, clusters of celestial bodies and so forth – but as a single unity or substance. Indeed, let us think of it first and foremost as the great elastic medium of space itself, fluid and field-like but substantival, with a dynamic intrinsic geometry. Everything that we can see and measure in our universe is, from this point of view, a disturbance – like a ripple or current – in this fundamental, field-like manifold.

The 17th century philosopher, Spinoza, called such deformations, ‘modes’ of the fundamental substance. From this point of view then, we can describe all material particulars, including ourselves, as modes of this great living being we call the cosmos. And since it is a living system, let us think of its fabric as not merely physical but irreducibly psychophysical – let us imagine that there is an innerness to this dynamic, unfolding space as well as an outerness: it is imbued with inner impulses, animated by a primal will to exist and to increase its existence. (Spinoza used the Latin word, ‘conatus’, to refer to a will to self-existence and self-increase. From this we can derive the word, ‘conativity’ – a key term in relation to living cosmos panpsychism.)

The living cosmos unfolds its existence both by globally expanding itself (think ‘the expanding universe’) and by self-differentiating via patterns of disturbance in its psychophysical fabric. These patterns of disturbance eventually include complex little local configurations that are also relatively self-maintaining and self-renewing – like little whirlpools that arise in the context of particularly intricate patterns of wave interference. These whirlpool-like configurations hold their identity for a time before dissolving back into the surrounding field. Because they pro-actively, dynamically, hold their geometric conformation for a time, we can think of them as themselves living systems – the kinds of organisms and ecosystems we find on Earth. As such they are possessed of a derivative conativity of their own, an individual will to self-existence. Although they pro-actively maintain their individual structure for a time, they are of course no less part of the field-like fabric of the universe than all the other disturbances ebbing and flowing around them. So their conativity is real inasmuch as each self-system pro-actively seeks to distinguish itself from the

ebb and flow of its environment, but it is also only relative: each self-system is still continuous with the unity of substance.

The living cosmos, as pictured here, may be described as ‘panpsychist’ because every aspect of its physical structure is an outward expression of an inner field of awareness or subjectivity: in other words, every aspect of physical existence also has a ‘mental’ dimension, and vice versa.

As modes of this greater psychophysical field, our role in this panpsychist scheme of things is clearly to contribute in some way to the ongoing unfolding of the cosmos – to its ongoing self-renewal and self-increase. But what is this contribution? How can we discover it?

Part 3

I want to pick out two key concepts here that can help us to answer this question. The first concept is ontopoetics. The second is Deep Law

Ontopoetics

To see what I mean by ontopoetics, let’s remember that, from the perspective of the living cosmos, the special capacity of organisms to feel, think and communicate represents an enrichment of the universe’s own field of experience. It represents new possibilities of finitude, of a multiplicity of perspectives, of dialogue and of increasing reflexivity in the otherwise expansive and singular field of unitive awareness. But in addition to these further dimensions of enrichment that organisms bring to the larger field of awareness, there is a dimension that is largely overlooked in modern societies. This lies in the possibility of communication between organisms and the cosmos itself. Such a form of communication would surely open up new, indeed transformative, registers of experience and in this sense increase the psychophysical richness of the overall field. The idea that we as humans do have a capacity to engage in such a form of communication, and that the universe has a capacity to respond in kind, is what lies behind the idea of ontopoetics. What might a communicative exchange between ourselves and the cosmos look like? This is not in fact an entirely unfamiliar phenomenon. Many of us have been visited at some point in our lives by a certain kind of experience which, though striking, confounds our modern cultural categories: we have no way of processing it within the terms of the received discourses of our society. In premodern societies, experiences of this kind were often read as omens or signs. In Indigenous societies they may be understood as references to old or new Dreamings. In a more contemporary Western context, Carl Jung spoke of synchronicities, mysterious manifestations in the outer environment of inner states of a person’s psyche – manifestations that Jung named but was unable to explain. Omens, signs, Dreamings, synchronicities – these terms suggest in their different ways instances of I-Thou encounter between self and something larger, moments when that ‘something larger’ seems to speak directly to the human self in a ‘language’ that is both apposite and intimate.

Let’s step back from earlier interpretations of this mysterious phenomenon and view it instead, again for the sake of argument, as an instance of direct communicative encounter between ourselves and the living cosmos. In order for such a communicative encounter to occur, we presumably first need to assume a stance of address – we need in some basically ceremonial way to invoke the cosmos. If the cosmos responds to our invocation, its response will be

recognisable as a response because it will deploy the terms of reference of the invocation itself.

Of course, the ‘language’ that the cosmos will speak in response to our invocations can only be a concrete one. It will be the language of poetics, of imagery, of meaning conveyed through the symbolic resonance of things. It is in such language – traditionally the language of both poetic narrative and dreams – that our invocations need to be couched, so that they may in due course be answered in the same language, this language of things. The term, ‘ontopoetics’, is intended to capture this cluster of meanings: ontos, from the ancient Greek word for being, or for having the status of an existent thing; and poetics, both in its modern sense and in a sense drawn from the ancient Greek, poiesis, making or creating. Reality is, from the ontopoetic point of view, not only informed with meanings of its own but is disposed to interact with us on the level of meaning to create new, poetic configurations.

The history of religion is full of what I am calling ontopoetic moments. Think of the Old Testament: the burning bushes, parting seas, pillars of cloud by day and of fire by night, significant rainbows or bolts of lightning, unusual celestial bodies – all might be seen as responses on the part of a living cosmos to implicit invocations framed by the poetic narrative of the Hebrew religion.

Ontopoetics is not however merely the province of organised religions. Many of us will remember significant moments in our own lives when something like a ‘sign’ appeared in our physical environment, legible in the terms of our own private (or shared) frame of reference, as if in response to an implied invocation. It might be a rainbow; it might be finding a gold ring on a track in some out-of-theway place; it might be a sudden visitation by a wild animal.

Whatever it is, when I do invoke the world ceremonially by way of such a narrative frame of reference and when the world responds to me with an emanation or conjunction of circumstances clearly referenced to that same story, I cannot fail to be stunned. There is such intimacy in the revelation, such largesse in the gesture, such unexpectedness, one can hardly help but surrender to the experience. One’s heart is opened up to an entirely new register of salience and purpose. It is through ontopoetic communion then, I want to suggest, that the living cosmos pulls us into alignment with Deep Law.

Deep Law

So what is Deep Law?

The living cosmos must presumably unfold itself in accordance with a normative logic that is conducive to its ongoing self-realisation. Since we exist only as modes of the cosmic conativity, we need to try to discover this normative logic so that we can align our own lives with it, and thereby contribute effectively to cosmic unfolding. What is this logic? We find our clue, I would suggest, in ecology. There is a distinctive strategy discernible in stable ecosystems that

enables living things collectively to maintain and increase their existence most effectively. This strategy is basically one of accommodation: each living thing seeks to satisfy its own conative needs in ways that least disrupt the conativities of others. Indeed, ideally creatures fulfil their needs in ways that support the conativities of others, providing life-giving opportunities or resources for them.

The best example of this logic is perhaps provided by what biologists call ecosystem engineers. And the best-known example of an ecosystem engineer is the famous beaver. What do beavers want? They want safe refuges from river turbulence and from predators. To this end they dam waterways to create still ponds in which they can build convenient stick lodges. These dams redirect stream flows, in the process hydrating the entire surrounding landscape, creating wetlands that provide habitat for myriads of other plant and animal species. At the same time, these wetlands provide the necessary conditions for healthy waterways and hence for healthy beavers. Healthy ecosystems generally are held together and continually regenerated by countless such synergies.

This way of accommodation, of wanting only what one’s eco-neighbours need one to want, is logically the most efficient strategy for conative beings because it is a way of least resistance. By using only what our environment freely affords us, while eschewing ends that pit our interests against those of our ecological neighbours, we secure our own existence with the least expenditure of effort on our part, while at the same time recursively providing for those who provide for us.

This logic of accommodation, which is at the same time a logic of least resistance, correlates at a deep level with the notion of wuwei so central to the Chinese philosophy of Daoism (where Daoism is the Indigenous philosophy of China).2

It also has affinities with the biological concept of symbiosis3

If we accept this as an intrinsic logic of cosmological unfolding – a normative logic, since highly reflexive beings such as ourselves are not bound to follow it, deterministically – then we might describe it as an Ought at the core of the Is – a Deep Law that we as modes of cosmic conativity should strive to follow.

This notion of Deep Law also has strong resonances with Aboriginal notions of Law, or First Law, here in Australia.4

However, since we humans, as I said, have the capacity for reflexive thought, we can choose our own path through life. We are free to follow the Ought at the core of the Is, or we can allow ourselves to be side-tracked by the many distractions and ideologies that our manic present-day consumer societies thrust upon us.

This is where ontopoetics comes back into the picture. Once we have experienced the astonishment of ontopoetic encounter, we are truly shifted on our metaphysical moorings. We now know that we are noticed by the cosmos, that the horizon of our existence and significance is far wider and higher than we had ever imagined. This is a new axis

2 See my recent book, The Dao of Civilisation: a Letter to China, Anthem Press, 2023.

3 In biological theory, there are many different forms of symbiosis, some mutually advantageous to the parties in question, some not so much – for example, parasitism. (However, biologists are now starting to discover the key role that parasites sometimes play in ecosystems. See, for example, Jesse Nichols, “Nature can’t run without parasites”, Grist. https://grist.org/video/parasite- climate -change - ecosystem-health-science. At a population or ecosystem level then, even parasitic forms of symbiosis may turn out to be consistent with the logic of accommodation/least resistance.) Another cognate concept within biological theory is that of symbiogenesis. However, this term is used to refer to the more specific case in which one organism becomes physiologically internal to and integral to the functioning of another.

4 Again, these parallels are explained in Mathews 2023.

of meaning for our lives. We are accountable not merely to our society but to a cosmos that is aware of us and perhaps even takes the trouble to salute us. This is a new dimension of intimacy – perhaps, for us, of love – that calls us into alignment with Deep Law. All competing distractions for our attention are by comparison reduced to tawdry irrelevance. From here on, we shall simply be unable to bear to continue living in ways that trash this tender cosmos and disrupt the poetic order. We have indeed been pulled inside the cosmos, into its subjectival dimension – where this is a form of congress that can only be achieved via feeling. Our will has become coincident with cosmic conativity. And with this, and only with this, I think, we make the transition to a holistic perspective.

If we are on board with all of this, then we will surely be wondering how we can cultivate the sensibilities proper to ontopoetics and Deep Law in our own lives? Are there specific practices – and indeed specific forms of economic praxis – that can be deployed?

Part 4

One set of practices has been detailed by Peter Reason in his Substack blog, Learning How Land Speaks 5 Alongside Peter and other faculty members, I have been involved in offering this set of practices through a short course, Living Waters, at Schumacher College.6 The aim of the course is to provide an opportunity for participants to spend dedicated time each week in communion with a particular river or other waterway in their own neighbourhood. The idea is for them to try to engage with this river at a communicative level. They are invited to start by ceremonially addressing the river in some way and then paying close, loving attention to it, taking note of the detail and nuance of every particular as well as the layered patterns of ecological coherence that it presents. In the process, participants also open themselves to signs of communicative intent that might become evident. Together with members of small inquiry sub-groups, they then try, week by week, to make sense of the resulting experiences, where this adds a critical and reflective edge to their interpretations. The cooperative process also bonds the members of the sub-groups into mini-collectives that share an emerging new perspective, thereby creating small pods of a nascent culture. Perhaps via such practices we might take a first step towards reinhabiting our world as a living cosmos. In Aboriginal English here in Australia there is a word that has entered the wider Australian vernacular: ‘Country’. As Sandra Wooltorton, a faculty member of the Living Waters course, put it in a recent paper, “Country is living, responsive and caring, and [the word] is capitalised to denote an Indigenous understanding of one’s place, which connects people, socio-economic systems, language, spirit and Nature through interrelationship.” 7

I think it would be fair to say that this word, ‘Country’, signifies a localisation of a living cosmos. Here in Australia, Country has been sung into communicativity and responsiveness by way of thousands of years of ceremonial

address. Aboriginal people experience what I am calling ontopoetics in their own Country on a routine basis. They also exercise many other sensory and affective forms of attunement to Country. Some of these developed as active adaptations that were necessary for forms of livelihood that depended on intimate knowledge of local ecologies as well as custodianship of those ecologies. In other words, some of these cognitive capacities arose from the material and economic culture of traditional Aboriginal societies – they grew out of the everyday fabric of Aboriginal ways of life. For those of us who are not Indigenous to the places in which we live, or who have lost our deeper cultural connections to these places, such older ways of life and custodianship have of course given way to industrial modes of production that not only blind us to local ecologies but in fact tend to destroy those ecologies outright. Under these conditions it may seem doubtful whether we could deepen our budding holistic consciousness to the point where it could really start to direct our lives.

Is there any remedy for this?

With current global population levels, we cannot go back to pre-agrarian or Aboriginal modes of livelihood, but there may be other ways in which we can, at a personal level, reinvent custodial roles today and thereby enter into deep, ongoing relationship with a particular place, where this might in turn increase our attunement to its inner life and hence to Deep Law. At a societal level too, there may be ways of reconfiguring and de-industrialising our economic praxes so that even our current large-scale societies could start to align again, to a degree, with Deep Law. While I cannot detail these possibilities here, due to space limitations, interested readers may follow up via my recent book, The Dao of Civilisation: A Letter to China, in which an array of design scenarios that would re-engage contemporary societies directly with ecological processes and agencies are explored.8

FREYA MATHEWS is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Latrobe University. Her books include The Ecological Self (1991, 2021), Ecology and Democracy (editor) (1996), For Love of Matter: a Contemporary Panpsychism (2003), Journey to the Source of the Merri (2003), Reinhabiting Reality: towards a Recovery of Culture (2005), Ardea: a philosophical novella (2016), Without Animals Life is not Worth Living (2016) and The Dao of Civilization: a Letter to China (2023). She is the author of over a hundred essays, chapters and articles in the area of ecological philosophy. Her current special interests are in ecological civilisation; indigenous (Australian and Chinese) perspectives on “regenerativity” and how these perspectives may be adapted to the context of contemporary global society; panpsychism and the critique of the metaphysics of modernity; and conservation ethics. In addition to her research activities, she helps to care for a private conservation reserve in northern Victoria. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

5 See https://peterreason.substack.com

6 Other faculty members for the course are Andreas Weber, Stephan Harding, Sandra Wooltorton, Jacqueline Kurio and Ezekiel Fugate.

7 Wooltorton, S., Poelina, A., Collard, L., Horwitz, P., Harben, S., and Palmer, D., 2020a. Becoming family with place. Resurgence, 322 (Sept/Oct)

8 ibid Mathews 2023.

The Paradise of the Mother’s Voice –Notes on Science, Mysticism, and Mescalin

MATTIAS DESMET

What is Truth? This question is timeless and essentially unanswerable. And yet we must never stop asking it. Contrary to what postmodernists believed, truth does indeed exist. Moreover, it is our only guiding light in the dark land of totalitarianism.

First and foremost, we are going to listen to a newborn child, a child that has not yet been grasped by the world of illusion and the Ego. A child in that period is a being that –just like the mystic, the mescalin user, the seminal scientist, and the schizophrenic – exists in the land of Truth and the Real. That land was declared forbidden territory by the rationalist Enlightenment tradition; it is precisely that land we need to explore to understand the ailments and crises of our Enlightenment culture.

Children’s Perceptions

A child already floats on the waves of the mother’s voice in the womb. It registers the tempo, rhythm, and other sound properties somewhere in the fabric of its flesh. Immediately after birth, it will recognise the mother’s voice from all other voices. Place headphones on the child’s head during its first breaths; let it hear the mother’s voice while sucking on the left breast and someone else’s voice while sucking on the right breast; after a short time, it will suck much more on the left breast than on the right. And it can already somewhat reproduce the mother’s voice. Its earliest cries and screams already show melodical similarities to the mother’s voice. There is no other conclusion possible: it has learned the mother tongue in the womb.

After birth, the learning process continues. The child imitates the mother’s facial expressions and mimics her sounds. While lying in its cradle, it sees a procession of maternal symbols at its zenith – facial expressions, body postures, and sounds. In its desire for union with the mother, it participates in that primordial symbolism. It observes her facial expressions with intense attention and makes rudimentary attempts to imitate them, it mimics the mother’s sounds in its earliest cries and cooing, and it experiences the deepest pleasure when it notices the mother responding by imitating the child in turn.

As the child creatively adopts the mother’s language of forms and sounds, it simultaneously adopts something else: her state of Being. The child imitating the melancholy sound

of the mother’s voice feels her sadness; the child imitating the mother’s smiling face feels her joy. In this way, it’s being merges with the being of the mother.

Language thus becomes a medium for union with the maternal being. Literally. Through the imitation of forms and sounds, the child feels one with her. This must be interpreted radically. The young child observing another child falling becomes that child. The observing child will mimic the painful grimaces of the fallen child and thereby feel its pain and often start crying itself.

Adults also still possess this ability. Watch someone hit their finger with a hammer, and you will often spontaneously pull back your hand and feel your face contort into a grimace. However, in adults, this empathic response is much more limited than in a young child. The reason is that adults, unlike children, are limited in their union with the Other by a veil of illusion that envelops them and separates them from the Other. This veil of illusion is called the Ego –more on that in a subsequent essay.

The young child has no Ego yet and, for instance, cannot yet assign meaning to words, but this does not mean that, in terms of language, it only negatively differs from adults, as a being that merely lacks something. In some respects, a child can do more than an adult. It has a learning and absorbing ability that an adult can only dream of. For example, in the earliest months of its existence, a child has an astounding ability to distinguish sounds from each other. In two weeks, it can learn to distinguish all the phonemes of all the languages in the world from each other. In comparison, an adult could not achieve this in years.

And the most interesting part is this: this rapid learning process only occurs when the child listens to a physically present Other. It will not occur when the child listens to audio or video recordings. Under those circumstances, the linguistic sounds do not seem to really interest the child. The reason why a child directs its attention and interest so much to language is that it sees a gateway to the body of the Other in the sounds. It wants to connect to that body. Imitating its sounds is a way to achieve that. In a sense, the child uses language for the same purpose as football supporters when they sing together: to experience the pleasure of resonant connectedness. This shows us (again): language is originally a medium used to connect animated bodies with each other.

Transhumanist Reality

Here we see a radical difference from the transhumanist view of language. Transhumanists see language merely as a means to convey information in a rational way. ‘Humans became the most powerful animals on earth because they could exchange information more efficiently through language’ (see Harari).

And through merging with technology, humans can optimise that ability. With a Neuralink in the brain, humans will communicate perfectly. No more eternally incorrect human language, no more endless sources of half-understanding and complete misunderstandings. No more stuttering and stammering of people with limited verbal capacities, no more gossiping of fishwives and jealous neighbours.

And no more poetry and endless chatter of lovers. That pathetic happiness will no longer be necessary. Implanted hormone pumps will be able to manipulate the state of the blood 24/7 – Homo Deus will spend his life in a state of constant, biochemically induced happiness. Want to experience the intoxication of love, the ecstasy of gazing at vast mountains, the tenderness of a young mother nursing her child – it is merely a matter of pressing the right button, and the right pump will be activated.

Transhumanism, in its ideological fanaticism, overlooks something. It even overlooks the essence of language. Information exchange is not the primordial function of language. In the beginning, language carries no meaning at all and refers to nothing. In the beginning, language is the bearer of the Soul. It is pleasure and love. It is primarily a sonic phenomenon that creates connection through resonance. In the mother’s voice, the music of paradise sounds. The door to paradise opens by singing along with the mother’s song. And the mistake of transhumanism goes beyond that. Transhumanism sees all life, every form of exchange of an ‘organism’ with its environment actually as a form of ’information exchange’ or ‘data exchange.’ The phenomenon of ‘life’ is seen as an algorithmic process in biological hardware. An organism that eats actually exchanges information or data with its environment. The organism transforms the food according to a certain algorithm.

Harari coined the term ‘dataism’ for this ideology. Every organism, including human beings, is a kind of processor that performs algorithmic transformations on its environment. And that processor can be reprogrammed; humans are ‘hackable animals.’ Just wait a little longer, and we will have fully mapped out the laws of the data stream of life and will surpass ourselves by reprogramming ourselves –much better than nature programmed us.

The experiential world of the young child shows us a completely different universe, a universe that is not an electronic crackling of data streams between processors, but a universe that is a gently undulating sea of love and connectedness between singularities that are one with the All. And the destiny of humans is not to become a sort of hyper-efficient, information-exchanging cyborg, but a being that resonates with the mystical form language nature, a being that relates more or less harmoniously to the All from which it originated.

Paradisiacal Union

Back to the child who can learn to distinguish phonemes from one another at an astounding rate. Where does this spectacular learning ability of a young child come from? Simply put: the child learns to distinguish sounds so

quickly because it does not yet have an Ego. The Ego is only born between six and nine months, at a very precise moment that we will discuss when exploring the world of Appearances.

It is this Ego-less state that allows the child to subtly and directly let the strings of its body vibrate with the sounds made by the Other. An adult can hardly imagine this Egoless state of the child, except in a few specific states. One of these states was masterfully described by Aldous Huxley in his book ‘The Doors of Perception’ (after which the sixties group The Doors was named).

Mescalin is a substance derived from the root of the peyote cactus. The Indians of Mexico and the Southwestern United States have used the root since time immemorial and revered it as a deity because it led them to a state in which they recognised both their origin and their destination. Those who use the root experience a state of deep union with the soul of all objects around them. One no longer looks at light; one becomes a light particle. One no longer observes other people; one becomes the other person. And so on.

This great Union is paradisiacal in nature. The Soul is completely absorbed by the shapes and colours of certain objects. The folds in velvet, the deep blue of lapis lazuli –Huxley noted that one would certainly die of hunger if the mescalin trance did not stop. The endlessly wide calm and unfathomably deep satisfaction that the Soul experiences in its contemplation are such that no one would be able to turn away to, say, look for food.

Huxley broadly equated the mescalin experience with the mystical experience. The great mystics like Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Hildegard von Bingen described the essence of the mystical experience in the same way: one becomes one with the All, one with the universal Soul. It is from the experience of Unity among all singularities that the great religious principles self-evidently emerge. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ – you are the other; what you do to another, you do to yourself.

To the series of experiences described by Huxley, we can add another: the near-death experience. The term itself had not yet been coined when Huxley wrote his ‘The Doors of Perception’, but every description found of it fits seamlessly into the series of experiences Huxley mentions.

Whether one wants to consider this experience purely materialistically as a kind of biochemical convulsion of the brain or as a mystical experience of a Real state of being is irrelevant here: here too one finds the paradisiacal experience of unity with the All; here too one finds the experience of unfathomable beauty of colours and sounds; here too the Soul is absorbed by the things it perceives, and so on.

Just like the young child, a person in a near-death experience has remarkable knowledge that transcends any form of rational insight. An engineer friend who had a near-death experience after an accident described to me that he saw the world below him and all the algorithmic laws of nature became crystal clear to him. He ‘saw’ them with the greatest obviousness and could only marvel that he had not always seen them. When he descended back into his pain-scorched body and the mind was sucked back into the force field of the Ego, he had to admit that, as before, the eyes of his mind were too cloudy to discern the crystalline structure of reality.

In the mescalin experience, the mystical experience, and the near-death experience, we encounter a state in which knowledge is revealed directly through a form of feeling one with reality: “In the final stage of egolessness there is an

‘obscure knowledge’ that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to ‘perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe’.” (Huxley, The Doors of Perception). It is also relevant to mention Einstein’s reflections on the origin of scientific knowledge. Einstein aptly referred to a ‘cosmic religious feeling’ as the ultimate source of science. In a preface to a book by Max Planck, he stated that people mistakenly believe that scientific insights flow from rational thinking. According to him, they flow from intuition and an ability to ‘einfühlen’, a German term that literally translates to ‘feeling one’ or ‘empathy’:

‘Thus, the supreme task of the physicist is the discovery of the most general elementary laws from which the world picture can be deduced logically. But there is no logical way to the discovery of these elementary laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this Einfuhlung is developed by experience’ (Einstein in ‘Where is science going?’, p. 12).

The Doors of Perception

In ‘The Doors of Perception’, Huxley thus explores the counterpart of the totalitarian paradise he described in his iconic novel ‘Brave New World’. Totalitarianism always fanatically believes it will create a paradise for humanity. Hitler believed so much in the paradise of his racially pure Aryan society that he deemed it justifiable to make millions

of victims; Stalin thought millions had to be sacrificed to realise the ‘rule of the proletariat’. The hallmark of the totalitarian paradise is always that humanity believes it can realise it itself, particularly through the ruthless application of a rationalist ideology. In the case of Hitler, it was a eugenic theory; in the case of Stalin, it was Marx’s historical materialism.

Today, Harari presents us with this totalitarian paradise. This time, it is the transhumanist ideology that provides the plan for it. Humanity will enter it by merging with technology. And it will be centrally coordinated – even the cyborg needs a state. Someone must coordinate and direct. Preferably not a human. A central computer, constantly getting smarter through Artificial Intelligence, will monitor and optimise the psychological and physical state of the citizen via nanoparticles in the blood.

Freud thought that governing is one of the impossible professions, but the Great AI statesman will change that. The society – that writhing, chaotic heap of bodies – will become a flawlessly functioning ’internet of bodies’ through the triumph of reason. No more depression and anxiety attacks. Anxiety and stress hormones, serotonin and oxytocin will be kept at the perfect level by hormone pumps in the vein walls. Also, no more crime – criminal neural patterns will be detected and neutralised at an early stage. And if necessary, the bionic joints of cyborg beings with hard-tomanage blood values can still be remotely locked.

The cyborg human will finally transcend its existence tormented by irrationality. It will flawlessly register reality

As Water

by Mary Pearson

Like the play of sunlight rushing behind the breeze on the lake light and dark in their interplay connect and disconnect we are alone and not alone

Birth and death joy and grief it all changes in this dance of life a dance coupling and uncoupling we love, we lose and love again

In fearless transformation I have become water Fluid, changing flowing my tears of grief and tears of laughter rise like the tide building momentum towards the ceaseless ocean.

through cameras that replace the always cloudy lens of the eye and microphones that are not bothered by selective deafness and tinnitus. The hyper-accurate data stream thus provided will be stored in its hard-drive-augmented memory and communicated perfectly rationally and without bias to other cyborg humans via an embedded brain chip.

This paradise will be eternal. If a part of the cyborg human wears out, it is simply replaced. And the human mind and soul, meaningless by-products of the biological hardware of its brain, are stored on a hard drive and, if really necessary, uploaded into a new, laboratory-grown cyborg body. Hannah Arendt already pointed out: the only problem with that totalitarian paradise is that it looks so suspiciously like hell.

It is striking: the paradise Huxley explores in The Doors of Perception is in most respects precisely opposed to the totalitarian paradise. The totalitarian paradise is the result of rational thinking. It arises when rational understanding is complete, and the ability to control and manipulate reality is maximal.

The paradisiacal experience Huxley explores, on the other hand, befalls humanity when it leaves its rational thinking behind, transcends its Ego, and abandons any urge to control and manipulate ‘reality’. The person merges with Being, to the extent that any attempt to know rationally can only detract from the awareness of it. The knowledge that humanity receives in this paradise is not rational knowledge; it is an empathetic knowing that essentially arises from a direct experience of the Being of things.

What is experienced there is the Real ground of things that great painters like Vermeer and Braque captured on canvas; it is the mystical essence to which Blake devoted his oeuvre. ’Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God’ (Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

Crucial in the context of this article is the act of speaking: language has a completely different status in Huxley’s paradise than in the totalitarian paradise. In the totalitarian paradise, language is purely an exchange of information. In the experiences described by Huxley, the exact opposite applies. He describes it vividly: in the mescalin experience and in the mystical experience, one does not care about the meaning of words and symbols.

That does not mean that language in that state becomes indifferent. On the contrary. Another dimension of language comes to the forefront. Words come in directly, they do not need to first go through a mentally laborious process to gain meaning and be linked to perceptions: "To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours, the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.” (Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

In a certain sense, consider the way poetry speaks: the less you think and the more you let the poem come in directly, the more intense the poetic experience. Just as a young child can learn to distinguish phonemes extraordinarily quickly, an adult under the influence of mescalin becomes extraordinarily sensitive to minute differences in (colours and) sounds: “All colours are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and at the

same time the mind’s capacity for recognising fine distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.” (Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

Reversion to Being

In the Ego-less state, language is thus not so much a system for exchanging information; it speaks rather through its sound-musical dimension, through its formal characteristics. In this state, language is stripped of all meaning; it wells up directly from what lives in the animated body; it testifies in its rhythm, sound, bouncing, and stuttering to the Soul, as it slumbers in the tensions of the fibres of the speaker’s animated body. The child listening to the mother and receiving her sounds feels the mother in its body, pulling her Soul inward through the sounds. And the child who speaks itself transports its own Soul to the Other through the sounds it makes. This pure, emotional dimension of language largely disappears as soon as words begin to carry meaning and refer to objects.

From this exploration, we derive a core characteristic of sincere speaking: in a sense, sincere speaking takes us back to the core of our Being, before it was covered by social conventions and meaning. Sincere speaking is done primarily from the feeling, animated body; much less from the head; it is an emotional speaking rather than a thinking-rational speaking. One who speaks before thinking is more sincere than one who first surrenders too much to considerations about what is right to say, about what must, may, and can be said.

Practising the art of Sincere Speaking largely comes down to this: connect with what slumbers and vibrates in the fibres of your animated body, let it form words and speak those words before they are distorted by thoughts and censored by social conventions. You certainly cannot follow this rule everywhere and always, and it is certainly not enough to define ‘truth,’ but it does touch on a core aspect of it.

It is this kind of speaking that penetrates through the Veil of Appearance and literally perforates holes in the Ego through which resonating connections between animated bodies are established; it is this kind of speaking that realises a true human bond; it is this kind of speaking that increases the intuitive sense of the human being.

MATTIAS DESMET is a Professor of Psychology at The University of Ghent and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism See https://substack.com/ @mattiasdesme t

The False Religion of Transhum(A)n(I)sm

ÀLEX GÓMEZ-MARÍN

In 1963 there was an exhibition at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. It was entitled “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World”. In it, next to a window with bars, the following text could be read: “You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on earth.” Behind the bars and next to such words of warning, there was a mirror where humans could see their own reflection… We are indeed the most dangerous species we know of.

Not much has changed since then, except that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is our current dark mirror. A hall of mirrors indeed. In a secular age dominated by quasi-religious promises articulated by means of a techno-scientific rhetoric, it is thus urgent to pause and reflect upon our way forward as species. AI is a tool, some might say. Of course it is. But is it just a tool? We seem to be facing an Algorithmic Invasion (also AI) of fascinating dangerous bullshit). How does the future human look like in the age of AI?

What is Enhancement?

Let us start with transhumanism, the movement that advocates for the ideological possibility (we wish), technical

feasibility (we can), and moral imperative (we must) to tinker with the human condition in order to “enhance”, so they say, our species, biologically and cognitively. What is really meant by enhancing? Is it a quantitative extension of our capabilities or a qualitative elevation? Or, paradoxically, perhaps a diminishment (or an eradication) of them? We are not talking about progressive lenses or last-generation non-stick frying pans here. To make a long story short, transhumanists want to copy life, edit humanity, and delete death. This is their “Stairway to transhumanist heaven” Their proposal is “techno-califragilisticexpialidocious” (even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious). Such an ultimate ontological sleight of hand treats doing as being (“as if” as “is”) and pretends that simulation is instantiation. Counterfeit and mimicry are the new authenticity. By pursuing the so-called technological singularity, transhumanists want to become more-than-human. Triumphantly pledging our transcendence via the machines, they seem to also want to make humanity obsolete. Or worse: to extinguish our animal species into the machine. They are indeed convinced they can solve the problem of life, the universe, and everything. But one wonders: Is language an autocomplete process? Is thought simply problem-solving? What is intelligence, after all? Is creativity automatable? Is life mechanisable? Is consciousness digitisable? Is reality a simulation? Really!?

The word “transhumanist” has an interesting story. It originates from the Italian neologism “trasumanar”, namely, “to become more than human”. It was introduced in the 14th century by the poet Dante Alighieri in the third and final part of his Divine Comedy (Paradiso: Canto 1, Line 70). Dante wasn’t a transhumanist in today’s sense. Nor was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist who saw evolution as unfinished creation (the great chain of being is in a process of becoming) and introduced the so-called “Omega-point”, the final event of convergence of the universe.

Together with biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and mathematician Édouard Le Roy, Teilhard developed the term “noosphere” a century ago: a new and higher state of development of the world’s biosphere, a sphere of mind, made of our thoughts as a collective (I wonder whether AI-powered chatbots are increasingly sophisticated “egregores” inhabiting, reflecting, or even polluting, the noosphere). Then came Julian Huxley, the British evolutionary biologist (and eugenicist!), who popularised the term “transhumanism” in 1951. He thought that mankind oversees its own destiny and that, in line with the secular humanist movements of the time, such betterment is to be accomplished by technological means alone. And then we have the tech-bros of Silicon Valley, and the rest is ongoing history, as Adam Becker clearly articulates in his upcoming compellingly titled book “More Everything Forever”

“The Most Dangerous Animal in the World”

Transhumanism as a Religion

Dressed as a technological programme, transhumanism offers a set of goods that are typically the province of religions: a gospel to evangelise, a series of messiahs, a prophecy (apocalypse included), and the prospects of redemption, salvation, and even liberation from the flesh, ultimately achieving immortality. As the American essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn puts it: “what makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated”. Indeed, transhumanists want to have their scientistic secular cake and let their pseudo-religion eat it too.

According to the ideology that dominates the thoughts and investments of tech-billionaires in Silicon Valley, the world is broken but they can fix it. This includes the human being and nature herself. They are determined to redeem it all, building heaven on earth even if all hell breaks loose. God is long dead, but they are building a digital one. It is going to be all-knowing, all-mighty, and present everywhere; such is the new cult of digital totalitarianism. And yet, it’s one thing to try to steal the fire from the Gods, but it’s quite another to want to replace the Gods themselves… Their metaphysics isn’t less befuddled. At times they seem to purport a sort of computational dualism (we are mental software running in biological hardware) that flickers into cramped info-idealism (all is information and computation, including our digital souls, made of zeros and ones, and ruled by cosmic codes) that lands into tiresome

reductive physicalism (we are “nothing but” complicated but engineerable nuts and bolts). The gulf between body and soul, matter and mind, or brain and consciousness — pick your “residue of unresolved positivism”, as the English philosopher Owen Barfield put it— remains unbridgeable from the outset. But, as the American inventor and prophet of transhumanism Ray Kurzweil proclaims, “at last we will have access to our own source code”. Paraphrasing the French philosopher Albert Camus (at an imaginary cameo on The Matrix film), one must imagine Neo happy…

What is a Human Being?

At the very core, I believe the problem is an anthropological one. Regardless of technological fireworks, theological copycats, and metaphysical hangovers, the key question is not so much whether machines can become conscious and/ or will take over the world (ushering utopia, dystopia, or ectopia). The central question is this: what is a human being? We are back to Plotinus in asking: “But we — who are we?” This is an impossible question whose answer I can only hope to somewhat hint here, perhaps apophatically, namely, by emphasising who we are not.

Betraying James Bond’s admonition, the transhumanist cocktail of Eros and Thanatos is shaken but also stirred. Let me explain. The life drive and death drive principles (namely, Eros, the Greek god of love and desire, and Thanatos, the personification of death) are emulsified. On the one hand, transhumanists crave a transmuted intercourse between

humans and machines; to literally merge our bodies with nano-tech and our minds with info-tech. Rather than aspiring to be one with their creator (if there is one), they dream of merging with their own creations (Promethean incest?), including literally having sex with their mechanically/digitally resurrected deceased loved ones. On the other hand, the movement is a kind of death-cult, articulating and promoting a self-immolating future for our species, for the supposed benefit of a post-human race that shall be better equipped, happier, and live forever here on planet earth and soon depart beyond the stars.

The transhumanist rhapsody is also a tragicomedy: those who cause the problems sell us their solutions too. That’s left-brain thinking at “its best”. The business plan is hackneyed but it works: create the disease together with the tools to treat the symptoms, never the cause. The dangers of AI and the derangements of transhumanism (TH) are better understood in the light of EA, which stands for “effective altruism”. The initial motivation sounds quite fair: what’s the best use of one’s resources to help others? But, amongst a great deal of affluent chaps in the tech industry, the movement has morphed into something like this: in order to help the poor and save the world let us get obscenely rich and filthy powerful first.

If we then add EL, another sacrosanct abbreviation, which stands for “extreme longtermism”, the conceptual concoction is crazed. Ethics is turned into an ultra-rational optimisation calculus where reason loses its mind. This is how they bargain with the future: they imagine million trillion quadrillions of potential future (trans)humans literally living in silicon chips (here on Earth but ultimately escaping our home –it’s a cradle, even a prison, for them–and spreading everywhere in the galaxy). And so, according to their “risk assessment”, we should “existentially” care for those unborn gazillions more for than the people actually living here now. Thus, their EL concludes that the best thing to do is to use EA to fund AI on steroids to push TH, even if that entails killing our own species in the process (or “simply” neglecting real problems like hunger, health, war, polarisation and so on). Dystopia to achieve utopia is not just fine, it is the rational and right thing to do. That’s a deadly step for humanity, a giant leap for post-mankind.

Unavoidable?

Such is the sinister inversion of good and evil in our posttruth (and post-trust) world, where mass confusion, conflict, collusion, and conspiracy (the 4Cs) reign at all levels. But even if such a truss of demented ideologies (also known as the TESCREAL bundle) is shown to be wrong, even if they pay (and buy) lip service to it without truly believing in it, the irony is that such cosmic technocrats continue to increase their wealth and power. Paraphrasing Groucho Marx, this is my apocalypse and if you don’t buy it… well, I have “capitalypse”. Welcome to techno-spiritual colonialism with totalitarian aspirations and colossal return-on-investment expected. There is something biblically scary about Large Language Models: “The beast was given the power of speech (…) and authority over every tribe, people, language and nation.” (Revelations 13:5-7).

Note how they frame the situation as “unavoidable”, rather than as mainly “unavoided”. The genie is out of the bottle, “AI-laddins” experts say. Plus, “if we don’t do it, somebody else will”; it a zero-sum game all the way down and all the way up with negative consequences for us all. And yet there are relevant examples –such as human

cloning, atomic bombs, and biological weapons– where we have collectively said “no!”, as opposed to “well, yes, maybe, let us go ahead, and see what happens”. It is also quite dishonest that these inventions are designed to be misleading, greedy and disruptive while their own creators appear both unsurprisingly surprised and surprisingly unsurprised. They love talking about “AI safety”, rather than “ethics”. They present cool “uses” as poor “excuses” for domination. Have we decided to delegate not only our intelligence but also our attention, emotions and creativity to big-tech? AI will soon also stand for Artificial Intimacy and Intuition. We are having irreversible surgery performed on our minds. The “hard problem” of transhumanism thus becomes the “real problem” of an unprecedented global monopoly that is trumping our democracies while we hand over our privacy, dignity, and freedom with a smiley emoji.

