The Phoenix of Metaphysics (Part 1)

So I'd like to talk, as I said in the introductory talk of this series, I'd like to talk a little bit, again, about metaphysics -- really, ontology and epistemology. Ontology, loosely speaking, is a philosophical term for the kind of exploration or study of the philosophy of, "What is actually real, and what is not real?" And epistemology is the philosophical term for the exploration of, "How do we know?" How do we know what's real or not real? What kind of knowledge -- about the world, about ourselves, about anything -- can we trust? What constitutes knowledge, and what does not constitute knowledge? So those two areas -- ontology and epistemology -- are intimately woven together. They kind of really imply each other, and traditionally they form part of what's called 'metaphysics.'

So I've talked about this a fair amount, you know, woven into the -- well, certainly the emptiness teachings over the years, but then also woven into the soulmaking teachings. Perhaps slightly different openings into the territory tonight. I'm supposing that some people will listen and feel a need to hear this kind of material, this kind of exploration, these kind of questions, the kind of history of our culture's thinking and explorations, and philosophy and science that has gone on over the years. And they'll feel a need for that, both in terms of they're legitimizing for themselves practices of sensing with soul and the imaginal, etc., but also how one relates to existence. And of course, that's not different, that's not other than the practice of sensing with soul. Sense with soul -- it has implications about how I live, and how I see, and how I feel the world. So some people will feel a need for this, and others will just be interested and find it fascinating, and there's some degree of eros in the exploration of these kinds of ideas, and hearing about them. And other people will maybe neither be interested nor feel a need. Now, all of that, that variety in where it lands with you is, to me, interesting. And I hope to weave in the fact of that variety, and that range of relationships to these kinds of explorations and questions and ponderings. I hope to weave that in a little bit, into the points I'm trying to make.

But as I've already just kind of alluded to, why is this important? Why are the questions of "What is actually real?" and "What kind of knowing, what constitutes knowledge? What constitutes knowing? What kind of knowing and sense of things and sense of truth are trustworthy or valid?" -- why is that all important? Well, you can, I hope, guess the answer already: all that has implications for how a person will regard or value the whole domain of practices that we're calling 'sensing with soul.' If I've decided that "This kind of thing is real, and that kind of thing is just absolutely not real, and therefore worthless, not valuable, not valid," etc., and if the kinds of perceptions and senses involved in what we call 'sensing with soul' are in the 'that' category (not real, worthless, etc.), then those kinds of perceptions, and what they bring to the soul, and the heart, and the action, and the speech, and the aspiration, and the dedication and devotion in human life is also relegated to the pile of 'rubbish, unworthy, not valid,' etc.

Conversely, though, if we can open up at least the possibilities of ontologies and epistemologies that justify and give value and validation to sensing with soul, that undergird those kind of practices and support it, then that has big implications -- not just for individuals, but culturally, perhaps, for our relationships to ourselves, to other human beings, to other species, to the planet, to the world, to also our desire, etc., all of that, how we view all of that, and how seriously we take it, and how powerful the consequences of such practices can be. So I think there definitely, absolutely is a case for saying this is important. This is important territory. And yet, still, as I said, that range and variety of how much people feel they need to open this area up or explore it or hear about it, and how much they're even interested -- that variety itself is also interesting, and something to consider, and to reflect on. [6:19]

But in line with what I just said a minute ago, someone called Moscovici -- I'm not sure exactly who he was, but he says, wrote: "Questions of epistemology [questions of what constitutes actual knowledge, what constitutes knowing, and not just kind of illusory fantasy] are also questions of social order."^[1] We could add, questions of ontology are also questions of social order. As I said, epistemology and ontology -- they go together. They weave in, and they involve each other.

Why are they questions of social order? Because of what I just said, because of the fact that what we consider real often forms the limit of what we genuinely and deeply respect. So if, for example, the kinds of senses of things and perceptions, the kinds of knowing, let's say, that we open up to and support with sensing with soul -- if that is considered not real, we won't respect it. And we'll only respect something else called 'real,' as I said. And all that shapes what a culture does, what it prioritizes, how the economy is geared, where taxes go, what people invest in, how they measure progress and well-being, and all that kind of thing. There are also issues, on top of that, of power involved. So maybe he meant both, in terms of social order. I don't know. Maybe he meant something else. I don't know. But in terms of, as Foucault points out, knowledge and power are inextricably related, so that when a culture as a whole, either openly or more subtly, decrees, "This is real, and that is not real. Therefore, this is worthy of respect. That is not worthy of respect," then that also automatically brings into play a kind of hierarchy of power, of social relations and social structures, dependent on which camp one falls into. If, unhappily, one falls into the camp of sympathizing with and finding beauty and import in the kinds of sensing with soul, for example, and they're not respected, they're not in the dominant paradigm, and so they get, as I said, either subtly or openly, they get pushed down the pecking order in the hierarchy.

Of course, all that can happen even, ostensibly, in a sort of -- what do you call it? -- you know, kind of democracy where there's free speech, etc., or in our culture, where many people are still frightened, or it's taboo, even, for completely irreligious and secular people, it's still taboo, often, to discriminate against people who have certain religious views, etc., and yet, still, there might be more subtle hierarchies of power, etc., in all kinds of ways.

So I think all this is important, and like I said, I want to trace a little bit of history, lay out, in a way, how things have a little bit unravelled, at least at one, let's say, strata of society, maybe the more intellectual strata, also another level, and what that might open up, that kind of unravelling, the place where we've got to in relation to these questions about truth, and reality, and knowledge, because many, many of us will actually be ignorant about all this. There have been certain developments in philosophy, but even more so in science in the last, say, 130 years or so, 120 years, that really open up and challenge and shake the very foundations of these questions of ontology and epistemology. And yet, very little of that has kind of trickled down to the person on the street, etc.

So, just very briefly, historically, you know, following the Scientific Revolution some hundreds of years ago, and the sort of fathers, if you like, of that revolution (Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Newton), what came, slowly, gradually to dominate -- and that's an important point, as well, that that revolution, like many revolutions, also, it wasn't something everyone said, "Oh yeah! Of course, that's right. I get it now. How stupid we've been." It was something that was very gradually brought into the mainstream, and gradually sort of adopted by most people unconsciously, by a kind of indoctrination, to become the dominant view. And we can call that -- what Galileo, Descartes, Locke, and Newton, and others kind of instigated or brought about, that revolution -- we can call that the classical scientific world-view.

And that has become, as I said, the dominant world-view, probably, for most people on the planet right now, I would assume, so that even when a person kind of feels allegiances to other contradictory views, there's still a lot of gravitational pull towards this classical scientific world-view. I think it was Charles Taylor who said that's one of the marks of a secular age: it's that no one can completely, naïvely believe certain beliefs any more that don't fit the classical scientific world-view. There's always a kind of pull of doubt there because of the weight of it, and the entrenchment of it, and also because it's been so successful. And that's partly how it grew to dominance. It wields great predictive power, for instance, about where a cannonball will land, or a rocket, or an engine, or whatever it is, and great power in what it has enabled humanity to build technologically. Hugely helpful and hugely problematic, as well, but enormous power, both in terms of its predictive power, and its technological power and the power over nature. And with all that, because of its predictive power and its technological consequences or spawnings, it has come to be regarded as true. It's 'the truth.' It's 'how things are' -- which strictly speaking, doesn't follow. And again, if we care about these things, that's a point worth noting.

But what does that classical scientific world-view, the dominant paradigm of scientific materialism, what does it kind of hold? It kind of holds that the universe is made of little bits of stuff. We call them 'atoms,' but we might be, loosely in that view, referring to subatomic particles, although that would be a mistake. But loosely, the world is made up, everything is made up of atoms. And these atoms are set in motion, and then follow their motions according to certain physical laws. And they bump into each other and interact with each other according to certain physical laws, and the whole thing runs like clockwork. So there's no divinity present in the workings of that, and the whole thing is purposeless. I used to say 'random,' then I realized that's the wrong word. What I really meant, if I've said this in the past, is the purposeless movement of atoms. It's not moving towards anything, any purpose. There's no meaning to the universe, to the movement of matter, etc. In its extreme form, it reduces the whole of the universe to 'just matter,' functioning like clockwork, and somehow producing consciousness as well.

And in fact, the clockwork analogy is interesting because it was a deliberate analogy, I think, on the part of Descartes and other people. And it was just that time in history where clocks were either becoming more prominent, or had just been invented, etc. So the idea for the philosophy and the vision of nature was kind of given, a little bit, by what was present as a new technology, and a prevalent technology that one encountered in the world. It's interesting now, if you read a lot of reports on current scientific theories, how they don't talk about clockwork any more. They talk about information. And the whole universe is just information. Or the whole universe is a supercomputer. Or even there are theories about the whole universe being, in fact, a computer simulation. Anyway, the point is that it's interesting to note how the world-view can just be conditioned by what's prevalent in terms of the technology that we encounter.

But like I said, all of that either has nothing to say about meaning, or taken a little bit further, actually postulates dogmatically, or posits dogmatically, a meaningless universe, a meaningless cosmos. It has nothing to say about ethics, and correspondingly, in the strict view of that scientific materialism, there is nothing to say about ethics, because ethics are not integral to the universe. It's also what we might call a kind of flatland view, in the sense that it lacks meaning, it lacks divinity, it lacks a lot of dimensionality. And again, that word's a little tricky, 'dimensionality,' but partly, what we could say, dimensionality is like depth. It's like what's not immediately apparent.

