This is the personal blog of Robert Godwin, the author of "One Cosmos under God," which he discussed in the WIE interview in my previous SCIY posting. Godwin describes his book as: "the fruit of a lifetime of thought attempting to synthesize material from a number of diverse domains, including cosmology, theoretical biology, quantum physics, developmental psychoanalysis, attachment theory, anthropology, history, mysticism and theology, into a coherent, self-consistent, non-reductionistic whole." — In "One Cosmos," Dr. Godwin reveals a humorous alter-ego whom he calls: 'Gagdad Bob.' His posting for today begins as follows:

Now, I'm not an anthropopogist. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn, and I do know a thing or two about a thing or three. And one of the things I know is that pre-human hominids only became human because of the specifically trinitarian nature of the human developmental situation: mother-father-helpless baby. This, by the way, is one of the many reasons I do not believe intellignt life will ever be found on other planets, because genes and natural selection are only the necessary but not sufficient cause of our humanness.
In other words, even supposing that life arose elsewhere and began evolving large brains, a large brain would never be sufficient to allow for humanness. Rather, the key to the entire enterprise -- the missing link, so to speak -- is the extremely unlikely invention of the helpless and neurologically incomplete infant who must be born approximately 12 months "premature" so that his brain can be assembled at the same time it is being mothered. If we had come out of the womb neurologically complete, then there would be no "space" for humanness to emerge or take root. We would be Neanderthals. Literally. ...    more »

This seemed like an appropriate article to post in honor of Christmas Day. ~ ron

...if you've been following the evolutionary trajectory of What Is Enlightenment? over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that a new kind of thinking has indeed been finding its way onto more and more of our pages. Call it integral, second tier, holistic, or systemic, this new thinking is the hallmark of a growing wave of visionaries with the eyes to look beyond the surface turbulence and grapple with the multilayered complexities undergirding our global dilemmas. Challenging us to face the elaborate interwoven forces that are shaping our destiny for better or worse, these evangelists of higher-order thinking offer what many feel may be the best chance we have at meeting the demands of the years ahead.

So, in attempting to come to terms with our uncertain future, and particularly with the role that religion will play in it, for this issue we decided not just to speak with a number of these leading-edge thinkers but to bring them together and have them speak with each other. As firm believers in Plato's assertion that the highest form of knowledge is that which emerges in dialogue, we couldn't imagine what could give us a better chance of seeing the biggest possible picture than a roundtable discussion between some of today's brightest integral minds, who are each attempting, in their own way, to forge a more evolved course through our present and future world. ...   more »

Kim sent me the link for this story a couple of days ago. At first I was a bit skeptical; it seemed almost too much to really be true. I checked it out, and it's in fact a true story, with its own website, lots of independent news stories, YouTube videos, and a segment next week (Dec. 26) on the NBC Today Show. It's a wonderful testimony to the human spirit, and a real life love story. So I thought to share it with you all during this Holiday season.


Dick and Rick Hoyt are a father-and-son team from Massachusetts who together compete just about continuously in marathon races. And if they’re not in a marathon they are in a triathlon — that daunting, almost superhuman, combination of 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles of bicycling, and 2.4 miles of swimming. Together they have climbed mountains, and once trekked 3,735 miles across America.
It’s a remarkable record of exertion — all the more so when you consider that Rick can't walk or talk.
For the past twenty five years or more Dick, who is 65, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seat-pod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.
At Rick’s birth in 1962 the umbilical cord coiled around his neck and cut off oxygen to his brain. Dick and his wife, Judy, were told that there would be no hope for their child’s development.
"It’s been a story of exclusion ever since he was born," Dick told me. "When he was eight months old the doctors told us we should just put him away — he’d be a vegetable all his life, that sort of thing. Well those doctors are not alive any more, but I would like them to be able to see Rick now." ...   more »

This is a fascinating website. Ulrich Mohrhoff teaches math, physics, and quantum philosophy at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry, India. He has developed a new perspective re the ontological implications of quantum mechanics known as the "Pondicherry Interpretation," which has been called "startingly original." ~ ron

