In Integral Relational Logic, all concepts are formed by carefully observing the similar differences and different similarities in the data patterns of experience, a general way of bringing order to the chaos the world is in today, which David Bohm used to unify the incompatibilities between quantum and relativity theories with his theory of the Implicate Order. Bohm adopted this simple way of bringing universal order to our lives from a suggestion given him by the artist Charles Biederman.

With this commonsensical way of forming concepts, the four principles of clarity, simplicity, integrity, and consistency naturally emerge in a thoroughly egalitarian manner, with none being more or less important than any others, including the concepts of Absolute, identity, and paradox. These principles then guide the formation of the primal concepts with which this experiment in learning begins—by starting afresh at the very beginning, at the Source, the Divine Origin of the Universe, viewed and experienced as Satchitānanda ‘Bliss of Absolute Truth and Consciousness’.

Beginning with four fundamental principles of concept formation is similar to the way that René Descartes set out in 1619 to develop a method that would lead to “the unification and the illumination of the whole of science, even the whole of knowledge, by one and the same method: the method of reason.” His four principles led to the famous statement, in the original French, “Je pense donc je suis,” translated as Latin “Cogito ergo sum” and English “I think, therefore I am.”

Descartes published his method in 1637 as Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, giving three examples of his method in practice, titled Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology. The second is most famous today as the Cartesian coordinates for Euclidian space, which many of us learned in secondary school.

The Discourse was followed four years later with Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Real Distinction between the Soul and the Body of Man Are Demonstrated. The Meditations gave rise to the split between res cogitans ‘thinking substance, mind, or soul’ and res extensa ‘extended substance’, by which Descartes meant an object with breadth, width, and height occupying space. As Bryan Magee tells us “ ‘Cartesian dualism’, the bifurcation of nature between mind and matter, observer and observed, subject and object … has become built into the whole of Western man’s way of looking at things, including the whole of science.”

To heal this deep split in my psyche, which I have introjected from the culture in which I was born, the creative power of Life has guided me to develop a genuinely holistic method called Integral Relational Logic, as the Cosmic Context, Gnostic Foundation, and coordinating framework for Panosophy, as the Theory of Everything.

In this simple way, Cartesian dualism, along with Aristotelian either-or, deductive logic, is totally transformed into Wholeness, as the union of Nonduality and duality. But rather than giving just three examples of the Method in action, as Descartes did, Integral Relational Logic is the system of coordinates for all specialist disciplines of learning, integrating them all into a coherent whole, as a megasynthesis.

This is because everyone implicitly uses this universal system of thought every day in concept formation, as this Glossary, illustrating the entire history of human learning, is seeking to demonstrate. So, by making what is implicit explicit, evolution becomes fully conscious of itself, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Julian Huxley foresaw in the 1950s.