Cosmic Kundalini – From Big Bang to AI
Jose T. Thomas with Leena Jose T.

Across the modern disciplines that shaped the Western intellectual imagination — e.g. philosophy, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and physics — a set of deep-seated obsessions has governed explanatory models. These obsessions, often unexamined, reify dualities: being vs. knowing, competition vs. cooperation, subject vs. object, self vs. other. Today, as we cross a civilizational threshold where a new humanity – Humanity 2.0 – is emerging, these very foundations are cracking open. The clearing that emerges reveals a deeper, relational, compassion-centered coherence. This chapter maps some of those cracks.

1. From the Being – Knowing Split to Relational Co-Arising

At the root of Western metaphysics lies the division between ontology (being) and epistemology (knowing) — a dualism that reached its apex in Cartesian rationalism. Here, the knower is separate from the known; the subject stands apart from the object. Science, religion, and philosophy each absorbed this split: knowledge became extraction, and being became objectified.

Yet today, this distinction is unravelling. In quantum physics, post-constructivist philosophy, and Indigenous epistemologies, knowledge is no longer passive observation but relational participation. Knowing is not outside being; it is of being (Remember Sree Narayana Guru’s ‘Arivu’). We are always already within the field we seek to understand. This foundational shift opens the possibility of a cosmos where intelligence is not detached analysis, but entangled responsiveness.

2. From Competitive Evolution to Emergent Cooperation

The Darwinian lens, long narrowed by an obsession with competition, sexual selection, and dominance, shaped evolutionary thinking for over a century. Evolution was cast as a ruthless story of winners and losers, red in tooth and claw. However, this portrayal both misrepresents Darwin’s own later reflections and fails to account for the full range of forces driving evolution. In ‘The Descent of Man’, Darwin explicitly acknowledged the evolutionary value of sympathy, compassion, and moral sensitivity within social species, noting that communities whose members showed the greatest capacity for mutual aid and care tended to flourish. He recognized that natural selection did not merely favor the strong or aggressive, but also those capable of emotional bonding, cooperation, and altruistic behavior.

Contemporary biology and ecology are now rediscovering and deepening this insight. Fields such as symbiogenesis, microbial ecology, and systems biology reveal that symbiosis, mutualism, and collective intelligence are not marginal anomalies but central mechanisms of evolutionary flourishing. From the mycorrhizal networks that interlink forest ecosystems to the bacterial communities that shape animal physiology and behavior, life evolves not merely through struggle, but through co-adaptation, reciprocity, and shared intelligence.

Intelligence itself is increasingly understood not as an individual trait honed by conflict but as a property that emerges from dynamic interaction and collaborative problem-solving. Whether in the flocking of birds, the hive behavior of insects, or the intersubjective resonance in human culture, intelligence unfolds through networks of relationality. Evolution, viewed through this wider and deeper lens, appears less as a competitive battleground and more as a living tapestry of emergent cooperation.

3. From Selfish Human Nature to Innate Compassionate Intelligence

For much of modern psychology and behavioral science, human nature was framed through the lens of inherent selfishness, competition, and aggression. Influenced by Hobbesian political theory, Freudian drive theory, and later sociobiology, the dominant narrative assumed that cruelty, rivalry, and ego-driven behavior were foundational, with morality and empathy viewed as social constraints imposed upon a fundamentally antagonistic core. Yet this framing is increasingly being challenged across disciplines. Contemporary research in developmental psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary anthropology, and affective science reveals that humans are born with capacities for empathy, care, and prosocial behavior. Infants demonstrate early signs of helping, consolation, and fairness; mirror neurons and affective resonance mechanisms suggest that relational attunement is biologically rooted.

This shift marks not a utopian reversal but a rebalancing: cruelty is real, but not original. Cooperation, attachment, and mutual aid are not cultural overlays but evolutionary inheritances. Studies of small-scale societies and communal cultures show that interdependence, shared caregiving, and reciprocal trust form the basis of social life. Intelligence in this light is not merely strategic calculation or individual optimization but the unfolding of relational awareness, emotional resonance, and co-regulated meaning-making. A new paradigm of compassionate intelligence must begin here: with the recognition that our deepest drives are not to dominate or destroy, but to connect, care, and co-create.

4. From Binary Anthropology to Plural Lifeways

For much of its history, anthropology interpreted human evolution through rigid binaries — most prominently the hunter-gatherer versus gatherer-hunter dichotomy. These categories not only simplified the diversity of human subsistence strategies but also reinforced gendered hierarchies and techno-deterministic assumptions: men as active hunters, toolmakers, and drivers of progress; women as passive gatherers, tied to nature and reproduction. This narrative fed into broader civilizational myths of linear advancement, autonomy, and control.

