NOEMAYA

I have always been an esoterist by nature, even though most of my life I was not aware of it. I am an esoterist because I have always been attracted to and interested in reason, but the rationality of modern sciences and philosophies never felt home or even close it. I had a secret yearning for the principle of all things and I was aware that physics and philosophy in their modern sense cannot take me there. I had a strong instinct for the absolute truth and scented my way toward it by way of phenomenological philosophy and at the end got what I sought by the performance of the Phenomenological Reduction. That experience was brought home by encountering Advaita Vedanta and the works of Frithjof Schuon.

The summary of esoteric metaphysics is that my Being is God’s knowing, and in general: World’s Being is God’s knowing. This is in conformity with the conclusion of phenomenology as envisaged by Husserl, that world is nothing but a noema, something essentially known instead of essentially material, though in some respects it is known as material and in other respect as mental. Phenomenological Reduction is the reducing of the individual to the divine intellect. Reduction releases the divine intellect from its captivation with the individual order of things. Thus, what counts for us as realities is for God pure potentialities. Phenomena are objects of divine contemplation. Thus, we are in essence things contemplated rather than things materially existent.

Perfect knowledge means the unity of the subject with the object, that is, the identification of the former with the latter. Let’s consider the example of a dream: Although all objects in a dream are made of consciousness, namely mental modifications, yet the dreamer cannot detect this, cannot know that other objects too are nothing but him/her. This is because the dreamer’s strong and formidable identification with the subject of the dream keeps him/her from seeing the true nature of the dream, and this is due to the fact that the realm of manifestation, or the plane of existence, is the world of identities, of separateness.

Both phenomenology and Advaita Vedanta come to the conclusion that “the universe is made of knowledge.” Physics, too, is coming to a similar conclusion, that “the universe is made of information.”

If we compare the rays of consciousness originating from the One to the act of observation in nature, then similar to what happens to quantum mechanics, the more focused the ray, the more localized the effect; this localization comes with the price of spreading out the momentum wave function, the complementary aspect of what’s localized. We can translate this situation into a metaphysical scenario in which each embodied human person has a personal aspect and an impersonal, universal aspect: the personal aspect is related to the individual’s subjectivity while the impersonal aspect is related to his/her metaphysical objectivity. One aspect dwells in the individual order and the other to the supra-individual order.   

We can in a way say that mathematical knowledge is very close to metaphysical knowledge, or to be more precise: Mathematical intuition is similar to the intellectual intuition. The fact that consciousness can conceive of paradoxical situations shows that consciousness somehow transcends natural logic which pertains to existential possibilities. The consciousness that bears this intellectual intuition, or metaphysical intellect, belongs to the supra-individual dimension of human personality.

If we accept that the physical order is the projection, or shadow, of a metaphysical order, then the natural consequence is to accept that the observed regularities in the physical order must have their origin in some sort of transcendental logic. We speak of logic rather than laws since what appears as existent in the physical order translates to pure knowledge in the metaphysical order.

From a metaphysical point of view, human life should be the attempt at answering the question “Who am I?” Or more precisely, human birth is an opportunity for consciousness to answer this question effectively, that is, to know the answer in a unitive way, knowing it by realizing it. The problem with modern science is that in its dogmatic inquiry and blindness to the nature of the subject, the scientist forgets him/herself in the inquiry. He forgets that the world which is the object of his investigations has its origin in his own subjectivity, and hence a complete knowledge of this world must consider his subjectivity, and consider it from a phenomenological point of view, which amounts to developing a metaphysics or first philosophy of consciousness along with physics and natural philosophy. Only in this case can knowledge be truly objective and systematic, and hence complete.