Transcription
Just to very briefly recap, we've been talking in particular about epistemology and ontology, the areas of philosophy that explore the whole question of knowledge and what knowledge is trustworthy, and ontology, the area of philosophy that explores the question of what actually is real and what is not real. And we described briefly what came gradually over years, centuries, really, to become the dominant world-view, given to us by classical science. And we described that: very much believing in an independently existing reality and the possibility of objectively, clearly, fully, even, knowing that reality, that truth, and a growing tendency to regard that world or sense that world as definitively and provenly meaningless, purposeless, lacking in divinity and dimensionality, etc., and just composed only of materiality. So those are some of its sort of drifts and kind of more extreme but still common tendencies.
And then we described very briefly, we touched on the revolutions in physics at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly relativity theories and quantum physics, and how that really severely brought into question the whole idea of an independently existing reality which we could know clearly, definitively, objectively, as it is. And this stimulated certain reflections on the nature of science in general, but particularly on the limits of the scientific method and also the relationship of science with truth -- that whole endeavour. There were other reasons for the critique or the questioning, really, of science and its relationship with truth. And there was a whole philosophical movement, or we can trace a whole philosophical movement that again questions the possibility of knowing reality, of having a privileged perspective, or attaining the perspective, the way of looking, the way of conceiving that achieves reality, in postmodernism and other kind of philosophical trends.
And on top of all that, we pointed out that even though many philosophers would profess allegiance to that kind of non-realist stance, that really what leaks out very often is some or other kind of realist stance. Very often, a secular, existentialist, and materialist view of reality -- somewhat, in some senses nihilistic -- leaking out despite their positing and claiming to not have a position about reality, or a claim about reality, or the possibility of attaining truth. And unpacking all that, it's the need to realize that what we bring in terms of framework, approach, language, history, culture, assumption, and motivation -- why I want this thing to be true, why I want the universe to be this way, why I want human nature to be like this -- all those considerations need to be brought into this whole kind of difficult soup, really, around epistemology and ontology. And that applies, whatever one's inclinations and wishes are -- a wish for this or that to be the case.
I pointed out further that, to a certain extent at least, epistemology is personal. To a certain extent, epistemology is personal. What convinces one person and what leads them to trust certain knowledge, certain insights, is different from another person who gains conviction by another pathway, or another revelation, or another consideration, and trusts that. And we also pointed out more generally that if you keep just asking questions about, regarding epistemology, "Why do you trust that? Well, why do you believe that then? And why do you believe that?" And you just keep going, asking questions: "Why? Why trust that?" Eventually, one will come to the fact, one will realize the fact that we're all holding -- whatever one's position, at some point, we recognize that we hold some kind of unproven assumption, and we're basing our epistemology and our ontology on something that can't be proved.
So all that, whether we consider it a kind of cataclysmic earthquake in the whole enterprise of human understanding, a whole fracturing of the kind of vessels that hold that human enterprise, or if one thinks, "Oh, that's much too hysterical language. Calm down," and views it much more "So okay, there are some difficulties here. We have to tone down our claims a little bit regarding truth, etc." -- however one regards it, one has to, I think, open to these considerations, and digest them, and respond to them. And of course, there are many possible responses; I'm just touching on a few. We said the realization, the deep realization of radical emptiness, the thorough, comprehensive emptiness of all phenomena, all things at all levels -- it's difficult to attain, difficult to hold on to, and quite sophisticated and subtle as a knowledge. And even that has its own epistemological -- won't say 'blind spots,' but assumptions. Even that insight into emptiness rests on certain unproven assumptions; it has to, whatever they are. But one option here is to develop that understanding of emptiness and hold that stance of the Middle Way of the Buddhadharma.
Another response, of course, is just to shrug and ignore all this, all this debate, and all this fracturing, and all this rug-pulling that developed -- certainly over the twentieth century -- and just kind of get on with things and ignore it. What that usually entails (and it's important to point this out) is when we shrug -- and it's a position, it's a popular position in some Western philosophy, contemporary philosophy, starting in the twentieth century, is to effectively say, "Well, this is unprovable. Ontology and epistemology will come to no end, won't come to an end, and therefore, we're not going to indulge in them. Any indulging in those kind of areas of exploration, and certainly any claims, all of that is a kind of human hubris and arrogance," etc. But effectively, practically speaking, often -- I'm thinking of philosophers like Richard Rorty -- what happens in such a statement is it effectively manifests as a kind of shrug. And in that shrug, one goes back to one's default positions. Hence, as I pointed out, Rorty, the leaking of the kind of, again, quite a secularist, anti-religious agenda. So all this talk about "no privileged point of view," but it's denigrating of the religious, it leaks out of the sides of his writing. And what also leaks out is this kind of belief and assertion that "the fundamental reality of things is the purposeless movement of atoms in a meaningless universe."
So we can say, "Oh yes, the philosophical problems here are too enormous. There's too much arrogance involved in claiming any progress towards truth or understanding, ontologically, epistemologically." We put it aside, and we regard ourselves as liberated from all that. But what often happens is, in that, there's a kind of deflation of the being, of the soul, in some ways. And what was supposed to open up more territory (Rorty again), more territory for conversation, actually ends up shrinking it. And the default views, the indoctrinated views, the dominant, common views of whatever society we're in end up just keeping their reign. Nothing has really changed there. But that's of course an option, but it's certainly a choice that some people make in regard to all this, either consciously or unconsciously.
A third option we talked about is the imaginal Middle Way, that kind of poetic sensibility. We talked about Yeats and the open-ended, infinite hermeneutic possibilities that Corbin emphasized in the reading of both Abrahamic scriptures and sacred books, but also of this world, and the events in this world, and the events in history, and similarly in some Kabbalistic teachings, the Zohar.
I should point out -- I'm pretty sure I've said this before. I'm not sure when. Could even have been just a couple of talks ago. But it strikes me as so important, because of the pain it can cause in some people's souls from not understanding it, that it's worth repeating. So sometimes when I teach about deep emptiness and the whole notion of ways of looking, and "There are just ways of looking," etc., some people feel a great grief. They're attracted to that teaching, they explore it to a certain extent, often a fairly deep extent, but they kind of reach a point where it seems to them that, "Okay, so the sense of sacredness, then, is something that I get just when I look in a certain way that sees sacredness, and I can look in another way that doesn't see sacredness. So sacredness kind of takes a secondary status to the mind that sees in this way, that adopts this way of looking as opposed to that way of looking." And in that, as I said, there can be a lot of grief, because something in the soul wants that sacredness, and wants it to be, again, something trustworthy, something less sort of manufactured just by the whims of the observing mind.
But going deeper into this whole process of exploring fabrication and ways of looking, if we just talk about emptiness right now, one actually realizes that the mind that looks, the mind that chooses to look in this way or that way, or is adopting this or that way of looking, the consciousness, and the conceptual framework, and perception, awareness -- none of that has inherent existence either. It, too, is fabricated in the fabrication of the world and the fabrication of perception. So subject and object, consciousness and appearance, awareness and world mutually entail each other. They mutually involve each other. They're fabricated together. Neither one, in a way, is more fundamental. They both, if you like, melt into each other and rely on each other. Two vacuums leaning on each other -- empty, empty, empty. They participate in each other.
So that seeing, to me, that level of seeing opens up -- in the breakdown of concept there, it's hard to even talk about or explain it in some way that logically makes sense or causally makes sense. But with it, there is an insight, a felt insight into the participation of self, and awareness, and consciousness, and mind, and way of looking in what we experience. And that participation, in the mystery of that participation, there is, to me, a profound sacredness. And I would say, to anyone who really tastes that deeply, it can't help but kind of resurrect, if you like, if one has dismissed or kind of let go of a sense of sacredness, it can't help but resurrect it, re-establish it, bring it back to aliveness and to the fore in some very deep and mysterious way. So that position of deep emptiness also entails sacredness. It implies and involves a sense of sacredness in the deep mystery of what it means. [15:55]
Similarly, I would say that what we were calling that 'poetic sensibility' or that 'imaginal Middle Way' also implies sacredness. It's there in all the elements of the imaginal that we talked about, the divinity, the dimensionality, the eternality, the reverence, the grace, the humility -- all these and others, other elements, are part of the sense of the sacredness. So both the profound and radical Middle Way of Dharma teachings on emptiness and the imaginal Middle Way involve and invoke and elicit and open us to a sense of sacredness. Of course there are some people who talk about artistic sensibility and poetic sensibility, and they're using it in a different way, and it perhaps doesn't, for them, involve that sensibility. It certainly did for W. B. Yeats, who I quoted, and it does in the way that we're using those terms.
So three possibilities: (1) shrugging, (2) the penetrating into deep emptiness, and the sophistication, subtlety, and profundity of that, of those insights, and (3) the entertaining and the exploration of the imaginal Middle Way, that poetic sensibility, the opening up of perception in sensing with soul.
