Origins

It is true, I think, that I have long wanted to understand and to explore. I have wanted to know and have been thrilled by nature as long as I remember. My parents remembered me as a boy who wanted to get to the bottom of things, a boy whose questions and questioning had no end. In school and college I wanted to understand the material and I focused on this rather than of what was required for performance in exams. Material that required no understanding was not worth my interest. My interests included science, mathematics, and philosophy—anything that enhanced understanding of ideas and the world. The interest extended to music and poetry; to these I would thrill; but the thrill of science and mathematics and philosophy was no less as they were my keys to the Universe; and the thrill to nature was greater because it was an entrance to the Universe. At universities, my teaching reflected my attitude and this sometimes frustrated students who wanted to perform in exams or who were interested in technical rather than conceptual understanding. However even those students later realized that my approach ultimately led to better performance and technical competence

From school through my teaching years I advance my knowledge of fundamentals in physics, mathematics, biology and philosophy. I did this through courses and reading. What I now consider to be real maturity came later. It required reflection and re-reflection and criticism. More than understanding, however, it developed as I used and further developed the ideas

My thought becomes reflexive

As it developed, my thought became reflexive. What is the method or process of my thought? How shall it be used toward insight? What are the real problems? What are the limits of mathematics, science, and philosophy? Are intrinsic limits or artifacts of history and or present practice? The question entails the reflexive: what are science, philosophy, epistemology, logic, metaphysics? Are they given or, as artifactual, are their meanings dependent on context? Do they cover the range of analytic-synthetic thought? What is that range? What is the greatest system of knowledge that can be thought? Can I know the world as it is rather than just some image of it? What are the limits of the world itself? My ambition to know became manifestly invested in the greatest knowing possible and the limits of Being

An early formal paradigm

My early formal thought involved use of an evolutionary paradigm to understand the Universe and its divisions. The work, Evolution and Design, was written in 1986 and 1987. The use of an evolutionary paradigm to understand and develop metaphysics was not new but I think I had creative insights; I learned an intense amount of philosophy and evolutionary biology. Even though I later abandoned the evolutionary paradigm as fundamental the paradigm itself and the exercise in creative-critical thought have been immensely useful

Search for alternatives

1n about 1990 I began to seek alternatives to evolutionary understanding. I would understand the Universe as a whole rather than as a process. I would understand the Universe as it is. There is a problem with understanding a temporal thing as non-temporal but the problem may be overcome by regarding the thing and its entire process as an object. There is another problem with understanding the Universe as it is. It intersects the problem of metaphysics as knowledge of the universe or of Being as they are. It is the problem how I can validly claim to know anything at all if my knowledge is not the thing itself. This problem later acquired the following resolution: perfect knowledge is possible in some directions but not in others. How is perfect knowledge possible at all? I assert: I know that there is Being for if there were not then even my ideas (or illusion that there is an I having ideas) would not be. Though trivial, the Universal Metaphysics that I later developed would have profound consequences that have this trivial knowledge as one of its starting points. Even later I would realize the arbitrary character of some of our notions of perfection—criteria for knowing that we tend to hold explicitly as well as implicitly—and to give foundation to the notion of perfection and that would bring the range of knowing under the fold of perfection (without abandoning perfect perfection at the core and ranges of perfection outside that core of metaphysics.) At the time I was concerned about the issue of knowledge but, fortunately, not too concerned because knowing is itself a process and we cannot expect to know all at once what will know in the end

Abandonment of paradigm

My search for an alternative to an materialist-evolutionary paradigm led through idealism and atemporalism. I was finally led to the idea that no paradigm is necessary. We can understand being as being rather than as matter or mind or process or extension and so on. I also began to see from physics that nothingness and manifest being are not essentially distinct (this was an intuitive insight)

Intuition

One day I had the intuitive sense that I was the world and that the world (Universe) was equivalent to the Void. This intuition occurred while hiking one warm afternoon in the Trinity Alps. The sense of oneness occurred as I hiked without effort where effort would normally be required

I tried to prove this without success until I had another insight: focus on the Void and its properties rather than on the Universe. This intuition occurred early morning one day in Weaverville, California at the foot of the Trinity Alps

Proof

The proof was then easy

The Laws, e.g. of physics, are patterns of behavior—they are limits: this behavior occurs, that behavior does not occur. While a law is what I see, the Law is the pattern itself. Being is that which is. A Law has Being. The Void is the absence of Being. Therefore the Void has no Laws. If from the Void there is some state of Being that does not emerge, i.e. if the Void had limits, that would be a Law of the Void. I.e., every state of Being emerges from the Void, i.e., the Void has no limits

Fundamental Principle of Metaphysics

Therefore the Universe has no limits

The intuition of the proof

Laws (limits) apply to the manifest world but not to the unmanifest (Void); therefore the world has no limits

Meaning of the Fundamental Principle: the nature of limitlessness

What does this mean? Its meaning includes that every referential statement must be realized or else that would be a limit. But this seems absurd because, first, some referential type statements violate logic and, second, our experience is riddled with experience of limits. The resolution of the first objection is that only logically sound referential statements should be allowed (and this is a demarcation of the statements that have realism but not a limit on the Universe itself.) This resolution has a problem in that logic itself is not perfect and the resolution to this problem is to redefine Logic as the requirement for concepts that are referential in form to have reference. The resolution to the second concern is that experiential limits are ones of immensely high improbability rather than impossibility

Meaning of the Fundamental Principle: some conclusions

It implies that while we live in a cosmos that we sometimes think of as the Universe, there are infinitely many cosmological systems. It implies that if any un-logical elements are removed from the Bible, its story is realized on infinitely many cosmological systems (but not that it is realized on most or on our system). It implies that the Universe has phases on unmanifest Being as well as manifest Being (and this resolves the problem of why there is Being, a problem that Heidegger called the fundamental problem of metaphysics). It implies that the Universe has phases of acute consciousness and identity and that every individual is ultimately identical to the Universe (even while we do not have explicit experience of this identity). It implies that this identity is experienced as an infinite journey in variety of Being (though this is not the only way of experience of the identity). It allows and requires that the journey begins with everyday spirituality as much as spirituality of the Universal kind—‘in the life of the spirit we are always at the beginning’. It implies that the concepts that modern thought designates as abstract have reference, i.e. abstract and concrete objects lie on the same footing. It redefines Logic as identical to Universal Metaphysics. Clearly it provides a framework for the logics, mathematics, and the sciences

Nature of the consequences

Thus the consequences are technical as well as human and ‘spiritual’.