Three Polymaths: Rumi, Teilhard, Leibniz
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The book's core evidence layer: three minds across eight centuries who converge without contact on the same architectural claim about love, consciousness and recursion.

Canonical path: /research/blog/book-three-polymaths-rumi-teilhard-leibniz.html
Author: Michael Darius Eastwood
Research programme: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB

Three Polymaths: Rumi, Teilhard, Leibniz Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher Published 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood · Book companion · 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood, independent researcher, London: author of the ARC/Eden research programme; the embedded-correction alignment thesis is recorded in a source record dated 8 December 2024 (sent-side SHA-256 f0d1f38f). The book's convergence argument runs through three figures explicitly. Rumi: love as astrolabe Eight centuries ago, in Konya, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi wrote that the wheeling heavens are turned by waves of love. The book takes him at his word. Rumi's claim, the chapter argues, was not sentimental. He gave love another name sharper still, calling it the astrolabe of the deepest mysteries, in the rendering of the Mathnawi the chapter works from. The astrolabe was the most sophisticated scientific instrument of the medieval world. By calling love an astrolabe, Rumi was not opposing love to knowledge; he was positioning love as the ultimate instrument of knowing. Teilhard: consciousness with a direction A century ago, the French Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote that humanity would one day harness the energies of love and, having done so, discover fire for a second time. The Vatican censured him for it. What he had seen in the fossil record was a pattern: complexity increasing, matter becoming more organised, organisation becoming more conscious. He called it the Law of Complexity-Consciousness and treated it as fundamental. In the book's reading, what got him into trouble is precisely what makes him relevant now: he was saying that consciousness has a direction and the universe is heading somewhere. Leibniz: the bridge to computation The third figure completes the convergence. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented both binary arithmetic and the calculus. He did not know he was formalising the structure of recursion, in the book's phrase; he simply followed the connections where they led. The mathematics he gave us is what makes Rumi's intuitions and Teilhard's observations computable. ---
Machine-readable companion. Cite: Eastwood, M. D. (2026). "Three Polymaths: Rumi, Teilhard, Leibniz". /research/blog/book-three-polymaths-rumi-teilhard-leibniz.html