Yes. There is a direct relation. Law of Non-contradiction or excluded middle is set up by Aristotle as the founding principle of Metaphysics in the West. This is in direct response to the Buddhist Tetralemma (A, ~A, both, neither) of which Aristotle offers what seems to be a devastating critique. But the tetralemma is the Buddhist way to point at Nonduality of emptiness. So excluded middle or non-contradiction is the response advocating dualism to the concept of nonduality by Aristotle who founds Western Metaphysics.

See Nondual Science Institute for more information.

My teacher Alfonso Verdu did quite a bit of work and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the relation between phenomenology and meditation, and that is how I got my start in philosophy and its relation to nondual traditions by contemplating his work and the possibilities for extending his work. I recommend his works on Buddhism.

There are a few examples of phenomenological approaches to meditation, but not as many as one would like to see. Phenomenology is rooted more or less in the lifeworld, and in the Indo-European tradition, transitioning from that into nondual traditions is not easy for Westerners interested in Phenomenology. On the other hand Buddhist texts tend to be somewhat dogmatic and we lack phenomenological texts by practicing meditators. Each school sets its own standards and describes that as if it were the only way of apprehending the states that they experience in their meditative experiences. So it turns out that the application of Phenomenology to Meditation is not an easy problem. This in a sense is why we need to understand the Western worldview, i.e. to counter the assumptions that are inherent in the embedding of Phenomenology in a tradition that takes Being for granted. And in fact this is why understanding the meta-levels of Being is so important, because there is a natural phase transition at the fifth meta-level of Being to Existence. And it is in Existence that the other traditions that have developed sophisticated nondual traditions have thrived. So if we do not get out of the illusion of Being into existence we will never understand Taoism, Buddhism, DzogChen, Sufism and other nondual ways. This is the fundamental problem with Westerners fascinated with nondual traditions not having a philosophical understanding of the nature of Being and the relation of Being to Existence. Basically they all get lost misunderstanding in fundamental ways what is meant in the texts of these traditions. There is something crucial lost in translation and no basis for sorting out the illusion from existence proper. It is important to note that those within the tradition are also struggling with the illusion, but they are hampered by not clearly understanding existence through the haze of Being. Buddhism that started off as an Indo-European heresy is the best guide in this regard. But even Buddhism is still infected by Being to some extent and it took DzogChen to cure that infection.

And it should be noted that just because languages do not have Being, i.e. non-indo-european languages, they still have illusion. It is not as if only Being is illusion. But Being is Maya an intensification of illusion. So it is just much harder to start within the Western tradition and to make sense of the phenomenology of existence. The only way I know to do it is to triangulate from the perspectives of multiple nondual traditions and use them as the criteria for understanding the Western Tradition, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. Western Orientialism projects itself on these Oriental Traditions and blocks our understanding of them in fundamental ways if we do not make the non-nihilistic distinction between Being and Existence. But those coming in from the outside make a similar mistake in their translation of their nondual way into terms predominant in Western Philosophy.  That is why I think the cutting edge of our tradition is to understand nonduallity within it as it exists already rather than making translations between traditions. As Nagarjuna taught us emptiness is at the core of logic as the discontinuities between the logical operators. Similarly, we can see that there are discontinuities in the Western Scientific tradition which might be called emergent events. The Western tradition is shot through with these discontinuities over which we have no control when they will occur or how. Our tradition is fundamentally fragmented. Understanding that is equivalent to doing what Nagarguna did with logic. Nonduality is there in a fundamental way within the Western tradition, we do not need to go outside our tradition to confront the nondual. That is why I wrote The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void.  The nondual discontinuities are shot through our tradition but it is especially clear when we go up the meta-levels of Being that structure our worldview and encounter existence as emptiness or void at the kernel of the worldview. We don’t have to meditate to see that but merely contemplate the tradition as it is given to us and its meaning. Meaning arises from the void or emptiness that fills the discontinuities inherent in the tradition. Everything within the tradition is like a Geode which is empty at its center and which has filled a void. Our phenomenology should be able to look at existence without being distracted by Being. Our hermeneutics should be able to handle pure meaning that arises from the empty void directly. But we have a long way to go before that is the case.

Hard to compete with the videos of Dr Gregory B. Sadler which are very interesting. He seems to go from philosopher to philosopher adopting their point of view and then growing beyond them the next phase where a new philosopher seems to solve the problems that the last one left unsolved. That is a legitimate path.