So actually, that scientific world-view, that classical scientific world-view only allows certain kinds of dimensionality. For example, the mathematical laws, whether it's of gravity or electrons or whatever it is, are a kind of dimension of the being of matter. So there's matter, and a kind of deeper strata that's not separate from matter -- it's part of matter, but it's a deeper dimension, if you like -- are the laws that matter obeys, the various mathematical equations and laws, etc. And so it admits only that kind of dimensionality. And all the time, it's supposed to keep the view of "all this is subject to experimental proof." So if a law gets disproved or improved upon, or whatever, or if a deeper strata of reality, a more fundamental particle, a smaller particle that makes up larger subatomic particles is discovered, or proved not to exist, or whatever, it's subject to that. So anyway, there are very limited kinds of dimensionality. It's a flatland world, a flat universe, if you like, without dimensionality. But actually, depending on how we use that word, we can say that there are certain kinds of dimensionality allowed.

All that, as I said, over time, came to just be regarded as common sense -- in other words, what everyone would agree on as the truth of things. It didn't start that way. It didn't start that way at all. So that, as I said, took some time for it to evolve to be the dominant paradigm where everyone would just -- "That's how the world is. That's how we think of it. That's how we relate to it. That's actually how we see it." And this world, just to specify some more components of it, is a world of what Newton called 'absolute space' and 'absolute time.' So space is just pure, empty space. It's absolutely still, and it forms a kind of backdrop for all this purposeless movement of atoms, etc., according to physical laws. But space is just neutral. It's just a receptacle, if you like. It's like a backdrop. And time, too, that time is absolute. It's the same for everyone anywhere. It just trundles on regardless of what is happening or what is there. There's also, wrapped up, the element and the postulate of cause and effect: "This effect is due to this cause or these causes in the past."

And in the conception of that cosmos, in the idea and theory of it, and also -- and this is important -- what observations, for a long time, seemed to verify back and validate that conception, was that the universe is made of things that are clearly this or that: it's a wave, or it's a particle, or it's this kind of particle as opposed to that kind of particle, and made up of clearly differentiable things with clearly differentiable properties -- for example, the position of a particle, or its speed or momentum, its energy, the time at which a certain event happened in the life of that particle or collision, or whatever. All these are clear, and clearly measurable -- accurately, definitively measurable, at least in potential. They all exist independent of the observer, and independent of the way the observer chooses to observe, the mode of measurement or observation, the way of looking. These clearly differentiable entities that this cosmos is made up of are also only influenced, their behaviour and their manifestation is dependent only on obvious interactions that they have had in their vicinity -- all of which has become, as I said, the common-sense view. So if this particle possesses this property, or this manifestation, we can see it's because of this interaction or whatever, which we can trace to something in its locale.

After a few hundred years of this, however, experimental results came in that started to shake up this whole world-view, and caused a great amount of commotion, and agitation, and debate, and brilliant and bold investigation, and discussion, and innovation, and resulting in the double revolution of Einstein's relativity theories and also the quantum revolution, quantum physics. There was a kind of shattering, really, of that whole world-view. Its very foundations and its foundational assumptions were rocked, and broken, and brought into question, as if the rug had been pulled out from the whole sense of the cosmos and an ability to even make sense of the cosmos. So some of you will know some of this, but for example, classically, light was regarded as a wave, and then it was seen to be able to manifest both as a wave and as a particle. What it manifested to us, whether it manifested as a wave or as a particle, depended on the kind of observation we made. So those are two -- Bohr used the word 'complementary' -- they're actually contradictory manifestations, contradictory attributes. To be a wave is something very different than to be a particle. A particle is a small thing in a fixed location, and a wave is not; it's spread out. What's the reality there?

There's a term called 'superposition.' In quantum physics, it refers to something being in a kind of 'hybrid state,' let's say, of two complementary or contradictory states. So for example, when we measure it this way, we see a wave. When we observe it that way, we see a particle. When we're not measuring it, it's neither one nor the other. The wave and particle states are superposed. If that example is not that radical for you, consider also the example that's central to Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, where a radioactive particle is in a state of being both decayed and not decayed, or neither decayed and not decayed. This radioactive decay -- has it happened yet, or has it not happened yet? And it's said to be in a state of superposition, where it's both decayed and not decayed at the same time. But what that actually means is something very abstract. With this superposition principle, recently in the last few decades, I think they've observed it in larger and larger objects. So there can be a tendency for some people -- and again, I think this is interesting -- if we talk about the psychology of epistemology, there can be a tendency for some people to hear some of these remarkable, mind-boggling results and facts about the quantum world, and relegate them to "that's all for very little stuff which I don't really encounter," and go about one's everyday life with a view of reality that's essentially unchanged, that has absorbed that common-sense, classical physics world-view, and takes that to be the way it is.

But this superposition, this baffling, undescribable -- at least undescribable in language or concept -- co-existence, somehow, of this state that encompasses two contradictory states, this superposition has been observed more recently in larger and larger things. So where's the boundary? And can I really just relegate all this, all these discoveries and conundra of the quantum world, can I really relegate that to something that bears no relevance for my life? You can hear, as I said, these are contradictory states that are somehow existing together. Even if we say 'existing,' not really sure that's the right word. But there's a contradiction of the law of the excluded middle. So if a particle has decayed, it can't be not decayed. And if it's not decayed, it can't be decayed. And somehow, before observation, that particle is said to be in a superposed state. It's neither decayed nor not decayed.

There's also, when we talk about an individual particle, physicists talk about the wave function of that particle. And that really describes -- it's a sort of smudge of probability, a probability cloud of where that particle will be, and how fast it will be moving, and all those other properties that were thought to be independent of the observer. One realizes, actually, what happens when we're not observing it is, all we can talk about is this abstract mathematical function in many-dimensional space, that when you do a certain manipulation of it, you get the probability of finding the particle over there, or the probability of finding it over here, etc., can be calculated. In other words, before we observe it, it doesn't have a definite position. It doesn't have a definite velocity. It doesn't have a definite energy. It doesn't have a definite time at which a certain interaction happened, a certain event happened in its life. It doesn't even have a particular property of being, let's say, a wave or a particle.

So this is radical. The whole world of discrete, clear, independently existing phenomena was decimated, and was replaced with something that, really, the conceptual mind struggles to understand, even though quite sophisticated and very accurate mathematics has come out of it in terms of being able to make these predictions of the probability that we'll find the particle decayed, or the probability we'll find it over here as opposed to over there. What actually is going on, independent of the observer, remains something that the conceptual mind really struggles to understand. But it's clear that it's not how we usually think of the world, and it's not how the picture painted by classical science -- as developed by Galileo, Descartes, etc., Locke, and Newton -- it's clearly not that picture that's a reality.

So Bohr coined this term 'complementarity.' Wave and particle, etc., are complementary views of something. But as someone else -- David Bell, a physicist -- pointed out, that's not really the right word. 'Complementary' is when you look at, let's say, the backside of an elephant, and you see a tail and a bum, and you look at the front side, and you see a trunk and big ears. And two people who can't see each other, you know, on either side of the elephant, get those two views. If they get a few more people and put those views together -- the side view, the front view -- then they'll get a composite picture of complementary views, perspectives on the elephant. They can put that together and make sense of it. It fits together. David Bell points out, or pointed out, that actually, Bohr should've used the word 'contradictory' -- or, rather, that's implicit in what he means by 'complementary.' (I wouldn't go so far as what David Bell said. He had a particular agenda.) But really inherent in what Niels Bohr meant by 'complementary' was 'contradictory.' These are not commensurable pictures. We cannot put these pictures together, wave and particle. You cannot put the picture together of "it's decayed and it's not decayed, this radioactive atom."

So, as I said, the whole idea of inherent existence, an objective existence of phenomena independent of the observer, independent of the way of looking, independent of the way of measuring -- that got fractured. It got broken in a very profound way. It became clear that what we see depends on how we look, depends on how we measure. What manifests depends on how we observe.

This was also found to extend to the past. So we think, "Okay, what manifests now depends on how I observe." But what seems to go even further, what does go even further, is the fact that a measurement made now seems to determine what happened in the past. In other words, say, was this particle a wave or a particle, did it manifest as a wave or a particle in the past, can depend on a decision I make about how I look at it, how I observe, how I measure it, actually billions of years later. How the Big Bang was in its details, for example, is something that depends on how we look now. And that was originally an idea proposed by John Wheeler, the physicist, and recently it's been corroborated in the laboratory (on a smaller scale, but the principle remains). How we look now determines the sense we have of what happened in the past, what was actual in the past. There is no inherently existing past. It also depends on how we look.

So you can hear, I hope, just how radical some of these findings are. Victor Mansfield is a physicist, and also a Buddhist practitioner, in fact, and has written a couple of books on this kind of stuff. But he basically reports, you know, we have an idea that a particle goes from here to there, and we can trace its root: this is the flight path, so to speak, from A to B, and we can presume it took that path, or we can observe it taking that path. And actually, that's not the case. He says:

Our conception of nature is at fault.... The natural, yet incorrect, assumption that the photon [or electron, or whatever] has a well-defined trajectory [a well-defined path] as it works its way through the [instrument in the laboratory, or whatever it is, whether or not we look, or] whether or not we know [that] trajectory ["it must have had one" -- so that's wrong].... It is simply wrong to imagine that the past already exists in full detail in the present.^[2]

So now he's talking about the absence of inherent existence of the past as well.

Light [or anything else, for that matter] does not take on either a wave or a particle nature [so this applies not just to light, but to electrons and protons and whatever] until we decide (at the last possible moment if we like) whether to measure its wave or particle nature.... Prior to our choice it's ill-defined.... The history of the universe is not written out in full detail. Such a fully defined and explicit past is an [imaginary] construction, a theory, a mental imputation -- a giant prejudice. We can normally get away with believing in an objective past that exists in full detail in everyday life. But in the deeper quantum mechanical sense, we must actively participate in defining the universe. It's not sitting "out there" [so to speak] fully objective waiting for us to reveal its pre-existent, well-defined, intrinsic nature.

So I hope I don't have to spell out the parallels with the way that we teach emptiness, and ways of looking, and the radical dependence on ways of looking. He goes on:

Quantum mechanics demands that we abandon some of our most cherished beliefs about the world.... Particles and waves do not exist simultaneously in some definite way only waiting for us to call one of these properties forth. Prior to [our] measurement [prior to observation] the system is truly indefinite, lacking in independent existence.

