Epilogue
So stated, the scope of this topic is very broad — and may seem unrealistically so. In life, the project has had three tiers, only the third being the primary focus of this work.
The first tier has been personal experience and reflection.
For various reasons, and at a young age, the author found a need to try to experience the very experience of knowing — this all tangled with the arts, science and spirituality — and with his own confusions trying to understand both himself and others. The bottom line was a life of trying to experience the interplay of personal awareness, scientific reasoning and spiritual feeling. This lead to studying and working in the context of the physical sciences, teaching in an art school setting and coming to Vedanta.
The second tier evolved (ca.1970s) from the personal into a more academic and critical effort — to seek and characterize individual and cultural ways of claiming truth — and to work with students who were experiencing their own difficulties in understanding various subject matter. This tier focused on developing interdisciplinary courses on ways of knowing (using an unpublished manuscript A Circle Through Art and Science.). Dr. Warren wrote, taught and published a bit along the way. Then, after initiation by Swami Swahananda, and with the Swami’s encouragement, he wrote by way of study (but did not publish) a few papers on Vedanta and physics in the late 1980s, a book draft on Paradoxical Wholeness in the 1990s, and other papers on comparative cosmologies across different faith traditions (1990s)
Such work, however, was then dropped for a number of years; the analytic focus seeming to be a gate across the path to entering the Quiet of spirit.
Now, the third tier has been to return to writing. This third tier is to symbolic logic: The most recent studies are connected with earlier, personal efforts (1990s) to see how one might generate a symbolic approach of non-dualism which connects to classical (dualistic) logic. Portions of these efforts were done while working at the Los Alamos Labs on energy development. Later, discussions with the physicist Geoffrey Chew at UCB and Mark Delb (then head of the Philosophy Department at the Dominican Theological Seminary at GTU), all proved encouraging. Houston Smith also was a great help in the author’s thinking. Some of the (then still being developed) symbolic notation and grammar proved helpful to Sister Gayatriprana in her work on Swami Vivekananda. This author has now been encouraged by others to put these efforts into some public form (he was also encouraged to make a pilgrimage to India before the final form, and see the work in the context of Jnana Yoga).
There are many references that fed into this work. Of all of them, three were seminal: Laws of Form by G. Spencer Brown, and two books by Swami Satprakasananda, Knowledge and God.
Laws of Form presents the ground for binary logic as a primitive of distinction (a ‘cut’ in the initially formless space). G. Spencer Brown also presents his development in the form ‘sutra-like’ with a Taoist/Buddhist clarity and implication. The books by Swami Satprakasananda address deep questions of philosophy, knowing/knowledge, reality/truth, and spiritual perspectives and insights. The ‘take-away’ of this set of his books is that the search for deep knowing is equivalent to starting with a deep search for God.
What has been presented here is not a story about relative experiences leading to Truth. Rather it is about the structure of world-descriptions arising from deep experiences in which knower and known are found to be co-relative. This work may have value if taken in the spirit of its historical development; namely, a struggling to understand understanding — a beginner’s path. It is hoped that in the end, the discussion here will offer the reader a sense of connection between world-descriptions reached by the many paths that we, as individuals and cultures, follow from awe to Truth, and by which ‘True’ and ‘Real’ are ultimately established as informed experience. It explores the form world-experience (as perspective) to the form world-structure.