How Does The One Become The Many

Posted on by toomajj

From time immemorial philosophers and theologians of nondual traditions, those taking the Ultimate Reality to be a one invisible and indivisible whole, have struggled to understand how this One thing appears as the many things of our phenomenal world.

There is no doubt that the world of phenomena is diverse and ephemeral. But there is also no doubt for the mystic and the metaphysician that this world has its root in a One which is undifferentiated and eternal; being such this One is characterized as both Absolute and Infinite. Some may call it God but it is really, if anything, an impersonal principle, though inexpressible under the same principle. The reality of such rootedness is self-evident to the mystic in light of his/her direct perception of the One, and it is also self-evident to the Platonic philosopher by logical necessity. Thus, they can deny neither the Reality of the One which is the most obvious thing to them nor the presence of a phenomenal world. These two brute facts are to be reconciled as far as the metaphysician is concerned. The mystic cannot really care less about this reconciliation; for him/her it is all God; the many is only a word.

This metaphysical question has recently become my serious concern within a different context. My academic research in the field of physics is focused on the foundational issues of Quantum Physics. The problem I am working on is the Identical Particles. Electrons are elementary particles in the sense that they don’t have an internal structure and cannot be divided into smaller parts. Now the problem in quantum physics is that no two electrons can be distinguished from one another. It is not just that they look alike (of course they are not the kind of objects that can look like anything at all; they don’t have a look); they have no individuality whatsoever. If we put two electrons in a box they cannot tell which is which; they have no selves, no identity, no individuality, and this in a fundamental way. This feature of the quantum world is utterly counterintuitive: In our macroscopic world everything has an identity though they may look exactly alike; they have specific histories. A chair remains itself as it endures in time; in other words, a chair is a chair because it keeps being itself as time passes. Maybe the following impossible example can clarify: Assume we have a perfect twin; they look exactly alike, both internally and externally; I mean no one in the world can tell them apart in principle. Now we take these two into a surgery room and put all their memories, somehow, together on a table and shuffle them and then put them back. What happens if we have done everything perfectly is that none of these two twins can know which is which, assuming they have not gone mad yet; they have lost entirely their sense of identity and individuality; they have no sense of “I” or “me” or “mine.” (They would pass as perfect mystics) I know it is an unimaginable scenario but electrons are like that, with the difference that they are so in principle and from the very beginning. Now how is this related to the problem of the One and the many?

One of the hypothesis that has tried to explain the above enigma of the quantum world is the One Electron Universe Hypothesis. The idea is that there are no two or more electrons; there is only one electron in the whole universe but it appears as many electrons that we observe. It says that all the electrons that constitute the substance of the material world are instances of the one single electron. This of course is a pure hypothesis and it is not yet shown that how can the One electron appears as the almost infinite number of electrons in the universe! By the way, it is believed that there are about 15747724136275002577605653961181555468044717914527116709366231425076185631031296 electrons in the observable universe.

This itself is fascinating that one of the fundamental problems of physics may require us answering the same question that was posed thousands of years ago: How Does The One Become The Many!

There are a few observations from metaphysics that may be useful for us here: First, the One never really becomes the many; the One is always the One and the Immutable, and hence never changes or becomes; the many is only apparent; it is said that only out of ignorance we perceive the many. Now there are ways of expressing this situation in the language of mathematics which is being still developed. Of course I have no answer to it for now.

One point to remember is that we are either conscious (direct perception) of the One or the many and not both at once. In other words, we are either conscious of the One or unconscious, ignorant, of the One. Being conscious but not conscious of the One we perceive the many. This implies that our consciousness of the One must lie in a higher plane of existence than our consciousness of the many. The many is not Real relative to the One. Only the One is Real. One must also be careful here not to consider this world to be an illusion: Metaphysically speaking, this world is an illusion only relative to the One which belongs to the plane of the undifferentiated Absolute. Relative to the One we too, our bodies and minds, are illusory; thus relative to us humans this world of multiplicity is real and not illusory. The very mind that thinks the world to be an illusion is itself an essential part of the same illusion. Only relative to the One everything else is illusion and unreal. In other words, the One is absolutely real while the world, including humans, is relatively real.

A familiar example of the one thing appearing as the many is very well known to all of us, namely dreaming: If we look at dreaming from a phenomenological point of view which is more empirical and scientific than the cognitive scientific approach, we see that the one consciousness, say my consciousness, when I sleep can make itself appear to itself as a world of diverse forms with many people in it. My one consciousness appears, when it goes one level down to subconscious or unconscious, as many consciousnesses in a world of many objects. See that this One that appears as the many does not dwell in the same level of reality: The higher One becomes the lower many. When dreaming, being in the unconscious which is the lower level, there is multiplicity; but the moment we wake up and hence come to a higher level of reality the multiplicity of the dream world instantaneously collapses into one single consciousness of my waking state which I call my consciousness. Thus, one consciousness can make itself appear as many things when it implodes within itself (interestingly reminds me of the big bang explosion), or we may say when it falls deeper into itself. Some say that the dream world is a manifestation of the unrealized possibilities of the waking consciousness. This rings true for the metaphysician who sees the world as apparent actualities within God who is All Possibility.

In a similar fashion the multiplicity of this world may be really the basement of a higher mode of reality which is the abode of the Immutable One. It may be that we are just characters in the subconscious of a dreaming God!

To add a note, it seems to me that maybe only consciousness has such property, that it can occupy different levels of reality, being One in a level and many in another. If this be so, then we must after all return to consciousness as the ground of reality. Quantum physics seems to have already taken this leap, though not yet wholeheartedly and by many physicists. But we all know that truth always prevails.

Anyways, the main point of this post was to jot down some ideas about this metaphysical, and recently physical, enigma. Let it be at least a food for thought.