And there's also a collapse of the whole notion of causality here, for different reasons, one of which he points out:

Since causality requires definite objects exchanging energy or exerting forces on each other, is it any wonder that independent existence and causality fall to the ground together in quantum [physics]?

So I hope you get a sense of how radical this is. And some of those ideas about the lack of inherent existence of the past were amplified by Richard Feynman in his theories -- called 'sum over histories' theories -- and in his colleague, Murray Gell-Mann, with, I think, another guy -- his name was Jim Hartle -- in a theory called the 'consistent histories approach.' Basically, they're different ways of viewing this fact of the lack of inherent existence of the past; not just the present, but the past as well. And we could name all kinds of findings and observations -- startling, radical, upsetting, mind-blowing, etc. Again, many of you will be familiar with just the fact, from Einstein's relativity theory, that time, the measurement of time, or the observation of what two events are actually happening at the same time, that also is dependent. It doesn't exist independently of the observer. It depends on the relative motion. Distance as well -- lengths shorten, etc., so the distance between two objects will be measured differently dependent on the observer.

Absolute space, absolute time -- these things began to get fractured, and only, since then, have got even more and more fractured, more and more decimated, really, as coherent notions or true notions. But not just time and space, but also mass, how heavy a thing is, and the energy of a thing -- all this is dependent on the motion. Even more startling, there was a theoretical prediction, at least -- they haven't measured it yet, but there's a strong case for believing that when someone is accelerating, whether they're in a rocket, or just being pulled by a rope, or whatever, that their observation, if they're, let's say, out in interstellar space, where there's, let's say, a vacuum, someone watching them would observe that space to be completely empty. There are no particles in it. There's nothing there. When they're accelerating, their measurements, from their perspective, from their vantage point, reveal not empty space, but a space around them that's full of a hot gas of particles. So what's there or what's not there depends on, is relative to, depends on the perspective, on the way of looking -- the temperature, the actuality of whether there are particles, etc. We could go on.

So there are all these baffling results. Many quantum physicists sometimes just get on with their work of calculating, and calculating how this atom will decay in this situation, or how to build a computer, or some other electronic thing, or how to build a bomb, or whatever it is, and really kind of shrug at these facts and observations that go contrary to the sort of normal and established world-view, and don't really think about them, because you can get on quite well with very accurate calculations, and building machines, etc., in engineering, building whatever you want to build, etc., without really saying, "What is going on here? And what does this do to the sense of reality, etc.?" For some portion of physicists, still, since this quantum revolution, and for some, still, this really strikes the wrong note, all this. And it sounds very wrong. Most of it sounds very wrong. Something's gone wrong somewhere. There's some fault there. So there is a degree of controversy with that relatively small portion of physicists who actually care about what this means, and what the implications are for ontology, epistemology, our sense of reality.

I'll read you something else from a physicist called Lee Smolin, if I can find it -- where is he? [shuffles papers] Actually, no, this is from Marcus Appleby. And so again, he states:

In quantum mechanics what you see depends on how you look. [Again, you recognize, even, that the language that he uses is very similar to the emptiness language.] Make one kind of measurement on the electromagnetic field and one will obtain results consistent with it being a smoothly varying wave; make another, different kind of measurement and one will obtain results consistent with it being a collection of discrete particles.... So which of these pictures is the true one? Quantum mechanics declines to say, just as it declines to say what is going on in a physical system when no one is looking.... The fact, that the outcome depends on the observer's decision as to which measurement to make, casts doubt on the assumption, that physics passively records events that would have happened anyway, in the absence of experimental intervention.^[3]

Again, there's this parallel with -- is our perception as human beings, is it a passive receiving? Is there even such a thing as 'bare attention'? So there's a parallel there. I'm not equating the two, but there's a parallel there. And he says:

This represents a subtle [I don't think it's subtle, but anyway], but important departure from the Cartesian ideal of total objectivity [the Descartes ideal of the world trundling along like clockwork, etc., independent of the observer, and potentially, one can gather facts of the status, about the status of all things].

And Marcus Appleby's reflecting, then, on the history of physics since the quantum revolution in the early part of the twentieth century -- actually, the late nineteenth century, beginning, really, and in the early part of the twentieth century -- and saying there are some, including Einstein, who really objected to all this, and said something must be really wrong, and tried to build an alternative picture that was more congruent with the idea of things existing objectively, independently, etc. But he goes on to say, Marcus Appleby:

No one can say for sure that Einstein's hopes will not be fulfilled at some time in the future. But it does seem to me that the effect of eighty years [so I don't know when he wrote this, but it's probably more than eighty years now] of theoretical work has been to make these hopes look increasingly forlorn.

My own feeling is that an adequate understanding of quantum mechanics ultimately depends, not on sophisticated technical developments [in other words, not on new formulae or theories], but on some simple conceptual shift -- something a little like the perceptual shift which occurs when one looks at a diagram like the Necker cube [you know those diagrams? They're drawings of cubes on a piece of paper, and when you look at it, you can kind of see the cube in three dimensions, and then you look again, and the whole cube has flipped, like you're looking at it from a very different angle, or it's a different cube], or the duck-rabbit picture.

You know, those two pictures, like white on black, or black on white, that, when you look at it one way, it looks like a duck; you look at it the other way, what was the space around the duck looks like a rabbit, etc. Or if you know those Escher paintings where there's a whole sort of complicated scene, and it can flip in your vision to reveal a very different scene, where everything kind of has a different context and geometry and shape in that scene. But in all these, with the Necker cube, with the duck-rabbit, and with the Escher, what you can't do is see both at the same time. So, he's referring to that. And he goes on to say:

Quantum mechanics is not intrinsically weird. It only seems weird because we insist on looking at it through Cartesian spectacles [through the spectacles that we've inherited and absorbed almost into our cells, from the legacy of Descartes, and Galileo, and Newton, etc.: mind is separate from matter, matter exists objectively of the consciousness, the way of looking, the way of observing, and of the mind, etc., and at least in theory, it's possible to get objective measurements of the factual status of things at any time. But he says] The problem is that Cartesian assumptions have become so deeply ingrained in our thinking that it is hard to find the right non-Cartesian spectacles.

So there's someone that's actually saying there's no -- he's not shrugging and just saying, "Well, whatever, I don't know, but I can get on with my mathematics, and my calculations, and my building computers, or bombs, or whatever." He's not saying, "I absolutely object to these findings." He's saying what we need to object to is our insistence on our inherited and indoctrinated world-view about mind, matter, and how the cosmos is.

Now, as these results presented themselves gradually, over the years and decades, with investigations in physics, at some point, stimulated by those puzzling results -- and by the wrestling of physicists with those results, with those facts and observations, somewhat stimulated by that, but also by other factors -- philosophers of science also began to question the whole sort of conceptual underpinning of the scientific endeavour and approach itself, and whether that might be not quite what it was wrapped up to be, in terms of this notion, wrapped up to be as an endeavour. The whole scientific endeavour was an approach to truth, a discovery of truth independent of any biases, or fashions, or ways of looking, etc., or independent of a conceptual framework. And so, gradually, over the twentieth century, and still, many philosophers of science, from different angles, began to even question the whole basis of the scientific method, and what its relationship was to truth, and its own kind of integrity, etc.

So again, if I quote from Victor Mansfield here, he has a quite nice analogy. And he says:

The scientific method, with its demands of reproducibility, completely controlled environment, and quantitative measurement, is only one way of interacting with nature. Science is not a pure revelation of nature in isolation, but [rather] nature's response to our particular form of questioning.^[4]

And then, exploring the issues of measurement in quantum mechanics, he says, leads us to realize that:

Science is in part an expression of a unique interaction between nature and ourselves. In quantum mechanics, to our great distress [or to our great joy, I would add], we cannot say what nature is like independent of that interaction. The scientific method has often been likened to a fishnet that captures certain kinds of aquatic life but allows many interesting forms to pass right through it. Because an extraordinarily beautiful little fish or alga escapes the net, should we deny its presence or reality in nature's ocean? Such elusive life forms might hold the key to a great deepening of our understanding.

He goes on:

If we do not understand the limits of the scientific method, then we are doomed to apply it where it hinders our understanding rather than enhances it.

So he's not saying -- he is a scientist -- and I'm not saying, certainly, either, that science is rubbish or anything like this, that it has no applicability, that is has no use, that it has no domain of relevance and import. But it often gets overextended. So there is the overreach of the scientific method and project, really, in what I've talked about before as 'scientism' -- believing that this scientific method, and the world-view that goes with it, which is actually an archaic world-view at this point, belonging to the mode of classical physics, that actually, that can explain everything, everything in the universe.

But it may very well be that this whole conceptual structure, that whole paradigm, and the way that the scientific method and the scientific approach actually, as Victor Mansfield points out, it only reveals certain things, and other aspects of reality, other phenomena in the universe will simply not be picked up, just because you're looking with the wrong paradigm. You're looking with the wrong lenses, with the scientific method. So as I said, how would we ever ascertain meaning in the universe, or meaning to the cosmos? Because right from the start, such things are barred from the scientific method. As I said earlier in the talk, it's a methodology of approach that actually has then, at some point, surreptitiously become a conclusion, and is claimed as a fact. It's overextended its reach. [54:34]

What we see depends on how we look. And part of how we look is the whole conceptual framework or paradigm. So Thomas Kuhn, the famous philosopher of science, wrote that

A paradigm is prerequisite to perception.^[5]

"A paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself," he wrote -- meaning that we're always approaching phenomena, whatever phenomena, with some kind of conceptual framework, and informed by some kind of history of what it's important to look for. What are the important questions? What are the salient features here? And our whole gaze, our whole perspective is engineered, and conditioned, and limited, and empowered -- both -- by that paradigm, whatever that paradigm is, so that what we see -- perception -- depends on that paradigm, to a great extent.

