About the Book
An original vision in a 'ground breaking' book. This book has been called ' - a brilliant and profoundly erudite epic - a heroic intellectual tour de force - ' (by David Lorimer, the Director of the Scientific and Medical Network) and both 'brave - and totally insightful (by Ervin Laszlo) but the book defies description; it breaks all the rules and is unlike any other. It is so comprehensive in its sweep, original in its writing, and its synthesis, that to isolate any aspect is to misrepresent all the others. That science has reached the end of its habitual road, and must apply itself to the 'hard problem' of consciousness, and a synthesis with spirituality has now become commonplace and the subject of innumerable books. 'Involution- An Odyssey' differs from these by retracing the scientific journey to reveal how and why science has reached the current impasse. Instead of lamenting the consequences of the road less travelled by science, the road of inner, spiritual understanding, it reveals the presence of quiet inspiration all along.
The torch bearers that lit the scientific journey: the Keplers, and Faradays that apprehended new relationships, were the scientific mystics, the counterparts of spiritually revealed truth. This work exposes the similarity between religious and scientific genius, by taking the journey afresh. In the good natured company of Reason and Soul the reader is invited on a journey through the landscape of Western thought. From the emergence of early man on the Serengeti plains, through Mesopotamia, the pre-Socratic Aegean, the Dark and Middle ages to the Renaissance and Enlightenment what the epic journey reveals is the process of Involution, the recovery of evolutionary memory. The inspirations of genius are the knots in the scientific rosary, and other languages - painting and music - keep pace, all equally reflective of that recovery towards all embracing holism. Science, it is proposed, is the incremental transfer of the memory of evolution encoded in DNA to the collective intellect which has built the scientific paradigm, a model of memory.
The entire chronology of scientific recovery is needed to reveal the mirror that involution provides of evolution; from the 'at-one-ment' of primitive man for whom the gods lay in the manifested natural world, through the increasing separation of intellect that came to perceive the natural world as separate, 'outside' the mind of man. Tools and the intellect of collective science have severed man from his true nature. The incremental penetration of collective memory to the dawn of creation has recovered everything in theory, but at the price of a false separation between mind and matter, Man and God. If this sounds formidable as a proposition, it is because it is. By increments, it rounds up oblivious science into the perennial philosophy. The book traverses the human adventure with swift ease, delivering the history of Western thought with light-hearted poetic economy. Comprehensive footnotes demonstrating 'a rare depth of perceptive scholarship' (Lorimer) are there for those who like their facts; (they take no scientific knowledge for granted) but it is the high poetic vision of the wood and not the trees that is central.
Poetry has always been the language of mysticism and this is mystical science, amused, self-mocking and a lot of fun In the words of Philip Franses (Editor, The Holistic Science Journal) - The genius of involution is not just a mechanism of science relating to the whole but a completely different realisation of the beautiful within living process - re-introduces the aesthetic, beautiful, meaningful process that is poetry into science.' Thus the reader is invited to share an experience - and not just another theory. 'A poetic narrative of extraordinary subtlety' touches more deeply than that.
Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction Where we are now: A broad over-view of evolutionary ideas, and what difference involution makes. Why poetry best serves its evidence. Canto the First: The Map and Older Tracks This reviews the past traditions of religious revelation and poetic inspiration, and the gulf that opened between rational and intuitive understanding. Early science and poetic odysseys were both shaped by envisaged perfection: holistic integration, or the absorption and paradise afforded by women and love; in contrast to the limits of reductionist analysis. Art comes closer to truth. Canto the Second: Memory, Dreams and Separation Some overall patterns constant throughout: Positive and negative oscillation: Complexity arising through synthesis, and the developing 'inner selection' prompting spontaneous maverick action and acceleration. Canto the Third: Earliest Days, Society and Language Early man, society, tools and language: the microcosm of the macrocosm, and the beginning of the divided mind and the separating of intellect. Canto the Fourth: Greece and Some Special People Recorded time: early ideas contributed by fertile genius, the unitary beginnings, the whole cosmos, and the start of divergence. The fracture between Plato and Aristotle cleaves that future division, between religion and science respectively, for all time. Interlude: Archimedes and Alexandria A moment of respite: in which the companions are faced with Archimedes' rejection and his analysis of the limits of intellectual endeavour as a path to truth. Canto the Fifth: The Dark Ages, Monasteries and Muslims Rome accumulates. The Church dominates. Celtic Christians: Monastic preservation of Greek sources: The Islamic world of chemistry and mathematics. Controlled artistic expression and prevailing ideas. Canto the Sixth: The Renaissance and Liberty Explosive concurrent developments: Geology in Britain: Anatomy and perspective in Italian painting. The exhibits of diversity are still subject to concepts of perfection: Pascal, Gilbert, Galileo and Kepler, followed by the rationalism of Descartes defining the limits of mind and matter for all future science. Canto the Seventh: The Enlightenment and Rationality The fully liberated intellect concerned only with the 'outer' and material: Newton and mathematics as the scientific language. New disciplines created by single thinkers, Boyle, Hooke, and Dalton delimit increasing specialisation as the mind reflects the diversity of recovered evolutionary memory. Finer subdivisions start to uncover the underlying unity. Classical painting and music provide a mirror to the formal analysis of