Morphology of Truth III

Posted on by toomajj

What is transcendental? There must be distinguished between transcendental concept and transcendental content. Transcendental concepts are those concepts that provide the formal conditions for the possibility of experience. Transcendental contents, on the other hand, which can be talked in the abstract through concepts, are conditions for the possibility of the sense of experience. For example, space and time are transcendental concepts, or a priori forms of pure intuition; however, reality and existence are irreducible units of meaning that provide the essential sense of all actual and possible experience regardless of the ontological status of the referents. These contents are provides by the nature and structure of conscious acts. Conscious acts have this peculiarity in that they are ecstatic: They constitute their objects, the cogitata, as standing outside the act itself; this is the manner of their constitution. For this reason the object appears as outside the act and as independent from it; such appearance, such mode of appearance of the content as ecstatic as communicated to the ego in the form of the sense of existence and reality, which merely a meaning and sense of the mode of appearance of the content and not about the content itself. It has to do with the sense of appearance and not what appears.

The absolute spirit that lies prior to all individuation.

Husserl is in many instances wrong; it must be noted that Husserl was so intensely preoccupied with the project of erecting a new science that he missed the deeper and the more radical implications and potentials of his phenomenology. Husserl opened the sphere of transcendental insight, which is a new and radical life, not for mankind but for the absolute spirit itself. Husserl was however obsessed with the problems of psychology, which I find trivial and irrelevant in the face of the transcendental grounding of all existence, namely experience.

            What there exists is experience; everything else, such as mankind and cosmos, is the content of this experience; content, as the self-objectification and self-understanding of experience, absolute spirit.

            Everything we know and understand takes place under the naïve, natural mode of cognition. This cognition is the essence of mankind; it is the peculiarity of mankind; this cognition is mankind; it is not that mankind carries this cognition. Mankind is identical with such mode of cognition: This natural cognition pertains to things existent; things that are defined under the title of Being, things that have Being. Therefore, this natural cognition is a grasp of things insofar as they have Being of one kind or another. This Being can be concrete object, like all bodies; it can be a logical object; or it can be an ideal, aesthetic object like culture, religion, or god. But these objects are all through and through existent, and they are understood in terms of a priori concepts that themselves pertain and hold only in the case of things existent, like space, time, causality, reality and existence, etc.

            There is, however, other modes of cognition that are entirely different than the natural cognition: One such cognition is transcendental cognition. Attainment of transcendental cognition requires the passing of mankind, for mankind insofar as it is man is caught up strictly in the natural cognition. One makes access to transcendental cognition as not man but something else, something that is in principle in accessible to all natural conceptualization, precisely because all natural concepts and categories pertain to things existent, but transcendental cognition is concerned with the meontic, that which is free of existential concepts and categories. From the point of view of the transcendental cognition one finds that the natural cognition is itself a product of transcendental cognition. In other words, natural cognition is a cogitatum of transcendental cognition.

            It is important to see that by this I do not mean that the cogitata of natural cognition are the cogitata of transcendental cognition; but rather, the natural cognition, which consists in the cogito, the natural cogito, is itself the cogitatum of transcendental cognition. Since the transcendental cognition is meontic and is not an existence-based cognition, the subject of such transcendental cognition is not egoic; it has no ego in the common sense of the word, or in the sense of the ego cogito. The subject of transcendental cognition is itself transcendental; it is the transcendental subject; it is in virtue of its meontic essence something itself meontic and prior to all individuation, for individuation is an ontic state of affairs.          

            The notion of transcendental ego much used by Husserl is very much misleading because it refers to the subject of transcendental cognition as something egoic, something existential, for all things egoic are also ontic in essence; they belong to natural cognition. The transcendental subject is meontic.

            Hence we see that the natural cognition pertains to the ontic; and transcendental cognition pertains to the meontic.

            What is ontic is the cogitatum of the natural cognition, carried out by the ego cogito; but the natural cognition is itself the cogitatum of transcendental cognition whose subject is meontic.

            The natural cognition relates to what is existent; but the transcendental cognition is the agent of forming, and constituting, the existent.

            For example, we speak of the universe as something existent; but one can always ask “where is the universe itself?” Although science dogmatically condemns questions of this kind under the excuse of their unanswerability, but it is a perfectly legitimate question, both logically and empirically. That science at its current state is not in a position to address such concerns, it does not imply that such questions and concerns are corrupt or ought not to be raised. For example, science cannot provide the condition for the possibility of science itself, and this makes its status shaky in respect to its rigor and truth.

            One such eternal difficulty of natural cognition and its reductive method is that since it cognizes everything in terms of its existence and under existential concepts and categories, then its reductive method, which must of necessity move within the same ontic sphere, get caught up in an infinite procedure of producing more things existent. But insofar as something is existent, which cannot be understood but under causality, it demands further causal reduction to another things existent; therefore, one can see and say from the outset that natural cognition can never, by its essence, achieve any ultimate ground for its endless productions and constructions. Let us look at this state of affairs: Assume that science, or whatever human activity, as found everything that is in the cosmos and all of its causes, even assume that the god of the whole universe has come down and introduced itself with all possible fantastic maneuvers and miracles. Everything that can be there is introduced and known to us. Despite this, we can still ask “what then?” “What does contain this whole existent totality?” “What is beyond this and its god?” “If god exists then how is responsible for its existence, and who for the existence of the one responsible for the existence of god?” “What is the point of whole this?” “Why is it at all?” or as famously asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “Even if god unconceals the purposes of its creation, then I ask still why is there god instead of nothing and absolute oblivion?”

