Essentials of a Spiritual Metaphysics

by Chris Ott

Chapter One: What do we know

Whether we are talking about an individual man, an individual woman, or an individual elephant, each individual only ever has contact with its own experience.

Pick up an apple and look at it. What do you see? Some will say "matter." That is wrong.

All you see is color. Even if you were colorblind and only saw shades of gray, gray is color. Black, white, gray, and red are all colors. So all you see is color.

But color arises only in the mind when the apple is perceived through the conditioning lens of eyes, nerves, and brain. There is no color independent of its being perceived. All that is there are frequencies of radiation. The skin of the apple absorbs certain frequencies; others are reflected. One frequency that meets the eye is interpreted by the mind as red. One is interpreted as blue. Thus you see the color that you do, the picture that you do. You do not see the matter of the apple. You see your own mental states.

This goes for all the other senses as well. Taste is an interpretation of something tasteless; sound is an interpretation of something silent, etc.

So you are, in a sense, stumbling blind in a world of your own experience.

Yet through the medium of your body, you have access to the whole wide world. So through a gross body you experience the gross world.

Now, what can you say of the apple in itself – as it exists unperceived?

All the qualities you can assign to the apple, even frequency and vibration, are irrational applications of a fallacy. Given the fact that you only have your own experience of the apple, you necessarily can only describe the apple in terms of analogues from your own brain-conditioned experience of it. And of course you cannot be sure that the actual apple is in any way analogous to the qualities you perceive, for you have no way to compare your experience of the apple to the actual apple. This fallacy of reading your apple experience into its cause (the actual apple) is the fallacy of reading effects into causes. It is false thinking – even though it feels totally natural.

So given that an individual only has access to his own conditioned experience, and has no way to understand or describe the world as it is in itself independent of his perceiving it, the question arises whether the individual has any way to say anything at all about things as they are in themselves?

Yes.

But before this individual can discover what that is, he has to give up most of his conditioning and become completely honest with himself.

For he must first admit that, as far as he knows, all things are provisionally possible about the apple. In fact, of the world beyond his experience, absolutely all things are possible.

No progress in understanding can happen until this is fully grasped.

Understand that what is said here is not that all things are actually possible. For it is also possible that some things are impossible. But what is being said is that, given the extreme limitation of the individual's scope of knowledge of things as they are independent of his experience of them, he has no leverage against which to assert that any particular proposition is impossible. So this potential we are talking about is a prescriptive attitude from which to move forward, not a description of things as they are.

If a man asserts that a proposition is impossible based merely on his prejudice, what he so often mistakenly calls his intuition, this also is of course bogus. For, since he is limited to his own orbit of experience, and has no immediate access to the world as it is in itself, independent of his perceiving or intuiting it, any claims from his so-called intuition are merely a repetition of the fallacy mentioned above. Having no access to the world as it is, independent of his experience of it, he has no way to compare his intuitions of how it seems it ought to be to how it is.

Now some say there is a class of propositions that we must say are impossible, i.e. those that are self-contradictory. This line of thinking holds that a proposition such as "The man both exists and at the same time does not exist" cannot possibly be true, for it defies the law of the excluded middle – whereby something must either be or not be. The claim that such self-contradictory claims are necessarily false still bleeds from the same fallacy as before. For such logical notions as the excluded middle, sound as they undoubtedly feel to us internally, are still grounded in intuitions found in experience. While it is soothing to the individual to have faith that his logic, derived from his intuition, is right, he has no way to compare his intuitions to conditions as they are independent of his experience.

Now there is another argument for impossibility that is equally false. It is the argument from definition – considered by logicians to be foundational to truth. This is called analyticity. For instance, the term "an immortal man" is deemed by logicians to describe an impossible creature because the definition of the word "man" includes mortality. But this definition of men as mortal is merely a regurgitation of the definer’s past experiences of men. What if there were men that the individual had never come in contact with that were immortal? Not having experienced them, the individual would not have counted them in his definition. His definition is thus objectively vacuous – telling us everything about the definer’s assumptions about things and nothing about things as they are. Words are mere placeholders for beliefs based on experience, not a compass to truth about things as they are.

If a logician continues to protest this point on the shear gravitas of analyticity (the power of definition), immortal men could be renamed "men prime," placating the logician with his own self-styled convention of attaching assumptions to signs (words). By such a simple child’s game the logician’s concerns are recycled to the oblivion from which they emerged – proving that the semanticist lives in his own hall of mirrors. The logician’s notion of truth is attached exclusively to his limited experience and bears the fig leaf of gentlemanly mannerisms. The only thing that definitions tell us is the suppositions of the definer, nothing about the world as it is in itself. Thus all that is known by definition is definition. We certainly cannot inform ourselves metaphysically from them.

