The Three Windows Model pt. 2

~ opening the windows ~

Part 2 brings the Three Windows fully into view ~ what each reveals, what each conceals, and why keeping their boundaries clear matters. These sections show how Naturalism anchors the entire framework, letting meaning deepen without distortion and letting mystery breathe without becoming machinery. This is the ethos of the model in practice: clarity without reduction & wonder without illusion.

III. The Three Windows

The Three Windows are not theories, and they’re not competing worldviews. They’re simply three ways the human mind makes sense of reality; three modes of seeing that appear across every culture, every era, every tradition. We move among them constantly, often without realizing it. The problem arises only when we forget which window we’re looking through, or worse, when one window impersonates another.

Each window reveals something essential. Each window conceals something as well. And knowing the difference has saved me from more confusion than any metaphysical argument ever could.

1. The Physical-Natural Window

This is the ground floor of knowing ~ the world that shows itself without needing to be believed. Breath, sensation, anatomy & physiology, biomechanics, ecology, weather, gravity, rhythm, fatigue, recovery: the things that do not ask for our agreement. The body-mind belongs to this window, because it is made of the same materials, pressures, and processes that shape the rest of the natural world. It is not separate from nature; it is one of nature’s expressions.

Through this window, knowledge begins with what is observable, testable, repeatable, or at the very least directly experienceable without interpretation layered on top. A breath is a breath. A pulse is a pulse. A shifting of weight in taijiquan is the mechanical intelligence of the body responding to pressure and change. A quiet mind during meditation is a nervous system entering a highly regulated state. These phenomena do not need supernatural scaffolding to be meaningful. They are meaningful already.

This window anchors everything else. If something doesn’t make sense here — in the body, in the world, in the tangible — then whatever metaphysics grows from it will be untethered. Meaning without ground becomes fantasy; practice without ground becomes theater.

I begin here not out of ideological commitment, but because reality begins here ~ including the vast unknown.

2. The Philosophical-Metaphysical Window

If the physical–natural window shows us what is happening, the philosophical–metaphysical window helps us understand what it means. This is where pattern, orientation, and conceptual grammar live ~ the realm where we interpret experience rather than simply observe it. Here, yin & yang become ways of describing complementary tendencies, qi becomes a name for coherence rather than a vital force, and dao becomes the unfolding pattern of things rather than a cosmic command.

To avoid confusion, let me clarify how I use the word metaphysics. Aristotle never titled a book Metaphysics. His editor, Andronicus of Rhodes, simply placed a set of Aristotle’s writings after the Physics — τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά — “the things after the physical.” In its original sense, metaphysics wasn’t a catalogue of supernatural realms. It was an inquiry into orientation: the principles, categories, and patterns that help us interpret life.

That is how I use it. Not as a claim about what exists behind the world, but as a grammar for understanding the world we participate in. A way of articulating coherence, not inventing cosmic architecture.

Through this window, philosophy becomes a tool of meaning-making: how we understand change, rhythm, process, emergence, complementarity, and the shape of lived experience. But it also gives us a way to make sense of our ‘inner weather’— to understand what our feelings point to, how our deeper intuitions take shape, and how reflection clarifies the contours of the self. These are the classical tools of contemplation and meditation, where sensation and insight meet and show us the subtle architecture of our inner life. These ideas do not attempt to describe the universe’s furniture; they show us how to navigate our own lives within it.

When metaphysics is grounded in the physical–natural world, it grows organically out of practice and observation. It clarifies experience without distorting it. And it gives us a language for approaching the unknown without surrendering to superstition ~ a way to hold mystery with humility, rather than fill it with imagination disguised as fact. It deepens meaning without pretending to offer evidence. It acts as a bridge between embodiment and story ~ neither literal nor fantastical, but reflective ~ an honest way of exploring what we do not yet understand while still standing firm on the ground of what we do.

This window guards against two extremes: reducing everything to mechanics, and inflating everything to mysticism. It is the middle way ~ the space where meaning has depth without demanding belief, and where philosophy remains honest because it knows its proper scope.

3. The Supernatural-Mythic Window

If the physical–natural window grounds us in what is real, and the philosophical–metaphysical window helps us understand what experience means, the supernatural–mythic window is where we turn toward what neither of those can reach: the deep mystery of existence. This is the realm of story, symbol, ritual, imagination, gods, ancestors, heavens and underworlds, neidan and tantra, inner journeys and celestial sagas— all the mythic architectures humans have created to speak about the ungraspable.

