why

It is a journey taken in confusion and illusion.

Of Conscience and Being.

An exploration of Reality and Truth.

Of Self and Sacred.

The Entry Point —

arises from asking a very broad question which has pulled my attention for most of my life. It has been a personal urgency to understand what people meant when they made claims about something being true, or real — claims which, for the most part, seemed to collide with each other. Their assertions of truth and understanding could not reach the boy who asked questions in the simple form of “What is a star?” — He was a boy who did not know how to know.

His father was an engineer; his uncle a priest.

The boy asked “What is the world?” “What is Truth?” “What is knowing?”

The answers he received in response were very different from each others’ and different still from the young boy’s images and dances of his dreams.

He - I - was about seven years old, and in growing up his need became to explore the very sense of directly experiencing knowing — and from that, the relationship of experience to consistent claims about reality and truth.

Over the years, the boy still thought of himself as “it is I who is trying to experience knowing and to understand truth and to know what is.” He took himself to be the same “I” for most of his life. But this, too, had to be questioned and explored.

We have started with his history because acts of the boy’s story couple the personal to the impersonal; a self to a world. And so, all of this in its simple and complete form, the urgent question can be stated as “What is ‘I know this?’”

I have to start this as a story which I think I lived.

The ‘seed years.’

My birth coincided with man’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This act of war effectively wiped out nearly a hundred thousand people and their environs in an instant, and gave rise to untold suffering and death to nearly that many in the months following.

You many think that an American child as young as five, benefitting from the peaceful years that ensured, would grow up in carefree happiness. But even then I had full knowledge of that crime against humanity. I was haunted in my dreams and bowed down by enormous grief during my waking hours. One of my friends, also a five-year-old Catholic, declared that he would become a priest. And he did. But my path was different. I could not be a priest until I knew what is Truth.

Art, science and religion will be our vehicle, or perhaps a magic carpet for our travels,

One can spend a lifetime searching for Truth. Where to begin this search?

These major disciplines don’t talk well together, and there are apparent conflicts between them. But if you delve deeply enough into any one of these disciplines you will find at its base both awareness and consciousness. From this awareness and consciousness the rest of the discipline is constructed, resulting in an apparently solid edifice.

What we are after here though, in this web book, is not to follow the roads out to the ends and explore the edifice, but rather, to reverse direction and follow each road back to its roots. And, what we find (lo and behold!) is that all of these apparently diverse disciplines have an underlying unity. At each core lies the exact same awareness and consciousness.

This web book is an invitation to take a deep dive through some of the major disciplines in art and science and spirituality; to explore the core. This exploration of diverse paths of inquiry is not a straight line, it consists of ever deepening circles through consciousness through which a paradoxical Wholeness emerges. That which appears divided is actually One.

Nicholas Warren
Nikola Varljen
Berkeley, California
Summer 2023