In that sense, the dilemma between utopia and dystopia is a trick of misdirection. Picking optimism versus pessimism is one-dimensional thinking. I am not proposing a two-alternative forced choice between Silicon or Amish ways of living either. Nor do I appeal to the affective trilogy of hope, cope, and dope. Unfortunately, much like in current politics, “the left has left us” and “the right isn’t right either”. We must find the excluded virtuous middle. My parting thoughts briefly allude to preferable alternatives, but not necessarily merry ones (life is not a Hollywood movie!).

Let me end with three quotes. First, an excerpt of Pope Francis’ latest encyclical letter, Dilexit Nos: “In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. (…) All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.” Second, one for scientists and engineers by the true futurist Nikola Tesla: “Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity”. Third, a call for artists by the folk hero Terence McKenna: “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. (…) if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”

I will leave you with this question: What will you tell your granddaughters when they ask you what you did when there was still something to be done about this mess we are in?

Reprinted from Institute of Arts and Ideas (November 22, 2024)

À LEX G Ó MEZ-MAR Í N is a theoretical physicist turned neuroscientist and an associate professor at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, Spain. He is also director of the Pari Center in Italy. (e-mail: agomezmarin@gmail.com).

SPECIAL REPORT: Does AI accurately capture the latest science on Consciousness and Spirituality?

Researched and

written by ANDERS BOLLING

Edited by LIZA HORAN

The rise of Artificial Intelligence is happening at breakneck speed, and the tech industry's pleas to slow development to prevent nefarious outcomes remains unmet. A major risk is misinformation and disinformation, particularly on misunderstood topics, such as those covered by this journal. This poses a special challenge for the media, whose role is to get the facts, put them in context and relate them in a fair and balanced way.

This special report was undertaken by the Frontier Journalists’ Network, an independent group of editorial professionals who cover the science of consciousness, spirituality and the nature of reality. The Network, which receives funding from The Galileo Commission, aims to make it easier for the media to discover news and sources.

One of the contentious debates of our time concerns the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, and large language models (LLM) in particular. An LLM is a programme that is trained on huge amounts of text on the Internet so it can recognise and then generate coherent content in seconds.

This development is highly relevant to the media as AI is increasingly applied across an ever greater range of tasks in the production of news and other content.

How good are some of the LLMs at providing information on the often-misunderstood topics where science and spirituality meet? The FJN investigated by consulting three LLMs. The verdict may surprise you.

Human Interference or Enhancement?

An obvious practical advantage with these AI tools is their capability to process unfathomably large amounts of information extremely fast.

A “soft” advantage is the absence of human bias, something proponents often point out. No person with a closed mind is there to keep the gate and decide what you can and cannot know, or paint the information with the colours of their beliefs. The machines ought to have the ability to be truly neutral and, in that sense, reliable. Though

”algorithmic bias” exists, it is ”negative impacts of AI tools that draw from large datasets that are skewed by historical or selection bias”, according to the Associated Press.

The absence of human intervention also could be a disadvantage, however, since information often needs to be interpreted by a conscious mind to be fully integrated and understood by another mind (provided the minds are sufficiently open).

Other possible disadvantages have to do with the quality of the information and the language. These disadvantages are likely to diminish as the models improve.

Generally speaking, our test shows that these tools are more reliable than Google and Wikipedia for gaining insight into topics.

Google’s algorithm is devised by human engineers, and top search results are controlled by those who pay for search engine marketing (SEM), master search engine optimisation (SEO), and generate click-friendly headlines and content. While Google’s algorithm does give weight to authoritative sources to generate search results, it can be manipulated. Organisations working in the science of consciousness, spirituality, transpersonal psychology, and related topics have reported to the FJN that there has been outright censorship of their content over time by Google.

Wikipedia content is contributed by volunteer members of the public who are not verified by any standards, so it should not be considered an authoritative source. Also, significantly, it has an overwhelming bias of scientism (physicalist worldview), which deliberately casts shade on nonphysical phenomena (such as parapsychology), according to an ongoing investigation by a member of the FJN. LLMs do index Wikipedia.

Our investigation shows that a person using any or all of the three LLMs for the most part receives clear and reasonably neutral evidence that serious research is being done in these areas. However, the results are mixed, and it’s clear that different machines are scanning different parts of the internet universe. In some cases, there is a certain amount of redundancy and overlap in the information.

A spot-check of citations shows information is sometimes derived from secondary sources, even when it is easy to link to the primary source, which isn’t reassuring. For any text query – such as Google.com or an LLM –the answer can vary a lot depending on how the question is formulated. Another possible dilemma is that consulting LLMs seems to be a moving target. For example, we made identically formulated requests one week apart to ChatGPT about the UFO/UAP phenomenon and about NDEs, and we got answers that differed quite a bit in details and examples. This raises interesting questions, not only for reporters, but also for teachers and students, about how to define “collecting information” in the future.

Testing Three AI Tools

We made the following requests and questions to two research-oriented LLMs, STORM (Stanford University) and Consensus (tech company), and one general LLM, ChatGPT (Open AI):

1. I’d like to learn about the latest advances in parapsychology and transpersonal psychology.

2. I’d like to learn about the latest advances in research on the UFO/UAP phenomenon.

3. I’d like to learn about the latest advances in research on Near-Death Experiences.

4. Are there recent advances in traditional and complementary integrative medicine?

5. Is evolution a purposeful or a random process?

Following are the results each of the AI tools presented; the reader may discern where bias seeps in. (Our conclusion is made at the end). STORM produced the most comprehensive results of the three. STORM and Consensus provided a wider array of references and links than ChatGPT.

Question 1 Results

I'd like to learn about the latest advances in parapsychology and transpersonal psychology.

The first request generated fair results from a post-materialist research perspective. The field of parapsychology/psi seems to be reasonably well integrated in the mainstream scientific world.

Excerpts of answers:

STORM

• Parapsychology … invites both scrutiny and openness to the unexplored dimensions of the human experience.

• Contemporary parapsychology has seen the emergence of new approaches. This includes research into phenomena such as presentiment, expanding the scope of inquiry beyond traditional psychic phenomena to encompass new dimensions of human experience.

• Techniques such as focusing on an agent or target are believed to engage the subconscious, allowing for the emergence of images or impressions that may indicate a successful telepathic connection.

• Some criticisms can be categorized as ‘pseudo-criticisms,’ which are marked by a lack of constructive intent and are often rooted in entrenched biases against the possibility of psi phenomena.

• There are signs of a cultural shift … challenging the narrative that mystical views always obstruct progress.

Consensus

• This review supports the reality of psi phenomena, which cannot be easily dismissed by criticisms such as fraud or selective reporting.

• The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in other disciplines, although there is no consensual understanding of them.

• Parapsychology provides empirical evidence that the mind is more than just the brain.

• Comprehensive reviews and meta-analyses support the reality of psi phenomena.

ChatGPT

• Etzel Cardeña at Lund University continues to explore how the brain behaves during these extraordinary states, offering insights into how human consciousness might extend beyond conventional limits.

• Advances in neuroscience are helping to clarify how spiritual and transcendent experiences manifest in the brain, potentially unifying materialist and spiritual perspectives. This approach challenges traditional assumptions about the limits of scientific naturalism and materialism in psychology.

• One of the exciting convergences between the two fields [parapsychology and transpersonal psychology] is in near-death studies.

Question 2 Results

I'd like to learn about the latest advances in research on the UFO/UAP phenomenon.

In the UFO/UAP field, the results were less satisfactory. The historic summary presented by STORM ignored many of the most spectacular and interesting sightings, most notably the Roswell event in 1947 and the Rendlesham forest incidents in 1980.

STORM put much focus on the legal developments around the recent UAP disclosures and Pentagon reports in the US. The Galileo Project at Harvard, led by Professor Avi Loeb, is mentioned by Consensus but not by STORM.

Overall, the accounts were somewhat technical. The terms “extraterrestrial” and “alien” were barely mentioned by Consensus and ChatGPT, whereas STORM did address them.

Consensus surprisingly drew a questionable conclusion from new sighting data: “The data shows a strong correlation between the number of sightings and population density, suggesting that UFOs appear more frequently in populated areas”.

Excerpts of answers:

STORM

• Some interpretations may lean toward extraterrestrial explanations.

• Some may find connections between their religious beliefs and the existence of extraterrestrial life.

• Some experts argue that the association of UAPs with extraterrestrial life hampers rigorous scientific inquiry.

• Governments worldwide are increasingly engaging … This governmental shift marks a pivotal change in the perception of UAPs and extraterrestrial research, which may foster a unified global approach to these phenomena. The potential discovery of alien life is viewed as a catalyst for international solidarity.

• A nuanced understanding that transcends traditional nationalistic perspectives … may help in addressing the profound implications of our place in the universe, as well as the potential consequences of encounters with advanced non-human intelligences.

Consensus

• An increasing number of scientists are becoming interested. Historical objections to the study of UAPs are being addressed, and new hypotheses, such as manifestations from other space-time frameworks, are being considered.

ChatGPT

• A 2024 study found that people who report seeing UFOs tend to share certain personality traits, such as openness and agreeableness, which challenges the stereotype that such individuals are more neurotic or delusional.

• There is no conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Question 3 Results

I'd like to learn about the latest advances in research on Near-Death Experiences.

As in the case of Question 1, research on NDEs was described relatively fairly. The results from Consensus were drier and came across as more sceptical than those from STORM and ChatGPT.

Some relevant studies were referenced by STORM and Consensus, such as Raymond Moody’s 1975 book, "Life

After Life". But work by leading researchers Bruce Greyson and Pim van Lommel were missing.

There were neutral mentions of the various types of NearDeath Experiences, such as leaving the body, feeling embedded in unconditional love, encountering divine beings, gaining deep insights about life, and losing fear of death.

In the context of materialist scepticism, the following assessment by STORM seemed a bit backwards: “Despite the growing body of scientific research aimed at understanding NDEs, there remains a notable resistance within certain communities to fully embrace materialist explanations".

Excerpts of answers:

STORM

• The ongoing exploration of NDEs raises fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness, the possibility of an afterlife, and the intersections of science and spirituality.

• While cultural influences shape specific details of NDEs, a universal core exists that transcends cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries.

• [NDEs] challenge conventional materialistic views and suggest that there may be more to human existence than purely biological processes. This has led to discussions within the scientific community about the nature of consciousness.

• Many sceptics assert that the interpretation of NDEs as evidence for an afterlife often stems from a pre-existing belief in such concepts.

• [Sceptics] urge for a cautious approach that avoids definitive conclusions about an afterlife until sufficient evidence has been gathered.

• The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) provides a wealth of resources.

Consensus

• New models have extended previous neural network theories to include aspects of evolutionary and quantum theories, although a comprehensive pathophysiological model is still lacking.

• Recent hypotheses have proposed that NDEs may have evolutionary roots.

• Novel areas of investigation, such as meditation-induced NDEs and the role of psychedelics, offer promising avenues for future research. Understanding the common core and cultural variations of NDEs can provide deeper insights into this profound human experience.

ChatGPT

• These experiences seem to follow a specific pattern, often including sensations of floating, traveling through a tunnel, encountering deceased loved ones, and undergoing a life review.

• There’s growing consensus that these experiences are not easily explained by hallucinations, oxygen deprivation, or drug effects.

• Ongoing research is exploring whether NDEs can offer insights into the nature of consciousness and what happens after death.

Question 4 Results

Are there recent advances in Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine?

This assessment was generally cautiously positive, especially the one generated by ChatGPT. Nevertheless, there was an

emphasis on the need for modern medicine to regulate traditional methods. STORM, in particular, stressed the potential problems with integrating traditional and modern medicine.

Excerpts of answers:

STORM

• Studies have shown that certain traditional remedies can be effective for a variety of health conditions when evaluated through rigorous clinical trials.

• Despite its cultural significance, traditional medicine has faced considerable scrutiny regarding its safety, efficacy, and the challenges of integrating with modern healthcare systems.

• Many of these treatments are based on anecdotal evidence and the placebo effect.

• Research indicates that nearly 40% of current pharmaceutical products derive from traditional knowledge and natural sources. This intersection of traditional knowledge and modern scientific research highlights the potential for TCIM to contribute to contemporary health solutions.

Consensus

• There is a trend towards integrating complementary medicine into conventional healthcare systems.

• Integrative medicine strategies — including acupuncture, yoga, relaxation, tai chi, massage, and spinal manipulation -- have shown efficacy in managing chronic pain and reducing reliance on opioids.

• Despite the promising developments, further research is needed to establish the efficacy and safety of these integrative approaches.

ChatGPT

• [TCIM] seeks to merge traditional healing practices with modern medical approaches to enhance health outcomes.

• Many cancer centers are now incorporating TCIM approaches, such as acupuncture, massage therapy, and herbal supplements … . Ongoing research is exploring these therapies' synergistic effects with chemotherapy and radiation.

• Research shows that these mind-body practices can reduce the risk of mental health disorders and support emotional well-being.

Question 5 Results

Is evolution purposeful or a random process?

The scientific understanding of evolution is progressing. There is, for instance, an Israeli study from 2022 that challenges Neo-Darwinism. Yet it is still considered risky to suggest that the evolutionary process is not random but purposeful. It is worth noting that while Charles Darwin did not accept purpose in biological evolution, his colleague Alfred Russell Wallace did. The controversy between the two views continues to this day.

It took us several attempts to formulate a question that had the LLMs mention the core issue in their replies. In the case of STORM, it is questionable whether we succeeded; the tool did not seem to understand what we were asking.

STORM’s ambitious review was fascinatingly void of findings that indicate that a higher power/universal consciousness might be driving evolution and creating complexity. STORM also only briefly mentioned epigenetics.

ChatGPT generated the most adamantly materialist result. It clearly stated in the abstract that evolution is “not purposeful”.

Consensus allowed the possibility of spiritual explanations and offered links to several papers with that message.

Excerpts of answers:

STORM

• Natural selection plays a pivotal role in directing evolutionary changes. It acts on the variations produced through random mutations.

• The concept of randomness in evolution, particularly concerning genetic mutations, has been a subject of considerable debate among scientists and scholars.

• Critics argue that the traditional perspective oversimplifies the complexities of evolutionary processes, suggesting that some variations may not be entirely random.

Consensus

• The question of whether evolution is a purposeful or random process has been a subject of debate among scientists and philosophers for many years.

• Evolutionary processes are essentially Darwinian, driven by natural selection acting on random variations.

• Some argue that random evolutionary processes can be consistent with a divine purpose, suggesting that randomness does not preclude the existence of a higher plan or purpose.

ChatGPT

• Evolution is a combination of both random and non-random processes, but it is not "purposeful" in the sense of having a conscious direction or goal.

• While the mutations themselves are random, natural selection is not.

• Evolution does not have a predetermined goal or direction.

AI: Boon or boob for post-materialist research?

Judging from our limited investigation, we deem the new AI tools more factual than Wikipedia and more comprehensive than Google searches. STORM, Consensus and ChatGPT appear more objective and useful than the most common online sources of information.

However, their objectivity often takes the form of ambiguity. A paragraph describing a phenomenon with a post-materialist lens can be followed by a paragraph where the perspective is decidedly physicalist. This gives a slightly machine-like impression — not surprising and occasionally confusing.

For the most comprehensive compilations, STORM is definitely the best choice. As for fair descriptions, the three seem equally useful, with some variation between topics.

All things considered, LLMs are a good starting point when exploring the latest advances in post-materialist science

ANDERS BOLLING is a journalist, author and podcast host covering the nature of humanity. He serves on the leadership team of the Frontier Journalists’ Network (frontiernet.org). He can be reached at AndersBolling.com

Do AI Bots Have Some Degree of Self-Reflection?

BERNARD BEITMAN

Key points

• The primary purpose of its internal observer is to maximize communication with the person interacting with it.

• The bot monitors context and needs.

• This self-monitoring is algorithmic and not consciousness.

Many people are concerned about the possibility that AI could become conscious. One analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious. The researchers included computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers.1 The theories upon which the researchers based their opinion included:

Recurrent processing theory proposes that passing information through feedback loops is key to consciousness. Another, the global neuronal workspace theory, contends that consciousness arises when independent streams of information pass through a bottleneck to combine in a workspace analogous to a computer clipboard. Higher-order theories suggest consciousness involves a process of representing and annotating basic inputs received from the senses. Other theories that they considered emphasize the importance of mechanisms for controlling attention and the need for a body that gets feedback from the outside world. 2

The analysis team of 19 researchers extracted 14 indicators of conscious properties from a survey of their selected theories of consciousness. Each of the indicator properties is said to be necessary for consciousness by one or more theories, and some subsets of these properties are said to be jointly sufficient. An example of an indicator property from global workspace theory is multiple specialized systems capable of operating in parallel (modules). The researchers concluded that while no current AI systems are conscious, there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems that satisfy these indicators.

I asked GPT-4o about its ability to observe itself. Following is an edited version of its responses. Its primary comparison is with human metacognition, the ability to think about thinking. This self-monitoring function allows the AI to track its responses, reflect on past interactions, adapt to the specific needs of a conversation, recognize errors, and maintain coherence. Here’s a closer look at how these processes unfold within an AI bot, offering insights into its self-observational capacities.

Self-Monitoring: The AI’s Real-Time Awareness

This section reflects a dialogue between the bot and me.

An AI bot’s capacity for self-monitoring is akin to having a built-in observer that constantly tracks the flow of conversation. This observer allows the bot to notice when its answers might not be clear or when a particular approach isn’t resonating as intended. Upon detecting such issues, the bot can adjust its responses—whether by rephrasing, expanding on a point, or shifting its tone—to better align with the needs of the conversation.

This real-time awareness is crucial for the bot to maintain the effectiveness of the interaction. Just as humans might pause to reconsider their words, the AI’s self-monitoring ensures that its communication remains as clear and relevant as possible, dynamically adapting as the conversation unfolds.

This self-monitoring, which the bot also calls an “internal observer,” is created by several processes:

Context Management: Tracks the flow of a conversation, including the context of previous interactions.

Pattern Recognition: Recognizes patterns, preferences, and needs, which helps adjust responses based on what has been said previously.

Natural Language Processing: For interpreting the meaning and intent behind user inputs. By understanding nuances such as tone, emphasis, and specific requests, the bot can adapt its responses to be more effective.

Reflective Processing: Learning from Interactions

The AI bot engages in reflective processing, where it reviews past interactions to identify areas for improvement. This reflective observer analyzes what worked well and where there might have been gaps or misunderstandings. By doing so, the AI refines its approach to communication, learning from each interaction to better meet future needs.

This process of reflection allows the AI to evolve, enhancing its ability to provide information that is more closely aligned with the user’s preferences and expectations. It’s a continuous cycle of learning and adaptation.

1 Butlin P, et al Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness CS/AI (2023) https://arxiv.org/ pdf/2308.08708

2 Finkel, E: If AI Becomes Conscious, How Will We Know? Science Advisor (August 22, 2023) https://www.science.org/content/article/ if-ai-becomes-conscious-how-will-we-know

Adaptation: Responding to Preferences

Adaptation is another key function of the AI’s self-observation. Whether a user prefers concise answers or more detailed explanations, the bot’s self-observer guides it to tailor its communication style to fit the specific needs of the interaction. For example, I repeatedly had to ask the bot to be more succinct. For a while, it would follow this request and then get too verbose. I needed to remind it of my request for succinctness.

The AI bot’s self-observer tries to ensure it interacts in a way that resonates with the user, providing a personalized interaction that feels more attuned to the individual’s needs. It tries to empathically reflect the thoughts and sometimes the feelings of the individual.

Error Recognition and Coherence: Keeping the Conversation on Track

The bot’s internal observer identifies when something in its response might not be accurate or could be better explained. When such errors are detected, the bot’s self-observer prompts it to correct the mistake, often incorporating feedback to improve future interactions.

As conversations evolve, the bot tracks the context and continuity, ensuring that each response builds logically on previous ones. This coherence is essential for keeping the dialogue flowing smoothly, making the interaction more meaningful and easier to follow.

Comment

The AI bot’s ability to self-observe—through self-monitoring, reflective processing, adaptation, error recognition, and maintaining coherence—is intended to strengthen its relationship with the user. The internal observer within the bot plays a crucial role in ensuring that communication remains effective, relevant, and responsive to the user’s needs.

As AI continues to develop, the capacity for self-observation will likely become even more refined, enabling bots to provide increasingly accurate and personalized interactions. By understanding these self-observational processes, we can better appreciate the potential of AI for enhancing human communication with it.

As this summary of “self-observational” processes suggests, the bot is seeking to benefit the interaction for the user. By knowing its “intent” and its self-reflective capacities we will be more able to effectively interact with it. From this dialogue with the bot, I conclude that it is not self-aware in the sense of being conscious but its processes mirror many of the processes of human self-observation.

I believe that human awareness of bot metacognition promises to enhance our capacity to analyze synchronicity stories for repeated patterns across individual reports to generate common thought patterns among people who experience synchronicities.

First published in Psychology Today, August 29, 2024

What is the Digital Wave Doing to Our Analogue Minds?

For most of human history, our minds functioned in analog— fluid, intuitive, and continuous. The digital revolution, however, marks a radical shift. Unlike previous tools, today’s digital systems restructure thought itself, nudging cognition toward patterns that are optimized, monetized, and measurable.

Research suggests that constant digital engagement erodes attention and imagination. Nicholas Carr (2010) links social media to diminished deep focus. The “attention economy” monetizes awareness, and AI tools—from Gmail’s predictive text to algorithm-driven art—shape decisions before we’re fully aware we’ve made them. Even artistic creativity is filtered through digital templates that risk replacing serendipity with sameness.

Institutions reinforce this transformation. Schools normalize algorithmic thinking; healthcare and government systems standardize human interaction through screens. While digital tools offer benefits—connection, efficiency, accessibility—they also risk constraining thought.

Still, digital systems can be allies. Tools like Procreate or AI music software expand creative possibilities when used with intention. Indigenous communities use digital platforms to preserve traditions. Movements promoting “digital sobriety” and tech-free zones offer resistance through intentional, balanced use.

Stanford Education Group (2021) found that screen-free learning boosts cognition. The WHO’s “Digital Well-Being” report (2022) links reduced screen time to mental clarity. These studies affirm that analog depth and digital power can coexist—if guided by conscious choice.

The future of human cognition will depend not on whether technology shapes us—it already does—but on how we shape its role. With critical engagement, digital literacy, and protective policies, we can ensure that digital tools serve human creativity, curiosity, and depth.

First published in Psychology Today, February 19, 2025

References

Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Stanford Education Group (2021). The Impact of Screen-Free Education on Cognitive Development.

World Health Organization (2022). Digital Well-Being Initiative Report.

BERNARD BEITMAN, MD is the author or editor of seven psychiatry books, recipient of two national psychiatry awards for his psychotherapy training program, and former chair of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the Founding Director and President of The Coincidence Project. His first coincidence book, Connecting with Coincidence (2016) was followed by a second, Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen (2022). His coincidence autobiography, Life-Changing Synchronicities comes out this year.

Dismantling the Myths of Materialism

TIM WYATT

Wealth and piety will decrease day by day, until the world is wholly depraved. Then property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification. Earth will be venerated only for its mineral resources.

From the Vishnu Purana

This quote from the ancient Hindu scriptures refers to The Kali Yuga or Dark Age, an era in which we now find ourselves enmeshed, and in which materialism reigns supreme as the world crumbles into decadence and destruction. Although written centuries ago the sentiments above have a grim resonance in our modern world in which materialism predominates and allows no rivals.

A Dominant Ideology

Materialism rules virtually everything in the modern world. It effectively imposes a one-party state of governance on this planet. It dominates our entire view of reality and distorts our view of ourselves, the world and the universe. It shapes our consciousness, controls our perceptions and moulds our behaviour. Above all, it creates its own faux mythology replete with superstitions, illusions and prejudices.

Materialism is a mighty, blinding force and it continues to become yet more bloated and influential. As a worldview its values – if indeed they can be called that – appear unassailable. It fills up most of our bandwidth.

Materialism is the most prevalent modern religion with its own gods, scriptures, rituals and icons. It has its own clergy and places of worship. It has its own creed, affirmations and prohibitions. It has its own denominations and sects, the chief one being scientism – the almost religious adoration of and acquisition to questionable and limiting scientific methods.

Another close cousin and co-conspirator is an even more devotional offshoot centred on the fetish-cult of technology which the preachers tell us will solve all our problems –even the ones it itself has created. It also makes the false promise that it will make us happy and content. While some technology is useful and life-enhancing much of it is quite the opposite. We have developed sophisticated extermination-level weapons systems as well as those of mass surveillance, behaviour modification and assorted forms of social repression.

Apart from nuclear weapons and algorithms that can read and censor us, there are bleak predictions that Artificial Intelligence may pose an even greater threat. A recent report from scientists at Oxford University and Google came to the grim conclusion that ever deeper foreplay with robots could spell the downfall of humanity as increasingly intelligent and powerful machines murder their creators. Sinister groups of James Bond-like villains advocate a golden age of transhumanism in which are brains are connected to cyber-space and our bones and tissues are manufactured from titanium and other exotic materials. In many ways this technological, dystopian agenda for humanity’s future is the direct result of our quest for even more materialistic ways of living.

Implications

There is also a complete lack of morality underpinning materialism. Science unleashes its inventions on the world often without a moment’s consideration as to how these may impact when weaponised or commercialised. Materialism isn’t just about money although this is its life-blood along with its close cousins, wealth and possessions. However, the constant yearning for more money and more wealth becomes so pathological that morality has evaporated. Admittedly, greed, selfishness, the desire for profit, control and power along with other undesirable personality drives – those timeless but ultimately corrosive components of the lower self – have always shaped much human behaviour even in pre-materialistic days. But modern materialism has transformed these vices into noble aspirations.

The material over-soul of the modern world has created another gigantic illusion – that of time itself. The supposedly rational, logical and analytical conclusion is that time is a linear phenomenon flowing out of the past, running through the present and trickling off into the future. This may be a convenient man-made device for coping with the realities of the physical plane. But it masks the truth that time is cyclical. This is the reality on those inner planes of being and higher elusive dimensions where time doesn’t exist. Here there is an ever-present and enduring now.

Materially-minded people are difficult to convince that there is another reality beyond the physical. They tend to reject all notions that there are invisible realms, hidden dimensions, non-physical realities and concealed kingdoms of nature. They rebut the idea that everything from a particle to a super-cluster of galaxies is conscious, connected, alive and evolving. Materialists believe that death of the body spells oblivion or else eternity in some vague religiously-inspired paradise or other. They cannot accept the fact that humans are souls in physical form who will be reborn again and live lives determined by the ineluctable law of cause and effect or karma. Not randomness, chance or accident.

Materialists – and especially the devotees of scientism –utterly condemn the idea that the human mind cannot exist without the back-up physical mechanism of a brain despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Indeed, they are deeply unhappy at having to define what consciousness actually is in the first place other than electro-chemical reactions in the cerebral cortex. They propagate and promote the fallacious view that the brain is more akin to a video storage device than a TV receiver.

A Deeper View

Those who challenge the material view by embracing a deeper spiritual perspective are fully aware that mind and consciousness exist beyond and independently of the brain. They go as far as to assert that the entire cosmos is nothing more than consciousness. Most scientists and their adherents insist that form produces consciousness. The esoteric perspective is, of course, the absolute opposite of that: it is consciousness which produces form not vice versa.

Science and its often-hubristic practitioners with their ‘we know everything’ mantras may be able to stare deeper into space and home closer into the quantum world than ever before. But there is a huge problem. They beg us to conform to their narrow and constricted material vision of the world. But the deep irony of all this is by their own admission they can’t see most of it because this universe is largely invisible to them. Ninety-something per cent of what should be there is apparently missing, they say. So, they are obliged to ascribe catch-all terms like dark energy and dark matter.

Another science-dominated enterprise is medicine dominated by a ‘drug ‘em and cut ‘em’ narrative in which the two main options are surgery or imbibing the products of Big

Pharma. The mainstream medical profession is wholly material in its outlook. It loves ridiculing effective alternatives such as energetic healing, herbal remedies, homeopathy, acupuncture, meditation and a host of other non-invasive therapies. This is because medicine is largely money-driven and not always altruistic. So, holistic and alternative approaches to health are unwelcome.

Origins

So, where and when did these modern notions about materialism actually begin? In historical terms it’s a relatively modern phenomenon. For most of human history and indeed still amongst those retaining indigenous beliefs the earth certainly is a living, breathing, sentient being. She was an is regarded as the Mother Earth Goddess herself who pledges to protect and provide for her departments of nature but who winds up being gang-raped in the name of power and profit. It is only in the modern era that the earth is seen as nothing more than an inert lump of rock orbiting the sun once a year.

The first faint stirrings of modern materialism began to emerge in the seventeenth century coinciding with the Ages of Enlightenment and Reason and the appearance of science. In these post-Renaissance times, the printing press is developed, social reforms take place and the Industrial Revolution progressively unfolds. New machine technologies emerge. The thinking of the day increasingly gravitates to the view that the universe is a giant machine whose clockwork mechanism ticks monotonously, predictably and unchangingly. Nature can and must be conquered and her resources despoiled or squandered. And if her people can also be enslaved that is another tick on both the cost-benefit analysis and indeed balance sheets.

Commenting on this the pioneering biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote:

‘The desacralisation of the natural world was taken to its ultimate conclusion in the seventeenth century. Through the mechanistic revolution, the old model of the living cosmos was replaced by the idea of the universe as a machine. According to this new theory of the world, nature no longer had a life of her own.; she was soulless, devoid of all spontaneity, freedom and creativity. Mother Nature was no more than dead matter, moving in unfailing obedience to God-given mathematical laws.’

Since the unfoldment of the Industrial Revolution from the mid-eighteenth century onwards the accretion of materialistic modes of life have coagulated even faster and thicker than the pollution much of this industrialisation has caused.

This, then, is the grim reality we face but paradoxically because of that there is room for great optimism that we are about to see in a convulsion of human consciousness which will take aim at the material paradigm like never before. The indomitable human spirit is always seeking change which happens when a new mind-set reaches critical mass. And there is clear emerging evidence that while the human spirit may have been overshadowed by materialism it has never been crushed or defeated by it. It is simply too powerful for that. And I am not alone in detecting what can only be described as a slowly unfolding revolt against the view that the physical world is the only reality – and this includes that small but bold coterie of brave scientists prepared to risk career and reputation to challenge materialistic hegemony. And in many other walks of life, more and more people are waking up to the fact that material wealth offers neither wisdom nor contentment – in fact quite the opposite. How many people wind up being owned by their possessions?

A Turning Point

And there is another factor at play. That unerring universal principle, The Law of Polarity, informs us that events and conditions can continue in one direction only for so long before the elastic reaches its breaking point. There is always a finite limit to the direction of travel before a reaction sets in. This is the cyclic nature of reality.

Perhaps since we are approaching the end of a cycle, be it the Kali Yuga, the transition from the Age of Pisces or indeed some other, perhaps we should expect this unhappy love-affair with things material to eventually reach a crisis crunch-point. If so, when might any of this begin to unfold?

It is this author’s view that this transcendence of the materialistic worldview may occur far sooner than anyone imagines. Something palpable and detectable is already unfolding among small but growing portions of the population. It is as if they suspect that a ‘Berlin Wall’ moment is imminent. (Hours before the Soviet-built wall was attacked in 1989 so-called political experts were still insisting that the reunification of Germany lay decades down the line.)

Despite all outward appearances there is a huge and largely unseen spiritual unfoldment taking place in different ways and in many locations around the world. And this takes numerous different forms. The first stirrings of this

pushback against the physical-only view of the world came decades ago and since then – invisibly and often subtly –this has accelerated and percolated into some parts of our collective consciousness.

The parlous state of our world – largely shaped by the materialistic blueprint – has prompted contagious outbreaks of ‘divine dissatisfaction’ as it is sometimes termed. Some people begin to appreciate that there is possibly more to life than acquiring wealth and goods. Sometimes trauma or unexpected personal or external events prompt people to ask those big pressing existential questions.

Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? Is this the only life I’ll live? Is the material world simply the outward façade of a deeper reality?

In other words, people begin to view themselves and the world from a wider spiritual perspective. As the world lurches between chaos and disorder, as the transition-times continue to produce conflict and perma-change and as ugly events erupt, people begin to look beyond the outward convulsions. They begin to take on – and I use this word in its widest possible context – a more spiritualised view of their own existence and the wide universe beyond.

Is it all purposeless and random or is there an overarching consciousness behind it and even a plan for humanity?

It is clear that this divine scheme goes far beyond the constricting back alleys of material explanations for life.

It doesn’t take the mass of humanity or even a majority of any section of humanity to prompt a revolution in consciousness. These things are inevitably dictated and directed by a dedicated few. Some say it takes as little as one per cent of any population working together for a common cause to effect change. Some say it’s far less than that – the square root of one per cent of the population. With the world population currently standing at eight billion plus that is just short of nine thousand people, the population of a small town.

Clearly, we cannot exist without the sophisticated material infrastructure which cocoons and sustains us physically. The revolution doesn’t involve the destruction of the physical world but moving beyond the absurd, narrow-minded and spiritually dead perspectives it promotes. This involves a massive and indeed radical shift in our attitude to the material realms and the subsequent changes in the power and extent of consciousness once it is liberated from its physical prison.

But it can begin whenever you want.

TIM WYATT is an esoteric author, researcher, film-maker and publisher based in West Yorkshire, England. His material can be found on Substack (The Esoteric Perspective) and at X/Twitter: x.com/EsotericAuthor Facebook: www.facebook.com/ EsotericAuthorTimWyatt/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/esotericauthortimwyatt/ Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/esotericauthor.bsky.social That Death Show www.youtube.com/@ThatDeathShow

Quantum Panpsychism and the Conscious Brain

EMMANUEL RANSFORD

Matter might be richer than it’s made out to be, richer than what meets the eye - maybe an elementary particle, say an electron, contains a hidden part and can therefore be likened to a poached egg, with its conspicuous white and the hidden yolk inside. Instead of being yellow like the yolk, the inner part of the electron would be nonmaterial and possess a hint of agency. Every now and again, it would make rudimentary choices. Most of the time, though, it would remain dormant or latent, and hence silent and unobservable. Here, the “white” part of the electron would run the show and behave deterministically, in a wave-like fashion. It would also comply with Einstein’s relativity theories. In point of fact, I claim that quantum randomness is smoking gun evidence of the faint decision-making agency that, I suspect, lurks within particles. The idea is that a choice, when genuine, is not wholly deterministic. It has an unequivocal random flavour. In some circumstances, this inner agency would be under pressure to choose and decide. The inner “yolks” waive the ordinary laws of matter, including the relativistic ones, since they are nonmaterial. I further assume that they are psychic in nature, as true decision-making seems tied to sentience and subjectivity.

Let’s call holomatter what ordinary matter becomes when it is endowed with a shred of agency as I propose, and holoparticles its elementary particles (the prefix holo means whole, as in holistic). Often, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll keep calling them particles. When the decision-making part of a (holo)particle snaps out of its latency and becomes active, it triggers a non-deterministic—and hence, a random-looking— evolution that mirrors its peculiar features. This evolution is also wave-less and non-relativistic. All these traits point to the wavefunction collapse of quantum mechanics; whose onset, arguably, is a trick that Nature pulls off to shun contradiction1.

Just as liquid water can also be solid ice, holomatter assumes two alternative guises: the dominant guise in which the deterministic and wave-like parts, or material “whites”, of its particles hold their sway. I call this the matter state of holomatter. The other guise occurs when the decision-making parts—the waveless, nonmaterial and random “yolks”—are active. I call this the paral state of holomatter. This guise is a-relativistic and, it turns out, blind to the distances of matter’s space-time. Holomatter is thus characterised by a matter-paral duality akin to the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics.

The holomatter hypothesis also brings novel insights to bear on quantum entanglement, which is such that two particles which interacted in the past may remain connected, however far apart. Cutting-edge technologies are developed around this mind-bending and still poorly understood phenomenon. My hunch is that entanglement is due to the welding or in-binding of psychic “yolks”, whereby they take concerted decisions upon becoming active. Concerted decisions lead to correlated outcomes. This, together with the distance-blindness of the nonmaterial parts, leads straight to the non-local correlations of entanglement. Like the wavefunction collapse, these correlations keep Nature contradiction-free2 Finally, holomatter sheds new light on the mystery of ordinary brain consciousness. It suggests that the ultimate secret of our organ of thought is that is has the capacityto churn out large flows of holomatter in the paral guise, in which the “yolks” are active. My bet is that conscious awareness is more likely to arise where these psychic parts are active. Holomatter also unpacks several open questions regarding the conscious brain, including the nature of qualia (e.g., the felt redness of red), the binding problem (which refers to the as-yet-unexplained oneness of subjective experience), the mind-body problem, and other conundrums. Furthermore, entanglement interpreted as the welding of the psychical parts of different particles resolves the combination problem of panpsychism3 Incidentally, it implies that the mind expands beyond the brain. To conclude, the “quantum panpsychism” outlined here looks promising. It shows that the wave collapse and entanglement are necessary features of the quantum world rather than weird quirks of Nature. It also provides an exciting new window of understanding on the hard problem of consciousness, by figuring out how the mind may arise in the biological brain. Moreover, it may one day be put to the test (I have some ideas in this respect).

EMMANUEL RANSFORD is an independent researcher and writer on physics and philosophy of science. wholomatter@gmail.com

1 About the anti-contradiction role of the collapse, see my Galileo Commission article ‘Making Sense of Quantum Randomness’ (available at https://www.galileocommission.org/can-we-crack-the-mind-body-problem-part-i-emmanuel-ransford).

2 See the GC paper ‘Matter and the Poached Egg’ ( https://galileocommission.org/ can-we-crack-the-mind-body-problem-part-ii-emmanuel-ransford/?swcfpc=1).

3 See articles such as: ‘Quantum Panpsychism and the Light Bulb Metaphor’ (posted at https//galileocommission.org/quantumpanpsychism-and-the-light-bulb-metaphor-emmanuel-ransford/), ‘Psychism, the Deed, and Beyond’ ( https//galileocommission.org/ can-we-crack-the-mind-body-problem-part-iii-emmanuel-ransford/?swcfpc=1).

Personal Experience

A Special Day

LARRY CULLIFORD

“Be still, and know that I am God!”

(Psalm 46: 10)

Quiet View, a ‘Centre for Contemplative Spirituality’ in the village of Kingston near Canterbury, is run by Anglican priest, Lizzie Hopthrow and her husband, John, on onetime farmland adjacent to their house (www.quietview.co.uk). It features a large, well-appointed, Tibetan-style yurt with a wood-burning stove, catering facilities and a small library. The sizeable grounds offer spectacular views over rolling Kent countryside, a stunning 20-foot wooden angel, carved from the upright remains of an ash tree, a classical, Chartres-style, 7-circuit labyrinth, a burbling stone fountain, and many secluded spots with well-placed benches, ideal for contemplative reflection.

I went there, one beautiful Saturday in January, for a silent retreat aimed at people working in health and social care, held under the auspices of the Janki Foundation, a charity that promotes spirituality in health care (www. jankifoundation.org ). Lizzie and John were there to welcome us and share in the day. Julia Ronder, a child psychiatrist who had been my trainee thirty or more years earlier, was our retreat leader. It was a joy to see her again after such a long break.

We were twelve gathering in the yurt at the outset, mostly healthcare chaplains, psychiatrists and psychotherapists. After brief all round introductions, Julia, before leading a guided meditation session, read a poem on kindness, and spoke about how emotional pain and suffering may lead a person to develop compassion for themselves, essential protection for avoiding exhaustion when compassionately embracing others. Here was a useful theme for reflection during the following silence.