Another possibility that I mentioned at the end of the last part of the talk was that with the imaginal Middle Way, there is room, we could say -- there's room to move towards more of a stance of reification, more of a stance of believing or holding something to be a reality. And there are many different ways this can happen. As I mentioned, I talked about, or I started opening up that sort of end of things in the final talks of The Mirrored Gates series. But there are other ways, and there's one I just want to focus on right now, or another subset of ways that would fall into that category of a kind of, rather than holding this sort of precise Middle Way line in one way or another, actually fall into a category of entertaining a possibility of more reification. And that is to intuit, or posit, or deduce, or entertain the idea of some kind of -- let's call it 'higher truth' that integrates and makes sense of the paradoxes that we experience in our phenomenal world, in the normal state of consciousness, and makes sense of what seems nonsensical there.
For instance, some of the quantum physics observations of the seeming impossibility of knowing objectively how a thing really is before we observe, the problem of our observation always seeming to be determining what happens, and the apparent emptiness of things -- all that could be made sense of, and in a way, those paradoxes, gaps, and kind of fractures in our knowledge or our different perspectives can be made sense of, and integrated, and kind of made whole at a higher level of truth. So I've touched on this briefly -- I can't remember where -- over the years, just very briefly. And a couple of metaphors: one is that of those old disco balls. They probably had another name, you know. Some of you will remember. They're sort of three-dimensional balls hanging from a dance floor ceiling, and they've got little sort of tessellated pieces of mirror on them, so that when the dance hall lights shine on them, they sort of iridescently radiate in different directions, etc.
And so that truth is really like that -- or this higher truth, or this more absolute truth is really like a kind of disco ball, in the sense that it exists as a real entity in itself, in this three-dimensional way, but we're only able to shine certain lights on it, from certain angles, at certain times, for the most part, in our usual state of consciousness and understanding. And so it will just reflect, at different times, this colour light in that direction, that colour light in the other direction, etc. But in itself, it is a reality. So there's a kind of emptiness there, but at another level, it's not really empty. It exists objectively, independently, as a whole, as an integrated whole that brings together all those, makes sense of all those different perspectives and all those different manifestations.
Another metaphor is the kind of cartography, the kind of map-making systems that exist. I can't remember what they're called. I know one's called Mercator, and something else, but if you look at different maps you'll see, for instance, the relative sizes of countries are vastly different on different maps. On some maps, Africa, compared to, say, Europe, is absolutely ginormous. And on other map systems, Europe is not bigger than Africa, but a lot bigger than it was in the first one, or the distances between the countries, etc. And the problem there, again, is a kind of dimensional problem. The 3D earth, the globe of the earth, is how it is with the relative sizes, etc. But when you try and represent that in two dimensions -- that 3D spherical reality in two dimensions -- then you end up having to make compromises and sacrifices. Sacrifice this for that, or that for this, etc., so that neither of those two styles of map construction are actually -- they both have faults. They're both at best partial, and they're both, in a way, misleading. But the reality is the reality. They're the best attempts in two dimensions to represent what actually exists independently, objectively, in three dimensions.
Both of those metaphors I got from Sanford Drob's writing; I'm not sure where he got them from. So those kinds of ideas, and it's held that it's possible that reality is like that, and perhaps through philosophy, perhaps through meditation, perhaps through scientific progress, we can discern, or guess at, or extrapolate and conclude what the nature of the reality is that, in our normal state of consciousness, normal state of understanding, we cannot perceive.
So this kind of thing is relatively common; I don't know how common. But I was reading something by Ouspensky the other day, and he was actually talking just about the fourth dimension in more mathematical terms. I didn't read the whole article, but he just said something at one point about how [people] do séances, or they look for, they try to contact spirits after death, or this apparition of a ghost, or whatever it is -- that kind of phenomenon. And people try and prove it in different ways or whatever, that it exists like that, and/or construct some kind of sense of it, or a vision of what that existence must be like after death, or where spirits live, and all that. He pointed out that all of them involve an assumption that the spirits, if they exist, exist in the same temporal dimensions we do, in the same framework of time, this way that we experience time, for the most part, as sort of moving past to present to future. And that a spirit or a being, after it's died, may exist, or manifest, or experience time in a very different way. It doesn't belong to the same dimension of time that we do.
And so, he makes the analogy between, for example, a flat world, a two-dimensional world -- imagine a world that was completely flat like a piece of paper, or the surface of a lake, or something, and there are beings who are flat and live in that flat world. So they can only really move in two dimensions. They can only really sense in two dimensions. And they can only really conceive in two dimensions. If a being who inhabited a three-dimensional world were to, let's say, dive into that lake that they lived in, or put their pen through the piece of paper, or something like that, or dab onto the paper bits of ink or paint, lifting the paintbrush, putting it down, these beings would be completely baffled by the coming into existence and the disappearance of these phenomena, apparitions that seem to break all their rules of physics, and appearance, and the laws of how things work, etc.
But when you look at the whole thing from the perspective of three dimensions, it all makes sense. So rather than something just appearing out of nowhere and then disappearing out of nowhere, or appearing out of nowhere and then undergoing some -- imagine someone diving into a lake through the surface of the lake, and as they pass that surface there, the contour, the shape of cross-section there would vary as their body moves into the lake (wider in certain parts, double in certain parts with the arms and the legs, then one, then wider, then smaller, etc.), all that change of appearance would be bafflingly inexplicable to them. Looked at from, understood from a three-dimensional point of view, it makes sense, and it fits the usual three--dimensional laws, etc. But for those beings inhabiting a two-dimensional world, and grown up in that, and used to that, and with only that kind of apparatus, it would make no sense at all. [28:52]
And so his idea was that a fourth dimension could actually explain -- actually, I'm not sure if that was his idea, but just for the purposes of illustration now, the point is that there may be higher levels of reality, higher dimensions that then can make sense of all kinds of phenomena that we experience, that are problematical, paradoxical, nonsensical, etc., partial, contradictory. So, you know, actually, this is implicit. Perhaps I haven't emphasized it enough, this idea. We do talk about dimensions -- not in that mathematical way, but when we talk about sensing with soul, and when we talk about, for instance, eternality. Right there, there's something similar to what Ouspensky seemed to have been saying in these few lines that I read of his article.
So the angel is eternal. The angel is 'eternal,' which means 'timeless,' which means 'occupying a whole different dimension or realm of time.' And as I said, these things are always happening. This imaginal sense is always already happening. Or as Sallust said, "[it] never happened, but [it] always [is]."[1] So the angel is actually eternal. The appearance is, if you like, a refraction of the angel into time, into our experience, our dimension of temporality, our dimension of anything else. Or the appearance in time is, if you like, a kind of echo, an imperfect echo, or let's say, a three-dimensional echo of something that's four-dimensional -- but take that very loosely, or an echo, a manifestation in our limited sense of dimensions, a manifestation of something that has more dimensions, including that different temporal dimension. [31:15]
I mentioned the philosopher J. N. Findlay, and he would undertake a sort of careful phenomenological look at our reality, our reality of seeming to exist in a world of solid objects that we can't walk through, and that behave in certain ways, etc., and look at that, our experience of things, and pick up on the places where it doesn't quite make sense, it doesn't quite add up. Or different perspectives that are contradictory, paradoxical, seem to both be right, somehow, but neither completely right. And in his careful, sort of rigorous phenomenological analysis of everyday experience, he draws out those paradoxes and then proposes that they're resolved, again, with the solution of other worlds that exist at other dimensions, in other dimensions, so to speak. And here we don't just mean physical dimensions -- length, breadth, height, or time, etc. So we're really talking about other levels of worlds. And then, as I mentioned when I quoted him the other day, this exploration of the idea, or deduction of the idea of what he would call a 'mystical absolute' in which all these paradoxes are kind of integrated and made sense of, and so these worlds that he proposes -- and I've talked about this before in the context of Kabbalistic teaching, or some Dharma teachings, or other teachings from mystical Islam, etc. -- the idea of levels of worlds, multiple worlds at different levels. It's quite a common one. And these worlds, if you like, are, in a sense, tiered, and represent different degrees or stages between our sense of things at our level, at our limited dimensionality -- stages between that and this more mystical absolute that unifies, integrates, makes sense of all these paradoxes that we encounter.
So all of those that I've mentioned are also, like the deep emptiness, like the imaginal Middle Way, they are characterized by not just an implication of sacredness but a sense of sacredness. There's something intrinsically sacred in those notions of other dimensions, and what they explain there, and how they relate to ours. Of course, also, many of you will know from modern physics that beginning with Einstein's special theory of relativity in 1905, the idea of four dimensions being the sort of more accurate or, let's say, more useful model of things, rather than three dimensions, became really, really prevalent. So physicists almost always talk about space-time as opposed to three dimensions of space and then time. It's put together in four dimensions.
