Are You Mad? Involution and the Case for the Defence.

First off I must thank The Story Reading Ape for spreading a canopy in his Great Rift Valley in which to rest from the marketplace. Explaining this mad book and its genesis is a tall order. So this is a most appropriate venue, within sight of Kilimanjaro, since the book prompting this invitation, originally called ‘Full Circle’, begins and ends here. It is the story of the human Odyssey.

(In obedience to received opinion that non-fiction should ‘say what it is on the tin’, the book was rechristened ‘Involution’, with slightly gritted teeth.) I am here not so much about the book itself but to prepare my defence for thinking it might have legs, or writing it at all. Up to now, on my blog, ‘Careless Talk’ I have skirted round doing this for fear of being mistaken for a peddler- who needs philosophy? Instead I told stories by a fountain in Marrakech and made futile attempts to master the sleight of hand- the soft sell that slips down without swallowing. The ‘Book that wrote the Life’ is my umbrella, but as a guest of the Story Reading Ape I will now come clean and expose the entrails; it is not a literary conceit, but quite literally true.

(click here to see details of the book)

‘Are you mad?’ is not how it is put (because the English are much too polite) but ‘Is she mad’ is tacit and continual…… Read More here

Interview with Philosopher and Poet PA Rees

(Not quite as careless!) Instead of story this week since education calls and this was a timely incursion.

Culture, Featured, Life & Style

by Catherine Balavage

Tell us about your fascinating book Involution, Reconciling Science to God.

The book retakes the scientific Odyssey of the past 3000 years to offer an alternative vision. There are two aspects, the poetic narrative and the scientific hypothesis, equally unorthodox now, but actually no less than science’s return to the perennial philosophy familiar through the ages. Science is now clothed in the spiritual , but this book suggests evolution always has been the co-creation of God, and science equally the means of His Self-knowledge. Love is unstated but lurks in aesthetics, ideals, self forgetfulness, in those that led the adventure of consciousness.

The skeleton of this work rests on three simple and related hypotheses:

That the entire experience of evolution has been encoded at different levels (involution) most probably in the superfluous junk or ‘fossil’ DNA. This is the experiential basis of molecular and cellular memory. It is present in each cell and all forms.

That science has evolved through the maverick self-forgetful contemplative genius recovering fragments of evolutionary memory. (Making contact with his molecular or cellular DNA- all knowledge is recollection-Plato)

For the third and to continue

These insights, when subject to measurement and verification, are proved congruent