My path has been somewhat different. First of all in High School I was interested in Zen Buddhism and I never stopped thinking that this is in some way the ultimate position on existence. Rather I merely continued to refine my understanding of this position on existence over my long intellectual career. When I got to University of Kansas they had an East Asian Studies Program where I could study something related to Zen Buddhism in each department and out of 126 units 60 or so of the units for my BA where taken in East Asian Studies, while my other major was Sociology. By taking all those classes on East Asian studies including a series of Philosophy classes by Alfonso Verdu that taught me the fundamentals of Asian Philosophy culminating in graduate courses in Zen, I cam to understand as much as I could as an undergraduate the depths of Oriental Philosophy that resulted in Zen/Chan Buddhism. But Verdu also taught me Phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger as his specialty was applying Phenomenology to Buddhism. And that sent me on a journey to understand Western Philosophy better based on an understanding of Eastern Philosophy (not the other way around). So when I went to England to study Sociology I ended up studying Philosophy of Science at LSE 1973-1882 with emphasis on Continental Philosophy within an academic environment saturated by Analytical Philosophy. I was the only one at LSE at the time interested in the understanding of Philosophy of Science using Continental work as the basis of my research that I know of. My dissertation was called The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence. I used Russell’s Higher Logical Type Theory to understand the Kinds of Being discovered in Continental Philosophy in order to attempt to comprehend emergent discontinuous changes within the Western Tradition. However, I never stopped studying Oriental Philosophy during that time and had a great resource in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Library. I still read sutras on a regular basis, and now have gotten into reading translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts that have come out recently attempting to understand DzogChen. Essentially I use as my baseline Taoism, Zen, Hua Yen, DzogChen, Sufism as a way of understanding Nonduality and supra-rationality and then from that perspective looking to understand Western Philosophy within that context. Oriental Philosophy is much more Sophisticated than Western philosophy. However, Western Philosophy has its own depth that needs to be appreciated. The problematic is to understand the Western Worldview on the basis of Oriental views of Nonduality and Supra-rationality. Why do we want to understand the Western worldview? Because it is this Worldview which has achieved global dominance and underlies the destruction of our planet. It is not possible to solve the problems that lead to planetary destruction by the Western Worldview from outside. We must understand the Western Worldview from the inside in order to understand what has gone wrong that is leading to these disastrous consequences. But there is a measure by which to base our assessment on that comes from Oriental Philosophy in the form of the understanding of Nonduality Supra-rationally. So I have been engaged in this problematic for years and it has led to a lot of interesting results and has been an intellectual adventure of the first rank, which is still ongoing for me.

It turns out that there are a lot of interesting things that fall our when you look at Western Philosophy in its depths from the outside based on the criteria of Nonduality accessed through Supra-rationality from the point of view of Hermeneutics, Dialectics, Ontology, Phenomenology, Semiotics and Structuralism the fundamental methods that I have grown accustom to using over the years. For me the Western Tradition has at its core the work of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger but the kernel is Plato with an occasional nod to Aristotle. What is of most concern is to understand how Western Philosophy unfolds structurally and how it circles around positions of nonduality without for the most part recognizing them because it is lost in duality. There is something like Absolute Reason at work  underlying the structural unfolding of Western Philosophy such that Nonduality as comprehended supra-rationality is not ever far off no matter how deeply we are lost in dualities, and especially nihilistic fabricated artificial opposites in conflict that characterize the unfolding of the Western tradition. For instance, Emergence and Nihilism are themselves dualistic opposites. The Western tradition is like a train careening down a mountain out of control. The mountain face, the sheer cliff face of nonduality is always in view as it rounds bends, and plunges us all toward destruction. Of course, the passengers are so obsessed by their fate that they do not notice the serene scenery out the window of the careening train on which they are trapped. As long as we are trapped in duality and cannot find the non-nihilistic distinctions that will allow us to gain control of the train again then we remain lost in an undead state waiting for our fate to materialize as we fiddle Rome burns.

In essence the situation is very simple. The Western Worldview is fragmented and at its core is the discontinuities of non-duality that indicate the kernel of nonduality beyond the wild generation of Nihilism that is the core of the worldview. I call the recognition of this nondual kernel the Homeward path. It is the means by which we could heal our own self-inflicted wounds if we so chose to do so, and to take back control of our out of control worldview, that is not just distorting us but our planet and every sentient being on the planet through incipient greenhouse effect that has us careening toward a Venusian future. What is so fascinating is that the solution to the problem of radical active nihilism is so very close to us yet so far away from being recognized. At every unfolding of the structural unfolding of the Western worldview the unknown position of nonduality is always manifest but ignored because it lives in a blindspot of our assumption of non-contradiction and excluded middle that was set up by Aristotle in his metaphysics as the dominant assumption of this tradition.

