This presentation considers several different scenarios whose aim is to transcend human nature. According to Garreau,  modern transhumanism  is a belief in the engineered evolution of “posthumans,” defined as beings “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to no longer be unambiguously human by our current standards.” . The present author agrees with  Curtis L. Thompson  that we need to explore “the power of creative transformation that becomes accessible in and through lives marked by spiritual ecstasy.

As one ascends the levels of  organizational complexity, from inanimate matter to multi-cellular organisms, one clear trend is the growing freedom from physical limitations. How is this related to the question of transhumanism?  Here  the paper follows Whitehead’s insight   that one  must  first look to the highest levels for the general principles of existence, and then by subtraction  see how far down the hierarchy they extend. In this sense one could say that, for instance,  the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle represents all that remains of God’s radical freedom on the physical plane. To return to the main line of the argument, all of science could be regarded as what this author calls the Whiteheadian remnant of theology. What is striking about Hawking’s Flexiverse is that some of its features already foreshadow, albeit in a rather rudimentary way, what is expressed much more richly at the human level of complexity.

The paper published recently by Hawking and Hertog  is an extension of the famous “no-boundary” proposal published by Hawking and  Hartle in 1983. Most models in cosmology are bottom-up, that is,  one starts from the well-defined initial conditions of the Big Bang and works forward. However, this method is flawed because we do not know the initial conditions present at the moment of the Big Bang, Hawking and Hartle say. What we do know is the final state – the one we are in now.

Hawking and Hertog’s top-down cosmology employs  Feynman’s path integral (or sum-over-histories) technique  in which one starts with what we see today – the universe is nearly flat and expanding at an accelerating rate – and works backwards to see what the initial set of possibilities might have been. In effect, the present ‘selects’ the past. A measurement made in the present decides what happened 13.7 billion years ago.  The bio-friendly values of the fundamental constants in physics appear to have been selected via retrocausality.

Retrocausality will be regarded as one of the Whiteheadian remnants of a much richer set of possibilities that arise at the human level of complexity, particularly as one follows a path beyond the ego.

Perhaps the simplest way for anyone to experience what awaits us beyond the ego is to shift our focus from the incessant stream of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and  pointless, to the awareness in the background. For some it may happen “in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace,” according to Eckhart Tolle. For a mystic the universe floats in a sea of bliss. It is reported that an intensified flow of synchronicity is associated with such a transegoic state.

In recent years there has been  a torrent of serious books dealing with synchronicity, including those by Robert Aziz,  Allan Combs, Roderick Main, and Robert Perry.

This paper   makes  the claim that synchronicity is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for humans to achieve what to this author is the essence of the shift to the transhuman state – invulnerability. The paper will describe synchronicity as an empirically based version of divine providence that is associated with transcending the ego, understood here as the symbol of separation and fear,  rather than in its Freudian sense.

An attempt to put  synchronicity on a firm empirical footing  was made recently by Robert  Perry in his book Signs – A New Approach to Coincidence, Synchronicity, Guidance, Life   Purpose, and God’s Plan (2009) . The author does so by restricting synchronicity to the so-called CMPEs  or  Conjunctions of Meaningfully Parallel Events in which the skeptical explanation becomes extremely difficult to maintain. The paper examines the claims made in the book and relates them to the questions of invulnerability.