Human History and Worldview

¶ … worldview is a schema that includes values, beliefs, and principles that shape one's vision of reality. As such, a worldview is a lens through which the world is viewed. Personal experience, background, culture, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, education, the media, and a wealth of other variables shape worldviews. My personal worldview has likewise been shaped by my personal experiences, and continues to change as I encounter new ideas and ways of viewing the nature of reality.

There are seven core aspects of a worldview, including the nature of prime reality, the nature of the manifest reality around us, the nature of a human being, concepts of life after death, theories of knowledge and consciousness or epistemology, ethics or ethical reasoning, and finally, the meaning of human history. A worldview is connected with personal identity, and my attitudes toward spirituality also influence my worldview. Frameworks of understanding both spirituality and worldview include pluralism, in which multiple perspectives are given equal ethical weight or credibility.

Scientism stresses the importance of empiricism and rationality when making ethical judgments or assessments, particularly with regard to epistemology. As Cobern (2005) points out, scientism and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. Postmodernism is a broad term that can help a nurse like me to conceptualize my worldview in flexible and relative ways. I believe that experience is contextualized, and that my worldview is inseparable from contextual variables. Everything I experience and the thought processes I have every day are influenced by the historical period and culture in which I live.

The fact that I am writing about my spirituality and worldview suggests that I am from a culture that supports intellectual inquiry into these subject areas, to show the relevance of spirituality on nursing practice. Salladay (2000) claims that a postmodern worldview has led to burgeoning interest in spirituality as being integral to healthcare. Moreover, a postmodern viewpoint recognizes and values diverse perspectives and worldviews. Nurses working within the postmodern framework also foster cross-cultural awareness and understanding to promote responsible patient care.

Because spirituality and alternative and complementary methods of healthcare remain important to patients, they also remain important to me as a nurse. My worldview is also open minded, and I welcome constructive engagement with colleagues and patients whose worldview differs from my own. For me, prime reality, or ultimate reality, is nothingness, as in the Eastern traditions.

I appreciate the concept of nothingness as the nature of prime reality because it gives me comfort to know that the petty stresses of our lives, including fear, anxiety, and illness, are all meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The nature of prime reality is also dynamic, and I believe in the existence of parallel universes because I experience frequent deja vu. The nature of the world around me is meaningful only insofar as we ascribe meaning to that world.

We develop relationships with the people and ideologies that shape our lives, and thereby develop attachments to those ideologies and people. We also become attached to our self-concept, which is why some patients have a hard time accepting their illnesses or their impending deaths if they are in hospice care. The world around us can be viewed in a self-serving way, or it can be viewed as being indistinguishable from the self in a more monistic worldview, which is more akin to my way of thinking.

I believe that human beings are complex, because we are animals for the most part who have evolved brains with the capacity for higher level thinking even beyond reason. Our contemplation of space and time show that we also have the capacity to move beyond our own limitations. I believe in a microcosm/macrocosm cosmology in which the human being reflects the divine. After death, I do not pretend to know what happens.

I would like to believe that nothing at all happens, because the belief in heaven or hell generates fear in people. Instead of fear of death, we should welcome death as relief from the suffering of life. We should do our best to die consciously so that we can enjoy the transition to a new state of consciousness, if that is what happens, or to the obliteration of consciousness and the liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

It is, however, impossible to know exactly what happens after death, which is why my epistemological standpoint is scientific and empirical in nature. I do believe that reason, science, and facts are the only real means we can be assured of truth in our mundane world, but also that intuition and supernatural methods of knowledge assessment are meaningful for understanding the nature of reality beyond the mundane world. It is possible for us to know things when we develop a shared reality, as knowledge is created collectively.

Knowing right versus wrong is too often mistaken for rigid moral rules informed by religion or society. It is possible to know right.