As the twentieth century went on, there were all kinds of other theories, and certain developments invoked multiple dimensions -- 9, 10, 11, 13 became a very popular number, and then I just read the other day, 26 dimensions. So this whole idea of other dimensions, the postulation of other dimensions -- I'd say different kinds of dimension -- the postulation of other dimensions explaining and making sense of what we experience, in this case through experiments in science, it's common in physics as well. It holds sway in physics as well. How many dimensions and exactly how they work -- that's a different story. But the idea that there are more dimensions is pretty mainstream.
Can we prove that? Is that provable? We're back to that question of epistemology and ontology again. The answer, having said what we've said before, is "never finally," because just like Newton's theory that worked so well and seemed to be proven by its predictive power, its efficacy, its correspondence with observation -- eventually, after a few hundred years, was dislodged, to be regarded as at best incomplete, at worst just wrong, by Einstein's theory. So if that can happen then, it can actually happen with any physical theory, no matter how well it ties in to observed experimental data, no matter how many predictions it makes that turn out to be true when we do experiments. There's always the possibility that one day, another theory will come along and that will make a prediction that that initial theory didn't make, and it will turn out to be true. It will be turn out to be validated, and it will have a very different idea of what's going on, and a very different mathematics, and very different 'laws' (in inverted commas, I'll put them), etc.
So can we prove that about other dimensions in physics? No, never finally. But what they seem to offer -- and again, why they're so dominant, and popular, and established in physics -- is that they do provide beautiful, elegant, and coherent explanations of phenomena that we perceive in our world and in our laboratories. Or they seem, they almost provide those explanations, because none of them have been completely worked out.
So as I said, there are many of these different kinds of theories. I suppose that you'd have to ask a physicist whether he considers that sacred or not, and I'm sure you'd get probably a mix of different answers. I read recently about one -- I barely understood it, but it was intriguing to me -- again, reported by Lee Smolin in his book. I think it's called Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. And it's something called the "anti-de Sitter space-time" or the "scale-invariant (conformal) field theory." So that's a bit of a mouthful. I don't really know what it means. But as I understood it, it involves, basically, the idea that there are other dimensions of space-time that obey certain geometries -- so more than just the four that we're used to. There are other dimensions, higher dimensions that obey certain geometries, and the intriguing thing to me was the correspondence between those two different dimensions.
So there is a physicist called Juan Maldacena and lots of other people exploring this. This other, higher world, let's say, with these other dimensions, he says:
In some cases, quantum phenomena in the original theory [in the theory of our dimensions] translate into gravitational phenomena in the higher-dimensional space.[2]
In other words, there's some kind of mathematical correspondence between these two kinds of world. One has more dimensions and a certain kind of geometry, and the other one is kind of our world, or a certain take on our world. And two theories which so far have been extremely difficult to unite, both extremely successful -- quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity, theory of gravity -- physicists have struggled to unite those two theories. They seem contradictory, attempts break down, etc. So there's a lot of work going on into uniting those two theories.
What's interesting with this postulation and this mathematical model of another world is that these two seemingly incommensurable theories kind of mirror or correspond to each other across the dimensions. Solutions to Einstein's equations in the higher dimensional space-time give approximations to quantum phenomena in the lower dimensional space-time. Even something like, for example, heating up a gas of particles in the lower dimensional space-time corresponds to forming a black hole in the higher dimensional world -- so, pretty far out. I don't understand it. [laughs] And he gives some other examples. It doesn't really matter. The point is this attempt to make sense of, make coherent, and integrate things that don't seem integratable at our level of perception, level of understanding, level of conception and reasoning.
So I don't know. There's been quite a lot of objection in physics, over the last hundred-and-whatever years at least, that some of these kind of really outlandish-sounding physical theories (and we could string off a whole list, some of these theories in physics -- for example, the one I just briefly mentioned there) are not remotely testable. There's no way one could come up with an experiment that would kind of test whether it's possibly true. There's no way to find out: "Is reality like that or not?" So testable experimental predictions seem kind of nowhere on the horizon at the present time. And so a sharp criticism that comes from some quarters, some physicists and some non-physicists say, "That's not even science any more. You do all that, and you make your neat, lovely, beautiful, elegant mathematics work, and this implies that, and that fits together with this, and that resolves that problem. But it's not science if it's not testable. That's not science. It's metaphysics." And here that word 'metaphysics' is used in a very derogatory way to mean that kind of abstract speculation that is not subject to empirical observation. It's not subject to being able to be perceived and verified that way.
But if we think back over the history of both philosophical ideas and then scientific ideas, there were many, many theories that were untestable at the time, many theories, that became testable sometimes many years later -- even sometimes hundreds of years later. And at the time when they were proposed, and considered, and explored, and put forth, there wasn't any hope that they would ever be testable, and they were just regarded as metaphysics. But what was regarded as metaphysics became, actually, the bread and butter of experimental science. So are these physical theories that postulate other dimensions and all the rest of it, that don't seem remotely testable -- are they 'metaphysics' in that derogatory sense, or are they not metaphysics?
In relation to the whole area of metaphysics, again, Joel Weinsheimer, in this book on Gadamer, reports a sort of development in the twentieth century where -- actually, starting way before the twentieth century, there was this denigration of metaphysics and ridiculing of metaphysics in that sense, and there was this movement towards what's called 'positivism.' Like, you only trust as knowledge, or only even waste your time thinking about and working on understanding what can be empirically observed, what's open to perception or obvious logical deduction. And that grew to its heights in the early twentieth century with the sort of philosophies of positivism and logical positivism.
So again, positivism is the kind of philosophy that "all knowledge must be based on perception." It rejects any claims of metaphysical speculation. Knowledge is only empirical or, as I say, the kind of logical deduction, very simple logical deduction which is almost a tautology at times -- for example, "All bachelors are unmarried. Correct -- we can approve that as knowledge." So it's in support of what they call the 'positive sciences,' over things like metaphysics, religion, etc., which they dismissed as just nonsense and a waste of time, and this pursuit, and claim of, and attempted dominance of what they would regard as definite, certain knowledge arrived at in those ways. But Joel Weinsheimer has a short passage in the book just tracing the history there. So in, I think it was the twenties, in what's called the Vienna Circle in philosophy, really, this kind of positivism reached its height. But he said time went by, and then he said that:
By 1975, John Wisdom [a philosopher] can speak of positivism only as a "dead horse," but he dates the demise of its anti-metaphysicalism thirty years earlier:
This [animus, this animosity] against metaphysical meaninglessness [he writes in a book called Philosophy and its Place] had very many eminent followers; but they had all given up these extreme positions at the latest by about 1945. I remember Hempel [philosopher] in the mid-30s reporting that it was customary in the Vienna Circle [this circle of positivists and logical positivists] to interject "metaphysical" if any member lapsed into a meaningless statement [a so-called "meaningless statement"], and that this happened so often it had to be shortened to "M."[3]
So you can imagine sitting around, talking philosophy, and then sort of pouncing on each other with "M! M!" by virtue of someone believing that someone else had sinned by saying something or suggesting something that was possibly not strictly positivist, and therefore metaphysical. But he goes on:
By 1945, this was a thing of the past, and there was a cooling of this anti-metaphysical passion and a discredification of some of the fundamental ideas and suppositions of the Vienna Circle [and that whole positivist philosophy].
Charles Taylor, the philosopher, wrote:
Once we awaken from our positivist slumbers we realize that none of these features [that pertain to areas of our experience that are not strictly in the realm of natural science and physics -- we realize none of these features absent from the human sciences] hold of natural science either.[4]
So I have to explain that, because part of the agenda of the positivists was to reduce all knowledge, or the range of all knowledge, to the scope and the model of physical science, natural science. So that was the model, and everything -- so sociology had to replace religion, for example, and even sociology had to be modelled on the physical sciences, etc. So it's a strong current, it still exists today, etc. But the idea was, natural science -- meaning physics, etc. -- that constitutes knowledge. That's the only kind of knowledge that's valid, and valuable, and worth spending your time on and time pursuing. Anything else, which seems to be absent in all kinds of other domains, including many psychologies, and even some sociologies, and certainly religion, and spirituality, and all that -- all that's just relegated to the rubbish heap of nonsense and uselessness. But these different domains, he says:
The two turn out to be methodologically at one, not for the positivist reason that there is no rational place for hermeneutics [no rational place for this kind of open interpretation of things]; but for the radically opposed reason that all sciences are equally hermeneutic.
So as we said in the first part in the talk so far, this kind of stringent idea of a correspondence between sciences, laws, and the truth -- that, we could say, collapsed or at least opened up, got shaken up, got loosened, so that we start to realize that in all domains and all directions of the human endeavour -- for knowledge, for truth, to contact and to represent reality -- involve some kind of shakiness or latitude, epistemologically, and ontologically, and in terms of hermeneutic. So that in the eighties, those who would dispute the universal scope of hermeneutics find themselves on the defensive. There was really a kind of turning of the tides there. Of course, it might turn again at some point. But there's a very different situation. There is the demise of anti-metaphysics.
