Introduction

This reading list is intended as a resource for the way of being—ideas and realization.

The main works (the essential way of being and the way of being, both currently in-process) present principles of shared discovery and realization. These emphasize forging the way and not mere following.

These readings include some of my sources and influences but are a very incomplete list. The main influences for the way is a detailed list of sources. There is more on my influences below.

The readings below and the main influences above are the best approximation to a bibliography for the site. I maintained bibliographic lists of readings, both systematic and random, until about 2010. Though extensive, they are incomplete.

The way of being

The site and some resource works ◆ for my sources, see the essential way of being; there is more detail at main influences for the way ◆ templates for action ◆ a system of human knowledge ◆ world problems and opportunities with details at journey in being ◆ yoga and meditation ◆ page of useful links.

Works on immersion in the real with notes

Immersion in the real is (i) immersion in day to day and ultimate concerns (ii) in ways that are, connect, and lead to the real (which includes the ultimate). Some works—

Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet’s Lost Paradise, 2004. An exploration of travel to the heart of nature as means of self-transformation. Emphasis on ‘beyul’, which is connection to the real in the world and the self via immersion in nature.

Chagdud Tulku, Gates to Buddhist Practice: Essential Teachings of a Tibetan Master, 1993, Rev. 2001. A readable account of Tibetan Buddhism, its world view, and practice. Good material on working on roadblocks to spiritual development—attachment and desire, anger and aversion, and ignorance. Fundamentals of spirituality. Introduction to ‘vajrayana’, the essential category of Tibetan Buddhist practice.

John Hick, The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm, 1999. An excellent account of ‘higher realms’ and their connection to ‘eternal individual identity’ from within the modern world view of science. Develops realistic conceptions of God. Reveals conceptually and by example, the connection to the eternal and the real, in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Islamic and other terms. Shows the manifest connection in the lives of three modern ‘saints’—Mohandas Gandhi, Khushdeva Singh, and Nyanaponika Mahathera. Addresses the question of what lies beyond death in simple and reasonable, yet deep terms.

Christopher Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition, 2nd ed., 2013. An immense source of ritual for those who may be interested. Somewhat aligned with Tibetan Buddhism. An interpretation—“Tantra is a body of knowledge and practice in connection to the real, a precursor to Yoga”, “The versions of Tantra and Yoga in the western spiritual circuit are ‘debased’ and ‘diluted’ versions of their originals” (the terms in single quotes are not those of Wallis, e.g., original Tantra is not about sex, sexual practice, or esoteric sex). For more on yoga, see A Sourcebook in Indian philosophy by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore.

Pema Chödrön, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind, 2013. On the practice of meditation. The book is open with regard to aims of meditation. Its emphasis is meditative practice and being in the present and though it does not emphasize the ultimate it is an excellent foundation for opening into the ultimate—and the use of meditation for many ends.

Eknath Easwaran, trs., The Bhagavad Gita, 1985. A practical guide to a world view similar to that in this work, as well as an account of the realms of Yoga. How shall we act in this world? How shall we behave in the face of existential and moral doubt? The Gita has an effective approach to these questions.

Richard K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest, 1983. Nice account of a primal world view and way of life. Shows the reality of primal views, despite their strangeness to modern world views. Shows by description how individuals in primal environments are and connect to the real. Shows a way of conversation and day to day empiricism that are corrective of error—in a manner rather unlike that of religious dogma.

Graham Priest, One: Being an investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object, which is Nothingness. I have found that the apparent paradox that the void exists and does not exist (and related seeming paradoxes), is not a true paradox, and does not lead to explosion (in classical propositional calculus, if a statement A and its negation ~A, are true, then all statements are true—and false). This led to the fundamental principle that the universe is the realization of all possibility, and that, as in the Vedantic tradition, every being is all being. Graham Priest’s work has a clear relation to mine and provides a formal underpinning for the logical aspect of ‘the void exists and does not and consequences’. Priest relates the formal aspect to Buddhism, which is similar to Yoga and Vedanta, but less ambitious.

Tradition and mental well being

On modern therapy and psychiatry—a complaint about traditional religion in the modern world is that the traditions do not deal well with mental health issues. Here is a set of links, preliminary to upgrade— everyday psychiatry, everyday therapy, and existential psychotherapy.

Some useful links

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◆ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◆ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◆ Useful links

My infl uences

I have offered the way of being as a contribution to human thought and exploration. It is grounded in the history of ideas and action but seeks to go beyond. The ways in which it does so are not entirely new, but I believe, from extensive exposure to reading and public discussion, that I do indeed have something to offer. However, I leave judgment on assignment of credit to the reader.

The following are for the reader’s direction and to acknowledge my sources. I do not claim thorough knowledge of all sources—for some, what I learned was a single significant idea. My sources are so many—both explicit and diffuse—that I cannot hope that the listing is complete.

