ABSTRACT
In Twilight of the Clockwork God, John David Ebert makes the point that the
Jains who continue to survive in modern India today maintain an ancient cos-
mology that in its beginnings is contemporary with Minoan Crete. He likens the
views of the Jains to the mythopoeic image of Gaia upheld by today’s scientists,
including Brian Swimme, and he writes: ‘Both the Jains’ image of the cosmos as
a Goddess and Swimme’s autopoeic universe are quite different from the clocks
and steam engines of classical physics, for they envision a universe that is alive
and sentient, bursting with creativity [ . . . ] In the mechanistic universe, there is nothing new under the sun and no real creativity ever takes place.’3 Ebert’s
book documents the ending of the mechanistic episteme and constitutes a plat-
form for the ideas of contemporary groundbreaking thinkers across a range of
disciplines including mathematics, biology, cosmology, medicine and psychology.
In his introduction to the book, the physicist F. David Peat writes:
