Press Release

PRESS RELEASE

 

                  An Odyssey

                  INVOLUTION
       Reconciling Science to God

                    P.A. Rees

Published by CollaborArt Books  Sept 2013                                  $27.99/ $9.99

 

 
INVOLUTION CHALLENGES THE CORE OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

 

“A controversial hair-and-eye-brow-raising subject…insightful…brave… Getting close to science as well as to God at the same time, that’s no mean feat. Ervin Laszlo

This book is not another hand wringing lament for the impasse science has reached. From the history of scientific ideas it constructs a scaffolding from which to view another building altogether, the cathedral of consciousness. What the mystics have perennially known, science has now re-approached, but inspiration has been science’s quiet companion all along. This continuous artesian stream is what this work identifies and traces.

When Rees first offered Involution as a scientific thesis at Cambridge over forty years ago, it received scorn and indifference from scientists for its revolutionary hypothesis. It proposed that the language and methods of science, limited to the divisive and dividing intellect, precluded perception of what underpins science and creation itself. Since the followers of Plato and Aristotle parted the ways to knowledge, science has separated intellect from experience, mind from matter, heart from head and ultimately consciousness from the material universe. It is this division that this book seeks to illuminate and heal.

The beauty of your writing is that you allow the truth to breathe. Philip Franses (Editor Holistic Science Journal)
 

Rees makes a second assertion: the history of Science has been the recovery of memory. 

Involution has been the ‘informing’ of matter by consciousness at every level of complexity and results in the accelerating convergence to the single species, Man. This information is encoded in DNA as memory, a shared memory that interconnects all life. The recovery of that encoded experience is through the maverick and inspired genius momentarily encountering his memory through focussed contemplation. Hence his certainty.

Thus Involution re-introduces divine purpose through co-creation (and mathematical understanding) both from and to the archivist of DNA. Mavericks led what DNA retained.

 The evidence is presented an epic poem charting the history of inspired thought. In nine Cantos, two light hearted companions, Reason (speaking science) and Soul (speaking art), traverse the journey through the interior, from pre-human existence and early man’s emergence on the Serengeti, to the recorded civilisations of Greece and Rome, on through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and finally arriving at the world of modern science.  The vision is simply and poetically narrated for the right brain, the supporting science offered in detailed footnotes for the left.

                           A daring Dantean feat. Alan Morrison – The Recusant

According to Rees, the contemplative genius offers the ‘eureka’ moments of recovered memory to the collective intellect, which formulates that inspiration as theory. Through this modelling, intellect perceives (falsely) that the material world is ‘outside and independent of the perception’.  What is discovered inwardly is transposed outwardly. Thus the inspired right-brained geniuses that led the journey were usurped by the collective left brain of acceptable science. The transfer of memory to intellect builds a consensual reality but increasingly exiles Man from his deeper self.

This complement to Darwinism re-examines (and celebrates) the unique individual and the critical contribution of his experience to the collective journey of Mankind. To describe a rainbow in terms of its physics leaves everything of importance unsaid; the colour, shape and the glory. So too with this rainbow of a book; an arc through the history of conceptual thought, a meditation on the nature of knowledge, initially best viewed from the distance of poetic allusion.

This vision through and beyond the familiar suggests our Odyssey has reached a new turn in the spiral: the option of conscious co-creation.

The author’s grasp of the principal elements of Western culture is masterly and her poetic narrative woven together with extraordinary subtlety. David Lorimer, Director Scientific and Medical Network

About the Author’s Life
Reconciliation of extremes and an eclectic collection could be said to be the over-arching themes, both of this book and of Philippa’s life. With both Boer and British blood, two mothers, (one black one white), she grew up imprisoned in boarding school or with her own horse and the freedom of a whole country. An only child in the conflicted world of apartheid South Africa she had a grandfather fluent in both Zulu and Swahili, and a grandmother related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. That was the hybrid blood. Then were enfolded the other ingredients, the languages that this book would draw upon: Theology and Metaphysical poetry at school, and almost every faculty at University, from Medicine, through Architecture and Fine Art, until Classics gave way to Psychology and Zoology under the seminal paleontologist Raymond Dart and the father of embryology, BI Balinsky.

Later, marriage to a marine biologist and photographer meant a nomadic life on deserted Mozambique islands with fiddler crabs and mangrove swamps. An association with Nobel Prize winner, Konrad Lorenz at the Max Planck Institute introduced the dynamic field of animal behaviour. Later, she lectured on Saints and Scientists at Bristol University which gave research for this work systematic focus.

Involution was first conceived in 1970, after some profound experiences. Rees first presented her Theory of Involution as a scientific monograph to the Cambridge University Epiphany Philosophers, and the Modern Churchman’s Union in Oxford. Although decades before recent ideas about the language and plasticity of DNA, her theory was endorsed by leading scientists such as Konrad Lorenz, Arthur Koestler and Irwin Schumacher.

She claims the book wrote her life, not the other way round. ‘Everything was always better than something’ which in a broad sense could be said to be the theme of a book that integrates all of creation and all of the partial disciplines into a single web of connection through time and space. Mind and matter are two sides of the single reality.

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