describes a quality, activity or function, as separate from (though only, thanks to language, theoretically so) concrete existence. See activity, concrete, existence.

to be contrasted (as abstract) with existence (as concrete). Activity is all that can be created. Activity is experienced as changeability, causality or relation. Existence cannot be created. For the relationship between activity and existence, see Dialogue 1, 'Concrete vs abstract, existence vs activity', p.12. See abstract, concrete, existence.

to experience something outside oneself with the senses, as distinct from internal perception, which relates to conditions in our body, including memory, mediated by the nervous system.

a proposition that neither requires objective proof nor is capable of being objectively proven. An axiom can only be agreed upon or not. See self-evident.

the permanent, existent, living, conscious, invisible, original, non-created reality that is behind creation and is the cause of creation; God's existence, God's 'body', including his conscious parts. See existent, part, creation, consciousness.

particularly, the original cause. Only a subject, a living being, can be an original cause of activity. The living whole, the Being, must be the existent cause of all the activity - what we experience as Nature - in the whole.

Hlatky's hypothesis should be checked against our total subjective, internal and objective, distance-based, external experience of creation. See Dialogue 4, 'Checking Hlatky's hypothesis', p.128. See distance-based, objective, subjective.

the state of mind that children have before their thinking becomes confused by purely language-based ideas. The state of mind, therefore, that arises out of Nature-based thinking. Common sense. What in German is called Vernunft or die gesunde Vernunft. See common sense, language-based, Nature-based.

(as an adjective, 'commonsense') what everyone in common can experience with the senses, mediated by Nature. See Nature, self-evident.

describes existence, and is the opposite of abstract, which describes activity. See abstract, activity, existence.

having the ability to experience, primarily in relation to one's own body through the nervous system, and secondarily the formal experience of other bodies, the whole creation, through the senses. See aware, consciousness, God-consciousness.

the permanent, existent, living, conscious, invisible, original, non-created parts of the only original, non-created whole, God. See the Being, existent.

primarily, the ability to experience, to take things in, and to be moved or touched by what one experiences. Secondarily, it is the ability to act purposefully according to that experience - which requires purposeful thinking, which in turn requires memory of earlier experiences. Not to be confused, therefore, with what one actually experiences, with the contents of consciousness, with the faculty of memory-based thinking itself. Consciousness is the ability to experience that is behind the five senses. It is God's and our original quality. The basic need of the ability to experience is to be understood as like, and thereby loved, by what one experiences as having the same basic quality. See identity, like, love, quality.

the reality that God creates, within himself, out of his need to be understood by his parts, and with which we, the parts, through our created connection to a created body, are able to interact and thereby to have meaningful experience. Creation is technical, ongoing activity, God's activity. Creation is only illusorily existent. See existent, conscious part.

the ability û of Nature or of living beings û to create activity. Either we orientate to what Nature (interpreted as having God behind it) creates, in which case the meaning of human creativity is not problematic; or we relate to what is created by humans as an end in itself, i.e. created by humans in the absence of any consideration of, or in a confusion about, the purpose of Nature's creativity. See activity, Nature.

See Appendix B for a definition of Hlatky's view and other views of what constitutes a dialogue.

based on the illusion of distance that we have in creation, and usually used in reference to objective experience. See objective.

creation experienced as many different things separated by space, rather than as the unitary, indivisible order it must be. See manifold, multiplicity.

the theoretical, language-based division into two of something indivisible. Dualism is on a continuum: monism — dualism — pluralism. Generally used to refer to our experience of creation, where we experience dualism as contradictions, opposites: in terms of presence and absence (such as hot and cold, light and dark, life and death, something and 'nothing') or in terms of polarities (male and female, good and evil, positive charge and negative charge). Hlatky argues that we have to have the idea of the one non-created, indivisible reality, the Being, behind the dualistic reality we experience as creation, and that we can only understand creation as one meaningful order that is flexible on the surface but fundamentally unchangeable. See Being, creation, pluralism.

behaviour based on an understanding of the meaning of creation and our inseparable, common life in creation, as opposed to morals, which are rules for behaviour put forward in an authoritarian way in the absence of ethics.

the conclusion or set of conclusions that each person comes to in their efforts to understand reality, and what they come to value, the judgements they make, as a result of these conclusions.

