Email from Paul Hague 22 Nov 2016 18:54
Many thanks for your constructive response, David.
And many thanks again for inviting me to participate in the Commission for Extended Science. If my life’s work is ever to be accepted by the members of SMN and those of related organizations, it is open dialogue I need right now.
Anne has told me about the course she did with Nassim Haramein, which she enthusiastically described in a talk she gave at Schumacher College on ‘Unified Field Physics and a New Vision of Reality’ in May last year. After 21 minutes, she kindly mentioned the book The Theory of Everything that I had written the previous year and which she had read twice, the only person I know to have done so at all. In her talk, she presented two quotations from my writings on Consciousness and Reality, which are on her website at An Alternative Vision of Reality and on mine at the pages Mystical Worldview and Contextual Foundation.
At the other end of the scale, I’m preoccupied at the moment with the reality of a major crisis in the housing association where I live, as a microcosm of the world at large. So everything is interconnected in the most extraordinary manner, with each whole mirroring every other, like Indra’s Net, which Anne mentioned in her talk. Warmest wishes
Paul
==On 22 Nov 2016, at 11:47, David Lorimer wrote:
Thanks so much Paul
This is all very helpful, and I have sent it on to Ulisse and Hardin. You are quite right that we need to relate this to the current crisis of consciousness and to stand back a bit from the immediacy of everyday news.
I am currently reading Category:Ervin László:Ervin’s latest book, modestly entitled What is Reality? and with contributions from a number of other luminaries. It is subtitled the new map of cosmos and consciousness and among the contributors are Nassim Haramein, featured prominently in the film Thrive and has recently spoken in London. It looks like his holographic scheme provides an integral view that also reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity with equations that work to a high degree of precision. I know that Anne Baring has followed a course based on this work, and is very enthusiastic about it.
With every good wish
David
Dear Chris,
As David did not ask me to answer any questions over and above the remit he sent me on the 9th November, I still assume that the questions that you are seeking to get a consensus on answering are the ones on page 3-27.
On this assumption, I’ve spent this week answering two of them from the depth and breadth of my own experience: “The origin of everything. The Big Bang theory is full of holes” and “Inherent purpose in the universe”. I attach a four-page article titled ‘The Origin and Purpose of the Universe’.
I trust that it helps, not only to extend science, but to invert the scientific worldview, proving with irrefutable certainty that Consciousness is the Universe, the Totality of Existence. As the existence of the Commission indicates, thousands, if not millions, are working towards this end in the world today.
However, as I describe in my books The Theory of Everything and The Four Spheres, completing the final revolution in science is far more challenging than the transformation of the geocentric into the heliocentric paradigm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (A search for ‘M-3’ will take you to the relevant passages.)
For instance, in your first email to me, you wrote, “For me, the ‘universe’ is everything, whatever that turns out to be.” This makes complete sense, for what else can the Universe be but the Totality of Existence? But then you go on to say, “Like you, I know a few details about the universe, as well as a few details about my consciousness, but clearly I am a long way from knowing all the possible details, as are we all.”
Yes, I know a few details. But for me, other than the great global crisis facing humanity today, they really are not that important, for otherwise I would quickly get overwhelmed by information overload. What I am much more interested in are the general patterns underlying the Universe. For then I can see how all disciplines of knowledge relate to each other as a coherent whole, healing the fragmented mind. So, “As to whether anyone in the universe knows it all,” as you ask, does this really matter?
Ken Wilber seems to think so, because he writes in A Theory of Everything, “It’s not just that the task is beyond any one human mind; it’s that the task is inherently undoable: knowledge expands faster than ways to categorize it. The holistic quest is an ever-receding dream, a horizon that constantly retreats as we approach it, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that we will never reach.” “So why even attempt the impossible?”, he asks.
Well, as I describe in the attached article, the business management problem that I was wrestling with during the winter of 1980, when working in marketing for IBM, has led me to realize that Wholeness transcends the categories. I am very well aware that from the outside, this experiment in learning looks impossible. For it is based on the principle that the observer and observed are one; that the mapmaking process is included in the territory being mapped. Nevertheless, by describing it as succinctly as I can, I trust that it helps you and the other members of the Commission to see that my unprecedented experiences are authentic.