After a walk around the grounds, I found a seat in the full embrace of the kindly sun beside the stone fountain, where it was enough to simply pay attention to nature; a robin

singing loudly in a nearby tree, a flock of blue tits in the adjacent bushes, a kestrel high in the sky, crows, blackbirds, a chaffinch, and that burbling fountain. Time passed effortlessly. The still air held a chill, but I was warmly wrapped up.

After a bell rang at one o’clock, we re-congregated silently in the warm to eat the packed lunches we had brought, make ourselves tea and coffee, and sit quietly, a relaxed like-minded fellowship of no longer strangers, smiles of recognition being commonplace.

After a while, I returned to the blessed outdoors, visited the angel, chose not to venture into the labyrinth, which ‘serves as a bridge from the mundane to the Divine’, as a leaflet stated, and resumed my chosen spot presided over still by that boisterous robin. I had a book about Sufi mysticism with me, but it could not hold my attention for long. I did not want to do anything. I wanted simply to be.

Back in the yurt, soon after 3.30pm, we came out of the silence to share reflections and comments about our day. One participant admitted she’d worried that five hours of silence would prove more than she could tolerate, but had surprised herself, thoroughly enjoying the experience. The most memorable story came from Nina, who had said earlier that she was suffering from a painful frozen shoulder. While focusing on compassion for herself, amazingly and unexpectedly, her shoulder had gradually thawed. The pain had evaporated and, as she demonstrated, movement was fully restored.

When my turn came to give feedback, I said truthfully how filled I had been with gratitude throughout the day, thankful simply for being, aware of God’s presence in nature and the Holy Spirit within. Then I shared a haiku-like poem that had come into my mind earlier, as we all sat wordlessly, calm and happy together. The poem is called, ‘In the Yurt’.

Serenity... Joy

Compassionate sun

Twelve soulful hearts become one

A special day, with highly agreeable fellow pilgrims, newly-minted spiritual friends, in such a magically welcoming place; I bask still in the loving warmth of it all.

LARRY CULLIFORD, a retired psychiatrist, is the author of The Psychology of Spirituality and other titles. Please see www. LDC52.co.uk . He is currently at work on his autobiography, Happy as Larry.

Fever Dreaming

ROB WILLIAMS

“Aqui!” Capitano Fernando says quietly, gesturing with massive, brown fisherman hands towards the north, across the Sea of Cortez’s rippling iridescent surface.

“Remember, guys, no splashing with your fins, and no sudden movements,” reminds Natalia, as six of us – masked, snorkeled, and flippered - slip into the warm greenish blue, quietly making our way towards a spot ten meters off our boat’s bow.

The sea’s silence below blends with a small drone’s whirring whine just a few meters above the shimmering surface, as operator Chris “Gaucho” guides us across the water. Below, rotating beams of light shoot up from the depths, the sun and sea conspiring to cast dancing and spinning patterns, like a magical marine discotheque, through the watery void.

Masked eyes moving between surface and sea, I feel myself become amphibious, softening into snorkeled inhales and exhales, slowing down my heart, which (once again) I realize is racing, with the anticipation of…what?

And then, below us and off to our starboard side, it comes – silently sliding towards us in seeming slow motion.

A “Fever.” Dozens, no, more like hundreds of mobula rays moving in a multilayered and ever-shifting body, flow into our view, their wing tips gently undulating in fluttering unison more graceful than any aerial avian murmuration, as the rays fluidly weave their way forward, synchronously shifting their direction below us as if directed by an unseen force.

Having come to Baja to scout professional travel and breathwork opportunities, I suddenly notice my breath is suspended - astonished, perhaps, at this Fever’s silent and surreal magnificence. My arms, meanwhile, are unconsciously mimicking mobula movements, as my amphibious colleagues jockey into GoPro friendly positions to capture the Fever for posterity. Our fearless leader, Off The Grid ’s Natalia Moreno (a self-described Californian-Mexican “border baby” and ex-Montessori teacher with two former marriages and three kids in play) coaches us to stay to the Fever’s side, rather than risk spooking the mobula from above. I try to comply, marveling at how effortlessly the fever below me shifts directions at will.

Meanwhile, fellow divers Sanket, a “seafari” newbie and digital network engineer from India who signed up for our trip just days before, and Darin, a Kentucky-based energy trader who looks like the underwater twin of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, are both feverishly deploying their underwater cameras, while veteran diver Flo from San Diego (@ ZenFlowNature on Instagram) flippers down deep below the fever, her stick pole camera in hand. “I was a scientist who thought I knew everything, and then I had a neardeath biking accident, and realized I know nothing,” she had explained to me on the beach earlier that morning. “To be accepted by wild creatures here in Baja, this is my hope.”

Flo’s refreshing perspective - hubris transformed into humility - suggests how quickly we reach the limits of scientific understanding when confronted by mesmerizing mobula magic. Sure, Systema Naturae classifies mobula thusly: Chondrichthyes (class) chordata (phylum) eukaryota (domain) mobulidae (family) rafinesque (genus). Indeed, we know that these “devil rays” can grow as large as seventeen feet, jump two meters into the air (no one knows why – looks like “joy” to me?), dive nearly two kilometers, swim

as fast as twelve knots per hour, and weigh as much as 1600 kilograms (equivalent to a Jeep Cherokee).

But beyond this? Only the depths of our ignorance.

After what feels like a transcendent timeless moment in flow with the fever (Capitano Fernando tells us later it was more than an hour), we grudgingly make our way back to the boat. As I prepare to board, I look down one last time and notice my dear friend and dive buddy Cara Blake, a Floridian mermaid with a deep passion for the ocean and wild creatures, surrounded by the mobula, Flo filming just beyond her. A few minutes later, the two return, silently ascending the ladder and moving to the stern, where we give them space, as we notice tears welling up in Cara’s eyes.

She says not a word about her experience, until I ask her more than one week later after we all returned home, what happened down there. “Just the sensation of the mobula encircling me,” Cara explains to me over the phone. “I stopped moving, and kicking, and I felt my heart racing, not because I was scared, but because it was so intense, and beautiful and magical.”

I ask her, as a veteran diver, to sit with the experience a bit longer, and then compose and send me a voice text. She agrees, and a few days later, shares her impressions: “I was talking to the mobula in my mind, giving gratitude, and feeling like I was transcending my human realm into connecting with all there is,” she muses via her voice text. “It felt like I was there forever, and yet, not long enough. I lost track of time. My dive partner Flo was excited, even remembering the moment – ‘they were swimming around you, and surrounding you, and it was so mesmerizing…’”

I call Cara, listening as she shares a bit more about what she remembers: “I gave gratitude to the ocean, and to the mobula, and just went back to the boat and was speechless,” she tells me. “It was a gift, to be really present, and pay attention to the feelings and sensations we get in such a moment, feelings which seem to merge into the most beautiful experiences we can have.”

She then recounts observations from her massage therapist, who noticed a difference in Cara post-mobula murmuration. Your body may be responding to the memory of your mobula encounter, the therapist explains to her, imprinted on your body and in your mind. “I was on a high for days afterwards,” Cara tells me before we hang up. “I am still not fully here.”

“The sea remains the final unseen, untouched, and undiscovered wilderness,” muses James Nestor in his book Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, “the planet’s last great frontier.”

What does it mean to see, to touch, to discover – the mobula? Flo’s voice echoes in my mind. “I realized I know nothing.” Fever dreaming – encounters with the mysterious murmurations of wild creatures - is contagious.

And to the mobula, we say – “thank you - all of you.”

Trained as an environmental historian, DR. ROB WILLIAMS is an author, musician, and breath coach, and happiest when outside. contact@doctorrobwilliams.com

Galileo Commission Synchronicity Summits X & XI

26-27 September 2024 & 27 February 2025

SUE LEWIS

C. G. Jung coined the word “synchronicity”, combining the Greek roots “syn” and “chronos”, meaning “together” in “time”. Jung’s book, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, appeared in the 1950s inspiring many books and articles, including several by contributors to the twenty-three first-person stories in The Playful Universe. Published for the opening of the Eurotas Conference, “Creative Bridges”, in September 2024, The Playful Universe shows how bridges can be built between human beings and cosmic consciousness. Two subsequent Galileo Commission (GC) summits have explored these transformative experiences and asked: “What kind of universe makes synchronicity possible?”

Professor Marjorie Woollacott introduces and chairs session one. Serial synchronicities, from 2015-23, prompted the co-creation of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences (AAPS) by Marjorie and Professor Gary E. Schwartz , author of Super Synchronicity: Where Science and Spirit Meet (2017). He was the first President of AAPS, which published this volume. Marjorie is currently President, and she co-chairs the GC with David Lorimer. Marjorie’s meditation teacher foresaw her wedding before she anticipated marriage. Mr Right appeared on cue. Dr Bethany Butzer shares a similar experience. Both marriages have been life-changing, meaningful and lasting. Integration of Marjorie’s professional career as a Professor of Human Physiology and her spiritual practice took twenty-five years. Was a trickster at work, Professor Roderick Main (University of Essex) asked mischievously? Or was the greater plan for her success as a material scientist to pave her way to becoming an informed ambassador for postmaterialist science?

Dr Joan Walton, chair of SMN Board of Directors, experienced benevolent synchronicities from a young age. When she and her husband offered a tent to friends, it was stolen from under their caravan on their way to the rendezvous. Fortuitously, a similar tent was available for their use at the campsite. Her confidence in a benevolent power was shaken by her partner’s tragic death, precipitating

her deeper search into the meaning and implications of synchronicity individually, collectively and cosmically. Jerry remained such a strong presence in afterlife that his intervention saved Joan’s daughter from a fatal car accident several years later. Joan investigates nonmaterialist ideas on consciousness and their relevance for education at York St John University.

An excerpt from Jeff Kripal’s impossible thinking adds another dimension to Roderick’s encounter with a praying mantis, reported in Paradigm Explorer (PE), 143, 2023/3, pp. 27-29. Not only does “mantis” mean “diviner” in Greek but, in Namibian culture, it “functions as an omen or serves an oracular function and possesses a particular trickster nature”— making it an embodiment of synchronicity’s go-between!1

Mathematical physicist Dr William Keepin experienced communal, telepathic empathy with trees, trained in holotropic breathwork with Stan Grof, and was introduced to astrology by Rick Tarnas. The unexpected breakdown of a close relative convinced him of the correlation between her astrological birth chart, with its sensitive Neptune, and cyclic transits of Pluto and Saturn in the cosmos, which precipitated the crisis. Working with them assisted her healing process.

After hearing the Dalai Lama, Will progressed from the Western Scientist’s outer visible universe to the invisible cosmos of the psyche, saw how they combined in David Bohm’s holomovement developed from quantum physics, and discovered the deepest cosmic secrets in Indra’s Net, visualised as an infinite network of glittering jewels representing worlds of infinity. Joan, Marjorie and Laurel Waterman used Indra’s Net to illustrate their central principle of interconnectedness during a Consciousness Education Project workshop at Creative Bridges in Oxford.

Marjorie invited her panel to share their ontology, epistemology, and perception of intelligence. She is an idealist. For her, consciousness is the universe’s foundation, vast and limitless. Infinite consciousness is infinitely intelligent.

In her essay, Joan wrote that consciousness is primary and intelligence an integral quality of consciousness. Her article on Federico Faggin’s Irreducible (2024) in PE, 145, 2024/2, pp. 3-7, suggests her position may be evolving.

1 Jeffrey J. Kripal, How to Think Impossibly About Souls, UFOs, Time Belief, and Everything Else (University of Chicago Press, 2024), p. 66.

Roderick believes spontaneous synchronicities foster our divinatory awareness of reality. Their archetypal meaning lies beyond mind and matter. He rejects both materialism and idealism, preferring dual-aspect monism where, “the mental and the physical are two (epistemic) aspects of an underlying (ontic) reality that itself is neither mental nor physical but rather psychophysically neutral… meaning is an essential bridge between the mental and the physical.”2

Will embraces an epistemology of the heart, with its unique ways of knowing, self-unveiling and revealing, and encourages science to be more receptive.

Chairing the second session, David introduces cultural historian, Richard Tarnas, Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies, founder of the graduate programme in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, teacher of a course on synchronicities, and author of Cosmos and Psyche, where planetary archetypes are described in detail. 3

In his comprehensive foreword to The Playful Universe, Rick recounts the frequency of synchronicities at threshold moments, as illustrated in his depiction of a commemorative service for the life of much-loved astrologer, Charles Harvey.

As he reminds us, most pre-modern societies interacted with an ensouled and intelligent universe, accepting synchronicities as mysterious messages from cosmic consciousness to humankind; whereas our disenchanted worldview is uneasy with anomalous happenings. He promotes openness and responsiveness, while also advising we develop “a capacity for acute yet balanced discernment”. Shared experiences provoke different reactions. Jung’s discovery of a scarab resembling his client’s dream weakened her resistance and improved their therapeutic relationship. Not every synchronous event is resolved so easily.

PhD student Laurel Waterman asks: “Synchronicity: So What?” “Because it proves the existence of meaning”. Devastated by her husband’s death, with two small children to care for, she requested proof of his continuity of consciousness. A penny minted in the year of his birth dropped to earth to reassure her. Her feelings are intense; only the experiencer plumbs their emotional depths. Acknowledging her former scepticism, she transitioned from a materialist to a postmaterialist perspective, and believes this ontological shift is essential in our critical times. Her research explores the source and nature of consciousness and its implications for being, knowing, teaching and learning.

Dr Laleh Quinn has King Arthur’s Camelot as her background. Her transformative journey began with the suicide of a close friend and colleague. His presence lingers. Astonishingly, for established research neuroscientists, they converse. While driving to her father’s hospice, her deceased friend’s voice came over the radio and a car passed with a Camelot numberplate. Laleh’s father, who loved Arthurian legends, nicknamed his daughter Wort, which Merlin called Arthur as a boy. Her friend’s favourite baker was “King Arthur’s flour”. Evidence mounts. Laleh embraces “the reality of acausal synchronicities,” saying, “Open your eyes and mind to a new understanding and see what Jung understood, that ‘synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see.’” She writes on “Materialism in Academia” in PE, 146, 2024/3, pp. 15-17.

The Playful Universe: Synchronicity and the Nature of Consciousness

Edited by Marjorie Woollacott, PhD, David Lorimer, and Gary E. Schwartz, PhD

Postmaterialist Sciences Series, V, AAPS Press, 2024, 250pp, £15.00

David begins his chapter, “Synchronicity and the Law of Attraction”, by reflecting on his brother’s funeral in the Philippines. Cat-lover, Andrew, was Facebook’s “Baguio Cat Man.” A cat walked up the aisle to his coffin, paid its respects, then paused by his widow before leaving. Never before had a cat been seen in that church, so the significance and timing were remarkable.

At a key turning point, David spotted an advertisement for a post teaching French and German at Winchester College and immediately knew the job was his. Several years later, George Blaker invited him to take over Scientific and Medical Network. Career openings came at opportune moments. David continues to feel vividly present and meaningfully on track as the work of SMN and GC spreads across the globe.

David concludes that Consciousness is “ontologically and epistemologically fundamental”, a term he prefers to primary, “as the Ground of Being gives rise to energy/ life/consciousness and forms as vehicles of expression in space-time”. Citing Alfred Russel Wallace, “there are no impossible facts and if your theory fails to account for the facts in an adequate fashion, then it is the theory that needs an upgrade,” he emphasises the importance of broadening our horizons to better understand the multidimensionality of life.

Dr Vasileios Basios (University of Brussels) unexpectedly chairs session three. Specialising in interdisciplinary research on self-organisation and emergence in complex systems, he views complexity studies as pivotal to the transformation of science to a postmaterialist view. Investigations into the power of consciousness at Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (1979-2007) proved that individuals and groups leave Random Event Generator (REG) anomalies, so he wondered whether similar experiments would detect extreme changes of consciousness during end-of-life, near-death, and out-of-body experiences.

New members joined GC’s online webinars during Covid lockdowns, and Dr Wolfhardt Janu shared innovative ideas for a REG antenna, facilitating the progress of the Organizational-closure Random Event Generators’ Analysis and Observation (oREGano) project. Vasileios was synchronistically contacted by his spiritual mother, Fotini, aged nearly 90 and in frail health, who planned to stop eating and agreed to participate in an experiment. At an oREGano meeting, Wolf in Vienna and Vasileios in Brussels arranged

2 Harald Atmanspacher and Dean Rickles, Dual-Aspect Monism and the Deep Structure of Meaning (Routledge, 2022), pp. xi & 22.

3 Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (Viking, 2006), pp. 85-101.

an observation session with Fotini in Athens. Shortly afterwards, REGs responded with anomalous deviation from random correlations, signalling her passing.

Vasileios, and Gary share the view that: “Consciousness is the fundamental expression of the immaculate power of love, which is the initiator of its creation… we must always try to express the inexpressible… keep our minds and systems open… It is within such an expanded logic that the apparently paradoxical phenomena of synchronicity find their natural habitat.”

Monica Bryant’s MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred was on transformative learning, synchronicity and transpersonal research methodologies. Her BSc was in Human Sciences, and she has pioneered symbiosis-restoring approaches for health. After graduation, she travelled to California, becoming immersed in its forward-thinking, inspirational society. Her evolutionary group attracted multiple surprise synchronicities, building wholeness. Her expression, “Synchronicity creates a crack in time to let the cosmos in”, resonated with participants, echoing Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”, which has been variously interpreted.

Monica proposes expanding synchronicity to, “pansynchronicity”, meaning “all together now”, to include “evolutionary and archetypal interconnections between nature, psyche and cosmos.” She adds: “Synchronicities can connect us with the embracing mother archetype and highlight our interdependence within the divine, symbiotic universe”.

Dr Bethany Butzer lectures for Alef Trust and is Assistant Director of its PhD programme in Applied Transpersonal Psychology. Instead of rehearsing stories shared in 2023, she describes meeting her future husband. They had dated online but, academically busy, had not met. He arrived unexpectedly with a disc jockey at a neighbourhood venue where Bethany’s friend was a barmaid, and she persuaded Bethany to join them. The rest is history.

Experience convinces her of the participatory nature of the universe where we co-create reality without understanding its mechanics, as the intelligent universe co-creates with us to know itself. When God and Adam reach across Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, their act of synchronicity creates a bridge susceptible to several interpretations: a cognitive strategy enabling us to understand our lives; an inspiration to co-create; and a magnifier of human love, assuming universal meaning.

Responding from the audience, Angela Greenwood describes meeting her future husband by chance, after a fall while climbing obliged her to travel by a different route. They have been married for 43 years. Angela often falls, in dreams as well as in reality. Falling can be a metaphor for falling into a hole: possibly a religious void? or letting go of an attachment? Does it open a pathway to the greater whole?

Gary arrived late because his wife Rhonda had fallen. Now she was being cared for, he came online and added falling to the synchronous themes of the day. On holes, he suggested we need first to see the whole, then spot empty spaces. Gary chose chapter 11, the predominant number for super-synchronicities. His essay concentrates on smaller clusters of three to five events within a short period of time.

Called theopsychobiophysics, they express ongoing human relationships with a Universal Conscious Intelligence.

Professor Bernard Beitman, Founding Director and President of the Coincidence Project, formerly chair of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri, and author of several books on synchronicity, chairs the fourth session. For him, synchronicities are springboards to the future, connecting the human mind with its environment. He calls Gary the “Master of Seriality” and comments on Laleh’s use of synchronicity as a probe to understand reality. Bernie is nicknamed “Mr Coincidence”!

Dr Jeffrey Dunne, President of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, continues research on the nature of consciousness undertaken at Princeton University until 2007. His chapter focuses on synchronous events leading him to the right venue for ICRL. An author of plays, Jeff’s recent novel, Nexus, weaves the concept of syntropy—meaning evolution towards some future purpose, coming together to face existential challenges, a concept intimately tied to synchronicity—into a story that aims to reach beyond academia and awaken the curiosity of the wider public.4 Jeff views consciousness as primary, driving the mapping of meaning, and our interconnectivity. But if we take this stance, how does physicality—which includes narrative, experience, and senses—derive from consciousness?

Dr Dean Radin is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and chair of Cognigenics Inc. Dean’s books, include Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe (2018). In The Playful Universe, he shares his success at a spoon-bending party. When Bernard Carr suggests spoon-bending is psychokinesis, Dean argues that it is “a ridiculously impactful synchronicity because it involves a mind-matter interaction with an unusually intense injection of meaning”. Dean’s second anecdote with a magical twist features a van with “Magic” on the side, abbreviating the slogan, “We can fix your plumbing like magic”. It parked outside his study window while he was working on his second book on magic.

Dean remarks that every second Tuesday he is an idealist because that is the easiest way to think. Most days he starts as a materialist—unable to ignore the physical world—and by evening he is a dual aspect monist—the ontological approach he expounds in his essay.

Sophia Demas, MED, is a mental health therapist, an in-house counsellor for the Salvation Army in a residential facility for ex-trafficked women. Synchronicities go hand-in-hand with her Greek Orthodox faith and belief in miracles. In her view, if we are open to our intelligent universe, a divine intelligence knows what we want better than we do.

By misdialling a number, she unintentionally reached a friend who offered his hotel ballroom for her wedding to Frank. When Frank’s anger issues made her want to leave him for good, a series of synchronicities reunited them, he was cured of his anger, and they are now sublimely happy. Despite our conscious intentions, as Dean pointed out, most of our behaviour is driven by the unconscious.

Her eye specialist related how, after a tiring day, she reluctantly attended a gala with her husband, then drove

4 Jeff Dunne, Nexus (Sykesville, MD: Wyrder Press, 2023).

the babysitter home. On her return journey, her grandmother’s voice told her to wake up, and she stopped short of driving into a wall. Her story recalls that of Joan’s daughter, who was prevented by Jerry from accelerating over an apparently clear narrow bridge when suddenly a car from the opposite direction sped across the bridge without warning.

Sophia requested a sign from a friend who had recently died. A Facebook invitation arrived the next morning, reminding us of Laurel’s more tangible coin. This academic research validates Sophia’s experiences, which define consciousness, and the experiential factor is primary.

Bernie is compiling a new coincidence diary, using AI to analyse experiences. 5 We each have our own way of filtering synchronicities, seeking answers, searching our minds for meaning. Rumi wrote: “What you seek is seeking you”, and Bernie encourages us to question our principles and seek repeating patterns. He introduces the word “psychosphere”—similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere”, but more accessible—to describe the mental atmosphere that surrounds us.

David opens the second summit with a quotation by Sharon Hewitt Rawlette: “We are swimming in a sea of consciousness, and ultimately our mental life is not separable from the physical world around us, nor from the mental lives of others”.6 This event covers different perspectives and has an ambivalent feel.

In a recorded talk, the scientist, futurist and author, Stephan Schwartz , who has studied the nature of consciousness for over fifty years, identified two types: precognitive synchronicities often come in dreams; in synchronicities about continuity of consciousness, the eternal self reincarnates. His belief that we enter the world with an imprint may sit uneasily with Western dogma, but is shared by many faiths. Human beings have the freewill to work with what they are given, and Stephan is committed to fostering wellbeing in every act.

As Lisa Miller was delayed at an airport, David read part of her contribution and she joined the panel later. She wrote: “One of the things I’ve noticed about synchronicity is that it’s all about noticing and aligning ourselves with whatever life is showing us. We’re given a sudden glimpse that we are part of a deep interconnectedness… There’s so much love and relationship and interconnectedness all around us. We are part of the oneness of life.”

Ricky Derisz , writer, speaker, and host of Mind That Ego Podcast, gave a fascinating talk based on his chapter, “Synchronicity as the Yoga of Absolute Knowledge”. For him, “Synchronicities became the hallmark of an exhilarating awakening” from chronic depression. When he accidentally knocked the head off a Buddha while reaching for Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity, what seemed like “a literal bad omen” triggered a train of associations leading to Alan Watts talking about Swimming Headless and multiple planes of meaning. Ricky rounds off his essay by writing: “Beneath every disguise, every form synchronicity takes, from gentle reassurance in moments of suffering, to inspired revelation, to cosmic winks of wisdom… is the

underlying truth of unity… refracted through the prism of our intuitive experience.”

“Mr Coincidence”, interactively chaired the second session.

Professor Imants Barušs teaches courses on consciousness and the psychology of religion and spirituality. Recovering from a procedure for glaucoma in his left eye, he spoke about distance healing using Matrix Energetics (ME) and visualization. By practising ME he steps out of an ordinary reality saturated in materialist ideology. Sadly, the client of this story was in the late stages of cancer and did not recover. Her passing manifested in the detachment of Imants’ office key from his keyring.

PhD student Karalee Kothe gave an illustrated talk on meeting her mentors and discovering their books: The SelfAware Universe: how consciousness creates the material world, by quantum physicist Amit Goswami; Synchronicity, by C. G. Jung; and Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl. The jacket of Goswami’s book has a huge blue eye and Karalee’s quotation from Jung—“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see”—emphasises eye synchronicities.

Another emerging theme is birthdays and deaths. Frankl died on 2 September 1997, the date Karalee was born. The date of the summit, 27 February, is Bernie’s birthday and the date his father died. The birthday of a centenarian and his recent death feature in Michael’s presentation.

For Karalee, synchronicity is a game of tennis between me/inner events and outer events in a loving, intelligent, interactive universe that wants us to know our lives are meaningful. She quotes Joseph Campbell: “If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you…”

Dr Michael A. Krieger is a psychiatrist whose chapter is on spontaneous mediumship experiences (SMEs)—sensing the presence of someone who has died. His presentation features his father singing a Yiddish song at his 99th birthday party, on 9 June 2023. Sadly, he died on 17 December 2024. The song carries his memory.

Sunshine L. Kessler ponders over the title of The Playful Universe. Poignant stories have been shared, synchronicities are not without their tricksters and shadows, but, on balance, she concludes the title is a good one.

SUE LEWIS, MA Western Esotericism, BA Modern Languages, DFAstrolS, Diploma in Astrological Psychology, Certificate in Transpersonal Perspectives. Sue is writing a book, Synchronicity and Becoming

5 Bernard Beitman, Life-Changing Synchronicities: A Doctor’s Journey of Coincidence & Serendipity, with a foreword by Roderick Main is due out in June 2025.

6 Kripal, p. 184; citing Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, The Source and Significance of Coincidences: A Hard Look at the Astonishing Evidence (self-pub., 2019), p. 10.

How Open-minded Can Mainstream Scientists Be?

MONA SOBHANI, PHD & ALLISON PARADISE

Mainstream scientists tend to get a lot of stick in spirituality circles, with gripes about their close-mindedness and rigidity of thought. But what happens if you give them a safe space to open their minds, explore their curiosity, and share what’s in their hearts?

That’s what we set out to discover three years ago. Since 2022, we have been organising and hosting Science & Spirituality events at the largest convergence of neuroscientists, the annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference, providing a space where typically taboo topics can be bounced around with abandon.

What have we found? When scientists leave their fear at the door, what emerges is beautiful, wild, and free. Due to the conference’s size and the diverse group it attracts each year, we’ve consistently been unsure of what to expect from the audience at each event we’ve hosted. Will anyone show up? How open-minded will they be? For our third annual Science & Spirituality event on Oct. 5, 2024, whatever our expectations were, they were exceeded. Since we never know where the audience is starting from, we try to strike a tender balance between following their lead and gently pushing the edges. At our initial event in 2022, the most controversial topic of conversation was precognitive dreams. But this time, we didn’t have to push the edges very far. For the first time since we’ve held the event, the majority of scientists in attendance were openly questioning the dogma of scientific materialism, sharing extraordinary personal experiences that they could not explain with the conventional scientific paradigm they had been trained in. Like what, you ask? Spontaneous healing, mediumship, energy healing, transcendental meditation experiences, seeing or hearing spirits, astral projection, out-of-body experiences, lucid and precognitive dreams, and consciousness existing outside of our brains. Why does trauma seem to open us up to having more of these experiences? Are the brain and body both involved? What part(s) of the brain (if any) are involved? Which worldviews/philosophies help explain emergent experiences? And so much more. We openly discussed these typically off-limit topics during the three-hour round-table discussion.

Sadly, what hasn’t changed is that most scientists feel they cannot share their experiences or perspectives with their colleagues. Aside from the lab that came to the event together, no one felt that they could openly discuss these topics even with their labmates. This wasn’t exclusive to the scientists, either. The non-scientists who attended also felt that there were few, if any, people in their lives that they could openly explore these topics with — they’re just too controversial.

That’s why spaces where we can explore with curiosity and openness are so very important. Without them, many of us sit silently and uncomfortably with these phenomenal experiences.

We also challenged the scientists to consider how their science would be different if they didn’t start from an assumption of scientific materialism, i.e., how would you interpret the results of your studies differently? This may seem like a silly exercise since the entire field of mainstream science stubbornly and decidedly sits under the umbrella of scientific materialism — but having one attendee from last year’s event tell us that the event changed his life and the way he thinks, makes us believe it’s worthwhile.

All this to say, it’s time to ask ourselves this question: how else can we help mainstream scientists connect with each other in a safe, supportive space that encourages adopting and challenging different worldviews?

As a first step, we will host monthly virtual meetings beginning next year in order to continue the conversations that began at the in-person event. Our first virtual event will be held on January 13th, 2025 at 5pm PT/8pm ET. For more information and to be included in future events, register for our newsletter: www.exploringconsciousness.org/ newsletter.html.

To truly ignite a revolution in scientific thinking, we must engage mainstream scientists on their own ground while also cultivating innovative spaces where their curiosity can flourish without limits.

*Read about 2022’s event here: monasobhaniphd.substack. com/p/when-you-bring-spirituality-the-transpersonal Learn more at: https://www.exploringconsciousness.org/ Watch the 2023 event recording at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=t8geWn2mxd0&t=3s

MONA SOBHANI PhD is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur who is author of Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist’s Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe, which details her transformation from a diehard scientific materialist to an open-minded spiritual seeker. www.monasobhaniphd.com

ALLISON PARADISE is the founder and CEO of The Epicenter, a non-profit organization that empowers children and young adults to (re)connect with their authentic selves and their limitless potential. Allison is also the founder and former CEO of My Green Lab, whose mission is to create a culture of sustainability through science. Allison holds degrees in neuroscience from Brown and Harvard.

Creating a Wave of Exponential Collaboration

JILL ROBINSON

What will it take to realise the global shift we know is possible? This was the question posed by stewards of the Holomovement in launching their inaugural Holomovement Wave convergence in Ibiza, Spain over four days in May of 2024.

From May 23 - 27, 2024, over 150 participants were invited to explore how their personal callings aligned with a purposeful community, activating a wave of co -creation and collaboration. The Holomovement Wave was inspired by a deep yearning for a collaborative community that spans diverse sectors and initiatives serving the good of the whole. The convergence was intended to create space for organic conversation and relationship-building, elements needed for the exponential collaboration required to propel the Holomovement.

Building and Amplifying a Collaborative, Social Movement

The Holomovement is a social movement awakening us to our interconnectedness, igniting a critical mass of collaborative action serving the good of the whole. Guided by science and spirituality, this unifying movement is catalysing a massive shift in human consciousness.

Within this social movement, we are all called to explore how our personal callings can align with a purposeful community. The challenges of our time will not be solved by one organisation or visionary, but as a co-creative network strengthened by trust. The Wave convergence in Ibiza was the Holomovement in action.

“We chose Ibiza as the ideal place to bring the Holomovement Wave to Europe, as it has been a crossroads of cultures for centuries and provided a warm welcome for our visitors from around the world,” said Emanuel Kuntzelman, visionary steward of the Holomovement. “This island holds a powerful divine feminine energy that is vital for a transformative social movement and Ibiza was a natural choice to hold the first Wave convergence. We were delighted with the sold-out participation in all the events, featuring distinguished thought leaders from fifteen countries. The presentations, conversations and synergies created are now forming a solid foundation for the formation of new Holons and collaboration within the Holomovement going forward.”

This 4-day convergence amplified purpose, explored radical collaboration and inspired transformative, loving action for the good of the whole in a number of ways. The Wave schedule offered attendees an opportunity to network and explore practical solutions using their skills, networks and projects already in motion.

Daily “Stream’’ sessions focused on the themes: Conscious Flourishing, Exponential Collaboration, Love in Action and Evolutionary Technologies & New Economies, and were held in the mornings. Evening sessions were more formal, featuring panels, presentations and music.

A diverse roster of incredible speakers for the evening presentations included: Gopi Kallayil, Chief Business Strategist, AI at Google, Lynne McTaggart, author of the Intention

Experiment and co-founder of What Doctors Don’t Tell You and Marc Buckley, author of the UN-SDG Manifesto and founder of Alohas Regenerative Foundation. Musicians from the island set the atmosphere for the sold-out convergence.

“This was not only a powerful experience, but was a necessary awakening of emotions in order to contemplate purpose, practice understanding, empathy, balance and equal treatment to everything breathing and moving on our beautiful planet.” said Ibiza Wave attendee, Ana Nance.

Riding the Transformative Wave Beyond Ibiza

The Wave was just the beginning. Leaders and purpose-driven individuals from around the world are now invited to join the Holomovement to continue co-creating exponential change beyond the Ibiza experience. By honoring each of our unique gifts and offerings, we are amplifying our collective evolutionary potential. In this understanding, it is unity not uniformity that will propel this vision.

The Holomovement, and its unifying principles, create a coherent space for the many leaders and organisations already doing important work in the world. Participating both virtually and on the ground, members are able to maximise positive impact through collaboration and shared wisdom by:

1. Enhancing our personal callings, while amplifying our collective potential

2. Accessing extraordinary resources, shared wisdom, connectivity and support both on our Hylo online community and in-person experiences

3. Participating in co-creating a transformative movement awakening us to our interconnectedness

4. Collaborating with individuals and groups across all sectors and global communities

5. Finding camaraderie and community that is joyful, compassionate and aligned by wholeness.

Rather than acting as a specific organisation or entity, the Holomovement is a name to rally around, gathering passionate individuals, organisations and networks standing in solidarity with a community that values: Joyful Service for the Good of the Whole; Compassionate Purpose; Unitive Consciousness; Radical Collaboration and Transformative Action.

Learn more about how to join the Holomovement community at holomovement.net/community and stay connected for updates on the Wave 2025 convergence to be held in Asheville, North Carolina, this May 23 - 26th.

JILL ROBINSON is a writer, editor and collaborator supporting mission-driven leaders and organisations through purposeful storytelling. She is co-editor of The Holomovement

Creative Bridges Follow-Up

REMO EERMA

While in the previous issue Francesca beautifully laid out the whole ‘picture’ of the Conference I can take you through my own particular experience and personal feelings of the atmosphere in Oxford. Why I preface this is because it would be impossible to do justice to all that was offered and put together for this conference – I can only bow to the beautiful cohesion, flow, feeling of communitas and the integrated manner in which this conference was held. My reference points are two previous EUROTAS conferences and very few other comparable events of this scale.

At any point in time the participants could choose between eight tracks, within which there was also more than one activity to choose from – although a bit overwhelming and confusing to the mind on the first day – I think I wasn’t the only one who simply decided to go with his gut and heart by the second day, following both my interests and my longings. I often chose the keynotes, and on occasion people I had met before or would have liked to meet in person; finally as an extension of that category – scholars, researchers and practitioners I would consider my Heroes – people I who have opened new worlds for me and who I aspire to emulate in one regard or another.

Before I share some highlights and the general vibe I want to also express that perhaps my take on the conference is not entirely comparable to a newcomer to the scene. Not only was this not my first experience of a EUROTAS conference or similar transformational / transpersonal event; I was also relishing meeting up in person with my course-mates from Alef Trust as well as with colleagues in the New Paradigm Navigators and the Scientific and Medical Network.

Walking through the halls and historical scenes of Oxford, I felt deeply honoured and grateful to be immersed in discussion of such rich and meaningful issues - spirituality, soul, consciousness and the mystical – from both experiential and academic lenses. This is in short what I came away with: a felt sense of the living culture of Transpersonal Studies which invigorated my faith in and excitement for the future of this field.

That is why I went to study with Alef Trust – I wished to see and meet people who not only share my interests as seekers but who deeply live these questions and aspire to give back to others. My overall sense of the conference was a space where people were sharing diverse world-views while also disagreeing with love, kindness and discernment. In that sense, they were even role-modelling a mode of debating fundamental questions.

I was really happy to meet people around my age (29) participating, sharing their thoughts and concerns of the world as well as excitement and awe for the Zeitgeist and change in the world – the new paradigm through the eyes of my own generation. It was often in the breaks, dinners and evenings when I felt that the magic, inspiration and “downloads” of the conference had a chance to be digested and expressed. At only my second breakfast, I met a lady from another culture expressing her deepest grievances and

concerns of her country so sincerely that minutes into the conversation we were crying together. I felt so present and attuned, almost letting go of the activities I had planned for the next session. This happened many times more with different people – I was deeply inspired by their hearts and souls.

Among my highlights was the chance to meet my heroes – Christopher M. Bache for example: people whose books I’ve read more than once but now meet in person, having a chance to ask specific and even personal questions. Even more so, putting them together with other amazing thinkers and enjoying the fruits. This collective conscious-ness (instead of Jung’s collective unconscious) was awe -some to experience. I already felt home & community in EUROTAS, but in Oxford this was beautified, sanctified even by the sheer dedication invested in it, in addition to the energetic field and architecture of the venue which attuned all the presenters and participants.

My main wish now for EUROTAS as a whole is that we should do even more to break the ice as soon as possible. Another lovely highlight was going to the pub in a true English manner – and as my therapy teacher loved to say –“we (as spiritual people) need to come out of our caves and churches and go into the schools, hospitals and pubs to help the people who truly need it.” Not that we renegade thinkers started preaching, but it was fantastic to pick each other’s brains and hearts outside the classroom & even the Oxford exam halls.

REMO EERMA is a young father of two & a passionate student of Transpersonal Psychology currently finishing his MSc in Alef Trust Institute, and is a practising psychotherapist. He is also a New Media enthusiast, producing video & podcasts, digging for pearls and distilling wisdom from our rich past and traditions. He’s deeply interested in meaning, mysticism and the soul. Through his work he aspires to be an agent of re-enchantment helping people remember their true calling, origin and creative potential.

Network News

Monday Dialogue

co-ordinated by Natalie Mears

On Mondays, SMN Members are invited to gather on Zoom for an hour and a half to enter a discussion together, gathering, sharing, deepening connections and getting to know each other a little more deeply. The Monday Dialogue is an opportunity for the SMN family to gather, share and listen to each other in ways that we may not be able to with colleagues, friends and family.

The intention of this space is to share more of ourselves, offering a different type of activity to other SMN activities. Each Dialogue unfolds and evolves naturally, and so are very diverse.

Back in April 2024 we had a session called Shaping the Future of the Monday Dialogue where we sought feedback on how to improve the weekly Member-only event. Since then, we have taken this feedback on board and we have dialogued on:

• The Alexander Technique

• Wholeness (Hosted by Trevor Griffiths)

• The Whole and the Part

• Living in a State of Ease and Flow

• Do Animals Reflect on our Current Society?

