Defining the Cosmic Psyche is the most difficult task in this Glossary because it was not until about 2010 that I was sufficiently aware of its existence to give it a name. I did so after thirty years of profound self-inquiry, seeking to answer the most critical unanswered question in science: What is causing scientists and technologists, aided and abetted by computer technology, to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological development at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration?

The Cosmic Psyche—inaccessible to our five physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—is thus the final frontier of human learning and exploration, mostly unknown to Western science and many others, despite it being ever present within all of us. But not completely.

For instance, Albert Einstein wrote in a letter in 1945 to Jaques Hadamard, who was then studying mathematicians’ creative experiences, “The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism (sic) of thought. … In a stage when words intervene at all, they … interfere only in a secondary stage.”

Einstein was clearly alluding to the Cosmic Psyche here, without being aware that he was doing so. Nevertheless, this letter indicates that ideas first appear in the noncorporeal realm before they can be expressed externally in signs and symbols. So, if we are to fully understand what is happening to us all as a species, we first need to map the Cosmic Psyche.

To do so, we can best turn to the mystics, rather than the philosophers or scientists, to understand the nature of the territory we need to map, as the basis for the art of inner science. We can obtain a clue to what this might be from Yehuda Berg, who tells us in The Power of Kabbalah—as the mystical heart of Judaism—that there is a curtain that divides our reality into two realms, 1% being our physical world, while the other 99% “is the source of all lasting fulfilment. All knowledge, wisdom, and joy dwell in this realm. This is the domain that Kabbalists call Light.”

In Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, known as ‘Father of Yoga in the West’ and a major influence on the life and work of Steve Jobs, called that which is beyond the senses the ‘astral world, universe, cosmos, or body’. As his guru Sri Yukteswar told him, “The astral universe, made of various subtle vibrations of light and colour, is hundreds of times larger than the material cosmos.” Helena Petrovna Blavatsky also used the term astral body, when cofounding the Theosophical Society in 1875.

One who has actually used the term Cosmic Psyche is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who regarded the Cosmic Psyche as the ‘unified source of creation’,  David W. Orme-Johnson tells us in Chapter 1 of The Vedic Psychology of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: Fulfillment of Modern Psychology.

These mystics have discovered the immensity of the Cosmic Psyche, establishing its existence, at least. However, such inner scientists are not generally aware of the Method that enables us to cognitively map the Cosmic Psyche. For this has only been possible since the introduction of information systems modelling methods in business, some thirty years after the introduction of the stored-program computer in the middle of the twentieth century.

Regarding the content of the Cosmic Psyche, at a minimum, it contains all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines at all times, past, present, and future, much of it expressed electronically on the World Wide Web. So, for Life to heal my fragmented mind and split psyche in Wholeness, it has given me the Method that is necessary to develop a transdisciplinary cognitive map of all concepts and the relationships between them. This means that the map and the mapmaking process both reside in the Cosmic Psyche, as the territory being mapped.

This might seem rather strange. But it is a natural consequence of viewing the Totality of Existence from the vantage point of the Absolute, rather than one-sided human perspectives, much distorted by our conditioning. Standing outside ourselves, beyond subjective and objective standpoints, is rather like astronauts viewing the Earth from the Moon. Edgar Mitchell was so moved by his experience, when he returned to Earth, he co-founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), seeking to develop a ‘scientific view of our inner experiences’.

In addition, the Cosmic Psyche contains all mathematical objects, such as sets, numbers, functions, and geometric forms, which don’t have mass and so are not located in the physical universe. Rather, they are nonmaterial beings. For instance, this diagram of a circle is not a circle in a pure mathematical sense, for the circle has mass when printed on paper or projected onto a computer display. Rather, it is an expression of the mental image of a circle, which we draw to communicate that which we see within us with our inner eyes.

This understanding of pure mathematics has led me to view this universal subject in a quite different way from that in which it has been viewed since the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks. Rather than viewing mathematics as the science of space and number, developing as in the horizontal dimension of time, I view it as the art and science of patterns and relationships, emanating directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe, which I call the Datum ‘That which is given’.