David Cameron’s big speech on Europe last week was intended to be blue in tooth and claw. It came out beige.

That’s not to say there were no good ideas in it, no splendid rhetoric, nor sterling aspirations, just that it projected everything so far into the future they all but disappeared in the mists of time.

Realistically, we’re looking at a treaty signing around 2019/20, in the last gasp of the next Parliament. It seems this will be the same document that creates a fiscal union from most of the rest of the EU, giving the Commission endless opportunities for mission creep into British interests.

The timescale can only mean one thing: forget it. It will be Harold Wilson all over again.

Particle physicist, Professor Brian Cox has produced another visual spectacular in his new TV series, Wonders of Life. This follows Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe.

He’s beginning to run out of wonders, I fear. Perhaps his next series could be: Wonders of the Spiritual Universe?

I’m serious. He opens his first episode in a remote village in the Philipines at a festival where locals are celebrating the spirits of their ancestors who are thought to be living in the rocks around the houses.

Contemplating why so many people believe in a spiritual reality and survival after death, he remarks, “it feels right.”

It doesn’t last though. The day job kicks in and suddenly he’s claiming that life doesn’t need a mystical spark to get it going, just the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Laughable, you might think, but he does have a point. The law states that energy is neither created nor destroyed. In other words, energy is constant in the universe. Moreover, he equates energy with life itself. And it’s certainly true that energy animates living things, while death disperses it, leaving creatures inanimate and crumbling.

But that still doesn’t explain the crux of the matter. There is a point where physics gives way to metaphysics and the former loses its force. I would much prefer the terms, mystical or spiritual rather than metaphysics, which suggests a carry-over of methodology that does not happen.

Cox’s esteemed colleague, Stephen Hawking, put it best: “I understand how the universe works, but not why,” he wrote in one of his books. To equate energy with life still doesn’t explain what motivates energy, the “why” conundrum.

Somewhere in the back story, there is a force that creates intention. Intention is what animates life, especially higher forms like humans. We are not totally reactive creatures. No law of thermodynamics can explain the works of Shakespeare or the Upanishads.

The famed British astronomer, Fred Hoyle said that a hurricane blowing through a scrap yard for a million years will never create a jumbo jet. While his colleague, James Jeans asserted that the universe is “more like a great thought than a great machine.”

To be fair to Brian Cox, he does say in Wonders of Life that there is a strong chance “that the universe is alive”. Now we’re getting somewhere. The infinite monkey cage is not as deceased as we thought.

Coupled with his statement that the notion of a soul leaving a person at death feels right, that is a lot to wring out of a physicist in one hour of television.

What will the new unified Europe be like? I’ve let my imagination run riot in the following assessment:

A recent television item showed a house that had been left untouched since the early 1950s. Almost everything, from wallpaper to paintwork to furniture, was beige.

Beige is the colour of the future thanks to Brussels’ obsession with conformity — in the shape of the notion of equality — and control of every aspect of life.

I can see it now in my mind’s eye: mass immigration will mean there will be only one skin colour, beige, while rising populations will increase pollution so much that both sky and sea will be beige.

Eventually, there will emerge a new seat of world government in the vast conurbation of Brussels/Geneva, shortened to Breneva, which will set the pace on equality legislation around the globe.

To avoid class differences, nobody will be allowed to wear coloured clothing. All will don beige trouser suits, reducing individuality to a minimum.

Education will be identical for all, regardless of intelligence or aptitude. A new law abolishing war — to avoid winners and losers — will be hotly contested by women’s groups claiming that their new “right to fight” alongside men on the front line had been breached.

How soon “rights” become imperatives.

It will also become apparent that, to avoid such clashes in future, gender must be abolished. Castration will be voluntary at first, winning the participants a gold medal for services to the State. Then it will gradually be compulsory, with sexless children produced in Person Laboratories.

Mass medicalisation will eliminate all illnesses and psychological complaints except one: Boredom, the new plague.

A wide range of drugs will be prescribed to keep it under control: uppers and downers, cannabis, heroin, skunk, cocaine, all are available on prescription at no charge.

