The essentials and core of The Way of Being

This is to be (i) simplified (ii) reviewed in parallel with development of the main narrative.

It—especially the final paragraphs on pathways and my plan—is to be aligned with realization, in this document, and other documents – pathways, traditional ways, and my program.

Preliminary issues

How to write and combine the essence with the concepts

Begin with a summary of main points as outline

This document drives the writing

concepts.docm is secondary to this one.

Primary (outline) v secondary (fill) statements (paragraphs)

primary = outline

table of contents primary

secondary = reasons, proofs, explanations…

text = primary + secondary

How is truth best revealed?

If one (thinks one) has (metaphysical) truth, how is it best revealed to others?

Is there just one way?

What are some ways?

The first paragraphs

revelation

how to reveal ideas

we begin with the fundamental / metaphysical picture and aim of the way of being without proof, elaboration, or explanation, which come later

overview aim …

The universe is limitless – the realization of the most inclusive possibility, i.e., if a referential concept and its implications do not violate logic, it is realized. Therefore,

The following is list format for convenience and will later be (re) joined primary and secondary paragraphs.

the universe has identity – a sense and knowledge of self

the universe and its identity are limitless, particularly with regard to extension, duration, and variety and peak of being and dissolution

thus the universe far exceeds our empirical – experienced – visible – scientific cosmos, for there are limitlessly many cosmoses of limitless variety beyond

and that beyond is in extension and duration but also within, for there are other cosmoses passing through ours with minimal interaction at all moments

individual beings realize the ultimate nature of the universe

though it may seem contradictory for two distinct individuals to both realize the ultimate it is not contradictory, for all beings merge as a single self in the ultimate

while this realization is given, there are effective and shared paths or ways to the ultimate, which, when followed are efficient in realization and enlightened in process

until ultimate realization these paths remain under discovery and shared negotiation – it is a mistaken notion that that received ways from tradition and their masters are final, perfect, or absolute

however, it is worth exploring received ways, even where dogmatic, for inspiration and insight.

The aim of the way of being is shared discovery and realization of the ultimate in and from the immediate and toward the union of immediate and the ultimate.

Summary

The universe is the realization of greatest possibility; it has neither beginning nor end nor material cause, but its cause may be taken to be necessity; far greater than the known, it has cosmoses without end – and limitless peaks and dissolutions; there is a hierarchy of beings in which we are between the ultimate that sees all and the elementary that sees little; all beings merge as one in the greater peaks; there are shared paths of discovery and realization, which may learn but are not limited to traditional ways; birth and death are real but not ultimate – though we are finite on limited time scales, on limitless scales death is a merging with potential and birth is manifestation of potential – which is the process through which we realize the ultimate or descend into temporary nothingness.

A brief demonstration of limitlessness is that (i) the void (nothingness) exists and contains no laws (ii) if a possible state of affairs did not emerge from the void that would be a law (iii) therefore all possibilities emerge from the void. This demonstration is lacking in various ways, which are addressed in the main development.

Doubt has these functions—(i) it was critical in going beyond received knowledge via imagination but not mere speculation—demonstration of the claims is given (for lesser claims, demonstration will be probabilistic), (ii) it remains critical from truth and existential points of view, (iii) but as doubt is critical, so is doubt of doubt, (iv) readers who sustain doubt will either reject the claims of the way or understand them and live them better.

The aim (the way of) being is shared discovery, negotiation, and realization in the immediate toward the ultimate.

We are motivated by emotion (with pleasure and pain) and guided in action by reason which recognizes limits. Therefore an enlightened pathway seeks a balance of emotion and reason, finds pleasure in paths, addresses pain via healthy living, and emphasizes quality of being of individuals and society in this world and on the way to the ultimate.

What is a healthy life? It attends to physical, mental, communal, and spiritual aspects of life; it addresses pain via these aspects, via therapy, via the more fortunate help the less, and by maintaining a balance of address of pain and being on a path; it employs the two sides of experiential being—(i) subjective – reason and emotion in balance and meditation (ii) objective – arrangement of the physical, political, and economic environment toward the motion of beings toward the ultimate in this life and beyond.