science. Canto the Eighth: Modernism and Dissolution Involution returns to the origins, the Serengeti, where human thought began. The Kilimanjaro of excavated memory starts to melt; as evidence the dissolution of modern art and music. The pattern of either/or oscillation is danced through alternate chronological concepts; electricity and magnetism become united through ever widening law of forces and fields, matter and energy, ending with the last of the irreconcilable, relativity and quantum theory. The complete division between mind and matter are now the consequence of the complete separation of intellect from consciousness, science from religion, man from the created world, and from his deeper nature. Canto the Ninth: Love and Reunion Soul continues alone. Experience is the solitary constant we have traced through maverick leadership, the connecting steps of the ladder. This soliloquy of the serpent reminds us of the journey, now traversed, the slender walkway built by Reason's historical narrative. She then reveals her structural relationship with mathematics, geometry, with time, and the intuitions of genius to whom the storage of evolution's memory has been, in fragments, revealed. The serpent is the gatekeeper, mediating between the world of mind and matter. Science has uncovered hidden memory, and built a model, a left brain intellect, but the cost has been alienation, man from his true nature, in unity with all. Women are, at the end as at the beginning, the means of life and the idols of romantic aspiration, the practitioners of death in every birth, through which Man makes his ascent and his return. Through memory he has, collectively, come full circle. All that remains is the individual experience of love; dissolving all separation and silencing all words. Appendix Saints and Scientists and the common threads that link them. Afterword The experiences that led the author to this vision. Footnotes to all Cantos Bibliography Acknowledgement
About the Author :
Philippa's many lives have elements of fantasy fiction. Born in South Africa, fatherless before the age of two, she experienced the wildest parts of rural Africa in the care of her grandfather, on safari for weeks inspecting rural African schools with a cook, a tracker and a folding table. The other extreme was imprisonment in boarding schools studying the Metaphysical poets, Theology and the English Monarchy, and always hungry. These solitary extremes perhaps contributed to the need to reconcile the influences of two worlds, African liberty and European culture. Related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it is perhaps not surprising that she should arrive at a poetic narrative to achieve her reconciliation between science and religion, matter and mind. The 'leitmotif' of her writing is characterized by a celebration of the individual, often eccentric, always out of the mainstream. After sampling medicine, architecture, classics and fine art she ultimately achieved degrees in Zoology and Psychology. She has lived on (culturally) deserted islands in the Indian Ocean, fishing for supper; at the Max Planck Institute in Bavaria; lectured to mature University students; designed buildings; single handedly built her home, an arts centre and concert hall; raised four daughters, and failed to master the cello. Always reading and writing first. She lives in Somerset in her converted barns with an old collie and a long-suffering husband.
Review :
Praise for 'Involution- An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God' 'A brilliant and profoundly erudite epic charting the evolution of Western thinking processes, probing the frontiers of rationality and naturalism and opening up a deeper understanding of the nature of reality based on the reality of mystical experience. The author's grasp of the principal elements of Western culture is masterly and her poetic narrative woven together with extraordinary subtlety. The detailed footnotes demonstrate a rare depth of perceptive scholarship. This is nothing short of a heroic intellectual tour de force and deserves the widest readership.' (David Lorimer, Director Scientific and Medical Network) 'Philippa Rees wrote a book that is a rarity: it is on a controversial, actually hair and eye-brow-raising subject, and it is totally sincere. And totally insightful. If you the reader are as brave as this author, you are in for a fantastic ride. Getting close to science as well as to God at the same time. That's no mean feat. Enjoy the ride - and the light!' Ervin Laszlo ' - Your journey through poetry is more than just an alternative treatment of the material you originally theoretically described; it is the very act of genius, which is able to treat the ambiguous nature of the world differently. The poetry is an alternative for how the world makes meaning from the ambiguous. It is a completely alternative direction for an exploration of the world in itself. The scale of the feat you have thereby achieved by writing in poetry is immense. This goes far beyond the mechanistic notions of wholeness arrived at by some modern scientific authors. Your work reintroduces the aesthetic, beautiful, meaningful process that is poetry into science. The genius of involution is not just a mechanism of science relating to the whole but a completely different realisation of the beautiful, within living process.' (Philip Franses. Editor. The Holistic Science Journal. Lecturer Schumacher College) "Involution is, at least in terms of 'subject', a daring, Dantean feat. Rees's profound notion that the evolution of humankind is made possible by the dormant dominions of evolutionary memory in our unconscious - the eponymous 'involution' - is, I would suspect, a theory Charles Darwin would have gratefully embraced as a curative to his own bleaker 'discoveries', which he initially emotionally and religiously resisted. That Rees has chosen to communicate her dialectic in the medium of sprung-rhymed blank verse is ingenious in itself, as well as being in the narrative spirit of the poetry of the ancients. Whatever one's poetic, religious or scientific response to Involution may be, what will be difficult for even the most scouring of critics to deny is it's scholastic vitality, compositional discipline and macrocosmic scope. Involution is a work of indisputably tall ambition, and an accomplishment which may well prove much more than the sum of its invariably exceptional parts". (Alan Morrison. Poet. Editor: The Recusant On-Line Magazine
