If metaphysics deals with existence and reality, epistemology is the study of knowledge about reality and existence. Epistemology and ethics are mutually dependent. On these also depend politics, choices in the field of force and power, and aesthetics, the study of art and sense of life.

Metaphysics is not reduced to logic: it deals with paradox and inversion. Art and creative action illustrate this most clearly. What we seek to do in search of happiness is precisely what is sure to bring despair.

1. Our experience of the world is in terms of memories. Some of these assume iconic power after we have embellished them in the theater of the mind, and they become the scaffolding for the construction of our own personal reality in which things are glued together by hopes and dreams. This is a reality that is tantalizingly close to coming crashing down any moment for it runs into conflict with other realities. But the interplay of these realities has its own logic that becomes apparent when one moves beyond appearances to relationships and patterns of change.

2. Patterns repeat across space, time, scale and fields. Recursion is an expression of the fundamental laws of nature, and it is to be seen both at the physical and the abstract levels as also across relational entities. Recursionism provides a way of knowing since it helps us to find meaning by a shift in perspective and by abstraction.

3. Recursionism refers not only to replicated form but also to nesting. It emerges out of the same elements combining repeatedly at different levels. It encompasses form and function.

4. Recursionism explains why similar ideas of beauty and power appeal across species. The dance of the peacock attracts not only the peahen but also the human. Animal displays have universal significance.

5. Art is the creation of archetypal patterns. Since the structure of natural patterns is concealed by the chaos of the surface forms, good art mimics the concealment and recursion. In performance, poetry, and narrative, meaning is best communicated by suggestion.

6. The nature of cognitive systems is determined by the underlying biology. Therefore, biological forms are fundamental to art and social organization.

7. Shapes repeat within biological structures, and they are replicated in artificial forms such as dresses, toys, machines, and monuments. The forms that Nature makes are the models for our own creations.

8. Ideas are like organisms. They replicate and die like biological entities. They have similar relationships, and also a generative unity.

9. Recursionism across species implies that our behavioral patterns are determined by biology just like for animals. Freedom is the urge to perform by instinct; it is the urge to find harmony.

10. Language – both in the inner and social discourse – opens up new worlds of possibilities, spawning whole universes within. This brings together opposites, together with their unique tension.

11. Animals have the same spectrum of emotions that humans possess. It is through the lens of emotion that we communicate with animals. Cognitive categories come in wholes!

12. Each organism makes sense of the world within its field of activity. Our pet, an Australian cockatiel, has lived with us for over eleven years. One would think that living in a totally alien environment would confuse the bird, but he has special relationships with different members of the family, and unique rituals related to play and ownership. The bird and the humans understand each other at various emotional levels because of the common recursively expressed structure.

13. Humans' ability to communicate with each other is a consequence of recursionism, even though each person's experience is unique and different from that of other people.

14. Recursionism is the explanation why in an ant colony the castes adjust their populations to maintain definite proportions.

15. Continuing conflict in society mirrors the interplay of oppositions in physical and biological worlds.

16. As animals, humans live their lives according to some specific script, derived from one of many religious or social ideologies.

17. Freedom is the capacity to choose one of the ideologies, although one becomes a prisoner as soon as one has made the choice. Creativity is the capacity to jump across the ideologies to connect to the archetypal patterns of existence and appearance.

18. Recursionism is also at work across space, time, function, and form for processes of generation and transition.

19. Unity exists at different levels of manifestation. Order becomes apparent in the background of chaos when we identify the appropriate scale on which the phenomenon is projected.

20. Globalization is a recursionist process that is transforming the world system into an organism with components that have extreme specialization.