For me this is vitally important. Although David wrote to me on 13th November 2009, saying, “your thinking is far ahead of our time,” I still feel that I have a contribution to make to my contemporaries. In the past, I have been rather ambivalent about this, as David is well aware. But after many years of further self-inquiry, I feel reasonably free of this ambivalence. For me, David’s invitation to me to contribute to the Commission is a clear sign that I am ready to make the contribution that I know I have it in my power to make. Completing the final revolution in science is a major challenge for us all. But I am quite sure that we can make it as and when we are guided to generate the necessary synergy by harmonizing evolutionary convergence. So I look forward to extending our dialogue in the weeks and months ahead.
Best wishes
Paul
File:The Origin and Purpose of the Universe
On 13 Nov 2016, at 13:17, Chris Thomson wrote:
Dear Paul
When David invited you, he asked you to answer some questions
Best wishes
Chris
On 13 Nov 2016 13:08, Paul Hague wrote:
Dear Chris,
Just to clarify, by questions, do you mean the eight statements on page 3-27, listing questions and phenomena that cannot be answered by science, as it is today? If so, I would like to add a ninth question, “What is the root cause of the unprecedented, exponential rate of accelerating change that we are witnessing today?”
The methodology that I have developed to answer this ninth question answers all the others, showing the interconnectedness of all beings. Unfortunately, the methodology does not yet satisfy the third of Ken Wilber’s criteria for scientific method applied to the eyes of flesh, reason, and contemplation: Communal confirmation (or rejection).
Essentially, this is because I have been given the good fortune to realize a potential that is still just that in most people. For instance, you say in your book that the ‘science of the whole’, which I describe in my books and essays, is unlikely to happen in the near future.
People in general don’t like me saying this because while some feel inspired by what I share with them, many are incredulous because they cannot understand how I can see what they cannot see, when all the layers of the holarchical onion are stripped away, as you mention in your most inspiring book.
Nevertheless, as I am now approaching the peak of my abilities as an intelligent, conscious being, I have masses of energy. So I’ll do my best to give as much energy to this project as I can.
Best wishes
Paul
On 12 Nov 2016, at 16:37, Chris Thomson wrote:
Dear Paul
Probably the most useful thing you could do for the Commission is to answer the questions we posed to you in our letter of invitation.
You are officially an Adviser, but this places no restraints on how you might participate. We need as much energy in this project as we can get.
Best wishes
Chris
On 12 November 2016 at 11:33, Paul Hague wrote:
Dear Chris,
Many thanks for clarifying the aims of the Commission. Your comment that an active inner life will be a prerequisite for being an ‘extended scientist’ has made me notice that I wrote to you on Thursday from the old enthusiastic me rather than the more centred me emerging today. I felt really dreadful as a result, not being totally honest.
To come back to all my senses, I spent the day yesterday reading and studying your insightful book Full Spectrum Intelligence, which I much enjoyed, for it resonates very deeply within me. It is full of wonderfully challenging questions. But how can we identify the one that is the most important, that will lead to the answers to all the others? You say that you feel that you have been hoist with your own petard, in the form of a list of topics that science cannot accommodate. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by this other than that you feel that scientists will hit back at you if you try to play the game according to the old rules. Of course, this cannot work, for the rules that led to Newton’s Principia and the materialistic, mechanistic science that followed from this are obsolete, utterly inappropriate for our rapidly changing world. We cannot establish “that consciousness is primary, while matter and the physical are secondary” with the old rules. But that is essentially what Deepak Chopra tried to do in War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality, the book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, the co-author with Stephen Hawking of The Grand Design.
To end such wars, for me, the questions in your book that lead to answers to all the others are these in the Prologue: “Do you think that we are the most dangerous and destructive species on the planet? If so, why do you think we behave this way?”
Anthony Storr said much the same thing in Human Aggression: “With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate habitually destroys members of its own species. No other animal takes positive pleasure in the exercise of cruelty upon another of his own kind … The sombre fact is that we are the cruellest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth.” Having been born in the middle of the Second World War near London, your questions are very close to the questions I asked myself as a seven-year-old, which have guided my entire life ever since: Why do nations and religions continuously fight each other? Why are science and religion at war with each other? I didn’t find the answer to these questions until I was fifty in 1992, when I visited an esoteric bookshop in central Stockholm. There I found this sentence that Elaine Pagels wrote in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: “Even the mystics of Jewish and Christian tradition who seek to find their identity in God often are careful to acknowledge the abyss that separates them from their divine Source.” Similarly, F. C. Happold wrote in Mysticism, another book I discovered the same day, “To Jew, Christian, and Moslem, a gulf is felt to exist between God and man, Creator and created, which can never be crossed. To assert that ‘Thou’ art ‘That’ [as Vedanta Hindus do] sounds blasphemous.”