And as I said, there is, quite popular now, a certain current, both among certain scientists, but also among many lay people, this kind of overreach of the scientific method, and an overclaiming of its conclusions. One unjustifiably makes certain conclusions about what is established fact in the scientific world. So this is quite common, either with some neuroscientists, or with people who are sort of hovering in interface with the world of neuroscience, some psychologists and different kinds of people, when they claim that mind and consciousness arises from matter; it can be explained purely in terms of neurological, electrical impulses in the neurons, and synapses, etc., like that -- as if that was an established fact and conclusion that had been proven. And it has not. It absolutely has not. But again, there's this kind of creep of a claim, etc., there.

But there are, as I said, limits to the scientific method that some people are becoming aware of, have written about from all kinds of different angles. If we take that example that I just talked about, this idea that "actually, there is only matter in the universe," it can be called a philosophy of materialism, or less ambiguously, a philosophy of physicalism. But it actually doesn't explain, and cannot explain -- there's actually a kind of quantum leap, metaphorically, between matter and mind, between the properties of matter and the properties of consciousness. And no one has bridged that gap yet. Is it possible? I don't know. But as I said, it's not an established fact.

It also leads to certain strange paradoxes and kind of contradictions. For example, just reflecting on this, if we go with this, if I entertain this idea of a sort of fundamental physicalism -- in other words, there are just material entities in the universe, and what happens in consciousness, or the fact of consciousness itself, and the contents of the mind, in consciousness, they're essentially just material, because that's really what's real, is matter. If we follow that a little bit, actually, then -- some people actually think this way, or articulate this way -- then mind contents are essentially just, "I feel happy -- it's just some chemicals and some neurological synapses firing. There's no inherent happiness. It's just a kind of illusion because all that's real -- the self isn't real, emotions, etc. -- there are just states of material particles." What that means is that something like suffering is an illusion as well. It's just atoms and molecules moving in certain ways, interacting in certain ways in the brain.

But actually, we don't live or think like that. So even someone who claims that idea, an allegiance to that idea as a philosophy, doesn't actually live like that or think like that. And we don't run our societies that way. At least we try to, or say we do, take human suffering seriously in law, and in ethics, etc. But if we really hold this kind of project of proving everything is just the movement of atoms and material particles and their interactions, then it brings some strange conclusions that aren't actually congruent with how we live and view the world.

We can go a stage further. If you say, "Suffering is kind of real, or at least respected, even though it's kind of fabricated, or it's built as a mental construct from simply matter -- it's really, in its essence, just matter. There's no person suffering. There's no actual suffering. It's just some neurons creating a certain impression, but all that is just matter" -- if you say that, actually, then so is happiness, and so is a sense of beauty, and so is love, and so is soulfulness, and meaningfulness, and the sense, perception, and the conception and thought of divinity. All that's actually in the same category, if you like, as suffering. They're all kind of illusions based on, fabricated by, built by some kind of constellation or state of purely material elements, particles. So all that -- happiness, beauty, joy, love, soulfulness, meaningfulness, the sense of divinity -- are as real or unreal as suffering and pain, even physical pain. Atoms don't hurt; there are just atoms in combinations. All these things, then -- happiness, beauty, love, suffering, soulfulness, meaningfulness, the sense of divinity, the perception of divinity -- all are merely the movement and interaction of material particles, or atomic particles, that aren't immediately perceived or conceived as such. So there's a conception of them as something different, there's a sense of them as something different, but really, what they are is just that.

What that does, if I take this strange philosophy of physicalism to its extreme, it actually ends up inverting itself and kind of legitimizing all these areas of experience that are so important to us (happiness, beauty, love, meaningfulness, the sense of divinity, soulfulness), legitimizing them just as much as we legitimize our suffering, and our need to care for suffering, and our respect for it. All are equally worth respecting or disrespecting. All have equal value -- perception of divinity, beauty, soul, as much as physical pain. So it's a strange philosophy. There's a kind of -- 'hurdle' would be an understatement -- abyss to straddle, to find the connection between mind and matter. So this kind of overreach and overclaim of people who would, as I said, profess allegiance to this kind of total physicalism -- "that's all there is in the universe" -- leads to some strange paradoxes and conclusions.

In the world of philosophy in the twentieth century, as well, as I said, paralleling or, really, partly instigated by these sort of puzzling and shocking results from quantum physics, philosophers -- and philosophers of science in particular -- started to re-question or question the whole relationship of science and the scientific endeavour with truth. So Marshall Walker says:

No claim is made about the "reality" of the [scientific] model.^[6]

Actually, I'm going to read you a few quotes. I'm getting them from a book by Joel Weinsheimer. It's actually to do with Hans-Georg Gadamer, but it doesn't matter. No claim is made about the reality of the model. So the link between a scientific model or a scientific theory, even when one has found experimental results that are in line with that model, it's still, strictly speaking, not proffered as a model about reality or truth. And Marshall Walker goes on to say:

The sole criterion is successful prediction from the simplest, most convenient, or most satisfying model.

Successful prediction, rather than truth, from the simplest, most convenient, most satisfying model. Theories, as Larry Laudan observes in a book called Progress and Its Problems, are just as modest as models:

One need not, and scientists generally do not, consider matters of truth and falsity when determining whether a theory does or does not solve a particular empirical problem.^[7]

But philosophers, he points out, even if scientists are not concerned with truth -- at least, don't claim to be concerned with truth -- philosophers have been:

The preoccupation of classical philosophers of science has been with showing that the methods of science are efficient instruments for producing truth, high-probability, or even closer approximations to the truth. In this enterprise, they have failed dismally [he says].

So the criteria of science shift radically. And Thomas Kuhn, again, wrote a very influential book -- I think it was from the sixties, perhaps -- called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I've talked about it before in some past talks, years ago, but he suggests that:

We may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.

So the whole idea of science kind of marching onwards, closer and closer to the truth, and every once in a while, we have a shift of conceptual framework -- like, for instance, pre- and post-Einstein's theory of relativity -- the whole idea that that's then closer to the truth is very questionable to him. How the sure and steady advance of science toward the truth suddenly degenerated into a rout is most clearly explained by Imre Lakatos, who says:

For centuries knowledge meant proven knowledge -- proven either by the power of the intellect or by the evidence of the senses.... The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago.^[8]

So it goes back to the Greek sceptic philosophers, etc., who questioned this. But then he says:

But they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.

So as I said, this revolution, the Scientific Revolution, was so dazzling in its power to predict and to build technology and gain power over nature, etc., that the philosophical sceptics were kind of silenced. Then he continues:

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge. But few realize that with this the whole classical structure of intellectual values falls in ruins and has to be replaced: one cannot simply water down the ideal of proving truth.

Something, again, very fundamental has been decimated. Some vessel has been broken in the whole structure and the whole idea of what science is doing, and how it's progressing, and what its venture is in regards to something called 'truth.'

The most clear example of how this whole notion of truth was brought into question was actually with the history of Newton's theories of gravity and mechanics. So they were immensely successful, and very accurate in terms of their predictions and their power, etc. And then Einstein came along, particularly with his general theory of relativity, and a completely different idea of what gravitation was, a completely different idea of space and time, etc., and of course, together with that, the mathematical equations that describe that theory and carry its predictive power, that are then regarded as fundamental and universal laws of the cosmos -- very different.

So the two theories had different ideas, models of gravity and what was happening there, and what it was, and how it worked, and different equations that described that process mathematically. Some of the calculations about observed measurements will be just slightly different, coming from Einstein's theory. But the sort of fundamental edifice and ideas of what is going on -- in other words, the model of the universe, the model of reality that's going on -- is radically different in Einstein's theory of gravity.

So he says Newton's, the best-corroborated of all scientific theories, turned out to be at best incomplete and at worst false, because it was superseded by Einstein's theory. Then it remains in question, now, whether Einstein's hypotheses become also superseded or contradicted in the future. And even if they are corroborated, they should not be called true, because you never know whether a whole, very radically different model or theory comes along. Again, it might have just minutely differing predictions in some context about what we would observe. But the whole model of what actually is going on is radically different. So this all calls into question, well, what exactly is the relationship of scientific theories, even when they seem to have been corroborated by experiment and observation many times -- what exactly is their relationship with truth and reality? So all this questioning is very much alive, still, in the world of philosophy of science. Again, to quote Thomas Kuhn, he wrote:

The developmental process described in this essay [he's talking about his essay, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings -- a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution towards anything.^[9]

The evolution of science is not an evolution towards something called 'truth,' or a 'truthful' representation of reality, in his view. He's just calling that all into question:

Inevitably that lacuna [that gap] will have disturbed many readers. We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance.

But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?

So you can hear how radical these questions are to those of us who have grown up with a certain view of science. And that includes our contemporary culture.

Here's a philosopher called Grondin, Jean Grondin, and he talks about a conception of truth in philosophy which is different than the normal conception of -- or one current conception of truth in philosophy that's different than the normal conception of truth and its relationship to science. And he writes:

In dialectic [in that kind of philosophy] thought continually takes on new forms without their being postulated unconditionally a process of successive approximation to truth.

Same thing that Thomas Kuhn is saying. But then he adds:

In philosophical hermeneutics [in that branch of philosophy, that approach to philosophy] this infinite process is designated as "truth."

So truth becomes, the whole notion of truth becomes, in these philosophers' approaches, something very different from a kind of fact, which one either arrives at or doesn't, represents accurately or doesn't. It's a process, and it's infinite, and it's open-ended -- very, very different conception.

There's another, related debate about the nature of scientific theory to truth. Among others, there are two sort of theories of truth, if you like, or theories of theories of truth. One is called the correspondence model, or the correspondence theory of truth. So this theory, in what it depicts, in the model it lays out, corresponds to reality. In other words, "Reality is like this, and the model mirrors it. And that's what truth is. That's what truth is in science. That's what truth is in theory or anything else."

