Since I took early retirement from IBM in 1997, I have presented the evolution of my ideas and experiences through three websites, whose underlying technologies have also been evolving in three distinct generations. This website you are now visiting is also a third-generation website, using the popular WordPress content management system, rather than Drupal, which is needed for the all-important Glossary on the website for the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics.
The first website, which existed from 1998 to 2004, just used basic HTML entered through Symantec Visual Page to an ISP called Algonet in Sweden. It was much inspired by this cartoon that I discovered in the ecological and spiritual magazine Resurgence, which I subscribed to for many years.
This was my first attempt to present the transdisciplinary Theory of Everything as a coherent whole, which I called the discipline of omniology at the time. However, this didn’t work because some creationists had claimed the word with a quite different meaning. So in 2002, I changed omniology to Panosophy, meaning with slightly different spellings since 1642: “Universal or cyclopædic knowledge; a scheme or cyclopædic work embracing the whole body of human knowledge”.
This initial website also presented my intention to set up the Paragonian Institute, which I had set out to do with my Norwegian wife Berit in 1986, when we got married in Oslo. To illustrate the level of my conscious understanding at the time, I have set up this website on this server, more or less as it was, although many of the external links no longer work.
I had coined the word paragonian on 29th October 1984, following several weeks searching Greek and Latin dictionaries in Wimbledon library in London. The word derives from the Greek words para ‘beyond’, and agon ‘contest’ or ‘conflict’, a word that is also the root of agony, until the 17th century meaning ‘mental stress’, antagonist ‘a person who one struggles against’, and protagonist ‘leading person in a contest’. Paragonian thus means ‘beyond conflict and suffering’, a healthy, liberated, and awakened way of being that we can realize when we are both unified with the Divine and integrated with the Cosmos; when we base our lives firmly and squarely on our Immortal Ground of Being. Paragonian thus denotes the essence of Advaita (‘not-two’) in a word with a Western etymology.
After I was invited to move from Stockholm to the west coast of Sweden in 2003 to join a community seeking a holistic spiritual and ecological lifestyle, I was inspired to set up a new website for the Paragonian Foundation with its own domain name paragonian.org. This was designed by a professional web designer, a friend of my next-door-neighbour, who had also designed my first book The Paragonian Manifesto.
I envisaged that the Foundation would consist of four elements, Paragonian University, Paragonian Fellowship, Paragonian Business Academy, and Paragonian Publications. Once this was set up using the technology of Server Side Includes (SSI), I was able to maintain it myself through Adobe Dreamweaver using some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, PSP, and MySQL.
Then in 2010, a young man called Pär, living just 160 km north of where I live, suggested that he would like to design a brand-new website using Drupal. After a few years exploring how this website might be designed, this eventually went live as the Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics in 2014 on the domain name mysticalpragmatics.net. Sadly, however, Pär died before he could add all the functions that we envisaged and before he was able to sort out a number of technical glitches.
So since then I have focused most of my attention on writing books and essays on our rapidly changing times, uploading them to the website for the Alliance. After this was hacked in the spring of 2017, I managed to port it to the same ISP that is now running this website and also the older one for the Paragonian Foundation. I’ll now report further progress on the development of the website for the Alliance as blogs on this one under the category Administration.