If a logician says, "It is not possible that there is an immortal man due to my chosen definition of the word man, by which I include only those men who die” he is not saying anything substantive about the world beyond his experience, by which we include his experience of words and definitions. And it is precisely this world as it is independent of experience that we are seeking to describe. Logic is merely manners of speaking without contradiction – often formalized. Manners of speech do not and cannot impugn the fact that, given the limitation of our experience, all things remain possible irrespective of words. So analyticity (loading definitions into words and then deriving those definitions from those words) brings us no closer to comparing our experience with reality.

Now there is another semantic objection to the fact that, given the limits of the scope of individual experience, all things remain possible. It is sort of a pun. It goes as follows.

If all propositions are possible, then it follows that there is at least one proposition that is not possible. That proposition would be that – it is not possible for there to be anything impossible. And if there is at least one thing that is not possible, then it is false that all things are possible.

While this sounds like a fair objection to the proposition that all things are possible, in fact it is merely an entertaining abuse of words.

A logician will readily see that once this argument is stated formally, and the double negative is canceled, it merely reiterates that all things are possible.

It is not possible that there is at least one proposition that is not possible.

Reduces to:

It is possible that there is at least one proposition that is possible.

Reduces to:

At least one proposition is possible.

Enough said.

There is yet another way that people justify their assumptions about what is and is not possible. It is modal logic. In this formal language, certain conditions are deemed possible and others are deemed not possible. However, the criterion that is used to assign possibility to conditions is the imagination of the logician. Thus modal logic presupposes that the logician's imagination is the paragon of all possibility. But this assumption about human imagination, as the criterion for possibility, has no justification. If there was ever a game that logicians played without implications outside of logic it is modal logic.

Possibility is not the same thing as probability. Probability is a quantifiable attribute of world events. Possibility, on the other hand, cannot be quantified, nor can possibility be said to be strong or weak. Note that if, given the limits of human experience and imagination, all things remain potentially possible, and since possibility cannot be quantified or compared in terms of relative weakness or strength, then any claims of possibility are necessarily trivial claims – that is, they have no actual world implications and tell us nothing that was not known. And if possibility is ubiquitous and trivial than nothing substantive can be derived from it.

We have established four facts then:

• 1. Individuals only ever have access to their own individual experience.

  2. Given the limit of the scope of individual experience, all things remain potentially possible.

  3. Given that possibility is ubiquitous, it is trivial.

  4. Since possibility is trivial, nothing certain can be derived from human guessing at the nature of things as they are independent of experience.

These are actual facts. From these four established facts, it would at first blush seem to follow that we could not derive anything at all about conditions independent of our experience either through observation, intuition, or inquiry. And since we have only these at our disposal, we can know nothing at all.

It is explained already that the proposition that all things are possible is not meant to be a description of things as they are, but rather an admission of the human condition of being helpless to discover how they are. It is a prescriptive attitude, not a description of conditions. This admission of mind, this complete surrendering and giving up of the old modes of thinking – in terms of imagination, invention, pretension, presumption, prejudice, claims of intuition (which are most often really a mere sense of familiarity), claims of common sense (which are really relative subjective sensations), consensus, logic, definitions, language games, possibility, impossibility – giving all this up honestly and completely marks preparedness for the attitude of thought and feeling that is the prerequisite for embarking upon true and fruitful inquiry, the path of dnyana marga. This prerequisite cleansing of the mind of the methods of false imagination are required before discernment can begin, i.e. the gradual maturation of discrimination between the false and the real.

Coupled with this abandonment of old false practices, it is imperative to retain the open-handed attitude to receive the grace of truth from a previously unexpected angle – nay even to expect it and be impatient for it. If there were not avenues of inquiry left to the honest human spirit, then all individual seeking would be pointless. And the immediate implication of this would be absolute nihilism – the spiritual death of man.

Fortunately for the life of man, not all things are possible, not even from the perspective of the individual locked in his solipsist interpretation of reality with no way to compare it to the objective world. Fortunately, for the life of man, there is exactly ONE proposition that is known with absolute certainty, and its negation is not possible by any argument.

It is that, from the point of view of any individual, it is necessarily true and obvious that

5. The percept presents itself as it does.

What this means is that the movie screen of experience (sensation, emotion, thoughts) presents itself to the individual, however conditioned it may or may not be, and by whatever conditioning factors might be active in its presentation, as it does.