In kind of competition with that theory, there's what's called a coherence theory of truth, which abandons the idea of this possibility of ascertaining whether we have an accurate representation -- an accurate, final representation of truth -- or even if we're moving towards that accurate and final representation, as someone like Karl Popper would claim, and replaces it with what's called the coherence theory of truth. And so, what that really means is that the different components of this theory, whatever it is, or this model of the universe, they cohere. They make sense together. They fit with each other. And they fit with other things that we know or other models. And if you have a coherent theory, or the more coherent the theory, the more we're entitled to call it true. But that's a different claim than saying it corresponds to some reality: "This now is a picture of reality, an accurate replica of reality, or representation of reality."

So all this has gone on in twentieth century and twenty-first century philosophy -- just the whole notion of truth, and in particular, of science's relation to truth, has also been called into question, decimated, opened up, etc. So over the twentieth century, let's say, and beyond, partly stimulated by these findings in physics, and the theories of quantum physics and relativity and the whole revolution in physics that happened in the twentieth century -- partly stimulated by that, and the suggested implications that there is not an objective, independent existence of things, of matter, of anything; there was that current, which stimulated that thought, but partly, also, there were, as I said, reflecting and stimulated by those findings, philosophers of science who began questioning the limits of the scientific method, but also, even more fundamentally, science's relationship with truth per se, and what 'truth' actually means. Does science in fact reveal, or even approach, approximate truth?

There were also other movements in philosophy that had, on the face of it, nothing -- they weren't propelled by scientific discoveries. There were other considerations -- political considerations, purely philosophical considerations, linguistic considerations, cultural considerations, historical considerations, etc. -- certainly in the twentieth century, and even before that, starting with Nietzsche, into Heidegger, Derrida, but, you could say, even back to Kant, Immanuel Kant, questioning the possibility, questioning that it is possible for us to have access to an objective, independent truth, and questioning the kind of hubris that would assume that we either do or can. So there's a whole current in Western philosophy, certainly, that question that, depending on where you start that current historically -- it doesn't matter. But it kind of reached its zenith, in a way, maybe in the eighties or nineties, where sometimes, if you pick up any article, whether it's philosophy or articles on comparative religion, even, or all kinds of things influenced by that trend in philosophy to kind of denigrate any assumption of reaching some kind of objective truth about anything, and to denigrate even the possibility of doing so. Sometimes it's almost comical, picking up some articles -- they seem to start with a sort of, "I'm on the right side. I don't claim anything about absolute truth. And of course, I wouldn't say anything like that," or something. "So don't shoot me, I'm on the right team" kind of thing.

There's that whole current, but again, what's interesting to me -- or one of the things that's interesting -- is even with those philosophers who say that "There is no access to truth," or "There is no truth," or "We don't presume that. It's not possible, etc. We don't postulate any kind of realism, etc.," how easily and surreptitiously it sneaks back in, or it is sneaked back in. Or it's actually never really been abandoned. And the philosopher or whoever has not even realized that they haven't abandoned the notion of a basic reality or an ultimate truth, in this or that area or domain of being or existence. Now, that definitely applies to some physicists who work in the area even of quantum physics, etc., as I mentioned earlier. But even more so, the philosophers who sort of tend to emphasize this point or this disclaimer and pass judgment on even the notion of the possibility of some kind of access to an ultimate truth or a principal truth, still it sneaks back in, or it actually was never really abandoned in some area or another.

So again, if we go back to the philosopher J. N. Findlay, he's a very interesting and unusual character in twentieth century philosophy in that, totally against the stream, and almost in isolation, it seems, he did postulate ultimate truths, kind of mystical absolutes. There are some parallels with what we might call 'emptiness,' but it's really something different. I'll hopefully come back to this later in this talk. So he was criticized by anyone who bothered to pay attention to what he was proposing and writing about, working, as he was, very much on the sidelines of the academic world. But he was criticized for these reasons, and people said, "You know, what you're saying is meaningless, or self-contradictory, or this or that," and he wrote:

Whether this is true or not [about what I'm proposing], self-contradictory and empty notions [it's partly what he was being accused of] play a vast part in human experience and attitude.^[10]

So there's a lot of wisdom in what he's saying. Listen:

Self-contradictory and empty notions play a vast part in human experience and attitude, and this is certainly true of [humanity's] limiting notions of absolutes.

As I said, he was interested in a certain kind of absolute, a kind of mystical absolute. And then he continues:

Even philosophies which repudiate absolutes in their logic, and have professedly built up radically contingent, value-free systems, generally smuggle in absolutes of some sort, matter, logical space, the totality of atomic states of affairs, etc., etc. The paradoxicality and ineffability of mystical absolutes is simply a logical consequence of their being absolutes at all.

So two main points there. One is that "self-contradictory and empty notions play a [huge] part in human experience and attitude" -- very, very important point, I think. And secondly, that even when people, as I pointed out, say, "We don't believe in absolutes. We don't believe in any ultimate reality," basically, usually implicitly, they do, whether that's matter -- that's the most common one, I suppose, etc., or the totality of atomic states of affairs, etc. -- so "this is real, this is the reality, the basic reality." That's extremely common.

And we see that in all kinds of contexts, not just philosophy, academic philosophy, but all kinds of contexts. Even -- I think I've said this somewhere or other in talks -- you know, sometimes teaching about emptiness, and then someone will say, "Oh, I really like that teaching. It makes a lot of sense." And then they will say something about, "Did you know this or this about the brain, and how it's totally in line with what you're saying, how the brain actually processes information so that we can have different perspectives, or there are perceptual illusions, etc.?" Or they might want to try and explain the whole notion of fabrication, etc., from a neurological perspective. What's virtually explicit in that approach or suggestion is, then, that in a way, neurology and neurons and matter are more fundamental, even, than emptiness or fabrication, etc. They are what fabricate. They are what create perceptual illusions, etc. And so there's a causality there resting on the neurons. And as I mentioned before, you know, no one's actually proved that causality. It may be that the involvement of neurological networks is an indispensable part of perception, of mental functioning and mind, of course. But actually, what's proved so far is just that there's a corollary. There's a corresponding neurological function that's maybe necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, for mind.

But still, what's more important, I think, right now, to say is that there's a kind of, again, "smuggling back in." One hears about teachings of emptiness, one reads them, about fabrication, etc., and then smuggles back in a supposedly more fundamental notion of brain, of neurophysiology, of matter, forgetting, for instance, that matter itself is empty. Either from the results from physics, or from a deconstruction based on emptiness, etc., matter itself is empty. Time is empty. Space is empty. And without time and space, as we mentioned earlier in the talk, you can have no notion of causality. So causality depends on time. In the teachings of emptiness that I would favour, fabrication itself is not really an ultimate truth. You cannot explain perception ultimately. At a certain conventional level, you can explain perception as fabrication, and how that works phenomenologically, etc. But it's not an ultimate truth because causality is empty and not ultimately true. Time is empty, and therefore, the time in which fabrication happens is empty. What is fabricated is empty, and what fabricates is empty. So any model or proposition that retains a kind of fundamental basis, a place of neurophysiology or matter as a fundamental basis, actually is insufficient, in my mind. It falls down because time is empty, because matter is empty, because space is empty, because causality is empty. So that would be one very common instance.

But again, in the realm of professional academic philosophers, it's very common to kind of peer through the cracks, or it leaks out -- maybe that's a better way of putting it. Their ontological commitments and allegiances and preferences leak out, despite their professing, "There's no ultimate reality. We're not postulating any realism. There's no privileged point of view. In other words, there's no privileged way of looking, etc. There's no one correct perspective on things." So for example, in Richard Rorty, he would say that kind of thing a lot. He would write about that kind of thing a lot. And then it would slip out -- something like, "The universe is just made up of the purposeless movement of atoms," or something like that. And it's almost like it's caught in the cracks of his argument. So he's too smart to say it head-on, but when he is kind of not paying enough attention to what he's writing, perhaps, it stumbles out that, "Okay, that's actually the view." Or Foucault, Michel Foucault, for example, wrote:

We should not imagine that the world presents us with a legible face.... We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things.^[11]

So we must conceive conceiving as a violence that we do to things. But of course, how do we do a violence to things unless things are a certain way, in reality, prior to our discourse, prior to our conceiving? So the whole notion of "doing a violence to things" presumes that things already exist in a certain way, that we can do violence for: it's built like this, we smash it, or we distort it by our discourse, by our conceiving, by our perspectives, etc. So even these champions, or apparent champions, of non-realism are often betrayed by their allegiances, their predispositions. Their preferences and, if you like, agendas are betrayed in the cracks of their writings and language.

As I said, all this talk of non-reality, and this kind of dismissing, and the pulling, tearing down the assumption of the attainment, or even the possibility of attainment of some kind of privileged perspective or ultimate truth about anything at all, reached its zenith -- that whole movement of philosophy -- perhaps in the eighties or nineties, following the writings of Derrida and others, and what was called 'deconstruction philosophy.' And Cyril O'Regan wrote about this. He pointed out, I think, really importantly -- he said:

The art of deconstruction [that whole movement to deconstruct arguments that proposed, or that seemed to propose, some kind of privileged perspective or truth about anything at all -- that whole movement, and the art of deconstruction of philosophy] is a ... serious play [that] shows, unveils, uncovers the hubris of a discourse that would be complete.^[12]

In other words, if we could get this complete perspective, whether it's about anything -- the scientific perspective, a perspective on matter, on mind, on philosophy, on psychology, on culture, on ethics, on whatever. He goes on:

Taken at its word deconstruction cannot indulge in statement, in metadescription, and, least of all, in prescription.