Every culture has a mythic grammar. It is not an accident. And while “meta-physical” and “supra-natural” can technically point to the same territory — one Greek, one Latin — I use supernatural in its contemporary sense, to mean claims about unseen agencies or cosmic machinery, not the reflective work of meaning that belongs to metaphysics. Myth gives voice to the parts of life that refuse to be reduced to measurement or concept alone: the weight of loss, the strangeness of fate, the awe of nature, the reality of death, the terror and beauty of change. Myth lets us feel truth in a way that analysis cannot. It dramatizes the existential terrain, placing our human struggles into stories large enough to hold them.

As the mythic storyteller, Joseph Campbell, taught me at an early age,

“Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.”

— The Power of Myth

Myth is not there to describe the universe. It is there to reveal something about us. This is why myth endures ~ not because myth is literal, but because the unknown is real.

Through this window, the cosmos becomes a story you can walk into. Neidan — the Daoist “inner elixir” traditions often referred to as “inner alchemy” — functions very much like the tantric practices of Vajrayana Buddhism: symbolic, imagistic, and psychophysical methods that dramatize processes of inner transformation. Spirit journeys express psychological change; immortals embody aspiration; deities reveal archetypal forces; rituals choreograph meaning. None of these are blueprints of the cosmos. They are expressions of the human need to shape mystery into narrative.

The danger arises only when the symbolic is mistaken for the structural: when myth is treated as anatomy, when allegory is treated as physics, or when a story about transformation is taken as a manual for supernatural machinery. This is where confusion turns into harm: in religion, in spirituality, in wellness culture, in contemporary Daoist circles, and in the world of inner alchemy— anywhere myth is literalized and then wielded as evidence, authority, or moral command.

Held properly, this window is not a problem at all. It is one of humanity’s great achievements.

Myth teaches in a register that the body cannot speak and reason cannot contain. It gives shape to the wonder of being alive, to the enormity of the unknown, and to the longing we carry for coherence in a world that does not come with instructions. Mystery is not the enemy of clarity. Myth is how the humans live with mystery without needing to reduce it to fact.

The supernatural–mythic window is where meaning breathes on the far side of knowledge. Its value is symbolic, emotional, imaginative, and existential— not ontological! It speaks to the depth of our humanity, not to the structure of the cosmos.

And when it stays in its proper window, it enriches the whole view.

IV. The Ground of Naturalism

Naturalism is the anchor of the Three Windows Model ~ the quiet stabilizing force that keeps the entire framework oriented toward reality as it shows itself. Before we speak of meaning or myth, we return to the body-mind, to perception, to the simple fact that experience arises here, in this organism moving through a living world. This is where the early old school daoists began. They trusted what could be felt, tested, and lived. They placed practice before speculation and they took the patterns of nature as their teacher.

Naturalism, in this sense, is not a doctrine but a discipline: the commitment to begin with what is present, not with what we wish to believe. It is a humility of method and it keeps our feet on the ground.

Most misunderstandings in cultivation arise when this order is reversed— when metaphysics is allowed to determine experience, or myth is mistaken for mechanism. Without Naturalism, the windows collapse into one another. The philosophical becomes supernatural; the symbolic becomes literal; the body becomes an afterthought. The ground of Naturalism prevents this. It establishes a clear starting point: begin where you stand, in the felt and observable world, and let everything else follow from that.

This is not reductive materialism. The naturalist does not shrink the world; they let it reveal itself. The refusal to make claims one cannot support is not a denial of wonder— it is what protects wonder from becoming delusion. I like to think of myself as a student of what I call the Carl Sagan School of Spirituality: a spirituality of reality, of awe sharpened by honesty. As Sagan once wrote,

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality;

it is a profound source of spirituality.”

— The Demon-Haunted World

Myth He never rejected the spiritual; he rejected only the urge to explain mystery with mythology. What remains, when we look without distortion, is reverence for a universe that needs no embellishment. And in Sagan’s famous cosmic observation that “we are made of star-stuff,” I hear the deepest unitive truth of all. What could be more humbling, or more connecting, than realizing that everything we are was once the heart of a star?

Naturalism, in this fuller sense, includes the unitive dimension of experience. Spirituality need not invoke the supernatural. It can simply name the felt sense of belonging that arises when our inner life aligns with the larger patterns of existence. A spiritual moment can be small ~ a shared meal, a quiet presence among friends ~ or vast, like standing beneath a night sky and feeling yourself woven into everything around you. From this unitive ground, ethical life emerges naturally— not from commandments but from connection. When we feel embedded into the world, responsibility becomes instinctive.