In other words, 'This (pointing to what appears to be my world and thoughts) is how it appears.'

That cannot possibly be diminished. It is an indisputable unconditional fact for the individual – the only unconditional fact that the individual has.

Everything else is a mere guess.

Chapter Two: The objective and the subjective

So if the individual is limited to this solipsism, a bubble of personal experience, then how can he determine anything at all? How can he even guess at anything beyond it? How, for instance, would he even have guessed about the frequencies of radiation causing his sight perception?

Fortunate for the individual, it is generally agreed that there are hints within the scope of his experience as to its cause. While he cannot get outside of his own experience to directly perceive the objective world, a man can examine his individual experience more closely for clues to its nature.

The principle clue that something more is going on than solipsism are the two types of properties that a human being can find in his experience – called the primary and secondary qualities.

First let's look at the secondary qualities and see how early thinkers discovered their presence.

A medieval philosopher has a fever. He lies in bed as his wife cares for him. In the morning he is hot, perspiring. The bed is soaked. He strips to his undershirt, lays on top of his bedding – a cold towel on his forehead.

Later that same day he finds himself shivering with cold, calling out meekly to his beloved wife for more covers through chattering teeth.

What has changed? Not the air in the house. Nor has his body become colder. Rather the apparent change of temperature is in the man. It is not objective. It is subjective – from the point of view of the subject.

He recovers from the fever, having learned an important lesson. The sensation of the air experienced through the medium of the skin, nerves, and brain is not the temperature of the air. It is a representation of it which, when sick, fails to deliver properly. Even when he is well now, he recognizes that it is not the air on his skin that he feels, but his mind's representation of something he cannot directly feel or analyze.

An automobile inventor is standing with a stopwatch observing two cars race around a small track. Before the race began, as the drivers throttled their engines, the pitch of the engines had been consistent. But now as the cars approach on the track the inventor notices their pitch is higher. Then as soon as they pass him the pitch drops. As an inventor he knows that the source of the pitch, the speed of the pistons firing, remains consistent. The pitch that he hears, then, is not primarily a sound of pistons at all. It is a representation of their vibration, taking into consideration the Doppler effect.

Gradually men come to recognize that sense data, i.e. that which is brought to them by the senses, is subjective. It is relative to the reference frame of the observer, the condition of his organs, state of mind, laws of physics, etc. Subjective qualities are always relative.

The real facts, i.e. the objective data, are those facts that are not relative and remain consistent when measured. These are invariably only describable in terms of geometry and ratios. For instance, the speed of sound at sea level is a measurable ratio of distance to time, i.e. 340.29 m / s. This law never changes, even if it appears to change from a particular inertial reference frame of the observer. These objective qualities are called the primary qualities. They are called primary because they are first in the causal chain between objective world and subjective experience.

So, summing up, it is assumed that secondary qualities are how the body represents to itself the primary qualities. In other words, through the mediation of the central nervous system, the individual experiences the primary qualities as secondary qualities.

Chapter Three: Why not worry?

Now a series of concerns might arise. How, if we only have this paltry access to our own private experience, can we be sure of any of this about primary and secondary qualities? How do we know we are not all alone? Are we not locked into a limited solipsism? Did we not first assert that we are only guessing?

Yes, it is all just guessing. Given the pathetic limitation of the scope of personal experience, locked into the mediation of our nervous systems, nothing is certain. Not even that we have nervous systems.

These are some of the concerns that philosophers have raised:

• • How do we know there are truly other minds?

  • How do we know we aren’t disembodied brains in a tank hooked to a computer, fed false appearances electronically by a mad scientist?

  • How do we know our logic about the primary and secondary qualities is right, when it is already established that intuitions used to form logic have no genuine justification independent of experience of them?

These are all good questions, but no reason to worry.

If you see where you are in the diagram to above, you will see why it is so hard to grasp what is going on.

The seeming intractability of such problems is caused by the fact that you can never discover the source of the percept in the percept, due to the way you are situated in relationship to it. Plato described this as a cave, and from this come numerous mystical philosophies such as Emanationism, Illuminationism, etc. In this chart we simply update the metaphor into a more modern form – taking into account clues we know now that we did not know then, such as quantifiable natural laws. The principles remain the same.

But there's no harm in addressing some of these concerns.