In other words, if you really trust what deconstruction is saying, proposing, and attempting to do, then it must deconstruct itself, and it can't then offer a prescription: "You should look like this. You should look without positing an ultimate reality." That would contradict itself. Or to consider itself a more privileged perspective would be to contradict itself. So he continues:

That despite itself it manifests a tendency to do so [to indulge in statement, metadescription, and prescription, being prescriptive] is evident.

And then he cites a deconstructive philosopher/theologian, Mark Taylor, and he says a particular work called Erring

clearly indulges in an evaluative language of prescription and proscription [recommending this and prohibiting that].

He says you don't -- I'm paraphrasing now a little bit -- he says you don't find that so much in the work of Derrida, though even in Derrida's case, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he thinks his own proposal, he considers his own proposal to be right, in the way the ontotheological tradition is not. So 'ontotheology,' I think it's Heidegger's word, or maybe Derrida, I can't remember where it started, this postulate of, like, "This is real. This is true. And this has privileged, almost divine status." Onto-, from 'ontology'; theo-, from 'God.' "This perspective, or this statement, is true, is real, or is privileged." And so, Cyril O'Regan is pointing out, even in Derrida's case, all of these guys, they think that their proposal is right, in the way that other proposals -- say, for example, the philosophy of Hegel (which O'Regan is actually writing about it in this case) is not. And then he continues:

Openness [this openness of point of view] is a prescription, a metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical recommendation; closure [the opposite, so "we've arrived at a truth now, this is now the best perspective we know," or whatever it is], a proscription [a prohibition], a quasi-metaphysical no-no.... Deconstructionist use of the antithetical pair closure and openness has to be seen as thoroughly evaluative.

So there's a kind of self-contradictoriness that runs through postmodernism and that whole philosophy, among other problems. What is going on here? Why? Why is this so? You know, I think this is really interesting. And again, if we come back to J. N. Findlay and something he wrote:

However much we may affect interest in the architecture of nature [in other words, in science, etc.] or its various departments, or in the various detached systems of ideas which proliferate abundantly in their glassed-in compartments [in other words, in philosophical ideas], it is plain that we cannot achieve clarity in regard to any of them without achieving clarity as to our empirical, conceptual and linguistic approaches to them. Without due study of these, we are more than likely to see our own thought-[habits] and speech-habits and problems merely written large on the cosmos, and there is, in fact, no easier way to fall victim to what is arbitrary and personal than to set out uncritically to be objective and impersonal.^[13]

So again, he's saying something about the whole approach, that we have to actually become more conscious of our whole way of approaching whatever questions we're investigating, whatever areas we're questioning. And without that consideration of our approach, our leanings, our frameworks -- empirical, conceptual, and linguistic -- we're just going to project our habits, really, onto the cosmos, inner and outer. [1:40:09]

So our approaches, our frameworks constitute, in a way, or at least shape part of what fabricates what we then conclude. Our approaches and frameworks, our paradigms -- as I was talking about, that Thomas Kuhn quote: "A paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself." And as we explore this more and more, we can broaden his statement beyond, perhaps, the limits of what he initially meant by it. And then, of course, whatever we're already assuming, and what we might call 'ground assumptions' that sneak in. So I mentioned that René Descartes was regarded as one of the principal founders of the scientific method, and one of his main ideas -- which many of you will know, of course -- is in the question: is it possible to place our method of inquiry, and method of investigation, and our reasoning on a really solid, clean foundation -- a foundation we can trust, but also a foundation that doesn't drag in distortions, assumptions, that kind of baggage that would prevent a clear and objective seeing of the truth? So that was the idea, and then he postulated, "Well, is there one thing I can trust?" And he dismissed this and this and that and this, and he came down to this: I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum. This is the one thing I can trust.

You might very much question his conclusion there. But at least the principle is that there's one thing I can trust, and on that one foundation, supposedly, I then proceed. And whatever follows from that is acceptable. So what he would call 'radical doubt' underpins the so-called Cartesian method, the scientific method. You start with this radically doubting everything. Is there one thing that's beyond doubt? And then build things on that foundation. And that's supposed to be a pure and clean and objective, distortion-free, value-free, assumption-free, desire-free, etc., method to follow.

However, as a number of philosophers have pointed out since then, there's something a little fishy here when you read his work and regard his opus. There's more than one thing, but one thing I'd like to focus on right now. Charles Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce was a quite influential American philosopher. And I'm quoting Weinsheimer again, and he said:

Peirce observes that "no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied unless he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up."

In other words, someone professing to follow this method of radical doubt, and the kind of antiseptic cleaning of all the mechanisms of inquiry, and cogitation, and deduction, and observation, someone who is professing to follow that will kind of try and recognize what they believe, try and sweep it to one side -- the "beliefs which in form he has given up" -- give them up, give those beliefs up. But then actually, there's something operating that won't "ever be satisfied" unless "he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up." In other words, then you have a process where actually what you're trying to do is recover those very beliefs that you have made a big deal of putting aside. [1:44:47] And Weinsheimer goes on to add to Peirce's comment:

It is not by accident that in matters of faith, for example, however heretical the Cartesian method, its results were quite orthodox and traditional.

Here's this very heretical and kind of radical methodology of inquiry, and epistemology, etc., but in certain areas, at least, he ends up with just exactly the conclusions that were already there, the assumptions that he was already bringing in to that inquiry. They were quite orthodox and traditional. Weinsheimer says:

The method itself seems a circular detour, less an exercise of self-sovereign reason than of rationalization.

So there's a big trumpet-blowing that, "Okay, we're going to be completely independent in our reasoning, in our observation, independent of any influences, and conditionings, and assumptions, and all that" -- as I said -- "distortions, wishes, desires." And that would constitute so-called "self-sovereign reason," if there even is such a thing. And the point is, actually, he's just rationalizing what he already was taught in childhood, and had believed. Goes on to say:

Descartes himself does not so much make a radical beginning as justify the beliefs that he had accepted as true from an early age.

So Peirce makes that observation, Weinsheimer makes the observation, and Heidegger, also, in his Being and Time, made the same conclusions about Descartes. In other words, a little time passes, and other thinkers, other people, look back on that proclamation of Descartes -- "This is what I'm doing. This is how it works" -- and shine a light on it, and it doesn't look quite as spick-and-span, clean and pure as Descartes presumed it was, or claimed that it was. Dragging in, dragging back in assumptions -- or really they were never removed in the first place.

And then there's the whole question, which I've touched on before, about motivation. What is actually guiding us, or pushing or pulling us, propelling us in one direction or another, in regard to questions of ontology and epistemology, reality and knowledge, etc.? So it's almost like we bring back in a consideration of psychology. You know, what's happening psychologically, for this person or that person, that they're actually looking to make a certain conclusion? And then, indeed, they do make a certain conclusion. They end up with the conclusion that they had been wanting to make anyway.

So there was a guy called Fierz, I think his name was, and I think he wrote a biography about Newton, the physicist Isaac Newton. And he points out -- if I can find this passage -- he points out:

The [source] of Newton's deepest ideas about nature, Fierz found [this is from an article, I'm quoting now from an article by Christian von Baeyer], were his religious beliefs. Absolute space, for example, is a manifestation of God's ubiquity [of God just being everywhere, totally everywhere, if you like, equally and totally everywhere]. Absolute time is an expression of God's eternity. This suggestion is not introduced idly or speculatively, but explained explicitly and in detail in the Principia [Newton's great, great work on physics]. In Newton's words, translated from the Latin: "[God] lasts forever and he is present everywhere, and by existing forever and everywhere, he has established duration and space, eternity and infinity."

What's more, the idea is supported by Biblical references. For example, Newton quotes Saint Paul in Acts ... : "For in him we live and move, in him we exist." God is space, in other words -- what could be plainer? This is actually an old Jewish tradition. The word maqom, for space, is one of God's names [in the Jewish tradition]. While God's nature appears as space and time, his dominion appears in the form of natural laws. And the most obvious effect of his actions is gravity.^[14]

So Christian von Baeyer goes on:

It seems that for Newton the purpose of physics was not at all to reveal the mechanism of the world, as his followers, down to our time, imagined. Rather, it was to demonstrate God's influence on the world. Since God is utterly incomprehensible to us, the laws of nature -- such as universal gravitation [Newton came up with the first real theory about that] are incomprehensible too. Anything we can say about God is merely symbolic -- and therefore the laws of nature are symbolic too.

But basically -- and you can point this out for other physicists, like Kepler and others -- what's driving the motivation there was actually -- contrary to what many people suppose -- was actually a religious sensibility and a religious agenda. And he wanted to prove something about God.

Now, Newton was actually clear and explicit and very open about that connection, about what drove him, about his reasoning. What's, I think, much more problematic and kind of insidiously dangerous is when both the assumptions of reality and the motivations are not explicit, when they're actually implicit. And this is what we get a lot today, and particularly, again, in the discourse, in philosophies, or there are branches of discourse of the kind of secular world-view, because many of the assumptions -- conscious or unconscious -- on which the conceptual framework, and world-view, the Weltanschauung of secular modernism rest are not made explicit. In a way, then, the assertions and the views are kind of dogmatic because they're not explicit. So if you lay something out, there's a way that it's less dogmatic. People can say, "Well, I disagree with that bit." If you hide it, consciously or unconsciously, it becomes a kind of dogma. It's not quite clear what things are resting on, or what to question. And then even more so with the motivation. I've picked up this point before, in the past: why is it that I'm presenting a picture of the cosmos like this or like that? Why is it I am so keen to insist on a meaningless cosmos as almost a dogmatic point of certainty, or as if it's been proved somehow? What's going on for me psychologically? Why is it that I desire that kind of cosmos?

