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Our Guiding Questions:
Science & Ultimate Reality

Do physics and mathematics point to an “Ultimate Reality” or “Ground of Being” that underlies reality (that is, the laws and constants of the universe, as well as energy and matter), and if so, might this be described in terms of creative mind and love, as the mystics and perennial philosophers have suggested, and as some leading quantum theorists and cosmologists assert is at least plausible?

Sir John Templeton (1912–2008) invited us all to ponder what he considered the most significant and bold metaphysical question of them all: Is “Pure Unlimited Love” more than a spiritual energy experienced by countless individuals as transformative? Could it also be a hidden matrix underlying and sustaining all of visible reality? What a strange idea to us modernists for whom the universe has become disenchanted and demystified. Yet great spiritual minds from every religious tradition, even in modernity, assert that beneath the visible surface of reality there is a more Ultimate Reality or Ground of Being that is limitless in its intelligence, creativity and love. Thus, Sir John joined with modern luminaries such as Henri Bergson, Huston Smith, Evelyn Underhill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Howard Thurman, Pitirim Sorokin, and Gandhi in what Aldous Huxley famously termed “the perennial tradition.” Templeton adhered to this metaphysics from youth to his dying days, when he requested that I write a book on Sir John’s behalf, consolidating his ideas, suggesting trajectories of research, and bearing a title he designated—Is Ultimate Reality Unlimited Love? The modern soul is so desperately unable to find adequate meaning in sensate materialism. Perhaps Sir John’s hope for spiritual progress with the eventual convergence of Ultimate Reality and Unlimited Love is at the center of spiritual progress.

Current Guiding Questions

Earlier Framings

Book: Why Good Things Happen to Good People

A Humble Approach—read David Lorimer’s review