through human language we are able to 'cover' û that is, describe, give a name to û everything. This enables to us to communicate our experience and memory of every thing so that we can discuss the whole causality. God's purpose in giving us this possibility is that we should use it to arrive at an understanding of him and his purpose with the whole creation û that is, the original cause and meaning of creation û and thereby an understanding of each other. See further definition of the purpose of language in Appendix A.

that which is permanent, unchangeable, non-created, non-creatable, concrete; God's Being including the conscious parts. The absolute existence is invisible and intangible. Its immanent quality is the ability to experience and conscious, purposeful expression, that is, activity, of which only the absolute existence can be the cause. See abstract, activity, axiom, Being, concrete, conscious part(s).

that which appears to our senses as concrete, visible and tangible existence, but which is at the same time found by our senses to be the opposite û impermanent, changeable, created, creatable, abstract û and found in our experience of living beings to be transitory. See abstract, concrete.

permanent, unchangeable, non-created, concrete. Objects in creation are illusorily existent. See concrete, existence.

usually in 'existential needs': needs that are related to the survival of living bodies: light, warmth, air, water, food, movement, reproduction etc. See need.

a form is something we experience from the outside as relatively existing (a cup, a pen, etc). See existence (absolute), existence (relative), Being.

in its form, that is, as seen from the outside, without regard to other qualities.

activity, or cooperating activities.

related to, demonstrating purposeful activity.

the parts', the participants' consciousness of God behind his creation û as interpreted in Hlatky's or some other hypothesis.

from the Latin idem, meaning 'the same'. Identity describes what is the same, what is unchanging about something. To talk of 'changing identity' is therefore a contradiction in terms. Only the Being has an identity: both as an absolute, unchangeable existence, whose essence is the same unchangeable cause, the ability to experience and act, which is the basic quality of life. See Being, consciousness.

purely language-based ideas or thinking: purely theoretical thinking divorced from our total current experience of creation and possible for humans only because of human language. It becomes anchored in language-based memory, what we call 'history', and gives rise to the identification with time and transitoriness. To be distinguished from Nature-based or reality-anchored ideas or thinking, with Nature interpreted as God's expression, God's activity. See Nature-based.

alike, the same as. God and his conscious parts are like in their ability to experience. Arising out of what they experience û God in the Being, the parts in creation û both have the need to be understood as like, and thereby to be loved. Likes cannot be compared with one another: like cannot be compared with like. The idea of like precludes any hierarchy. See love, conscious part.

logic relates to the meaning or purpose of the activity of a living being (as only living beings can have a meaning to their activities). An activity is logical if it meets the need it is intended to meet. Logic could be defined as the meaningful connection of a living being's need with the technical means of satisfying that need: e.g. when I am thirsty, it is logical to have something to drink. See meaning, need.

the basic need of God and of the conscious parts to be understood as likes, which gives rise on God's part to the need to create creation, and on our part to the need to understand and relate meaningfully to creation, on the basis of the natural, bodily needs, which are principally the same for every living being. Love is the feeling that accompanies our understanding that another living being is like us. Such understanding is thus the precondition for love. See need, preference, undivided love.

the same as the multiplicity and the diversity. Oneness experienced as dualism: the manifold and the interaction of it all. Used by Kant: Oxford English Dictionary 'àthe sum of the particulars furnished by sense before they have been unified by the understanding.' See diversity, dualism.

the purpose and the aim of an activity.

describes activity that aims to satisfy a natural need. We feel alienated when we don't know the meaning of a human being's activity, i.e. activities that originate with humans but which do not meet a natural need and which aim to demonstrate unlikeness, 'originality'. Alienation is then our identity, because we don't recognize the meaning of Nature. We want instead to change Nature, out of a view that it is basically random or chaotic. See need, natural.

relate to the ability of humans to acquire knowledge of constructive and destructive causality, independent of any need, and to explore and direct creation, the visible, perishable world with which we have a tangible, objective relationship. A mechanical or mechanistic view of life û which is characteristic of modern science û means a view that excludes the idea that the visible and tangible picture expressed by creation and represented by the manifold has a conscious meaning. See creation, manifold.

See ethics.

the same as the manifold and the diversity. See diversity, manifold.

something we do not know the origin of, and which we cannot therefore explain.

in accordance with Nature's meaning and purpose. See meaning, Nature.