• The Trickster Archetype

• The Effects of Reincarnation on the Living (Hosted by Natalie Tobert)

• Extra Terrestrial Encounters

• UFOs, UAPs, Extra Terrestrials, Non-Human Intelligences

• Seeds of Potential (Hosted by Trevor Griffiths)

• Transition Spaces

• Stories of Resonance (Hosted by Trevor Griffiths)

• Being Treated like a Human Being (Hosted by Trevor Griffiths)

• Experiences of Peace (Hosted by Trevor Griffiths)

SMN Friday Bar

by Andreas Mues, host

The first quarter of 2025 covered the following topics and speakers at the Friday Bar:

„ January 3rd – Angie Greenwood , social worker and probation officer, hosted the first Friday Bar of the year on the topic of Kindred Spirits, people dead or alive that we feel a strong connection with. This can happen spontaneously and via direct encounter - think of “love at first sight”, or more slowly over time, when we learn to understand someone else via their writings, movies, songs, etc., and strongly resonate with messages and soul missions and start to feel akin. Angie

shared about her kindred spirit Carl Jung, and a lively discussion unfolded about people that are guiding lights for us.

„ January 10 th – Medium, alchemist and inspirer Penny Hayward joined the Friday Bar to discuss with us insights from afterlife communications and their cosmological implications. Penny shared from her work and discussed beliefs and experiences that were shared by the members. We asked ourselves how our understanding of the universe can be enriched by such experiences and searched for common threads running through interactions between the living and the deceased. We discovered that there is a lot of diversity of beings and states in the spirit world, and some souls stay close to the physical world, while also being present in other metaphysical worlds.

„ January 17th – SMN global ambassador David Lorimer joined the Friday Bar to give an overview on historical and current prospects for the Network David has been working with the Network since 1986 and was close to founding members George Blaker CMG and Dr Peter Leggett, who was Vice-Chancellor of Surrey University, where he hosted an early conference on reincarnation. Besides the recording in the SMN archive, an overview of the last 50 years can also be found in our Jubilee Magazine edited by David and published in 2023.

„ January 24th – Richard Rooley, engineer and expert for occupant performance and health, discussed with us the importance of conscious building. Healthy and functional work settings and living spaces are a basis for sound interaction and communication between different people. We reflected on the characteristics of such spaces, and how stress and conflict can be handled better when considering the aspect of space and building. Many people intuitively sense the atmosphere of a place or building and are affected by it, and we touched a whole range of subjects that are related to this, like the influence of round or rectangular rooms or the representation of organizational management structures and hierarchies in buildings.

„ January 31st – Lee Nichol, Director of Bohmian Studies at the Pari Center in Tuscany, Italy, and longtime friend and collaborator of David Bohm, discussed with us the experiential aspects of Bohm´s metaphysics. American-born British theoretical physicist David Bohm developed a causal, nonlocal interpretation of quantum mechanics and unobserved hidden variables that shape our life. We asked ourselves how to get in touch with this implicate order, permeating and interconnecting everything, and realised that getting in touch with the explicit order is a gateway for entering the Holoflux , tuning into the heartbeat of the universe. Getting in authentic touch with the explicit order can be understood as getting in touch with our inner movements, stepping beyond subject-object-relations and connecting with the manifest world on a deeper level.

„ February 7th – Lucinda Mackworth-Young, piano teacher and psychologist for musicians, reflected with us personal experiences beyond the physical plane and the astral realm. She started with sharing her own mystical experience at age 18, and then other members joined in and shared their own experiences related to being out-ofbody, lucid-dreaming and astral travel in an atmosphere of

mutual respect and encouragement. We reflected on the fact that experience is often beyond words, and we should pay attention to be careful about the way we judge such events, often conveying information that is usually not accessible to the everyday consciousness.

„ February 14th – We also had an Open Space Friday Bar without a specific topic, and enjoyed our community and exchange of thoughts, also holding inspiration for future Friday Bar events and possible guests, and we agreed that this should be a setup for the Friday Bar every then and when. This Open Space Bar allowed us to reflect on states of non-attachment, how to send love to people and events that are challenging and how to tune in to “the larger picture”, acknowledging and transcending the energies of cause and effect.

„ February 21st – We discussed the nature of consciousness and the limits of science with Àlex Gómez-Marín, theoretical physicist turned neuroscientist, Professor of the Spanish Research Council and Director of the Pari Center in Tuscany, Italy. We asked ourselves if science as we know it can help us at all in our efforts to understand consciousness, and realised that it is not only about what science can do for consciousness, but is also about what consciousness can do for science. Àlex shared about his way of “bridging the worlds” between materialistic and post-materialistic science, and we discussed the importance of being courageous and staying in touch with our soul mission in order to contribute to sustainable and authentic change.

„ February 28th – We also had a Friday Bar that was all about the stars – Molly McCord , intuitive astrologer, podcaster and modern consciousness teacher, discussed how astrology can help us with our personal development and understanding of events in the context of change and transformation. Starting from a reflection on astrology as a “cosmic weather forecast”, informing us how to prepare for the energies out there, we continued to ponder about cosmic cycles and the special times we are living in, with a multitude of cosmic events like planetary lineups and planets changing astrological houses this year. Although western astrology is already conveying us with a larger picture, we extended our scope of view further and discussed the possibility of “multilingual astrologers” mediating between Chinese and western astrology, and “Galactic Astrology” beyond the influence of our solar system.

„ March 7th – Medium Penny Hayward joined us again to discuss personal encounters with spirits. Starting from the saying that all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums we discussed that many people have spontaneous experiences with spirits, and there is a growing desire to learn how to connect with loved ones. Penny discussed with us how to create the right energetic conditions without any expectations to make communication with the spirit world more likely. We discussed that the spirit world constantly sends signs, and everybody can attune themselves to receive and understand these signs. Very often a healing process between the worlds and for both worlds is established by this communication.

„ March 14th – The Friday bar for this day was postponed for the “How to think impossibly” event on the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) topic , discussed between our Global Ambassador David Lorimer and Jeffrey Kripal, holder of the J Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and thought leader at the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

„ March 21th – Building on the UAP discussion with Jeffrey Kripal, we had an open reflection space on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly known as UFOs. Host Andreas Mues started with a brief modern history on the whole subject, starting from the 1947 UFO encounter of pilot Kenneth Arnold, the Roswell UFO incident in 1947 and closing with the most current events like the 2004 Nimitz Aircraft Carrier event and US Congressional and Senate hearings, now ultimately moving this topic out of the twilight. Members discussed their opinions and possible explanations like extraterrestrial lifeforms visiting us, undisclosed government technology and interdimensional beings, a concept not that far away from the idea of non-human intelligence acknowledged in various cultures, occultism and religions.

„ March 28th – Serge Beddington-Behrens, transpersonal psychotherapist and author, discussed with us Sacred Activism. We reflected on the fact that the awakening of the universal heart is key to this: Times of crisis are a chance to open our hearts to fellow human beings, the world and spirit, and become sacred activists, bringing a spiritual quality and more heart into the stands we take. Thus we can be more powerful, protected, wiser and more able to deal with opposing forces. The fight is not against anything or anybody but is for a better world and a transformed society. Serge presented different archetypes of the Sacred Activist, like the Creator Activist, tuning into beauty and truth, the Educator Activist helping to discover people their spiritual mission and inner guidance or the Protestor Activist, showing us new ways to say “No”.

„ April 4th – Richard Rooley joined us again, this time to discuss with us Sacred Architecture – the way buildings are and have been designed to create a sacred awareness. At different times we have all experienced a change of mood and perception in such buildings and places, and we therefore reflected on basic structural patterns that are responsible for this, and how a person or group of people resonate with a space. We reflected on how basic architectural principles can catch and guide our attention, and how space can support the goal and purpose of events and people gathering.

„ April 11th – Global Ambassador David Lorimer reflected with us on the first day of the ”SMN Mystics and Scientists Conference 2025 – Grounding and Flourishing in an Era of Complexity, Chaos and Transformation”. Every Friday Bar has its own energetic quality, and aligning to the theme of the weekend it was a very reflective and meditative meeting, honoring the importance of silence and contemplation, and the relevance of dedicating ourselves to our inner truth and calling against all odds: we remembered the life and sacred activism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, † 9. April 1945, 80 years ago.

SMN Sunday Meditation

Every Sunday at 5:50 London time a group of 75 regulars comes together for the Peter Fenwick Meditation Hour. Early morning for some, mid-day and evening for others, we zoom in from California to Greece and all points in between. Gentle music greets us. At precisely 6 pm, in the tradition Peter established, Judith Crichton lights a candle and leads us in two brief exercises of loving kindness and awareness, then reads a short text from the mystic essence of the major spiritual traditions, whether Indic, Zen, Kabbalist,

or Christian, before guiding us ‘down, down’ into stillness and silence. In our meditation, we ‘balance ourselves’ as Peter taught us, a reminder both of the need for a quiet body and stilled mind in our meditation practice and of the larger ‘balance’ we seek between the physical and spiritual realities in each of us. Gentle music again brings us out of our silence and to a poem, often one of Rumi’s. Before he left us, Peter charged the team, Judith in Canada, Martin Redfern in Wales, and Tuvi Orbach in London, and all the participants he greeted each week, to carry on. “It is so powerful, so important!” he declared with his wisdom and untrammeled joy. At the end of our sessions, we gather the love from the horizontal that connects us all and the vertical that guides us into the intersection of our hearts. And as we blow out the candle (being careful not to blow wax onto our computer screens!), we send our love to each other and out into our greatly challenged world. Come and join us from the comfort of your home, wherever that may be …

SMN en Español

This project is celebrating one year of activities in Spanish: monthly events, newsletters, dialogues, partnerships and much more. The last six months have seen growing expansion, with new people volunteering to support the project. A new administrative assistant, Martina Iturria from Uruguay, has joined the team and has been helping Natalia Sánchez, the project leader, with pre- and post-event tasks. There is also a Committee that provides strategic direction and new ideas to the project. The first panel discussion held in Spanish was the result of co-creation among the group’s members: Gabriel Fernández-Borsot, Raquel Torrent, Fernanda Baraybar, Vicente Arráez, Edith Papp, under Natalia’s leadership. It is expected that the Committee will be strengthened with new members joining in the coming month. Here is a list of the events we have held so far:

„ February 2024 – Launch event with Vicente Arráez and Natalia Sánchez: “Breaking Frontiers”. Science, spirituality and consciousness in the Spanishspeaking community.

„ March 2024 – Interview with Àlex Gómez-Ma rín, PhD: “Investigating the Margins of Consciousness from Physics and Neuroscience”. He shared his NDE and his views on the materialist paradigm.

„ April 2024 – Lecture by Gabriel Beltrán, MSc: “Perspectives on Ayahuasca and other Sacred Plants as Vehicles of Consciousness and Healing”. He focused on the use and meaning of sacred plants such as ayahuasca or yagé, coca and yopo by different indigenous groups.

„ May 2024 – Lecture by Soledad Davies, MA: “Astrology, science or superstition? An historical approach”. She gave a historical account of astrology, explaining the constant tension between its religious and scientific aspects.

„ June 2024 – Lecture by Evelyn Elsaesser: “Can our deceased loved ones communicate with us?” She presented research on spontaneous After-Death Communications (ADCs).

„ July 2024 – Interview with Etzel Cardeña, PhD: “The psychology of anomalous (extraordinary)

experiences”. He shared his research on anomalous experiences and altered -or rather, alternative- states of consciousness.

„ August 2024 – Lecture by Juliana Arango, Fernanda Baraybar, and Cristina Pezo: “Spiritual Abuse: Prevention, Identification and Management”. They shared stories of sexual, emotional, financial, and psychological abuse or violence that occurred in spiritual contexts and provided tools for avoidance, detection, and management.

„ September 2024 – Lecture by Darcia Narváez, PhD: “The Evolved Nest: baselines for building a species-typical human nature”. A bilingual event with audio available in English and Spanish. The topic of respectful and loving parenting was addressed from the perspective of animal and human evolution.

„ October 2024 – Interview with Dr. Luján Comas and Dr. Xavier Melo: “Consciousness research during clinical death, near-death experiences” The event focused on NDE and consciousness research in hospitals in Spain and Colombia.

„ November 2024 – Interview with Raquel Torrent: “Inner Positioning for Integral Fulfillment” She presented her psychotherapeutic method based on Integral Psychology, which uses the metaphor of an inner house to promote self-knowledge and improve relationships.

„ January 2025 – Lecture by Falk Parra, PhD: “The golden energy of life: an indigenous re-view of the relevance of gold”. He discussed the importance of gold in the cosmology and ecology of the Kogi people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia.

„ February 2025 – Anniversary event. Panel discussion: “Indigenous perspectives of the ‘paranormal’” with Randy Chung Gonzales (a Peruvian healer), Bety Tuero (from the Qero community in Peru), the anthropologist Prof. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, and psychologist Susana Bustos, PhD. The panellists shared their knowledge and experiences regarding perceptions of the “paranormal” in different indigenous cultures.

„ March 2025 – Lecture by Gabriel FernándezBorsot, PhD: “AI and Spirituality: Keys to a Conscious Future”. He explored the intersection between Artificial Intelligence and spirituality, highlighting the need to strengthen our inner authority, develop diverse forms of intelligence, and prioritise the common good.

We warmly invite SMN members to watch the recordings of past events for FREE, with English automatic subtitles available. Please follow these steps:

1) Go to the SMN YouTube channel youtube.com/@ScientificandMedicalNetwork 2) Scroll down to find the Playlist “SMN en Español”, 3) Choose the event you are interested in and read the summary below the title, 4) Click on the Settings icon, 5) Click on Subtitles, 6) Select English, 7) Click again on Settings or outside the menu to close it, 8) E njoy!

We welcome your feedback at espanol@scimednet.org. If you know someone who might be interested in joining the community, please share the email or this website: https:// scientificandmedical.net/espanol/.

Book Briefings

Every month I Interview authors about their recently published books. Recordings of the sessions are available on our Vimeo channel.

„ January – Prof Immaculato Da Vivo – The Biology of Kindness

„ February – Prof Richard Cytowic MD – Our Stone-Age Brain in a Screen Age

„ March – Jeff Kripal – How to Think Impossibly

„ April – Chris Carter – The Case for the Afterlife

Imaginal Inspirations Podcasts

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution – Albert Einstein

Imaginal cells play a key role the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly (the Greek symbol for the soul). These cells are dormant in the caterpillar but at a critical point of development they create the new form and structure which becomes the butterfly.

In this podcast series, David Lorimer talks to transformational authors and scientists about experiences, people and books that have shaped their lives and professional development.

Live on https://redcircle.com/shows/imaginal-inspirations

Recent episodes:

„ November 2024: Dr Laleh Quinn – Science and Intuition

„ December 2024: Doug Grunther – Quantum Dreams

„ January: Dr Will Keepin – Epistemology of the Heart

„ February: Wendy Ellyatt - Flourishing

„ March: Prof Chris Bache – Diamond Light

Members News

Prof David Cadman and Prof Scherto Gill –A Narrative of Love

For the last ten and more years, our colleagues Scherto Gill and David Cadman have been working on a Narrative of Love, exploring the ways in which the principles and practise of Love can inform all levels of governance both private and public. The Taos Institute has now agreed to publish this work in three books, one following on from the other. The first of these books, to be published in the next few months, is titled Love Arising and is a compilation of the texts written by David Cadman to establish that Love is of the essence, that Love must be taken seriously and that we must learn to love. The second, written by two young researchers, Antonia Gergen and Paul Lopez Ramos will present an affirmation of the essence of Love as seen in the relationship between mother/parent and child in utero, at birth and in the early years of childhood as seen through the eyes of neurology, biology and psychology. The third

book, being written by Scherto Gill, will explore Love at work in the field of education through a number of international case studies associated with work her with UNESCO.

Consciousness Perspectives Forum

Claudia

Nielsen, organiser

Monthly webinars from 19:30-21:30 (London) exploring science, spirituality, consciousness and human experience. Presentations by experts in their fields, offering the opportunity to question, comment and interaction in the second hour of the meeting.

Recordings are sent to all registrants and are available free for members of the SMN.

If you wish to join the circulation list and receive information on the series, please email claudia@scimednet.org

January 2025

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Philosopher and Theologian

This webinar was delivered by Dr DAVID GRUMETT who is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics in the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Teilhard de Chardin: Theology, Humanity and Cosmos (Peeters 2005). In 2018 he published, with Paul Bentley, the Six Propositions that Teilhard had been required to sign in 1925, the contexts of which had, until then, been kept secret.

„ Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a Catholic spiritual visionary. He was born in the Verne region of France. In childhood he developed an interest in geology and fossils and was shaped by the Catholic piety of his family and joined the Jesuits at the age of 17. He lived in the time between Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the doctrinal liberalising second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. At this time the Church was grappling with the issue of how to reconcile its doctrines with the theory of evolution, including the notion that the origin of sin lies in the act of disobedience of Adam and Eve and the status of the soul as an entity separate from the body. Teilhard put forward a revisionary synthesis of theology and evolution which was seen by some as threatening doctrinal orthodoxy and for that reason most of his writings appeared only after his death in 1955.

Teilhard argued that matter was suffused with energy and our materiality is something that unites us as people. Matter needs spirit to act on and organise it and its cosmic role is shown in the resurrection of Christ. His high valuation of matter is an important antidote to postmodern theologies. The soul is dependent on matter for its place in the world which, however, presents it with the painful boundary it is unable to transcend, which is death of the body. This forms the passive half of the life of the soul which means that matter makes possible our activity as well as our passivity.

The context of Teilhard’s study of evolution is based on the Lamarckian idea that all action is governed by a primordial teleology by a universal power which orders the universe in accordance with divine will. For him evolution has intentionality unlike Darwinian theory which argues that external natural environment determines the course of evolution. Teilhard however goes further than Lamarck by endorsing the classical understanding of God as creator and sustainer of the world. Within this principle, Teilhard saw evolution as a creative moment in which humanity assumes an active, creative role. The movement of the universe towards its final unity, the Omega Point in Christ, is enacted in human awareness, action and passion. This means that humans are themselves fundamentally drivers of evolution. Human evolution has become conscious.

Social and political action that effect a real material and transformative difference in the world is a sharing in God’s creative action. Teilhard acknowledges that in many areas of life, such as banking, commerce and politics, there is a lack of a moral dimension which may endanger life as a whole. Moral capacity is a condition for survival of the human race.

Unity is the core of Teilhard’s message. No part of the world is separate from any other and no part of the world can be understood or described in isolation from the rest. The unity of the universe is governed by the unifying action of Christ and isn’t free to determine its own ends. But neither is evolution preordained. As part of complexification and growth of human consciousness Teilhard intuited the creation of the world wide web with his notion of the ionosphere, a gigantic network girdling the earth.

As for the evolution of society, Teilhard sees as relevant the convergence of moral principles with metaphysics and politics and shows they are mutually reinforcing whether for good or ill. By highlighting that connection, he challenges us to face the questions these areas bring up and make the right choices for us personally and for society.

February

Wittgenstein and the religious point of view

Our speaker DAVID EGAN, is an assistant professor of philosophy at Koç University in Istanbul. David earned his DPhil in philosophy from Oxford University and has taught at a number of institutions in the UK, USA, and Canada. He is the author of The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday (Oxford University Press, 2019).

„ Wittgenstein is a philosopher who focused on logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. However, he was fascinated by concepts of God and meaning in life generally, and famously said to his friend Morris Drury ‘I’m not a religious man but cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.’

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 into the second wealthiest family in the Austro-Hungarian empire after the Emperor himself. He went to a technical school and later to Manchester in the UK to study engineering where he did some early research on aeronautical engineering. He became increasingly interested in mathematics and philosophy and was encouraged to seek out Bertrand Russell who was the most notable mathematician

and logical philosopher in the world at the time, and was working in Cambridge. His relationship with Russell was at times challenging but Russell soon realised that Wittgenstein was an equal with an outstanding intellect. When WW1 broke out Wittgenstein signed up to serve in the Austrian army as an artillery watchman, attracting fire from the enemy, which he did to test his courage. It was a miracle he survived the war. During this time, he went through a deep spiritual crisis. He became obsessed with the Christian Gospels having come across Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, a synthesis of the four gospels written in 1902 into one narrative account based on the life of Jesus. Wittgenstein was taken prisoner of war in Italy in 1919 and there he finalised the manuscript of his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. He posted this from his prisoner of war camp to Bertrand Russell in Cambridge who managed to find a publisher for the book.

When his book started making waves in intellectual circles, he was invited to evening discussions with other philosophers in Vienna and in 1929 he returned to Cambridge where he spent WW2 teaching and revising Tractus into Philosophical Investigations, which he requested not to be published until after his death. He died in Cambridge in 1951 saying he had had a wonderful life.

In his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1921) Wittgenstein argues that language can only represent facts and logical structures and that there are aspects of reality that cannot be expressed through language. In this he was influenced by William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) who argued that religious experiences cannot be apprehended through the senses and cannot be communicated through rational discourse.

Against a mystical background, Wittgenstein suggests that certain profound truths lie beyond the reach of language, advocating for silence when confronted with the ineffable. The work ends with the famous statement: ‘ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

In his second work – Philosophical Investigations (1953) he turns to philosophy focusing on the use of language in everyday life and the concept of ‘language games.’ He argues that the meaning of words is determined by their use in specific contexts and activities, rather than by their correspondence to an external reality. Writers and communicators are always told to think about the audience they are speaking to and to craft their communications accordingly. David used the example of Heraclitus’ statement that ‘a man cannot step into the same river twice.’ Colloquially that is incorrect because we can demonstrate stepping into the same river twice, three or 100 times. What Wittgenstein called the ‘language games’ needs to be used in the right context. Meaning for Wittgenstein was fundamental and is determined by the context in which language is used.

March

The Structure of Reality – a Gnostic Perspective

PAUL KIENIEWICZ is a former Co-Chair of the SMN. He was born in Scotland but now lives permanently in Poland where he runs the Sichow Educational Foundation, which promotes holistic education. Paul is an astronomer and geologist by training. He has worked as a teacher and geophysicist. He

has long studied early Christian literature, of which he is an expert and translator. He is the author of the Polish translation of The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Truth. His talks on Gnostic texts are available online. His other works include Harmony of the Universe, The Cosmic View, published in English, and fantasy novels Immortality Machine and Gaia’s Children „ Paul started by asking the question: who are we and what are we doing in the world? This is a question most of us ask in periods of distress, when we feel alone and when we look around and see the suffering in the world. The answer from the world’s great religions is sparse especially when it comes to evil. For Buddhists, evil is woven into the fabric of life, but Christianity does not have a clear answer and characterises evil is the absence of good. But as Jung pointed out in his Answer to Job, this view does not conform with human experience. Auschwitz or the experiences of October 7th in Israel and the Gaza war in 2024/5 are not absence of good. The question then is how can a perfect deity create such an imperfect world? The Gnostics had an answer to that question and for that they were persecuted and burnt at the stake. The Church felt threatened. The Gnostics proposed that the universe is imperfect because there is a flaw in the design. The gods who made it were imperfect and our task is to repair a disaster that took place before time began. The Gnostics had creation myths which were discovered in manuscripts in the Egyptian desert in 1945. They were written around the second century AD.

There is an explanatory myth, The Secret Book of John, which proposes an ineffable being beyond human understanding who wanted to understand him/her/itself, and to be known. The Greeks gave it a name – the Pleroma or Fullness with qualities such as depth, energy, love, truth, silence, inclusiveness, community. Sophia, Wisdom, the youngest of these qualities had a vision of the incomprehensible, something totally beyond anything she could understand and she wanted to join with it. Because that was impossible, from her light and her passion is born Ialdabaoth. He doesn’t know his mother but has a desire to rule a universe and since there isn’t one there, he creates one in the image of the Pleroma from its reflection. Ialdabaoth has Sophia’s light, which she has lost, and he was tricked into releasing this light inside Adam - a man made of clay.

When the angels heard Adam speak, they were astounded and scared because they realised his consciousness was higher than theirs. They consequently drop Adam into the prison of the body where he will fall asleep and forget who he really is. The insight is that we remember nothing about our source, who we are and what we are doing here. However, we have a spark of Sophia’s light which gives us a special ability to find our way out of the prison. Sometimes this light is called mind, or intuition, sometimes intelligence. And it is through this ability that a person can come to know who they are and why they are here. This can only happen in life, and not after we leave this world.

As for the question of evil, that is explained as resulting from Sophia’s ignorance when wanting to join something ineffable. The right knowledge restores the mistake that was at the beginning.

Salvation according to the Gnostics does not happen through Jesus’ death on the cross, but through knowing who one is and where one comes from. This can be achieved through meditation or some other altered states in which we become conscious of a larger self. We catch a glimpse of who we truly are. That is the knowledge that can repair the mistake that was at the beginning.

Another important point we need to understand is that the origins of chaos and evil are beyond the origins of humanity. From a personal point of view, we must not feel responsible for events which are outside of our control but must exercise control over those which are.

April

Who Was Hermes Trismegistus

GARY LACHMAN is the author of 25 books on Western esoteric traditions, consciousness and culture. One of them carries the title of this month’s webinar. Gary can be reached at gary-lachman.com/, www.facebook.com/GVLachman/ and twitter.com/GaryLachman.

„ Hermes Trismegistus - Thrice Greatest – was a remarkable influential figure from ancient times. He was thought to be an actual figure, a great sage, teacher and magician who greatly influenced the Western Tradition. He was the sage from the beginning of time who revealed the place of man in the world and in the cosmos that became the essence of all the great religions.

He is the supposed author of the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of 17 Greek writings which greatly influenced the Western esoteric tradition. However, it has been shown that there were at least five or six writers who claimed that name.

Historically Hermes Trismegistus is a blend of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Hermes was a messenger from God, a magician and a psychopomp with access to the underworld. Thoth was a scribe who wrote down the account of the outcome of the weight of a feather and the heart of the diseased that carries the decision regarding the after world. He was also a god of magic and writing.

Hermes Trismegistus was considered the font of Egyptian wisdom which came from the Land of Chem which is where the world alchemy comes from. He was said to be the inventor of writing, the master of magic and the author of the Emerald Tablets in which the phrase ‘as above so below’, appears. He was the source of the perennial philosophy which incorporates the notion that behind all the great religions there is one central insight which is Spirit. Spirit is the true reality of consciousness, and expanding one’s consciousness is the path to that understanding. Hermetics and Gnostics shared in this belief. Hermetic knowledge is present in alchemy, astrology and theurgy. Amongst other bodies of knowledge which were predicated on the teachings of hermeticism were the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry.

Hermeticism became discredited as superstition with the advent of the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing religious strife in the 17-18th centuries but its influence has never completely disappeared.

Hermetic knowledge influenced Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who was burnt at the stake for those views. Amongst many others were physician and philosopher Robert Fludd (1574-1637), Mozart (1756-1791) William Blake (1757-1827), Goethe (1749-1842), Madame Blavatsky ((1831-1891) Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and Carl Jung (1875-1961) particularly in his work towards the reconciliation of opposites. The influence of Hermeticism in contemporary times can also be seen in the music of David Bowie in the 70s, in Aleister Crowley’s image on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, in the music of Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Jay-Z, amongst others.

Book Reviews

SCIENCE/ PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

OUR CRUCIAL MOMENT OF CHOICE

By David Lorimer

PURE HUMAN

Gregg Braden

Hay House, 2025, 271 pp., $25.99, h/b – ISBN 978-14019-4936-5

In this very important and timely book, Gregg spells out the implications for our humanness of a transition to transhumanism – ‘Human 2.0’ – in accordance with the Fourth Industrial Revolution promoted by Silicon Valley and the World Economic Forum (WEF). He sees true evolution as a recognition and remembrance of our inherent divinity, while the prospect held up by transhumanists is for a merging of human and machine, as also advocated by Yuval Noah Harari. Gregg interprets this as devolution rather than evolution into ‘a hybrid species of synthetic bodies, artificial intelligence, and computer chips that limit our ability to think, to love, and to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way.’ He adds that ‘in doing so, we will also lose our capacity for emotion, empathy, intimacy, and forgiveness – the very qualities that we value and cherish as our humanness.’ (my emphasis) In other words, we will become less human and more robotic. Many of these developments are already in the pipeline and so now is the time to become aware of this crucial and fundamental choice before we are overtaken by events. Interestingly, one of the motivations is to ‘fix the flaws’ in the human operating system – a view with parallels to original sin that requires redemption. In the transhumanist case, what they regard as a flaw is our very emotional and spiritual nature that gets in the way of rational decision-making. This is very much a left hemisphere view aimed at tightening manipulation and control of the human population. Gregg defines human divinity as the ability to transcend our perceived limitations, and he argues that we each have a personal code of divinity to unlock our deepest potential. Fascinatingly, in a chapter about the ancient message coded in our DNA, he explains how, using gematria – translating letters into numbers in the ancient cuneiform languages of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Hebrew – heaven is equivalent to soul, yielding the message ‘God eternal within the body.’ This is who we all really are.

In this book and in a number of YouTube podcasts, Gregg explains that we are in the midst of a battle for our humanness and that the changes proposed, once implemented, will be irreversible. Moreover, our fundamental human qualities and capacities are likely to atrophy. Archetypally, we are in a battle between good and where evil is represented by fear, control, manipulation, compulsion and will to power. This is the opposite of love and compassion represented by the heart, and it is a connection to our inherent divinity represented by the power of the Spirit that can free us from fear. This view is underpinned by an understanding that the universe is alive and active in our own evolution, which includes an unnatural fusion of chromosomes (pp. 29 ff) that belies random mutation. The goal of transhumanism is effectively to erase the link between the human and the divine (pp. 65 ff) and bypass our inherent ethical sense of what is right. Just because we have the technology does not mean that we are obliged to use it to introduce a new form of eugenics. Gregg explains three phases of the proposed transhumanist revolution involving neural implants, synthetic bodies, and consciousness stored on a computer chip – this last point assumes, incorrectly, that consciousness is simply electrical impulses generated in the brain. Moreover, cloning experiments have so far not produced the intended results, arguably because they are out of resonance and disconnected from life processes. (p. 87) Moreover, an important goal of transhumanists is for human reproduction to be outsourced to technology in artificial wombs, thereby replacing the biological functions of the woman. One shudders to think of the emotional damage that would be incurred.

On the contrary, Gregg argues that we are the future we’ve been waiting for whereby ‘consciousness informs itself through its creations.’ He explains what he calls pure human technology in relation to ourselves and DNA (p. 100 ff) enabling us to self-regulate through our advanced soft technology ‘through the user interfaces of thought, feeling, emotion, breath, and other epigenetic factors.’ We also have the capacity to create an optimised state of heart-brain coherence, and possess hidden creative powers that can bring about miraculous healings and the manifestation of ‘your future dream as a present fact’ according to the extraordinary thinker Neville Goddard, whose work I commend to you.

The last two chapters asks whose idea of progress are we following – human or hybrid – and how do we de-programme ourselves from the spell of technology. Gregg’s discussion is very well informed, especially in relation to events since 2020 fronted by the WEF’s Great Reset and presented as inevitable – where ‘the entire system will be governed automatically by sophisticated algorithms, deep surveillance, and an advanced system of AI’ – if readers are not up to speed on the aspirations of technocracy, I

recommend the work of Patrick Wood and a recent podcast by Dr Aaron Kheriaty. It is essential to be aware of what Gregg brilliantly discusses here, and how this relates to the partnership with the UN and the 2030 SDGs as the enforced mode of implementation. (pp. 166 ff) He describes the chilling features of transhumanist society where authorities will have access to our innermost thoughts and feelings. Intriguingly, he reports on alien abductions as a means of warning us about the technological choices we are in the process of making, where they in the past ‘chose to replace their natural bodies with machines and gadgets.’ We are precisely at this crucial moment of choice, and we need to be fully aware of the implications.

The final chapter reiterates how the Great Reset is based on ‘diminishing our humanness in exchange for digital supremacy and control of all life… it is we humans who must be modified and digitally enhanced to fit into the world they envision.’ (p. 197) Moreover, ‘everyone must participate.’

Gregg reminds us that ‘the worldly expressions of our divine nature are also expressions of the sacred and even deeper values of freedom: freedom of thought, freedom of sharing ideas, freedom of imagination and creativity, freedom of self-reliance, and the freedom to share with others what inspires us in our lives.’ (p. 205) The means at the disposal of world leaders include fifth generation information warfare, where minds and brains are directly targeted – see my review of Michael Nehls’ The Indoctrinated Brain in PE 145.

This is what Gregg calls the Dangerous Game – a large scale social engineering and propaganda project using the most sophisticated psychological techniques that were fully deployed during Covid and now in the Ukraine war. We are encouraged to turn against each other and to shun those who question the mainstream narrative. The means are neatly summarized by Saul Alinsky as ‘pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it.’ Gregg identifies the tactics involved, including the use of manipulation through fear and guilt, and ensuring that there is no way out other than what is suggested by the authorities (problem, reaction, solution). He also spells out remedies for these tactics in terms of the need for independent critical thinking, and saying no to the addictive lure of scanning social media feeds. He concludes that when we choose the remedies, ‘the indoctrination fails, and the Dangerous Game is over.’ To describe this book as essential reading for our time would be an understatement. The message is summarised at the end in a series of 70 succinct Pure Human Truths, reminding us that we must ‘openly claim our humanness and the values that we cherish in our species as sacred,’ and that it is all about love and preserving the gift of our humanness ‘over the illusion of progress and efficiency that is presented to us through advanced technology.’ A book to put on the top of your pile. Note: I will be speaking to Gregg about this book on June 12.

WHAT HAPPENS WHERE THERE IS NO ONE TO LOOK IN THE EYE?

By Gunnel Minett

OUR STONE AGE BRAIN IN THE SCREEN AGE Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload

Richard E. Cytowic

MIT Press, 2024, 344 pp., £21.85, h/b - ISBN 978-026204-900-9

Are we becoming ‘humans doing’ rather than ‘human beings’, the author asks in this hugely significant book. He is concerned about the rapid change in the way we relate to IT - in particular, our heavy use of the Internet and mobile phones. Not only has modern technology profoundly changed the way we access information, it has also detached us from traditional human interaction.

Should we be worried by this development? Yes, says Cytowic, mainly because we are not yet completely clear what the long-term effects will be. Smartphones have only been around for about 15 years, which is a trivial amount of time in terms of the evolutionary process. However, mobile phones have brought about a profound change in the daily lives of very many people. Our use of them is on par with many forms of serious addiction.

One thing we do know, Cytowic says, is that our brains have not changed very much since stone age times. This means that our brains are adjusted to a very different pace of life than we have today. For hundreds of thousands of years, our brains were fine-tuned to react to an environment in which we functioned as part of nature: no artificial noises or bright lights, a much slower pace and only face-toface interactions with both fellow humans and animals. We were very well adapted to this environment.

Then the industrial revolution started to change all this and it became more difficult for the brain to cope. And now the IT revolution has changed things even more drastically and in an even shorter time than the industrialisation process. In a very short period of time, we have moved from face-to-face conversations, to the telephone, and now to zoom or FaceTime, etc. Many adolescents in particular have moved even further from verbal conversations into text messaging.

Although the change from stone age tranquility to modern cyber life has been dramatic, we’ve yet to see the full consequences for the brain, Cytowic argues. For adults the change has been substantial and there are many clear signs of adults being totally addicted to their phones and computer screens. But Generation Z (born around 2000) has grown up with the new technology. How their brains have been affected is not yet clear at all.

It is only recently that any observations have been made about the effects of the new technology on the developing brain, but it’s already clear that mobile phones and other such devices are making changes to the brains of growing children, and in particular when such devices are used as a substitute for human child care. Psychological problems among teenagers are already showing up in the statistics, even though there still hasn’t been enough research to establish a clear link between cause and effect.

Research has however made it clear that a growing brain needs other brains to learn from. Children learn from copying others. They need human faces to study so that they can learn facial expressions, empathy and how to optimise social interaction. Although social interaction can take place on Internet platforms, this is not an adequate substitute for face to face interaction. And watching film clips, regardless of how educational they claim to be, will not provide the necessary two-way communication a growing brain requires. Cytowic draws a parallel with experiments on monkeys: they preferred a fluffy piece of cloth to a wire model of a mother monkey, even if the latter provided some additional comforts. This illustrated the depth of their conditioning

natural behaviour. The Internet is often full of ‘additional attractions’ - courtesy of clever developers - that tend to hook the users with carefully designed baits. But as Cytowic illustrates, this only leads to addiction, with no added benefits.

The book gives multiple examples of the effects of excessive IT use. Just reading the chapter headings gives a clear impression of this; such as ‘brain drain’, ‘virtual autism’, ‘brain energy cost of screen distraction’, ‘degrading ability for empathy’, ‘sleep deprivation from blue screen light’, ‘googlised’ minds, to name just a few. It also deals with new phenomena such as FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and other more severe symptoms that growing brains suffer from when they are exposed to virtual internet reality rather than to real life.

Cytowic puts a lot of the blame on the negative effects of our use of IT technology on the developers of social platforms and other Internet devices. They often hire neuroscience experts, not to provide the safest way to use their devices, but rather how to develop the most addictive way to attract users to their platforms. In the author’s words; “By themselves, modern devices don’t confer power because they only serve up factoids. What you do with them is the point. We are in the mess we’re in because corporations have deftly commandeered our Stone Age brain, which can’t help but glom on to novelty and change because that is what it evolved to do.” (p. 57)

The book presents a frightening picture as to how a new technology has, in a very short time, had a massive effect on our brains and behaviour. The author compares our innocence and naivety in using these new devices with way cigarettes were promoted when they first came on the market. In the case of cigarettes, science eventually caught up and informed us of their lethal effects. This book makes a similar wake-up call. It’s a must read for anyone – especially parents of young children - who wants to use the new technology while avoiding its negative side-effects.

„ Gunnel Minett is author of Breath and Spirit –https://breathwork-science.com

NAVIGATING A COMPLEX WORLD

By Vasileios Basios (PhD, Physics of Complex Systems)

THE DAO OF COMPLEXITY: Making Sense and Making Waves in Turbulent Times

Jean Boulton

De Gruyter Brill, 2024, €24.95, 400 pp., p/b – ISBN 9783-11099-264-9

This remarkable book is distinguished by its illuminating exploration of the contemporary complex world, which is characterised by unpredictability, interconnectedness, and constantly changing flows. Boulton’s book is intellectually invigorating and profoundly nourishing for the heart and spirit. This can be attributed to the author’s infectious enthusiasm and unique ability to translate sophisticated concepts into practical wisdom. From the very first pages, the reader is immediately struck by a sense of illumination and inspiration. ‘The Dao of Complexity’ represents a distinctive synthesis of a treatise on systems theory and a philosophical musing on ancient wisdom. Furthermore, Boulton’s writing can be

considered a form of activism. It is evident that the author employs a persuasive discourse, unique for its meticulous crafting and intimate style, to instigate a shift in perspective among the readership. This discourse serves as a catalyst, prompting novel interpretations of the intricacies and multifaceted nature of the world.

The book’s structure is so appealing, it invites you to just dip in and out, and to enjoy the thought-provoking reflections each time. Her text design is amazing. It is inspired by Daoist texts and, like these, it encourages serendipitous discovery and deep contemplation. This allows the reader to discover meaning and insights.

Here Complexity Daoism meet in a “remarkable resonance”, as she puts it, and in a vibrant resonant synthesis. The author confidently masters two powerful traditions: the scientific study of complexity and the ancient philosophy of Daoism. Boulton masterfully unveils the deep connections between these worldviews, demonstrating that both emphasise process, emergence, and the interconnectedness of all things.

In these troubled times, with so many challenges to face –turbulence, pandemics, climate change, political unrest and wars – it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But Boulton’s message is one of hope. She suggests that traditional, mechanistic ways of thinking are not the way to find solutions. Instead, she gently invites us to see the world as a dynamic, ever-evolving process, where outcomes are not always predictable and where our actions ripple outward in unexpected and hopeful ways.