Of course, how all this works out is extremely complicated. And it has taken many years to unravel it all. But essentially it is easy to access this perspective. All it takes is to understand the relations of nondual traditions to each other  such as those mentioned, and then use that as a criteria for understanding the dukkha, dunya, maya of the Western tradition rooted in Being as something superabundant over existence. Being is uniquely Indo-European and it is what gives us our possibility of dominating other cultures and it is also our Achilles heel which leads us on to our own destruction. Other traditions have understood illusion, but we merely have a much more potent variety of it which at once gives us technological advantage, and makes us fools falling for our own self generated emergences and nihilisms that compound in the intensification of nihilism in our tradition through the emergent events that overwhelm us. What is out of control in this train ride is what discontinuous change will occur next and when and how deep it will transform our understanding of the world. But these discontinuities themselves are examples of encounters with the cliff faces of nonduality. Nonduality is inscribed into and implied within extreme artificial fabricated dualities by which our tradition expresses itself in concrete dialectical positions that structurally unfold in history as we work out all the permutations of the possibilities of our worldview. These possibilities appear as the deeper philosophical positions that open up new vistas on our existential situation of being caught up as thrown into the situation dwelling in an out of control worldview, realizing we are falling, and projecting the outcome of where we will end up when the train finally crashes somewhere on the track down the mountain. Unlike Heidegger who thinks dasein is falling, the fact is that mitsein is also falling too as the They (One, or as Lacan calls it The Big Other). We are all falling down the rabbit hole together not just Alice. But by a series of fundamental and always deeper reversals we understand the situation much better given the work of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Each develops a philosophy in the confines of the last in the series through deep reversals of assumptions and through those we can glean something about the actual structure of the worldview and what throws it out of control through the dialectic of nihilistic and emergent events like those described by Kuhn, Foucault, and Heidegger.

I don’t have a position within the various structural positions that appear in the unfolding of the Western Worldview because that worldview does not encompass nondual non-conceptual non-experiential non-positions that are comprehended supra-rationally.  What I try to have are appreciations of deeper and deeper positions developed within the worldview by which its comprehends its own situation of falling toward its own self-generated oblivion in rare moments of self-consciousness. Non-duality is in some sense adamantine. It does not change in any way even though it is the basis for all change within experience. There are striated hierarchies of change, changing change, changing change that changes, etc But what changes can only be seen if there is a reference and nonduality is the reference point against which all the meta-levels of change are gauged. Nonduality is unstriated at its depth. It is there to be faced in every breath. But where it is is non-directional and cannot be pinned down by specific concepts or experiences because it envelops all concepts as non-conceptual underpinnings, all experiences as non-experiential references. It appears as the discontinuities in experience and between concepts. Find the most radical distinctions that can be made that are naturally given, no just dreamt up and you are confronting nonduality. And these may be between natural phenomena, or between visible and invisible phenomena, or most difficult to comprehend between invisibles. We must make non-nihilistic distinctions in order to apprehend them. We must encounter and see through entanglements and superimpositions and the distinctions between these limits of our experience. But if we can do that we see a golden thread runs through our thoughts and experiences that we can follow that gives it meaning. Meaning gushes out of the nondual. And the ultimate intellectual adventure is to follow that thread where ever it leads without preconceived ideas  of what form it should take. When you do that vast vistas are opened to the understanding and one teeters on the brink  of wisdom. But whether that wisdom can be made ones own is always an open question.

The road to understanding the deep things about our worldview in the context of other more sophisticated worldviews not barbaric enough to destroy themselves and the planet along with them. What was discovered in these other worldviews is available in our own worldview. The antidote to our deep sickness lies close at hand but unrecognized. It was always there hidden in the kernel of the worldview. It will always be there whether we take advantage of it or not. For illusion to be illusion it needs the measure of existence based in nonduality to distinguish it as illusion along with it as its constant companion. Illusion only exists to make clear what is not illusory beyond the dialectic of emergence and nihilism. Illusion always points beyond itself toward the foundational state of non-illusion. But those pointers are always subtle and take a comprehensive viewpoint to unwind into a supra-rational non-nihilistic path to follow within a world that overwhelms us in every way by overwhelming nihilism that cuts to the core of our experience and derails us at every juncture as we careen down the track together in the out of control engine of the train of our worldview. If we look at the train as a whole, and we look back to the origins of the train and the way that the track and the train itself were constructed we can make sense of it by a genealogical investigation. But the story is very complex and is difficult to concentrate on when the situation is so dire. But if we can step back and get a deeper perspective we realize that whether we get control of the train or not the cliff faces of nonduality will not change and they offer us absolute limits for our journey whether we heed them or not. The whole question revolves around whether we can take the homeward path into the depths of our own tradition and unearth the non-duality that is there which can serve as a guide and can allow us to attempt to take control of the situation again by stepping out of the train and realizing we are actually the cliff faces that define the limits of the human situation within our worldview even more than we are the creatures trapped within the train.

