'The Non-Personal Universe of Being'

In what appears today a divided and unmoored world, in which religion is relied upon less and less to give guidance, "a substantial and rising share of the [USA] public (27% in 2017, up from 19% in 2012) call themselves spiritual but not religious" (Pew Research Center, 2017). What can these people do in such situation? Where can they turn to? In this small book a like-minded fellow traveler shares his reflections on how to confront these troubling times without a personal God and attempts to provide not only a coherent intellectual framework, but also consequent, general ethical guidelines, both based on the novel idea of the non-personal Universe of Being. This booklet is a reworking for a larger audience of separate articles dealing with various aspects of it. Four of them have been published in peer reviewed journals of philosophy and spirituality and one is new. Except for one chapter, the work is "philosophical" only in the very general sense of philosophy as "love of wisdom". It is better seen as an extended personal meditation, supported by philosophical ideas acquired during years of reading from many diverse sources. Paramount, however, is the influence of the great American psychologist, William James, with his The varieties of religious experience, and of one of the foremost neo-Thomistic philosophers of the last century, Jacques Maritain. Glauco Frizzera, M.D. is a retired academic pathologist (formerly at the University of Minnesota, New York University, the Weill Cornell Medical College, as well as the AFIP). In retirement, he has been looking for answers to essential questions about the human condition, first from a Catholic perspective, then from that of a 'spiritual but not religious' person. He believes he has found a reasonable, coherent and useful response to many of them in the central idea expounded here.

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