I am currently reading "Earth Ascending - an illustrated treatise on the law governing whole systems" by Jose Arguelles. For anybody who doesn't know, he also wrote "The Mayan Factor" where he deciphered the Mayan calender. "Earth Ascending" is, I think, out of print and might be hard to find, but I'll talk about it anyway.
I've had the book on my shelf for years, and it has been looking rather intimidating, but only recently have I started reading it and started getting an idea of what he is trying to do in the book.
I realized that I had gone about it the wrong way the first times I tried starting on the book.
It contains a lot of very elaborate illustrations or charts cross-relating a stunning amount of different phenomena. Historical epoques are charted out and neatly matched up and synchronized with DNA sequences, the I-Ching, radiation belts and a bunch of other things.
At first my reaction was sceptical: "How the heck would he know that it works exactly like that!?". I took it first as a purely scientific presentation and I was looking in vain for the step by step proof that would show how he came to those conclusions.
I realized eventually that he is doing something quite different, and I started to get excited about it.
He is doing mind-maps of our whole planetary system. Not just materialistic, scientific charts, but more wholistic maps including also more metaphysical realms, and relations between the different kinds of systems.
That is kind of a lost tradition. Before the modern scientific revolution started splitting science off from metaphysics, religion and art, it was more in fashion for learned men to draw up elaborate charts showing the inter-relationships of everything. A chart about the weather might show the planet, the elements, spheres around the planet, other planets in the solar system, humans, various deities, connections and relationships between all of these, and more.
Modern scientific thinking might tend to scoff at "naive", "superstitious", "fancyful" stuff like that.
From exploring mind-maps I can appeciate the point, however.
Arguelles defines a discipline he calls "holonomics".
"First used by George Leonard in The Silent Pulse (1978) as a term defining entities 'in the nature of a hologram', HOLONOMIC is a term descriptive of holistic knowing, i.e. knowing that is simultaneously intuitive and rational, scientific and artistic. Thus HOLONOMICS describes the order of reality as well as the way we come to know and express that order".
..
"Thus, as a holistic knowing, holonomics depends upon a self-reflective consciousness, a clarity of perception, and an ability to account for and create order - a process culminating in the intuitive apprehension and expression of the whole system of order of which one is a member."
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"As the law governing whole systems, holonomics accounts not only for the interrelationships between fields in the phenomenal world, but for the interaction of man with this world - man with all of his cumulative history, thought, and forms of expression inseparable from the planet upon which he finds himself". (pg 15)
In other words, it is examining and expressing how one experiences the world, including scientific facts as well as metaphysical intuition, artistic freedom, and more.
There is no ONE right or wrong way of doing that of course. In a holographic universe everything is related to everything else in one way or another. There are many different views of the world, and still we are talking pretty much about the same thing.
One doesn't have to know everything, one doesn't have to have studied all existing text books on the subject, before one can present a picture of the world.
That is a very liberating idea. Talking about the world is not limited to people in lab coats who have done scientific experiments for years. It is OK to use intuition and artistic expression and combine it with the available rational knowledge one has, and to express it as a whole.
- Flemming