We see that the same questions that are raised now and guide our scientific inquiries can still be asked with the same vigor and seriousness. As far as we refer to something existent, there is going to be endless positings and abstract constructions. This is the same in both directions: Whether we go outward toward the macroscopic or inward toward the microscopic. Then, anything that can have the form of a proposition, which refers to things ontic and is itself something existent, can never have the status of ground; can never be truth:

            So, although we have no idea of truth and its nature, but it is clear to us that if there “is” a truth at all, it cannot take the form of anything we have known so far; it cannot itself be formulated into a proposition, under something existent; truth, then, must be meontic; and we now know this from the outset and out of logical necessity. But since natural cognition deals with things only existent and ontic; then if there is a truth, its attainment must occur but another mode of cognition; it cannot be grasped or formulated within natural cognition.

            What naturally suggests itself in respect to the possibility of truth and its proper mode of cognition is to reflect and inquire not on the cogitata of natural cognition, as we have so far done, but to reflect on and inquire about the natural cognition itself, its conditions of possibility, its phenomenal, structural feature; and this only in pure description rather than the usual analytic explanation which naturally must enter into the sphere of the ontic. For if there is another mode of cognition, and if it is at all accessible to us, then since we know that goring forward under natural cognition has will fail out of necessity, then it must be out of natural cognition, such that natural cognition may be itself a phenomenon before transcendental cognition.

            Now if I can say that the object of my sight is something that exists, can I equally say that my sight itself, seeing, too, exists?! If I can say so, in what sense does my seeing of an object exist?! Where does it exists?! Although I can determine the object of my seeing spatiotemporally, I cannot determine with clear sense the phenomenon of seeing itself spatiotemporally! Where is my seeing taking place?! We see that place is itself a notion applicable to the objects of sight; place is rather a form in which sight is made possible; how can we apply this notion to sight itself?!         

Also since truth, for it to be truth and absolute, cannot be propositional and ontic, cannot be something existent, something that existential concepts and categories cannot by applied to it whatsoever, then it cannot be experienced within the structure of retention-protention-horizonal synthesis. Everything revealed and experienced with such structure is (appears) transcendent to consciousness. Therefore, truth cannot be anything transcendent; it must be immanent, for everything transcendent to consciousness appears as real and existent outside consciousness; this is its essential mode and sense of its appearance. Also anything that is immanent is revealed and experienced all at once; it has no sides or manifolds within which an identity appears. It is identical with itself and doesn’t refer to anything beyond itself. But everything transcendent to consciousness carries the mark of existence; it is essentially ontic. So truth must be essentially something immanent if it is to be truth and absolute, instead of existent and contingent.

Everything existent is contingent.

Also everything transcendent to consciousness, which appears through retention-protention-synthesis structure, is essentially embodied, for it has to appear partially; it must have sides and aspect; embodiment is defined here as that which has sides, aspects, and profiles; it may not necessarily be physical embodiment. But we defined embodiment in its broadest sense, as something that appears adumbrationally, with sides and aspect and profiles; and the necessary condition for all such appearance is the retention-protention-horizonal synthesis.

So anything transcendent to consciousness is embodied, in that it appears adumbrationally and gradually, and not all at once.

But since truth cannot be something transcendent to consciousness, and has to appear immanently and all at once; I mean it has to be given in its entirety and not partially; it is either there fully and entirely or not at all; then truth cannot be embodied. I mean it cannot appear adumbrationally and within the structure of retention-protention-horizonal synthesis. Truth cannot have embodied character. It cannot be seen or understood in terms of any embodiment, whether physical or spiritual or else. It may appear rather as an emanating point; of course it would not appear as an emanating point standing there; it would be an experience with the essential sense and character of singular emanation.

Also it cannot be localized, for localization is the character of embodiment, all things transcendent to consciousness, which have to appears within the structure of spatiotemporality; but what is immanent, like subjective experience, doesn’t obey such limitation. Our subjective experience of love or hatred, or our thoughts, are not experienced as things in space-time, or with a distance from us. This is because they are immanent and given all at once in their entirety. Spatiotemporality is again another mark of that which is transcendent to consciousness.

This negative methodology proves more fruitful than all positive methodologies for the case of truth. For, since we do not know beforehand what truth is or what it looks like, we can only show, by strictly logical means, what it cannot be and how it cannot appear if it is to be absolute truth. We may even be able to arrive at truth be a sheer force of negative inquiry, negating all that there is so only one and the same thing is left which cannot be subject to any negation in principle, namely it is apodictic and appears with immanent, apodictic certainty.

 

        We must show that no accomplishment of natural cognition can have the character of truth. Truth-Forms cannot appear within natural cognition. But natural cognition itself is a truth-from.

(A piece of music has temporal embodiment): Kant calls Noumenon an object of awareness not produced by sensory experience.

That it is possible for man to transcend his condition and situation, although he is always already situated, is indicative of his transcendental origin. He can lift himself up into transcendence, without being consciously aware of it, and influence or change the very condition to which he is bound.

And so far the attempts of philosophy and logic has been to begin from the world and move toward truth. I would like to begin from truth and move toward the world. The former approach is of course the most natural because world is the first thing we know; we first open our eyes to the world, the phenomenal world; and then from this world-experience we, at least some of us, scent the being of something else, something indubitable, behind the system of appearances that we call the world. Of course, our original attention to, or awareness of, some truth has the character of a scenting; we are not clear what it is or how it looks like, and not even sure if it exists at all. Despite all this skepticism, and against the advice of parents and all practical men, we continue on our way toward something of whose being we are not certain. It is for this lack of certainty, and the natural obscurity of the beginnings, that we have all these system philosophies, spiritual and mystical practices, and religions and schools. Since man is not sure of what direction to take, the course of history has allowed for a trying of almost all possible directions.

Now assume that someone, say me, has in some way arrived at that absolute truth. And such truth in virtue of its absoluteness and the apodictic certainty in its being and appearance, is wary of all and any obscurity. Then, isn’t this a batter ground for a beginning, where one has a firm foot on apodictic certainty?! One may begin from truth and move toward the world, for if the being of the world requires the being of such truth, then such truth must have as logical consequence the phenomenon of world and world-experience. Now our approach is begin from the truth and derive the world and its necessary existence as an accident of truth.

