But moving to the heart of the work, the fundamental thought underlying this rich volume is the possible nature of our Universe as a sort of self-aware cosmic computer -- in a way that scientifically (if not strictly technologically) completes the circle of Vedic thought. The savvy reader might well wonder, by the way, why I am beginning with what is actually the second book in a series. This is Kismet. Pure chance. An arbitrary function of this title happening to appeal to me (as a pandeistic thinker) before I saw any others.
The author speaks with an expansive and lively vocabulary and conceptual fluency of thoughts that reflect what has rattled around in my own mind for some while -- of philosophizing, of mastery arising from the will to become a master, of the remarkable premise that Consciousness itself arises from a self-sustaining feedback loop. He gamely coins the term Infinityism to frame the conceptual boundaries of the inconceivable, preferring to refer to God as “transfinite,” a term which he notes was yet undefined when the religions were casting their conceptions of the Divine. He identifies the many (and growing) routes by which we are ever-increasingly bound by expressions of a collective subconscious, which is itself but one aspect of an all-encompassing underlying consciousness. To those familiar with the post-Enlightenment idea of Pandeism, I need not spell out the significance of this line of thought to that theory.
Tuynman draws from a diverse array of philosophical forbears, from Hegel to Alfred North Whitehead to Buckminster Fuller to Terrance McKenna -- not all of whom are recognized as philosophers (he titles Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, for example, as "contemporary technoprophets"), but all of whom can be recognized as such when their observations are set in Tuynman's grand context. His analysis of the autopoietic is auto-poetic (just as his poetry is profoundly analytic). It feels as if he is consistently pulling the covers of reality back to reveal intuitively realized mechanisms of our Universe from the most modern concepts of science, and then tying these back, again and again, to some of the most ancient philosophical ideas. He does not blur the lines between these frames of thought; he demonstrates that the lines are an illusion, a construct dissolved simply by turning to observe from a different angle.
Like the courses of an excellent meal, getting deeper and deeper into this book makes you feel fuller and fuller of useful information, and yet it is tasty enough that though you finish feeling satisfied, yet knowing you could have another plate of the same again tomorrow.