Interestingly, too, if you read about the processes, and the aspirations, and the kind of -- I'm going to call them soul-tenets or soul-guiding principles of leading physicists, you actually find that some proportion of them, and often some of the most radical and forward-thinking, brilliant and successful physicists say that they trust and encourage others to trust the beauty in mathematical theory to lead them. In other words, they're not kind of following observations that come out of the laboratory and then trying to piece them together in a way that makes sense. They're rather following their intuitive sense of the beauty of some kind of mathematical concept, and the elegance in that, and trusting that to open up new ideas, and new conceptions, and new models about reality and physics.
And you can hear all that, when we say it that way -- I've mentioned this before -- Dirac said, "It must be beautiful."[5] He was talking about, you know, whatever theory we have to describe nature, it must be beautiful, and the mathematics that goes with that must be beautiful. It's a sort of tenet. If it's not, it can't be right. And you can hear, again, in that intuition and that eros, really, for beauty, for elegance, for that kind of simplicity, and coherence, and integration, and innovation there, there's a soul-calling. There's the eros of the soul for that beauty, and how much that has to do with, mirrors our movement of soulmaking. I've said before: beauty and image go together. Beauty and soulmaking -- you could almost replace the word 'soulmaking' with beauty, and a lot of the same principles would apply, vice versa, in terms of what it is and how we respond to it.
So Einstein was also in this, in that camp. I'm quoting from a book by Graham Farmelo now, and at a lecture in Oxford once, in 1933, he said:
Speaking quietly and confidently, he urged theoreticians [Einstein urged theoreticians] not to try to discover fundamental laws simply by responding to new experimental findings -- [which is] the orthodox method -- but to take their inspiration from mathematics [and the beauty in mathematics, etc.].[6]
So I hope it's clear, one of the threads through this talk, in trying to open up our conception and approach, the consideration of epistemology and ontology, and open up what might be possible there, one of the threads is to look at the scientific method, with all its gifts and what it has opened and enabled for humanity, and to look at how it was initially conceived and presented, and the picture of it that, in a way, we all bought into to a great degree -- a picture of both science and the scientific method as a kind of pristine or untainted model of epistemology and ontology, and that that model came to dominate and influence all thinking and all the ways we even intuitively sense the questions of ontology, and epistemology, and cosmology, and those whole areas of metaphysics, so that science and the scientific method came to be thought of as the acme of, the pinnacle of what represents a good, solid, clean, sensible approach to knowing, and to knowledge, and to reality.
But as we unearth some of what's actually involved in that scientific method -- and different philosophers, as I said, have looked at it over the twentieth century, and scientists as well -- we get the sense, "Oh, it's not quite what it seems," for the different reasons I've touched on. And we come to realize that questions of epistemology and ontology are actually more complex than it might seem, and more complex than perhaps have been handed to us as the results of classical scientific method. And so even, as I said, in its dominance over our thinking, and its dominance as a model of a good approach to knowledge, to ontology and epistemology, other approaches were denigrated, either fell by the wayside, or were overpowered, or openly ridiculed, or dismissed, etc. And among them was this whole idea of metaphysics in the sense of speculative, abstract thinking or conceptions that seem not to be able to be tested by experimental observation that's replicable, etc.
But as I was mentioning, maybe metaphysics never really went away. Maybe it's been resurrected. Where, anyway, is the boundary between so-called metaphysics and physics, between metaphysical thinking and methodology, and the methodology of, say, theoretical physics? When we examine it more closely, we can see that science, both in terms of its method and its aims, its goals, is not quite what many of us grew up believing it was or were taught that it was. It's not quite as unscrupulously clean, or pure, or tight as a method, and in terms of where it's actually headed. So the foundations, the conceptual foundations, all the ways of thinking about things, the ways of building on those foundations -- it's not always as clean-cut as it was presented to us. [59:30]
So as I said, none of this is to deny the benefits, and wonders, and gifts of science, or to banish it somehow, if that were even possible, but just to point out that the scientific project, in both its methods and its aims and goals, is not quite as simple, or clear-cut, or clean as it was taught to us that it is, and as many people would like to still believe that it is, or still do believe that it is. And this has implications. All this has implications on how we think about knowledge, how we conceive, again, of ontology, epistemology, of what is legitimate, for instance, with regard to sensing with soul, and imaginal practice, and other areas of human exploration. All this has implications on our sense of ourselves, our sense of things, our sense of what avenues are open to us, and what kind of basis/bases they need, and how trustworthy they are.
So one of the really interesting things, to me, is the fact that so much that is helpful, or interesting, and generative of further exploration, further noble exploration, can actually come out of what is not true. This is evidenced many times in the history of science. So for example, going back to Newton again, he forged ahead with his explorations of mechanics and gravity, etc. And he based it on what were essentially dogmatic assertions and assumptions of absolute space and time. His colleagues, his contemporary colleagues thought he was bonkers, and they objected to these two ideas of absolute space and time. They thought it was completely absurd. And yet, based on those assumptions, he built his whole edifice of Newtonian mechanics and the theories of gravitation, and they were immensely, as I said, successful in terms of their material predictions and very helpful in all kinds of ways. Later, as I said, they were proven untrue by experiments. Absolute space and absolute time are not held by scientists to be realities any more. Yet based on those false assumptions, dogmatic assertions, basically, that turned out to be wrong, this whole incredible opening up and blossoming of human knowledge and human capability came. [1:02:25]
Once Einstein's theory came, the two relativity theories undermined the ideas of absolute space and time once and for all. And then even more, a whole other level since then with quantum theories of space-time -- it's a whole other level of kind of exploding the notions of an absolute space and absolute time. But as Lee Smolin points out in regard to that interesting historical trajectory there, with those notions, he says:
Absolute space and time was what was required to make progress at that time in history [at that time in Western history, in the history of thought], and to see this was perhaps Newton's greatest achievement.[7]
He brought in these notions. They were unpopular. They were regarded as ridiculous. They turned out, way after his death, to be not true. But based on these untrue, unpopular notions, all kinds of benefits and discoveries emerged. Now this, to me, suggests a parallel or analogous kind of legitimacy and usefulness of, at times, adapting, in soulmaking practice, various assumptions, or working logoi, or conceptions that are either definitively not true, unproven, or unprovable. So again, it's like the whole way we're working is not closed as tightly as the usual image that's presented to us of scientific methodology would seem to indicate. Again, with regard to Newton, the fact that Newton's theories proved so accurate in their predictions, and helpful, made people assume that they were true, that those assumptions of absolute space and absolute time were true, and that the whole theory was true, until several hundred years later, and those experiments and results around Einstein's relativity theories. [1:04:37]
So there's an assumption of truth just because of efficacy, and predictive power, and helpfulness. But the truth wasn't there. And yet, all this could come out of it. So with regard to the soulmaking logos, or different logoi, different conceptions within the soulmaking paradigm, different perceptions that we have, what does that imply? Might there be, as I said, legitimacy, and fecundity, and usefulness sometimes in just entertaining certain ideas, or building ideas, drawing ideas together as I described in some earlier talks? Some of them may be definitively untrue. Some of them may be just -- who knows? They're in the realm of metaphysics that's just about speculation that's unverifiable, or they haven't been proven yet, or whatever, and yet can be immensely fruitful in what they open up, what they lead to, just as Newton's conceptual notions that form the basis of his whole architecture were.
Again, just those couple of sentences from J. N. Findlay: "Self-contradictory and empty notions play a vast part in human experience and attitude."[8] And we might add, given what I've just said, that false notions, unproven notions, unprovable notions can all actually be very fruitful in all kinds of ways. And maybe -- and I've said this before in the past -- maybe we need ideas, we need concepts, we need conceptual frameworks. They orient us, they shape experience, they inspire us, they open avenues of sense, and sensibility, and perception, and concepts. In other words, ideas spawn other ideas, just as these ideas in Newton of absolute space and absolute time -- on top of those ideas, with those ideas as a basis, further ideas came, which were fruitful. [1:07:06] And concepts and conceptual frameworks -- no matter, as I said, whether they're sometimes untrue, unproven, unprovable -- can in themselves be soulmaking, or can be generative and supportive of soulmaking. Perhaps we need that kind of speculation. We need that kind of freedom with ideas, a certain amount of freedom with ideas, but ideas and conceptual frameworks are indispensable. It's part of humanity's soul to reach out, to grapple, to build, to speculate, to construct, to demolish, to sculpt these structures of ideas. And for our purposes, on that, or in that, wrapped up in that, and based on that, can be all kinds of soulful sense, all kinds of soulmaking, all kinds of beauty, all kinds of opening for the soul. Harold Fisch wrote:
Man does not live by bread alone, but by the language which he discovers for signifying what is otherwise unsignifiable.[9]
So in the face of the endless mystery of being, of the cosmos, of human being, what is otherwise unsignifiable, in the face of that, we live by the bread also of, he says, 'language.' I would widen it to 'concept' and 'conceptual framework.' These nourish us. They open out possibilities, like a scaffolding allows us to reach, to build things, and to climb and reach places that we wouldn't otherwise be able to reach, and to gain vantage points. I can imagine going up a scaffolding, and you can see, you have a different view from that height. So there's this need, I think. There's a soul-need, and soulmaking needs conceptual frameworks and ideas, and the latitude of what kind of ideas, and where they stand in relation to truth or falsity, or provenness or unprovenness, maybe that latitude may be wider than we have been taught to believe, have come to believe through this dominance of the classical scientific paradigm, and its presentation of its view of ontology and epistemology. So there's this need for the soul, for soulmaking. There's a need of conceptual frameworks and ideas like that.
