The core of the new method of observation

The key to this method, as practiced by Buddhists, is to recognize the inner states which are wholesome, and then to move toward those phenomena in the inner and outer world which cause or tend to create this state of wholesomeness in the observer and in which wholesomeness is considered to be the most important and most fundamental internal condition.

The idea is that our feeling is not merely a subjective and changing thing, but that it itself is a reliable instrument — and that the condition, or state of this feeling, is a source of objective truth.

It is, in the end, this measuring technique that provides one mainstay of the claim that degree of life is an empirically observable quality in the world.

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/9 Beyond Descartes: A new form of scientific observation#