A five-year journey of discovery and transformation as told in a sequence of twenty-five blog posts.
I finally retired from work on 31st December 2018, at the age of 77. At the beginning of April 2019, I made a pilgrimage along the last 272km of the Camino of Santiago do Compostela, which set in motion the intellectual and spiritual adventure I write about in this blog post. Soon after my return from Spain, I described my experiences in the post After the Dust Has Settled.
Whilst reflecting on my experiences, I discovered the remarkable Emmy-Award-winning film, “Journey of the Universe”, which introduced me to Thomas Berry and took me deeper into “Big History”. I wrote about that in Nothing’s the Same Since Samos.
The need to reconcile Jesus’s life, death, and message and its interpretation by his followers with a modern scientific understanding of the world has never been far from my thoughts since my days at Nottingham University, where I first studied Electrical Engineering and then Theology. This prompted me to write the post Hearing Christ in Context, followed by “A New Story.”
As Covid-19 and lockdown allowed me to learn the skills I needed to create a new website, I started to post more often. The Church as a Christian Tribe resurrected one of the studies I prepared for the discussion group at Folkestone United Reformed Church. At the same time, The Human Predicament became, in a sense, my manifesto for the need to find a way that encompassed both Science and Spirituality. I attempted to fuse insights from both science and Christianity in A Thousand Ages.
My focus on Human Nature began to show in my extensive reading, and the new website was ideal for posts such as Sapiens?, which contained links to 25 of the more than 200 books I had posted on the website.
I had been interested in stories since I first became aware of Narrative Theology in my sermon preparation as a Lay Preacher, but gradually, their significance became more prominent in my thinking, and I wrote The Fascination and Danger of Stories.
As lockdown ended, I summarized my spiritual confusion in a further reflective piece on my reading in Pathways to Wisdom: the Risky Adventure of Expanding One’s Horizons. It was the first time I mentioned “Strange Loops.”
Human Nature began to play a more prominent part in my thinking as I summarised my business career’s insights for a group of Mark Winter’s MBA students at Manchester University in Reflections on a Half-Century As A Manager. When Dan Hulme posed the question at lunch in July 2022, I related my business insights to the spiritual and scientific ones with What’s Wrong with the World?
The thinking behind this post provoked deeper and deeper reflection, and without realising it at the time, I invoked a second “strange loop” as I renounced “theism” in the post The Ship of Theseus: Everything changes, nothing changes. In response to this post, Colin Smith asked me whether I thought the situation was FUBAR or SNAFU. I responded in October 2022 with Situation Critical: There are too many of us, and we are behaving too badly.
In 2023, I was preoccupied with my new Shepway and District u3a group, “Science, Philosophy, and Spirituality.” Most posts during this period are related to the monthly sessions rather than personal spiritual insights. I did, however, apply what I had learned about human nature to what I knew about projects and project management and agitated for increased research spending on human nature and global cooperation.
In August 2023, however, I had a breakthrough in understanding that was to lead, less than a year later, to the transformation I had sought since I was seven. I described the breakthrough and how I had sidled up to it in Beyond the Brain.
In February 2024, Carolann Samuels, a member of my creative writing group, introduced me to Katrijn van Oudheusden and her Substack, Daily Nonduality. Subsequently, in March, I related storytelling to the embodied mind perspective and wrote Who Do You Think You Are? The Story Your Body Tells, quickly followed in April by How the Stories We Tell Influence What We Achieve and Rebuilding Trust: A Cornerstone for Successful Societies, Projects, and Global Relations.
By now, I was regularly practising Daily Nonduality meditations, inquiring into the human experience of “awareness beyond awareness”, and in May found myself exploring the convergence of physical, biological, and cultural evolution in three posts” Rethinking Progress: Embracing Unfolding and Adaptation in the Anthropocene, Unveiling Unity: The Interconnected Evolution of the Cosmos, Life, and Human Culture, and Integrating Consciousness, Non-duality, and Self-Identity into a New Paradigm of Progress.
I explored expressing my new way of experiencing the world in a quasi-fictional format in The Gathering at the Forest’s Edge before finally managing to express it in a way that feels to me to answer my lifelong need through three linked posts: The Mystery of Consciousness: Awareness Beyond Awareness and the Sense of Cosmic Oneness, Understanding Strange Loops: Unravelling Life’s Paradoxical Patterns, and Transcendence Beyond the Supernatural: Exploring the Depths of Human Experience.
In “The Frontiers of Knowledge”, philosopher A. C. Grayling draws attention to “”the paradox of knowledge, which is that the more we know, the more we realize the extent of our ignorance, not least in these three crucial areas of enquiry about the world, the past and the mind.” That is certainly true of my own lived experience. But somehow, the recognition that this is simply the reality of human life brings with it a sense of peace and gratitude for this amazing gift. Life may be an adventure to be lived rather than a mystery to be solved, but I still enjoy immersing myself in mysteries of all kinds.
Terry Cooke-Davies
16th July 2024
Thanks to the AI assistance provided by ChatGPT (4o) from OpenAI for creating the featured image.