The essentials

The Way of Being (abbr. the way) is shared discovery and realization of the ultimate in, for, and from our world.

To appeal to being – the concept – as existence is to take the world as it is rather than to prejudice discovery by appeal to or denial of substance (e.g., matter or mind), relationship, process, trope, spirit, or other kinds (so it is implied that the ultimate is under discovery rather than given). Then, to conceive the universe as all being does not distinguish spirit from matter or assert or deny the nature and existence of these kinds (and so, whether a god created the universe is falsely regarded as fundamental). The void is the absence of being—though it is a being it harbors no beings. Laws, i.e., natural laws, are patterns that are immanent in the world (or the universe or parts of it such as a cosmos or cosmoses, and, thus, laws are beings. The void has no laws.

As the void has no laws, all possibility emerges (possibilities emerge) from it—of absolute necessity; it is of necessity that there is no eternal nothingness. The manifest universe may be seen as emerging from the void, from any being, or from itself—it is not created except if necessity is seen as creative force.

The universe is the realization of all possibility; it is experiential and has identity, which phase eternally between nothingness, the manifest, and peak states of being (note: experience is awareness in all its varieties).

Is this contradictory? No, for (i) there is no self-contradiction for possibility is an inherently consistent concept, that is—there is no internal or logical contradiction (ii) there is no contradiction of observation or science, for the possibilities that we do not see or that may seem to contradict science, occur outside the boundary of observation—in other words, there is no external, scientific, observational, or empirical contradiction.

The universe and its identity are limitless in duration and extension; in variety, peak, and dissolution (it phases eternally between the void and the manifest).

There are cosmoses of limitless number and variety, whose isolation is at most temporary, and which must be connected at the edge of their boundaries (in extension-duration)—but not only at the edges – there are and at any of their times, there must be effectively no-interaction or negligible-interaction cosmoses passing through one another, especially through ours (thus the connection is everywhere).

We are experiential beings in an experiential universe; in experience there is a relation between ‘experience of’ and ‘the experienced’; the former is the concept or subject or as-if of mind; the latter is the object or as-if material, i.e., as-if of matter).

Here, object is not restricted to ‘thing’ but includes relation, process… whatever can be the object of experience including experience itself; nor is object restricted to the physical—it includes natural, living, and social entities, e.g., the political and the economic, and as-if mind and as-if spirit as the object of perception or thought.

We are beings in an experiential hierarchy—neither the zero of sentients, nor the merest, nor the peak, but phasing between the ends of the sentient continuum; we – all beings – inherit the limitlessness of the universe, which is not a contradiction as beings merge as one in the peaks of the universe.

That we will realize peak and dissolution eternally is given; however, there are (intelligent) pathways to the ultimate, which, to be effective, should be shared and negotiated rather than merely followed (traditions may be useful in charting paths); ultimate god is not remote, it is in process – a process in which all beings take part.

Birth and death are real but not absolute. In death, we go back into potential being (i.e., minimal being merged with all being or, in the extreme, the nonbeing of the void). In birth, we are (generally) not copies of our previous beings. Why, in general, do we not have this explicit awareness? Explicit pan-awareness of universal existence occurs at higher levels of experiential being – beings that populate cosmoses with perhaps greater forms than ours. Perhaps this is not the most common mode, but from limitlessness it is necessarily one mode of panbeing. Thus, even discounting those who say they perceive past lives, we do have the conceptual power—here and now—to see our panbeing.

Therefore, the ‘why’ question above is really—ought to be—a ‘how’ question and the answer is that while we do not (may not seem to) have perceptual awareness, we are at that place in the hierarchy of experiential being such that (i) we can think the question (ii) answer it conceptually even though or if we do not see it now, in this life, perceptual awareness of it will arise in going back into potential being and emerging again, higher in the experiential hierarchy.

