The book: A Meditation on Mystical Union Using System Dynamics, version 1.3 (1996).

This book manuscript, updated from time to time, is the 1996 version of an autobiographical, scientific, and phenomenological study of an engineer's experience of mystical union. The study has been in progress since December 1984.

Introduction

Religion can be categorized under four headings: political religion, mystery-mongering religion, ritual religion, and real religion.

There is nothing inherently wrong with political religion. At its best it is the great art of integrating the powerful forces of real religion with the purest and highest purposes of the culture. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King were examples of political religion at its best. However, the reality is that political religion is often captured by second rate forces who, in attempting to perform the above integration, place their primary commitment not to God but to their culture.

Mystery-mongering religion is illustrated by prophesiers, channelers, astrologers, palm readers, sellers of drugs and lotions, etc. Whatever truth may exist in these various phenomena, they tend to lead individuals away from reliance on the divine intelligence that lies within each person's own mind, an intelligence that can lead one home to truth, reality, and peace.

Ritual religion: (My views are incomplete on this form of religion.)

On the other hand real religion is quite simple. It is concerned with putting ones life on the line and all one holds dear in the search for truth, integrity(morality), freedom, and the well-springs of pure love. Real religion is to strive with all ones heart and soul to find the reality at the ground of one's Being and then to build a sound life based on the rock of that divine ground.

At the heart of real religion is the experience of mystical union. Though mystical union is a rare experience, it is central to all cultures. Each culture has a name for this holy experience: born again, nirvana, no-thing, enlightenment, satori, wu-wei, nirvakalpa samadhi, fana, devekut, ecstasy, etc. In mystical union one sounds the fundamental note of ones existence.

Of those people who have experienced mystical union, some have been more successful than others in the important task of integrating that experience into their lives and philosophy and presenting and interpreting its greatness to their society. This book is yet another attempt to succeed in presenting and interpreting that great experience. But it offers an unusual approach: It uses system dynamics to analyze, model, and simulate the author's experiences associated with mystical union, particularly the author's consciousness during the purgative period. As such, the book is a breakthrough in religious studies, particularly in the field of science and religion. Essentially the book is a study of an engineer's experience of mystical union in the form of an engineering report with narrative, description, theory, and application sections.

It should be noted that in the field of science and religion at the present time the seeker of truth must walk a narrow path between the arrogance of the scientists and the mendacity of the theologians.

System Dynamics

System Dynamics is a general systems discipline that has been slowly developing and gaining strength since 1956, mainly around its originator, Jay W. Forrester, and his associates at MIT. In 1994 there were around 500 to 1000 serious system dynamicists throughout the world and their numbers were doubling every three or four years. The purpose of its use is to understand the behavior of any complex system, particularly human and social systems, by structuring them as multiloop nonlinear feedback systems. In this book it is used to model and simulate and understand the consciousness of the mystic during the bifurcating sequence of states of a spiritual crisis. The sequence of the crisis in order of appearance was a tragedy in the potential mystics life, then the slow descent into obsession and the disintegration of moral character, then renunciation, spiritual fire, concentration, absorption or flow, dark night of the soul, and eventually the far from equilibrium state of mystical union.

Other features of the book are as follows:

Relating mystical union to diverse fields of knowledge.

The linkage between mystical union and diverse fields of knowledge comes about because the experience of mystical union brings the mystic into contact with Being which is classically considered to be the root of knowledge. The fields of knowledge linked to mystical union are: metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of the mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, parapsychology, psychiatry, psychology, anthropology of consciousness, evolutionary psychology, comparative religion, history of science, sociology, theoretical biology, artificial life, irreversible thermodynamics, theoretical physics, non-linear control theory, Godel's Theorem, and the mathematics of non-linear differential equations associated with any system dynamics model. Phenomena such as entrainment, jump phenomena, shift in loop dominance, bifurcation, and chaos arise out of such equations.

Indicating the Centrality of the Experience by means of relevant quotations of mystics, saints, poets, philosophers, sages, and scholars:

There are over 200 quotes from mystics, saints, poets, philosophers, sages, and scholars from all cultures in the Reference sections. A list is shown below. This compilation came about because once the structure of the experience was established using system dynamics, it was possible for the author to organize and integrate on its framework vast amounts of insights gleaned from cultures throughout the world pertaining to mystical union.

The author has presented parts of this book in talks at the following conferences or locations:

(Note: The latest publications on my work - which supercede the talks, posters, and publications listed below - can be accessed at this link.)
  1. European Conference on Science and Theology at Rome in 1992. (Sponsor: Vatican Observatory)
  2. International System Dynamics Conference at Utrecht University (Netherlands) in 1992. (My paper was published in the 1992 Proceedings of that conference.)
  3. General Systems Conference at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute at Toronto in 1993. (Sponsors: International Society for the System Sciences [ISSS] and [IEEE])
  4. Divinity School, University of Chicago in May 1993.
  5. European Conference on Science and Theology at Munich and Freising in March 1994.
  6. Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in March 1994.
  7. Tucson II Conference on Consciousness, Tucson, Arizona in April 1996.
  8. The Brain and Self Workshop, Elsinore, Denmark in August 1997.
  9. Science and the Primacy of Consciousness Conference, Lisbon, Portugal in April 1998.

Table of Contents of the book: A Meditation on Mystical Union Using System Dynamics:

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