• What is the Goal of WoK?
• Who are we?
• What can you find here?
• How can you participate?

We want to provide a forum for considering the difference between knowing and seeing. For example, someone can say "it's a nice day today", just by looking at the blue sky and the sun shining. But if that same person later suffers a near-fatal disease or accident, recovers, and then walks out for the first time and says "it's a nice day today", there is something extra, something different. It is not just a matter of knowledge as information, or of emotion, but rather a matter of being more fully appreciative of what life is. This is a direct-seeing type of knowledge, something in which the whole human being participates.

To give other examples: a mathematician seeing through a complex question, a physicist hitting upon a new way to model an experimental situation, a craftsman seeing and judging the quality of a tool or product, an experienced mediator sizing up the qualitiy of the many lines of tension in a conflict situation, a magician seeing through the deception provided by one of his colleagues.

There are two ways in which we invite you to explore this seeing/knowing difference. One way involves a personal engagement in a critical investigation of the role of direct seeing in science and in other investigations of reality. Another way is more applied, in asking the question of how direct seeing relates to a variety of fields of human endeavor, such as ecology, education, medicine, policy making, and even science itself. On this web site, we want to provide a resource center to explore these themes.

Piet Hut is an astrophysicist and the director of the Program for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His interests range from (astro)physics and other natural sciences to computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy. While most of his published work is in the field of his specialty, computational astrophysics, he has also made contributions to various interdisciplinary forums. In addition, Piet has helped start several initiatives, such as the B612 Foundation, which aims at significantly altering the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015; MODEST, short for MOdeling DEnse STellar systems; and the Art of Computational Science, which widens the notion of `open source' to `open knowledge' and `open lab.'

Steven Tainer is a logician, philosopher and teacher of Eastern contemplative traditions, which he has studied intensively since 1970 with many Tibetan, Chinese and Korean masters. After practicing for a number of years in both mountain retreats and in (non-?) ordinary circumstances such as Silicon Valley, he began offering a range of meditation and internal yogic teachings and retreats to public groups. He also serves on the faculty of the Institute for World Religions in Berkeley, CA. His specialties are Indian Buddhist philosophy, the "Unity of the Three Traditions" in Chinese thought, Taoist yogic practice, and Ch'an contemplation. Working on behalf of his teachers, Steven is the coauthor or editor of over eighteen books on Buddhism and Taoism (including Dragon's Play, and Time, Space, Knowledge).

WoK will:

• present regular refinements of our views regarding different ways of knowing, with particular emphasis on challenges to a rapprochement between scientific and contemplative knowledge.
• provide access to our personal dialogues on the subject of how a high-level understanding of contemplative knowledge compares with both present-day and future forms of science. Edited transcripts of some portions of these dialogues will be presented on the site, and for each main set, a summary will be offered of how we each understood what emerged, progress and changes in our understanding, and issues to be further addressed or resolved. In conjunction with these summaries, we will post other short pieces designed to provide quick access to the main points of our work.
• offer digests of relevant news in public debates, culled from major journals, conferences, and newspapers.
• feature one-on-one interviews with a wide range of specialists in addition to scientists and contemplatives (mathematicians, philosophers, historians and other scholars, policy makers, educators and health providers), whose positions bear centrally on our main areas of concern.
• post a series of questions devised to elicit discussion on important and controversial aspects of "ways of knowing," along with responses submitted by selected experts in the above-mentioned fields.
• post readers' email ("letters").
  
• review of books and journal articles.
• list other relevant sites, books and sources.

In addition to simply accessing the WoK site, you may subscribe to a bi-monthly email distribution list providing the WoK site's latest content changes and additions, and news concerning WoK-related public events. You may also email WoK's editor with questions, suggestions and comments. WoK appreciates such feedback and will endeavor to take it into account. Finally, WoK will eventually offer a "Letters" column, so you may email a candidate submission if you wish. Please note, however, that WoK will only use submissions that have been approved by the Editor as having special relevance to WoK's primary interests, and does not guarantee that every emailed "Letter" will be posted. Links for both subscribing to the distribution list and emailing feedback and letters will be added and enabled as soon as our first few main content pieces have been posted.