The Way of Togetherness is about getting ourselves together, getting our social lives together and ultimately about getting everything together. It is a guide to achieving the wholeness and unity needed to get through the precarious passage of life and make the most of it. The very idea of togetherness is indispensable for our future. Unless humanity stands together, it may not have a future on this planet, and may not deserve one. Moreover, a world falling apart is full of people falling apart, and hating each other, with or without cause. All these negativities come together as the world spirals into growing conflict and an arms race. As isolated individuals, we can do little about this, and as self-indulgent, lazy individuals we can do even less. But there is no imaginable limit to what we can achieve if we all act together for our mutual benefit.
Note on the Symbolism of the Front Cover The image at the centre of the cover is of a three-year-old boy on the beach at Carnoustie laughing at his father paddling in the water. That image is of the author of this book. The two tartan stars depict the Sinclair tartan. The star on the left is the plain Sinclair tartan and that on the right is the hunting Sinclair tartan. These tartans are nineteenth century inventions. In fact, the Sinclair clan was known to the Highlanders as ‘the carles wi’ the breeks’ who did not wear the kilt and were not Gaelic-speakers. The problem of The One and The Many goes back to the Greeks. One thing decomposes into many things, and many things coalesce into one thing. It is impossible to pin them down. But the interaction between the two is crucial to the Way of Togetherness. We move forward by alternately analysing and synthesising things - taking them apart and putting them together. This is the dynamism of the Way of Togetherness that points towards a better future by ever-increasing reconciliations between opposites. ‘It is the way to the stars’ (sic itur ad astra - Virgil, Aeneid, Book 9, line 641).