For I have argued before that consciousness is not a property of mankind: Mankind is an accidental property of consciousness: Fuck the thing-in-itself.

William James’ conception of philosophy as a struggle to achieve clarity is itself an ambiguous goal. And even so, philosophy’s journey so far has brought more obscurity into the picture, and nothing more than science itself has been responsible for such production, for it is standing on obscure grounds, thanks to skepticism and corrupt empiricism of modern philosophy.

Verba volant, scripta manent

Natural cognition is meant after the manner of the natural attitude in Husserl. It is the natural cognition in virtue of the structure of its cogitata. The cognition is always correlated with its cogitata. The cogitata of a particular cognition is always limited to the limit and scope of the constitutions of the cognition itself. The natural cognition, which is a characteristic of mankind, is what it is in virtue of its essential relatedness to that which is always existent. The natural cognition is an achievement of ontic validities; it always and only deals with ontology.

But natural cognition is itself an accomplishment of transcendental cognition. Natural cognition is in fact the cogitatum of transcendental cognition. Although the cogitata of natural cognition are always meant as existent and ontic, but the natural cognition itself is not so easily reduced to and exhausted in something merely existent. Let us inspect the following example:

            I am seeing a cup in front of me. I can say that the cup is since I am seeing it in front of me. (Please keep in mind that I am giving a descriptive account; I am not concerned with the material structure of the cup itself or the mechanism behind my visual cognition.) I see the cup is something that has Being for me in front of me; its Being is enveloped in spatiotemporal restrictions: It is, it is located, a particular distance from me; I am seeing it in this particular time, from this particular angle and within this particular perspective and under particular lighting. It has it Being, it appears, as something outside me, as something that has its Being regardless of me seeing of it or being directed at it. I can simply say about this cup that “It is there.” Not let us direct my attention to my seeing of this cup. I am no more attended to the cup itself but to my visual experiencing of the cup. I can say here that “I am seeing or having an experience of seeing.” My seeing is something that I have, that I am currently undergoing. I cannot speak of it as something there, for my seeing itself has no spatiotemporal relation to me; it is no located a distance from me; I also cannot speak of it as something inside me; there is no relationship of this kind between me and my seeing. I cannot grasp my seeing as something either external to me or internal in me. I also cannot view my seeing from other points of view, from other perspectives and angles and under a different lighting. I may move around the cup, view its other sides, aspects, and profiles; but my seeing has no sides to it; it does not appear to my in such way. It has a peculiar character that is entirely different from that objects that appear is the act of seeing. I view the cup with certain properties which I can say some of them depend on my manner of viewing it; I can posit a cup-in-itself as the substance of cup that exists in itself regardless of my viewing of it; for instance, I know that this or that particular lighting under which I see the cup does not belong to the cup itself but rather the my condition of seeing the cup. In the same manner I attribute certain properties that belong to the cup itself and not emergent in my experience of the cup; I posit this as the cup in itself. But I cannot say or posit any of this regarding my experience of seeing. Seeing is always already appearing as something in itself. It is itself and has no properties; I cannot grasp it in terms of substance and attributes. It is given to me either all at once in its entirety or not at all. It has no further aspects to be explored. It is a whole.

            So we see that since the object of experience has an essentially different character than the experiencing of the object, then I cannot apply the same concepts and categories to my experiencing that I also apply to objects of experience. My methodology and toolbox for inspection and analysis should always be chosen according to the nature and structure of the object. I cannot pick up a hammer in order to use it as a screwdriver for working with a screw. The machinery that I choose for analyzing the natural objects cannot be used also for my analysis of the natural cognition that provides the objects in the first place.

Truth Hidden in Plain Sight: Cosmos as the embodiment of consciousness

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The Primacy of Consciousness in the Constitution of Self and World

Seeing is an instance of knowledge; in seeing an object is known to us, namely its identity is given to our consciousness; thus seeing is an experience that holds the knower-knowledge-known division. The study of the experience of seeing can give us clues into what knowledge is in general. We pick one example to study: The seeing of a cup in front of me.

Seeing of this cup in front of me makes the cup known to me as the cup in front of me. In this seeing the identity of the cup is known, thus establishing an instance of knowledge; but the cup is known as the cup seen. It is the seeing of the cup that is the object of my knowledge here. What is perceived is the cup as seen and not the cup in itself. Therefore, in my seeing of the cup it is not just the identity of the cup that is known; two things are known simultaneously: The identity of the cup and the identity of the knowing that knows the cup. The knowing too has an identity; it has a unique character, in this case it is the seeing. Our knowing of the cup is a knowing through seeing. This knowing is a seeing. The object known is not the cup in general but the cup seen.

Therefore, in saying that we have knowledge of the cup, knowledge of its identity, there are two objects, or identities, that are known: The identity of the knowing involved and the identity of what is known through this knowing.

Now if we close the eyes and touch the cup, the cup is known to us as the cup again but this time it is the cup as touched. The touching of the cup is by no means the same as the seeing of cup; the cup touched is not the same as the cup seen though our consciousness synthesizes the two different experiences to about one and the same object, the synthesis happening in consciousness and not in the world; but it is obvious that what it feels like to touch the cup is utterly different from what it feels like to see the cup. The tactile character of this knowing is itself known to us immediately, like the visual character of seeing.

