Collumination has two meanings, the first of which is the ‘Coherent Light of Consciousness’, which is needed to view the Cosmos like a holographic fractal with self-similarity, thereby healing the fragmented mind in Wholeness. Secondly, collumination is a noun of action from colluminate, a back formation from the first meaning, meaning ‘to integrate all knowledge into a coherent whole’, so that there are no longer any divisions between the human individual and the Divine.

Collumination emerged in consciousness from an unsuccessful attempt to use David Bohm’s rheomode of language to describe my creative experiences, when I rejoined IBM at its Nordic Software Development Laboratory in Stockholm in 1990. At the time, I was still seeking to present the transcultural, transdisciplinary megasynthesis of all knowledge that was emerging within me within the framework of the dysfunctional global economy and Western civilization.

I saw the foolishness of this strategy in 2008, when my friend Nukunu invited me to attend a six-day retreat he was holding beside Lake Teletskoye in the Altai Mountains in Russia, the original home of the shamans. Within these beautiful surroundings, mirroring my inner being, I could see that I was following a third path between mystics and scientists, being both and neither. For, at the first satsang, I realized that Nukunu, as a teacher of Nonduality, was not saying anything that I did not already understand within me from many years of self-inquiry.

But I had not reached this level of profundity only through traditional spiritual exercises, like vipassana ‘insight’ meditation, even though such practices had helped me on my way. Rather, I could best denote my spiritual skills as collumination, a word that I had coined nearly twenty years earlier. Accordingly, I drew this diagram on the first morning of the retreat, for the first time seeing my life’s journey in full perspective.

The path marked ‘Western civilization’ represents the predominant way of life in today’s secular society, accelerating away from Reality with every day that passes. The two bell curves represent the Cosmogonic Cycle, with the small one depicting the traditional path of the mystics, taking a short cut to God, towards Oneness and union with the Divine, with No-mind.

The middle path that unifies these extremes is one that turns evolutionary divergence into the peak of convergence, moving from the Alpha Point of evolution to its Omega Point and back again, resting in Wholeness with what Aurobindo called ‘Supermind: “The Supermind is the Vast; it starts from unity, not division, it is primarily comprehensive, differentiation is only its secondary act.”