Dear Visitor,

Welcome to ‘Spiritual Consciousness as Evolutionary Learning: exploring myth, metaphor, magic for sustainability’ (XSCEL). The X represents a significant Semiotic spectrum of scientific signs, contradictions, and paradoxes as you will discover if you choose to join this experiment.

The magi wisdom, or magic we have in mind is based on T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, a poem easily found on the internet. The 22 chapters in our book began with Chapter 1 by the mathemaGician Ralph Abraham.

Whether you’ve arrived here by intuition, chance, spontaneity, systematic, systemic semiotics, or as a result of reading our 2025 Routledge edited collection, … we’re thrilled to share with you:

1. the resources we used as part of this research project,
2. opportunities to converse with 22 authors from 15 countries,
3. forthcoming events you may be interested in; and
4. plans for further collaboration, inquiry and semiotic research.

We are a group of academics mainly attached to universities, along with some independent researchers, using Charles Sanders Peirce semiotics to frame signs of the times, against Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realist methodology. Our main method has been Conceptual Metaphor Theory, seeing self as metaphor, metonym and meronym, relating concrete life experiences to abstract beliefs, values and eternal truths. We continue to explore the case studies in our book which dealt with linguistic anthropology, neuroscience, and quantum theory.

It’s important to establish at this early stage, that there is no fee, nor obligation to become a member of the group; however, it would be good to have a basis for a stable community of praxis, some understanding of each other, our differences and similarities.

So, please feel free to introduce yourself, and say a bit about your own research interests on our contact page: Contact Us