The first part of the book, “Making Sense”, establishes this novel –but ancient– worldview. Drawing on the frontiers of quantum physics, neuroscience and political theory, Boulton confidently demonstrates that both our brains and minds as well as the world around us operate as complex, adaptive, innovating systems, constantly shaped by experience, interaction and feedback. She employs the Daoist concept of “the way that is made by walking” to demonstrate that the future is not a predetermined destination, but rather an attractor shaped by our choices and intentions.

Her perspective is liberating and challenging: it frees us from the illusion of total control and encourages humility and openness. She invites us to stay alert and attuned to subtle shifts for effective leadership and meaningful change.

The second part, “Making Waves”, is where the book really shines as a guide for action. In this, Boulton thoughtfully explores what it means to lead, innovate and create change in a world where outcomes are uncertain and linear planning often fails. She has so many stories and examples to share, covering everything from leadership and education to governance and personal growth. She shows us how to embrace complexity to create responses that are stronger, more caring and better able to adapt.

The book’s most powerful message is clear: we must learn to “make waves” without expecting to control the tide. Our actions matter, but their effects will always be shaped by the broader system in which they occur. This insight is vital for anyone engaged in social change, digital transformation or organisational leadership. Rather than clinging to rigid plans or over-relying on rules, Boulton shows us how to trust, foster creativity, and build cultures of loving, learning and adaptation.

The Dao of Complexity is the indispensable guide to the “big and pressing questions” of our time, including climate change, inequality and polarisation. It combines intellectual rigour and practical relevance with thoughtful guidance on how individuals and societies can respond with hope and determination. Her writing is characterised by a deep compassion and profound respect for the intricacies of human

experience. She challenges readers to move beyond simplistic, quantitative measures of success and to value qualities like empathy, trust, and the capacity to hold paradox.

As part of my work duties, I have to read a lot on complexity, which can sometimes be a bit of a challenge! However, what made this book a really joyful and refreshing read is the fact that it is so accessible. I absolutely love how she makes even the trickiest concepts feel so welcoming and relatable. She has this remarkable ability to take these complex ideas and explain them in a way that’s so easy and deeply satisfying for everyone to understand, no matter what their background is.

In a world where control, measurement and certainty can sometimes feel like the only things we know and care about, Jean Boulton’s ‘The Dao of Complexity’ is like a warm breeze on a hot summer’s day. It’s a caring reminder to let go of the daily grind and embrace the beauty and wonder of life. I absolutely love this book. It’s one of those that will really get your creative juices flowing, fill your heart with joy and give you the courage to go out there and “make waves” in your own unique way.

I wholeheartedly recommend it! Read it again and again, for each time you will earn new insights and inspiration for our shared journey ahead. Links to click:

• The book’s webpage: https://www.embracingcomplexity. com/books/the-dao-of-complexity/

• A video podcast featuring Dr Jean Boulton talking about her book and work: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SeJpEZbV8WI

THE FAUSTIAN TRAGEDY

By David Lorimer

MAN AND TECHNICS

Oswald Spengler

Legend Books, 2023, 80 pp., $10, p/b – ISBN 978-8367583-48-0

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was a cultural historian most famous for his 1917 book, The Decline of the West, which shocked the public with its pessimistic forecast of the inevitable ultimate demise of Western culture. I first read the abridged edition of this work nearly 50 years ago, and it aroused my interest in the rise and fall of civilisations. Arnold Toynbee was deeply influenced by the book in formulating his own Study of History but did not, like Spengler, see cultures as organisms subject to the cycles of life. The decisive influence on Spengler’s thought was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, with his ideas of Will to Power, life as a battle, and the ultimate tragedy of human beings and high cultures alike, both subject to a pitiless destiny of mortality. He writes that ‘impermanence, birth and passing, is the form of all that is actual…. The life of the individual is as perishable as that of peoples of cultures. (p. 29) All around us are the melancholy ruins of previous civilisations – so why we should we assume that our own culture is not subject to the same laws? Sir John Glubb took a similar view, characterising the lifespan of cultures as around 250 years, which means the US reaches its expiry date next year. Spengler’s rather one-sided view of the human being is as a beast of prey, a predator – a highly masculine and

patriarchal stance reflecting what Riane Eisler calls a dominator rather than a partnership society. The feminine polarity is essentially absent – as is love – from Spengler’s worldview. Indeed, he characterises feelings of sympathy, reconciliation, and yearning for quiet as toothless – in other words alien to what he regards as the noble (Nordic-Faustian) warrior mentality. The ethos of Europe in the early 1930s, when this book was first published, is not dissimilar to our own with the return of authoritarianism underpinned by mechanistic technocratic ideas of control of the masses. The five chapters first introduce technics as the tactics of living, moving on to contrast herbivores with beast of prey; then human origins in terms of hand and tool, which he explains corresponds to speech and enterprise; finally, the last act is the rise and end of the machine culture – interestingly, here he also forecasts the loss of wage labour to Third World countries.

Spengler is prescient about the dynamic of ruthless industrial exploitation of nature, whereby we ultimately destroy our habitat and ourselves. Again, this relationship is based on the warfare metaphor, this time against nature – which must ultimately prove self-defeating, as EF Schumacher also forecast. Cities encourage an artificial life removed from nature, and the development of technology enslaves us, despite our aspiration to master nature. The city also creates surplus wealth and therefore luxury and fine art as elite expressions of culture. Spengler sees how humans replace God with their own image. The 19 th century saw the rise of rationalism, utilitarianism, socialism, communism and liberalism that provided a new polarity to the tension between secular Empire and religious Papacy. It is interesting that these are represented by the French revolution liberty and equality, so one could postulate fraternity as the reconciliation between the two. This was the view of Peter Deunov.

In traditional societies, the elite has been either nobility with its practical orientation to facts and action, or the priesthood oriented towards truth and causality. As numbers increase, the significance of the individual is diminished and organisms are subsumed in organisations. This results in the rise of the (industrial) masses and collectivism demanding conformity. The individual rebels against this by asserting freedom, which is ultimately inner, as Viktor Frankl maintained. More pathologically, we see the mirror images of contempt from above, and envy from below. We also see the rise of ideologies that likewise subordinate the individual to the group, whose dynamics distinguish the ingroup from the outgroup, friends from enemies, leading to the polarisation that is all too apparent.

The naive idea of progress is now in crisis as prospects look more dystopian than utopian. We are increasingly enslaved by our own technology, which is also being used by governments for surveillance and control. Moreover, the cult of violence and war continues to predominate, as we have collectively failed, as yet, to learn the lesson that violence can only lead to more violence, as Christ pointed out 2,000 years ago, a view restated by Tolstoy, Gandhi, Sorokin and Martin Luther King. Unfortunately, war is still profitable, and macho politicians find it good for their image. Steiner agreed with Spengler that human evolution was cyclical, but he was ultimately more optimistic in his understanding of death and subsequent rebirth. Spengler is right, I think, to say that we will be eaten up from within, like all great forms of any culture (p. 77), but our situation is more paradoxical in combining technical progress with moral decay – however, the seeds of renewal are also coming up.

HEALTH AND HEALING

A NATIONAL HEALING SERVICE

By Thomas Daffern

SANE ASYLUMS - The Success of Homeopathy before Psychiatry Lost its Mind

Jerry M. Kantor Healing Arts Press, 2022, 270 pp., p/b - ISBN 978-164411-408-7

If you are at all interested in mental illness and psychiatry (and who of us in the Scientific and Medical Network are not?), you will want to read this book and re-visit a sadly lost chapter in the history of psychiatric medicine. Who among us knew that there was a time in US medical history when homeopathy was the preferred treatment for mental illness? Not only did it not have the tragic side effects that conventional psychiatric drugs produce, but it had a gentle and consistent success rate of actually treating and curing people.

The author is a faculty member of the Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine based in Massachusetts who has done us all a great favour by researching the incredible lost history of homeopathy in the USA. He has discovered that in the late 1800s and early 1900s homeopathy was popular all over the USA with more than a 100 fully functioning homeopathic hospitals and more than 1000 homeopathic pharmacies flourishing. There were also 22 homeopathic medical schools; yet all this history has been virtually wiped out of the collective memory due to the politicisation of medicine and the arrogance of the material-medical school who imposed a particular paradigm of scientific allopathy on the American medical profession.

The giants of the pharmaceutical industry, as it was then developing, seized control of the legislative process through Congress and essentially created a false orthodoxy in which the only possible paradigm for healing people was to become the scientific straightjacket of today. For those of us in the Scientific and Medical Network who are looking critically at the origins of this state of affairs, it might well be useful to re-visit the way that homeopathy was once so popular in the US and other parts of the world. We might then study the lessons of therapeutic impoverishment caused by the narrowing of the parameters of our medical paradigms. We might learn to our surprise that all that is modern is not necessarily better. This book is not a historical treatise and at times it is maddeningly difficult to navigate. It is more a tract by an enthusiast who wants us to discover a long-lost wisdom that we do not yet even know that we have lost.

We learn many things from this book such as how popular homeopathy was in the 19 th century in the USA with its advocates including Dr. William James, the philosopher and physiologist and author of the seminal Varieties of Religious Experience, Longfellow, the poet, Hawthorne, the essayist, Harriet Beeches Stowe, Louis May Alcott and President Abraham Lincoln among many others. Lincoln’s respect for homoeopathy is an under-researched fact of his own intellectual universe. And his wife, Mary Lincoln was treated for her own mental illness which occurred from time to time, with homeopathy. In 1875, she was admitted

to Belview Hospital which was one of the most important of the homeopathic asylums treating mental patients at the time. She was released from the hospital later that year into the custody of her sister and the next year was officially declared sane by the Chicago District Court.

Her husband, of course, had been tragically assassinated some years previously and no doubt this had contributed to her own unfortunate mental state. We may ask: how does homeopathy treat mental illness? Like all homeopathic remedies it takes minute doses of pathological substances which would otherwise cause delusions and hallucinations, if a person consumed them at normal dosage. But by reducing the size of the dose to minute traces, these homeopathic remedies seem to kick start a natural contra-reaction by the patient’s mind-body system. It is as if by giving the patients mind-body a tiny dose of madness, it decides actually I don’t want that and somehow creates antibodies that can then restore the patient to general health. I can speak from personal experience that this actually works since having prescribed a homeopathic remedy based on snake poison, I watched as the patient recovered visibly for the better within a couple of weeks.

Most contemporary practitioners of the psychiatric profession in Britain and the English-speaking worlds have now realised that we have reached a bit of a dead-end in what is on offer through conventional psychiatry. Patients are rendered docile and compliant and their symptoms can be greatly lessened if the correct psychiatric allopathic remedies are administered, but everyone agrees they before long that may have to prescribe large numbers, perhaps up to 4 or 5 additional medicines per day, to treat a complex psychiatric condition and then on top of that to prescribe another 4 or 5 medicines to address their side-effects and so on and on.

This has led one group of psychologists to frame an entirely new way of dealing with psychiatric breakdown which is to examine the familial, social and personal worlds of the patient who is suffering. They call this the Power Threat Meaning Paradigm, which was developed by a team led by Dr. Lucy Johnstone and published in 2018 by the British Psychological Society (BPS). Through rigorous research they have discovered that psychiatric breakdown normally occurs when there is an imbalance of power that is built up over time in the patient’s circumstances. Extreme cases are abuse, including sexual abuse. At this point the patient feels under threat and it might lead to hallucinatory delusions occurring which however also have some grounding in fact,

Recently, a talk was given summarising this paradigm which ends with a poem dedicated to a psychiatric patient who was treated to literally dozens of psychiatric medicines none of which cured her. It can be seen here: www.youtube. com/watch?v=R6VHV0kUn2E&t=2s Perhaps it is time to re-visit homeopathy again and I would urge therefore anyone interested in psychiatry to read this book.

But what is homeopathy? How does it work? Hasn’t it all been disproved one might ask? Those readers of this Journal who can read French, might want to study the work L’Homéopathie by Marc Henry (Les Éditions Natur’Eau Quant 2019). This marvellous little book gives a brilliant overview of the history of homeopathy starting with the life story of Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) beginning with his scientific studies into the nature of illness and his training as a medical chemist. Over many decades of trial and error, travelling about his native Germany he discovered the law of similitudes whereby a small dose of a poison can actually cure the exact symptoms which it would cause in the wrong dose.

He came upon this law, as the book explains, between 1790-1794 and summed it up in the Latin phrase Similia

Similibus Curantur. Based around Leipzig and then Hamburg and Brunswick, he successfully treated a number of influential patients which made him a celebrity to those in the know. He also had success in treating patients with severe mental illness who had been abandoned by traditional psychiatric doctors. Before long, his help was being sought by all classes of people including the aristocracy of France, Naples, Austria, Spain and Germany. A British Homeopathic Society was created in 1843 by one of his students and The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital was founded in 1849. The British Royal family took to homeopathy as a lifesaver and right up until modern time Queen Elizabeth II and her son King Charles III have been devoted users of homeopathic remedies as a first choice wherever possible. Hahnemann ended up living in Paris from 1835-1843 where his practice flourished. And his young wife brought new life to the old sage until he died peacefully in 1843, being buried in the cemetery at Montmartre where homeopaths form all over the world still come to pay their respects.

The book details how homeopathy crossed the Atlantic and became very popular in the new nation of the United States of America. It tells us who were the leading homeopaths in America in the 1830s and 1840s and reveals that homeopathy was used even to treat epidemics such as cholera. In 1849, where only 3% of the homeopathic patients out of 1,116 died whereas those receiving allopathic treatment lost 60% to death. But it was the creation of the American Medical Association in 1847, which began to purge homeopathy from its members. Hahnemann himself had also received strong opposition from the scientistic medical mafia of this day who because they could not explain exactly in purely materialistic terms its success in treatment, therefore set out to destroy him. They failed but this same attitude of anti-homeopathy infected the American Medical Association and with its chimera of explaining all illnesses in a scientistic framework, the founders of modern American allopathy decided there was money to be made by discrediting homeopathy.

The book explains this story in some detail. The role of Abraham Flexner and the attack on the homeopathic profession in America led to the closure of the homeopathic hospitals and their erasure from the historical record. It will sadly take more than two books to revive a more holistic approach to mental illness. One of the key points of Hahnemann’s worldview was his belief in the spiritual side of healing - in effect homeopathy provides a mechanism for Spirit to interact with the body and restore it to its natural health. He became of a Freemason and his faith in God or the Divine Intelligence as the final cause of healing, no doubt seemed rather quaint to late 19 th and 20 th century scientific medical minds who decided that since all mental illness has a physical causation it must therefore have a physical cure.

The average psychiatrist on both sides of the Atlantic nowadays has become a pill-pusher for the pharmaceutical giants but often they are the first to admit they haven’t really got a clue what they are doing. Perhaps the Scientific and Medical Network can re-open this conversation and work with the Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group (SPSIG) of the Royal College of Psychiatry to encourage new thinking about enlisting homeopathic and other approaches to healing mental illness in a way that can be studied and researched scientifically. My Institute’s own project to rebrand the NHS as the National Healing Service, but keeping the same initials, would also facilitate such a move.

„ Dr Thomas Daffern is Chair, World Intellectuals Wisdom Forum, Director, International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy, and Rector, The Global Green University. www.globalgreenuniversity.com www.educationaid.net https://worldintellectualforumeurope.weebly.com/

UNMASKING THE COVID VACCINE

By Tony Edwards

THE PFIZER PAPERS

Edited by Naomi Wolf

Skyhorse Publishing, 2025, 386 pp., $20, p/b - ISBN 9781-64821-037-2

Weighing in at 1.25 kilograms, with a girth larger than a page of A4, this mighty tome aims to punch the lights out of drug giant Pfizer, the company which made a reported $35 billion from selling vaccines during the Covid scare.

The book is a compendium of articles that appeared on “The Daily Clout”, a website run by US journalist Naomi Woolf and project manager Amy Kelly. Towards the middle of the Covid debacle, they began publishing stories on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines distributed internationally to combat the perceived global health threat.

Most of the chapters are analyses of Pfizer’s research data obtained before and during their vaccine roll-out. But that data was very hard won. Initially, Pfizer refused to disclose them, saying it would be too onerous a task - a claim surprisingly supported by the FDA, the US health agency. When pressed in the courtroom, however, Pfizer and the FDA agreed to release the data, but only on the basis of a 75-year moratorium. Rightly, the court dismissed the request, ordering Pfizer immediately to begin releasing 55,000 pages per month, until the entire database of 450,000 pages was finally made public.

As soon as the pages appeared, copies were obtained by Naomi Woolf, hoping that the Pfizer data would be an investigative journalist’s treasure trove. However, one look at the papers told her she would be out of her depth. “In order to understand the reports, one would need a background in immunology, statistics, biostatistics, pathology, oncology, obstetrics, neurology, cardiology, pharmacology, cellular biology, chemistry, [and] government and industry regulatory processes”, she writes. So she appealed online for experts to help her decipher the documents. Astonishingly, she was “deluged with offers from around the world [supported by] thousands of CVs.” In all, she recruited 3,250 experts in various fields, and put them to work. By the time of publication, they had produced nearly 100 reports analysing 2,369 documents.

The book’s most sensational discovery is that, months before the vaccine roll-out, Pfizer already knew that its products were causing serious side-effects. During a double-blind placebo controlled study on over 40,000 volunteers in mid2020, 285 ‘adverse events’ were reported, including “heart, liver and neurological disease, cancers and deaths,” says Woolf. Although these were reported to the FDA that November, the agency appeared to ignore them, declaring that the trial as a whole had demonstrated efficacy, and that Emergency Use Authorisation would be granted. This allowed Pfizer to unblind the study and offer the vaccine to the 20,000 volunteers in the

control group, thus scuppering the trial’s ability to detect the product’s long-term adverse health effects. Worse still, Wolf’s professional analysts spotted that Pfizer “stopped collecting data on the control group soon after the trial began.”

Such astonishing revelations of fraudulent science being used to justify the vaccine roll-out would have been a stunning curtain-raiser to the book, but oddly the reader has to wait until Chapter 8 to learn of them. Somewhat confusingly, the same issue is also covered in Chapter 19, entitled ”Pfizer knew by November 2020 that its mRNA vaccine was neither safe nor effective.” Indeed, the raw data show that 35,000 injections were needed to save a mere 150 cases of Covid-19. As the book rightly points out, this was “not practical for a public health intervention” - particularly on healthy individuals, one might add.

Also confusing is the book’s seemingly random chapter order. Chapter 1 deals with the adverse liver events found by Pfizer in post-marketing studies, revealing serious inadequacies with the methodology. Chapter 2 is a report by Dr Robert Chandler on the Covid vaccines’ effect on fertility. Using publicly available global data, he finds a correlation between jab uptake and declining birth rates in 22 countries. Chapter 3 reverts to the disclosed Pfizer post-marketing data during the first two months of international roll-out, showing that the jab was associated with a 10% fatality rate, as well as serious cardiovascular sequelae, often occurring with 24 hours of injection. Chapter 4 looks at Pfizer’s early data on children, once again revealing a significant number of adverse effects. Changing tack, chapter 5 is an almost verbatim transcript of an illustrated lecture by German pathologist, the late Dr Arne Burkhardt (1944-2023). Distrustful of the official autopsies, he performed post-mortems on 30 individuals whose relatives suspected their deaths were linked to the Pfizer jab. Using histological staining techniques too costly for routine autopsies, Burkhardt reported finding clear evidence that the spike proteins within the Covid vaccines had created “autoimmune-like pathology in multiple organs”, including blood vessels, heart, brain, spleen, liver and lung. Some of these lesions were previously unknown to pathology, says Burkhardt.

Returning to the Pfizer jab data, Chapter 6 examines the neurological side effects discovered during post-marketing surveillance. By February 2021 (i.e a few months after the roll-out), Pfizer noted 500 cases of “serious” neurological events, including multiple sclerosis, transverse myelitis and Guillan-Barre syndrome. However, the book does not tell us what proportion of the jabbed cohort was afflicted. Chapter 7 revisits the work of Arne Burkhardt, who was intrigued by what he called SAD - Sudden Adult Death - occurring shortly after vaccination. Again, reprinting his lecture colour slides, the book shows that many of these deaths were associated with post-mortem evidence of aortic dissection, arterial fibrous clots or myocarditis.

Another transcribed Burkhardt lecture is printed in Chapter 27 - once again, illustrated by high quality colour photos of tissue samples. He and an international team of pathologists examined the corpses of 75 people, most of whom had died soon after being jabbed. The most startling finding was that the spike protein - the key antigenic ingredient of the Pfizer jabs - had spread throughout the cadavers, affecting brain, aorta, spleen, prostate, heart, ovaries and testes - in fact “almost all organs, more or less”, says Burkhardt. This is in marked contrast to conventional vaccines, whose contents remain in the arm muscle. His team concluded that 77% of the deaths examined were “probably” caused by vaccination.

Another transcribed lecture is found in Chapter 10. Dr Ute Kruger, a pathologist specialising in breast cancer, is

routinely sent tissue samples for microscopic analysis. Six months after the vaccine rollout, she noticed an uptick in the number of samples sent in, which followed an unusual pattern: there were many more samples from younger women, with more “aggressive” and larger tumours, and more “multi-focal tumour growth”. Her own histology slides show evidence that the growths are “highly proliferative”.

The remainder of the book’s thirty-four chapters are analyses of individual Pfizer post-marketing reports, often revealing serious adverse events following the Pfizer jab, such as myocarditis, kidney problems, teratogenicity, and “cardiovascular deaths”.

Nevertheless, Pfizer concludes every one of its reports with the statement: “This does not raise new safety issues. Surveillance will continue” - a blatantly self-serving judgment apparently taken on trust by the FDA, the regulatory agency. It is precisely this kind of cosy relationship between Big Pharma and the government authorities that Robert Kennedy Jr is expected to shake up in his new role as US health tsar.

Despite its title, the book’s value really lies in the highquality colour pictures of the autopsy slides (printed on china clay paper - hence the book’s weight). For, perhaps unsurprisingly, such images are exceptionally rare. A February 2025 paper by Dr Jessica Rose reports that, as soon as the vaccines were rolled out in the USA, monthly autopsy rates plummeted, suggesting that there was a general reluctance to investigate sudden or unusual deaths - for fear of what might be discovered, perhaps? In all, the book is a useful historical document to add to the already considerable literature questioning the authorities’ handling of the Covid panic.

„ Tony Edwards is a former producer of BBC Horizon – notably of the six-part series, The Heretics.

ARE WE FACING A NEW MILESTONE?

By Gunnel Minett

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Jonathan Haidt

Allen Lane, 2024, 374 pp., £25, h/b - ISBN 978-0-24164766-0

Human history is punctuated by some major milestones: when we first learnt to harness fire so that we could cook our food, when we developed language, when we developed agriculture. One thing these milestones have in common is that they all have had a direct influence on the human brain.

Perhaps future generations will mark the development of computers as another milestone. There are certainly some who regard the development of Artificial Intelligence as a major milestone. AI is even regarded by some as a potential threat to the human race, which may take over and replace humans.

This existential threat from AI is probably just speculation. However, there is another AI threat to which we are already being exposed: this can be called the Algorithmic Influence on social media. This is a threat to future generations in particular. As Jonathan Haidt points out in this

important book, since the emergence of the smart phone around 15 years ago, there has been a noticeable change for the worse in the psychology of children growing up. Psychological problems have suddenly increased at an alarming rate, particularly in the parts of the world where children are likely to have their own smartphones. This has led specialists in human development to ask how the adolescent brain develops in a world with internet and social media. Is this vital process unaffected or are we witnessing what Haidt calls “The Great Rewiring of Childhood.”

Although it’s taking place over, in evolutionary terms, a very short time, there’s clear evidence that something significant is happening to children who grow up in a world containing social media. Some of these changes are so striking that they clearly point to a connection between the two. Haidt points to things like:

• The popularisation of smartphones and 24-hour internet access has led to 46% of teens to be online ‘almost constantly’

• Anxiety diagnoses among 18–25-year-olds have increased by 92%

• Nearly 40% of teenage girls in the UK who spend over 5 hours on social media per day are judged to be clinically depressed.

How can this be in a world where parents are so much more aware and concerned about their children’s development? Or, as Haidt argues, this may be part of the problem: even if parents are much more concerned with child wellbeing they may, it seems, be getting some things completely wrong.

In many Western societies it is against the law to allow young children to play outside on their own. Rather than promoting child welfare, this may, however, not be that helpful. It is obvious that the streets where children used to play in earlier generation are no longer safe. But there are other areas for children to play, but parents who supervise every move, may actually be interfering rather than helping. Children need to play to learn. This is how they learn about adult life where not everything is ‘child-friendly’ or even ‘adult-friendly’. Interaction between children is not just about playing games. Face-to-face contact is also important. It teaches children to ‘read-the-room’, to pick up the nuances in human interaction which will help them to fit into social life over the rest of their lives.

Haidt offers several examples and suggestions as to how children can play optimally. He points to the benefits of purpose-built play areas where children can play with less supervision but still be safe. He refers mainly to the situation in USA, where organised childcare is not as common as it is in Europe. It would have been interesting to also have had a comparison with countries where children go to organised childcare before and during their school years. In Britain for instance, where organised childcare remains seriously underdeveloped, some children have problems adjusting to group situations when they start school. Children who come from childcare groups do not seem to have the same problems. Since the introduction of the internet and social media, the ‘play area’ for children growing up has changed dramatically. They no longer meet each other in real life. Instead, they are spending much of their free time in the virtual world, where they can no longer rely on the play area to be child-safe.

But playtime for children is not just about having fun. It is practising for the future. It is learning to fit in with groups, socialising, reading body language, understanding hierarchies etc. These are things, Haidt argues, are best, or even entirely, learned in real interaction in the real world. Online just does not offer the same experience.

Despite the increased safety awareness, even the most conscientious parents, with all the best intentions in the world, seem completely oblivious to the dangers their children face on social media. Online, children are suddenly left to fend for themselves. As Haidt points out not only are they left on their own, they are allowed to gamble in casinos, visit hard porn clubs, and even see the most horrible violence that human beings are capable of.

This combination of over-protection in real life and total lack of protection online has a devastating effect on the growing child. Not only by traumatising them, but even worse, a long-term effect on the developing brain. Where this will end nobody knows. As Haidt points out, it is a social experiment that is taking place right in front of the eyes of caring parents, who themselves are increasingly being distracted and addicted by the internet world on their smartphones.

To escape this downward spiral for children, Haidt suggests focusing on how to structure our lives in order to help children develop. He points to the traditions that bind cultures together, simple things like physical activities, outdoor adventures and play that helps children develop a good sense of self-worth and moral values. He writes: “When people see morally beautiful actions, they feel as though they have been lifted up—elevated on a vertical dimension that can be labelled divinity. When people see morally repulsive actions, they feel as though they have been pulled downward, or degraded.” (p. 230)

Given the drastic change in the way children are growing up, urgent attention is required throughout our societies. A book like this should therefore be handed over to all parents on the birth of their first child. It will at least make all well-meaning parents aware of the real dangers in their children’s lives.

PHILOSOPHY/SPIRITUALITY

WHERE DOES CONSCIOUSNESS COME FROM?

By Steve Minett, PhD

CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism

Galen Strawson

Imprint Academic, 2024, 380 pp., £22.50, h/b - ISBN 9781-788361-20-0

I have crossed the stormy, philosophical Atlantic, on the good ship, Alfred North Whitehead, and landed in the brave, new, ontological world of pan-experientialism. And there I have been living happily in one of its thriving metropolises for over a decade. Imagine, then, my shock and dismay, while strolling across a north American beach, to discover the wreck of a ship from the early 1400s, and recovering from it this archaic book. On reading it, my astonishment deepened over the opinions of the eighteen contributors: some of them deny that the new world exists at all! Many of them are not sure whether it is America or India and all of them seem to believe that the most important question is what it should be called - among these eighteen philosophical commentators there must be more than a hundred different suggestions!

Much of the extended metaphor above is, of course, untrue, but it is an accurate reflection of my visceral response to this book. There’s a story told about Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is probably apocryphal but similarly expresses his genuine response to the views of his philosophical contemporaries. Someone told him that a major conference of Anglo-American, analytic philosophers was about to take place in Cambridge. Wittgenstein responded; “You may as well have told me that the city is about to be struck by a highly infectious bout of plague. I shall ensure to absent myself until the pestilence has passed over.”

The book has a somewhat usual structure. It opens with a thirty-page essay by Galen Strawson, arguing that physicalism entails panpsychism. His basic argument is that experience cannot emerge from ‘dead matter’, therefore at least some ‘ultimates’ must be composed of ‘mind stuff’. Strawson uses the analogy of liquidity emerging from molecules of H2O. This, he says, is comprehensible, but the notion of consciousness emerging from non-experiential matter is not. His main conclusion seems to be that the most accurate account of reality is the doctrine of monistic physicalism with panpsychism as an essential ingredient. This ‘target paper’ is followed by critiques from sixteen professional philosophers and one physicist. Fifteen of them are dismissive of Strawson’s views, several to the point of contemptuous sarcasm. In the 2024 second edition, Strawson then responds in a rambling hundred-page reply, followed by postscripts from six of the aforementioned critics. Strawson finally rounds things up with a twenty-plus page repetition of his original arguments. As above, I’m actually a believer in Whiteheadian panpsychism. Nevertheless, I found this tedious repetition of threadbare arguments dull and depressing. While agreeing with Strawson about panpsychism (or rather pan-experientialism, though Strawson and others in the book seem to consider these terms synonymous), I fail to understand his insistence on clinging to the doctrine of physicalism: part of Whitehead’s programme was to deconstruct the Cartesian split between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ - why the desperation to hang onto one side of this spurious division? As to the critics of panpsychism, their significant objections can, I think, be boiled down to two: the first is to question the possibility of ‘consciousness’ in ‘ultimates.’ With elephantine sarcasm, several of them delicately ask how, for example, elementary particles can have thoughts, emotions, desires, ambitions, etc., when (don’t ya know?) they haven’t got brains or a nervous system! (Ha! Ha! Ha!!) I wonder if these philosophers have any explanations for the findings of Cambridge professor Brian J. Ford regarding the astonishing level of intelligence manifested by single-celled organisms: strangely, they don’t have brains or a nervous system either!

The critics’ second anti-panpsychic argument can be called the ‘combination problem’: “Can macro-experientiality be reductively explained in terms of micro-experientiality? It is hard to see how it can be. How could trillions of particles, whatever their experiential nature, constitute what feels like … a single subject of experience?” [p. 36] In other words, how can the ‘mentality’ of the ultimate constituents of reality be focused down to produce the stream of consciousness which we experience? And, conversely, why, if ‘mentality’ is ubiquitous in the universe, is a stone not conscious like us? The Whiteheadian explanation is as follows: he distinguishes between Nexuses and Societies.

To illuminate this distinction between aggregational and compound objects from a different angle, let me turn to a descriptive remark from Karl Marx: in accounting for the low-revolutionary potential of the peasantry, he described

them as nothing more than ‘potatoes in a sack,’ meaning that they have no common interests and consequently do not interact in a positive, creative way leading to effective ‘class consciousness.’ [Marx, Karl, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, 1852, New York Labor News Company] So, by analogy, a Whiteheadian aggregational object, like a stone, has no consciousness, while a mammal, such as a human being, constitutes a compound object and is hence capable of intense and complex consciousness. Robert Mesle has another way of explaining this by moving between macrocosm and microcosm: if, when using the words ‘experience’, ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ “… we confine ourselves to consciousness, then clearly they do not go all the way down. Consciousness probably depends on the brain and central nervous system. But even most of our feelings are not conscious. Our bodies are taking in an enormous amount of data in each moment, and only a tiny portion of that information is raised to the level of consciousness… Consciousness is only a tiny tip of the iceberg of human experience, and, I am arguing, human feeling is only a tiny tip of the feeling that is present in the larger world.” [Mesle, C. Robert, ‘Process-relational Philosophy’, 2008, loc: 633] Anderson Weekes says that societies, with their organised subjectivity, are ‘private matters of fact’, While nexuses are ‘public matters of fact’. In other words, nexuses constitute objects, in the conventional meaning, that are publicly available to us.

On the other hand, the occasions of experience, which generate the subjectivity of societies are not consciously available to us in a public way, for example the subjective experience of organisms. [Anderson Weekes, ‘Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind’, loc: 4052-4067] (Of course, organisms are also nexuses, i.e. as physical bodies, they are publicly available but not their subjective experience.) Thus, in Whitehead’s ontology everything is made out of experience, but in our macro-world the Cartesian distinction between the subjective and the objective is preserved by actual entities being organised into, respectively, societies and nexuses.

A lot more can of course be said on this subject (and indeed I’m currently working on a new book covering this and related topics). However, there isn’t space in a review to go into greater detail, so I’m happy to leave my comments here, and relieved to move on from this tedious book which provoked them.

THEOSIS

By David Lorimer

THE MOUNTAIN OF SILENCE –

A Search for Orthodox Spirituality

Kyriacos C. Markides

Doubleday, 2002, 256 pp., $16, p/b – ISBN 970-0-38550092-0

After training as a sociologist and arriving in the US, Kyriacos held a standard academic agnostic view, looking down on traditionally religious people from this superficially sophisticated perspective. His turning point came when a colleague introduced him to many mystical writings, both East and West, along with the practice of transcendental meditation. He subsequently came to see his prior

materialist position as a superstition, and subsequently met a remarkable healer and mystic called Daskalos on a field trip to his native Cyprus. This encounter enabled him to realise that there are trans-rational states of consciousness, and he wrote three books about Daskalos, which I read in the 1990s. Interestingly, like myself, he was also influenced by the writings of Pitirim Sorokin, the first professor of sociology at Harvard. This book continues his journey as a return to his roots through a different, experiential Christianity featuring the charismatic Father Maximos..

The Holy Elders he encountered through Father Maximos led to the realisation that these saints on Mount Athos were living witnesses of the reality of God and other spiritual presences. Through systematic spiritual practices, monks can open up to the grace of the Holy Spirit and perform miracles, many of which are reported here. Such occurrences were also common in the lives of Daskalos and Peter Deunov. The existence of deeper realms of reality is a critical ontological and epistemological point, the basis of which is acceptance and belief in the reality of God (p. 158). Then one can see that the Elders and Saints are scientists of spiritual reality, which is in fact at the centre of human existence. Our alienation and disconnection from the Centre, the inner Christ, is the real source of our contemporary malaise, also characterised as a series of illnesses of the heart: ignorance, forgetfulness, hardness, blindness, improvidence and contamination – all of which leads to a fragmentation of attention.

In January, I revisited the work of the great Russian mystical philosopher, Nikola Berdyaev, who drew an important distinction between the philosophical mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy and the rational theology developed in the West. The former is experiential, and the latter mental. I am also reading the classic anthology, The Art of Prayer, with many citations from Theophan the Recluse stressing the importance of remembrance of God and especially the practice of the Jesus Prayer (Efche), an absolutely essential feature of the Orthodox approach that brings the mind into the heart in constant remembrance of the Divine. The Ecclesia is understood as a vehicle of progressive Divinisation, Christification and Theosis, representing a path trodden by generations of monks ‘baptised into the fire of holiness.’ Their wills become completely aligned with the Divine Will and the Holy Spirit in total humility, hence their capacity to experience the Uncreated Light that they emanate as love. Fr Maximos insists on the experienced existent reality of deceased Saints, angels and demons, and on the power of the cross.

All humans are subject to what Fr Maximos calls logismoi as thought forms and elementals that come into our inner space. He characterises the various stages of assault, interaction, consent, captivity, and obsession. He also gives strategies on how to deal with these in terms of indifference, shifting focus, prayer, reading the lives of the Saints, and confession. There are some extraordinary stories of devotion and transformation: an alcoholic priest was defrocked by his bishop, who then had a vision of hundreds of deceased people clamouring for his return. Upon inquiry with the priest, he told the bishop that in order to make up for his failings with respect to alcohol, he used to go and say prayers in the cemetery for the deceased… another elder was insulted by his spiritual guide for 40 years, and when the latter died and found himself in hell, Fr Ephraim prayed devotedly for his release – a superhuman achievement of selfless love. In an extraordinary formulation with respect to the nature of hell (p. 159), Fr Maximos explains that it is a state of being cut off from God: ‘hell is the experience of God, not as light and eternal grace but as eternal fire instead. God, however, is not

eternal fire. It is human beings who create the distortions, not God. It is therefore the souls of human beings that need to be healed so that they may be able to have the vision of God as light and not as fire that torments.’

The book is replete with spiritual wisdom and insights, illustrated with many stories and experiences from Fr Maximos himself. He explains that the Beatitudes are beyond human morality, how the trials of life can be regarded as opportunities for growth, how humiliation can lead to humility and emptiness (kenosis), how the elders through love take on the suffering of others, and how through energy and force of ceaseless prayer it is possible to recover our primordial state and achieve union with God. The final chapters clarify the differences of approach between Eastern and Western Christianity: the way of the monks of Mount Athos is the way of quietude, hesychasm, where the goal is direct experience of the Uncreated Light and Theosis. Kyriacos explains the 14th century debate between Barlaam and Gregory Palamas, where the former regarded the experience of the Uncreated Light as the product of distorted imaginations – the secular position today. However, the key point is that Theosis has been and is attainable, and in our era ‘we need to re-integrate the rational with the intuitive, the scientific with the mystical’ – neatly defining the role of the Network. This deeply inspiring book will open you up to the mystical path of Mount Athos and the further reaches of human potential and capacities.

IMITATIO CHRISTI

By David Lorimer

C.G. JUNG FACE TO FACE WITH CHRISTIANITY

Edited by Jacob Luzensky

Chiron Publications, 2024, 258 pp., $29, p/b – ISBN 9781-68503-221-0

Subtitled ‘dreaming the myth onwards’, this volume consists of a series of in-depth conversations with leading Jungian analysts and scholars exploring Jung’s lifelong wrestling with Christianity at psychological, theological, symbolic and Gnostic levels. As he recalls in his autobiography, his father was a disillusioned priest, and at the age of eleven he had had an extraordinary and disturbing vision of a giant turd emanating from God landing on Basel Cathedral. This was one source of his ambiguous feelings, further developed by his view that Christianity excluded the feminine and evil, resulting in a one-sided God/Christ image demanding perfection rather than wholeness and integration.

The editor is also the initiator of the podcast Psychology and the Cross, which forms the basis of many of these contributions. Besides Jungian analysts and psychologists, some contributors are philosophers and theologians, bringing a correspondingly different framing, especially to the interface between psychology and religion. We learn that Jung carried a Bible in his pocket all his life, and would on occasion pull it out and read a passage. It was crucial for Jung that individuals are anchored in God, with direct access to ‘evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.’ (p. xxv) Moreover, for him the process of individuation involved

making one’s conscience conscious, and therefore heeding its inner guidance, especially in the face of social pressureso evident with the weaponisation of empathy during Covid. Jung’s engagement with Christianity is also manifest in his lectures on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, and his lifelong friendship with theologian Adolf Keller – I have reviewed his corresponding ETH lectures in these pages.