I was asked to answer this, but I did not attend graduate school for philosophy. I am self-taught for the most part. My degrees are in Sociology and Systems Engineering, but my dissertations were very philosophical in those disciplines and for all intents and purposes I was doing my degree in philosophy as a subject even if not in the discipline of philosophy proper. This has good and bad things about it. A good thing is that one is not bound by the strictures of the academic discipline of philosophy, the bad thing is that one is not being mentored by someone who really knows the subject. But if it is a new subject that others are not yet expert in, as Continental Philosophy was in English when I went to school, i.e. there were very few people who were interested in Continental Philosophy who were not on the continent, then mentorship is less of an issue, and you are thrown back on your own resources anyway, and by being outside the Analytically saturated philosophy discipline is then a great help since one is not bound to writing boring papers, but can explore freely the new subject matter of philosophy that is infinitely more interesting than anything that Analytically philosophers have come up with so far. That is because Continental Philosophers discovered the strange fact that there are different kinds or modalities of Being as experienced phenomenologically by human beings beneath the relified level of subject/object distinction, i.e. at the level of being-in-the-world of Dasein. This fundamental shift in the nature of philosophy is still not well appreciated.

So what was it like to be studying Continental Philosophy in an Analytically world but be outside the discipline of philosophy, and in another discipline? It was wonderful. It was an amazing intellectual adventure which has continued ever since and continues to unfold in amazing ways. We talk about inter-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity but few people ever get a chance to do it. I got a chance to do it because the English system is such that you can do work beyond your discipline if your adviser allows it, and my adviser was very tolerant in that way. But that is more possible with philosophy than other disciplines because philosophy impinges on all other disciplines being the origin of all other disciplines and being more general than all other disciplines.

However, one problem is that because most scholars are stuck in their discipline and don’t learn anything beyond that most of my work is incomprehensible to others. That is because I start out assuming that you will know many different disciplines so that we can speak about them freely in their relation to each other. If you don’t know that then you are going to get lost when you read my papers because you need to take a Hyperborean viewpoint that is trans and interdsicpinary in order to understand them. I like this term which I get from S. Rosen’s commentary The Mask of Enlightenment on Nietzsche who says that Zarathustra takes a Hypoborean viewpoint which is a perspective across all other perspectives. The Hypoboreans live in a place in the far north which cannot be gotten to either by land or see and is beyond where the winds come from. Getting to such a viewpoint can only be done if you take your education into your own hands, and you read across disciplines, and you follow your subject where ever it may lead across disciplinary boundaries, learning each discipline as much as necessary along the way. Learning as much as necessary does not lead to mastery, and so one must settle in many cases with being a jack of all trades because knowing everything about everything is impossible. But it does not mean you need to be a master of none. One only needs to master the crucial disciplines to your problematic. But there is no reason to exclude other disciplines due to arbitrary academic boundaries set up in university in order to limit scholarship. Independent scholars are truly independent and can study what they like to the depth that they like and thus come to know much more than scholars that are hemmed in by artificial disciplinary boundaries that they must respect if they are going to advance in their career.

Even with the rise of interest in Continental Philosophy in America and England it is still treated disciplinarily. Mostly it is pursued by people in English departments whose understanding of it is questionable. But fortunately there aer now some schools where you can get a good grounding in Continental Philosophy in a Philosophy department. So for instance UCI is such a school and at that school I took classes from Martin Schwab who recently retired who really helped me understand some of the fundamentals of Continental Philosophy. I wish I had been able to take more of his courses because he is someone who really knows the subject deeply and very well and from whom it is possible to learn a lot about Continental Philosophy. Finding a mentor like that is very important because there are many ways to go astray without knowing it in a discipline in which you are self-taught. But it took me years to find that kind of person who really knew the subject much more deeply than I did myself and who could give me hints as to what I might have misunderstood along the way. So just because you are outside a discipline does not mean you cannot find a mentor in that discipline.