When we are touching the cup we immediately know that we are touching it, that we are having an experience of touch; the identity of the act of knowing, in this case the touching, is always immediately known to us in a self-evident manner. In seeing too, the instant we start seeing the cup we know with absolute certainty that we are experiencing a seeing and not a touching or a hearing. The too are never confused or doubted, and there is no case of neurological disorder that can have such an effect: In order for me to become confused about whether my experience of this cup is a seeing or a touching I must know what it is like to see and what it is like to touch so to be confused about them; but this knowledge is identical with the self-evident knowledge of the identity of the act of cognition, thus removing the possibility of all confusion regarding the identity of the act; but unlike acts of cognition, confusion frequently arises about the identity of the objects known in the act; we may not know immediately whether what is seen is a cup or a vibrator. These objects belong to the contents of the act while the identity of the act itself is its form. We see that the contents have varying qualities, such as the quality of what is seen, whether it is obscure or clear, etc. But the form has no varying quality; the identity of the act is a whole: Seeing is either seeing or not; it may be that what is seen is not seen clearly or that we see poorly, but it is obvious that it is seeing nonetheless: Seeing is always seeing regardless of what is seen or whether what is seen is real or unreal, since seeing in our dreams has the same character as seeing in waking states. The identity of the act is a formal-logical structure of consciousness and has nothing to do with the world that is known through the act. Natural processes can never produce seeing and then touching and at once making them self-evidently known and distinguished. Natural processes are themselves known in and through cognitive acts; they are syntheses of consciousness, always presupposing the self-evident and primary role of cognitive acts. Even though it may take some time for us to be sure of the identity of the object seen or touched, the identity of the act of cognition is immediately known without us having to make inferences or inspecting the contents of the act such as what is seen or touched.

We can extend this to all other modes of cognition: In any case when a cup is the object of my knowledge it is always through one or the other act of cognition whose identity is immediately known. When the cup is the object of knowledge it is the cup as seen, or touched, or imagined, or remembered, or experimented on, or scientifically theorized upon, etc. It is always through such self-evident acts that objects are known. But objects are always known only as seen, or as imagined, or as theorized, and never aside and outside from these cognitive forms. We never have an experience or knowledge of a cup-in-itself and aside from the act in which the cup is known. The cup-in-itself is always an ideal structure. Even the idea of the cup-in-itself is the cup as theorized by me precisely as the cup-in-itself; this idea too is still the cup within my cognition and not apart from it.

So all we see are experiences of objects and not objects themselves. And it is important to see the difference: Objects of experience always appear inside space and time; everything seen or touched has a place already. But look at your experience of seeing; the seeing itself is not something inside space. You can ask “where is the cup?” but it doesn’t make sense to ask “where is my seeing of the cup?” Thus, the categories of space and time apply to contents of experience and not to experience itself. But since we are always surrounded by experiences of objects and not objects themselves we, as the experiencing subject, are not really inside space or time; space and time apply to what is experienced, but not to the experiencing subject itself. In other words, we are having experiences of time and space. The experience of space and time is not itself something inside space or time. The subject who is experiencing space and time, whose content of experience is space or time, is not itself subject to space and time since experience of space is not a natural object; though what is seen in seeing is a spatial object, something embedded in space, but the seeing of the object is not itself spatial; the space that is seen has 3 dimensions, but the seeing of that space is not an object with any dimensions; it is totally a different kind of object as we know, to the extend that we cannot even apply the concept of object to it. Reflect on your experiences: Look at the objects you are seeing and see how they have a place inside the seeing experience and how space is something inside your seeing though not observed; now shift your attention to your seeing itself; see that the seeing is not itself something in a place since place is something appearing inside seeing and not outside it. You cannot touch your seeing or rotate it; but everything there is is inside this seeing; see that everything we assume that exists exists only in experience, experiences that are themselves beyond space and time. There is nothing outside experience, because there is not outside to experience.

To summarize: In any instance of knowledge two identities are known: The identity of the cognized object and the identity of the act of cognition. The cognized object is always known in and through a specifically determined and known mode of cognition.

But how is the identity of the act of cognition known? We saw that the act of cognition is immediately known and that it is self-evident; it is given to us with absolute, apodictic certainty. It is in fact indubitable, for in order to doubt the identity of the act of cognition we have to use the cognitive act of doubting whose identity should be either self-evident or else our doubt is void to being with. In order for us to successfully doubt the identity of a cognitive act we must presuppose the identity of another cognitive act.

If the world is known to us through acts of cognition, then how are the acts of cognition known to us?! How am I seeing that I am seeing? Who is seeing my seeing, my imagining, my thinking and theorizing and reflecting?! We cannot posit that the knowledge of these acts is known through some other acts, the same way that external objects are known through cognitive acts. To posit such hierarchy creates the problem of infinite regress. Thus, there must be an absolute point in and through which acts of cognition are self evidently given to consciousness, making consciousness eigen-standing and self-sufficient.

We naturally think that it is the world that we know, or it is the world that exists; we think that objects are really objects of the world, and that it is these natural objects or natural processes that produce consciousness. But the objects that we experience are not external objects; they are experiences; they are experiences whose objects are meant and intended as external objects. The actual objects with which we are constantly surrounded are experiences, experiences of a world appearing as real, its reality being part of the experience: The sense of existence and reality is always present in experience as the color is present in all instances of seeing. The sense of existence of the tree belongs to the experience of tree as the color green belongs to experience and not the tree itself, the tree itself being only an idea of consciousness constantly intended through the manifold of experiences. Thus, the sense of existence is there in all experiences as color or roughness are in all instances of seeing or touching, respectively. Even a color blind sees everything with a color though only with limited possibilities.

The same way that apparent shape, size, color, etc. belong to the internal-formal-logical structures of all seeing, whether in dream or waking state, the sense of existence, or objectivity, too belongs to the internal-formal-logical structure of all experiences, of consciousness in general, whether it is an experience in dream or waking state. To say something exists independently of experience is as meaningless as saying that the tree has a color even if we are not looking at it. According to Wolfgang Pauli, German physicists, such proposition, the thesis of independent existence, “is not even wrong” since it doesn’t even make any sense.

There is no world or reality whose existence can be proven; there is only experience of a world, experience of a reality. There are experiences that we experience and not objects. What we see is the object seen; what we touch is the object touched; what we imagine or think is the object imagined or thought, or the object experimented on or theorized upon. It is seeing that we see; it is touching that we touch.