...Scientists are the myth makers of our time. If a story is believed by a large fraction of the scientific community, it becomes part of our (socially constructed) reality.
Take electromagnetic waves. Even if you agree with me that we cannot observe them directly, you will probably insist that we can observe them indirectly: their effects are all over the place.
But it isn't their effects. The jiggling of that charge over there isn't the effect of an electromagnetic wave acting on it. It is the effect of my jiggling this charge here. The rest — the generation of an electromagnetic wave here, its propagation, and its action on that charge over there — is a myth. ...   more »

I'm posting this portion of Chap. 5 of "Trialogues at the Edge of the West" because I think it may relate to the discussion presently under way re the article titled: "Instruments of Knowledge and Post-Human Destinies." My hope is that some of the new theories now surfacing in contemporary science may support our work in deconstructing the insights presented both in traditional Hindu and Buddhist texts and in Sri Aurobindo's more recent writings.
For example, the initial section of "Trialogues" that I quote below raises some interesting ideas about the possible relationship between light, perception, mind and consciousness. (ron)   more »

The two postings on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies (I and II) generated a thread on the relationship between physical instruments of observation and knowledge in the scientific sense (microscopes, telescopes, nuclear accelerators), human organs of observation and knowledge (mind, intelligence, sense organs) in the cognitive / psychological sense and possible mutations of human consciousness in the ontological / phenomenological / epistemological sense (change of being, change of consciousness, change of modalities of knowledge). The last (possibilities of a change of modalities of knowledge) opened up a consideration of Sri Aurobindo’s phenomenology of supramental knowledge and its subsidiary action in human forms and instruments of knowledge – specifically sense-knowledge through the sense organs with the “sixth-sense” of the “sense mind,” manas in the Indian Sankhya formulation behind them at/as their origin and the supramental Samjnana further behind/beyond but with a concealed and subsidiary operation in/through manas. Here we are reproducing the relevant parts of this very fertile thread for focused consideration.   more »

There's a profound crisis in the scientific world at the moment that is going to change science as we know it. Two of the West's fundamental models of reality are in tremendous conflict. The existing worldview of science is an unstable combination of two great tectonic plates of theory that are crashing into each other. Where they meet, there are major theoretical earthquakes and disruptions and volcanos of speculation. ...    more »

...In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely overwhelm our metaphors...
If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost, with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers, such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own self-sufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods, demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric universe. ...    more »

Coral Castle was built in the early 20th century by an eccentric Latvian recluse named Edward Leedskalnin who allegedly left Latvia when he was rejected by his 16 year old fiance. He would never marry and would spend 30 years of his life building a Coral Castle and its surrounding buildings, for his alleged 'Sweet Sixteen'. Leaving for America, he came down with terminal tuberculosis. He allegedly spontaneously healed, stating that magnets had some effect on his healing.
Leedskalnin was a 100 pound 5-foot tall man who wound up in Homestead, Florida on a ten-acre tract of land just south of Miami, Florida. Somehow he allegedly managed to single-handedly lift and maneuver blocks of megalithic stones, mostly coral, weighing up to 30 tons each, to create not only a castle but other things.
How Leedskalnin worked has never been discovered, though he labored for 30 years. The veracity of his doing this alone is impossible to prove because he worked at night, hidden from the eyes of observers. He seemed to know when he was being watched. On those occasions he wouldn't lifted the stones and stopped working. ...    more »

A man came to a scientist and wished to be instructed; this instructor showed him the revelations of the microscope & telescope, but the man laughed and said, "These are obviously hallucinations inflicted on the eye by the glass which you use as a medium; I will not believe till you show these wonders to my naked seeing." Then the scientist proved to him by many collateral facts & experiments the reliability of his knowledge but the man laughed again & said, "What you term proofs, I term coincidences, the number of coincidences does not constitute proof; as for your experiments, they are obviously effected under abnormal conditions & constitute a sort of insanity of Nature." When confronted with the results of mathematics, he was angry & cried out, "This is obviously imposture, gibberish & superstition; will you try to make me believe that these absurd cabalistic figures have any real force & meaning?" Then the scientist drove him out as a hopeless imbecile; for he did not recognise his own system of denials and his own methods of negative reasoning. If we wish to refuse an impartial & openminded enquiry, we can always find the most respectable polysyllables to cover our refusal or impose tests & conditions which stultify the enquiry."
- Sri Aurobindo

Reading the above words, I am reminded of how much I appreciate the postings here on SCIY and the attitude of open enquiry ...   more »