In general we need to remember that our highest priority is to pursue a course that is going to lead to intellectual adventures of the first rank. You will sometimes find that is possible in a discipline. But for the most part what ever can be done in a discipline has probably already been done. The wide open territory is in the interstices and lacunae between disciplines, in the blindspots of our tradition, of which there are many lurking beyond the prison walls of given disciplines. There are of course guards on those walls that lead to the wilderness which is untrammeled beyond the asphalt patchwork of pavings of various disciplines. But if you can avoid being knocked off by the guards whom you fear will curtail your career, then you can venture out into those verdant pastures beyond the pale, they give way to roads less traveled, and then to tracks and paths and eventually to places where no one has trodden where new vistas open up within the mountains of thought that Nietzsche discovered and at the perennial of which he placed Zarathustra. Of course as he says there is solitude there, because very few will venture beyond the boundaries of their disciplines. But in the solitude there is also deep insights to be had along the way as one travels where few minds have gone before. And this is especially true in our time when so much has been discovered in various disciplines unexploited by other disciplines in the solution of their problems.

In order to find this untrammeled territory one must first discover a problematic that will guide beforehand your questioning. Having a problematic that is deep enough is always a difficult thing to find, but once you find it then you need only follow your own fascination as discovery gives way to discovery based on the hard work you do learning what is necessary to pursue your independent course of inquiry. Many times it will take years of fruitless work before you gain the necessary insight, and normally that comes after all the avenues you can think of have failed. But the important thing to realize is that today the new continents to explore like within no longer in the outside world as new geographies. On the map of our discipline coverage of the realms of knowledge there are still many undefined areas, places where we think we will fall off the edge of the map of knowledge if we go there, and places where monsters roam freely.

I recommend that what every your discipline you learn to navigate to those places where the map of knowledge is vague or non-existent between or across disciplines and plumb those depths, which are of course the depths of your own self.

He thought it would be his own time because his time was the time in which the ultimate philosophy, his own, had been realized. So his idea was that the end of history would be like the early 1800s.

Plato

However, clarity, completeness and consistency is not the measure, but depth.

My Theory of almost Everything is a meta-theory called Special Systems Theory. Together with General Schemas Theory and Emergent Meta-systems Theory it attempts to explain the underlying a priori necessities of a meta-theory for the arising of Life, Consciousness and the Social. My main contribution is adding the basis for understanding the relation between these emergent thresholds via anomalies in mathematics and physics. A recent summary is here Page on Mediafire. If you really want to get deeply into it seeReflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory which is the long version which is a bit older at Advanced Systems Theory, Philosophy, Especially Metaphysics and you can also see Reflexive Autopoietic Systems Theory at the same site which are the essays I wrote while I was discovering the theory. The theory hearkens back to my Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void also at the same site.

As a sociologist the genesis of the theory comes from a close reading of Plato’s works concerning his imaginary cities. Noticing that those cities have strange properties it occurred to me to look for those same anomalies in mathematics and I found not only analogous anomalies but discovered that the various analogies from Mathematics fit together unexpectedly to give a very precise model of the three special systems called Dissipation Ordering Special System, Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System and Reflexive Social Special System. An introduction to this approach can be found in Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature which is barking up a very similar tree but lacks a complete theory. He calls the Dissipative Structures of Prigogine “Morphodynamic” Systems and defines Autopoietic Systems as “Teleodynamic”. He lacks a Sociodynamic level associated with Reflexive Systems. For an explanation of the relation between Special Systems Theory and Deacon’s Theory see FoundationsOfSpecialSystemsTheory01a01kdp20130703a.pdf. Another important resource isAmazon.com: Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Complexity in Ecological Systems) (9780231075657): Robert Rosen: Books, For a basic introduction to the area see The Web of Life. The theory also informs my second dissertation at Emergent Design (emergentdesign) on about.me. Many other background works appear atKent Palmer – Academia.edu

Justification is fairly simple. We know that of Everything the hardest things to explain is the arising of Life, Consciousness and the Social. So an important step in providing a meta-theory of everything addressing how these special thresholds of emergence relate to thermodynamics and the rest of physics like Qunatum Mechanics and Relativity etc. This meta-theory explains how the thresholds are related to each other and to the background of physics. The answer is that the analogies to these thresholds exist in Mathematics and then there are comparable anomalies in physics to those in mathematics. Thus this theory is fully scientific because it has a fundamental mathematical structure that is very precise, and then this structure is reflected in Physics which give analogous hither to unrecognized thresholds in physics that correspond to the kind of organization that appears in Consciousness, Life and the Social. People recognize these as ontic thresholds of significant phenomena but there is no ontological explanation of why these thresholds are possible, and what their relation to each other might be a priori. Terrence Deacon does a good job of rethinking some of the basic concepts that would allow us to understand these thresholds. But he has no mathematical basis for his theory, but merely hypothesizes the difference between thermodynamics, morphodyanmics and teleodynamics. Special Systems Theory gives the mathematical and physical framework of anomalies that define these thresholds and how they relate to each other including their relation to sociodynamics which is a threshold that Deacon does not consider. Therefore, this framework is justified by the fact that there is no overarching theory of the necessity of the emergence of these thresholds which is ontological and a priori, and Special Systems Theory supplies this overarching framework as a meta-theory within which we can place the theories related to specific phenomena at each threshold.

