Meditative Reason and the Holistic Turn to Natural Phenomenology

Abstract

In this essay I shall focus on the central themes of my book Meditative Reason,¹ which open the way to the holistic turn to natural phenomenology. Perhaps the greatest lesson in the global evolution of philosophy is that “What is First” situates and contextualizes all that appears, all existence, all discourse, all experience and phenomena. The centuries of living experiments in diverse traditions of first philosophy reveal that there is no getting around the absolute presence of What is First — that which generates and conditions all realities. These historic experiments concur that it is absolutely vital that we humans enter into an authentic way to think about or mind the first principle and to conduct our experience ever mindful of its presiding presence. One of the great lessons of the global evolution of cultures is that the egocentric mind inherently eclipses What is First and proceeds in a pathological conduct of mind that is detrimental to all aspects of human life.