Ihave decided to begin this book about theliberation fromignorance, violence and suffering with American Pragmatic Philosophy and the human predicament. The phrasehuman predicamentexists everywhere human beings are born, live and die, in cyclic nature and existence. Change is universal in nature and existence since it is synonymous with motion—from the movements of subatomic particles in all forms, to the movements of the stars, galaxies and the universe. If anything is eternal or unchanging,we can only sense itfrom our limited point-of-view since we are mortal and finitebeings.

No one knows for certain why there is something rather than nothing or how the universe actually began and evolved. But we do have myths, theories and hypotheses that are the result of intuition and the interpretation of incomplete data.

Knowledge is something very special and unique among humans; and although other animals have knowledge essential for survival, breeding and caring for their species, their knowledge is not as complex, technical or abstract as our own; but then what do we really know about other animals and the working of their minds? We know that other animals, once domesticated, are very loyal to their owners and have an instinctive empathy for the emotions of their owners. But unless we have learned the nonverbal cues and unspoken languages of our loyal pets we cannot really communicate with them in the ways that we can with each other.

The structures and functions of our body and mind are hugely complex and inscrutable. We each live in our own sense and experience of an infinitely greater world; yet we each create our meaning and feeling of the world from thefirst-person point-of-viewor perspective. In philosophy,phenomenologyis the theory of consciousness or the view we each create our own sense of the world through the processes and acts of the body, mind and soul. Unifying feeling or experience of the world is the structure and function of consciousness; and the maxim thatconsciousness is always a consciousness of somethingin nature and realworld.

Yet William James—one of three classical American Pragmatists—has written:“no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever unacceptable.”It is a realization that most serious students of philosophy realize early in their study of human experience, knowledge and meaning. (1)

We are born in our skin, the living boundary of our bodies, and live out our days and years to our inevitable ending in the same, aging skin—in solitude. Whether we live for fifty or a hundred years, ‘aging, sickness and death’ is the unavoidable destiny that we will all experience. No philosophy, science or society can change our fate as a living organism; aging is inevitable, sickness is inevitable, and death is inevitable. Yet there is