SOFIATOPIA developed over several decades from a personal philosophical inquiry into a freely accessible corpus of web studies and books.
Its history records successive attempts to bring critical thought, scientific knowledge, and transpersonal experience into a coherent relation without reducing one to another.
The project began in 1981, when, at the age of twenty, I wrote the Dutch monograph Sketches of an Absurd World View. Its dark and nihilistic tone belonged to an early phase. In 1982, the practice of Vedic-based yoga within Ananda Marga opened another horizon and initiated my sustained interest in transpersonal experience.
In 1987, I wrote the Proto-Tractatus Logico-Comicus, a short English text that made the first attempt to organize these inquiries into a philosophical system. By 1992, daily meditation and the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism had transformed it into the Tractatus Logico Tragi-Comicus. This was not a completed system, but a map of questions and directions that would occupy the following decades.
One orientation remained constant : matter, information, and consciousness had to be understood as irreducible yet interdependent operators.
None can be reduced to either of the others.
This threefold framework opposed ontological materialism and ontological mentalism while allowing scientific, philosophical, and transpersonal inquiry to retain their distinct methods and objects.
On April 9, 1996, the project first appeared online as Report on Studies in Philosophy. The Internet made it possible to publish the studies freely and to revise them as the work developed. Crucial in these was criticism, the normative branch of philosophy encompassing epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics.
They act as guardrails for immanent metaphysics.
Ancient Egyptian Studies, the Buddhadharma, mysticology, neurophilosophy, mysticology, and other auxiliary inquiries gradually enlarged the project, while philosophy remained its center.
The work developed independently of institutions, doctrinal allegiances, and academic pressures. Its governing attitude was what Multatuli called 'free study’ : inquiry answerable to its subject and critical controls rather than to an imposed authority.
In 2006, Buddhism became a decisive part of the project. Its contemplative and philosophical resources made possible a more coherent articulation of science, philosophy, and mystical experience. The website and the books published from it preserve successive stages of this continuing inquiry.
Three Ways to Explore the Project :
Web Studies
The web studies form the first and most provisional layer of SOFIATOPIA. They preserve successive stages of the project and remain freely accessible for consultation.
Print-on-Demand Books
The print-on-demand books offer the most developed and sustained formulations of the principal philosophical, Buddhist, and Ancient Egyptian studies.
PDF E-books
The PDF e-books provide digital access to many of the same works in a portable format.
Site Plans
The site plans and links that follow should remain. They help visitors move from the project’s history to its present structure and available materials.