The fallacy within the metaphysical assumption that nature exists independently of consciousness and that consciousness is the product of natural processes is as follows:

If consciousness is a product of natural processes, and if these natural processes do not depend on consciousness for their existence, then it is possible for nature to produce consciousness without there having to be a consciousness, that is, it is possible to have experience without it being an experience of something, or being someone’s experience!

But experience is not something like a natural object; it is essentially something other than everything that is in nature since everything in nature is known through consciousness. When the natural scientist is looking inside natural processes to find clues to the origin of consciousness, he is unaware that he is constantly using consciousness in his search and that he is never outside it, that these natural processes are themselves processes known in and through consciousness, thus always already biased by his consciousness. what this scientist is doing is in fact nothing but consciousness looking inside its own content (known natural processes) for its own origin: There is never an outside consciousness, the idea of outside consciousness itself being an idea of consciousness, and hence inside it all along.

It is crucial to understand that the fallacies within natural science does not entail that we claim consciousness creates nature and matter, as is often objected by hasty and shallow observations of our critics. They pose the question as to how, then, does consciousness create matter? How can consciousness which is itself not physical create a physical reality? The response to this criticism is as we pointed above frequently and emphasized:

Very Important: Consciousness does not have to create matter or physical reality. Consciousness does the job by creating an experience of physical reality. It is experience of matter that we have and not matter itself; it is experience of physical reality that we have and not an actual physical object; when we are hit by a massive object it is the experience of being hit by a massive object that we have, experience of pain that we have; there is experience of mass, experience of being hit, etc. There is nothing but experience. Consciousness creates this experience whose content is a real-looking cosmos that unfolds in time; consciousness does not have to create what is experienced in order to produce its experience; and we know that consciousness does precisely the same thing in our dreams, creating experience of touch, experience of sight, experience of pain, of thought, of imagination, experience of a material object, and experience of a physical reality with open horizons extended to infinity. The sense of existence and reality of the contents of experience are parts of experience produced by consciousness.

All that there is and all that we know are acts of cognition, experiences. Even the sciences that pretend to have overcome the fallacy within their naive thesis of Realism are sciences as experienced, sense data as theorized, nature as perceived, etc. When science posits that our perceptions are created by the sense data of the external world, the being of this external world which is first and foremost known through experience is itself taken for granted; it is itself something always already experienced in perception; how can we use it as the cause of perception! It is in perception that the externality of world is given to consciousness. What is given and known strictly in perception cannot be used as the cause of perception.

The external world that is supposed to produce experience is itself something always already known through experience. We never really step outside experience; the superstitious character of modern science comes from the fact that it uses metaphysical and un-empirical elements to account for empirical phenomena; thus, it is only a modern version of traditional magic. Magic, too, worked, as does modern sciences in its addressing the needs of the mass; but this utility, and particularly the mundane utility, is by no means a criterion of objective truth; and it makes this modern magic even more biased as it is driven and funded by self interest and profit. As it was said before, I may have a hammer that works perfectly in doing its job, but this does not justify me to stand and proclaim “hammer is the truth.”

In this sense modern science is anything but empirical and objective; its first thesis upon which all its conclusions rest, the thesis of realism, is a purely metaphysical assumption, one which is in principle unverifiable both empirically and theoretically. A science with metaphysical foundations for empirical phenomena is not science in any sense. The metaphysical, and unjustified, character of the assumptions of modern science were at last exposed in Quantum Mechanics which showed the collapse of the theses of Realism and Materialism. The Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations expose precisely the fallacy within the thesis of Realism, as they show that nature apart from an observer not only makes no sense whatsoever but also that it would be incapable of producing the phenomena of world in the first place: An independently existing world cannot produce an experience of itself by itself and inside itself. 

World is a product of consciousness since world is nothing but the experience of world, the same experience equally present in dream experiences. World as the horizon of all actual and possible experiences is always present in the background of all of our experiences; it is in the background of this world-consciousness that everything is understood in the first place: Objects are objects of the world; we are beings in the world, yet world is not something ever fully experienced; world is not itself an object of the world but it is always there for us in some peculiar sense. Though there is always a consciousness-of-world in the background but it is only objects of the world that are experienced; world itself is not a thing. It is important to pay attention to this world-consciousness always present in the background of all of our experience, for this world-consciousness is the ground and origin of all sense and significance in our experiences. World-consciousness and the sense of existence are present in all moment of experience and they are the foundations of the world that is experienced to be actually existing apart from consciousness, while this sense of independent existence itself is a production of consciousness.

There is nothing other than experience. The idea of external world is itself the experience of its idea. It is pretty stupid to claim that there exists an external world that produces experience on the basis that we experience an external world. The externality and existence of the world is something appearing in and through experience and in no other way. But this same externality and existence is experienced in dreams too. There does not have to exist an actual reality in order for us to experience a reality. The real appearance of experienced objects is something that belongs to the structure of experience and not to the world itself, and that is why our dream experiences too have to be experiences of a reality. To experience is to experience a reality. Reality is derived from the structures of consciousness and not from the world, since this world is something always already known through consciousness.

World is essentially something experienced and not something existent. 

There is no world; there is only consciousness of the world. But this consciousness of the world is also equally present in our dreams. The only difference between dreams and waking states are the stability of experiences and not their internal structures. Seeing in our dreams is exactly like seeing in waking states even though what is seen may be strange and peculiar. This holds for all other acts of cognition and experiences. The reality and objectivity of what is experienced belongs to the internal and logical structures of experience; it has nothing to do with an actually existing world. The actually existing world is itself something cognized in one way or another. Objectivity is an experience of consciousness. The senses of objectivity and subjectivity are both productions of consciousness:

Subjectivity is the inward projection of consciousness while objectivity is the outward projection of consciousness. Subjectivity, which is signified by “I,” is consciousness in itself while objectivity, which is signified by “world,” is consciousness reflecting itself. “I” am consciousness as immanent while the “world” is consciousness as transcendent. “I” am the knowing aspect of consciousness while the world is the existence aspect of consciousness whose unity forms the absolute bliss: “I” am the enstasy of consciousness while the “world” is the ecstasy of consciousness.