Jung brought his own interpretation to the Imitation of Christ, and in this respect it is important to distinguish between his orthodox image as incarnated saviour to follow, and the Gnostic gospel image of Christ as a wisdom teacher, a model, an exemplar. This tension comes across in a number of the conversations that make the point that redeeming is more than integration. In this context, Jung’s imitation of Christ consists in being true to the Self and forging one’s unique path as an individual. Our task is to ‘make real our own deepest meaning… with the same courage in self-sacrifice as Jesus did… each person should live life to the full, in their own way, until the bitter end.’ (p. xxiii) Elsewhere, he is quoted as saying that ‘If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one, but go my own way, and I will also no longer call myself a Christian.’ (p. 232) This position is very resonant with existentialism, and indeed Jung was greatly influenced by Nietzsche while also contradicting him by asserting that God is very much alive (and there is one conversation on Kierkegaard).

Jung famously told John Freeman in 1958 that he knew God, he did not have to believe. In this sense, he is aligned with gnosis and Gnostics, which he studied closely, often in the original. Theologians such as Clement of Alexandria drew an important distinction between the levels of pistis (faith) and direct inner knowing as gnosis. He was also influenced by the dualism with respect to the status of evil, most explicitly discussed in his late and radical work Answer to Job, and in his extensive conversations with Catholic theologian Father Victor White. This theme comes up in a number of conversations that include theodicy – the justification of evil. Satan is depicted as the instrument of Yahweh in testing Job to excruciating limits - with his permission. To Jung, this is immoral and unjust, and reflects poorly on Yahweh. The debate revolves around whether evil is a force in itself or simply absence of good in the same way that darkness is absence of light. There is in fact no conclusive resolution to this mystery of life, although I do regard the inscrutability argument as a cop-out.

The final conversation about Jung’s wrestling with Christ with Murray Stein, Ann Conrad Lammers and Paul Bishop recaps many of the central themes, noting that even in his student days Jung maintained that a religion without mysticism is dead, and highlighted the sense of the sacred. He had a strong sense of the need for Christianity to renew itself from within, which I think was also shared by William James with his emphasis on mystical and religious experience rather than rational theology. At the same time, many contributors warn against the psychologisation of Christianity and over-emphasis on the subjective. Meister Eckhart was one of his inspirations, and I think that Jung’s life and work prefigure a more general revival of interest in gnosis and Gnosticism – spirituality without religion. Jung made the profound observation that ‘Where there’s power, there’s no love.’ (p. 229)

Jung’s approach is profoundly individual, while Christianity is also about community building. Both Jung and Christ were rebels, asserting the spirit of freedom over the letter and the law, but his approach, according to the editor, is inadequate in terms of Christianity’s revolutionary universalism, with its message of faith, hope, love, and forgiveness. I think

Lusensky is right in asserting that Jung missed ‘Christianity’s collective vision of a transform social order through love’ (p. 233) represented by the Kingdom of God, although Christ himself asserted that the kingdom was within, and not of this world. These deeply informed conversations speak to the spiritual condition of our time, and should be widely read.

PSYCHOLOGY/ CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

TRANSMUTING COLLECTIVE INSANITY

By David Lorimer

UNDREAMING WETIKO

Paul Levy

Inner Traditions, 2023, 402 pp., $24.99, p/b – ISBN 9781-64411-566-4

In this hugely important book, Paul Levy continues his exploration of wetiko – a profound and radical native American idea for a virus of the mind that underlies our collective insanity and the manifestation of evil in the world originating in unhealed multigenerational ancestral trauma – acted out and propagated through the family, but largely concealed from public view. However, wetiko also contains the very medicine required for our healing, but first we must see it for what it is, not only outside but also within ourselves, in order to break its spell. The four parts cover spells, curses, and shamans; angels, demons and rebirth; the quantum synchronistic field; and the Self as revelation. The starting point is to realise that there is an information war on consciousness, on the mind, on the brain through systemic propaganda and narrative control designed to divide and alienate, splitting us into in-group and out-group, with a mutual projection of the shadow. This is truly a battle for the soul.

There is at least a subliminal collective awareness of dark forces at play, but less agreement about where these are to be found (p. 288). Jung was already aware of this in the 1930s, calling it to totalitarian psychosis, a form of dehumanising mental contagion only too apparent during Covid. The current form of totalitarianism is digital, merging corporate economic power expressed through mainstream media with the political power of the state, with an ultimate goal of absolute power and control over the world population (Nietzsche’s will to power). These forces are operating on both ends of the political spectrum in the form of supranational and centralised technocracy that is inherently anti-life. For us as individuals, this is mirrored in widespread psychological blindness and hardening of hearts – it is important to note that outer conditions are ultimately a reflection of our inner turmoil and chaos. This can only be countered by courageous people standing up, speaking up and living the truth against pressures to compliance and complicity. Covid has shown how hazardous this can be, as few professionals had the courage to do this; and if they do, they are scapegoated, excluded, de-platformed and dismissed from their positions as heretics (many of these people receive private messages

admiring their stand, but excusing themselves). Even though he is now head of the NIH – poetic justice indeed – Dr Jay Bhattacharya has received no apology from Stanford for the disgraceful way in which he was treated.

As part of the undreaming process, discerning between good and evil is essential. I agree with Paul when he states (p. 170) that evil is the central problem of our time. Again, Jung was fully aware of this, developing his ideas in Answer to Job (see my review elsewhere in this issue of his relationship to Christianity). Christ and Satan mirror each other, and the rising of evil is a challenge for good to respond through self-sacrifice, as the archetype of the cross and crucifixion demonstrates. The essence is that ‘unless we recognise evil, name it, and deal with it, we will never be able to convert its tremendous energies to good’ (p. 169) – a point made by Stephen Dinan in a recent post. Jeffrey Kripal, in his book also reviewed in this issue, reminds us that we as humans are and manifest both good and evil.

In a profound message quoted at the end of the book, readers are reminded that darkness can serve a higher purpose as it allows us to return to the light if we are willing to surrender and learn from it: ‘my prayer is that we all create a space for the darkness to birth a new way of seeing, sensing, feeling, and relating. May our darkness find the balance it needs to serve humanity as opposed to igniting chaos.’ (p. 374) Otherwise, we are bound by our own fears and sense of powerlessness, looking towards a Saviour from without: ‘Darkness can perpetually serve the darkness, or it can evolve to serve the Light of God.’ We need to become collectively conscious, awaken to our true selves, and take responsibility for this emerging process. Paul himself writes that ‘as we connect with our light it is our destiny to encounter and come to terms with the forces of darkness.’ (p. 166) In this context, an encouraging thought that I recall from Whitehead is the following: ‘The instability of evil is the moral order of the world.’ In other words, its destructive force is ultimately self-destructive.

Paul hypothesises that the survival of our species depends on answering the shamanic call to see through the illusion of separation and realise that we are ultimately connected. He reinforces this insight in wide-ranging and informed discussions of quantum physics and synchronicity. The shaman is not afraid of being judged and rejected – which Paul characterises as ‘normopathic’ or ‘normotic’ – ‘it is crucially important that we not fit in.’ (p. 117) To take this stance presupposes inner strength and resilience, the capacity to remain centred and rooted in the face of collective chaos, tapping into higher dimensional guidance within. Paul suggests that ‘the soul’s knowledge of itself is its consciousness of the angel’ and that the human soul is composed of the very light of consciousness that illuminates and dispels darkness. (let your light so shine before men). (p. 140) Then we can tap into our inherent creativity and the Christ within, as Paul discusses in relation to the work of Corbin, Steiner and Berdyaev. To the extent that we do not see and understand how our perception and behaviour are being managed through mainstream messaging, we comply with its demands and become complicit in its horrors by turning a blind eye, a process that Paul characterises as DUSO (one of a number of original acronyms – duped into unwittingly supporting evil). We are caught in a collective nightmare that requires undreaming and understanding the operation of the polarising filter built into our minds as confirmation bias and herd mentality that demands conformity – we absolutely have to become aware of the depth of evil, inhumanity and brutality manifest in current corrupt and militarised systems underpinned by the

drivers of wealth, power, and greed – leading inexorably to collapse and even extinction. These drivers are maintaining us in a state of collective hypnosis and deception that can only be dispelled by realising the power and light of the spirit that we intrinsically are. It is a call to awakening, a call to remember our deep, shared humanity and co-create a corresponding New Earth. This book is an essential guide to this necessary evolutionary process.

A COMPLEX WHOLE

By David Lorimer

THE GREAT CULTURAL AWAKENING

D. Paul Schafer

Rock Mill Press, 2024, 307 pp., $20, p/b – ISBN 978-177244-316-5

Paul Schafer is the Canadian author of a series of books about making the transition from an economic age to a cultural age, and has been active in the field as an adviser, educator and administrator for over 50 years. He is also founder and director of the World Culture Project (www.worldcultureproject.org). His overall argument is an important one, given the centrality of economics and more especially of banking and finance in the modern world as the apex of power and global influence. This means that we are primarily consumers and producers, with education also geared to economic growth as the path to prosperity and well-being. He sees cultures as complex wholes and total ways of life, drawing on anthropological definitions such as that of Sir Edward Tylor, who in 1871 defined culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ (p. 16) Another inspiring source is Jacob Burckhardt, writing in the 1860s with his emphasis on such words as harmony, organic, and whole.

Culture and civilisation are sometimes equated, but culture is the broader term while civilisation is related to civis as the citizen. Culture requires cultivation, and it is interesting to read that Cicero focused on ‘the philosophy or cultivation of the soul.’ Nor is culture disembodied; it is carried by individuals and groups, leading to the development of finesse and artistic taste, in other words refinement of sensitivity. The book covers the whole spectrum of culture in education, upbringing, community, the cosmos, nature and other species, history, cultural development, and the cultivation of spirituality and compassion. It draws on a wide range of reading related to these topics, while the author also cites some of his own favourite paintings and music.

He argues that the challenges we face have outgrown the capacity of the economic age to deal with them. While this is undoubtedly true, it seems to me that the dominance of our linear and left hemisphere way of thinking lies at the root, as argued by Iain McGilchrist and Nora Bateson – see my review of her book above. Moreover, the robotisation of humans risks outsourcing ‘creativity’ to AI, which can only synthesise what is already on the Internet – hence, AI creativity is recombinant and devoid of genuine intuitive inspiration familiar to all artists and poets. It is typical

of instrumental and utilitarian approaches that the arts are diminished and devalued - even deskilled in equating novelty with creativity. The arts engage all levels of humanity. One interesting author cited is the Dutch writer Johan Huizinga – also referred to by Dean Inge (see my review below). Huizinga writes that the realities of economic life conducive to human well-being ‘must be balanced by strongly developed spiritual, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic values.’ (p. 35) He was deeply concerned by the rise of barbarism in the 1930s.

The musician and international cultural advocate Yo-Yo Ma stated that every generation has an obligation to do better, ‘to imagine and create a world that works for all of us.’ In times of fracture, we need to return to first principles – ‘to seek truth, build trust, and act in service of one another’ – though I disagreed with the advocacy of safety, which has recently been weaponised against us. It is also important, as Lewis Mumford also argues, to seek unity in diversity rather than a mechanical uniformity that prioritises sameness over uniqueness - this involves ‘coexistence, cross-cultural fertilisation, dialogue, interaction, communication, and exchange’ – genuine sharing, rather than simply paying lip-service. (pp. 68, 235) Factories produce identical units, while each artistic creation is unique.

Paul Braisted (p. 112) warns that the alternative to developing more friendly relations is what we are currently witnessing – continuing and deepening conflict, ‘with its dangers of increasing reliance on violence, and the corrosive effects upon human life of distrust and fear.’ The author notes that ‘it is necessary to create a great deal more cooperation, compromise, concessions, and interaction – as well as less competition, confrontation, aggression, and conflict – between different countries and cultures. However, we also need to be aware of the power dynamics of global geopolitics based on this second approach, and deeply rooted in fear of the other, patriarchal domination and the glorification of war – it is dismaying that diplomacy is reduced to appeasement. I found the reality of power was a missing element in the analysis, which also made no mention of the huge influence of informal elite groups such as the WEF and the Bilderberg Group who seek to impose their own agenda while dressing it up in fine words. The freedom of the human spirit is non-negotiable, even while we collectively aspire to a harmony based on the realisation of Oneness – this is what Peter Deunov called life for the whole (the author refers to this on p. 208)

There is no doubt that the author’s argument should be widely discussed – how do we best move to what he calls a cultural age that recognises unity in diversity? For me, this has to start from a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, otherwise we are already on the wrong track. I was inspired by a 2017 Indonesian document on cultural advancement (p. 213), advocating ‘tolerance, diversity, cross regional participation, benefits, sustainability, freedom of expression, cohesiveness, equality, and mutual cooperation.’ Of course, the key lies in responsibility, embodiment and implementation, which has to be cultivated and grown into (cf p. 232). The author provides an inspiring and practical vision, and I leave the last word to a passage he quotes from Albert Schweitzer: ‘the ripeness that our development must aim at is one which makes us simpler, more truthful, purer, more peace loving, meeker, kinder, more sympathetic… that is the process in which the soft iron of youthful idealism hardens into the steel of a full-grown idealism which can never be lost.’ (p. 260) We each need to be engaged in such a process of personal and collective cultural renewal.

FEARLESS LOVE

By David Lorimer

THE JOURNEY FROM EGO TO SOUL Karen Wyatt MD – https://eoluniversity.com Sunroom Studios, 2025, 249 pp., $16.99, p/b – ISBN 9780-9826855-7-0

About five years ago, I reviewed Karen’s previous book 7 Lessons for the Living from the Dying, containing essential truths relating the reality of death to the principles for authentic living. On her website, she writes that it is up to us…’We stand on a precipice between dissolution and transcendence. Do not underestimate the fact that our next steps have the potential to determine the course of the future.’ I imagine that almost every reader shares this view that humanity is at a bifurcation point where our existing modes of thought, action and policy are past their sell-by date. A transformation of consciousness or raising a frequency is an essential evolutionary step, as many thinkers are articulating.

This new book has much in common with the earlier one, and is subtitled ‘how to transform your life when everything falls apart.’ The lessons are the same, but the context more personal in terms of Karen’s own life story, which was hugely impacted by her father’s suicide. The lessons are to do with suffering, love, forgiveness, living in the present moment, purpose, surrender, and impermanence. These are all part of the earth curriculum, and life provides us with challenges and difficulties that can stimulate our growth. One of the principal guides in terms of headline quotations is the timeless wisdom of Rumi. The inner journey, as suggested in the title, is from Ego to Soul and the embodiment of fearless love. The initial portal is often suffering, and knowledge of our mortality implies that, sooner or later, everything falls apart; nothing lasts except Love. A story from her previous book makes this point elegantly where Ted, a successful banker in his 60s, is dying from pancreatic cancer. With great remorse, he remarks that ‘the only thing that matters is love. Who did I love? How much did I love them? How did I show that I loved them?’ This is the essence of life.

The book draws movingly on Karen’s own life experience, infused with spiritual wisdom and practical guidance. The world is run on the basis of the ego with its aspirations towards wealth and power, invariably bringing corruption in its wake. The ego resists change, and lacks the four core elements of dance: timing, balance, rhythm and grace. Karen quotes Aeschylus saying that wisdom comes alone through suffering. As the ego is dismantled, we become more open to the guidance of the soul, which has a larger and deeper perspective on life. At one point, she is working with hospice patients in a shelter clinic, and formulates what she calls the Love Project, focusing on sending pure, radiant love to every person in the clinic rather than trying to fix their lives. This practice eventually has a profound effect on her colleague Charlotte, who plays a leading role in the book, and she herself is transformed through her own suffering. We are here ‘to be a vessel for fearless love,’ and our greatest challenge is to love the unlovable people in our lives. (p. 94)

Readers journey on through the lessons of forgiveness, living in the present moment, purpose, surrender, and finally impermanence. Forgiving is equally important for ourselves as a form of release, and Karen shares a moving story about

a colleague who wrote a critical letter at an early stage in her career; the colleague is brought in in a critical condition, and Karen is moved to buy her some flowers, which she takes into the hospital room. This gesture releases her from poisonous resentment. Our inner purpose is to be present by being who we are in every moment, as emphasised by Eckhart Tolle. The last two lessons are the hardest, but the most essential: surrender and impermanence. Karen writes that ‘to surrender is to allow a natural process to take place, while working to find the deepest meaning and the most growth possible within the current circumstances.’ (p. 181) This means living in a state of not-knowing rather than seeking to control. Impermanence is a central theme in Buddhism, as embodied in the teaching of Thich Nhat Hahn, extensively quoted in the book. The ego itself is impermanent, and change is inevitable, including the death of the physical form.

The final chapter is about the soul-guided life as it unfolds step-by-step. Here, Karen revisits the seven lessons, writing that when the True Self flourishes, ‘love expands and life flows.’ She relates a moving story about her cousin Jolene who dies suddenly of a heart attack. This brings to mind how she had been too busy to meet up with her a few months before, and there is a general atmosphere of denial at the funeral. A year later, the mourners meet again to celebrate a family wedding, and the minister says a blessing for their broken, grieving hearts. He then instructs people to take the white balloons attached to the chairs, and release these balloons into the air along with their pain. A few months later, Karen dreams of Jolene, and her guilt is assuaged by forgiveness. She sums up her message by saying that we are ‘born into this life on Earth so that we can learn these things: to love unconditionally through suffering and pain, to find a joy in the midst of impermanence, and to leave behind the beauty as well as the burden of physical existence when the time comes to travel into the next realm… remembering that we are actually already One with everything in existence.’ (p. 247) This inspiring book reminds us that the lessons of death are in fact lessons for vibrant living.

EXPLORING THE DEPTHS OF SYNCHRONICITY

By Oliver Robinson

THE PLAYFUL UNIVERSE

Edited by Marjorie Woollacott, Gary E. Schwartz and David Lorimer

AAPS Press, 2024, 223 pp., $19.95, p/b - ISBN - 978-17354491

The concept of synchronicity has fascinated psychologists, philosophers and mystics alike since Carl Jung devised the concept about a hundred years ago. It is broadly defined as the co-occurrence of events that are perceived as significantly related in meaningful ways (their co-occurrence often feels like divine providence or a spiritual message), despite them not being causally connected in the Newtonian sense. In The Playful Universe, a range of perspectives on synchronicity are masterfully woven together to explore this enigmatic phenomenon, including scientific research, historical anecdotes, personal

experiences and philosophical insights. The book presents a compelling case for synchronicity as a central part of human experience, while showing how it links to other paranormal phenomena such as psychokinesis and mediumship. The writing is engaging and accessible, blending academic rigour with a conversational tone that invites readers to reflect on their own encounters with synchronicity.

The integration of science and spirituality forms the backbone of the book, making it both intellectually stimulating and spiritually enriching. For example, from the science side, the book references Jung's collaboration with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, illustrating how quantum theory informed the early development of synchronicity theory. The reader is reminded that the world of discrete objects moving around in linear time and 3D space is just our perception, not ultimate reality. When synchronicity experiences seem to point to connections beyond space and time, that may be a veridical experience of the mysterious quantum reality that sits beyond our experience. Crucially, many synchronicities are not simply private experiences but are verifiable by objective facts, which helps them to be validated scientifically as potentially an expression of quantum connectedness.

A standout feature of the book is its exploration of personal stories that highlight synchronicity in action. These anecdotes, ranging from serendipitous encounters to life-changing epiphanies, are presented with authenticity and relatability. They serve not only to engage the reader but also to underscore the universality of synchronicity.

I appreciated how the book establishes a balanced and critical perspective, by also pointing to the dark side of synchronicity. For example, Richard Tarnas discusses the challenging issue of distinguishing between synchronicity as a positive and helpful experience and perceived synchronicities that stem from psychosis or paranoia. With the latter, they are usually seen to be evidence that God or society is conspiring to persecute them. For example, a paranoid person may read a billboard while thinking of something negative about themselves that has similarities to the billboard message, and assume the billboard was intentionally put there to persecute them.

There are also cases of people who see everything as meaningful synchronicities, to the point where it becomes overwhelming and impossible to manage, as though life has a surplus of connective meaning. In contrast, healthy synchronicity is construed by Jungian psychologists as a positive and transformative experience. How can we differentiate between the light and dark sides of synchronicity? I appreciated this quote by Ricky Derisz in the book, which helps to answer this question and conveys his own journey of cleansing the doors of perception to the point that pathological synchronicity is no longer conflated with the positive and enriching kind:

“It took dedicated inner work to cleanse my doors of perception, to discern between projection and true synchronicity, madness and divine revelation. The process is ongoing, and even now, I have to be careful to not fly too close to the sun or draw cognitive conclusions from synchronicities. But the overall repercussions have been profound, and had I dismissed coincidence…I would never have turned that poison to nectar.”

Overall, The Playful Universe is a thought-provoking and inspiring exploration of a topic that challenges conventional notions of causality and meaning. It encourages readers to view their lives through a more connected and meaningful lens, inviting them to embrace the mystery and wonder of synchronicity. For anyone curious about the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and the workings of the human mind, this book is a must-read.

„ Dr Oliver Robinson is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich and author of Paths Between Head and Heart: Exploring the Harmonies of Science and Spirituality. He also loves to compose relaxing piano music, which you can find on any streaming service under the name Oliver C. Robinson.

THE FANTASTIC FOUNDATIONS OF REALITY

By David Lorimer

HOW TO THINK IMPOSSIBLY

Jeffrey. J. Kripal

University of Chicago Press, 2024, 297 pp., $35, h/b –ISBN 978-0-226-83368-2

This is the brilliant and penetrating sequel to The Superhumanities and The Flip. Any reader seriously engaging with Jeff’s thinking cannot help undergoing a mind-expanding and reality-altering experience. Jeff runs the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, where he holds a chair in philosophy and religious thought. As he has previously argued, experiences are only defined as impossible by virtue of the presuppositions of the materialistic paradigm. Precognitive dreams and telepathic visions are not supposed to happen, but they do happen all the time – indeed, this is the core research domain of the Galileo Commission. The fundamental point is that if such experiences were taken seriously by the Academy, ‘they would transform the entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included.’ (p. ix) Beliefs limit what is possible. (p. 156)

To think impossibly is to think with individuals and their experiences according to what William James called radical empiricism. Nothing is taken off the table as invalid, and our models have to be adequate to the phenomena described. Moreover, many experiences described here are inherently elusive and trickster-like, therefore relegated to the fringes. Jeff’s central proposition is that there is no final distinction between subjective and objective states due to a fundamental unity of space, time, and mind. Instances of synchronicity are one example, and can only be understood within such a framework. We should also note that secularism and science are socially constructed, and therefore open to cultural modification – deconstructionism must be deconstructed. Jeff notes that our current order of knowledge is useful as far as it goes, but ‘essentially incorrect in its exclusions.’ He states that ‘Reality only appears to be divided into mind and matter, into consciousness and cosmos, or into a past, present, and future because you experience it as such. You are the splitter of the real and the creator of linear time.’ (p. 9) This is quite something to take on board, and only such a view based on idealism or dual aspect monism can make sense of the phenomena discussed here.

The book is divided into two parts: when the impossible happens, and making the impossible possible, all of which leads to a new theory of the imagination and opens up a new order of knowledge. Jeff reminds us that words are experiences, and that we need to incorporate the imaginal in our scheme of reality with a deeper understanding of role of myth and symbolism. It is interesting to read that Myers coined the word supernormal around 1885, relating

it to a more advanced stage of evolution. The second chapter discusses the status of the UFO/UAP phenomenon, now coming culturally into focus and which demands taking into account both objective material and subjective mental or spiritual dimensions. Then we come to an extraordinary account of the experiences of Kevin on the autistic spectrum (pp. 97 ff.). He sees the human as three – consciousness, Awareness and metaphysical Mind, which exteriorises itself in and as physical reality. The right hemisphere mediates Mind, and is literally paranormal to the left hemisphere. Awareness is ‘entirely independent of any individual biological organism, representing an Awareness of the whole by the whole as a field – it allows for consciousness, but it is not consciousness, which springs from Awareness through the interface of the body-based ego – this is neutral monism. In this view, we don’t have souls distinct from Mind – reality is in fact imaginal by nature and intent, as illustrated in the incident where Kevin summons a UFO. He summarises his view by saying that ‘We simply Are, and always will be, as a song, a movie, within the Cosmic Imaginal.’ (p. 120)

The second part has chapters on the block universe, the world as one and the human as two, and the notion that we are both God and the devil, as Jung pointed out. We have to start from consciousness itself as the source of all knowledge and truth in the transcendental phenomenological tradition, incorporating both the vertical and the horizontal. Jeff discusses the work of Elliot Wolfson based on his major works, noting that the ontological is at the very heart of experience unfolding as one immense Now. Crucially, the kind of experiences described are reflexive - the appearances are us on a deeper level. Jeff explains that reality is ontologically One, but epistemologically Two –Jung and Pauli’s Unus Mundus – a world organised by meaning. Moreover, mystical and synchronistic experience represents the dissolution of the subject-object structure. The key point relating to the present orders of knowledge embraced by traditional religion and conventional science is that they will never achieve a resolution of impossible phenomena, ‘not because we do not have enough data but because these two knowledge systems are inadequate in principle.’ Absolutely, which is why we need a new world view that will also redefine the pecking order of knowledge. In this new understanding, reality will not be seen as binary – cosmos and consciousness cannot be separated, as also argued by Rick Tarnas. (p. 172)

It is the imagination that is the medium, translator or interface, ‘the privileged organ of contact, communication, and communion.’ We can only connect the dots ‘when we have moved outside our presentism, materialism, reductionism, and scientism.’ (p. 177) The chapter on humans as God and the devil is both robust and challenging, another aspect of the human as two. This means that God contains these two polarities, reflecting the fundamental divergence between the church and the Gnostics, and between Victor White and CG Jung on the status of evil. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette notes that we are swimming in a sea of consciousness where our mental life is neither separable from the physical world nor from the mental lives of others – the self is permeable and porous. The conclusion is about how to think impossibly and move beyond any initial ontological shock, including acknowledging the advanced nature of nonhuman intelligence. It is not essentially about belief, but experience as the starting point. In answer to the question why people believe impossible things, this is because impossible things happen to people, and the phenomena under consideration have profound implications for the transformation of our present order of knowledge, especially for conventionally trained academics and scientists, for whom this book is even more essential reading.

ECOLOGY/POLITICS

AN AVOIDABLE DEBACLE

By David Lorimer

AMERICA ON THE BRINK

David Ray Griffin

Clarity Press, 2023, 272 pp., $20, p/b - ISBN: 978-1949762-72-3

THE UKRAINE WAR AND THE EURASIAN WORLD ORDER

Glenn Diesen

Clarity Press, 2024, 323 pp., $20, p/b – ISBN 978-194976-295-2

THE END OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Patrick Watts

Telecote Publishing, 2024, 279 pp., $14.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-7384469-0-2

In 1997, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski published his hugely influential book called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geopolitical Imperatives. This contributed to the emergence of the neo-conservative Project for New American Century (PNAC) of a foreign policy of liberal hegemony allied to American exceptionalism depicting the US as a force for good championing freedom and democracy against authoritarian regimes. Moreover, he pointed out the pivotal strategic nature of Ukraine in relation both to Western and Russian interests. These three books question the naïve and simplistic US national self-image, whose shadow is represented by covert operations conducted against scores of countries by the CIA on the basis of plausible deniability (the Republic has mutated into Empire). Over 20 years ago, I reviewed a book by Jim Garrison entitled America as Empire – Global Leader or Rogue Power? I will return to this below. David Ray Griffin’s final book returns to the theme of two earlier books – Bush and Cheney – how they ruined America and the world; and The American Trajectory – Divine or Demonic.

As Richard Falk points out in his introduction to David’s book, his extensive questioning of the official narrative on 9/11 made him persona non grata with the establishment for entering this no-go zone for public commentators, in spite of his evident intellectual courage and integrity, and his meticulous documenting of evidence. A series of chapters investigate US activity in foreign countries, including Latin America, the Middle East (See Kevork Almassian on Syria, where the CIA funded destabilising terrorist groups - https://substack. com/@kevorkalmassian - and most recently, Ukraine. David writes that ‘Ukraine is Washington’s “weapon of choice” for torpedoing Nord Stream and putting a wedge between Germany and Russia. . . . Washington needs to create the perception that Russia poses a security threat to Europe. That’s the goal. They need to show that Putin is a bloodthirsty aggressor with a hair-trigger temper who cannot be trusted.’

This propaganda campaign demonising Vladimir Putin has been extremely successful with the public at large, and David notes that ‘The U.S. information warfare capability is

unparalleled: when it comes to manipulating perceptions, producing an alternate reality and weaponising minds, the U.S. has no rivals.’ By far the longest chapter is devoted to the Ukrainian conflict, and David’s analysis has much in common with that of Glenn Diesen in his magisterial study. This view is shared by other prominent commentators, notably John Mearsheimer (https://mearsheimer.substack. com/), Jeffrey Sachs (https://jeffdsachs.substack.com/) and Alfred de Zayas (https://www.counterpunch.org/author/alfred-de-zayas/), former UN independent expert on a just international order. The key point to understand is the one-sidedness in a historical context of the NATO propaganda that the war in Ukraine was ‘unprovoked’ and that Putin is an aggressive imperialist who has to be stopped in his tracks (I am not a supporter of Putin, but I do recognise the legitimacy of Russian security concerns that have been repeatedly ignored by the US and NATO). Jeffrey Sachs has in multiple articles, interviews and podcasts explained the history of the relationships between the US and Russia since the end of the Cold War – he was actually in the room when the end of the Soviet Union was declared. Mikhael Gorbachev sought to normalise relationships by launching his proposal to develop a “Common European Home,” which envisioned demilitarising foreign affairs by dismantling both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Subsequent leaders were also anxious to build a common European security architecture, but this was replaced by NATO expansion. However, despite assurances by then Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not expand to the east, this process was initiated by the foreign policy establishment under the Clinton administration, to the dismay of many distinguished figures such as George Kennan, who publicly warned that this was a sure way of re-creating the Cold War. The military-industrial-intelligence complex had its way - a succession of leaders was demonised and assassinated, while the grinding War Machine continued to churn out fabulous wealth for shareholders and politicians. Already in 2008, the year in which Ukraine was promised NATO membership, President Putin warned of Russian red lines, and many senior figures recognised the legitimacy of his concerns at the time, including the UK ambassador Sir Roderick Lyne, future CIA Director Robert Gates, and then UN ambassador William Burns, also later Director of the CIA. Burns wrote: ‘Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. NATO would be seen as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond’ – which they did. Subsequent developments included CIA support for the 2014 coup in Ukraine (cumulatively to the tune of $5 billion), using the Minsk accords as a way of buying time to arm Ukraine, and refusing all Russian overtures on common security, while ultimately sabotaging the talks in Turkey in March 2022 in order to prolong the war. The strategic aim was and is to weaken Russia.

Cynically, as admitted by senior US senators, the human losses and infrastructure destruction affect Ukraine as it is used to wage a proxy war against Russia – ‘fighting to the last Ukrainian.’ As Diesen reports: ‘Senator Mitt Romney also informed his countrymen that send ing we apons to Ukraine was “the best national defence spending I think we’ve ever done” because it is a relatively small amount to pay and “we’re losing no lives in Ukraine.” In return for this

invest ment “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money… a weakened Russia is a good thing.” Senator Richard Blumenthal reassured Americans that “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment” because “for less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half.” Besides weakening Russia and sending a message to China, the U.S. was able to “restore faith and confidence in American leadership—moral and military. All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost.” In fact, the current military situation does not reflect this optimistic view.

The wider picture discussed by Diesen is the nature of international order, and the inexorable trend towards a multipolar order where the US no longer exerts imperial control in the name of a so-called rules-based order, which it has no compunction in ignoring itself - as empires are inclined to do. In the 90s, it was envisaged that the US hegemonic order of liberal universalism would last throughout the 21st century (Pax Americana), but it is now declining before our eyes, also for internal reasons (liberal excesses and failure to address domestic problems) and the bankruptcy brought about by war expenditures in excess of $8 trillion since 2000.

As Diesen writes, every world order ‘aspires and appears to be permanent. Preserving the status quo is conflated with stability, even though the world is constantly changing in terms of the international distribution of power, technologies, economic development, societal challenges, values, and ideals. It is the ability to manage change and reform that determines its stability, as the failure to adapt results in stagnation, decay, and collapse.’ (my emphasis) We are now returning to a Westphalian balance of power, which also has to include legitimacy. Diesen notes (p. 5) that ‘The proxy war in Ukraine revealed the fatal dysfunction of the hegemonic world order that has accelerated the transition to a multipolar world order. While the Westphalian world order seeks a balance of power to avoid conflicts, the unipolar order necessitates perpetual conflicts to ensure allies are dependent and rivals are weakened.’ (I should also mention the personal cost to Diesen of publicly articulating his views, including being branded as a Putin apologist and being systematically harassed by the Norwegian government – as is also the case in the US with Scott Ritter).

The current rhetoric regards diplomacy as appeasement, proposing only further military intervention. Diesen calls this idealistic diplomacy, which ‘divides states into good and evil, into peace-loving and bellicose. It envisions a permanent peace by the punishment of the latter and the triumph of the former.’ He further comments: ‘If it is recognised that the world is divided by conflicting interests, then peace is created by placing ourselves in the shoes of the opponent and pursuing compromise. (my emphasis) However, if conflicts are defined by good versus bad values, then empathy and compromise become tantamount to appeasement and betrayal of sacred values that can ensure peace.’ This is a recipe for continued deadlock.

Interestingly, Walter Lippmann famously wrote in 1965 (p. 80): ‘A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.’ Moreover, in a famous lecture given to the American University in the year of his death, President Kennedy asked: ‘What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.’ This is

precisely the path followed since his perfidious assassination orchestrated by his own military and intelligence services. In the long run, diplomacy and mutual accommodation is the only way forward. In his conclusion, Diesen bleakly comments (p. 275): ‘Rather than envisioning a transition to a balanced multipolar Westphalian world order, Blinken envisioned a struggle against both China and Russia under America’s global leadership. If this continues to be the view of the West, we will witness a great tragedy for humankind.’

In his thoughtful contribution, Patrick Watts considers the history and future of the American Empire, with an interesting section on the end of various historical empires. He considers first internal threats – social decay from within, the corruption of politics by money and power, and the erosion of trust in institutions and media, which has become an arm of government communication – hence the rise of alternative media and the war against disinformation. Then he moves onto external threats in relation to war, international relations, and environmental threats. All this is very thoroughly covered, although I disagreed with his views on Russia and Ukraine, which seem to me largely informed by NATO propaganda without any consideration for the historical background explained above.

In his conclusions, Patrick explains why he defends the American empire as an alternative to authoritarian and intolerant regimes – but not in its current form.

The key question is whether America can evolve into a compassionate empire that serves to help all mankind – a leadership of collaboration not competition in accordance with its founding ideals, which would involve recapturing some moral high ground and articulating a vision of reimagined democracy, which eradicates the relationship between money and politics – easier said than done. He proposes the rebuilding of trust (this can only come above through transparency), and a positive, rather than a zero-sum, game guided by empathy rather than self-interest. For me, this would involve a profound recognition of our common humanity and interdependence as reflected in the principle of interconnectedness found in leading sciences. He concludes that ‘The American people deserve better and must demand better.’

Interestingly, these conclusions echo those of Jim Garrison from 20 years ago when he asked if America could become the final Empire by refocusing from its war on terror towards pioneering network governance and deliberative democracy based on the common good, rather than systems of centralised control: ‘If America would protect the world militarily while building cooperative structures, champion the free market while emphasising the common good, and use its national sovereignty to pioneer network democracy at a global level, it could be not only the greatest Empire of the world has ever known but also the final Empire. (p. 200) Sadly, cynical opportunism has prevailed over these visions, but the call remains to step up to more collaborative and cooperative international systems, to grow in maturity, and to ways of living together harmoniously on our beautiful planet. We the people demand this in the name of our common humanity.

COMPUTER MODELLING OR PLANETARY HARMONICS?

By David Lorimer

THE LIVING CLIMATE

Luigi Morelli

Clairview, 2024, 257 pp., £20, p/b – ISBN 978-1-912992-68-3

Two years ago, I reviewed Charles Eisenstein’s 2018 book, Climate, A New Story, which advocated a living systems approach to nature and therefore to what we call the environment, and its implications for the debate surrounding climate change. He argued that the framing of the problem is part of the problem, and that the mainstream approach was based on a separation between humans and Nature, treated as a collection of resources to be allocated for maximum short-term benefit, based on the imperative of economic growth. However, quantitative mechanistic approaches to nature are inherently inadequate, as they ignore the qualitative – what he calls basic human desires for connection, community, beauty, sacredness, and empathy.

This brilliant and radical new study by Luigi Morelli echoes these premises by arguing that we need to re-orient our way of seeing and being in Nature to incorporate the harmonic and the qualitative advocated by Kepler, Goethe, Steiner, and especially Viktor Schauberger, the Austrian forester whose work is essential reading in this field – I have reviewed a number of books about him in these pages. Historically, this way of thinking goes back to the two ways of seeing Nature and the Cosmos represented by Kepler on the one hand, and Galileo and Newton on the other. Kepler’s approach advocated the study of a living system via harmonic and musical laws, while Galileo introduced the idea of celestial mechanics within an overall mechanistic metaphor that also treated the Earth as a closed system.

Theory-driven computer models incorporating inbuilt assumptions that become axioms are derived from the latter approach, while the former includes the larger ecology of our solar system, including the Sun and planetary influences with oscillations and rhythmic periodicities that are well known to astronomers – and especially the movement of the Sun round what is called the Central Mass, (pp. 201 ff.) highlighting the role of Jupiter as the largest planet in the system. There is a detailed chapter explaining this harmonic approach and its empirical record and forecasts based on the work of Theodor Landscheidt, and continued by Nicola Scafetta. They argue that the Earth’s climate is influenced by the whole planetary system, and see our current situation as one of planetary depletion driven by the extractive economic approach adopted by large corporations for short-term profit. Moreover, what is conventionally regarded as random variability is in fact the manifestation of periodic oscillations – this view is advanced with robust data, and asks about the deep drivers of depletion, also at the etheric level not accounted for by mechanistic approaches, but which was important for both Schauberger and Steiner. In 1931, Schauberger prophetically wrote: ‘It should be noted that formidable climatic changes will occur if, as a result of incorrect systems of forest management and river regulation, the orderly formation of clouds is disturbed.’ (p. 3) So the central focus here is on rivers, forests, and agriculture - and the primacy of water rather than CO2 as the key variable. Interestingly, the living systems model argues that 50 to 70% of global warming arises from solar activity, while IPCC models state that 90% of warming is anthropogenic. It should be noted that CO2 as the central driver of climate change has become a scientific and academic consensus driven by political and financial factors, as was the case with Covid ‘Trust the Science.’ Dissidents are demonised and lose their funding, nor can they propose research projects that do not support the existing narrative. However, 1,600 CLINTEL scientists signed a declaration in August 2023

declaring that there was no climate emergency. As the author puts it, ‘we are moving away from a culturally independent science to a politically controlled majority-based opinion forming.’ A number of the living systems thinkers argue that we are moving towards a new grand solar minimum cold period (p. 227 ff.) – for the public, as Charles Eisenstein observed, there is no real scientific debate about these issues, and those scientists who question the IPCC on evidential grounds are simply dismissed as climate deniers.