The early Greeks for their break with superstition, their ideas on change and atomism, their introduction of metaphysical thinking – Thales of Miletus is noteworthy for association with the birth of metaphysics ◆ Early Vedic philosophers for insight into the ultimate and beginning of a break with primitive thought – Veda Vyasa, date and authenticity unclear, is the legendary author of the Mahabharata, the Veda, and the Puranas ◆ Plato, especially as rendered by AN Whitehead, for reflection on power as a measure of being and for his thoughts on the good, the good person, and the good society ◆ Aristotle for his thought on being, the idea of first principles, categories, the idea of category, and logic ◆ Adi Samkara, Indian philosopher, for reflection on the universe as phasing between peaks and the void, the reality of our experiential connection to the world (‘consciousness’), experience as real – as the world, and thereby our identity with the universe across all its phasing (‘Brahman’) ◆ Johannes Scotus Eriugena, for his thought on the universe as ‘all that there is in space and time and all that there is not’ ◆ Thomas Aquinas on the necessity of god, i.e., the necessity of necessity ◆ René Descartes for method and original knowledge—experience is given ◆ Baruch Spinoza for thought on the world, god, and attributes ◆ GWF Leibniz for logic, necessity, the principle of sufficient reason, and thought on possible worlds ◆ Scientists and the metaphysicians, too numerous to individually mention here, from Archimedes and Aristotle through today for the concept of paradigm and for developing a raft of paradigms for the physical, living (functional and evolutionary), experiential, social worlds, and the universe – scientists deserving especial mention for what I have learned from them include Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Ernst Mayr, John Wheeler, and the creators of quantum theory, especially Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, and Steven Weinberg ◆ David Hume for a critique of inductive thought ◆ Immanuel Kant for the importance of understanding and its possibility in that the form of experience has correspondence to the form of the world; and of reason ◆ Friedrich Nietzsche for his sparkling criticism of the necessity of metaphysical, epistemic, and social norms ◆ Hans Vaihinger for the ‘philosophy of as if’ ◆ Alexius Meinong for a generalized notion of object with regard to category at all levels, e.g., entity vs relation vs process and existent vs nonexistent ◆ Samuel Alexander for clear insight into the ideas of experience, ‘experience of’ and ‘the experienced’ ◆ AN Whitehead for critique of received metaphysics and awareness—‘prehension’—as the essence of being ◆ Bertrand Russell for breaking with idealism and an initial move away from apriorism ◆ Wittgenstein for clarity on the nature of logic and relations among science, logic, ethics, and metaphysics—review the framework of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ◆ CK Ogden and IA Richards for their suggestive symbol – concept – object theory or meaning of meaning—i.e., of linguistic meaning. In the way of being this is shown to have necessity ◆ Heidegger for clarity on substance and being (I do not agree with his strategy see being as a receptacle for human essence but do agree that that essence is a metaphysical player) ◆ Karl Popper for insight into the nature of science ◆ AO Lovejoy, philosopher, historian of ideas, for an introduction to the principle of plenitude—the idea that the universe contains all possible forms of existence ◆ Viktor Frankl and many other accessible writers on the search for significant meaning ◆ The existential philosophers for redirecting attention to the perennial human and philosophical problem of the significance and ‘meaning of life’ Viktor Frankl and many other accessible writers on the search for significant meaning ◆ David Lewis, metaphysician, for his thoughts on possible worlds and his idea that all possible worlds exist but are causally separated (in the real metaphysics of the way, causal separation is contingent and neither universal nor necessary) ◆ Ernst Mayr for insight into the nature of evolution ◆ Kurt Gödel for his place in formalizing logic so that there can be an effective meta-logical calculus ◆ WVO Quine for seeing logic as empirical and seeing affinity rather than distinction between logic and science ◆ Herbert A Simon, economist, for the thought that establishing new knowledge is search in a dual space of concepts and referents (objects) ◆ Michael Dummett for the idea that to be is to be known by some knower ◆ John Searle and other modern researchers into the nature of mind and consciousness for insight into the nature of consciousness ◆ Graham Priest for his work on dialetheia, paraconsistent logic, everything and nothing, and in relating those technical ideas to our place in the world, particularly as conceived in Buddhism—all as tied together in his book, One (2014) ◆ Richard K Nelson, anthropologist, in Make Prayers to the Raven, for revealing the reality of the worldviews of peoples living in contact with nature—despite an apparent gulf between their views and modern views ◆ Hugh Brody, anthropologist, for an account, perhaps romanticized, and similar in intent to that of Richard Nelson in The Other Side of Eden ◆ I have also been inspired by some religious leaders and politicians, for example, Buddha, the Jesus story, and Gandhi. Even dogma is inspiring where, because it is suggestive, it promotes its own overcoming ◆ Many Internet sources have been useful, especially Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Wikipedia—as sources of ideas and secondary literature, though not as authority. Articles on metaphysics, the void, and empiricism vs rationalism have been useful recently. The last, together with Quine’s writing on logic, have been useful in my thoughts against apriorism and against the strictly empirical as a source of real knowledge.

Nature has been a source of being and of inspiration in ideas.

I have learned from the cultures of India and the USA; from three schools—St. Xavier’s School, Hazaribagh, India; Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India; and University of Delaware, USA.

My development was encouraged by my mother, 1915 – 1999; my PhD advisor, Michael Greenberg; and my friend, Joan Elk, 1930 – 2010.