Consciousness has two complementary modes of being which can only come together or not at all: It has a mode in which consciousness appears as inside itself (entasis), and it has another mode in which consciousness appears as outside itself (ecstasis); consciousness appearing as inside itself is experienced as the “I,” and consciousness appearing as outside itself is experienced as the “world.” This is why whenever and wherever there is the experience of “I” there is also the world-consciousness present in the background; and whenever and wherever there is an experience of the world there is also an experiencing “I” attached to it. In dreamless sleep there is neither “I” nor the “world.” World is a necessary moment of the I as the I is the necessary moment of world. In fact, “I” and “world” are one and the same thing, essentially consciousness:

The “I” is the inward reflection of the world while the world is the outward projection of the “I.” Consciousness is a unity whose appearance takes the Yin-Yang structure projected as the I-World polarity. Everything appears and happens in between these two, though in reality there is no such division and nothing is happening at all.No division has taken place and nothing has ever happened.

This whole grand existence is a performance of consciousness; but this consciousness performs it so well and with such mastery that we cannot see its traces; it gives the world while hiding itself behind its phenomena. It is so prevailing and all-encompassing that we fail to see it and its work, thinking that it were just another object in the world. Reality is an idea of consciousness and not consciousness a product of reality, for reality is itself known in and through consciousness, and hence subject to its formal-logical structures. If the “I” appears inside the world, a world that is external to the “I,” that’s because consciousness projects itself such and so: Consciousness is that peculiar phenomenon that can appear both as world and as an object inside it, both as totality and individuality; consciousness does exactly this same thing when in our dreams it creates a performance in which it simultaneously plays the roles of the world, the experiencing “I,” and all the other subjects inside that world. This is what consciousness does: It can appear as a whole and as a part of that whole at once. It appears as world and as the “I” experiencing that world; but consciousness doesn’t create, and doesn’t have to create, any of these since all that there is is experience and nothing else: Consciousness produces an experience in which it is a subject inside an infinite world sharing this world with other subjects. It does exactly this in our dreams, which includes the waking state: This waking state too is just another of such performance which is only more stable that dream. The deeper the projection of consciousness goes the less stable its experiences become. As the deeper into subconscious we go, the less clear everything becomes. In this sense, the apparent separateness between individual subjects is like the apparent separateness between the character of our dreams which are in fact different aspects of one and the same person, the dreamer. In dream consciousness only projects the ideas of subconscious into real-looking experiences. Our waking state is the same: We are characters inside the subconscious of universal consciousness; this whole world is a subconscious world, and we are all only different faces of one and the same universal “I.” The sense of “I-ness” in all of us is one and the same, and it comes from one center; it is one “I,” one consciousness in whose daydream we come and go as mere appearances. Our outward form and humanity belong in the world of subconscious of this universal consciousness, but our true essence, the true Self, the “I” at the center of all of us is transcendent to all phenomena since it is the pure experiencing subject that has the daydream. All this that we experience is a subconscious world, all the identities and characters being illusory characters of a subconscious. The experiencing “I” at the center knows no birth or death, no pain or pleasure, for death and birth and pain and pleasure are only experiences within its subconscious. None of it is real. But what is more is that any of you can actually wake up from this subconscious and merge out of the daydream; then you will see the megastability of that state compared to this waking state. The megastable state called Samadhi or Transcendental Experience, or the Ground State of Consciousness, which are objective and empirical states of consciousness.

To the same degree that our dream experiences are unstable compared to our waking state experiences, our waking state too is unstable compared to the Samadhi megastability. We experience the instability of the waking state as impermanence and mortality; waking up from this state we experience a supreme stability in which there is no impermanence and mortality. The reason there is no experience of mortality is that the time of the supreme state is no more ecstatic like the time of our waking state: In ecstatic time we experience time as having a before and an after about a now. But when this ecstasy of time is transcended, time has no more a three-fold structure; there is no before and after. It is not that in Samadhi we live forever; we are immortal because we don’t live at all: There is only an eternal now.

Consciousness as it goes downward deeper into subconscious worlds not only becomes less stable but also divides more and more outwardly. At the supreme state which is the uppermost point it is one; in its first excited state which we know as the waking state the one points spherically spreads out, inflates, into an infinite world with multitude of subjects. But each subject which is individualized consciousness goes deeper into a yet lower state of consciousness in its dreams, the second excited state, in which one subject is again inflated into an infinite world of dream with multitude of subjects which are less stable than the higher state. Therefore, the lower, or the more excited consciousness becomes, the more spread out and divided and the less stable it becomes. Naturally at its highest state it is united and megastable, One and immortal, Absolute and Infinite: It is one indivisible immortal whole.

Bertrand Russel once said “It is a brute fact that the universe is there.” But he was utterly wrong since “It is his experience of universe that is there.”

A genuine empiricism and objective science cannot but say the following since it is simplest empirical observation that can be made:

It is a brute fact that there is experience and nothing but or outside experience. 

Morphology of Truth II

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Truth is traditionally defined as that which cannot not be; it is necessary by its nature; it also has to be absolute. What is relative is dependent, and hence not marked by necessity but rather by accident.

Truth cannot belong to the sphere of Being and existence; it is not something that can be said to be or not to be, to exist or not to exist. Something that exists can also be conceived of as not existing. The non-Being of something that is in Being is a logical appendix to its Being. But truth is that which whose non-Being cannot be conceived of. Thus, it cannot belong to the sphere of Being or among beings. Truth has to be beyond Being if it is truth at all. Something that is in Being does not qualify as truth.

