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Guide to The Way of Being – Contents

The site | The way of being | How to search | Worldviews | A true worldview | Validity—reason and ethics | The ultimate and its realization

Guide to The Way of Being

The site

This site is an ongoing, iterative record—not a finished endeavor. Visit resources and the latest essays. Mini-resources—the little manual, sources (short version), system of human knowledge.

The way of being

The way of being is a search for the real and the ultimate in knowledge and being. It emphasizes a spectrum of human interest—a spectrum from acceptance to seeking.

Its aim is shared discovery and realization of the ultimate in this life and beyond. In this life, it is to live in the immediate and ultimate as one.

How to search

Search begins with curiosity. It begins in the world and with the history of thought and exploration; history provides an initial foundation to rebuild and build upon and helps avoid dead ends of the past.

In the beginning we think that all knowledge and thought are to be questioned, especially our own. But the critical attitude ought to be applied to itself—perhaps we can achieve ultimates in some directions. And criticism must be balanced by imagination for (i) without imagination, there is nothing to criticize and (ii) imagination and criticism sharpen each other.

How we search, how we think, where we look, what tools we use, what limits we imagine are informed by our view of the world. Perhaps all people have a worldview, if only tacitly. But even tacit views are informed by common kinds of received view such as materialism, idealism, and process philosophy. And how are we to criticize and judge? Some received approaches are empiricism, rationalism, and pragmatism. We gain by understanding these traditions. But they are only a beginning. Even the critical views must be subject to criticism and perhaps improved with imagination (and criticism again).

Worldviews

A common approach to worldviews is based on experience of the world. This includes worldviews based on science. An extreme though not uncommon version is the view that the modern scientific and empirical picture of the world is essentially the picture. This cannot be known to be true because (i) the empirical does not see beyond its boundary (ii) the empirical alone reveals nothing except data or observation.

The empirical is necessarily balanced by ‘picture building’. One kind of picture building is religious cosmology, which is imaginative and may be dogmatic. Religious cosmologies have symbolic value but as realist, they are often absurd, if not false. A non-reductive picture from science is a rational picture, but incomplete. A third kind of picture is metaphysical, which is commonly hypothetical but, when built upon direct knowledge, improved by criticism, has, at least, potential for realism.

A true worldview

Is it possible to remove the hypothetical element from metaphysics? In the way of being, we find that it is. One key is abstraction. To abstract is to remove descriptive features from a concept, leaving only those which are capable of precision. As an example, consider the concept of the universe, understood as all that there is over all time, space, and beyond (if there is a beyond). Of course, we do not know its entirety in detail. But we do know that there is a universe, that there is an entirety (actual or potential). This constitutes precise if trivial knowledge.

The metaphysics of the way of being builds upon such precise and perhaps trivial concepts such that the resulting system is not just nontrivial but ultimate in (i) revealing the universe to be the greatest possible (ii) in perfect representation of the universe. The ‘price’ for this ultimacy is that what is known is not the universe in detail but a framework.

Validity—reason and ethics

How do we know that the framework is true and valid? Rationality is one of the concepts built into the picture.

Can we build detail into the picture? Yes, by supplementing it with knowledge from our traditions, primal, western, and eastern. Is not such knowledge marked by imprecision? Yes, but that is not problematic as follows.

The ultimate picture shows that all beings realize the ultimate. Therefore, imprecision of the tools is not an ultimate impediment in realization. Further, received knowledge in process is the best we have and therefore good enough, subject, of course, to an attitude of imaginative criticism. The final criterion of knowledge is not precision or sufficiency of depiction alone but is also in terms of value, i.e., ethical.

The ultimate and its realization

A picture of the ultimate is built in metaphysics. The picture includes the fundamental truth that our experiential nature is fundamental and, with appropriate interpretation, the nature of the universe. This is not anti-materialist, but a view in which being has mind and matter like sides. Thus, realization should and does have experiential and material aspects. Pathways are built in realization, which is supplemented by resources, which have (i) resources for realization (ii) resources for study and development of the way and its basis in the history of thought and exploration.

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