The initial problem that initiated this project arose from the observation that the local paradigm, as it was being lived in the American deep South in the last half of the twentieth century, did not educe humanness but in fact appeared to interdict it. The term humanness is defined here as the full-flowering of one's human potential through the attaining of her logical purpose (i.e., final cause, function, principle gift) and the ensuing eudaemonia that arises when such a "mode of attaining" is achieved. Eudaemonia is Aristotle's word for "happiness" of a form that can only be actualized through the fulfilling of one's function. It has become clear that the determination of one's function, or principle gift, can only be discerned through rigorous investigations into and deliberate acting upon her deepest, innermost predilections.

With this project, I was able to find and traverse a replicable path to humanness through an immersion into the forest ecosystems of south Mississippi, conducted with the purpose of discerning "clues" enfolded within the "way of nature," clues that slowly informed me on how to live a life steeped in humanness. From those clues and patterns, a cosmology was created, one wedded to the scientific cosmogenesis, one that undergirds a fully-human ontology and educes eudaemonia.

The methodology of this project was organic; it evolved as I evolved. I began the process by determining paradigmatic assumptions of the local paradigm that seemed to interdict the educing of humanness. Next, I developed a working cosmological model that might educe humanness, one that I developed through observation, reflection, and insight. This was followed by a move into nature where I immersed myself in a phenomenology of nature so that I might come to know her in a profoundly human way by integrating noosgnosis (mind-knowing) with somagnosis (body-knowing) and kardiognosis (heart/soul-knowing). Taking the insights gleaned from this phenomenology, I recapitulated, described, and explained the process and the insights vis-à-vis the body of Western knowledge seeking universal patterns congruent to what I consider to be a human ontology. Finally, I developed a cosmology that elucidated how those universal patterns could have come into being in light of what we know about the scientific cosmogenesis. Principle insights in the cosmology include the insight that human beings are profoundly related to all other beings and the insight that the universe is a responsive universe. As I respond, it responds.