From necessity and absoluteness it follows that truth has to be one and unique; if there are two truths that are not identical, then the necessity of one excludes the necessity of the other by definition unless otherwise they are identical. Therefore, if we have two truths, either they are identical or else none of them is truth.

Therefore, truth is that which is unique, necessary, absolute, and beyond Being. Metaphysically speaking, truth is One, Unique, Absolute, Infinite, and by necessity both immanent and transcendent at once. However, anything that can be put into a proposition belongs to the sphere of being. Proposition is an assertion, a predication. The negation of that which is predicated is always conceivable; thus, truth cannot be something to be predicated on something. Proposition can only house facts; fact is by definition relative and contingent.

Yada, yada, yada… Truth is something that can only be experienced. It is something to be seen rather than asserted. It is in the nature of truth, logically and ontologically and metaphysically, that it cannot be put into proposition; it has to be experienced. But it can only be experienced transcendentally because all natural experiences pertain to contingent facts. World is a body of facts, facts being essentially relative and contingent; hence, no natural experience such as seeing or hearing or believing can grasp truth.

The experience of truth has to be absolute and self-evident. The self-evidence of truth lies in the truth itself and not provided from outside it by way of argumentation or logical demonstration or experiment. Only facts are shown in experiments. This means that you cannot at once experience the truth and also entertain even the slightest doubt whether it is truth or not: Truth is that which cannot not be. This is the best guide for the aspirant. As long as one can ask himself whether this is it or not, it is sure that it is not it; when you see the truth you will know, and you will know with absolute certainty such that it is not possible at all to doubt it. This arises from the essence of truth.

The face of truth is its own proof.

It is said that “Truth is infinitely close to us while we are infinitely far from truth.”

Of course, none of the above proves that there is such a thing as truth; but if there is it has to have the above essential characteristics by definition.

To go after the proof for truth is pointless. Since truth is not a thing to be put into proposition or predicated, it is not something to be proved. And there are things that exist but cannot be proved: Color exists, though it exists in experience; it is something experienced. But it is impossible to prove to a blind man the existence of color and what it is like.

Things that exist in experience are things that transcend proof; proof does not apply to them, for their truth is established in and through experience and not through logical or rational demonstration. Thus, the lack of proof does not prove anything. Those whose first attack to metaphysical truth is “prove it” really have not understood the first thing about logic. The best answer to them is to ask them to “prove that proof is the only method of demonstration.” The example of color and the blind man is the counterexample.

Truth, too, since it is something experienced, cannot be proven or disproven; it is either seen or not seen; and he/she who has seen it needs no proof whatsoever.

The 4th Dimension

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If we were exclusively 3 dimensional beings, then we would not be able to experience a 3 dimensional world. Why? Below is the reason:

Construction:

  1. Circle is a geometrical construct that needs two dimensions for its construction.
  2. The construction of a circle is possible only in a 2-D space.
  3. Two dimensional space is a necessary and sufficient condition for the construction of a circle.
  4. When we say that a certain geometrical or topological construct is N dimensional we mean that an N dimensional space is the necessary and sufficient condition for its construction.

Perception:

  1. Circle as a 2-D construct can be perceived fully only from above, from above the 2-D space in which it is constructed.
  2. To fully perceive a circle one needs to transcend the circle’s space.
  3. One has to be transcendent to the circle in order to perceive the circle, or else the circle itself will be transcendent to one’s perception.
  4. Circle in its entirety is always a transcendent shape to the immanent
  5. In order to perceive a circle in its entirety, the shape of the circle, one has to step into the third dimension, a dimension that is transcendent to the dimensions of the circle and yet contains the space of the circle.
  6. The condition for a perception of the 2-D totality of a circle is being in a space that is both transcendent to the space of the circle and yet contains the space of the circle as immanent.
  7. To perceive an N dimensional shape in its entirety one has to be placed in the N+1th

Conclusion:

  1. To perceive (experience) the N dimensionality of a space, rather than deducing and inferring it, one has to be transcendent to it, being located in an N+1 dimensional space.
  2. For an N dimensional space to be perceived (experienced) it has to be immanent to the observer’s consciousness, but this immanence is possible only if the observer is transcendent to the observed, hence enjoying a higher dimension than the observed.
  3. The dimensionality of an N dimensional space is always transcendent to the observer located in the same space.
  4. The dimensionality of a space becomes immanent only and only for an observer that is transcendent to that space.
  5. Our experience of 3-D space is immanent: We intuit the 3 dimensional character of our space immediately and don’t need to deduce or infer it by examination and investigation.
  6. The 3-d character of our space is given to us immediately; it is immanent.
  7. Since our experience of the world is already 3 dimensional and immanent, therefore we have to be transcendent to it and located outside of it.

                                                                                                      QED.

 

    ***To experience two dimensionality directly one has to be in the third dimension. Therefore to experience three dimensionality one has to be in the fourth dimension.                                                    

Non-Duality and Quantum Mechancis

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Non-duality is an inevitable consequence of quantum theory. The philosophical expression of quantum mechanics is that the “thing-in-itself” is pure potentiality and is actualized only from outside itself by something other than itself.

Pure potentiality cannot actualize itself. The other actualizing agent may be a consciousness, an observation, measurement, or interaction with an environment.

Defining the totality as a quantum system, whether it be our universe alone or infinite universes, this totality by definition remains always and forever in pure potentiality, for there is nothing outside it in order to actualize it.

This means that our universe was never created; it is not: It is pure appearance and has no substantial reality.

In a state of pure potentiality nothing is preferred to another; there can be no distinctions; there is no duality in pure potentiality: If we accept the truth of quantum mechanics, then we have to accept that the underlying reality is essentially non-dual.