Unlike most of the introductions here, in which intentions and new initiatives for better lives to forge a different world are uppermost, mine are now much more modest. They weren’t always so. I approach the tail end of a life in which past experiences have forged a vision of reality that created a work (self published and virtually ignored) I knew to be an important contribution- and I still do believe that.
Rather than lay claim to academic influences that shaped my thinking, I can identify contributions to my vocabulary in which to express those experiences. An analogy might be that I was building a new monastery from what lay about. The building already existed in my mind and almost any stone would suffice. So rather than collecting the stones (other ideas, theories and formulations) and then shaping a structure of modification or adherence, I simply used what lay to hand. Accused of erudition, the truth was closer to a carpet bag lady. My experiences had catapulted me out of any orthodoxy, but the mystics came closest to corroborating. Teihard de Chardin, Meher Baba, Rumi et al, and now the New Age Scientists of the Akasha like Laszlo.)
To back-track a little: My whole life, and its vicissitudes, contributed to the shaping of a vocabulary. I grew up as an only child shuttled between the wildest parts of South Africa (on safari with my grandfather, a fluent Zulu and Swahili linguist, inspecting rural African schools) and the privations of a repressive boarding school (with Classics, Theology and Literature capitalised) Everything in my life has offered such extremes, and such polarity, both Boer and British family, a white and a black mother, a liberal African environment as an enclave in the furious era of the white oppressive Apartheid. Nothing fitted. So isolation has been endemic: Isolation and the need to reconcile the irreconcilable, racially, politically, intellectually, spiritually.
I looked everywhere for a ‘home’ and never found it. Everything was always better than ‘something’.
I came to see that in every life there is the daimon destiny; for me it was to make art from the skill of ‘not fitting’. So I sought companions in the ‘not fitting’; the mavericks, the geniuses of science to re-trace an alternative vision of reality, and an alternative history of Western thought, dominantly science. One I believe fits the evidence rather better than Darwin and his contemporary followers like Dawkins.
If I have a dominant ‘place to stand’ it lies between the intellectual theorizing of Wilber and Sheldrake and the academic reductionism that still seems content with ever tighter formulations appreciated by the intellect alone, and the equally loose hugs-and-kisses spiritual journeys of the individual seeker that probably work for them but impart little to others. Although experiential knowledge is, for me, the bedrock of understanding, I am driven to make it relevant to others. I wrote Involution as a scientific monograph 45 years ago ( I hoped for work and access to a library), and setting aside its prescience and ill timing, the responses of academia were so savage, and intemperate that I lost regard for the wages of the intellect, and recently wrote it poetically.
I did let off steam in a series of blogs which put the book on trial for its heartless persecution of its author. The first is here: The Trial of Involution-An Odyssey. Opening Day – INVOLUTION: Science and God: Reality Redefined
I now write fiction, probably shelved as magical realism, in which I seek to weave the field of influences (the nexus of causative consciousness with its sparking synchronicities) as intrinsic to the magic of ordinary life and perceptible to the observant, rather than some desirable imaginative alternative, or future destiny.
My spasmodically visited websites are here https://involution-odyssey.com/ and here https://philipparees.me/
I am far from sure what I can contribute to this group of seekers. I lack technical know-how but my belief that nothing is ever incidental, and the pleasures of not being entirely alone ( even when my participation suffers the time lag of being in the UK) gives great reward already for which Marco ( and his silent cohorts) deserve thanks. So Ciao.