A primer from Howard Bloom, who coined the term, Omnology “can help make you the person you
really want to be instead of the person squashed into existence by a bunch of disciplinary boundaries.
Omnology is a science, but one dedicated to the biggest picture conceivable to its practitioners. Being an
Omnologist is one’s aspiration to omniscience, an academic base for the promiscuously curious. A field
dedicated to the panoramic.”.
Where may an Omnologist be born? When I was 10, I really wanted to be an artist because both my
Grandparents would sit and draw with me. Living with them growing up and still with my grandmother
today, she’s my soul source for my creative intuitive intensity. It was through her I watched the History
Channel repeats of Ancient Egypt, Outer space and Dinosaurs. I would stay up late long nights drawing
hieroglyphs and Pokémon in Jurassic scenery waiting for my mother to come home from her night shift
often falling asleep in a recliner with a notebook in my lap and the TV buzzing. The art, history, and
science would accompany me with the unknowns of the world that was also the unknown when my
mother would return. In my wondering, it was here a philosopher was likely seeded and so the
questions began.
Perhaps my first baby Omnologist question was “If light takes so long to travel, maybe
aliens are watching Earth’s Dinosaurs now from their planet telescopes?”. Reflecting back, I was so
young and remember visualizing myself in a white lab coat asking it openly. At that moment, both
grandparents were out on the porch doing their nightly ritual having an evening cigar already looking
out to the stars. That’s when my grandmother chimed in that we should visit the planetarium at
Carnegie Science Center.
As the teen years rolled through, I drew less and adopted my grandparent’s hobby in
horticulture, but what stole my attention wasn’t the patio flowers and garden snacks. I quickly
immersed myself to family’s first computer at the age of 14. That’s when my curiosities grew even
further and Personality Psychology and Anthropology was in its infancy. It started with binging
intellectual discourse on YouTube before “influencer” was a coined term. This is where Howard Bloom
entered my timeline on TJ’s channel, “TheAmazingAtheist”, where he stirred my inspiration much like
those magical nights I used to bond with drawing and late-night TV. Howard talked on about a plethora
of relevant topics that kept me in a sense of something larger than myself, but not exclusionary. I felt
like an immediate participant. I was only starting to realize that the ambitions to life sit solely on your
attention to details, your unique experiences, and those you embrace for providing you key insights. I
later discovered think tanks like The Venus Project who shown me another world is possible and mother
nature wasn’t static. This project expanded on ideas outside the cultural norms of habitation and
resource-based economies. The internet had introduced my mind to variety of pathologies.
Meanwhile, role-playing games (MMORPGs) became a vivid part of my socialization.
Remembering every emotion I experienced then, mediating conversations and coming to understand
what drives the motivations to peace and war, my own painful immaturity, and dazzling interpersonal
chemistry. Among the gamers I found myself receptive and in the top counsels of organizing clans. This
personal experience opened the door to interests in Politics and Psychology. Suddenly, I could feel the
drawing child waning from my hand grip, easing down the pencil to the whole world opening up to me.
I let the internet take me completely and it’s obvious why it happened. My art heart became fickle and
found new avenues moving to the digital space. I was designing game concepts and socializing on
websites that connected me to others. There would be times only for romantic crushes I’d draw for love
but I was holding this unquestionable looming dangerous belief that art doesn’t make a living. Not for
me, anyway. Nevertheless, new interests were on the loose and where I lost a creative expression,
unconsciously it grew into cries for the Humanities.
Post-College I was sitting handsomely 13 floors high in a corporate building overlooking the
bridges of downtown Pittsburgh. You would have thought I made it somewhere fantastic but you’d be
wrong. I was growing insufferably miserable year by year working there. What went wrong? The online
gaming that connected me to much of the world in my teens lost its passion when I made a gross
miscalculation. I thought I wanted a degree in computer programming and business to design games and
combine a community to the creation? I still do, but I left out one important detail that sent me astray…I
never resolved that limiting belief that I was capable of an Art that could make a living. That fear
stemmed from not taking my own precious accounts on life seriously. In the Humanities, Art is that
expression of your soul to put it plainly. It’s the essence of your being sharing what it felt inside a
particular moment. I had traded that hopeful spark of discovery to be second place to the comfort and a
promise of a paycheck so I can live another day to “think about stuff I like”. It was that ever-driving
divisionary force called fear that segregated my imagination away from immediate action. I had bought
into a lie that I was being productive when in fact I was simply being busy. I was playing the game of life
on defense while having no offense, or soul’s work in motion. Making a living shouldn’t focus putting
money at the center of what you believe and was not my original thinking but perhaps a parental
advisory sticker that I gave too much concern for. The following years I would reconsider Personality
Psychology as a resource to keep my sincerity in check. It turns out it really helps others too and that’s
vital for the Humanitarian that lives inside of me. After all, we have more in common with others than
we do what’s different. It was a single belief that held me back for years. Everyone can relate to that on
some level. It’s worth remaining open to the possibilities of every person you meet can be just as unique
to the one idea you’d like to share.
Finally, a project I will spend a life exploring is taking a grandparent’s care for plants in the scope
of permaculture and let that inspiration pour into other creative outlets to enrich it further. The impulse
to bring about life can be parallel to our own interpersonal relationships. From there I expand into the
domains of anthropology, our increasing cyber world, and what it means to have societal infrastructure
for future generations to be part of its ongoing development.
Reflecting back when my grandmother brought up the Carnegie Science center, no
thoughts crossed my mind at that age of the great feat of engineers it took to construct such a place or
the minds of astronomy who conceptualized to put it together. I would come to appreciate my life more
fervently as I acquired these precious insights climbing through the paradoxes of career and stumbling
across the abundance and limitations of our culture. A child is meant to experience an array of realities
that we hope spark a sense of wonder which encourages purpose and contribution to human kind.
There implies fulfillment as exploring and creating combined. I had to stand on the shoulders of giants
like Howard Bloom akin to self-actualizing a scaffold of habits to reckon the importance of my
immediate experience. At that tender age the Planetarium felt like an experience much like dreaming.
There weren’t any or enough words to describe what I could fully anticipate. Today, I know better. I’ve
reserved Space to the unknown in me because it’s what quietly drives my interests in Personality
Psychology, Anthropomorphic History, and my latest exploration, the need for Technology and
Permaculture to deliver a sensible vision. I’m still figuring out what’s valuable here on Earth. After all,
Space is the final frontier. As my grandmother once asked, “I would just like to know what’s beyond the
black?”. To me it sounded like a question and a statement simultaneously. It told me something about
her and gave me a question to work though in this life. My curiosities cannot be sacrificed for one or the
other because the multitudes of this life require their cooperation. I hope to someday meet yours here
at HBI.
Howard Bloom himself has lived his life as an Omnologist. He’s taken his conductive passion for
Public Relations in the Sixties and compounded the experience into disciplines of the Sciences and the
Humanities. I see it in the way he talks about solutions beaming down from Outer space. I see it in the
way he writes about historical economic turmoil and connects it to biology as a way to align surprising
insights into our sociology. It’s clear to me the remarkable story of Howard is essentially the riveting life
we all aspire for ourselves, but not for the sake of our own prestige but for the betterment of the world
knowing we’ve put to use our fullest potential reigning in on our skills and talents holding nothing back.
Sacrificing not one passion for another, but combining them into spectacular tools from within us.
Howard likes to say, if there’s no god, then it’s up to us to aspire to omniscience!