But again, I would say, as I mentioned before, that we need ideas. Maybe they don't need to be true, or maybe they're unproven, maybe they're unprovable, some of them, what we bring into the cauldron, the crucible of soulmaking. But still, I would say that although there might be this latitude, there is some constraint on it, or maybe there needs to be some constraint on what kind of ideas and what their relationship is to ordinary perception, to our usual notions of reality, to what we take as truth or untruth, etc., so that there is some rigour, to a certain extent, to the material in the cauldron, or to the cauldron itself -- maybe that's a better way -- so there's some resistance, some constraint of solid material, if you like, so that the ideas that we entertain, conceptual frameworks in terms of soulmaking, they're not just willy-nilly ideas, not just random. (A) They to be generative of soulmaking, but (B) they're wrestling, at least a little bit or somewhat, in relationship with what we take to be true. They have some relationship with notions of truth, they're not completely divorced of that, so that they do have a connection with our experience and what we observe phenomenologically. There is some kind of connection with, correspondence with what might be truth or reality. There's some kind of coherence of these ideas. If there's more resistance there in the ideas, so it's not just willy-nilly, it's not just like moving air, there's some solidity and resistance, so that this crucible is like moulding clay. There's some solidity there, and the crucible is made from moulding that clay, moulding that solidity. [1:12:13]
So again, there's a kind of Middle Way there -- more latitude than we might think with concepts, and ideas, and conceptual frameworks, and yet not completely so free as to become kind of just whimsical, ungrounded, airy, because then, out of pure air, a crucible cannot be built. So again, there are two extremes, and somewhere in the middle, which is quite broad, there's fertile ground. And part of the fertility comes from a certain tussle and resistance, a kind of obligation to tether our ideation and what ideas we're experimenting with, to tether it to notions of reality and truth, no matter how problematic the whole areas of truth and ideation are, to tether it to some kind of epistemology and ontology, no matter how open, and complex, and puzzling those areas are. It doesn't mean necessarily working it all out completely in some very finished product of philosophy. After all, no one has done that yet with any ontology or epistemology. But I hope you get this point about this Middle Way that involves some sense of resistance while still having much more range, and latitude, and possibility than we might have thought, if our thinking was completely dominated by what was presented to us as this model, this 'best way of thinking,' this 'only way of thinking' about ontology, and epistemology, and ideas that are entertainable or not. [1:14:02]
So for example, in the soulmaking paradigm, some of the ideas that we've put out there, or suggested, or mentioned, alluded to at different times -- for instance, the very, or the seemingly simple, almost axiomatic proposition 'the soul loves soulmaking,' and taking that as a sort of very basic, foundational idea which generates, spawns, really, a whole structure, a whole conceptual framework of soulmaking. Or ideas like the possibility that our soulmaking is God's soulmaking, that we participate in the soulmaking of the divinity, of the Buddha-nature. So these ideas that, again, they may not be proved, may not even ever be provable, but they may be very fertile in different ways.
Or as a variation on that, the idea that I just mentioned, that our soulmaking may be, at times, regarded as a kind of infinite jñāna -- jñāna, this word for 'gnosis,' meaning the ultimate knowing of the Buddha-nature, or the Buddha-nature's ultimate knowing, a word that was amplified a lot in Mahāyāna, and particularly in Vajrayāna contexts. So what it implies, that word, is that -- what it can imply in some circles -- is that it's a kind of knowing that's able to fully see the emptiness of all things at the same time as it perceives appearances. And the subject and the object are not separate. The world that is perceived is not other than the mind, the Buddha-nature mind, dharmakāya that perceives it. They're all part of the same thing. And in the perception of the world, a temporal world, the perception is of divinity. So this Buddha-nature perceives divinity everywhere. But in one and the same knowing, it can both know the Unfabricated, the timeless, that which is beyond concept, the thorough emptiness, and the forms, the divine forms, and the temporal. And that knowing might include embodied kind of knowing, other kinds of knowing, desire, the whole soulmaking process. Our soulmaking is a participation in that soulmaking of the divinity, in the divinity's infinite jñāna, which is not a final process. It too is organic. It grows with the soulmaking dynamic. [1:17:15]
In that way also, in that idea that our soulmaking includes both this love, and eros, and attraction that we can have towards the Unfabricated, as well as towards the perception of forms, this world, the world of matter -- an idea like that, you know, can come or will come. I think some kind of idea like that will come, I think, just inevitably at some point, organically, out of the whole soulmaking dynamic. As the eros with regard to our perceptions is allowed to infuse and inseminate and expand the perception, expand the ideation, the eros-psyche-logos dynamic, etc., we will begin, at some point, to experience the divinity of our own eros, our own psyche, of the ideas that move in our mind, of what we see. And then an idea, like I've just described -- that our soulmaking is participating in the infinite jñāna, or the soulmaking of the Buddha-nature, or God, or whatever -- that idea will arise naturally. I mean, I've mentioned it quite a few times over recent years.
Conversely, that idea might itself form a seed that stimulates the possibility, and opens, supports the possibility of that kind of perception of our process being divine that way and participating that way. And that idea and that perception, together, then, may fertilize the whole soulmaking dynamic further around, crystallized, or growing, fermenting around that seed or idea, and all kinds of other possibilities open. [1:19:07] So these ideas can be fertile, generative, opening.
The whole idea of the angel out ahead, to borrow Corbin's phrase that we've used quite a few times, of some image that is intimately related to me, sort of other than me, sort of part of me, 'me' and 'not me,' calling me, a telos calling me, pulling me, attracting me, itself somehow timeless, or the idea of eternality itself, and timelessness as an element of the imaginal, all these ideas, they can be very fertile, and they're also, by the way, as I said, they're ideas that can come, be suggested to us from our experience -- also from what you might hear one of us say, or read somewhere else, or hear someone else say. But they're also ideas that come from experience, and in so doing, they can open up soulmaking. They can support more soulmaking. And they're also ideas, as I said, conversely, that in the soulmaking process, if we don't get in the way, they're the kinds of ideas and the kinds of experiences that I would expect to arise, and variations on these kinds of ideas, I would expect them to arise. And then that idea gains substance and power in the consciousness, in the soul.
So in their relationship with our experience, you can see that's part of what I mean by some of these -- that these ideas, there's an openness of ideas. We don't need to wait for something to be a proven truth or reality. Just as the example from the history of physics with Newton's ideas: immense progress, and opening, and discovery, and technological creations, and creations in terms of ideas came out of two ideas about absolute space and time that turned out not to be true. But again, there's some rigour involved in which ideas. We don't need to wait for them to be true, but at the same time, there's some rigour in these ideas, and they need to be contingent in some way on kind of being coherent, to some degree, with other ideas that we're having, in some kind of meta-framework. And also, they're contingent on our phenomenological observation in terms of our experience. So something happens in our process, in our perception, our meditation, and it suggests these ideas. [1:22:07]
Or how about an idea, for instance, one idea that comes -- I don't know if it originated with Pseudo-Dionysius, but let me read a passage from him. It says:
For this beauty, this ideal beauty, causes the existence of everything.
So in his system of metaphysics and sort of spiritual system, there is a sort of transcendent, absolute ideal of beauty. And he says:
[This] beauty ... is the source of all things. [It causes the existence of all things. From this ideal comes the existence of everything. Beauty is the source. This beauty is the cause of all things.] It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty. And there it is ahead of all as Goal, as the Beloved, as the Cause toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which actually brings them into being. It is a model to which they conform.[10]
This is a very different idea of causality than we're used to these days -- very different idea. And yet maybe that idea, even hearing that little passage from Pseudo-Dionysius, you know, written centuries and centuries ago, maybe it stirs something in the soul. It speaks to something. The idea itself, topsy-turvy as it is compared to our usual thinking, it can attract the soul and potentially be, as I said, fertile in terms of what it does in the soul when we take it on, when we entertain it as an idea -- as an idea of causality, in this case. I mean, just to say about that, on the human level, we can, and there are, sometimes we use this idea in soulmaking, certainly other paradigms (for example, the Diamond Heart School, Ridhwan School), will have this idea that even -- let's call them the apparently ugly manifestations of our human nature, our choices, etc., in fact, at root, they started initially as impulses towards beauty but got distorted. So our pathologies, our kilesas -- greed, aversion, etc. -- they're actually rooted deeper in the soul's love of beauty. That was the stimulus. That was the seed. That was the initial momentum. It's only that conditions and the soul's avijjā, fundamental delusion, direct it to distorted manifestations of beauty, of beautiful values, of fixations of imagination rather than imaginal, etc.
