Understanding Reality

'Note To Humanity It is time we as a species examine our true purpose for existing in earnest. Establishing the understanding and simply stating a belief, the belief that our inalienable rights were endowed by the Creator, are two entirely different things. What is different is the approach. For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, isolated pockets of humanity have professed the altruistic belief that individual rights are endowed by our Creator. The idea of human rights being endowed by the Creator of the physical universe was always based upon an intuitive sense. The esoteric means by which a few select individual could understand the rationale for such an altruistic belief was little understood by most people. As a species we have never focused upon building a rational model supporting the idea ... Society has not recognized the means of establishing the rationale for such rights.This book, Understanding Reality, rectifies the problem One might argue there is more than one possible means by which a rationale demonstrating the concept of individual rights being endowed by The Creator as opposed to the concept of individual’s rights being endowed by individuals can be demonstrated. It is difficult, however, to conceive of a more potent tool than a rational model, graphics, demonstrating the fact. Building a simple model of reality, building a cross sectional two-dimensional drawing of the whole of reality begins with the use of four perceptual tools available to our species, namely: observation- science, rational dialectics - philosophy, universal teachings - religion and a universal language - mathematics. We, humans, are visual creatures and as such a drawing, a picture, of reality helps us understand the composition of reality, understand reality itself. A model of reality gives us a picture demonstrating where we as individuals stand in reality, which in turn leads us to understand our true essence. It is the understanding of our true nature, which then leads us to understand why we exist which in turn leads to the rational understanding regarding the significance of individual and regarding who or what granted us our individual rights. If our rights were endowed to us by other physical beings, be they human or otherwise, then said rights can rationally be ungifted by those that gifted them. If, however, The Creator of the physical universe endowed our individual rights, then only the Creator can rationally remove them. So it is the war between the secularists and the theists rages and the secularists, at this point in time, are winning. We are a species, which is losing its way. Humanity is at the beginning of a new millennium and as a species we are standing at a fork in the road, where ‘two roads diverged in a wood’. We are standing at the crossroads of humanity’s journey into the third millennium and the beginning of our becoming space travelers, and we as a species have yet to make a decision as to which road to take. Are we spiritual beings or are we physical beings? One fork in the road says we are physical beings located in a physical universe. This appears to be the road most traveled by our species in our present day and age. If present day individuals, however, look far out into the distance, they will clearly see their present path leads to the oblivion of individual rights, of human values and of human freedom. Relative truth is gradually replacing the concept of absolute truth as humanity bends to the pressures of secularism. The other path emerging from the fork in the road, diverges from humanity’s present trend and involves change, involves refocusing upon the primary message of universal teachings and as such this road is full of apprehension of the unknown, fear of what is to come after death, dread of being responsible for things we’ve done and things we should have done but didn’t do. ...' Daniel J. Shepard Metaphysicist

Mathematics/Science Undergraduate degree - University of Michigan Master's degree in Physical Science - Eastern Michigan University 30 years teaching mathematics & science 20 years science and/or mathematics department chair I’m not sure if I became a philosophical thinker because I was a depressant or if I became a depressant because I was a philosophical thinker. Whichever the case, I am both. To make matters even stranger I am an optimistic depressant philosophical thinker. Actually it might be more accurate of me to state that I am an optimistic depressant philosophical thinking metaphysicist. But how did metaphysics enter the picture? During my early teens I began questioning what was ‘out there beyond ...’ Over time this thinking sequentially lead to ‘beyond the stars’, ‘beyond the galaxy’, 'beyond time and space' until I came to the end of the physical universe itself. Once I had reached this 'outer wall' of the physical universe. I could not help but mentally poke a hole in this wall. Having created a hole in the outer wall of the physical, I peered through the hole only to see nothing. At this point I was mesmerized with questions that forever haunted me: What is this nothingness on the ‘outside’ of the physical universe? What is the physical universe immersed within? What is out there? What are the characteristics of this existence outside the universe? What does this outside of the universe have to do with us, with myself, with God Itself? The questions became cruelly unrelenting and overpoweringly dominating of my very psyche. With time and the use of humanity’s four perceptual tools (observation – science, universal teachings – religions, rational dialectics – philosophy and universal language – mathematics) the answers began to reveal themselves. The answers came not in terms of a bias on the part of one tool as opposed to another but in terms of all four tools agreeing with each other. The biggest hurdles to the work came in the form of cynicism, skepticism, closed minds and most of all in the form of the words, ‘can’t’, ‘its impossible to know’, ‘humankind is not intended to understand’, ‘prove it’. In all good conscience, it must be stated, ‘We cannot prove anything beyond all doubt ...’ Having stated the obvious, we can then move on to state: ‘... but we can ‘prove beyond a reasonable doubt.‘ So it is a new model of reality emerged capable of leading our species into the new age of the third millennium.