These books completely changed my life, even though I was working at the time as an innovative project leader in IBM’s Nordic Software Development Laboratory. I was not able to give them my full attention until after I took early retirement five years later. For then I had the freedom to build my scientific researches on Gnosis, on inner knowing of the Divine, quite different from cognitive knowledge, as Ken Wilber points out in his first book The Spectrum of Consciousness. By unifying Eastern mysticism with the business modelling methods that underlie the Internet, the attached diagram shows how I relate the ontological and epistemological foundations of all knowledge to Gnosis, as the union of Cosmic and Unity Consciousness. This shows that mathematics is only of secondary importance, as you say. That is the mistake I made on Thursday. It is me playing the game in the old way, not the new.
Is this model something that you could use in the Commission? What role do you think I could play? Am I now a member of the committee or just an advisor? That is not clear to me at the moment.
Best wishes
Paul
On 10 Nov 2016, at 18:00, Chris Thomson wrote:
Dear Paul
Many thanks for all this.
In our project, the Commission is at least as interested in finding new ways of asking questions as it is in finding definitive new answers. And I am sure that I am not alone in assuming that much will hinge on new forms of evidence…a new epistemology, if you like. These will include forms of perception and consciousness currently excluded from science. Thus, we believe that an active inner life will be a prerequisite for being an “extended scientists”. It will be part of their continuing training.
As you will have read in the main document (the remit of the Commission), we have hoist ourselves with our own petard, in the form of a list of topics that, we say, science cannot accommodate. Ideally, the new, extended science will be able to accommodate all of them. But, one step at a time! First, we need the new ontology, the new epistemology, and the corresponding new methodologies! It is these three things that we hope to describe in some detail our report next year.
You will see, in one of the Appendices, that we have begun to suggest a new ontology, i.e. a new worldview or paradigm. At the heart of this are two assumptions: (i) that the universe is a single, undivided whole, in which absolutely everything (ourselves included) is intimately and non-locally connected to absolutely everything; and (ii) that consciousness is primary, while matter and the physical are secondary. As you can imagine, much flows from these two assumptions, for example, it implies that we and the universe are primarily “spiritual”, as distinct from material. Although quite a few people say that they subscribe to these beliefs (this is common among those who write about quantum physics and consciousness, for instance), very few people actually behave as if these two things were true. Their behaviour belies their stated beliefs. If extended science is to mean anything at all, new behaviour must correspond with new beliefs.
As for mathematics and the intellect, these will remain important, I am sure, but much less central to science than they are today.
Best wishes
Chris
On 10 November 2016 at 16:59, Paul Hague wrote:
Dear Chris,
Yes, I’ve received the remit and apologies for not reading it all before replying to you, as it answers the question I asked you. I was already aware of two of the documents that the Commission is basing its work on and have been planning to write to their authors for some time. As writing unsolicited letters doesn’t work very well, it is wonderful that I have been invited to help the SMN to integrate all these initiatives into a publicly available report. It is much needed.
Do please tell me how I might contribute. You say there is little in the way of funded research on extended science and a methodology is much needed. For myself, I have been working for 36 years on extending science without any funding, developing and applying a methodology that has evolved from the transcultural, transdisciplinary business modelling methods that underlie the Internet. Regrettably, I have not yet found a way of communicating this systemic, rational methodology without the life experience that brought it into being, despite writing several books and many essays, articles, and pages on my website. So rather than talk about the methodology directly, perhaps I could tell you a little about how it addresses the two major scientific limitations that you have identified.
The first lies at the heart of what David Bohm called the measurement problem in quantum physics in his classic 1951 book Quantum Theory. As he said, if quantum theory is to provide a complete description of the world, then the wave equation should apply to both the observer and observed, a situation that leads to paradoxes, such as the EPR-thought experiment. This measurement/observing/participating problem is essentially the same as that with which I was wrestling during the winter of 1979 and 1980, when developing a national marketing strategy for Decision Support Systems for IBM in London, the first such programme in Europe at that time.
