|
One Earth | Three Worlds Mystics of all traditions speak of the unity that lies behind all things. Scientists seek to define the laws that govern matter and energy. But neither approach accounts satisfactorily for the world of imagination, ritual and creativity, for the inexplicable connections found in precognition, for the uncanny accuracy of oracles like the I Ching, or for the effectiveness of healing modalities like homeopathy. In One Earth | Three Worlds, Julian Carlyon draws on quantum theory, Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, the work of scientists Rupert Sheldrake and David Bohm, and ancient Chinese wisdom, to better understand how the unity lying behind all life might manifest itself in the daily-life world of our experience. Through his schema of ‘oneness world, twoness world and intermediary world’, the author draws together such diverse threads as quantum entanglement, synchronicity, similarity and analogy, homeopathy, healing, dreams, creativity, free choice and destiny, spiritual unity, movement practice and the body. In doing so, he offers a way to appreciate how spiritual and scientific perspectives can exist alongside one another – a way to see how the unity behind everything can show up and work its magic in the physical reality of our lives. This is a book for anyone – scientist, therapist, creative artist, healer, eco-activist or enquirer – curious about how our world works and how to reconcile our apparently conflicting approaches to reality. |
Reviews of One Earth | Three Worlds
This book is a tour de force. It links quantum physics with the pre-quantum physical sciences and metaphysical, mythical, creative and healing consciousness. The book is grounded in epistemologically sound research findings and copious inter-disciplinary referencing and cross-referencing. It is indexed and replete with footnotes. Carlyon writes clearly and steadily as he guides the reader on a journey that makes sense of disparate paradigms, finding correspondences, resonances and affinities where generally, in the status quo, they remain invisible. He bites off a lot, but not more than he can chew. The book hangs together succinctly. It’s a slim volume (133 pages) that wears its erudition modestly, achieving an overview of giant vistas without ever getting grandiose. The author has done something extraordinary in remaining sober and unobtrusive in the way he writes: no polemics, no conspiracies, whilst elegantly covering so much that is both deep and momentous. The three worlds in the title are 1) the physical world in which there is separation, cause and effect, duality, time and space, 2) the world of unity, wholeness, timelessness, non-duality, 3) the intermediary world of synchronicity, dream, ritual, myth, healing and archetypes. He proposes the possibility of ‘a new holistic science’ which continues to ‘observe life and formulate laws as it now does’, but which also acknowledges and respects the ‘unbroken whole lying behind all inward and outward events. A new science would recognise how outwardly separate things and events could be a-causally connected with each other within a background of oneness’. As humanity seems in so many ways to be throwing itself wholesale into a disastrous cataclysm, Carlyon’s gentleness, depth and breadth of thought and vision offers something of great hope. I would say the book is a clarion call to something urgently needed by our human predicament at this time, marking and elucidating what might be both a possibility and a necessity of evolution. It is an accomplishment of intellectual research and correlation which, without saying so, probably offers a pathway for averting apocalypse. Simultaneously it has the stature of being a spiritual classic for our times: an auspicious work the pages of which I found myself turning with reverence. This is a gem of a book, a profound deed of healing. NN, Psychotherapist and Artist, November 2022 This book is an important theoretical contribution to bringing together the three worlds of the title, namely the oneness world, the twoness world and the intermediary world. The first is the mystical realm, the second the empirical material realm addressed by science, while the third is crucial in relating to the two, and cannot be fully explained by either. The chapters range widely over such areas as physics, psychology, homoeopathy and their respective principles such as similarity and resonance, with a particular focus on the pattern that connects these fields. The author reminds readers that the element of passion and need has to be present for synchronicity to occur. If oneness world is a totality beyond division and therefore description, twoness world is one of objects and fields in spacetime, a world of cause and effect: oneness can also permeate/interpenetrate twoness, with seemingly anomalous effects; here lies the bridging intermediary world. As humans, we inhabit all three while the artist, healer and shaman are perhaps most at home in the intermediary realm which is also that of choice. Interestingly, the author quotes Nick Herbert as saying that ‘a universe that displays local phenomena built upon a nonlocal reality is the only sort of worlds consistent with known facts and Bell’s proof’ – witness the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics. In this respect, Taoism is isomorphic, while also paralleling the unbroken wholeness in David Bohm’s implicate order and the separation that occurs at the explicate level. The author postulates that a future science might be able to accommodate the intermediary realm characterised by ‘the presence of oneness in twoness’, with oneness as causeless, the twoness as causal, and the intermediary as acausal. He identifies this status precisely as the biggest problem for modern science indicating that the prevailing model is incomplete. Correspondingly, oneness is consciousness itself, ‘or the space in which everything appears.’ All this is usefully summarised in a series of helpful diagrams (pp. 114-117). Highly recommended as a fresh and fruitful theoretical approach. David Lorimer (The Scientific and Medical Network) 15th December 2022 This masterful work is both profoundly accessible and deeply challenging. I found myself gently held as a reader, who needed time and compassion to absorb the contents of this beautiful book. It will become a regular reference in the future, to the extent of realities in which we all exist. RA, therapist and author, March 2023 |
|