In the Hours of Being we actively try to search out and discover the existential choices that will allow us to live authentically. The goal of the Hours of Being is to help people access their agency and freedom to make skillful, good faith existential choices that are more likely  to be  authentic to themselves, and which will empower them on their journey of manifesting their authentic self.

We make existential choices all the time, but we mostly do not articulate to ourselves the nature of our existential choices. An existential choice is our decision to determine what we believe about the shape and nature of reality and what makes sense to us because of those beliefs. Our beliefs are constructions we make to guide us through life and to decide what matters to us.

To artfully and skilfully make an existential choice, it is necessary to contemplate the objective and absolute qualities of reality. The objective and absolute qualities of reality describe the forces that universally influence us and determine our existence. The objective and absolute qualities of reality to which we choose to ascribe, determine which existential choices we reasonably and meaningfully can make in good faith. In the Western European cultural context, we typically make a distinction between existential choices that only consider physical matter as real and existential choices that assume that reality includes some sort of metaphysical consciousness or supernatural deity. 

The philosophical school of thought that only takes physical matter into consideration is called Materialism. According to materialism everything is derived from physical matter, even our consciousness and mental states. Within the paradigm of materialism it is believed that experiences like our emotions or our perception solely are created by physical processes, for example our brain chemistry and neural networks. When we philosophically ascribe to materialism we formulate our ethics and logic without reference to any metaphysical or supernatural power or properties. The modern Western European world is mostly organized around the paradigm of secular materialism. In this paradigm an attempt of science, logic, and reason is considered unserious if it is made with reference to any metaphysical or supernatural claims. This is because within a materialist or secular worldview, the metaphysical and supernatural are seen as unscientific, illogical, and unreasonable because they cannot be proven using the scientific methods of this paradigm, which only admits five senses physically observable phenomena as permissible evidence for such proofs. 

The skill and art of making existential choices with reference to the metaphysical and supernatural is however an ancient and far reaching discipline within the many human traditions of thought and spirituality that exist outside secular materialism. The Hours of Being works within this deep discipline, because we recognise that it is possible to access objective knowledge about reality and ourselves through spiritual practice and contemplation, something that Western sciences largely would reject. 

The Hours of Being also acknowledges that our thoughts and intentions impact the physical world around us. Such ideas, that would be common in Eastern traditions 3000 years ago, we in the West only recently came across through the discovery of quantum mechanics. And Western sciences are still trying to reconcile the lessons of quantum mechanics, which tells us that mind and matter are not separate but that they coevolve and influence each other. This indicates that the paradigm of philosophical secular materialism (which the Western sciences and Western philosophy is based on) has significant blindspots, which sets limits on its usefulness in an existential exploration.

With this in mind, it is the opinion of the Hours of Being that people should be careful making existential decisions solely using the modern secular materialist Western thought paradigm, because it lacks the ability to describe or account for basic human experiences and essential natural and spiritual phenomena. Instead, we prefer to include the vast array of human transpersonal cultural knowledge and traditions spanning across cultures and centuries of conversation and practice as valuable information for structuring and guiding existential inquiry.  Indeed these bodies of transpersonal cultural knowledge and tradition are a record of how humans have experimented and explored the aspects of ourselves that a secular materialist framework would never adequately account for: intuition, dreams, interpersonal connections beyond the bounds of physical contact, the power of imagination, the power of narration and meaningmaking, the presence and felt sense of guidance of those who have come before such as ancestors, just to name a few.  

 Of course, the Western science and philosophical Tradition has much to offer but its insights must be integrated with the massive amount of information that humanity knows beyond the bounds of that tradition.

The Hours of Being believes that disciplined spiritual practice and contemplation of the metaphysics that governs our existence is a science, because it seeks to understand and learn about the objective nature of reality without bias or prejudice. In this regard, The Hours of Being is a scientific endeavor because it offers processes of transpersonal transformation that supports people contemplating in a reasonable, disciplined, and skillful manner the objective nature of reality and becoming conscious of the existential choices they reasonably and in good faith can make within this objective view of reality and themselves. The Hours of Being also offers a time and space for people to practice integrating the existential choices that best allows them to live in a correct relationship with objective reality.