As the human population becomes ever more incapable of serious work, an increasingly robotic workforce is developed to take over. Humans will be the drones of the new world order.

However, in one little lonely outpost of the world designated, Rebel Colony 47b, once known as Great Britain, a freedom movement has survived.

Its population maintains all the old traditions of marriage, family and freedom of conscience. Children are born naturally and educated according to their talents and inclinations.

The colour beige is strictly forbidden.

A few years ago, Business Week journalist, Stephen Baker, had a thought-provoking piece over at Blogspotting. Its title is a telling Knowledge workers: We’re on our own, and it means what it says.

Face it, knowledge workers, if we’re not already freelancing, we’re heading in that direction. I’m typing this on a company-owned laptop, but Gartner predicts that within three years, one in 10 companies will be forcing employees to provide their own laptops. I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.

He painted a grim picture : “Increasingly, we’ll be on our own.” Grim for some, at least. Personally, I’ve always been “on my own”. All authors are. But I can see it would be tough for the gregarious types who are addicted to office politics and the water-cooler mafia.

He continued: “Why is this happening? Companies have the data and the intelligence now to cut the jobs they need done into tiny slices, each one going to the person best equipped to handle it anywhere on the globe. It’s a virtual assembly line.”

This is my long-held theory that each critical decision should be taken at the point of maximum competence, regardless of job title. I call it “superdemocracy”.

Now comes the juicy part of Baker’s idea. For those who write online more in hope than expectation, this is a Business Week endorsement:

So what do we do? For starters, we blog. That way we build our individual brands, our knowledge, and our network of connections. These are going to be ever more vital assets in the years ahead. If we do a good enough job building them, companies may decide to bid for our services fulltime, even throwing in insurance and a 401K.

Soon, in the “ecosystem that’s unfolding, one teeming with knowledge entrepreneurs, I’m betting that most of us, by choice or circumstance, are going to be running our own show.”

This is happening now. Many of my friends are peeling away from the corporate system, and those who are not, would like to. Interestingly, as Stephen says, blogging is the centrepiece of that effort. It puts you out there and up there, in the neon lights of a business Broadway that’s tapping its way into the 21st century, as the hoofers of old tap-danced into the 20th.

Poppycock Watch
All mergers and acquisitions are based on the idea that economies of scale will drive down costs across the board and produce synergies between organizations. This assumption is so ingrained in our thinking that few people stop to ask why most takeovers fail.

In any group activity there’s a hierarchy of decision-making. Each person in the structure (we won’t say “node”) gets a bagload of responsibilities based on various assumptions, and the empire-building of their predecessors. Like cream in a milk bottle, decisions have a strong tendency to rise up the hierarchy, stopping only when the number of assumptions needed to take them exceeds common sense.

Notice the word “exceeds”. This isn’t a rational process, it’s pushed purely by ego and vanity.

The result is that most decisions in any organisation (business or governmental) produce a one-size-fits-all outcome which gives a false sense of synergy, while destroying efficiency and particularity.

“Particularity” may sound odd here but, in reality, it’s the crux of the well-being of any complex infrastructure. It means decisions are made with few assumptions and with a “size”, or scale, that fits the need of every case.

Modern Western countries are one-size-fits-all societies. It’s our weakest link and the point where our enemies concentrate their attacks. They know most decisions, whether laws, regulations, red tape, whatever, are unpopular and largely unworkable, because they lack particularity.

Thus we need armies of lawyers to sort things out, over long periods of time. We also have to throw huge amounts of national and business capital at problems just to keep them afloat.

Politburo orders are always wrong. EU “directives” are never right for most people. Decisions taken on 10 Downing Street’s sofa have been proved disastrous time and again. White House decisions are hardly spangled with success. Microsoft, and even lucky Google, make crass moves all the time which go totally pear-shaped.

If every decision were taken at the point of maximum competence, or very near to it, there would be few assumptions to make, and the outcome would be as close to perfect as it’s possible to reach.

So here’s The Syntagma Principle: Particularity means never having to make assumptions. If you’re making assumptions, the decision shouldn’t be taken at your pay grade.

