Clearing a Way – Unveiling the Mental Tricks that Hide Reality

This original book articulates a personal world view arrived at over many decades and characterised by what the author calls a triquetral model, illustrated throughout the text. His previous books include Emotional Logic as a way of harnessing your emotions into inner strength – emotions are energy in motion informed by values. Trevor’s journey goes back to Oxford where he was a medical student and realised that a key component – relatedness through the heart – was missing from the received picture of form and function. This sense was reinforced by some unusual experiences, including a precognitive dream, the kind of episode dismissed by enlightenment science that has stripped life of meaning and values. The purpose of the book is ‘to strengthen a person’s inner heart to make life-enhancing choices in difficult situations, not death-enhancing ones.’ (p. 7) An important starting point is the new science of adaptive systems and emergent order as a dynamic way of understanding life and matter – all this in the context of human values and choices, relationally arising from within. The ultimate expression of this is the presence of loving kindness.

Trevor sees himself as an ecological cartographer exploring territories ‘such as chaos theory, adaptive systems, emergent order by feedback learning, quantum technologies, information theory, and process philosophy.’ (p. 11) The book reads as a demanding Odyssey covering a great deal of ground and divided into four parts and twelve chapters: the knowing brain and the known world; heart level emotion as energy in motion; conversations between people who see life differently; and belonging together in the land of quantum gravity. The book is dense though clearly structured, and contains an excellent 30-page glossary, including definitions of Trevor’s original terms. His conversational orientation in life illustrated on p. 59 postulates form and change in our experience of space and time, dynamically connected by relatedness – correspondingly, personhood is seen as (open system) informational responsiveness, and mind as consciousness, thought, will, and emotion.

A central theme is the place of the heart in dualistic physical science. Mind and heart are seen as modes of the person also characterised as soul, spirit and body. An important chapter explains three I-It analytical perspectives: structuralist/materialist, individualist/informationist, and collectivist/vitalist, well summarised on pp. 226, 235 and 245. Trevor’s own approach is triquetral diversity in unity (Chapter 9), and it is important to distinguish this from a Venn diagram of overlapping separateness. The three perspectives already mentioned are brought together on p. 267 with a view to integrating them in life-enhancing personal values. He invites readers to go beyond being simply observers of life to becoming participators within (Bohm’s) creative implicate order. He proposes a triquetral balance of ethical principles in terms of autonomy, duty to maintain unity, and justice, encouraging us to recognise the primacy of what he calls synchronous synergy ‘as the reality of relatedness and the starting place for transformative living’ (p. 351) – here mind and heart form a creative partnership and ecological wholeness ‘within an open system of life shared with others and with the land’, underpinned by an awareness of Infinite Love. (p. 352) This all opens up the possibility of thriving together.