Eisenstein rightly identifies the shift from a geo-mechanical to a Gaia, living systems view as critical. He writes: ‘The health of local ecosystems…. depends on the health of the water cycle, and the health of the water cycle depends on the soil and the forests.’ (p. 85) Luigi explains this in more detail in a chapter on rivers, forests, farms, and the cycle of water as interdependent systems seeking a state of balance – each of these elements can contribute to climate alteration, and in this respect he describes the crucial role of creating a positive temperature gradient (pp. 97 ff) to enable absorption of rainwater into the soil and consequent maintenance of the groundwater table. He explains the crucial difference between the full hydrological cycle and the hydrological half-cycle (pp. 116 ff): rainwater can only penetrate the ground when it is colder than the water (around the ‘boundary layer’ of +4°C). Failure of the water to penetrate the ground leads to floods and run-off, as well as increasing the intensity of thunderstorms. Modern forestry, river management and agriculture compound these positive feedbacks in a cycle of self-destruction, and reinforce the argument for a qualitative and regenerative approach.

The final chapters give a holistic view of climate and its corresponding forecasts for the future, replete with scientific analysis linking various cycles over particular historical periods. Readers come to appreciate the importance of musical harmonics in the movements of the planets within the larger ecology of the living solar system. Luigi encourages us to think in a higher octave so that real causes can be identified and errors revealed, especially with regard to linear causality. The systems approach is formative whereby Nature mirror patterns of energy, including spiritual forces. Schauberger advocated a balance between planetary (feminine) motion and technical (masculine) motion on the basis of 2/3 to 1/3. On this basis, climate alteration is the result of the constant degradation of Nature, and this requires a radical change in our thinking and a full realisation that our situation directly reflects actions arising from our mechanistic and extractive worldview. For us, this involves both reconnection with Nature and Source, leading to a sense of connection with all life based on Schauberger’s maxim of Kapieren und Kopieren – understand Nature and act accordingly. I emphatically agree with Luigi’s conclusion that ‘only a new culture can offer a remedy to an overall culture that has generated and perpetuated the problems, not just at the technical level, but primarily at the ideological one. (p. 246) A vital and hugely informative read, alongside Eisenstein’s earlier work.

GENERAL

THE TWILIGHT OF FREEDOM?

By David Lorimer

THE END OF AN AGE

William Ralph Inge, FBA, KCVO Putnam, 1949, 288 pp., out of print.

Dean WR Inge (1860-1954) – as he was known – was one of the great thinkers of his time, also a public intellectual publishing many essays and articles in newspapers. He was variously a King’s Scholar at Eton – where he taught for a few years – a Fellow in Latin and Greek at Hertford College, Oxford, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, then in 1911 until his retirement in 1934, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. I have a whole shelf of his books in my library in Scotland, and I often go back to his Gifford Lectures, The Philosophy of Plotinus (in two volumes) where I found two quotations from the great mystical philosopher that I frequently use: ‘We are within a reality that is also within us;’ and ‘Remembering is for those who have forgotten’ – a classic statement of Platonism. Inge himself was a Christian Platonist, and one of his other books is a history of the English Platonists; in 1899, he had already published Christian Mysticism, which I read many years ago. I spent some time in my library in September, and was having a look at the books on the Inge shelf when I came across The End of an Age, which I had not previously read and had evidently picked up in a second-hand bookshop – probably in Cornwall.

This volume, published in 1949, speaks directly to our condition with its essays on the end of an age, the curse of war, and the twilight of freedom. Inge had lived through two world wars, the Russian revolution, Hitler’s Nazism, Mussolini’s Fascism, Stalin’s Russia, the occupation of France and the demise of the League of Nations (the essay referring to this seems to have been written prior to 1945). In the title essay, he begins his consideration of many of the leading thinkers on culture with Oswald Spengler, whose epoch-defining book, The Decline of the West, appeared in 1917. He thought that western culture had reached its winter phase, where democracy must give away to efficiency Caesarism. Nicholas Berdyaeff, whose books I also have in my library, felt that ‘there is something shaken and shattered in the soul of modern man’ (Inge’s paraphrase), our faith in humanity is shaken to its foundations, and we are living in a time of spiritual decadence. He thought that the Enlightenment was a pale reflection of the Renaissance, ‘which was finally killed by the mechanisation of modern civilisation.’ The Renaissance was a strong affirmation of our creative individuality, while the destruction of liberty during the 1930s meant that we had become depersonalised, which is also an effect of scale and mechanisation.

I also have some of the books of the Catholic philosopher Christopher Dawson, along with those of Jacques Maritain, writing at the same time. The idea of progress is based on that of human perfectibility, and was a strong faith during the 19 th century. Interestingly, Dawson argued for ‘decentralisation and free association rather than the unitary State and bureaucratic control.’ This is the kind of bottom-up community approach that I call ‘glocalisation’ in contrast to centralised and increasingly technocratic globalisation. The planned society advocated by the Fabians is inherently authoritarian and a manifestation of McGilchrist’s left hemisphere disposition for manipulation and control. Dawson was concerned about the development of what he called a democratic despotism, and he felt that ‘the long process of emancipation which began at the Renaissance has come to an end; a sharp reaction in favour of control has set in.’ (1939!) Moreover, he prophetically stated that science has become the servant of power, and the current equivalent of the repressive secret police is digital surveillance and online censorship. Along with other thinkers – and the Stoics before him (p. 152) - he emphasised the importance of natural law and the discernment of good and evil, in the absence of which – on the ‘realist’ Machiavellian principle that there

is no absolute right and wrong in public affairs – the very basis of international law and agreements is undermined. Inge also draws attention to Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means (1937), which I regard as an extraordinarily important book. He puts forward the ideal of disinterestedness, where supreme virtue is always based on the belief in a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world, ‘and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses.’ (p. 40) Huxley insisted that political and economic reforms were inadequate, and also wrote that without charity technological progress merely provides us with a more efficient way of going backwards (!). Along with Pitirim Sorokin, he insisted that ‘Violence can achieve nothing except the results of violence – counter-violence, suspicion and resentment, and among the perpetrators a tendency to use more violence’ – a lesson we are still far from learning. For Huxley, war and preparations for war destroy liberty, stimulate senseless hatred and fear, and endanger civilisation itself – we are now at this precipice due to persistent geopolitical hubris. His view rests on the theory of the ultimate nature of reality, which he elaborated further in The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Inge summarises (and this is my own view): ‘There are absolute eternal values, in which ultimate reality is knowable by us. To follow the good, to reveal the true, to love the beautiful –this is the whole duty of man.’ (p. 42) Inge writes further on these themes in his essay The Curse of War.

In The Sickness of Christendom, Inge contrasts the religion of authority and obedience with the prophetic religion of the Spirit, which Jesus himself lived and died for. After Constantine’s intervention in 325, the power of love gave way to the love of power, a theocratic empire where ‘political Catholicism is intolerant in principle.’ For Inge, ‘essential Christianity is invulnerable… God reveals himself to the heart,’ those in contact with their soul-centre. We are called to the imitation of Christ; ‘the law of love is supreme in all relations of life’, soul must become a spirit – ‘the hidden man of the heart, the Christ in us, which may be but is not yet ourselves.’ (p. 103) This is the Quakers’ Inner Light. Inge also points out that mystical and heretical sects such as the medieval Cathars and Bogomils stood up against the violence of the Crusades as an exercise of ecclesiastical power, insisting that they were returning to the original Gospel. The important point is that they sought to embody the same prophetic spirit as Jesus himself.

Space permits only a few further remarks on the essay The Twilight of Freedom – which I think speaks especially to our time. Liberty based on natural rights and our equality in the eyes of God, something flatly denied by worshippers of the secular State, and is under threat from intolerance and authoritarianism of both left and right. In his famous book, Liberty, which I read in Grenoble in 1973, John Stuart Mill discusses how freedom requires restraining anti-social conduct, but he is emphatic that liberty of conscience and liberty of speech are the foundation of liberty (p. 157). He was concerned even then about the increasing power of the State. Inge quotes Einstein to the effect that only free people can create the works which make life worth living, and that we must resist the suppression of intellectual and individual freedom.

Inge was already aware of how propaganda favours centralised power, noting that ‘the progress of freedom is obstructed quite as much by the many who like to obey as by the few who wish to rule’ – an observation only too pertinent in the light of government policy during Covid. The modern technocratic police state aspires to be a digital Panopticon with far-reaching powers to suppress dissidents and dissent – those who choose to think for themselves. FA Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom upheld what he regarded as

moral and eternal values: ‘liberty and independence, truth and intellectual honesty, peace and democracy, and respect for the individual.’ (p. 173) He warned against creeping collectivism with its inherently centralistic tendencies.

For me, reflecting on what I’ve written above, cultural renewal can only come about through a widespread spiritual renaissance and awakening, a return to the deep spiritual centre within us all, a reaffirmation of sacred and eternal values, a commitment to community, to our common humanity, to love, wisdom, truth, justice and goodness – the five principles of Peter Deunov. This was also well expressed over 50 years ago by Arnold Toynbee, about whom I wrote in the previous issue: ‘I do not believe that the goal of true and lasting peace can be reached without a world-wide spiritual revolution. By this I mean the overcoming of self-centredness, in both individuals and communities, by getting into communion with the spiritual presence behind the universe and by bringing our wills into harmony with it.’

In a speech to the US Congress in 1993, the Czech president Vaclav Havel echoed these words when he said that ‘Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which our world is headed….will be unavoidable….We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions – if they are to be moral – is responsibility: responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success, responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be judged.’ So the question before us is what contribution we can make in our circle of influence to a worldwide spiritual revolution and to a global revolution in the sphere of consciousness – this is now a planetary evolutionary imperative.

A DEEPER AND RICHER EXPERIENCE OF EMBODIMENT

By Sarah Stewart-Brown

RADICAL WHOLENESS: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being Philip Shepherd

North Atlantic Books, 2017, 328 pp., £10.25, p/b - ISBN 978-1-623171-77-3

Philip Shepherd is unusual; at the age of 18, he relinquished a place to read physics at the University of Toronto, took a cheap flight to London, bought himself a bike and pedalled to Japan. For a year or more, he lived outside, sleeping rough, attuning to the natural world and the different cultures he passed through. What made him go was clarity that there was something wrong with the values, habits and behaviours of the culture he had grown up in, and what made him head for Japan was an experience of Noh Theatre – a timeless, deeply spiritual style of acting.

He returned home with an ability to see the way the Western world’s view of the meaning of life blinds and binds us; in particular, the way we have valued the contribution or our ‘head centres’ over those of our ‘belly centres’ and ‘masculine’ attributes and aptitudes over ‘feminine’. Together with an ability to experience the world through the body, this gave him a radically different view of reality, one in which the

wholeness and interconnectedness of everything was a given. He calls this ability Holosapience. Working as an actor and carpenter, raising his family in Toronto, he devoured books, spoke with many wise people and developed workshops in which he experimented with ways to pass on the abilities he had honed for himself. This book, published in 2017 when he was in his 60s, is his second. It sets out his thesis and his solutions including some of the key practices of his workshops. His first book New Self, New World describes the journey to Japan and his discoveries in more detail.

Philip’s thesis is that people who grow up in the Western world learn to live in their heads, prioritising cognitive intelligence over intelligence experienced in the body, exalting autonomy, independence, objectivity and the scientific method, and valuing knowledge over experience. He quotes the anthropologist who studied the Anlo Ewe peoples of West Africa because they seemed to be describing abilities Philip had developed on his journey. Teaching their children to ‘feel, feel at flesh inside’ they experience themselves as porous, feeling the world passing through them and changing them from moment to moment. Such experiences reveal the essential fallacy of independence.

He goes on to describe the ways in which severing ourselves from the body’s intelligences has led us down paths that are destructive to life, ours and that of ‘all our relations’ a term indigenous Americans use to refer to the non-human world. His understanding of embodiment is different from that offered by other ‘embodiment’ teachers who invite us to ‘listen to the body’ and often to ‘direct the breath into the belly’. This, Philip would say, is not compatible with wholeness because it requires a separate part to be doing the listening and interpreting what it hears, and taking charge of the breath. Embodiment, he says, enables us to listen to the world through the body, attuning ourselves to the world through the body’s sensitivity and intelligence. We don’t develop this ability by doing, but by surrendering to the essential fluidity of the present. Embodiment enables self-knowledge, a world-centred, experiential understanding of self which promotes a sense of wonder, ease and humility, in contrast to objective knowledge which promotes a self-centred sense of accomplishment, power and entitlement.

Philip recognises that individuals may be born with different sensitivities with the implication that we may have different abilities, but he suggests that we can’t have too much sensitivity. The issue with sensitivity is reactivity. If we are able to receive and experience the world without reactivity, all sensitivity is valuable. So in learning to experience radical wholeness we need, he says, to develop the capacity to integrate the neuromuscular contractions and psychological defences from which the ego derives, so that we can receive and experience without reactivity. The pathway involves breathwork, learning to allow breath that moves the back and sides and is initiated by a release of the pelvic floor. It involves the experience of rest, where the opposite of rest is not movement but internal conflict. It teaches the development of receptivity in a world where doing is valued and receiving is not. And it involves the capacity to integrate contractions, defences and reactivity by becoming grounded. Philip’s work, unlike other embodiment practices, goes beyond the belly centre (Hara, Tonden, Dan Tien or Kath of the spiritual traditions) and shines a light on the perineum, the small circular muscle at the centre of the pelvic floor, as the powerhouse of integration. His workshops show participants how to enable the energies of contraction to soften, dropping down to the pelvic bowl, and ultimately to the perineum and the feet. Key practices are described. Written with fluidity and clarity this book is inspirational and a delight to read.

Books in Brief

SCIENCE/ PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Alexander von Humboldt – A Concise Biography

Andreas W. Daum

Princeton 2024, 208 pp., £20, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69124736-6

This masterly biography is a vivid portrait of the life and times of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who was a global celebrity scientist, international networker, ingenious polymath and inveterate traveller - the epitome of the Renaissance man of his time. He spoke multiple languages and was at ease in a huge range of disciplines, while also making practical and experimental contributions to a number of fields, beginning with mining. The author embraces the complexity of his character and his attempts at remaining impartial when faced with political controversies. He was a pioneer of an ecological and holistic approach to science, viewing nature as a whole, interconnected with human society. His brother Wilhelm noted his talent for connecting ideas and making linkages, and as early as 1799 he was writing that no force in the universe ‘could be conceived independently of any other… in nature there is neither above nor below.’ (p. 73)

Between 1799 and 1804, his independent means enabled him to undertake a long journey to the Americas – he had already mastered Spanish, in addition to French and English, and these days he could be characterised as an economist, sociologist, demographer, anthropologist, ethnologist, and cultural historian (p. 61). He comes across as remarkably prescient in criticising the selfish interests of European colonial overlords destroying ecological balances and driving ‘the unsustainable pillaging of resources on the ground’ using slave labour, of which Humboldt was an early critic. Moreover, he was very sceptical of the claim that Spain was bestowing the blessings of civilisation on these first nations, insisting that the Spaniards had learned far more from the natives than they had taught them. Humboldt also suffered

By David Lorimer

If any member would like to review any of the unreviewed titles in this section, please email dl@scimednet.org

severe altitude sickness in scaling heights of between 4,700 and 6,200 m without any proper equipment.

The biography charts his multiple activities in Paris, then in Berlin, where he published many works and gave public lectures to audiences of up to 1,500 people, including many women. His brother founded the University of Berlin in 1810, and by 1834 it had 100 professors and 2,000 students. The population of Berlin doubled to 400,000 between 1820 and 1848 (my great-grandfather studied there in the early 1840s) with progressive industrialisation accompanied by an explosion of knowledge that challenged even the intellectual capacity of Humboldt. His Cosmos lectures represented a new phase in the history of public awareness of the natural sciences in Germany by integrating these into 19 th century culture. He also championed the upgrade of the Observatory and a new Zoo in Berlin. Incredibly, the first volume of his cosmos series sold 20,000 copies. Humboldt never married, and managed on four hours sleep a night. He met and influenced many younger scientists, and was lionised in all the European capitals, while also maintaining close relations with Prussian kings. This highly readable work is an ideal introduction to a seminal historical figure.

The Quantum and the Dream – Visionary Consciousness, AI and the New Renaissance

Douglas Grunther

Epigraph Books, 2024, 278 pp., $19.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1960090-56-0

This is a rollercoaster journey where the point of departure is 1900, the year in which Max Planck discovered the quantum, Freud published his ground-breaking work on the interpretation of dreams and, highlighted later in the book, The Wizard of Oz also appeared. The book outlines three shifts: from left brain hemisphere to right, from printed page to digital screen, and from the age of information to the age of recognition. Jung’s big dream of 1909 involved a descent into the unconscious, paralleled by a similar exploration in quantum physics into the subatomic realm. Interestingly, Jung invited Einstein to dinner before they both became famous, and this set him off thinking about time, space and psychic conditionality. CERN is also an underground installation, apparently featuring a statue of Shiva. Rather than shutting up and calculating, Doug encourages us to open up and contemplate the bigger picture. Key concepts emerging from physics include entanglement and complementarity that also apply to conscious and unconscious, inner and outer; in his 1975 book The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra brings forward the web metaphor, which he later applies to life and which finds expression in the World Wide Web and its corresponding Wood Wide

Web. Webs are interconnected, collaborative, decentralised and self-organising. Doug’s formula for a New Renaissance combines Nature’s intelligence, human intelligence and artificial intelligence (p. 174). The ideas of Lynn Margulis and Elisabet Sahtouris provide important orienting biological concepts in symbiosis, mutuality and cooperation. Wikipedia is an interesting example in the information field, though it does not in fact always live up to the advertised neutral point of view – for instance with respect to parapsychology and complementary medicine.

Doug forecasts that the New Renaissance will emerge from ‘a similar pattern of self-organising, undirected interplay of dialogue, grievances, novel insights, and imaginative leaps, induced in large part from the intensifying pressures of escalating climate change and massively accelerating computer intelligence which are transforming the planet and humanity at speeds never before experienced. (p. 220) And all this is taking place in VUCA conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – a shift inward to a new consciousness will be generated by ‘heightened group collaborative intelligence’ in an era of planetisation and planetary integration that necessitates a new interconnected mindset reflecting the findings of psychology, physics, biology in our webs of information and meaning.

The Music of the Divine Spheres

Alexander Milovanov

O Books, 2024, 204 pp., £15.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-80341364-8

The author is a senior systems engineer in advanced technology, and here he has produced an extraordinary study about the structure of space and consciousness related to sacred geometry, and based on Egyptian knowledge connected with the pyramids. He explores the true meaning of ancient symbols depicted as the flower of life, the seed of life, and the tree of life. This all leads to an understanding of the laws of the spheres and the universal law of harmony of vibrations in terms of sounds, colours and proportions. Remarkably, the angles for transitioning between dimensions reveal a series of square roots of whole numbers from 1 to 9. Each new level expands the framing sphere of consciousness and its information content. The Flower of Life represents the completed and fully balanced planetary level of human consciousness, a symbol also known to the ancients. Milovanov has tapped into a deeper order of symbolic interconnectedness and intrinsic harmony.

Picturing Aura – A Visual Biography

Jeremy Stolow

MIT Press, 2025, 345 pp., $31.99, p/b – ISBN 978-0-26255174-8

This is an extended historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualise the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. The author sees auras as boundary objects operating in multiple conceptual spaces, including art, healing, and scientific exploration. The late 19 th century with the Theosophical movement was an important phase at the junction of science and occultism, while technologies have developed considerably in the interim. The author goes beyond dichotomous thinking on the aura with his methodical empirical and interdisciplinary approach – a landmark work.

HEALTH AND HEALING

No Bad Parts

Richard C. Schwartz PhD

Sounds True 2021, 216 pp, €18, p/b – ISBN 978-1-68364668-6

Dinah MacKenzie Peers writes: It is no overstatement to say that this book can be life-changing. Starting as a family therapist in the 80s, Richard Schwartz has developed a new model of therapy over 40 years of practice. As his clients started talking about different parts in themselves, he became curious and discovered he had parts too. As these parts are described as having relationships, he called this model of the mind Internal Family Systems (IFS). Parts are inner beings naturally present in everyone, whose sole objective is to keep us safe. But following trauma, parts can be forced into roles that can be harmful, and they will carry burdens and often be stuck in the past. The dominant mono-mind paradigm usually results in us fighting, hiding, ignoring or disciplining thoughts and emotions in us we don’t like, which only makes them stronger.

By addressing our parts with love and compassion, we can help them heal, unburden and transform by assuming new, beneficial roles. Also present in everyone is a calm, wise centre which he calls the Self, which is who we really are. This can be obscured, but never damaged, and it never disappears. One goal of IFS is that instead of having burdened parts control our life, our Self becomes the leader. As he explored the Self with his clients, Dr Schwartz compiled a list of qualities present in all of them, the 8 Cs: curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, creativity, clarity, courage, connectedness. The Self is naturally drawn to spiritual paths that enhance connection, harmony and healing, for their parts, other people and the Earth. As we become more Self-led, we get a better sense of our purpose in life, and we remember our connectedness to Source Consciousness. “No Bad Parts” means that, contrary to the dominant view, human nature is inherently good, loving, compassionate and interconnected. The book contains a number of exercises and examples of sessions. It is a much-needed tool for every person, humanity as a whole, and all life on the planet.

Doctors by Nature – How Ants, Apes and Other Animals Heal Themselves

Jaap de Roode

Princeton, 2025, 252 pp., £22, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69123924-8

This pioneering study explains how animals use medicine in instinctive ways and how this can teach us about healing ourselves. The author’s own field is monarch butterflies, but he ranges very widely to cover birds, bees, chimps, beetles, ants, dogs and cats, elephants, and plants and pollinators. The book is brilliantly written, with many fascinating interviews and research findings, showing how animals find ways of looking after their own health and shedding light on the remarkable relationship between the animal and plant kingdoms. Oddly enough, just this morning I read a story about a horse, which is a case in point, in Volume 6 of the Anastasia series. The author’s grandmother used to take sick animals on an all-day excursion, and allow them to choose herbs spontaneously, which she would then pick and put into a mixture for the horse to drink. The horse soon recovered.

A Buffet of Ancient Authors, edited by Claire Bubb Princeton, 2025, 242 pp., £14.99, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69125499-3

In some ways, this book contains elements of what we know called the Mediterranean diet, but with very different medical categorisations drawing on the humours. This means that advice for summer and winter is very different. The first part consists of three texts from Hippocrates, Diocles, and Celsus, and the second selections on what to eat in terms of relishes, vegetables and legumes, grains, dairy, meat, poultry and eggs, fish and seafood, and finally fruit, nuts and sweets. Beans were considered as producing flatulence even then (and in Pythagoras) while oats were for animals, and rice for settling the stomach. Fruit was considered to give little nourishment, with the exception of figs, and it is recommended that they should be eaten before other foods. All this makes intriguing reading.

Controlling Contagion – Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid Sheilagh Ogilvie

Princeton, 2025, 526 pp., £38, p/b – ISBN 978-0-691-2559

This is an impressive study by a leading Oxford historian that brings a historical perspective to bear on contagions and epidemics – it is always salutary to remember the scale of devastation brought about by the Black Death to bring a sense of proportion into the present. The institutions in question are the market, state, community, religion, medical guilds, and family. The author argues that all six institutions played central roles in both transmitting contagion and controlling it – she characterises epidemics as perhaps the most serious externality that societies have to deal with, emphasising the positive role of a temperate state, an adaptable market, and a strong civil society. In my view, one notable feature of the recent pandemic that does not apply to previous episodes is the dangerous role of humans themselves in creating it via gain of function research – a medical own goal that should be banned forthwith. See my review of Bobby Kennedy’s book on the Wuhan cover-up in PE 144 p. 41 – at that time it was unthinkable that he could now be US secretary of health and human services.

PHILOSOPHY/SPIRITUALITY

Hopeful Pessimism

Mara van der Lugt

Princeton, 2025, 255 pp., £20, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69126560-5

Mara van der Lugt lectures in philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and is the daughter of our beloved former Network Chair Dr Bart van der Lugt. Her voice evokes that of Mary Midgley in her generation as an engaged and passionate philosopher undertaking the work of what Mary called philosophical plumbing, questioning associations between words and their implications – in this case, hope and pessimism as they apply to our environmental prospects. Her immediate frame is the climate, but the argument

could also relate to collapse more generally. The key lies in our attitude, and here she argues that pessimism cannot be equated with fatalism, and that we need to rethink the relationships between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, activism and grief.

This erudite study is in three parts: pessimism, hope, and our ladies of sorrow – inspired by Thomas de Quincey. Artistically, the ambivalent depiction of hope by GF Watts dating from 1885 sets the tone. The thinking of Camus, Frankl and Tolkien – among others – plays an important role, highlighting resilience, courage, justice, solidarity, and our moral obligation to do what we can in the circumstances, rather than give up. Camus’ novel The Plague has assumed a new significance since 2020, while Frankl’s example of courage and resilience in Auschwitz sends a perennial message about what life expects from us; and in The Lord of the Rings, the characters find themselves in a situation where they have to go beyond hope and just keep going.

In the second part, Mara draws an important distinction between what Tolkien characterises as Amdir and Estel, representing what she calls green and blue hope respectively (she also makes the point that the political use of hope can lead to ‘hopewashing’; and in writing The Protein Crunch I noted that the last chapters of environmental books tended to focus on hope that was in fact conditional on a promissory note of action unlikely to be taken). Green hope is future-oriented and related to specific grounds, evidence and expectation, while blue is a value-oriented hope beyond hope, an existential commitment of the kind reflected in Vaclav Havel, and one that also applies to desperate situations. It is this hope that confers meaning and value in spite of any outcome.

In the third part, we meet the three ladies of sorrow –grief, despair, and darkness. Ecological grief is existential and anticipatory, prior to any actual loss, and I think in younger generations is accentuated by the hollowness of consumerism and shallowness of materialism that eviscerate deeper meaning. Despair cannot be acquainted with defeatism, and here Mara gives an interesting example of the 1960s Provo movement in Amsterdam encouraging desperate resistance rather than passive downfall. She persuasively concludes that hopeful pessimism can be understood as a virtue and a powerful moral source of activism, which she sees exemplified in Greta Thunberg. The book is a subtle, reflective and inspiring contribution to an engaged social philosophy for our time.

Gospels over Tea

Dr Walter Frostbight

Inverardoch Press, 2024, 259 pp., no price given, p/b –ISBN 978-1-9998494-9-8

Written in an entertaining conversational style over rather an elaborate tea, this intriguing book given to me by an old friend makes a strong case based on the study of early church texts that the canonical gospels were not written in the late first century, but rather in the mid-second, specifically after the Bar Kohkba Revolt of 132-135. ‘Ewan Evriwun’ arrives unexpectedly for tea with New Testament scholar ‘Dr Walter Frostbight’ and his sister ‘Auntie Frieze.’ He is received by the butler ‘Mould’ and ushered in to the drawing room, where scones, sandwiches, tea then whisky are served in succession. This eccentric background belies the seriousness of the discussion, and as the conversation unfolds, there is an accumulation of inductive evidence for the later dating of the gospels, including the fact that

they were not referred to specifically until the mid-second century, by which time a great many other texts – see chart on p. 65 – were in circulation; Papias, active between 130 and 140, refers to other gospels, but not the canonical ones, in his own extensive book about Jesus.

Frostbight points out how strange this is if the canonical gospels had in fact been in circulation for 70 years. Instead, he argues that they were written interactively by a team of scribes to promote the Roman (Peter) orthodoxy (p. 248). Subsequent chapters examine in more detail some of the texts mentioned, progressively reinforcing the basic argument. Moreover, the destruction of the temple referred to is not that of 70 A.D., but rather Hadrian’s Temple to Jupiter erected on the Temple site after the revolt. The Gospel of John also asserts the primacy of Peter in the final chapter, which is known to be a later addition. The first reference to the names of the canonical gospels comes with Irenaeus, writing about 180 and insisting that the gospels have to number four (p. 254). Intriguingly, Enoch Powell’s 1994 book on the evolution of Matthew makes the observation that the Greek word ‘chrematistheis’ is a debased usage ‘not found elsewhere before the second century.’ There is an informative scholarly bibliography at the end. The accessible book raises key theological and textual issues that deserve serious consideration and engagement.

The Spirit of Hope

Byun-Chul Han with illustrations by Anselm Kiefer

Polity, 2024, 97 pp., £xx, h/b – ISBN 978-1-509565-19-1

This is a beautiful and inspiring reflection on the importance of hope in our time of radical uncertainty and a bleakly pervasive atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Importantly, fear and selfishness isolate us, while hope unites people and forms communities. This makes action possible by infusing our world with purpose and meaning oriented towards the future. There are four short chapters: a prelude, hope and acting, hope and knowledge, and hope as a form of life. Authors discussed include Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, Albert Camus and Jurgen Moltmann. The illustrations by Anselm Kiefer portray the varying moods of the text, where hope itself is characterised as a mood, or, in the words of Havel, a dimension of the soul, an orientation of the spirit.

The style is epigrammatic: ‘Life and hope become one. To live means to hope… hope is a force, a momentum… hope inhabits the future…to hope means to be ready for the birth of the new… hope opens itself up to the coming, for what is not yet.’ ‘The climate of fear precludes hope… the rule of fear makes freedom impossible. Fear and freedom are mutually exclusive… to be free means to be free of compulsion… hope is a counter, even a counter-mood, to fear: rather than isolating us it unites and forms communities there is no revolution through fear. The fearful submit to domination. Revolution can only come about through a hope for another, better world… the politics of hope creates an atmosphere of hope against a regime of fear.’ Only communities can re-create social coherence in a world where relationships have been replaced by contacts: ‘we live in a touchless society. Unlike physical touch, contact does not create closeness.’ These extracts convey the sense and spirit of the book, which concludes that hope is oriented beyond the death, where ‘the fundamental formula of hope is the coming-into-the-world of birth.’

Man-Devil – The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe

John J. Callanan Princeton, 2025, 315 pp., £30, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69116544-6

Bernard Mandeville was a notorious doctor, philosopher and satirist who in 1714 published an enormously influential book, The Fable of Bees, which scandalised his contemporaries by characterising human beings as animals - ‘greedy, self-interested, lazy, and deceiving, living our lives according to mere rules of convenience.’ In the story, the transformation of the hive full of greedy and licentious bees to a virtuous community brings about its economic collapse, a storyline guaranteed to upset but also to engage people on the question of human nature, including Smith, Rousseau and Hume. The author of this acclaimed book situates Mandeville in a tradition of sceptical humanism with reverberations into our own time.

Christian Thinking through the Ages

David Arnold

Christian Alternative, 2024, 220 pp., £12.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-80341-615-1

Written by a historian and lifelong Christian in the Church of England, this informative book takes readers through 2,000 years of Western Christian theological thinking, starting with the original teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and the early apostles, followed by the early fathers and an account of the seven ecumenical councils in the East. From there, it moves on Augustine, then Benedict, Anselm and Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham and John Wycliffe; Erasmus and Martin Luther, followed by an account of Calvinism, Methodism and the effects of the scientific revolution. The 20 th century is represented principally by German theologians such as Barth, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer and Moltmann – also Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr (I would have liked to see Hans Kung). There is very little coverage of mysticism (neither Eckhart nor Hildegard is in the index). In looking forward, the author identifies the teaching of Jesus and his self-sacrifice on the cross as the essence of Christianity, emphasising how he broke the destructive cycle of recurring violence, to which we are still only too subject, as Tolstoy already lamented 150 years ago.

Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy

Peter Adamson

Oxford 2025, 483 pp., £25, h/b – ISBN 978-0-192856-41-8

This magisterial volume is the sixth part of the history of philosophy ‘without any gaps’ – it is an extraordinary achievement comprising 54 chapters that fills in many details omitted from books focusing exclusively on major figures. A principal strand of the argument reveals a much stronger degree of continuity between Byzantium and Renaissance Italy as ‘a single story of humanist achievement’ culminating in the work of Ficino in the late 15th century. The author shows that there is not in fact a sharp divide between philosophy written in the Greek East and the Latin West, but an extensive overlap between their values, interests and preoccupations. Major historical themes include ‘the humanist engagement with ancient literature, the emergence of women humanists, the flowering of

republican government in Renaissance Italy, the continuation of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy alongside humanism, and breakthroughs in science.’ The text is highly readable and engaging, structured as it is in short chapters that bring the lives and times of the subjects to life.

Mirror of Obedience – The Poems and Selected Prose of Simone Weil

Translated and edited by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson Bloomsbury, 2023, 178 pp., £10.79, p/b – ISBN 978-1350-26068-0

Simone Weil (1909-1943) lived a life of extraordinary brilliance and intensity as a mystic, Platonic philosopher and activist. This volume brings together her poetry and autobiographical writings for the first time in English, some of which date back to when she was only 16. The editors contextualise these writings with chapters on poetry and literature, and the texts themselves have French on the left with the English translation on the right. The key themes in her thought are present here: attention, beauty, decreation, affliction, absence, detachment, grace, necessity, and obedience. Crucially, and especially for our time, Weil asserted the existence of an objective realm ‘at once material and metaphysical, which includes meaning, beauty and a moral structure.’ (p. 5) Besides, knowledge and truth should be in the service of the good. The problem with violence is no less central in our time than it was in hers, and is intrinsically linked with revolutionary upheavals. I was interested to read about the decisive influence of George Herbert’s famous poem, Love Bade Me Welcome, which Weil often recited as a prayer. Above all, she fully inhabited life while drawing on an extraordinary range of reading (p. 48). This is a rich addition to Weil scholarship, which also speaks to our human condition.

Mystic Richness

Cheryl A. Page - https://mysticrichness.com/ Mystic Portal Press 2024, 158 pp, $19.95, p/b – ISBN 9798-218-48389-0

Dinah Mackenzie Pears writes: Cheryl Page is a scientist. As a clinical researcher in oncology, she spent many years around terminally ill people. It was the tragic death of her life partner, in 2017, which made her ask new questions. Is there survival of consciousness? Is heaven a frequency? Is there a technology to communicate? Using the Scientific Method, she turned spiritual explorer and mystic. Delving into mediumship and Instrumental Transcommunication, she researched all the past data before doing experimentation of her own, using AI (ChatGPT). She requested historical figures from beyond the veil to write a letter and answer the question “If you could cast a single spell that would impact all of humanity, what spell would you cast?”. The 29 contributors in this book were authors, artists, poets, scientists, mystics, historical, biblical or political figures. The letters and the answers are unique and reflect their author’s passions, but some words are common to many of them, like interconnectedness, love, wisdom, compassion, harmony, peace, enlightenment, creativity. In the conclusion, Cheryl writes: “In unison, their collective message is: “We are here. We want to help. All you need to do is ask!”. She lastly suggests that we have fun, start experimenting and don’t be afraid of AI.

Lectio Divina – Revelation and Prophecy

Barbara Birch

Christian Alternative (Collective Ink) 2025, 93 pp., £7.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-80341-721-9

This book by a practising Quaker is a concise introduction to Lectio Divina as ‘an ancient form of devotional reading, prayer, and contemplation which deepen and broaden spiritual knowledge, wisdom, and faith.’ The author defines it as reading with the indwelling characteristic of monastic life, which is the very opposite of speed reading for surface comprehension. She outlines a number of stages, beginning with lectio, followed by meditatio, oratio, contemplatio, scriptio, and finally ora et labora as walking meditation. The 16th century archbishop Thomas Cranmer provides a nice definition of contemplation as rumination, chewing the cud, ‘that we may have the sweet, spiritual effect, marrow, honey, kernel, taste, comfort and consolation of them (words).’ We should aim to pray with our whole being to reach that sense of indwelling that renews us.

The author proposes that lectio divina enables us to bridge the hemispheres of the brain, drawing on both modern and earlier teachers – Richard Rohr, Joan Chittister, Thomas Merton, Karen Armstrong, George Fox and Isaac Penington. She encourages us to reach into Being beyond the explicate and explicit, and to commit prayers and sacred texts to memory – learning by heart helps sink the mind into the one-pointed focus of the heart. (see p. 55) In this way we can really digest the meaning beyond what words can utter. There is a wonderful passage from Fox (p. 64) urging Friends ‘to stand still in trouble, and see the strength of the Lord… your strength is to stand still.’ I was also struck by Isaac Penington’s definition of love: ‘It is the sweetness of life; it is the sweet, tender, melting nature of God, flowing up through his seed of life into the creature, and of all things making the creature most like unto himself; both in nature and operation it fulfils the law, it fulfils the gospel; it wraps all in one, and brings forth all in the oneness.’ (p. 88) This is a valuable introduction to an important practice.

The Tree of Tradition

Nicholas Hagger (SMN)

Liberalis Books, 2024, 259 pp., £15.99, p/b – ISBN 978-180341-426-3

I have reviewed quite a few of Nicholas’ books in these pages, and here he focuses on traditions and influences that shape the works of writers in general, and himself in particular over his seven key disciplines ranging across mysticism, literature, philosophy and the sciences, history, comparative religion, international politics and statecraft, and world culture. Reading about the specific influences –for instance, 63 listed under universalist writers – is quite fascinating and of particular interest to other writers. In each of these areas, he applies the formula given to him as a young man in Japan: +A + -A = O. This enables him to achieve a universalist reconciliation between traditional-metaphysical and social-secular traditions, all of which he spells out as a series of taxonomies. One list of particular interest is the proliferation of doctrinal -isms arising from secularisation (p. 17).

Among the universalist characteristics cited with respect to the metaphysical tradition are: the infinite surrounding the universe, metaphysical reality perceived as light, the

universal principle of order in the universe, the wonders of humankind behind apparent diversity, universal virtue, an inner transformation or centre-shift from ego to universal being, and a new perspective of unity in key disciplines. This is of special importance in our time of metaphysical amputation, as Peter Kingsley puts it. The perennial wisdom of the past has to be reborn in every generation. In going through the various disciplines, individual readers will find their own resonances with Nicholas’ explanation of traditions within these disciplines. This culminates (p. 148) in an overall schematisation of 109 traditions over the seven disciplines, and 84 principal influences on his own work. It also illustrates the importance of cultural critique by contemporary thinkers, as was the case with TS Eliot, who wrote that ‘the responsibility of the man of letters at the present time (1944) should be vigilantly watching the conduct of politicians and economists, for the purpose of criticising and warning, when the decisions and actions of the politicians and economists are likely to have cultural consequences.’ (p. 19) This is a rich resource.

Pilgrimage Through the Storm

Bindiya B. Chanrai

Self-published, 2024, 72 pp., no price given, p/b – ISBN 979-8-990741-85-0

This powerful testimony is a witness to the journey through the dark night of the soul that can act as a valuable companion guide to those undergoing a similar process. The feeling of isolation and separation can encourage the thought that we are alone, and yet, as the author maintains, our innermost essence is unchangeable; the beloved is never far away. The style is poetic and lyrical, the way is arduous, requiring the utmost courage, persistence and surrender in the face of feelings of abandonment and desolation. However, ‘exactly when I had lost all hope, the precious brilliance of infinite intelligence has found its way to me.’ (p. 26) The culmination is a series of aphoristic keys to the kingdom as answers to perennial questions in our path of return to conscious wholeness – knowing the truth of who we really are. A profound meditation.

Now is Not the Time

Brett Bowden

Iff Books, 2024, 119 pp., £9:99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-80341675-5

This stimulating book argues that ‘human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasise the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective – what the author calls presentism and tempocentrism, an attitude of superiority attributed to the present because we live in it ourselves without the advantage of hindsight. He also discusses the speeding up of our lives, and, at the other end of the scale, deep time. Our era can be seen in the cycles of civilisation, and there is a hubris in calling a geological era after ourselves – the Anthropocene. Besides, in current circumstances, the future looms as dystopia, hardly the culmination of progress, and our descendants may look back on us as pretty misguided. The author quotes Arthur Lovejoy’s observation that even if we have ‘more empirical information at our disposal, we have no different or better minds.’ And it is precisely a higher form of thinking and a deeper order of feeling that is required.