Having a Theory of Everything is not unusual. Almost everyone who is anyone seems to have that. And what is the use of having a Theory of Everything if it does not cover the hard problems, like Life, Social, Consciousness because these are included in Everything. Unfortunately having a Theory of Everything is not enough. This is because theories are a dime a dozen. There are myriad theories available. The problem is to develop a theory that interacts in significant ways with the cutting edge of science. Most crackpot theories do not do that. And that is why they are for the most part ignored. Also they are ignored by academics if you are not an academic, because they don’t believe that someone who is not doing this full-time and is employed in the field actually can get in touch with the cutting edge of science. Even people who are full-time physicists at university have a hard time connecting in a significant way with the cutting edge of science, so how would anyone else do. Anyway that seems to be their reasoning when ignoring independent scholars.

I would argue of course that independent scholars are just as likely if not more likely to be able to connect significantly with the cutting edge of a given discipline or science in general. Why is this. One reason is over specialization within academia. Someone not forced to stick to one discipline is more likely given enough hard work across disciplines to see things that specialists cannot see. Another reason is that Independent scholars who are funding their own work are not tied to what grant committees think are important. Independent scholars just do their work on what fascinates them and may even have more time to dedicate to their subject than academics who are embroiled in the educational system. But on the other hand there are severe handicaps for the independent scholar. First of all if they are not teaching they are not going over and over the basics of their field on a regular basis. And if they are not attending conferences in their field then they don’t actually know what is going on in it. And they are unlikely to have colleagues in the field with whom they can discuss their ideas. So the independent scholar is unlikely to know what is going on in the field in a way that is continually updated and fresh in their minds. And so what is more likely is that they will have some idea of it from when they were studying at school which they continue to develop as they read further, but they are hopeless ly out of date without knowing it. From all this we can see that there are both plusses and minuses concerning the position of the independent scholars position toward their field.

What has changed of course is the internet. The role of the public scientist has been enhanced by the internet because it is possible for the independent scholar to publish their papers on the Internet without filtering by journal editors. But unfortunately a culture of serious conversation and deep consideration and debate of issues on the internet has not formed yet. So there is really no audience for the work of independent scholars among others who consider themselves public scientists. One of the major barriers is the fact that scientific papers are locked behind firewalls that most people do not have access to who are not part of a university. This is a huge barrier to scholarship. But even if open source journals take off the real problem is that outside of academia the public has not organized itself yet to act as a community of public scientists so that they can consider what Independent Scholars have come up with along with what is relevant produced in academia to help determine what is relevant and what is not relevant in our general search for meaningful contributions to the cutting edge of science. The point is that for the most part science has become so esoteric that most people cannot relate to it at all, less well come to terms with its cutting edge in a significant ways. Fundamentally, if you have not dedicated your life to it as an academic then you are unlikely to know enough to contribute. But on the other hand there are extraordinary people who exist in this world who break this general rule, but then those people do not have the channels to get their ideas out to others so that they can be seriously considered. In general the best way to get ones ideas out for others to consider is to attend conferences and give papers. The next way is to write articles for the core journals in your field. And of course there is always the path which is tried and true which is to write a book that explains your TOE to everyone. But the sad fact is that even if it is the next best then since sliced bread it is unlikely to attract attention either within the field of your choice or among the scientific public.

One reason is that many people are claiming what you are claiming. And for the most part they are wrong about the importance and significance of their work. And the chances are that you too are wrong. Science is about power relations rather than knowledge for the most part. Knowledge is a secondary concern. The institutions of Science, academia, have been set up to keep people like you out and to make sure you do not have an impact. Only special people who get grants and get positions in universities are considered worthy of trying to come up with something important in their fields. Of course, these roadblocks have been more of less rendered ineffective by the internet, but still because the scientific public has not organized itself to consider more than whatever comes out of academia as significant, it is unlikely that other theories not supported by the academic power structure will get considered outside of academia, and they are certainly not going to get considered inside of academia, as its whole raison d’être is to take care of its own.