An alternate perspective is not that we are ‘this being’ and will emerge again, higher, but that we are all just one being, constituted of many, discrete beings relative to the time frames of our cosmos, but continuous – one – on sufficiently long time frames or at a level of description above time and change. Now, given this reasoning, we can intuit or sense our oneness of being, but can we perceive it? It may depend on what we regard as our instruments of perceiving. From the point of view of an individual self, the boundary between the body and the environment is the location of instruments of perception; from a universal perspective, that boundary as locating what is to be called perception is arbitrary and internal-internal and internal-external flows of information have the same status; neither perspective is in error, neither is finally basic, but each is more illuminating for some purposes and less illuminating for others. Perhaps, however, it may be possible to be aware of our panbeing in some states of consciousness, e.g., in meditation or cathartic experience (as awareness of a signature of panbeing in our being).

Limitlessness reveals an ideal metaphysics, which is perfectly faithful to the real in virtue of an abstract (character) of being and the void (which are not essentially abstract—the abstract is what remains when what is essentially distortable from the concept is filtered out). It shows an ideal of perfection but needs a complement to develop concrete vision of and paths to the real. The complement may be chosen as our pragmatic knowledge which is not perfectly faithful. The join of the two—the perfectly faithful and the pragmatic—is not perfectly faithful but as the only and necessarily effective guide to the ultimate it is perfect and seamless relative to the ideal of realizing the ultimate in this world and beyond.

This join, named the real metaphysics, entails a worldview at the core of the way (i) of the immediate and the ultimate as one and, in what follows, (ii) with pathways of enlightenment for living with attention to material and ultimate aspects of individuals, societies, and the world.

This system reveals dimensions of being (abbr. dimensions)—(i) the pure dimension—experiential being in form and formation of worlds and beings on the way to the ultimate and (ii) pragmatic dimensions from our received knowledge—which, since imperfection is allowed in process, may be chosen from the western system: natural (material, living, experiential), social (group, political-economic-value, culture-education-discovery-meaning, i.e., meaning in the sense of significance), and the universal (experiential and object-like aspects of approach to peak being), together with paradigms projected in process to the universe (e.g., non-determinist variation and selection for near equilibrium, mechanism with and without probabilistic change, dynamics of systems and societies).

At levels of description over long times, perhaps, e.g., far greater than the life of a cosmos, individual selves approach universal self. At a level that is above time, universe and self are identical. On the other hand, in a process view, from nothingness come selves, then universal self, which repeats eternally, beginning with nothingness once again.

Thus, narrative may begin with self-experience or being-universe. In beginning with being and the void, the emphasis is on realization. To emphasize academic metaphysics first, it could begin with either experience or being.

The material on pathways is repeated later in realization > overview, with greater detail on planning.

The material below is paste special to later in this document, and templates and dedication.docm. The material should be edited here and updated where it has been pasted.

The aim of an enlightened, healthy, or effective lifeway or pathway is effective realization of the ultimate, beginning with its best form in this world (i.e., the world of the seeking beings).

That is, there is dual focus on quality of life in our world and the ultimate. The effective path recognizes that experiential human being is discrete over ‘ordinary time’ (e.g., lives) but ultimate – peak being – over long enough times or at a level of description above time; that is, birth and death are real but not absolute—locally but not absolutely real.

In this world the individual experience—perception, thought, feeling, will, and action—is the focus of ends – political, economic, moral and other (positively because it is where all significance lies and negatively by elimination of inanimate / non-feeling objects). Groups and institutions are important, but their importance derives from the significance of individual experience. In the universe at large, experience itself is the focus and generator of all ends (and, thus, ‘inanimate objects’ are included because, when primitive experience is taken into consideration, they are not essentially non-experiential).

A healthy pathway (physical, mental, communal, and spiritual) attends to needs and effective action individual, society, and world, in meditative, material, and immersive aspects of the dimensions on a path to the ultimate. A healthy life emphasizes the needs of the individual and society in this world and on the way to the ultimate.

Enlightenment seeks balance and integration of emotion, reason (fact, inference), and action in interest (service) of self, other, community, world, and approach to peak being.