Now, this applies also to any other view. So this question about motivation, for example, and assumption -- that's two questions, about motivation, and underlying assumption, and approach; we'll say three considerations. That applies also to the view of radical emptiness. It applies if we're kind of in favour of, or trying to present notions of spiritual absolutes, or metaphysical realities, or whatever. So I think it's really important to realize this, the place of agenda and motivation, which is very often -- certainly not made explicit, and very often not even conscious. I've talked about this before. What kind of self and world do I want to kind of paint for myself and then inhabit? And why? What's going on there? Whichever way it is, what's my predisposition?

So yes, what are my assumptions that I'm not questioning, and that I'm not even sharing with others? "I'm assuming this and this." What is in the whole framework of the way I'm approaching things, linguistically and conceptually? And what's going on in my motivation, and why, about how I want to conjure the sense of the stage, the theatre of self and world? So really important, I think, to realize this -- all of us, whatever our inclinations and hopes and allegiances are -- to realize this, and to admit it. Bring that into the discourse. Then it's almost like a whole other level of, well, honesty, transparency, but also range, and openness, and complexity comes into these kind of debates and arguments, and this kind of discourse and thinking. [1:55:35]

To throw even more kind of jittery-making considerations and observations into the mix, and things that shake us up a little bit, and shake up the ground, make it all a little bit less certain, certainly more complex, is also, I think, to point out that -- I don't know how to say it, quite -- epistemology is personal, it seems to me. So I've noticed, particularly, let's say, in the area when teaching emptiness to people, or talking with them about emptiness, and about (if they're on this journey of deepening understanding and exploration of emptiness) what is it that actually gives a person a deep conviction in emptiness? And what's interesting to me is that it varies. So not everyone will be convinced by the same either meditative experiences, or reasoning underpinning meditative experiences, or philosophical analyses, or whatever it is. It's quite individual. What makes this person convinced at a very deep level of their being, that they would build their life around it, and stake their life on it, and that it affects their life deeply? What makes this person convinced deeply, let's say, about emptiness? It's very different than what makes this person deeply convinced about emptiness. And yet they both have a deep conviction -- a deep, ingrained, passionate, and powerfully effective, and liberating conviction in emptiness.

This, I think -- again, just observing over the years from teaching -- is really interesting. For Person A and Person B, in those examples, what was convincing for Person A is totally unconvincing for Person B, and vice versa. And when it comes down to how we're going to live, how we're going to orient to ethics, how we're going to make choices in our life, what kind of liberation we're living out, then epistemology has to be personal, in the sense that I have to trust it. I have to trust this knowledge, or this insight, or this reasoning, or that perception, or whatever it is. It has to be personal. And then, when I observe what makes a difference for people, that actually they have this personal sense of something that they can trust, it really varies quite a lot. I think that's very interesting.

And as I pointed out, I think, in one of the earlier talks in the series, it might be, for some people -- if we just talk about emptiness for a second -- that they are, in fact, taking the teachings of emptiness, and the conclusions of emptiness, and the ontology of emptiness -- they're taking it on board out of trust for some authority, or a particular teacher, or sometimes it's me, or whoever else, or some teacher from history, etc. What's interesting in Tibetan Buddhist teachings is, they have a whole -- it goes back to Mahāyāna Indian Buddhism -- there was a whole exploration of these questions of epistemology: what knowledge can we trust? If you have a certain experience in meditation, how do you know whether you can trust that experience or not? If you're walking down the street, how do you know what you can trust in terms of your perception? If you're, you know, reading spiritual scriptures or whatever, how do you know what you can trust, etc.? And so, they really tried to explore, and expound, and expand this whole area and these questions of epistemology. And one of the categories of valid epistemology is scriptural authority. In other words, "You can trust this because it says it in that book, and that book's a good book." So it might be easy for us, sometimes, for some of us, to kind of pooh-pooh that. But again, what's interesting to me is just what a range there is in personal epistemology. [2:00:41]

In other words, what makes a difference for different people? What really makes a deep difference, so that they, as I said, build their life, their choices, their risk-taking, etc., on what basis? On a basis that's personal for them -- it has to be personal to have that kind of faith in it, because when we talk about epistemology, we're talking about, "What knowledge can I trust?" It means it's a foundation. "I dare to put my foot there because the ground is solid" -- that kind of knowledge. And so, most of us, in a way, have that kind of trust of authority, even though some of us might hear what I just said about scriptural authority and the teachings about that in Buddhism, and a lot of us are much more familiar with Buddha's teaching of, "Don't trust anything. Come and see. The Dhamma is ehipassiko, etc., to be seen for oneself. Come and see for yourself, etc." But actually, there's this whole other teaching of scriptural authority as well. And most of us have that relationship with authority and trusting the knowledge, of course, with scientific authority, medical authority, and these kinds of things. So even though you might be a little suspicious of that kind of notion of scriptural authority, we have it in lots of areas in life. We have to, because there's too much knowledge to have for one human being.

And so, sometimes, with all this, it might be that, for example, people practising sensing with soul, and imaginal practice, etc., don't feel any need for ontological or epistemological explanations, or clearings, or groundings, or legitimizations. And someone might say -- I don't know -- someone might say of those people, "They're just willy-nilly trusting these images and these strange sort of spiritual or so-called 'soulful' perceptions of things, this 'sensing with soul,' or whatever. Why don't they question the reality of that? How do they legitimize that? Are they not lazy? Are they not being lazy or sloppy?" Perhaps someone would think that from the outside. But if you stand back, and look at the whole picture, and say, "Well, maybe not any more than most human beings -- who are many now -- who have, say, heard or read about, for instance, the radical ruptures, and conundra, and shifts of ontology and epistemology effected or implied very strongly by the modern physics over the last 120 years."

In other words, it's said, we hear this, whatever, all this stuff from physics, and what it implies, it doesn't seem to affect much deeply in many people at all -- most often even the physicists themselves. But certainly for the lay people, and for some physicists, as I pointed out, there's not a lot of kind of, then, vigorous and energetic pursuit of these questions of ontology and epistemology. So someone who picks up, and who has an affinity with, and wants to explore, and has faith in sensing with soul, that kind of thing, explorations, you know, they might not be any more lazy than any of the rest of us who don't pick up any of these other questions and, as I said, conundra of ontology and epistemology that are actually the heritage, the legacy of our culture, of our Western culture, at the present.

And something I also pointed out, I think, several times -- it's also in the book that I wrote about emptiness, Seeing That Frees -- when you really start to think about epistemology, you start to realize that all and any epistemology, all and any sense of, "I know this," or "This is the kind of knowledge I can trust," you start to see, at some point, it's always, at some level down, it's going to be resting on assumptions, and at some point, you'll reach an assumption that's basically unproven. And so if you say to someone, "Oh, you believe that about what knowledge you can trust, or what's real?" and say, "Why do you believe that?" And you pursue that question, and they'll say, "Because of this." And you say, "And why do you believe -- well, why do you believe this, then?" And they say, "Because of that." And say, "Why do you believe that?" And at some point, they'll just have to say, "I just believe it." And whatever reason they give, you can come up with another question. And at some point, it will just reach a kind of bedrock of an unproven assumption.

And I say, all and any epistemology, all and any choice, if you like -- whether it's conscious or unconscious -- about what knowledge we can trust (and then by implication, because they imply each other as subjects, the ontology, as well, the notion of what's real, woven in together), all and any epistemology and ontology rest on unproven assumptions at some point. And so there's a parallel -- at least a parallel, if not an equation here -- with the situation in kind of philosophical hermeneutics, and also the hermeneutics of literature and all that. [2:06:53] So J. Hillis Miller wrote:

Whenever the interpreter thinks he has reached back to something original, behind which it is impossible to go, he finds himself face to face with something which is already an interpretation.^[15]

So we cannot kind of get to the bottom of this. At some point, certainly, as I said, all and any epistemology rests on unproven assumptions. And again, can we realize this? Can we admit it? Do we even admit it to people that we disagree with? [2:07:45]

So it's complex, all the things that come in here -- historically, psychologically, conceptually, philosophically. As I pointed out earlier, to actually stay true, or to have integrity, and thoroughness, and steadiness, and comprehensiveness with that assertion that there's no privileged perspective, that one is not asserting any ultimate truth, or that it's not possible to do so, etc., that's actually very difficult. And so there are slips, and distortions, and blind spots that come in here, for all kinds of reasons -- gaps, lacunae, shaky foundations, questionable building structures. It's difficult. Sometimes it's just a lack of self-awareness. Sometimes it's maybe even lack of honesty, self-honesty and honesty with others; I don't know. The position of what we might call 'deep emptiness' -- that there really is no ultimate reality, that there's not a privileged perspective -- that's difficult. That's difficult to realize, and difficult to sustain. [2:09:23]

And it's also not as simple a position as it might sound. So I can't remember if I said this before, but it bears saying again: you know, the fact that there is no 'real' way something is, independent of our way of looking, that how it appears depends on our way of looking, and that it's not a 'something' at all independent of our way of looking -- so these are all, I would say, conclusions of the kind of exploration, deep exploration, thorough exploration into emptiness the way, at least, I would teach it. So the fact that there is no real way something is independent of our way of looking, the fact that how it appears depends on our way of looking, and the fact that it is not a 'something' at all independent of our way of looking -- all that does not equate to or allow us to say that all ways of looking and perceptions have equal epistemological and ontological validity, or that they're kind of all exactly the same. So there's something kind of very simple-sounding about the emptiness teachings, and it's possible to kind of be a little lazy with that, a little sloppy. [2:10:57]

And what I said about the "all and any epistemology resting on some unproven assumptions" applies also to the epistemology of emptiness. In other words, how do I know emptiness is true? How do I trust that, that insight, that perception? That trust, in other words, that epistemology, that "I trust this insight. I trust that knowledge. I trust that, whatever it is, about emptiness" -- that also has to rest on unproven assumptions. What do we do with all this? As I said, sometimes, and it seems to be quite a common reaction, just to kind of shrug and get on with things in the way that we're used to, which is basically the way that we've been usually indoctrinated by a culture or a sub-culture -- something like that -- or the way that we're just predisposed to whatever. What do we do with all this? Is there a way we can keep it all alive, creative, and also still discover, so that there's some rigour, some integrity, some honesty, some challenge, some journey to all these questions and this journey?

