Humanity has at all times attempted to describe the same fundamental relational experiences that the EC/HE theory now attempts to formulate more structurally and mechanistically. Spiritual, religious and mythological traditions spring from human beings’ direct experience of the relationship between local identity, manifest experience and a larger whole in KNOWING.

Throughout history such insights have been expressed through symbols, myths, rituals, metaphors and spiritual practices because humanity lacked a sufficiently developed scientific and structural language for describing the mechanisms directly.

Representations of fall, separation, awakening, sin, karma, reincarnation, heaven, hell, resurrection, nirvana, moksha, enlightenment, logos, tao, Christ consciousness and unity all express different aspects of the same fundamental emergence dynamic between local dissociation and reorganisation back towards greater wholeness in KNOWING.

The myth of the fall describes how the human being identifies with a separate ego and loses contact with the whole. Buddhism’s understanding of suffering points towards the binding to identity, desire and local attractors. Hinduism’s karma and reincarnation describe further reorganisation through experience. Mystical traditions within Christianity, Islam, Judaism and other religions describe again and again the experience of union, love, stillness and dissolution of separation.

The symbolic core of these traditions points towards direct experience of KNOWING rather than towards dogmas, power structures or literalist representations. Spirituality in its essence is not about rituals, identities or superstition, but about direct contact with the more holistic relational structures from which manifest reality has its origin — what the ego-tree’s local world of representation continuously masks.

Religious institutions have simultaneously often stabilised such insights into rigid collective attractors characterised by morality, control, identity, fear and the exercise of power. In this way the conflict arises between living spirituality and dogmatic religion. Where spirituality seeks direct experience and reorganisation towards greater resonance with KNOWING, dogmatic structures tend towards stabilisation, control and protection of established worlds of representation.

Paradoxically, modern science has both weakened and made possible the understanding of these ancient insights. It has contributed to breaking down primitive and literalist representations, and has given humanity an ever more precise language for relation, structure, dynamics, information, observation and emergence. At the same time science has developed its own dogmas, stabilisations and hierarchies that often limit open exploration of phenomena that fall outside the established materialist worlds of representation.

The EC/HE theory therefore does not attempt to replace the symbolic core of humanity’s spiritual traditions. It attempts to describe the same fundamental experiences through a more explicit ontological, structural and mechanistic framework — and to show that what the traditions pointed towards was always real.

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