An enlightened path (i) seeks intelligent and shared negotiation (not just following received ways or masters) (ii) results in a replica – typically incomplete – of the ultimate in the being – body and mind – of the individual in ‘this’ life and rarely in the ultimate itself (iii) but is on the way to the ultimate and while realization is given, the enlightened path is efficient in realization of the ultimate as we cross from life to life, from form to form, amid the myriad of cosmoses, while dwelling in nothingness in between.

Pleasure and pain (physical pain, doubt, anxiety) are unavoidable. The issues of pleasure and pain are addressed (i) in that pleasure for its own sake need not be avoided, but paths emphasize pleasure in being on the way—on the path (ii) by shared negotiation of pathways (in which leaders may arise but are not seen as absolute in truth) (iii) with therapy – the best therapy of the time (iv) by the able and fortunate giving aid to the less able or fortunate (v) by attention without obsession to healthy living – physical, mental, communal, and spiritual (vi) and above all that local enlightenment which avoids illusions of ideal perfection but seeks a pragmatic balance of emotion (particularly pleasure and pain), reason, and action on shared paths—i.e., as far as reasonable, seeks process through and not around pain.

Effective pathways address living in the immediate world on the way to the ultimate—they address the everyday and the universal, (and, as elaborated in the document outline of the way-new.docm), dimensions of being (i) at a high level the pure subject and object aspects of experience (ii) in the world, the pragmatic. Particularly included are (a) meditation, calming, analytic, and visionary (including an attempt to visualize and ways to actualize panbeing) (b) yogic or healthy living directed at individual, family, work, and community – local to global and immediate in time to ultimate.

Thus, enlightenment pertains to being in this world for the ultimate is not in need of enlightenment; in received religion, enlightenment is often thought to be a kind of ideal perfection; however, the real perfection emerged here sees it as a good to best mix of an idealized notion of perfection and the work – even struggle – of being on a path.

As far as unjustified belief or disbelief are religious, most people who have a position on the truth of dogmatic religion are religious.

The path of the way is open to use of religion though not to its dogmatic insistence. We recognize two approaches in religion—one that emphasizes a relationship with a powerful divine element which may symbolically energize a positive life and another that emphasizes correct thought, speech, and action on the way to realization which may be mundane or universal.

The mix of (i) the ideal and the struggle vs perfection and (ii) negotiation vs following are two differences between the path described here and common received ways. As the worldview of the present system is ultimate, the paths here frame received pathways. The present system gives preference to those received pathways that see limited being as on the way to the ultimate rather than the ultimate as a remote reward. Still, all systems are recognized for symbolic and community value.

The planning focus of an individual-as-individual-as-communal-and-for-discovery-and-realization is a flexible routine selected from options—(i) awaken early – affirmation of being, dedication to realization, meditation on sustaining an attitude of achievement and equilibrium with others through distraction and pain, review priorities and how and when to die; (ii) recognition of ground issues—safety, security, focus on the way, health issues (medications, diet, mental and physical exercise, sleep), and discipline; (iii) morning tasks—medications and treatments, open files to edit, walk-stretch / vitamins / breakfast / fluids, set times and reminders; (iv) developing and foundation for the way—ideas, experience, reflection, study, cowriting and editing, publishing, and presenting; (v) living the way (one’s way)—ideas, attention to self – meditative and physical, immersion in nature and the real, attention to community – social / political-economic / cultural (knowledge development and transmission, tradition, art, religion), attention to spiritual being, relations and networking, acting roles; (vi) pressing and urgent action—being present to the real – emptiness now / security – money and place / safety / pushing the way; (vii) daily and weekly tasks, lunch, review of plans and planning, preparation and planning for travel and immersion; (viii) exercise—aerobic, stretching, light weights; excursions and photography; (ix) evening rest and review, preparation for the next day, relaxation, social activities, networking; sleep early.

Summary—(i) morning routine and tasks (ii) the way – foundation and transformation, with relationships and sharing (iii) pressing and urgent agenda – emptiness now, security, safety, push twb (iii) tasks and lunch (iv) exercise (v) pm routine (vi) sleep early.

My planning and routine above is a sample—its principle will be integrated with the routine in templates and dedication.