Distinguishing the Grades

It is important for the discriminating autodidact or intellectual seeker not to take for granted the conventional point of view which is the cornerstone of modernity. The scientism today president over Occidental and increasingly Oriental society imposes an air of unquestionable objectivity which, without the direction of a sacral doctrine distinguishing grades of reality and thus a paternal metaphysics to properly judge the meaning and worth of derivative subjects, persists without critique of its fundamental principals, and subsequently integral aspects of reality become eschewal.

Extracorporeal concepts progressively degrade to practical functionality due to increased civilizational dependency. When an ambient taboo on the revaluation of the nature of measurement is posited, mass reification occurs: measurements are taken for the realities they symbolize and represent; the physical is taken as the metaphysical from which it is derived; the finger which points to the moon is taken for the moon itself.

The above point of view makes time appear as a linear progression instead of an ever-present-now. The solidity of the view of linear time quickly crumbles upon as simple a process as ontological identification, which is most properly its purpose:

For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis of predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is! [1]

Similarly is “space” or matter disputatious:

The perfect description of a small particle of dust by these means would take everlasting time, since one would have to account for every point of its volume. [2]

This author’s purpose is not to polemicize the scientific point of view in and of itself, but rather to suggest that things be put in their rightful order. The disconnection or elongation of man from meaning, or the mistake of holding the conventional above the unconventional, favors horizontal progress to vertical growth. The schism of Earth and Heaven, and the rejection of man as the ambivalent symbol which bridges the two, which the modern reified scientistic point of view is responsible for, prevents one from retracing their own being to its source: the source of all being which escapes perfect description because it is beyond description itself as it is beyond all things.

This Ultimate Reality, the Name that cannot be named, is the Beyond-Being of which Being is the first auto-determination. [3]

One must not found his Logos upon relativity, for even “All is relative” is built upon the Absolute; Māyā (illusion) depends on Ātman (the absolute, supra-personal God) for her manifestation, and so, also, do we.

Shayne


1. The Way of Zen, Alan Watts, p. 6
2. Ibid, p. 8
3. Religion and the Order of Nature, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, p. 12