Sick means ‘affected by physical or mental illness, not healthy’, a word that can be applied to the collective, such as “The British economy remains sick.”

Erich Fromm, a social psychologist, much influenced by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, used this collective sense of sick as an attribute of ‘Western civilization’, confirming what I had intuitively seen during my formal education from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, from my innate sense of Wholeness.

In 1956 in The Sane Society, as a follow-on to Escape from Freedom (The Fear of Freedom in the UK) from 1941, Fromm asked, “Are we sane?” and “Can a society be sick?”, answering these questions with a resounding ‘NO’ and ‘YES’, respectively. What is regarded as the normal behaviour of society can be considered to be pathological.

Then, in 1976, in his greatest masterpiece To Have or To Be?, Fromm outlined how we might avoid psychological and economic catastrophe by healing our sick society, assuming that we humans have the power to do so. Inspired by Meister Eckhart, the pre-eminent Christian mystic, and Shakyamuni Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, he visualized this healing process in four steps:

1. Symptoms: We are suffering and are aware that we are.
2. Cause: We recognize the origin of our ill-being.
3. Cure: We recognize that there is a way to overcome our ill-being.
4. Remedy: We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life.

For myself, to understand the root cause of conflict and suffering in the world, I have needed to develop a radically new science of causality, answering Fromm’s call for a “Humanistic Science of Man as the basis for the Applied Science and Art of Social Reconstruction”.

The basic reason for our malaise is the experiential and cognitive split between humanity and Divinity, from which we are never actually separate. This split opened up at least five or six thousand years ago, leading us to suffer from cultural schizophrenia, out of touch with Reality.

Added to that, during the last few thousand years, evolution has been more divergent than convergent, leading us into cultural delusion with fragmented minds. This has been further exacerbated because some fourteen billion years of evolution passed through its Accumulation Point into the psychosocial turbulence we are witnessing in the world today.

The remedy is thus to bring universal order to all our learning with the construction of the Unified Relationships Theory, which corresponds to Samādhi ‘a joining together’, three steps in the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, as the last of his Four Noble Truths. The Eightfold Path begins and ends in the two phases of Prajñā ‘supreme knowing’, like Gnosis, the inner knowing of the Divine.

But to what extent this art of inner science could help humanity at these troubled times is most uncertain. For to find Peace, I have needed to follow a life-enhancing work ethic, free of the divisiveness and constraints of money, as an outsider to Society. Similarly, J. Krishnamurti famously said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” living for most of his life on the money provided by his foundations.