Profundity of the Week
The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
Eckhart Tolle, in Oneness With All Life

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Coming up: Mystology: A different way of looking at the world. Also a website, mystology.com.

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CERN* is alive with the sound of Quantum physicists.

While it doesn’t quite have the ring of the opening line of The Sound of Music, the place really is abuzz these days with pinging particles singing from the same hymn sheet.

The reason for it all is a minor “breakthrough” in the seemingly age-old quest for that most elusive of objects: the Higgs Boson, also called the God Particle.

“The Higgs,” as it is universally known — after British scientist, Peter Higgs — is thought to be a kind of field which matter, in its disassembled quantum state, passes through. The drag on particles by the field gives mass — or the appearance of mass — to the bits that are said to constitute matter.

You may think the above paragraph is filled with enough caveats to drag any particle down, but that is how the experts themselves tell it. Though even they can’t really believe they will achieve this crucial step towards verifying the Standard Model of the Universe as imagined (theoretically) during the age of Albert Einstein.

The Higgs is now thought to occupy a narrow segment of the giga-electron volt spectrum defined as 125 GeV. All else has been more or less checked and eliminated. It’s a bit like a gambler with one throw of the dice left to secure his winnings — all or nothing.

Psychologically, some of the players are preparing to be disappointed, saying: “If the Higgs is not found, it will be even more exciting!” Yeah, right.

But you’ve got to hand it to them for their energy and enthusiasm, not to mention their zeal for spending copious quantities of our money. Quantum expenditure is something they have yet to master. Let us hope it is less elusive than the Higgs.

In his Royal Institution lecture on Quantum Mechanics over the Christmas holidays, Prof Brian Cox claimed that Pauli’s Exclusion Principle demonstrates that “everything in the universe is connected to everything else” — the mystics’ Unity of Being, perhaps?

He then rubbed a very large uncut diamond, thus “increasing the energy level of all the electrons within it”. At that moment every other electron in the universe apparently adjusted its energy level because it can’t occupy the same level as any other, according to Pauli.

Think about it: all movements on Earth, or anywhere else, “cause” a maelstrom of frantic activity around the universe. Could the universe actually be alive, as genuine mystics have always asserted? It sounds very much like Indra’s Net to me — a very ancient idea that everything in the universe reflects everything else.

Did those early physicists get their ideas from ancient mysticism (“hippy stuff,” according to Brian Cox)? Discuss.

Similarly, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, much used by Cox in his lecture, has the unmistakable whiff of free will in action. Again though, it’s spoken of as a driver of events, not the result of intelligent action.

With the Higgs all the rage right now, it’s not easy to squeeze in an alternative view of the universe. But as this column is Midweek Mysticism, an attempt must be made to inject some sanity into the “will we, won’t we” debate that’s boiling over in Geneva.

Last week I chanced upon hints of a fascinating book published in 1901 by Dr Richard Maurice Bucke, a 19th-century psychologist and medical doctor: Cosmic Consciousness — A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind.

Twenty-nine years earlier, Bucke had experienced a shattering and life-changing expansion of consciousness in which he “saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter, but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is also built and ordered. That without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that the happiness of everyone is in the long run absolutely certain.”

The content and breathless nature of that statement bears all the hallmarks of countless mystical experiences down the ages.

Dr Bucke believed there are three stages in the psycho-spiritual development of man: Simple Consciousness, which is shared with animals; Self Consciousness, which is the normal state of human beings; and Cosmic Consciousness, which only the illumined attain.

He cites nine examples of such beings: the Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Dante, the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, Jacob Boehme, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and, interestingly, the American poet Walt Whitman, whom he knew personally. There would also be many unknown people with such insights not made public.

He suggests that they are the beginnings of a new race of man increasingly inhabiting the Earth. The marks of this race are: “moral and intellectual elevation”, a clear conception of the meaning of the universe, a good character, and having passed the “age of illumination”.