For information systems architects develop models of dynamic business processes, such as designing, manufacturing, marketing, ordering, and invoicing, and their relationships to each other. But such models of the psychodynamics of business and hence society cannot be complete without including the process of building the model in the territory being modelled, which is like a television camera filming itself filming.
My purpose in solving this problem was to answer the most critical unsolved problem in science today: “What is causing scientists and technologists, aided and abetted by computer technology, to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological invention at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration?” This gave me the idea that there are nonphysical mental energies at work in the Universe, addressing the second major limitation in science today that you have identified. I wrote an initial attempt to integrate these mental energies with the physical energies recognized by science in the summer of 1980 after resigning from IBM in an essay titled ‘The Future of Computers and Society’. Even though this essay was at an embryological stage of development, David Bohm found it interesting and invited me to meet him at Birkbeck College in November 1980. Seeking a unifying concept for the nonphysical and physical energies at work in the Universe, I asked him, “What is the ultimate source of energy?” He replied, “Energy doesn’t have a source, it is contained within structure.”
I now know that the first part of this answer is not true in my experience. However, structural energy makes complete sense, structures consisting of meaningful relationships between forms, in a holographic, self-similar structure, of which Koestler’s holarchy is but one of three such structures.
In information systems modelling, this holarchy is called an aggregation hierarchy, forming a part of non-hierarchical association structures. However, software developers, especially, also recognize the existence of interrelating generalization hierarchies, which explains why the Internet is expanding exponentially. Then there are evolutionary hierarchies of parents and children, interacting in siblings, cousins, and so on.
So I’ve spent the past 36 years in developing a systemic, rational science of consciousness that can incorporate these incredibly powerful ideas.
There is just one task remaining to provide a complete expression of the unification of the psychospiritual and physical universes. I have recently discovered that the mathematics of quantum computation contains a discrete form of the wave equation in quantum physics. To incorporate this into a synthesis of everything, during the past couple of months I have been relearning linear algebra, which I studied as an undergraduate in the early 1960s.
My plan now is to write an essay this winter describing how Self-reflective Intelligence and the mathematics of quantum computation show that the measurement problem in quantum physics is essentially the same as that of information systems architects in business developing a comprehensive model of the psychodynamics of society. This essay will describe the algebra of algebras that Bohm sought to establish his theory of the implicate order—unifying quantum and relativity theories—on a solid scientific foundation.
From a spiritual perspective, this is an exercise in self-awareness, which Rupert Spira, for instance, emphasizes in his teachings of Nonduality. As he says, experience is fundamental to both spiritual awakening and scientific inquiry.
There is thus no need to explicitly mention the methodology that I use to make sense of all our experiences, for it is simple commonsense, implicit in the consciousness of everyone living on Earth. It can be well understood intuitively without explaining the rationality behind it. For instance, on Tuesday, I described a little of my work to my dentist, who found it most interesting, asking me for the address of my website. And yesterday, I shared experiences with a retired farmer and his wife, who similarly had no difficulty in seeing essentially the same vision. So I have no problem in sharing experiences at the human level without the mathematics getting in the way. However, as the language of science is mathematics—as the science of patterns and relationships—I have dedicated much time during the past few years to explore which mathematical tools can best help scientists understand what is happening to humanity at the present time. The methods that work best are not those that physicists and engineers generally use. Rather, they emerge directly from pure mathematics, which since the middle of the nineteenth century has become ever more abstract and general, leading G. H. Hardy to apologize for being a pure mathematician, saying, “I have never done anything ‘useful’.” The methodology I use to extend science into the nonphysical psyche takes this process of abstraction to the utmost level of generality, incorporating Aristotle’s metaphysical concept of being and Plato’s concepts of universals and particulars into the ontological foundations, extended into the epistemology level, corresponding to the class model in business modelling. With this solid foundation, we can then build a coherent body of knowledge that corresponds to all our experiences from the mystical to the mundane.
There, this is a little of my background. I look forward to hearing from you on how I can best contribute to the Commission.
Best wishes
Paul