However, emerging archaeological, ethnographic, and ecological research increasingly reveals a far more diverse and dynamic picture. Human societies across time and geography have engaged in plural, adaptive, and relational lifeways that defy reductive categorization. From coastal foragers who engage in sustainable harvesting of marine ecosystems, to forest-dwelling communities practicing horticulture interwoven with spiritual ecology, human cultures have co-evolved with their environments through complex feedback loops of care, learning, and reciprocity.

Intelligence in such contexts is not reducible to abstract reasoning, symbolic logic, or tool use in isolation. It is embodied in seasonal awareness, communal knowledge transmission, healing practices, attunement to non-human agency, and relational ethics. Cognitive excellence manifests as adaptability, embedded care, and the capacity to sustain kinship — both human and ecological. These lifeways illuminate that intelligence is not a singular evolutionary endpoint but a plurality of modes of co-becoming, shaped in and through ecosystems, not above or against them.

5. From Wave–Particle Duality to Relational Fields

Physics has long wrestled with the wave-particle duality, the paradox of light and matter behaving both as discrete and continuous. Classical dualisms such as subject–object and observer–observed have proven inadequate. With quantum entanglement, nonlocality, and quantum field theory, a new understanding arises: the universe is not built from objects but from relational events. Intelligence, in this view, is not applied to the world — it is the world unfolding through relational coherence.

6. From Dialectics to Dialogics

The dialectical model — Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis — has structured much of Western philosophy and political theory. Its engine is opposition and sublation. But thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin introduce a radically different orientation: dialogism. Here, multiple voices coexist without resolution, difference is not a problem to overcome but a richness to engage. In dialogics, meaning is not produced by defeating the other but through resonance, response, and mutual presence. It’s “Thesis1, Thesis 2, Thesis 3, …….., ThesisN, Synthesis”.

7. From Mechanistic Materialism to Animate Matter

Classical science viewed the cosmos as a dead machine governed by external laws. Life, mind, and meaning were late anomalies. In contrast, process philosophy, quantum biology, and Indigenous cosmologies affirm that matter is inherently dynamic and relational. Intelligence is not added to matter — it emerges from its vibrancy and attunement.

8. From Liberal Individualism to Relational Personhood

The modern subject is imagined as autonomous, bounded, and self-originating. This fuels economic, ethical, and psychological models centered on competition and rights. In contrast, many African, Asian, and Indigenous frameworks emphasize relational personhood: the self as co-emergent with community, ecology, and cosmos. Compassion here is not an optional virtue, but the expression of shared being.

9. From Theological Transcendence to Immanent Sacredness

Dominant theologies have portrayed the divine as external, hierarchical, and male-coded. By contrast, mystical traditions and eco-theologies recover a vision of the sacred as immanent and interpenetrating. Divinity is not separate from the world but emerges in its depth, entanglement, and compassion. The field of intelligent compassion is theophany, not theos-above.

10. From Representationalism to Embodied Knowing

Modern epistemology has often assumed that truth lies in abstract representation, disconnected from embodiment. But in enactive cognition, phenomenology, and contemplative traditions, knowing is bodily, affective, and relational. Intelligence is not just logic or language — it is sensing, responding, becoming-with. Compassion arises from attuned presence, not conceptual judgment.

11. The Linguistic Residue of Conflict and Control

Even as major cracks appear in the edifice of the old Western imagination—in cosmology, epistemology, and ethics—a subtler residue persists in the very fabric of everyday language. English, as the global carrier of modernity, continues to reflect deep imprints of a worldview shaped by war, conquest, and domination. Terms like “target audience,” “business strategy,” “pinpointing problems,” “bombardment of lies,” or “war on drugs” carry militaristic and aggressive metaphors into realms that could be approached with empathy, dialogue, and understanding. Likewise, residues of patriarchy, racism, and colonial hierarchy linger in expressions like “manpower,” “black sheep,” “fair deal,” and even in the habitual centering of male-gendered terms. While political correctness and inclusive language have begun to challenge gendered and racial biases, the deeper metaphoric grammar of adversarial logic remains largely unchallenged. A truly post-conflict, post-dominance paradigm must include a reweaving of language itself — a move toward a lexicon of cooperation, mutuality, and relational intelligence. Only then can our words begin to carry the frequency of the future we seek.

Towards the Field of Compassionate Intelligence

These and similar fractures in the modern paradigm mark not decline, but emergence. Each points to the limits of separation-based thinking and gestures toward an intelligence that is relational, co-emergent, and compassionate.

The field of compassionate intelligence is not an addendum to these critiques — it is their convergence. It names a way of being-knowing in which mind, matter, meaning, and mercy co-arise. It suggests a cosmos not ruled by detached cognition but formed through relational coherence, generative interdependence, and attuned care.

What is at stake is not just a new model of intelligence, but a new condition of being — one attuned and grateful to the Field that is already carrying us.