Innocent of East and West

As you have opened up this page, you just might be fascinated, for one reason or another, in the relationship between science, technology, mind, and spirituality.

First of all let me congratulate you on your intuitive faculties. This tryst of destiny has deep implications for the world as we go forward in the 21st century. What strains the mind today, is simply tomorrow's common sense.

There is nothing extremely special about multiple people arriving at a similar worldview via different means. This is why the essence of spiritual philosophy has been understood as "Perennial Philosophy" -- it keeps on rising again, with minor variations, in different languages and cultures. It has been said many times: there is only one truth, but everyone must find their own way to it.

Some of the topics which we like to discuss , quantum reality, chaos theory, buddhist psychology, Indian philosophy, Sufism, creative inspiration, psychedelic drugs, jinns, angels, eschatology, the psychology of consciousness -- may be familiar ones. However, my aim here is not to repeat well-worn platitudes and garments.

Mathematics have played a central role here, we’ve intuited. Numbers with their strange patterns: you may multiply backwards, then forwards to get the same answer, but dividing backwards and forwards gives you different answers. A negative multiplied by another negative begets a positive. These strange clues left behind by mathematics underpin our capacity to tease out gentle patterns in our lived experience. Quantum mechanics is full of mathematics that take a long time to understand. Crystals are mathematical in a way I could understand even as a child; they are simply the creative tilings of time-space.

In carrying out this process repeatedly, I’ve found that certain genres of mathematics were far more useful to me and my interests than others. In particular, chaos theory, general systems theory, as well as aspects of cognitive science pop up again and again, arising just at the "right" time, matching some aspect of my inner intuition. I’ve also been greatly inspired by the study of modern physics -- general relativity and quantum theory. Although the mathematics of many physics theories are not directly useful in my line of work, they, like chaos, complexity, cognitive science and systems theory, are part of a general trend towards holism.

I know I’m slightly different from most founders, in that I derive many ideas from deep introspection, rather than purely an analysis of data. In a multitude of cases, I compare my model to data, but only after it has come to my soul during an intense meditative session. This all being said, I am building as an entrepreneur, and the exploration of inner reality has very little prestige in modern capitalism. So I minimize this aspect of my work -- both in written and verbal communication. In publications, we present our ideas more or less according to the standard entrepreneurial conventions, explaining them from the data they had come out from, or out of the ideas of others.

Of course it has occurred to me that there might be many other founders, scientists, artists, and other folks who also derive their way of operating from inner experience, but who, like me, feel compelled by the norms of society to present ideas in a more empiricist way. I never dwell on these issues too long. I just present ideas in a manner I have to, in order to get them across to myself, and others.

So are we "reinventing the wheel"? We have indeed reinvented the wheel. What we are doing, in my humble opinion, is to display a way of constructing the wheel with materials at hand. If one is living on a deserted strip of land where the most common building materials are palm trees and choral, then we better figure out ways of redesigning the wheel out of palm leaves and pebbles. Subsequently, if one is living in a culture dominated by science and rationality, then it is helpful to also figure out ways of deriving eternal, spiritual truths from scientific, mathematical ideas.

In the end, if one takes a sufficiently broad historical perspective, all religions and philosophies can be viewed as "redesigning the wheel out of materials at hand." Oriental philosophies build spiritual insight out of Oriental culture, just as shamanism builds spiritual insight out of tribal culture. The underlying nature of the universe is not changing as culture advances; what changes are the cultural forms and technologies used to access the universe.

Mamba

Kya Naseeb