God's activity, creation's inherent quality. See creation.

Nature-based ideas or thinking: ideas or thinking based on our total internal, subjective and external, objective experience of Nature interpreted as God's activity. To be distinguished from 'purely language-based' ideas or thinking. See language-based, objective, subjective.

that which gives rise, on the basis of a living being's experience, to activity. The activity is aimed at fulfilling the need. Here we have to understand the difference between the need for love, the existential needs, and the artificial needs of human beings. The need for love gives rise to God's need to give out creation and it gives rise to the human need to understand, communicate and agree about God's need behind creation. The existential needs are the needs of the body and are principally the same for every living being on Earth, which makes it possible for us to love the other species as likes. Humans' artificial needs can be meaningfully connected to existential needs or can be independent of them. Identification with independent artificial needs makes the experience of natural love problematic. See creation, existential, love, natural.

'what lies in front of' a person. 'Objective experience' is what one experiences outside oneself and is distance-based. To be distinguished from subjective: 'what lies behind or inside'. Both objective and subjective experience must be taken into account, as an indivisible unity, in philosophy. See distance-based, philosophy, subjective.

what is visible or plain to the senses. See self-evident.

as in the organic view of unity, which Hlatky originally called his hypothesis. Organic, referring to the absolute whole, the Being, refers to a living whole, not exactly as in creation, where such a whole is made up of differing living parts organized towards an end, but rather a whole in which there is a distanceless, mutual relationship between the whole and like, living parts. The opposite is the mechanical view of unity, which is based on the idea that the unity is fundamentally non-living. A mechanical unity, a totality, is simply the sum of non-living, similar or dissimilar parts, without a mutual relationship between the whole and the parts. See mechanical, totality, whole.

'whole' and 'parts' are two indivisible sides of the same thing. The term 'whole' presumes parts, and the term 'part' presumes a whole, and both presume a meaningful relation between the whole and its parts. See whole, conscious part(s).

relates basically to the question of the original cause of creation, as a precondition for understanding creation's meaning. It is based on axioms and is different from the thinking required to understand causality û cause and effect û within creation. See axiom, creation, meaning.

is concerned solely with understanding the original cause and meaning of creation. See meaning.

the view that there are many causes of what we experience in creation, and not a single original cause. The belief, for example, that what we experience as matter in creation is the cause implies in practice a belief in an endless number of causes, that is, absolute pluralism. See dualism.

unavoidable, since creation offers us more than one way to satisfy some of our needs, but not to be regarded as the basis for love. But in the absence of love for the whole creation û that is, if we don't love God for his creation û we have to choose between what we prefer and what we do not prefer. We then experience what we prefer as a salvation from the negative feeling we have basically for creation, and we confuse it with love. We are then identified with our preferences and can never get rid of the basic negative feeling. See needs, undivided love.

is equivalent to the soul. It is the sum of evaluations of causality within creation, which we build up during our life with the help of our memory û through thinking steered by our common, natural needs and our personal, artificial needs û and which underlies the behaviour patterns we display. See need.

property, capacity, nature, characteristic. A quality cannot be experienced objectively, as something in itself separate from the object that expresses the quality. The basic quality of God and his parts is the ability to experience. See consciousness.

either the original reality, or the reality that we experience day to day, that is, creation û as specified. 'The whole reality' refers to both these together. See creation.

reality-anchored thinking is thinking anchored in reality û and not purely in memory, i.e. in time û in the same sense as 'thinking anchored in Nature'. To be distinguished from 'purely language-based thinking'. See language-based, Nature-based.

axiomatic, not requiring nor being capable of objective proof or of argumentation, because it describes something that is evident only to the self, through immediate experience. It relates to common sense, since self-evident describes what is common û internally/subjectively and externally/objectively û to everyone. 'Obvious', by contrast, relates to what we perceive outside ourselves. See axiom, common sense, objective, obvious, subjective.

See psyche.

'subjective experience' is experience of being conscious and experience of our body, including our memory and psyche, mediated by the nervous system. It is immediate and direct, whereas 'objective experience' is distance-based. See distance-based, objective, psyche.

See mechanical.

something that is the sum of its (non-living) parts. See whole.

love for the whole creation, that is, not fundamentally dividing creation into good and bad, lovable and not-lovable. This still leaves room for preferences, which are a practical necessity. See predilection/preference.