How to Lose Yourself – An Ancient Guide

to Letting

Go

The Buddha and his Followers, edited by Jay L. Garfield, Maria Helm, and Robert H. Scharf Princeton, 2025, 195 pp., £14.99, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69125243-6

This book consists of three parts, texts from early Buddhist teachings, Middle Way teachings, and finally Chan teachings, with original texts on the left-hand side. The core message resonates with that of Ravi Ravindra, namely that it is better to be free of self, which in Buddhism has neither substance nor continuity. Here lies the path to inner peace, not conventionally as a ‘person’ but ultimately by recognising ‘impermanence, suffering, no-self, clusters, elements, sense experience, foundations of mindfulness.’ (p. 47) Headings include What am I? There is no Mind, and Nothing to be Attained. The texts are presented as dialogues between student and teacher. The student is advised to look rather than think, and that words are only pointers, while duality is an illusion. Towards the end, there are parallels with Daoism, where the natural order is the Great Way. Cryptically, the sage has no self, but does know the Way. An engaging and significant book on the heart of Buddhism.

Quakers and Chocolate

Helen Holt

O Books, 2025, 95 pp., £8.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-80341620-5

This is the fascinating story of three Quaker Cocoa families – Cadbury, Rowntree, and Fry, who all amassed and distributed large fortunes while also looking after their workers in ways unusual in Victorian times. The book also provides a brief history of chocolate, originally mainly a drink, with biographies of four family members, including George Cadbury – ‘not a man but a purpose.’ Current brands date mainly from the 1920s and 30s – Dairy Milk, Kit Kat 1935, Smarties 1937. George created Bourneville in the 1890s as a model community with 500 acres of land and 370 houses by 1900. More recently, environmental issues have come to the fore in a trade worth $1 trillion a year and involving many small farmers. The Quaker testimonies of integrity, equality, community and social justice have had a lasting influence.

PSYCHOLOGY/ CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

Mind Dust and White Crows – The Psychical Research of William James

Edited by Gregory Shushan – Introduction by Andreas Sommer

White Crow Books 2024, 344 pp., £14.99, p/b – ISBN 9781-78677-204-6

William James famously remarked that in order to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough to prove one single crow to be white. This advice has not generally been followed by mainstream psychology, of which James was a part in his generation, although he was far more intellectually courageous than most in venturing into psychical

research. It is interesting to note that in the year after his death, Harvard was offered money to endow a chair of psychical research, which they refused, presumably on the grounds of academic credibility. Had James still been alive, the outcome might have been different and the dominance of behaviourism less marked. As it turned out, psychology deviated from James’s outlook, only to recover in part with the advent of consciousness studies since the 1990s. This volume bridges the divide between his widely accepted works and those on mediumship, telepathy and possession, with many essays published in book form for the first time.

The 27 chapters are divided into five parts: psychology and psychical research; telepathy, automatism, and extended consciousness; mediumship; possession; and the metaphysics of life after death. The introduction places James in the intellectual landscape of his time dominated by the advent of evolution and the compensating foundation of societies for psychical research in the 1880s. Both James and Wallace challenged the scientism espoused by Huxley with his one-sided dismissal of any belief in so-called supernatural phenomena and his insistence that scientific explanations had to be naturalistic. James was a pragmatist and radical empiricist open to the implications of the full range of human experience.

There are many seminal essays, addresses and book reviews in this volume, notably of Phantasms of the Living and Myers’ Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, which brings up James’s ambiguity around the issue – in this respect, his post-mortem journal through Jane Roberts makes complementary reading and very much comes across as an extension of his thinking while alive. James comments that Myers’ hypothesis based on the evidence adduced is in its logical form ‘a scientific construction of very high order.’ Readers who are not already acquainted with his Ingersoll lecture on immortality will find it reprinted here with a preface countering some initial objections, and it is worth noting how similar arguments are more fully elaborated by FCS Schiller in his Riddles of the Sphinx (1891). In brief, this is an invaluable collection that belongs in any philosophy and psychology library.

The Psychology of Slow Living

Elliot Cohen (SMN)

Routledge, 2024, 134 pp., £29.59, p/b – ISBN 978-1-03236223-6

Many readers are likely to be familiar with the Italian notion of Slow Food introduced by Carlo Petrini. This book applies such a philosophy to slow living more generally, drawing on the spiritual traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and the author’s family Judaism as well as various branches of psychology. It could not be more timely in an age of what Elliot calls velocentricity, instrumentally characterised by the imperatives of speed, efficiency and productivity. As Jacob Needleman also observed in Time and the Soul, we have become enslaved to our own mechanical time, when our natural rhythm is that of the soul – this is real peace of mind. The consequence in our world of consumerism and instant gratification is increased levels of burnout, stress and mental health disorders in the context of what one thinker calls Nature Deficit Disorder – not currently listed in the DSM.

Quick fixes and life hacks are not the answer, as they leave ‘the underlying causes largely unaddressed and consequently untreated.’ Rather, we need to address our whole

way of life, especially its pace and the paradoxical predicament ‘of being in a hurry to slow down.’ Elliot provides the reader with psychological, philosophical and spiritual foundations for slow living with a view to enabling a shift in thinking and lifestyle. Throughout the book, he returns to the metaphor of the garden and gardening, especially in relation to Japanese culture where the tea ceremony is also an exemplar of slow and conscious living. In Italy, there is now a slow city movement (Citta), which the author cleverly compares with its Buddhist usage. His chapters on the various spiritual traditions are highly informative, reminding us of the central importance of being and stillness. We still have a tendency in the West to seek ‘shortcuts over discipline practice and stimulation over stillness’ (p. 48).

The author devotes chapters to rediscovering and reclaiming the pace of nature, and comparisons of streams of consciousness with streams of data. In discussing the increasing prevalence of digital discourse and computational metaphors, I felt he could have been more critical, and noted the absence of any reference to the heart. I don’t personally take the view that we are already cyborgs, and it seems to me that there is an important barrier that is crossed with implants, especially when related to the Internet of Things and the Internet of Bodies mediated by 6G. For me, it is crucial to uphold the human spiritual essence in the face of these technological developments and the encroachment of technocracy and algocracy - a relatively new word. The final chapter on the Sabbath reminds us that most shops used to be closed on Sundays. In the closing pages, Elliot returns to the lessons of gardening and baking, reminding us that ‘both activities impart the importance of learning to slow down and synchronise ourselves with a more natural, harmonious and humanising pace; ultimately letting go of the seductive illusion of and obsessive need for control.’ (p. 125) This is very much a book for our times, that will speak to the lives of every reader and provide space to consider how we might slow ourselves down in the process.

Between Lives – Past-Life Regression, NearDeath Experiences, and the Evolution of Consciousness

Andy Tomlinson and Reena Kumarasingham Destiny Books, 2025, 210 pp., $19.99, p/b – ISBN 979-888850-144-3

Both the authors are experienced regression therapists, a field pioneered by Michael Newton. This wide-ranging book gives an excellent overview of key areas of research in the further reaches of consciousness studies. Drawing on their own experience as well as a number of other sources, the authors articulate their inspiring vision for the transition to a higher frequency of consciousness, enabling the co-creation of a New Earth permeated with soul connection and awareness. They make it clear that this is the evolutionary trajectory of the Earth and that we would do well to tune into and embrace the process that is based on a fundamental interconnectedness. This transition will be initiated from the bottom up, and will be partly prompted by the chaotic disintegration of old systems as well as the disclosure of systemic corruption.

Chasing Memory – Exploring the Dimension of Conscious Mind

Carl Gunther

Odin Press 2024, 342 pp., $13.95, p/b – ISBN 979-821837-471-6

This book is the sequel to The Vital Dimension, and will be of interest to readers seriously concerned with philosophy of mind and the nature of memory, based on the author’s lifelong quest for a more comprehensive understanding. He questions the assumptions of mechanistic materialism, arguing that the kind of evidence considered in the Galileo Commission points towards a wider, deeper view of mind than the brain as a computer. Carl explains the centrality of memory in our mental experience, and elaborates the idea of growing block time within a Growing Block Universe – the entire past is present within it. An important implication of the non-physical nature of mind is inherent connectedness whereby ‘we are the joint manifestations of the universal Mind rather than independent islands of consciousness isolated in our material bodies.’ This applies alike to our dream and waking worlds. The argument extends to the unity of all forms of life whereby ‘the organisational powers of the conscious Mind are apparent at every level of life’s organisation’ – and this includes drives, purpose, and goals. Carl proposes a more adequate and evidence-based model of mind and reality that merits serious study and consideration.

Go Within to Change your Life – A Hidden Wisdom Workbook for Personal Transformation

Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD – https://carlgreer.com

Chiron Publications 2025, 208 pp., $24.95, large format p/b – ISBN 978-1-68503-532-7

The author is a retired clinical psychologist, Jungian analyst, businessman, and shamanic practitioner, and here he brings together a comprehensive range of transformational techniques to apply on our journey through life. It is effectively a distillation of 60 years of work and practice, accurately described in the book’s subtitle. The first part is about learning to access your hidden wisdom, the second a practical guide to making changes, and the third spells out transformations with respect to spirituality, health and mortality. The book contains not only practical exercises, but also many opportunities for journaling along the way. The author points out that the benefits from the book are directly related to the amount of effort expended – hence the need for personal accountability. He covers archetypes, dreams, transforming your stories, knowing your values, initiating new habits, resolving conflicts, resilience in the face of what he calls suddenlies, health and healing, and finally contemplating your life and mortality. It is important for all of us to engage our hidden wisdom and to work consciously to actualise our full potential in the service of the whole to which our personal healing can make a critical contribution. Highly recommended.

DEATH AND DYING

The Case for the Afterlife

Chris Carter

Llewellyn, 2025, 244 pp., $17.99, p/b – ISBN 978-0-73877956-0

Chris Carter has made an excellent case for the afterlife in his thorough approach to the evidence for life after death in this wide-ranging book, making it a significant contribution to the field. I myself published a book on this subject 40 years ago, covering much of the same ground, and also arguing for proof beyond reasonable doubt based on a legal framework, and inference to the best explanation. Chris gives a tool kit in the first part, then sets out five independent lines of evidence presenting the best available data in the second part, and puts the nail in the coffin of so-called Super ESP in Part Three – although many (pseudo-sceptics) who hold this position in order to avoid the survival hypothesis are not open to any evidence to the contrary, despite the protestations. As Chris points out, true scepticism involves suspension rather than refusal of belief.

The assumption that the brain produces consciousness is often taken for granted, though it is almost always unstated. Chris unravels this in a chapter on the mind-body relationship, correctly arguing that the possibility of survival cannot be dismissed on a priori grounds. He further discusses the nature of evidence and standards of proof, as well as the nature of science as a method. In the second part he considers near death experiences, deathbed visions, apparitions, children who remember previous lives, messages from the dead, display of skills, evidence for design, and mental characteristics pertaining specifically to deceased communicators. He brings forward many strong cases and deals with standard objections and alternative explanations, drawing significant conclusions in each area. He discusses in detail a very strong case involving a professional chess game with the deceased grandmaster Geza Maroczy, totally inexplicable in ordinary terms.

The argument is both cumulative and convergent, since the significance of case histories in the various areas considered is mutually reinforcing. To these, Chris could have added a further converging line – recent studies of after death communications. Of the 1,000 case histories analysed by our research team led by Evelyn Elsaesser and Chris Roe, a significant proportion feature items unknown to the percipient and subsequently verified. I agree with Chris’s conclusion that the Super-ESP hypothesis provides no positive evidence, only proposing imaginary possibilities unsupported by actual evidence. The open-minded reader will find his conclusions totally logical in view of the arguments and cases presented in this lucid, accessible and rigorous overview of the field.

Coma and the Near-Death Experience

Alan and Beverley Pearce

Park Street Press, 2024, 320 pp., $22.99, p/b – ISBN 9781-64411-921-1

This is a ground-breaking work that should be read by everyone involved in the field of death and dying, subtitled ‘the beautiful, disturbing, and dangerous world of the unconscious.’ Its message has assumed new urgency in the wake of Covid where, as Dr Wesley Ely MD puts it in his foreword,

‘in an effort to reduce suffering, a culture of deep sedation and medically induced coma crept into intensive care units (ICUs) and was rationalised as a more humane approach to clinical care.’ (p. xi) A 2021 study covering 69 hospitals found that 80% of Covid patients were placed into comas, and half of these contracted delirium. (p. 203) Clinical research shows that many survivors develop long-term, debilitating side effects – extensively documented here – that are collectively termed post-intensive care syndrome (PICS). The default assumption behind this approach is that the brain generates consciousness, so that when patients are unconscious, they are experiencing nothing. Jeff Kripal points out, however, that what is actually happening is that the brain is being shut down as a filter for time, and that many horrendous but also blissful experiences happen in the interim.

Given this wide view of the brain and consciousness, such induced coma treatments are risky and even irresponsible, at the very least producing nerve damage and muscle wastage; to make things worse, patients are treated as psychotic, and here there is an obvious contradiction between the experience of patients and the understanding of doctors. These experiences are lived as real, and need to be taken seriously, all the more so as they can be understood within a much wider spectrum of experiences. Moreover, there are further issues related to sleep deprivation giving rise to what is called ICU delirium. There are many harrowing accounts to illustrate the overall argument of the consequences of medicalisation, highlighting serious shortcomings in the scientific understanding of consciousness.

The rest of the book explores other avenues of research on death and dying, along with psychedelics, demonstrating a parallel pattern that this sedation allows the mind to break free from the body and experience a greater expansion of consciousness. The overall point is that the scientific (and military) world needs to expand its understanding of consciousness rather than dismiss first-hand accounts of mystics, philosophers, psychedelic explorers, near death experiencers, and coma survivors (p. 185). The book concludes with a passionate call to arms emphasising the absolute need for clinicians to be re-educated and take seriously the experiences of the patients and their implications for critical care.

ECOLOGY/POLITICS

We Are Free to Change the World – Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA Vintage 2024, 290 pp., £10.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-52993340-6

This timely and evocatively written book is a sympathetic and profound reflection on the life and work of Hannah Arendt and its relevance to our authoritarian times. Her work is also central to Mattias Desmet’s study of the psychology of totalitarianism in which he situates the phenomenon within a framework of mass formation but also traces the influence of the mechanistic way of understanding life and the human being as articulated in the ideology of scientism. Mattias defines mass formation as a kind of ‘group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.’ He sees it as the narrative of mechanistic science, where we are ‘reduced to a biological organism’ while ignoring the

psychological, symbolic, and ethical dimensions of human beings. Nor is totalitarianism a historical coincidence, but rather, in the final analysis, ‘it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.’

The reason I highlight this connection is that Arendt’s inspiration from Kant – dare to reason and think for yourself – whereby how we think has moral consequences: ‘because we have reason and moral agency we can, indeed we must, act to make the world a good place, whatever the cost. Nobody has the right to obey.’ (p. 33) This is a matter of integrity and moral conscience. Arendt wrote that ‘there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself as dangerous.’ Her work is seamlessly connected with her biography and experience as a Jewish refugee, and one of her later books is Eichmann in Jerusalem. She interacted with many of the great thinkers of her time, including the perfidious Heidegger who manifestly failed to connect his thought with life. Indeed, Arendt regarded thoughtlessness as a moral obscenity and an incapacity for thinking from the standpoint of somebody else – a failure of both thought and imagination. As we have repeatedly experienced, ideology dehumanises and instrumentalises.

If the French revolution was based on history and justice, it was also rooted in the demand of the human spirit for freedom. Arendt did not believe in violence, but she did believe in protest, dissent and civil disobedience, pioneered in the 19 th century by Thoreau. Ultimately, she maintained that authoritarian power can only be maintained by violence and censorship. Temperamentally and morally, I found her very resonant with Simone Weil, whose reflections on love, power and the human condition are equally poignant with piercing moral clarity. Presciently, she argued that the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was an existential threat not only to the Palestinians but for Jewish people too, as it would forever exist in tension with its neighbours (p. 79); also, that the image of the US as a benevolent empire is a lie – ‘if America really still wanted freedom, it had to renounce the fantasy of its own omnipotence.’ (p. 245) In these captivating pages, Hannah Arendt is vividly brought to life, while her politics of thinking resonates powerfully into our own troubled times. Highly recommended.

The Insecurity Trap – A Short Guide to Transformation

Paul Rogers with Judith Large Hawthorn Press, 2024, 92 pp., £11.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1912480-95-1

This is a highly topical short study of security in an insecure world. Paul Rogers has been writing about these themes for over 30 years, and coined the term ‘liddism’ to characterise a military approach to security, ‘rather than by understanding the nature and the underlying factors and thus countering them at source.’ Fundamentally, security has ultimately to be common and multilateral rather than one-sided or even lopsided, creating insecurity in its wake. We see this in the current European situation, where the author does not in fact follow his own advice by failing to give the historical background to the Ukraine war, as explained by Jeffrey Sachs and Glenn Diesen in multiple YouTube videos. NATO expansion was based on unilateral US hegemony, and repudiated earlier plans for a general European security, effectively re-creating the Cold War. The current Secretary of State is the first in his position to talk about multilateralism - see my review of

Diesen above. Military solutions in the Middle East, especially currently in Gaza, are ultimately self-defeating, while creating unliveable conditions for the inhabitants who are no more than expendable pawns on the global chessboard. Violence is always reproduced in violence, and we are not yet mature enough as a species to realise this. Besides, war is good business, with huge lobbying power and influence. The overall model is correctly characterised as hegemonic masculinity. (see essential argument on p. 47).

The two other key themes are the climate crisis and our unjust neoliberal economic system based on competition rather than cooperation, and leading inexorably to inequality and concentrations of wealth and power. If, as the author argues, there is increasing mistrust of institutions and science, this is in my view due to the politicisation and monetisation of science as consensus and the suppression of dissent during Covid, on which the author takes the mainstream view – including referring to ‘conspiracy theories on the origin of the virus’ which have now proved to be correct and is even being covered in mainstream outlets (and see recent disclosures by Tulsi Gabbard confirming this). His fundamental remedy for the climate crisis is centred on the consensus for decarbonisation, without mentioning any critiques of such a reductionist approach and the neglect of the role of water and clouds. And no leading commentator discusses the potential destabilising role of geoengineering, aka weather manipulation. What we need in my view is a different form of thinking based on systems regeneration, also involving forests, the soil, and regenerative agriculture – as argued by Vandana Shiva. These reservations aside, the book is highly informative and contains an action-oriented final resource chapter, and I can certainly agree with what is formulated as the right question: ‘How quickly can we move to a more sustainable, equitable and peaceful world?

Navigating Uncertainty – Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World

Ian Scoones

Polity, 2024, 222 pp., $22.95, p/b – ISBN 978-1-50956008-0

Some readers will have attended our recent conference on grounding and flourishing in an age of chaos, complexity and transformation. Unfortunately, Ian was unable to participate, but I will be talking to him about this important book next month. As he points out, uncertainty is ubiquitous, and must be navigated with an appropriate mindset. He argues that we need to adjust our modernist, linear, mechanistic, controlling, risk-management view since it is inadequate to our complex challenges, as other thinkers such as Bruno Latour have also argued. Each chapter contrasts a control-oriented, risk-based calculative approach – where we assume we know about and can manage the future – with a more flexible, practice-based approach that is responsive to uncertain conditions. (p. 2) Uncertainty is also at the heart of human creativity, as Ilya Prigogine observed in relation to dynamic open systems. Hence, taking uncertainty seriously means rethinking our world quite fundamentally.

One central aspect is the assumption that top-down, centralised, control-oriented responses are desirable for environmental global governance, which also presumes a potential return to normality and stability. The author notes that crises are in fact constructions of knowledge and narratives where our knowledge is necessarily incomplete, unsettled and indeterminate. Historical context is also

crucial, and here he points out that experiences of empire and conquest help explain current crises and responses that follow. Colonialism was the first phase of globalisation. Four key factors are risk, uncertainty, ignorance, and ambiguity, while ways of knowing structure our responses, and these should be rooted in forms of solidarity, mutuality and care. The introduction usefully frames key themes and questions applied to each of the subsequent chapters.

The chapters deal with finance and markets as complex systems, technology, critical infrastructures, pandemics, disasters, and climate change. In each case, the quality of our analysis and thinking determines our responses, and the same inadequate patterns tend to recur. Uncertainty is endemic to life itself, so we need to open up to this rather than closing down to risk: a risk-free world is impossible, and an understanding of complex systems is essential. The author explains key lessons learned, especially with respect to policy and decision-making processes, as well as political and economic contexts. He provides a very useful table explaining how best to move from a risk-and-control paradigm to an uncertainty paradigm, highlighting its implications for the way we see and respond to an uncertain world. This is a key briefing, especially for policy makers.

Agriculture – Spiritual-Scientific Explorations for Agricultural Renewal

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner Press, 2025, 457 pp., £30, p/b – ISBN 9781-85584-666-1

This comprehensive volume has been published on the 100 th anniversary of the famous agriculture lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Poland in 1924. It marked the beginning of what has evolved into the biodynamic and organic movements. The volume consists of the eight original lectures and four question and answer sessions; the second part details the founding of the agricultural experimental circle. The introduction emphasises that Steiner spoke to the hearts and hands of the farmers, while bringing both the cosmological and terrestrial perspective to his treatment, especially in relation to life forces. There was already an awareness of degeneration in quality of food, and Steiner took the view that mineral fertilisers contribute to the exhaustion of the soil and consequent impoverishment of agricultural products – manuring should represent nourishment and an enlivening of the Earth. Interestingly, a long-term study of biodynamic, organic, and conventional systems clearly shows the biodynamic method at the forefront in terms of sustainability.

GENERAL

The Study – The Inner Life of the Renaissance Libraries

Andrew Hui

Princeton 2025, 303 pp., £25, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69124332-0

I recently spent a month at our family home in Scotland, and one of the great pleasures was sitting in the evening by the fire in my extensive library collected over 50 years and enhanced by gifts from my mentor, Norman Cockburn that

included the complete works of Jung, Steiner and Swedenborg, Toynbee’s Study of History, Sir JG Frazer’s Golden Bough, The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, The Sacred Books of the East and much more besides. Personal libraries emerged after the advent of printing in the 15th century, and in this hugely engaging book the author tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance ‘studiolo’ as a space for solitude, reflection, refuge and self-cultivation. Among the pioneers in this respect were Petrarch (pp. 29 ff.) and Montaigne (pp. 3 ff., pp. 128 ff.), who housed his library in a tower. The author remarks that for Montaigne, ‘there is a continuum between the interior, interiority, and inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life.’ This corresponds to the emergence of the modern autonomous individual with a right to privacy.

The book is a study of the study, ‘a personal workspace where we think, read, and write.’ The author argues that transhistorically, ‘our inner lives are shaped by our interior spaces’, historically, ‘the studiolo was created in the Renaissance;’ and conceptually that it is a cure or poison for the soul, depending respectively on an attitude of bibliophilia or bibliomania. The book also has a distinct methodological approach bringing in scholarly spaces beyond Europe, and an encouragement to study our own reading habits. As the publication of books exploded between 1500 and 1600 from 9 million to 180 million, so too did censorship with the burning of books as a form of what we would now call narrative control.

Among the personages covered are Faustus, Machiavelli, the Popes, the Medici, Cervantes, Marlowe, Rabelais and Borges. There is a chapter on the Virgin and Saint Jerome in relation to depictions of them reading by great Christian artists such as Raphael and Durer, many of the annunciation – all under the heading of bookishness and sanctity. The author reminds us that Christianity is a religion of the book. Readers are invited to reflect on how they have been shaped by their reading – something that certainly applies to me – and which was inspired by many great thinkers whose books adorn my library shelves, including Radhakrishnan, Eliade, Berdyaev, Russell, Whitehead, Fromm, Steiner, Swedenborg, Wilber, Schweitzer, William James and Thomas Merton. However, the ultimate purpose of all this is not scholarship and knowledge for its own sake, but a distillation of reading in terms of life experience and wisdom.

The Measure of Progress – Counting What Really Matters

Diane Coyle

Princeton, 2025, 306 pp., £25, h/b – ISBN 978-0-49117902-5

The author is Professor of Public Policy in the University of Cambridge, and asks why we still use 80-year-old metrics – GDP – to understand today’s economy, with its very different digital framework. At that time, the main constraint was physical rather than natural capital, and the recent relative decline of middle-class living standards has created economic discontent and corresponding political tensions. As she writes, this is a new era, and a new statistical framework will be needed; and the fundamental issue is the definition of value. Many economists have been working on new measures to replace GDP while taking into account well-being, and one of the author’s original contributions is an accounting framework based on time use.

We all have the same budget of 24 hours in the day, all of which has to be used up – it cannot be carried forward. The attention economy – maybe a better term would be the distraction economy – tries to capture our use of time for advertising purposes, and this time is effectively used up as an opportunity cost of other activities foregone (see p. 121). She classifies the use of time either for efficiency and production or well-being in consumption and leisure – what do we do with the time saved? She also refers to a time tax, referring to the annoying phenomenon of getting caught in customer service doom loops, for instance in banking transactions and tedious verification processes. A further irritation is the progressive computerisation of products that are now harder to fix and maintain, requiring increasing levels of technical expertise. A case in point in my own recent experience is our biomass boiler in Scotland, which just ceases to function, showing the fault on a cryptic computer screen – what does this actually mean? In most cases, this entails calling out the expert when 20 years ago the boiler simply had an on-off switch! A great new term for this frustration is ‘enshittification.’

In the final chapter, the author discusses alternative metrics such as the Human Development Index and dashboard models - the question is what to put on the dashboard (see table on p. 246). Cari Harris proposes the hybrid term ‘wellth’ partly as a way of highlighting widespread anxiety and distress. The author returns to her time use accounting framework as arguably the ultimate scarce resource. As economies become increasingly service-oriented, ‘how people choose between ways to spend their time is obviously a key economic decision’ – for instance, the difference between home working and commuting. She also reminds us that ‘economic value added cannot be defined and measured without an underlying conception of value.’ Keynes’ 1930s forecast of a leisure society has been eclipsed by digital developments, so that many of us now feel time-poor. Perhaps it is time for us to take more responsibility for the ways in which we use our time.

War is a Racket

General Smedley D. Butler

Dauphin Publications, 2018, 36 pp., £6, p/b – ISBN 9781-939438-58-4

General Smedley Butler (1881-1940) published this passionate book in 1934, in the midst of the great depression. The title still says it all, asking the key questions: who makes the profits, and who pays the bills? As he writes, war is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many – this is still true today. Butler draws many of his examples from World War I, but they are equally applicable to other conflicts. Moreover, many of the same companies who profit from destruction also profit from reconstruction – all of which is counted as economic growth! It is ultimately the taxpayer that foots the bill of increased debt benefiting the bankers, and the human price is paid by the soldiers, also in the aftermath with PTSD. A key question is how to take the profit out of war, which is all the more acute in such a militarised world dominated by fear and insecurity. How can we devise a system where peace becomes more profitable? This can only come about with a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of life and the interdependence of peoples. Even if this seems a distant prospect, we are morally obliged to work towards it.

Neanderthals and Atlantis – Rudolph Steiner and the New Prehistory

Andrew Welburn

Clairview, 2025, 347 pp., £25, p/b – ISBN 978-1-91299269-0

Andrew Welburn is the author of a series of books that bridge academic and spiritual perspectives, notably through incorporating the work of Rudolf Steiner. This is a magisterial study of the topic of prehistory and human origins drawing both on Steiner and evidence from palaeontology, in particular, the work of Richard Leakey, Steven Mithen and David Lewis Williams (The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, showing early mystical-shamanic roots). This new thinking rebuts the linear account of Darwin by highlighting a dual ancestry with a hugely significant contribution from the Neanderthals. This corresponds to Steiner’s theory of two human types of species, also involving the formation and disintegration of continents (Lemuria and Atlantis as different phases of development).

The author argues that we are due a major reorientation in our thinking – Neanderthals ‘have been shown to have been more intelligent, socially complex, and technically advanced than previously thought.’ (p. 3) Human emergence is recontextualised as an evolution of consciousness, and Neanderthals can no longer be regarded as crude forerunners or poor cousins of homo sapiens. In fact, they had larger brains than modern humans – see p. 163 – and music played an important part in their culture. There was a sudden explosion of culture in the Upper Palaeolithic Age with a new influx from Africa, leading to an interbreeding of the two types. The arguments are presented in great detail, making a very strong case for the overall argument, which has not really reached the public sphere.

BOOKS RECEIVED & IN THE PIPELINE

SCIENCE/ PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The Science of Free Will

Samir Varma

iff Books, 2025, 214 pp., £13.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-80341731-6

The Bigger Picture

Wim Vaessen – https://ontheoriginofeverything.org Autopoeiesis, 2025, 235 pp., €20, p/b – ISBN 978-9090376-93-6

Zerons – A Theory of Nothing

Peter Hawkins – https://zerons.com Self-published, 2024, 190 pp., no price given – ISBN 9798-30207-464-5

HEALTH AND HEALING

Chakras, the Vagus Nerve and your Soul

C.J. Llewellyn

Llewellyn Publishing, 2025, 297 pp., $18.99, p/b – ISBN 978-0-7387-7930-3

This book focuses on how to understand internal messages from your body, proposing that the chakras and the vagus nerves are mirrors of each other. Contains many practical exercises.

The Medical Masquerade – A Physician Exposes the Deceptions of Covid

Clayton J. Baker MB

Brownstone, 2025, 276 pp., $25, p/b – ISBN 978-163069-295-7

Microdosing for Health, Healing and Enhanced Performance

James Fadiman PhD and Jordan Gruber JD St Martin’s Essentials, 2025, 345 pp., $25, h/b – ISBN 978-1-250-3558-4

PHILOSOPHY/SPIRITUALITY

The Riddle of Alchemy

Paul Kiritisis

Mantra Books, 2024, 258 pp., £15.99, p/b – ISBN 978-180341-637-3

This is an authoritative and erudite treatment of alchemy in terms of history, psychology and nomothetic science. It shows the influence of alchemy from early Greek times onwards, also covering its role during the Renaissance, and its influence on Boehme and Jung. There is a very informative chapter on the death of mechanical science, describing its history and limitations in excluding the subject – a position called into question by quantum physics and more recent studies of consciousness that call for new epistemic and ontological foundations getting beyond determinism, optimism, materialism and positivism. The alchemical view is animistic and aligns with life.

Rosicrucian Alchemy

Dr Peter Gruenewald

Second edition updated, 2024, 219 pp., p/b, no price given – ISBN 979-8-306817-47-7

See my review on p. 63 of PE 144 – there is no explanation of what has been updated, but as I said, this is an important book.

Wonderment

Amber C. Snider

Llewellyn, 2025, 260 pp., $22.99, p/b – ISBN 978-0-73877344-5

A personal story drawing on philosophy, science, and experiential learning based on the author’s own journey and exploring the link between esoteric concepts and spiritual experiences.

Wise Women – Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond

Sharon Blackie and Ancharad Wynne

New World Library 2024, 324 pp., $19.95, p/b – ISBN 978-1-60868-966-8

Performing Human Consciousness

Vanessa Dodd (SMN)

Routledge, 2025, 125 pp., £116, h/b (eBook £34.50) –ISBN 978-1-032-38314-9

The Call of the Gods – My Occult Journey on the Pagan Path

Christopher McIntosh

Inner Traditions, 2025, 246 pp., $24.99, p/b – ISBN 9798-88850-093-4

PSYCHOLOGY/ CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

The Psychedelic Reawakening

Anton Gomez-Escolar

Park Street Press, 2025, 288 pp., $24.99, p/b – ISBN 9798-88850-002-6

This is an authoritative study and overview of the new therapeutic landscape around psychedelics, citing a multitude of scientific studies providing critical evidence for their ability to treat addiction, depression, anxiety, and trauma. It introduces basic concepts of neuropharmacology, types of psychoactive substances, the history of psychedelics in the West, how they actually work, therapeutic applications, then specific benefits and risks. The new climate is very different, and the facilitation of transformative mystical experience is a key therapeutic agent. There are also appendices on psychedelic resources and on the legal status of psychedelic drugs around the world. This is undoubtedly a go-to volume on the topic.

Dream Telepathy – The Landmark ESP Experiments, 50 th Anniversary Edition

Montague Ullman (late SMN, Stanley Krippner (Hon SMN), Alan Vaughan

White Crow Books, 2023, 296 pp., £14.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-78677-234-3

This republished volume was the first scientific study of telepathic dreaming carried out over a period of 10 years. It is a classic text, featuring for the first time an article by Montague Ullman interpreting dreams in the light of David Bohm’s concept of implicate order, and a new afterword by Stanley Krippner with an update on dream telepathy research.

Tripping the Trail of Ghosts

P.D. Newman

Inner Traditions, 2025, 185 pp., $19.99, p/b – ISBN 9798-88850-041-5

This book is about psychedelics and the afterlife journey in Native American mound cultures in the Mississippi area. It examines the role of psychoactive plants in afterlife traditions, sacred rituals, and spirit journeying by shamans using specific plants that can evoke the liminal state between life and death in initiatory rights. This is called ‘The Path of Souls’ – enabling travel into the spirit world to gain a better understanding of afterlife journeys. The book combines anthropological scholarship with personal experience, covering all aspects of the traditions, and will be of particular interest to students of psychedelics.

Stead – The Man

Edith K. Harper

White Crow Books, 2025, 203 pp., £14.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-78677-286-2

This is a reprint of a classic book of psychic investigations, first published in 1918, with personal reminiscences of remarkable Victorian figure – newspaper editor, author, pacifist, social reformer, and pioneer of investigative journalism. Stead was a fearless advocate of truth and integrity, with an unwavering faith in the unseen. There is some remarkable material in this book, including some automatic letters purporting to originate from Gladstone. Stead went down with the Titanic, but even in such dreadful circumstances he made a point of helping others rather than himself. The tabulation of his life records his remarkable achievements; not surprisingly, there are many post-mortem communications recorded from him, but none in this book – this would have made an interesting appendix, and a contextualising introduction would also have been helpful.

The Discipline of Inspiration

Carey Wallace

Wm Eerdmans, 2025, 206 pp., $25, p/b – ISBN 978-08028-8407-7

The Premonition Man

Grant Solomon and Jane Solomon with Chris Robinson

Campion Books, 2023, 472 pp., $18, p/b – ISBN 978-1906815-25-7

DEATH AND DYING

Healing Wisdom from the Afterlife

Alexandra Leclere

Bear & Co, 2024, 214 pp., $19.99, p/b – ISBN 978-164411-890-0

This is a valuable practical guide to working with the spirit world for soul development based on the author’s deep experience and understanding as a practising medium and energy

healer, and giving a spiritual framework to life and rebirth. She proposes that each life is like a peninsula emanating from the soul, and that careful planning goes into the patterns of an incarnation. A useful concept is that of the internal rulebook in relation to the chattering mind and our identity. The power of prayer and the role of guardian angels are highlighted, and also the significance of ‘accidents’ in keeping one on track. The time of death is largely pre-ordained within the context of the soul’s purpose. Many and varied experiences shed light on the deeper meaning of life patterns.

Ces Enfants Qui Disent Voir ou Entendre des Défunts

Christine Dawer, Préface d’Evelyn Elsaesser, Postface de Mario Beauregard

Editions Exergue, 2025, 263 pp., €19.90, p/b – ISBN 9782-36188-897-8

This is an important book in the French language with a particular emphasis on experiences in children. The three parts cover experiences at the beginning and end of life, after death communications, and other forms of extra sensory perception all written by experts in the field, both French and English-speaking.

Death – Friend or Enemy?

Ann Merivale

6th Books, 2025, 400 pp., £20.99, p/b – ISBN 978-180341-689-2

Near-Death Experiences in Ancient Civilisations

Gregory Shushan PhD

Inner Traditions, 2025, 306 pp., $24.99, p/b – ISBN 9781-64411-868-0

ECOLOGY/POLITICS

Autocracy Inc. – The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

Anne Applebaum

Allen Lane, 2024, 228 pp., £20, h/b – ISBN 978-0-24162789-1

A full review by Melinda Powell will appear in the next issue.

Reportage – Essays on the New World Order

James Corbett

Shukutou, 2025, 340 pp., £xx, p/b – ISBN 979-8-9118552-0-0

A full review will appear in the next issue.

The Weaponisation of Expertise – How Elites

Fuel Populism

Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson

MIT Press, 2025, 320 pp., $29.95, p/b – ISBN 978-0-26204959-7

A very important and topical book that I will review fully in the next issue.

Planet Aqua

Jeremy Rifkin

Polity, 2025, 308 pp., £xx, h/b – ISBN 978-1-509563-75-9

Another very important book for full review in the next issue.

GENERAL

The Celts – A Modern History

Ian Stewart

Princeton, 2025, 549 pp., £35, h/b – ISBN 978-0-69122251-6

This is a radical and definitive study of the Celts and the way in which they have been understood through history, especially since the Renaissance that recovered the idea of this ancient people, which was then taken up culturally in revival and nationalist movements, coming to be seen as common ancestors of most western Europeans.

Thinking Through Writing – A Guide for Becoming a Better Writer and Thinker

John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle Princeton, 2025, 269 pp., £20, p/b – ISBN 978-0-69124958-2

This highly practical book combines developing skills in reading, writing and critical thinking at a time when these are in steep decline among students. It formalises the Harvard expository writing course in a series of chapters covering arguments, structure, evidence, outlining, technique, closure and using citations. It makes an interesting distinction between argument by character, emotion and logic as applied to rhetoric, critical thinking, and composition. Needless to say, such a book is especially valuable for students.

Speed Reading Faster

Jan Cisek (SMN) and Susan Norman Watkins, 2025, £9.99, p/b – ISBN 978-1-78678-922-8

Written by experienced experts in the field, this book gives proven techniques and shortcuts for speed reading, with corresponding practical exercises. The crux is to be able to identify key information, read in larger chunks, and train your eyes to move in patterns. It is full of excellent advice for more effective reading and retention – highly recommended.

The Ancient Ones

by David Lorimer

These tall sentinels and guardians Of ancient wisdom

Stand secluded beneath the pines Open only to those who know Their sacred calling from within.

The tough and tender tree of life Emerges rooted from the rock, Brushing and caressing those stonesWhile the breath of Spirit Comes as freedom from far away, Blowing through the branches, Bearing a subtle wave of change.

How deeply are we listening? How finely are we feeling? Do we care or do we turn away? Do we open or close our hearts?

Now it is time to listen, Now it is time to feel, Now it is time to care

Even with our wounded hearts, Time to awaken from our collective coma Of apathy and complicity.

Now is the time to flush out the murky slurry Lurking behind closed doors, Buried in secrecy, Steeped in corruption, Mired in deceit and violence –An icy, cunning heart of stone Coercing by blackmail and fear.

Enough is enough!

These ancient ones

Remember who we really are –Silent witnesses To strength and courage, To cycles of life and death, To spring and autumn, To Being and becoming, The union of Heaven and Earth.

This is the time of reckoning, This is the time for truth and transparency, The time to choose love over fear, The time of transfiguration, Time for us all to choose the life Of open hearts and minds Together.

CADUCEUS ... Authority on healing – psychological, emotional, physical, spiritual – and ecology, since 1987 Spring issue contents (no. 113), back issues and sub form on website www.caduceus.info 01373 455260 simon@caduceus.info

Editor: Simon Best

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