Think of it this way. Your TOE is really your education. Buy developing it, if it really is any good, has been an educational journey. And that is worth while in itself regardless as to whether anyone else recognizes it. As independent scholars we really do have to be completely independent. In other words we are independent in as much as we fund our own studies. We are independent from the strictures of academia, which makes it possible to move across the lines of the specialties when those in academia are loth to do that because of the repercussions on their precious careers. We are independent in our assessment of what is the cutting edge of the discipline to which our work responds. And we should be independent of whether or not our work attracts attention or not. In other words it all gets back to motive. It is good to share what you can as you can of what you have done, if you think it is important to the field. But whether or not the field takes any notice should be irrelevant to you. Present your work at conferences, write some articles, publish a book on your work, and then move on to further research, further education. And if you continue to educate yourself you may find that what you thought was the ANSWER to EVERYTHING was in fact wrong and only interesting to you because of what you did not know at that time. And eventually you may discover an even deeper theory of everything, but then you will have the experience to know that this is probably not the ultimate in knowledge either.

Lets go back to Socrates. The Delphic Oracle said he was the wisest of men. So he went around questioning people who were deemed knowledgeable to find out why that might be so. What he found out was that his wisdom lay in the fact that he did not think he knew anything, while everyone else thought they knew. Having a Theory of Everything is tantamount to thinking you know something that others do not know. Something that gives you the right to pontificate and that should make others listen. But probably as with the various sophists and philosophers who Socrates questioned this is probably a self-generated illusion, and when it comes down to it, you probably need to go back to your studies and learn more and you just have not realized that is the best course yet. Who gets attention and who is ignored is not fair but is about the distribution of power more than it is about knowledge. So it may be that you really do have something important to say. In which case you should record the fact that you discovered what ever it is you think you have found which is so astounding, and then move on, getting on with your education, because guess what, you can spend a lifetime waiting to be recognized and never get recognized. So you need to think whether that is the reason you are doing what you are doing. Is it to get recognized or to gain knowledge. Gaining knowledge is endless. Even if you have a TOE you have not exhausted the depths of knowledge that is possible to have, and I suggest you fix your gaze on what you do not know and move on to those greener pastures, after you have made your mark in the sand by letting others know about your theory. This way when you find out what your TOE was not all you thought it might be, you will be less embarrassed because after learning more you will be the first to say what its defects are. And by identifying its defects first, you will earn more respect than if you had produced something and never realized what was wrong with it.

Knowing what we actually know is one of the hardest things to do. The best policy is to assume ignorance unless proved otherwise after much testing of your own ideas.

The best way to become educated is to follow what fascinates you, what ever that is. If you do that then studying is never an effort because your fascination takes you through the work without effort no matter how hard that work is that is needed. On the other hand if you are studying what you should because you are told that is the only way to make a living, or because that is what your parents want you to do, or for any other reason than you deeply involved with the subject due to your own intrinsic interest in it, then studying is very hard, if not impossible. Now some people can do what they are supposed to do or are told to do and can get through it. Other people find this very difficult. I am one of those people who cannot study unless I really want to know the answer to something. So it just turned out that those intrinsic interests of mine led to a Ph.D. in the Humanities. If my interests had led somewhere else that is where I would have ended up. I guess this is more or less saying I did not choose it but it chose me. I spent nine years in England studying what ever fascinated me and somehow that amounted to a Ph.D. During that time I became interested in Software Engineering and Systems Engineering via Systems Theory and ended up making that a career. Later I did another Ph.D. in Systems Engineering in order to get a qualification in my career area of choice. My advice is to study what fascinates you while you have the chance to study what ever you want in school, and then work out how that allows you to make a living later as you figure out what kind of work fascinates you. If you study many different subjects then you can easily absorb new ones and essentially that allows you to grow into what ever it is that you need to do next along the way.

True to form I am going to think about this question in terms of Heidegger’sBeing and Time which I have been commenting on at Thinknet. But first a side reference to Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature. Purpose is what he calls an ententional phenomena based on absential eventities referenced and interpreted by ourselves but which are actually things that are missing from our physical existence. Ententional and abstential are neologisms that Terrence Deacon made up to refer to phenomena like purpose which only appears in life, and consciousness and the social but has nothing to do with physical matter per se except in as much as it is an absence, something missing.

Heidegger of course makes a major theme out of death, and says that it is the only way for Dasein (being there, being-in-the-world) to become authentically individuated as a self within the context  of the mitsein (They, One, or what Lacan calls the Big Other). Basically Heidegger says we never experience Death itself, but only the anticipation of it that leads to an existential anxiety that expresses itself in Fallenness, i.e. the ultimate groundlessness of our existence.

