Geek from earliest days, I was always fascinated by how things work. I was probably 7 or 8 when the placing of my Christmas stocking woke me up. To my huge delight there was a cuckoo clock kit with a bag of cogs and ratchets, pine cone shaped weights and of course a little wooden cuckoo.
I sat up and put it together. I didn’t work. So I took it all apart and redid it. It still did not work. So I took it apart again, and built it again. And it worked. And by then it was light, so I rushed into my parents’ bedroom to show them. The reaction was muted. My mother told me many years later that it was hugely expensive and they bought it hoping it would keep me amused for the holidays. But geeks can’t stop!
Physics was my favourite subject at school. But when sports cars came into my life, speed, spanners and engineering became the great fascination. When I grew up a bit I got interested in the mind, and I trained as a psychotherapist. Noble thoughts of helping people became tempered with realising I could use a bit of help myself, getting over 10 years of prison in boarding school. I learned NLP and Eriksonian hypnotherapy and practised for several years. Then came computers.
I found programming perfect fun, and that developed into software engineering and systems analysis. I not only got to understand complex systems but actually build them from scratch as well, geek heaven. Meanwhile, the popular science genre exploded in the 90s, and I read voraciously. This was like a miraculous extension of my love for science fiction. The whole point of SF for me is that it depicts a different type of world. New things are real or unreal, and different rules apply. It is the different type of system, and of course how it works, that get my fascinated. And here suddenly, was a field of study delving into the workings of a totally different and unfamiliar type of world. And yet this was nonetheless the mechanics of this reality in which we actually live. Turbogeek excitement.
Naturally, I never expected to have any new insights in the field, but looking back it is clear why I did. The whole basis of the physics was stuck on a paradox because something not in the physics was what was being observed. Just as in the most difficult programming bugs, something outside of the system was having an effect. So coming from an I.T. perspective, the resolution to the major and longstanding paradox became strangely obvious. Granted this does sound very unlikely. It is well known that the days of the lone theorist making a significant discovery are long gone. But there is no new physics in what I am describing. This is just a new perspective on the well-established science that has been discovered.
In physics one cannot attribute anything going on to something outside the system because there is no outside. The universe is everything there is, by definition, and it is all physical. What has been discovered but not recognized is that the universe as a whole has properties not explicable by the physics that structures its form. There is something else, and it is by definition something of a radically different type. It is of a different ‘logical type’, and that explains the whole thing. It is not literally outside because there is no outside, but it is ‘outside’ of the physical world because it is contextual to the physical world. It is the meaning of these different types that is my discovery, if it can be called that.
The paradox is not because of a lack of science but because of an ‘ontological category error’, which just means taking something to be a different type than it actually is. So although my only qualification is a blank slate, this turns out to be much more of an asset than one could readily imagine. As Thomas Kuhn wrote in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Those who achieve fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have generally been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they changed”. This was tremendously reassuring. I just had novice luck.
Once I began to realise the implications, I found myself compelled to do my best to communicate the ideas. It means there is much more to us, and much much more to life, than we have ever understood. The great spiritual principles are revealed as natural attributes of this different type in operation. The religions strive to reach these revelations, but are usually hamstrung by the conventional beliefs. This, however, is ‘Gate, Gate, Paragate’ Beyond, Beyond, and Beyond of Beyond. This is a mantra from Mahayana scriptures known as the Prajñaparamita Sutras, meaning the ‘meditations for perfection of Wisdom’. Astonishingly to our conventional worldview, this actually describes the three levels of types that make full sense of our superb science. What it means is ridiculous but also quite wonderful.
The world is personal, real only where one has observed it. This means one is actively interacting with the destiny of the world, all the time, all unaware. The realisation brings about the great spiritual awakenings. Enlightened self interest is the only sane path through life, but the payoffs are not only immense but eternal. The picture painted of the new age this engenders has been the most wonderful thing in my life, and I very much want everyone to have the opportunity to take it up. I pray you dare to know!
All the reference material for this work is available at Avant Garde Science.
New book soon.