So we can entertain that slightly more limited idea in terms of human psychology, in terms of what's actually causing things, what's propelling us in our motivations, in our choices, our perceptions, all of that. What would it be, then, to allow this idea? Or is it possible that in an opening of the soulmaking, this idea actually spreads to see the whole of nature, the whole of cosmos, the cosmos that way? Is that possible? Is there some rigorous wrestling with ideas that would allow that, as a concept, to open up -- even if it's unprovable -- to open up for us and be generative and powerful in the soul? Or is it just, again, through the meditations, through the sensing with soul, through the allowing of the soulmaking dynamic in practice to open up the sensing, to open up the seeing, to open up the ideation that, in fact, that perception of causality with regard to beauty becomes something that we sense, that's a kind of immediate, tangible, palpable, striking sense of things, of the universe, of the cosmos that we live in?
So, all kinds of ideas. We could go on with the list. There's just four or five I just sort of rattled out quite quickly, but we've given out so many possible ideas and concepts over the years, and there are many, many. But basically, the point I want to make is, it's possible to build on ideas that are unproven and unprovable, and that may be someday actually proved to be not true. It's possible to build on them. It's possible. That is what happened in physics, and probably what still happens in physics and science. And it can certainly happen in the realm of psychology, in spiritual work, and soulmaking. [1:28:04] So these ideas can be fertile and, as I said, supportive of soulmaking -- and not necessarily true.
If we return back to the larger questions of ontology and epistemology, and again, just dipping into the world of contemporary physics, Lee Smolin, the theoretical physicist, working on quantum gravity, on theories of gravity, and the quantum world, and how they might be integrated, etc. And he's sort of looking back at the last years, and voices a realization that sort of dawned on him and other physicists in the last -- I don't know what -- thirty years or something. And he says:
Looking back, it is clear that the assumption that a unified theory [of physics, a unified theory of everything, or even a unified theory of just quantum physics and gravity] would be unique was no more than that -- an assumption.[11]
In other words, there was this idea that if we can unify these different theories and come up with a grand theory of everything, then that must be true. That must be 'it,' because there's only going to be one of them. But that "there's only going to be one of them," he's realizing, is an assumption, or physicists are beginning to realize is an assumption. He continues:
There is no mathematical or philosophical principle which guarantees there to be only one mathematically consistent theory of nature.
This goes back to the coherence principle, the coherence theory of truth: just because you can find a coherent theory of truth, it doesn't actually mean there's only one of them. He continues:
[For hypothetical worlds having one or two spatial dimensions rather than three -- so that's what physicists do sometimes. They reduce their theories to one dimension or two dimensions rather than three to make it more easy to think about and more easy mathematically, and then they see what happens on those levels, to start with. But hypothetical worlds having] one or two spatial dimensions, rather than three ... we have constructed lots of consistent quantum theories, including some which have gravity ... [a] fact [which] should lead us to doubt the assumption that mathematical consistency in itself allows only one theory of nature.
Somewhere else, he introduces what's called the hypothesis of duality, and so he's introducing it in the context of, again, different theories. So there's a whole theory, as some of you will have heard about, called string theory, about "These are the ultimate building blocks of matter. They're strings, not particles, not waves, not fields, but strings." And there's a whole mathematics, etc., and a very elaborate theory that comes out of that.
And then there's a whole other theory, different than string theory or the string picture of things that presents the ultimate reality or the ultimate basic building blocks of all things as fields -- electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, or some kind of unified field, of which the electromagnetic, and the gravitational, and the nuclear forces are all just kinds of manifestations of this one field. But he writes:
There is a ... possibility ... that both the string picture and the field picture are just different ways of looking at the same thing. They would then be equally fundamental, and no experiment could decide between them. This possibility excites many theorists, as it challenges some of our deepest instincts about how to think about physics. It is called the hypothesis of duality.
So he adds:
I should emphasize that this hypothesis of duality is not the same as the wave-particle duality of quantum theory.
So it's a scaled-up version that applies to whole theories and whole conceptual frameworks, rather than just one kind of entity -- it's a wave, or it's a particle, or both perspectives are valid. It applies to whole theories, that this whole theory and that whole theory, this whole edifice and picture and that whole edifice and picture are somehow just different ways of looking at the same thing. So it's not the same as the wave-particle duality, but it is as important, he says, as that principle, or the principle of relativity.
Like the principles of relativity and quantum theory, the hypothesis of duality tells us that two seemingly different phenomena are just two ways of describing the same thing. If true, it has profound implications for our understanding of physics.
And he goes on to say:
By embracing the hypothesis of duality, several of the problems that have clouded our understanding of physics for almost two centuries may be resolved....
[And this] idea of duality is still a major driving force behind research in elementary particle physics and string theory.
And no doubt that some physicists are really excited. Many physicists are really excited by that. I'm sure many physicists are really disturbed by that and don't particularly like that notion. But again, this brings us back to these different sort of, if you like, meta-strategies or meta-conceptions in regard to ontology and epistemology, and how that whole process should proceed, can proceed, etc. So when he says there's no guarantee that there's only one consistent or coherent theory of nature, when he introduces his idea of hypothesis of duality -- that maybe two different theories are actually just different ways of looking at the same thing -- that could be akin to, or a manifestation of, that idea that I introduced earlier, when we talked about mystical absolutes. So the idea of two different two-dimensional cartographical representations of the globe, two different kind of map systems of the globe -- one was called Mercator; the other, now I remember it's called a polar projection; and maybe there are others, but take just those two -- that in a way, because of our limitations of two-dimensionality, trying to capture a three-dimensional reality, and similarly, our normal three-dimensional perspective trying to capture this more multidimensional reality in physics, that these two map systems are actually just different ways of representing that, each with their drawbacks and strengths. But the globe itself, the reality itself, nature itself, the cosmos itself is a certain way in reality.
Or again, I gave the example of those disco balls, or the Necker cube -- you know, those two-dimensional representations of a cube, which kind of flip, in our perspectives, from a cube in this orientation to a cube in that orientation, when we feel it and sense it in 3D. But here, we're talking about whole conceptual structures, whole conceptual frameworks that are those two perspectives in the Necker cube, that are not entertainable simultaneously, but we can flip between them, rather than just one idea.
So an example of one idea would be -- well, if we talk about sensing with the soul, the idea, or the perception and idea that "We project images. Images are a projection of us. They come out of our mind. We create them," versus the idea that "The image projects us. The image emanates us. We in fact are an emanation or a projection of this image." That's a much less popular idea. But those two kind of contradictory ideas are single ideas that we kind of hold together sometimes. In the soulmaking Dharma, of course, we say "create and discovered," "imaginal Middle Way," etc., trying to kind of harness together the complementarity and contradictarity, paradoxicality of these two opposing ideas. But they're single ideas.
Here we're talking about whole frameworks, whole conceptual frameworks. So are these ideas that Lee Smolin is talking about from physics, that there's no guarantee that there's only one consistent theory, and this idea of the hypothesis of duality with regard to whole theories, do they imply this whole idea of similarity between the maps trying to represent something at higher dimensions, that actually is real in higher dimensions, so to speak? Or do they represent a manifestation of the whole emptiness ways of looking paradigm, where ultimately, there's this kind of profound mutual involvement, profound mutual participation of subject and object, mind and matter? [1:39:36]
It may be that many physicists don't like that idea because their whole project, from when they were young, was to try and discover what reality is in an objective sense. So the idea that the mind is involved in that way may not sit that well with their inclinations. It might be that these two ideas -- the one of the absolutes, and the one of the emptiness ways of looking -- there are ways of conceiving where they're not actually that different anyway. And then if we expand this consideration beyond the realm of just physics, and again, extend to include other antinomies -- meaning paradoxes or insoluble dichotomies that are part of our experience of the world and our consideration of the world -- and open up the philosophy of that without shirking from them, as Kant did, and Hegel, and J. N. Findlay, and lots of others. So for example, the whole antinomy or paradox between free will and determinism. We sense that we have free will as human beings. And at the same time, we can also sense, and see, and understand, and in many cases, seem like we can prove or show that our responses and our choices are determined biologically, culturally, in terms of conditioning, etc. [1:41:32]
But how do we integrate those two positions -- the belief in free will, and the belief in determinism? If I just choose one over the other, I lose quite a lot. If I really just believe in free will, it doesn't leave a lot of room for compassionate understanding of, for instance, crimes or what's motivating a criminal, let's say, or when we fall short of our ideals ethically, etc. When I just believe in determinism, and everything's just biologically conditioned, or culturally conditioned, or whatever it is, and it leaves no room for free will, what does that feel like? What kind of sense of life does that form a basis of? Kind of soulless, with actually very little meaning possible in life, very little nobility -- in that way, too, also lacking in compassion, lacking in wisdom as well. Or the whole, as I said, conundrum of mind and matter: how does consciousness meet matter? How does consciousness know about matter? How is there this quantum leap between that which doesn't have awareness and that which does have awareness? How can they contact each other? How can one arise from the other? Are they two? If they're two, how are they connected? If they're one, how is it possible that this one came out of that one?