The old school daoists knew this well. Their writings treat the body as an ecosystem, the mind as patterned movement, the person as a node within a larger field of relations. The Neiye describes cultivation as learning to harmonize with the “patterns of heaven and earth,” not by invoking the supernatural, but by refining sensitivity to the pulsing rhythms that shape all living things. This is Naturalism as practice ~ aligning breath, posture, attention, and conduct with the dynamics of the Cosmos itself.

From the standpoint of complexity, this makes perfect sense. The body–mind is a living system: adaptive, recursive, relational. Coherence emerges from interaction, not isolation. Breath, alignment, and relaxation are not esoteric techniques; they are simple rules that allow a complex organism to self-organize more effectively. Naturalism is what lets us see this clearly. It keeps practice grounded in what actually changes us.

Most importantly, Naturalism protects the Three Windows from distortion. It prevents us from treating metaphor as mechanism or philosophy as astronomy. It allows the symbolic to inspire without misleading, the philosophical to guide without overreaching, and the bodily to teach without being ignored. It ensures that each window does its proper work.

This is why Naturalism forms the quiet axis of the model ~ the still point around which the three windows turn. It is not the most glamorous part, but it is the most necessary. It keeps the entire structure honest. It reminds us that cultivation begins in the real, that meaning grows from participation, and that whatever else we believe or imagine must remain accountable to how the world actually is. Nothing is lost by doing so. If anything, the world becomes more intimate, more astonishing, and more alive.

It is from this ground ~ the ground of Naturalism ~ that the Three Windows can best do their work. Only when we stand firmly here can we distinguish experience from interpretation, interpretation from symbol, and symbol from belief. And only from here can we begin to walk the old school dao: a way rooted in the real, open to meaning, and spacious enough to let mystery breathe.

V. Closing ~ keeping the windows clean ~

The Three Windows Model isn’t meant to replace anyone’s worldview, and it isn’t offered as a hierarchy or a new doctrine. I didn’t build it to tell anyone what to believe. I built it to keep my own metaphysics honest— to make sure the meanings I draw from practice stay grounded in the natural world rather than drifting into the supernatural. Earlier in this essay I named the distinction that became my compass: the gap between what we experience and what we conclude from experience. The same goes for the question that has shaped my own path: whether my metaphysics grows from the natural or the supernatural. The closing task of the model is simply to keep those distinctions alive.

That’s what the windows are for: to keep different modes of knowing from smudging together, and to remind me that each reveals something essential and conceals something as well. Most of the confusion I’ve seen in body–mind traditions comes from forgetting this— treating a sensation as evidence, a metaphor as mechanism, a myth as physics, or a philosophical insight as revelation. When the windows stay clear, experience stays honest, meaning stays grounded, and mystery stays spacious. That is the old school dao in practice.

Very little of this confusion comes from bad intent. It comes from blur— from the moment an intense experience is mistaken for a cosmic fact, or when a conceptual insight is inflated beyond its scope. And on the other side, entire lineages of wisdom get dismissed because a skeptic cannot sit comfortably with metaphor, symbol, or ambiguity. The windows are not broken; they are simply dusty enough that everything reflects everything else.

Keeping them clean means remembering that each window is for something different.
The physical–natural window shows what is happening in the world that does not depend on belief.
The philosophical–metaphysical window helps us understand what experience means and how it fits into a life.
And the supernatural–mythic window gives form to what cannot be measured — the stories, symbols, and imaginal architectures that help us live with mystery rather than collapse under it.

When the windows are kept to their proper work, nothing needs to impersonate anything else. Meaning keeps its depth without demanding belief. Myth keeps its beauty without pretending to be fact. Experience stays real without becoming revelation. Everything becomes easier to understand because it is finally allowed to be what it is.

This clarity is not merely intellectual. It is a form of care ~ for ourselves, for our students and clients, for the traditions we carry, and for the people who trust us with their learning. Clean windows protect us from confusion and protect others from the accidental authority we sometimes wield without realizing it. They keep our work grounded, and they keep our relationships honest.

More importantly, clean windows let wonder remain luminous without slipping into illusion. They allow us to honor mystery without needing to dress it in cosmology or force it into an ontological claim. They help us stay rooted in what is real while still letting meaning breathe.

I didn’t build this model to win arguments or settle debates. I built it so I could stay honest in my own practice ~ so the body-mind could teach what it teaches, philosophy could clarify without overreaching, and myth could inspire without misleading.

So my invitation is simple:

Use the windows. Keep them clean. Notice which one you’re looking through.
Let each reveal what it reveals and conceal what it conceals.

If you can hold that much ~ if you can let the world show itself without forcing it into more or less than it is ~ then you will already be walking the old school dao ~