So interestingly your question contains Dying which is something that we all do, but none of us experience, to the extent that when we are dead we have no experience, it is always something in the future even if it is imminent. On the other hand you have an ententional phenomena of purpose, which is something always absent at least physically. So it appears that your question contains nihilistic opposites, i.e. something never experienced verses something that is never here. Both are always in the future. That is why Heidegger says that we are always oriented toward the future, one giving purpose to our life and the other recognizing the ultimate end we can foresee because we have seen others come to that end. If it is true that this question contains nihilistic opposites in tandem then our real question is how do we make the non-nihilistic distinction between the two. Clearly if both of them are future then that must be counter weighted by the past which is related to thrown befindlichkeit (foundness, or mood). The nihilism of the future certainly engenders a mood of depression, a withdrawal from life because of the uselessness of it. But according to Heidegger that is really just covering over the anxiety about death that permeates everything that must be overcome in order to seize life resolutely and authentically.  This more or less says as we might  have imagined that the non-nihilistic distinction between past and future is in the present. And in fact in Old German there were only two tenses complete and incomplete. Both future and past are complete from that point of view. What is incomplete contains the now and virtual co-now of the mythic. We lost the mythic co-now in the symmetry breaking between the mythopoietic and metaphysical eras so that is why the future tense is given extra emphasis in the metaphysical era. Anyway that is a clue for why the nihilistic opposites of death and purpose both appear in the future. But it is also a clue as to what needs to be done to get out of this nihilistic situation. One answer is hedonism of the present. But that is also nihilistic. Another answer is just carry on as expected which is also nihilistic. But another answer is to realize that each moment in the present has a virtual co-present that haunts it. That virtual moment is mythic and contained in logos as its existential. That existential is unassigned to any of the standard three temporal ecstasies.

What gave life meaning for the Heros of myth was to have their story told by bards, and scops down  though time because their lives and deeds had been so glorious. Each of us constructs as self though narratives we invent about ourselves to establish our identity.  When we are living our mythic journey within a self-constructed narrative that makes sense to us we feel as if our life has meaning. One can interpret this as the fusion of the now of the present with the co-now of the mythic as expressed in Logos. The now of the present from the point of view of Heidegger is only Falling. But he says that we can have if we are authentic a moment of vision which goes beyond mere falling. That vision gets expressed as the mythic narrative that informs our lives, that we make up and live every day based on what happens. Just as really past and future are the same peterite tense so to the now and virtual co-now that Deleuze talks about are the same ultimately. Lack of meaning comes from our banishment of the mythic in the metaphysical era. But the mythic is not just any story we happen to make up, it is rather a story built out of archetypes that explores our archetypal milieu as Jung and Hillman understand it. An excellent example recently come  to light is Jung’s Red Book which encapsulates his struggle to bring mythic meaning into his own life. Jung’s answer would have been “Get a Red Book of your own and start inscribing your own archetypal mythology to support your experience of the now by the mythic co-now that haunts it.” This goes back to Plato who called the WorldSoul a moving image of Eternity in time, and also a realization of change and changelessness at the same time, i.e. a supra-rational view of life. Every thing is changing and everything is staying the same and the intersection of those two when held together in our contemplation gives insight into the nature of existence. It is not a contradiction, paradox, or absurdity but in fact a supra-rational state in which myriad opposites are true simultaneously without interfering, which we see as interpenetration or intra-inclusion. This is at least a Zen or DzogChen way of looking at the situation. Every moment is nondual without any hint of cardinality (one, two, multiple). We are actually in that state all the time, but we only realize it rarely. That state is full of meaning that flows out of manifestation through the void or emptiness into our  lives at every moment, if we but knew.

So the real question is why we don’t experience that ecstasy continuously? Heidegger would put it down to our immersion and lostness in Mitsein (the They). Various traditions call the problem Dukkha, Maya, Dunya, which are various ways of indicating illusion. Life naturally fills with meaning pouring out of the non-cardinal states (non-monist, non-dual, non-plural) if we don’t block it or ignore it. Our natural state is to be flooded by meaning coming from nowhere to inform our lives with things like purposes, values, virtues, order, rta, good, fate, archetypal sources of existence, roots of self-manifestation. In that state the nihilistic question does not arise. The nihilistic question that saps the world of meaning arises only in the nihilistic state that covers over the ecstasy of existence which is either interpreted as empty by Buddhists or void by Taoists. The emptiness of existence or its void nature is the prerequisite for the cup of existence being filled by meaning. We always search for that libation bearer from whose hands we long to drink that long forgotten wine.