So as I said, there are these different approaches. We have the approach of the emptiness ways of looking. We have this approach of the sort of mystical absolutes, akin to the analogy of the different cartographical representations, making maps. And you get certain philosophers who fall in one camp -- so for example, Hegel, and J. N. Findlay, etc., Sanford Drob, who favoured the idea of a real or true mystical absolute: it exists as it is. We cannot normally intuit that mystical absolute because our conception and perception doesn't for the most part work at that level. We cannot see in those extra dimensions. We cannot think in those and conceive in those extra dimensions. But it is a real and true thing, and sometimes, through reasoning, and careful thinking and deduction, we can intuit that mystical absolute, that real truth in the kind of super dimensions. Or through meditation, etc., we can intuit, open to, get a glimpse and a taste of that real, true mystical absolute. And in that absolute there's a kind of coincidentia oppositorum, the Latin phrase -- well, it's got a long history in Western philosophy and alchemy, the idea of the coincidence, the kind of interdependence and interpenetration of things which seem opposite to each other (so for example, free will and determinism, mind and matter, etc.). [1:45:37]
So there are the philosophers that favour that approach, and that whole idea, and working towards that idea, and that postulate of that idea. And then there are other philosophers, probably much more common these days, who favour a kind of, "Ultimate truth of things is a kind of fractured, incomplete, finitude of our human being, and our human knowledge, and the world itself."
So Slavoj Žižek has this notion of the parallax gap. 'Parallax' is two perspectives on the same object. So actually, there's a parallax between your two eyes. If you look at an object a few feet in front of you, and you just close one eye and close the other eye, you'll see it moves. The apparent placement of the object moves when you close one eye as compared with the other eye. So each eye is getting a parallax view. And rather than, as happens in our biology, the brain kind of integrating those views when we have both eyes open, he, along with many contemporary philosophers in the postmodern vein, stimulated by postmodern thought, "There is no ultimately reconcilable view. There is no absolute that synthesizes this kind of coincidentia oppositorum. There's just parallax. We live in a fractured world. We are incomplete. Our knowledge is incomplete. Our vision is incomplete. It is that way. There's this gap between different perceptions, conceptions, and conceptual frameworks. There is no hard reality to which they refer to. There is no truth. There is no synthesis. There is nothing in another dimension that we can kind of hope to mystically open to."
But again, going back to something I talked about earlier, I would ask: again, what's the psychology that's going on underneath, or underneath that kind of position, when someone insists on either one or the other -- "There is this mystical absolute," or "There isn't"? What are the motivations? So what is going on in Slavoj Žižek's soul, if you like? What are his motivations for insisting on that position and that kind of 'finitude' -- to borrow a term that I think came from Heidegger -- that kind of fracturedness? He talks about a kind of nothingness between different perspectives, and that nothingness is, in a way, the ultimate reality -- there's just this gap, this parallax gap. Sanford Drob, writing about Žižek, he said:
Reality for Žižek is the irreducible gap between oppositions, the incommensurate views of his parallax.
And again, what's going on psychologically? What are the motivations for wanting this kind of world, this kind of postulate about reality? He's still making a postulate about reality. There's still a metaphysics there, right? He's saying, "The truth is, there's no hard reality, and there's just this fracturedness, this gap, this nothingness, this irreconcilable difference."
What's fashion? You know, how much human beings are conditioned by fashion, as I was mentioning when I talked about reading some of the articles, philosophy articles and books from a certain period in the late twentieth century, and how they almost start with what reads like an almost fearful proclamation of one's sort of guilt-freeness with regard to positions of reality: "I'm not proclaiming this. Don't shoot me." You know, what's fashion? What's intimidation? What's career moves? What other kinds of motivation are more to do with the way we want to fabricate self, other, world? Why? What's going on? So these are all, to me, really interesting questions -- not that we could even ever always get to the bottom of that, because whatever system we have for deciding or looking at the questions of motivation, psychology, and soul, they're also going to be based on other concepts, and assumptions, and systems, systems of psychology, which are very, very different.
You know, what motivates people from the point of view of a Freudian is very different than what motivates people from the point of view of a Jungian, or a Skinnerian, or whatever -- or from our point of view, for that matter. So I don't know Žižek's work intimately at all. Sometimes when I read a little, it sounds a little bit similar to the emptiness ways of looking thing that I've offered and laid out. But I don't think it is, really. Again, as with several of the other philosophers I mentioned, there's very often a sort of hard reality being smuggled back in, in one way or another.
And again, there's a difference in tone, and the world painted, and the picture of humanity painted by that whole view of reality. So it has the flavour, to me, what Žižek is propounding has the flavour of that kind of tragic, existentialist view of reality. But for him, that tragic existentialist view is, he would say, necessary for society to get on, and live together, and prosper, and to have human freedom, etc. It's an argument a bit like Richard Rorty's. He said we need to keep the conversation open and keep it happening. But as I said, so often that kind of view itself, rather than opening things up for people, there's a way that it can actually harden. There can be underlying agendas and opinions about reality, and there's a way that the whole thing can become just a kind of shrug with regard to truth, and with regard to the possibility of passionately pursuing questions of ontology and epistemology and truth.
So I don't know if I'm reading it rightly, but if you compare that kind of tone, and feel, and direction, and kind of soulscape, cosmos-scape, if you like, and what it does, potentially, to that passion, to that eros, with regard to ontology, epistemology, and truth -- if you compare that with a quote from Goethe, which really, as I said, not sure if I'm interpreting it right, but I'll read it anyway:
People say that between two opposed opinions, truth lies in the middle. Not at all! A problem lies in between, invisible, eternally active life, contemplated in peace.
"A problem lies" in between "two opposed opinions ... invisible, eternally active life, contemplated in peace." Might he mean that, in regard to these seemingly irreconcilable differences of view, of theory, of conceptual framework, of these lacunae and problems in our whole approach to, and wish for, and relationship with truth and reality, that there can still be a kind of open-ended eros and inquiry regarding truth and reality, "contemplated in peace"? So we don't need to start wars over this kind of thing.
Maybe, again, I'm maybe stretching what he says in a direction he didn't mean it, but that peace can also include agitation, just as the artist, in their creative work, can be okay with that kind of -- to quote Picasso -- the anxiety in the creative process and the agitation in the creative process. Maybe, also, as thinkers, as philosophers, as explorers of truth, as wonderers/wanderers (in both spellings of the word, with an O and with an A), wonderers/wanderers in the cosmos, our peaceful contemplation of these things can be filled with eros and passion and agitation. There's a certain level of -- it stirs up the soul: we want to know, we're gripping, we're following threads, we have to hold on, it's complicated, it's confusing. So there may be a certain agitation there at times. At other times there can be just be that very easeful, fluid exploration of these things, fluid moving between considering and entertaining different conceptual frameworks. But perhaps in what Goethe's saying is: no, no cheap answers, no cheap shrugging in the face of no cheap answers -- but perhaps this open-ended eros and inquiry is possible for us. Perhaps the cosmos itself is beckoning us to that, ongoingly, forever.
Can't remember if I've shared this: I remember learning to swim, my father teaching me to swim, and in the shallow bit of the sea, he would stand sort of, I don't know, 10 feet away, when I was young, and -- when we were young, my brother and sister as well -- and he'd say, "Swim to me!" And so we would swim. And he would, I'm pretty sure [laughs], he would absolutely deny it, but I'm pretty sure then he would just slowly walk backwards, so I just had to swim further and further and would sort of improve my swimming. And I kept saying, "You're moving backwards! You're moving," and he said, "No, I'm not, I'm not!" [laughs] But maybe there's something of that in the cosmos, the cosmos itself as meta-angel out ahead in its mysteries, in the conundra it presents us, in what it allows us to glimpse, in what it reveals. And then that presents other conundra, other problems, other seemingly irreconcilable dichotomies and paradoxes, etc. [1:58:21] And we're drawn onwards by the cosmos, by our eros, by our love, by our curiosity, by our soul.
And maybe, too, just adding a piece to something I mentioned earlier, maybe in all these questions about, considerations about ontology, and epistemology, and metaphysics, and what's justifiable, and what's legitimate, and all that -- maybe, also, we need to expand our notions and categories of epistemology, and our notions and categories of ontology. So usually, if you just think about it, usually when we think about epistemological categories, we think about, "Either you know something or you believe something." So in other words, in terms of ideas and perceptions that we can trust. Generally, epistemology, you think, "Either you know it or you believe it."