In time, all humans will possess this faculty, he writes. “The same race and not the same; for a Cosmic Conscious race will not be the race that exists today … The simple truth is, that there has lived on [Earth] appearing at intervals for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another [superior] race … breathing the same air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing. … This new race is in the act of of being born from us …”

As an antidote to the Higgs/CERN excitement, I recommend this book to you. I spent a while last week trying to lay my hands on a copy. Amazon didn’t have any, although they acknowledged its existence. Library stacks have long ago pulped it to make room for rows of computers and shelves of DVDs.

As is often the case, though, serendipity, in the form of the “Library Angel” came to the rescue. It’s obtainable from the Kindle system.

What would we researchers of arcana do without Amazon’s Kindle? Downloaded in seconds for a pittance, there it is, fully formed like Hydra, a voice of sanity from the past.

It’s just a pity that the file is not editable. It would be great if out-of-copyright books at least, had a cut and paste facility from Kindle to Word. It would be easy enough on Kindle for PC, a free online app.

Never mind, many thanks for not so small mercies.

* CERN in Geneva, home of the Large Hadron Collider and the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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As well as Armistice Day, today is also 11.11.11, an occurrence of huge significance for those latterday Pythagoreans who take numerology seriously.

As a psychologist of sorts I’ve never been able to whip up any enthusiasm for the numbers game. It has a ring of primitivism about it, a shamanic straining to make sense of the world, rather like those cosmology boffins whose batty theories about the universe give us so much raucous entertainment. Try reading Prof. Brian Cox’s latest slim volume on Quantum physics — it will drive you mad. (I’ll be reviewing it at a later date).

Back to 11.11.11. Let’s take a look at how things are right now. Well, it’s raining outside my window and fairly dark and dreary. Not auspicious at all, but hardly unusual for a November day in the Westcountry. Oh, and there’s a full moon, again a regular monthly occurrence.

But hang on, the Eurozone is collapsing around our ears and it can’t be long before an unstoppable contagion is raging through the world’s banking system.

Even mighty HSBC — whose strength is in the East, far away from the Oompah euro currency area and its lederhosen-clad officials in barmy Brussels — is voicing serious concerns.

The head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, is talking about a “lost decade”, and that starts now. To make matters worse, “adverse feedback loops” are setting in as financial and economic misalignments feed on each other.

It’s hard to discern any clarity among Teutonic policymakers beyond a cleaving to the lessons learned during the two Great Inflations of the 20th century. Generals always fight the last war, it is said, and German politicians are not noted for being light on their feet.

Defending a lost cause is probably the best we can expect, and a decade or two of grinding deflation for the already impoverished southern and western European peoples.

However, as a few notable commentators have pointed out, the least horrible solution would be for a new Hanseatic League* to be formed, within the EU and with its own currency, historically, the Thaler. This bloc would include the wealthy core countries of the north.

The Latins and the Irish would retain the euro and their debts remain denominated in that currency. France would fight to be in the strong core currency, but its debt dynamics point to the Latin bloc, as does Italy’s. The alternative would be a return to their legacy currencies.

At a stroke, the 40pc or so loss of labour competitiveness built up over the past 12 years would begin to lift. The internal “balance of payments” crisis, which is destroying the Eurozone and its disadvantaged members, would begin to right itself.

The tectonic plates of policy would be moving with the immense forces of nature, not against them. If we are prompted to pray for anything, it should surely be for that.

At present, we are still in the destructive phase, but if Chancellor Merkel can be persuaded to go back to the future, 11.11.11 could be working a magical miracle right before our eyes.

* The Hanseatic League was an economic alliance of trading cities and their merchant guilds that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe. It stretched from the Baltic to the North Sea and inland during the Late Middle Ages and early modern period (c. 13th–17th centuries). The League was created to protect commercial interests and privileges granted by foreign rulers in cities and countries the merchants visited. The Hanseatic cities had their own legal system and furnished their own protection and mutual aid. Despite this, the organization was not a city-state, nor can it be called a confederation of city-states; only a very small number of the cities within the league enjoyed autonomy and liberties comparable to those of a free imperial city. Wikipedia.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Mysticism in the Modern World is coming soon.

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