Isaiah 59:2-4

I have been asked a lot about this book already, and I suspect the questions will keep coming ad infinitum. I have been asked what is ‘Iniquity’? Iniquity is immoral or grossly unfair behaviour, ‘vice’ in a modern context, ‘sin’ in a religious context. So Iniquity and the Separation of Being on a surface level refers to that original sin or vice that results from the psychic separation of the world into ‘me’ and the world around ‘me’. There is no such separation, it is only an illusion. The biblical mythology of Adam and Eve’s original sin in the context of the book corresponds to a fundamental psychological error in interpretation of the world as we see it. A tragic flaw that lies deep within us. And that flaw defiles the relationship between us the world around us, between what is and what we believe the world to be. It is a metaphysical argument that runs throughout the book.

The book, you must understand, is not religiously zealous, it is philosophically zealous. It purports that the ego is the cause of the world’s evil. The over-identification with ‘I’ and ‘me’, where greed incites corruption and the devaluation of life, and the degradation of relationships and world at large that follows. Can anyone disagree if we take a deep breath and a good look at what is going on around us at every level of society it seems? While the ego is vital for healthy functioning of a human, to live by ego alone, without a world view that puts checks and balances on ego-consciousness, results, frankly, in the world in which we now live.

Isaiah 59:2-4

2 But your iniquities have separated you from your God;

your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.

3 For your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt. Your lips have spoken falsely, and your tongue mutters wicked things.

4 No one calls for justice; no one pleads a case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments, they utter lies; they conceive trouble and give birth to evil.

Believe it or not, when I came up with the title I had not come across Isaiah 59:2-4, which encapsulates the religious context of sin, or iniquity and one’s ability to continue a relationship with truth. It is an apocalyptic lament, especially when you consider the corruption across societies around the world today and the race to the precipice in which humanity seems to be now engaged. (We will deal with God in another blog piece, entirely its own topic – of course!).

But, even more significantly as far as the book is concerned, there is a scientific basis for all this as well. Science now paints a picture that reveals that there is in fact no separation of being, of us and a universe around us. In fact science goes much further and new theories have been developed which creates a paradigm shift in the way we view consciousness itself. The book elaborately unveils this and the various theories in science that build toward this picture, culminating in Sir Roger Penrose’s Orch-OR, (none other than Roger Penrose the English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science, the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, who worked with Stephen Hawking to develop our understanding of the Big Bang itself) which suggests a specific, non-computational mechanism for consciousness in the brain. The book, as someone said recently, is very much a ‘Sophie’s World’ of the science in relation to consciosuness and the separation of being, the iniquity that lies deep within us all.