For example, we notice with the imaginal how much it can give freedom and strength. I've given a few examples, for example, how imaginal images, and the way they calm and touch the soul and open the soul, can give great freedom, profound freedom and strength with regard to, say, dying young. But that whole category of imaginal experience doesn't really fit simply into either of those categories of knowing or belief. I have some image of something, or some sense of sensing with soul of the cosmos. And is it that I'm then insisting on that as a truth, in the way that we usually consider the word 'knowledge' -- "I know this, this constitutes knowledge, it's a truth"? No. Neither is it belief in the usual sense.
So usually we have these two categories -- knowing and belief -- when we sort of think about epistemology, when the layman thinks about epistemology, let's say. And then the 'knowing' category is further categorized, and so it's either correct knowing, accurate knowing, or incorrect: "You're deluded." And then if there's not knowing, there's belief. And either when there's knowing or belief, that can give you power there. For the soul, it can give you a sense of something that the soul is trusting. And that thing and that trust has tremendous power, and gives the soul, in this case, lots of support. [2:01:27]
It may be that, wrapped up in the imaginal, the whole, again, coherence of the conceptual framework may be a factor in the epistemological strength and efficacy of the image. I alluded to that, again, as well -- how much, how important the conceptual frameworks are, that they are coherent, supportive, rigorous, that they make sense, that they lead onward, meaning they lead to more soulmaking, and they're also in contact with our experience and with the rest of the ideation. And/or (both) it may be, again, that the whole imaginal perception, what comes to us through the imaginal is more like art. The whole relationship is more like art. So someone might say to me or to someone else, "Oh, you had an experience. You had an image, or you had a vision, or whatever it is, and that makes the difference. That's why you feel peaceful with dying young, or okay with it, or whatever it is." But underlying their comment is probably an assumption that, "Because of that experience, you now think or believe you know something. You know something about reality that makes your dying or death in general okay, or that you believe." But again, so they put it into those two sort of more common epistemological categories -- even though they don't think this way -- two more common epistemological categories that have become the only ones left to us in the current dominant world-view.
But the effect of the imaginal and the imaginal experience is actually more like the effect of art. So it's neither knowledge in that limited, usual sense, nor is it belief. It's a third epistemological category. The kind of way that works is most akin to the way art works when it profoundly moves us, when it profoundly touches the soul, gives us a reassurance, gives us orientation in life, and meaning, something we would stake our lives on, even though it doesn't fall into these two currently more usual epistemological categories, knowing or believing; something else. So again, going back to that Yeats quote about belief, etc., and whether that's really the appropriate word, the appropriate concept for what happens with regard to poetic sensibility, artistic sensibility, and imaginal sensing, sensing with soul.
So finally, can all these possibilities remain open? The possibility of some kind of mystical absolute that's real and true, but kind of exists at levels or dimensions that are beyond our usual conception, perception; the whole emptiness ways of looking idea; the whole imaginal Middle Way; the pursuit, the erotic pursuit in science, in philosophy, in psychology, in all of that, our erotic pursuit of truth; the idea that possibly, actually, "Hold on, we need to step back and actually think about other epistemological categories beyond the ones that we've just kind of been handed by history, and by our culture, and by certain developments of our culture, of Western culture over the years." Is it possible that all these possibilities remain open, that they remain viable, that they're avenues that we can walk down, travel down, explore, open roads; that we remain alive, and they remain alive as directions, frameworks to entertain and explore?
So I'm not saying, I'm not suggesting that openness of all of them because I'm a nice guy, and I don't like argument, and I'm trying to sort of appease everyone, and have everything be really calm and peaceful. That's not why I'm saying that. All of them involve problems, involve limits, involve danger, so to speak -- intellectual danger, if that's not too dramatic a term. It's like that line -- I think I quoted it once also when I was talking about logoi. I think it was in Eros Unfettered. There's a line from Leonard Cohen that's something like this:
There's a crack in everything. It's where the light gets in.
And we can apply that to conceptual frameworks. All these conceptual frameworks, many of them, because of some of the reasons I've traced in this talk, there's always a crack. There's always a hole in the foundation that's sort of patched together. Or there's always a crack that will appear. It's "where the light gets in" -- it's where the growth gets in. Maybe these -- or I would say, not maybe, but I would say, the problems with regard to ontology and epistemology are ultimately insoluble, many of them. Humanity will never reach some final conclusion that's proved, proven, and is satisfying, that doesn't have a crack in it. But those cracks in conceptual frameworks, those holes, those patchings-over -- that's actually part of the deal, and partly what spurs us onwards, what draws us onwards, what allows other containers which, too, will have cracks in, so that there is this growth there. There's a dynamic that's possible if we can relate to this in the right way. It needs our openness, openness of mind, openness of heart and soul. It needs our eros. It needs our participation. We need to participate in these whole conundra.
And again, something I've mentioned before: we tend to relate to these questions of ontology and epistemology in terms of "wanting to know the truth." And I think that remains an important motivation and stimulus for that movement in terms of these questions. But it's interesting, given everything I've said in this talk and previous talks, it may be that our eros and inquiry into truth and reality may not actually yield truth, yield some kind of final truth that we're then finished with the whole question of truth, for the reasons that I've said. It may not deliver us to that truth, but it may open up for us and yield all kinds of other gifts, some which will be enormously helpful in all kinds of different ways, all kinds of other discoveries and creations, just as with the example of Newton and his theories. And it may lead to soulmaking. [2:10:28]
So our kind of inquiries into and wrestlings with ontology and epistemology can be considered not just in terms of the goal only of truth, but of soulmaking too. Why choose this ontology? Why even wrestle with these questions? Yes, in regard to truth, but also because of the soulmaking. So an individual idea, an individual logos or concept may be, may itself be soulmaking or supported with soulmaking. Our whole conceptual framework, out of many different conceptual frameworks we can entertain, may or may not be soulmaking. And the whole movement of inquiry into ontology and epistemology and truth, and the legitimization of metaphysics or not, all that -- that whole inquiry itself may or may not be soulmaking, depending on how we're approaching it. But we can expand the consciousness of our motivations so it's wider than just, "We want to know the truth." We actually realize that part of what's wrapped up in this is, "What delivers soulmaking, and what doesn't?" And of course that may change, not only in different periods in history, and culture, and place, but also right now in my practice.
And you know, not everyone is going to get kind of really passionately interested and obsessed with these kinds of questions of ontology and epistemology. There are huge differences in souls, in what they're drawn to and what they're drawn to at different times. But still -- and if I quote Harold Fisch again, or actually expand on his quote, alter it slightly, remember, he said:
Man [excuse the gender-biased language, but Man] does not live by bread alone, but by the language which he discovers for signifying what is otherwise unsignifiable.
So human beings do not "live by bread alone," but by the concepts and conceptual frameworks which they create and discover "for signifying what is otherwise unsignifiable." They create and discover to represent, to navigate, to orient, to open to, to explore, to make coherent sense of the mystery of things, the mystery of being, the mystery of reality, and a human being's relationship with that, in terms of epistemology and all else. So this is something, whether or not we become really involved in the nitty-gritty of these philosophical questions -- some will, some won't -- still, the importance of conceptual frameworks that have some rigour, some constraint, but also that we're open to create and discover there. And mediated by that is the soulmaking. One really has part of that as the soulmaking. That is part of soulmaking.
Again, to repeat something I've said in previous talks, to think that I can just throw away metaphysics, throw away, ignore, shrug, and walk away from ontology and epistemology, metaphysical speculation, to think that I can avoid that in some kind of pure, non-conceptual relationship with the universe, with existence, to think that I can rid myself of all that -- that's delusion. It comes in, and we don't need necessarily to buy the limited, old model that went with classical science and scientism. There are a lot of holes in that. There's an expansion possible there, and to enter into and open up to that expansion will support, and nourish, and give lifeblood to the whole exploration of sensing with soul, and to our whole sense of existence.
Sallust, "On the Gods and the World," in Five Stages of Greek Religion, tr. Gilbert Murray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), 246: "Now these things never happened, but always are." Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210125175339/https://hermetic.com/texts/on_the_gods-1, accessed 28 March 2021. ↩︎
Lee Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (New York: Basic Books, 2017). ↩︎
Quotes from Joel Weinsheimer are possibly from Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Quotes from John Wisdom are from Philosophy and Its Place in Our Culture (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1975). ↩︎
Charles Taylor, "Understanding in Human Science," The Review of Metaphysics, 34/1 (Sept. 1980). ↩︎
Graham Farmelo, It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science (London: Granta, 2001), xiii: "During a seminar in Moscow in 1955, when asked to summarise his philosophy of physics, he [Dirac] wrote on the blackboard in capital letters, 'Physical laws should have mathematical beauty.'" ↩︎
Graham Farmelo, The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets (New York: Basics Books, 2019). ↩︎
Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. ↩︎
J. N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute: Metaphysical Papers and Lectures (Milton: Routledge, 2019). ↩︎
Harold Fisch, New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1998), 32. ↩︎
Pseudo-Dionysius, "The Divine Names," The Complete Works, tr. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 77. ↩︎
Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. ↩︎
