Grothendieck, Bohm, Sheldrake, Leyton and Theosophy - Part 1

 From today onwards I will be exhibiting the deeper connections between combined intuitions of mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, physicist David Bohm, biologist cum chemist Rupert Sheldrake, artist Micheal Leyton and the Theosophy. 

In my thesis I have modelled  Leyton's transfer using the mathematical precision of Grothendieck's relativity. Rupert Sheldarke and David Bohm had intense discussions on the nature of consciousness with Krishnamurthy back in 1980s the videos of which are now freely available on youtube. Rupert Sheldrake proposed a theory of morphogenesis which showed that nature is niether static nor random but has formative cause and collectively evolving. This is exactly the way in which Leyton described generative theory of shape. His book "Shape as memory" has same intuition as that of Rupert Sheldrake in that he describes as Memory is inherent in Nature and how biological and mineral forms develop their shape. It has connections with the implict order of David Bohm's intuition of quantum physics which Sheldrake himself has discussed in his book Morphic Resonance: The nature of formative causation. So it gives me a renewed hope me to derive a combined theory synthesising their works.

Now what has this all to do with Theosophy ? The book Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky describes how nature has evolved man up from mineral to plants to animals (an ongoing process) and how it is trying to make it super conscious eventually. It indirectly describes the working of such a combined theory to which we will systematically try to derive on this blog. Further, the book Telepathy and Etheric Vehicle by Alice Bailey describes the phenomena of intuitive telepathy through which she received the material for her 24 books of Theosophy. This intuitively hints at what Sheldrake calls type of morphic field set up between the consciousness of Alice Bailey and Djwal Khul. Bailey herself calls it a particular type of telepathy along with various other types such as instinctual telepathy,  intellectual telepathy.

Why am I starting this journey first from a blog? Why not directly start within scientific community? Indeed I will share my findings with the community in time to come. However my own experience during my PhD is in resonance with the experiences of Grothendieck, Bohm, Sheldrake and Leyton collectively which is clearly described by Sheldrake in his own words as below:

"In the past, some of the most innovative scientific research was carried out by amateurs. Charles Darwin, for example, never held an institutional post. He worked independently at his home in Kent studying barnacles, keeping pigeons, and doing experiments in the garden with his children. He was just one of many independent researchers who, not reliant on grants or constrained by the conservative pressures of anonymous peer review, did highly original work. Today that kind of freedom is almost nonexistent.        

.....

Nevertheless, the conditions for widespread participation in science have become more favorable than ever. There are hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who have had scientific training. Computing power, once the monopoly of large organizations, is widely available. The Internet gives access to information undreamed of in past decades, and provides an unprecedented means of communication. There are more people with leisure time than ever before. Every year thousands of students do scientific research projects as part of their training, and some would welcome the chance to be real pioneers. And many informal networks and associations already provide models for self-organizing communities of researchers, working both within and outside scientific institutions.

As in its most creative periods, science can once again be nourished from the grass roots up. Research can grow from a personal interest in the nature of nature, an interest that originally impels many people into scientific careers but is often smothered by the demands of institutional life. Fortunately, an interest in nature burns as strongly, if not more strongly, in many people who are not professional scientists."

I remember a quote from one of the masters of wisdom reproaching and encouraging the theosophists:

“It has ever been thus. Those who have watched mankind through the centuries of this cycle, have constantly seen the details of this death-struggle between Truth and Error repeating themselves. Some of you Theosophists are now only wounded in your ‘honour’ or your purses, but those who held the lamp in preceding generations paid the penalty of their lives for their knowledge. Courage then, you all, who would be warriors of the one divine Verity…”

The point is that we are fortunate enough to continue expanding from where these authors left. They have faced much criticism if not death like those who came before them.

 

One starting point for mathematical modelling of morphic fields is the book Mathematical Models of Morphogenesis by the mathematician René Thom. Sheldrake points to these mathematical models of morphogenetic fields in which the end-point toward which systems develop are defined as attractors. In the branch of mathematics known as dynamics, attractors represent the limits toward which dynamical systems are drawn. Ofcourse at that time category theory was still rigorously being developed so today we can take a fresh view on such models from Grothendieck's viewpoint.  

And finally this should help us to address the problem of the mystical word consciousness as discussed in the Galileo Commission Report. 

 

During my PhD. I stood on the shoulders of giants Grothendieck and Leyton to work out a solution for a fundamental problem in my field of specialization. Now I wish to try and stand on the shoulders of Grothendieck, Bohm, Sheldrake, Leyton and Theosophy together to see how the view looks from up there !!!