For some people, given all this that I've said in terms of what's opened from the revolutions in physics in the last 120 years, what's opened from the considerations of many philosophers of science, in terms of science's position vis-à-vis truth, and questions of epistemology and ontology, what's been shown as the limitations of the scientific method, and certainly as the limitations of the classical scientific world-view, but also, more widely, the scientific method, the calling into question "What do we even mean by truth?" Is it what we used to mean by 'truth'? Can we hold that notion any more?

And we start to realize: oh, then, we actually bring a whole package to these questions, a whole conceptual baggage, linguistic baggage, methodological baggage, etc., tendencies of perception, tendencies of observation, habits, and then motivations, and then this other question of the fact that epistemology is both personal and must, at some level, rest on unproven assumptions. Is there a way that we can kind of take all that earthquake in, and all the kind of fracturing of the ground that we've become used to over hundreds of years? And actually, more than hundreds of years, because before the Scientific Revolution, it was just a different kind of solid ground, in terms of epistemology and ontology, that everyone believed in, in the West, at least. Can we take all that, and the fractured ground from those kind of multiple earthquake realizations and honest admissions, and actually retain something that has some creative tension in it, that doesn't just end up with us shrugging, and things going flaccid, and sloppy, and lifeless, and actually kind of uncreative?

Remember -- I can't remember what context I mentioned it now, but Stravinsky's thing, Stravinsky's statement about, you know, when there are constrictions, it's actually a more creative process. When I have constrictions on what kind of shape or rules this music I'm going to compose has to follow, then it's a much more creative prospect. If anything goes, then actually, I get a kind of -- yeah, flaccidity, sloppiness. There lacks the kind of tension in the wire, in the material, in the soil for creativity in terms of perception, in terms of how we relate to the world, in terms of sensing with soul, in terms of how we relate to ethics, etc. So can I, looking at all this kind of fractured ground, admitting all that, taking it in -- is there a way to relate to it, other ways to relate to it, that still have, as I said, some integrity, some rigour, some challenge, some possibility of direction and journey, following a thread rather than it just disintegrates into some kind of wobbly, sloppy, blancmange kind of thing, where everything kind of "eh, it's all okay"? It will also then correspondingly lack power, I think.

So with all this, some people -- I have no idea what proportion -- are able not so much to sidestep, but to find a particular avenue with all these questions of epistemology and ontology, and kind of, certainly not all the time, but move in and out of the mode of what we would call the imaginal Middle Way, or a kind of poetic sensibility, poetic view of existence and experience, and certainly the kinds of experience that we talk about, sensing with soul and imaginal perceptions. And so the poet W. B. Yeats wrote something -- someone was obviously asking him about this stuff. I don't quite know the context, but he said:

Some will ask if I believe all that this book contains, and I will not know how to answer.^[16]

Don't know what book he's talking about, but the important sentence is the next one:

Does the word belief, used as they will use it, belong to our age, can I think of the world as there and I here judging it?

"Does the word belief, used as they will use it, belong to our age?" In other words, does it make sense any more, given everything I've said? Can I think of the world as there, as independently existing, and myself here judging it, as an independent, objective observer of an independent, objectively existing world? And of course, he was a poet, and had access to that poetic sensibility, that imaginal Middle Way. And I'm pretty sure I mentioned, a couple years ago in a talk, an article I came across in The Guardian by Stephen Tomkins, I think his name was, and pointed out, you know, there's nothing in the Bible, Old or New Testament, I think, that states that the Bible should be read literally, or I think in the Qur'an; I'm not at all familiar with the Qur'an.^[17] And there's nothing there saying, "You should believe all these stories and statements or whatever as -- you should believe them literally." And this is something Henry Corbin emphasized over and over again. It was really a big part of his agenda in his representations of various Islamic teachers from history, that we're not talking about -- when we talk about the Qur'an, when we talk about the Old and New Testament, we're not talking about a collection of facts. We're talking about a symbolic opus. The stories, the narratives, the parables, all of it, the whole thing is kind of parable, in the sense that it invites interpretation.

And not just that -- not allegory in the sense that allegory means, "This represents that. Oh, okay, I've figured out the code, so every time I read that, I'll understand this. And then the truth, the interpretation, the hermeneutics stop there. I've finished it now. I know what -- I could rewrite the whole thing, substituting word X every time there's word Y, or whatever it is." So not allegory, which has a limited sort of, "This means that," but what Henry Corbin calls ta'wil -- it's from the tradition -- ta'wil, this kind of open hermeneutics, open interpretation, that there's, if you like, infinite possibility of interpretation, an infinite depth, this, again, in our language, infinite, this unfathomability. I cannot box it in. I cannot reduce it to one meaning, one cause, one explanation, one representation. There's this endlessly fecund space that scripture -- in this case, the scripture of the Abrahamic religions -- that it invites us into. And it behoves us to participate in that interpretation. It's something we meet -- again, create/discover. There's that possibility.

This is also a teaching you get in the Zohar, the Jewish Kabbalistic mystical huge book from the -- well, depends who you believe, but let's say the Middle Ages. And again, they're quite denigrating of people that just consider the Bible a collection of stories and historical data about whatever it is, the history of the children of Israel, or whatever. While they might believe there's some truth in that, not just the Bible, the reports of those stories, whether they're factual or not, but also the events themselves have this infinite hermeneutic. So there's, again, this idea, this possibility of infinite hermeneutic, this invitation to an endless interpretation.

So certainly for Corbin, also in the events of life, there's what we would call the possibility of sensing with soul. It's not just what it seems. There are dimensions and possibilities there. So this kind of imaginal Middle Way, this kind of poetic sensibility, this kind of openness and engagement in the endless and infinitely fecund possibility of interpretation, of hermeneutics, of image and symbol -- that's one kind of stance with all this, one kind of thread of navigation with all these questions.

And again, I may be repeating myself, but I think it's important, so I will say it again: with regard to imaginal practice and the perceptions we have of the world through sensing with soul, given what I've said, it may be that humanity will not ever arrive at a fully complete and conclusive answer or truth regarding the ontic status, the reality status of imaginal images. So this philosophical question, again, can go on forever. And I think, rather than shrugging, I think it should -- I think it's beautiful to engage in these questions with some rigour, with some integrity. What is true? What is real? What is not real? How can we, what knowledge can we trust? Even though we might never reach an answer, again, there's an infinite process there that's possible, that's not just unconstrained and not in relationship with the need to be coherent, and to correspond with our experience, etc., and our discoveries. But we may not ever reach an end there.

But phenomenologically, with regard to practice, we can notice that adopting or finding ourselves in the imaginal Middle Way -- in other words, sensing images and soulmaking perceptions, sensing with soul, as neither real nor not real (so we talked about this kind of theatre-like quality) -- that stance of the imaginal Middle Way automatically and often effortlessly allows us to have and feel, with respect to an image, a sense of duty with freedom. We can have duty with freedom. And we can have relative non-attachment. So this imaginal Middle Way, again, it's between two poles, real and not real -- "two extremes," as they would say in the Dharma: the extreme of reification, and the extreme of nihilism. And the imaginal Middle Way, in being between those two poles, also delivers a kind of Middle Way, that we can have a sense of duty, and the power of that, and the way the soul is touched by a sense of duty, and the alignment that gives, and the devotion that gives in life. We can have a sense of duty with freedom, and autonomy, and relative non-attachment. So again, the imaginal Middle Way delivers something between two extremes: (1) a duty where there's no freedom, and just attachment, and no autonomy, or (2) the freedom, and non-attachment, and autonomy, but no sense of duty. And that stance delivers that, as I said, automatically and effortlessly, this poise of the imaginal Middle Way, phenomenologically speaking, experientially speaking, in practice.

And similarly, we can have a sense of sacredness and meaningfulness without fixation or tightness. We can have a sense of depth that is open to more discovery. So it's not a depth, and "now this is finished," etc. So there's something about this poise of the imaginal Middle Way, experientially, that's, again, it's very fertile. It has, it delivers a lot of power -- not power over, but power into our being, power for the journey, power for creation/discovery, power for navigation in life, power for meaningfulness, etc., that actually works in life. So the imaginal Middle Way is a very helpful, very powerful, very fruitful perspective, and it's important to notice that, that we get these gifts with it: freedom, energy, wonder, beauty, joy. They all come out of that imaginal Middle Way.

Conversely, we can see, and notice, and feel -- and this is an invitation to actually, as I said, see, notice, feel what happens, what dies, and how these gifts are unavailable; they shrink, they close, they become unavailable when an image is reified, or a sensing with soul perception is reified or literalized. Again, we can look to the effects to inform our choices, our stances, our attitudes, perspectives, and conceptions. There may be, there is this, I think, endless, endlessly open, difficult philosophical journey to go on regarding ontology and epistemology. And there's this possibility of the stance of the Middle Way, the imaginal Middle Way -- at least some of the time, much of the time -- and this poetic sensibility. And phenomenologically, we notice this yields really good results. We can trust it. We can trust what comes out of that. So that's one kind of avenue of possibility out of this fractured landscape, and kind of fractured foundations, what appears to be fractured foundations regarding ontology and epistemology.

And there's also, and I pointed this out, or I began opening up a little bit the territory of the possibility of a bit more reification, leaning a little bit more to the reification pole within the imaginal Middle Way. I began opening that up in, if I remember, the last talks of the Mirrored Gates series, I think. "Between Ikon and Eidos," I think they're called. So is there a possibility of actually not being so strict or tight with the range of the imaginal Middle Way, and actually leaning more towards a kind of reification, or allowing a kind of trust in the reality of certain perceptions and senses we have of things, when we sense with soul? So I'd like to explore that a little bit, too, as another option.