How do we know there are truly other minds? When you dream, no one ever tells you anything true you didn't already know. It is impossible because in a dream you are the only mind and contain all there is worth knowing, even the contents of the apparent other minds in the dream. Life is different. In life, people constantly tell you things you never guessed. You can go and confirm these things. You can prove to yourself that others have mental content that you don't have. So you can't be the only mind.

I only see that there is 'this' and it presents as it does. I can only open my eyes and arms and say truthfully, "It presents thusly." How can I guess where it arises from or to whom? The perfect master Upasni Maharaj once said that everything in this world is good simply because it appears spontaneously. Can I be so vain as to contradict him?

Some say that where there is a percept, there must be someone seeing it. It is said also, where there is smoke there is fire. This witness or fire is called the Absolute, the Unmoved Mover, the Creator, the Light, and God Almighty. Being infinite, it is said, the witness has infinite names. It is said by a few that I am in Him, and He is in me. If I am a mind as Descartes says, then I am God’s lens. The proponents of advaita say that I am not the real witness, but neither are we two.

Chapter Five: Explaining the quality distinction

The artist who did this painting was named Henri Rousseau. According to my father, Lyn Ott, Henri Rousseau was a primitive artist, which means he had no formal education in art and was self-taught. He was also a customs officer. One day Rousseau said of Picasso's paintings, which he could not understand, "Picasso and I are the two most important painters, me in the modern style – and him in the Egyptian style." My father used to laugh and laugh.

How did contemporary geologists go about guessing how the continents got into the positions they are now in? First they examined the processes that can be found still occurring on the Earth, such as volcanism, subduction, and erosion. Then they measured the rate of these ongoing processes. Based on this information they extrapolated how such processes, over a long period of time, might have caused the continents to take the shape they now have. This field is called "plate tectonics."

Similarly, with a process of evolving consciousness, we search within our mind for ongoing processes, such as sight, memory, and apperception – and we extrapolate backward to a simpler state of these conditions.

Just as in plate tectonics we discover that once the continents were unified as the continent geologists call Pangaea, we speculate that individual perception was once unified in a state that some mystics call the Universal Mind.

Materialism is not a process theory like these. It is a steady state theory from an era when that was the only kind of theory that there was. It requires inventive imagination, a strong desire to believe that the conclusion is right regardless of absence of evidence, and is marked by a lack of genuine curiosity. It is faith-based – in the sense that it is grounded in belief without evidence. And it is superfluously metaphysical – in the sense that it is entirely immodest in its reliance on mysterious unobserved agencies and entities with no clear explanation of their nature or account of their declared causal power. And it is irrational in that it offers no justification whatsoever for its axiom that matter will one day explain experience (and everything else), beyond a kind of complacent timeworn familiarity that it incorrectly calls "intuition." The sensation that materialists ascribe to their intuition is actually the quality that mystics call gross or ordinary consciousness – the baseless sensation that sense objects (like cups and saucers) are the ultimate reality and that their cause must therefore be analogous to them.

Evolution of consciousness requires unflinching honesty, disgust for complacent acceptance of the baseless, willingness to reexamine assumptions shown to be groundless, deep observation and introspection, acceptance of facts as they present themselves, and reason.

Such a view as the evolution of consciousness can be intellectually calamitous to the individual for a period of time, because it demands that the contemplative give up age-old and deeply rooted beliefs. But the fact that it resolves riddles materialism cannot, addresses questions materialism fails even to pose to itself, and is intellectually and emotionally satisfying to the individual who contemplates it, offers a great deal of compensation.

There are at least ten questions materialists can't answer.

• 1. How does matter cause experience? Allusions to nervous systems are a red herring and avoid the question. Materialists know this.

  2. What does the theory of matter account for besides and beyond what supposedly really is real, i.e. matter? Doesn’t materialism only accomplish this feat by defining “matter” as the only reality? What if this definition is the result of a wrong belief by the definer? How would you know?

  3. How did or do the natural laws evolve? Are they material? If not, what is their ontological state? Explain better what you mean. How do you know? How is this answer consistant with materialism?

  4. What existed prior to the Big Bang? Was this a material state? Whether yes or no, by what method was this determined?

  5. What prompted the Big Bang to occur?

  6. Is a moment in time for the Big Bang a coherent concept?

  7. What is time? How did time emerge? Explain the mechanics by which time arose precisely, without inventing anything that cannot be observed within or around us.

  8. What is space besides “space?”

  9. What is the logical justification for modus ponens?

  10. What is the cause of healthy human intuitions, and by what faculty do you know this?

Decade after decade materialism has survived through evasion, obfuscation, red herrings, band wagon, appeal to authority, straw man arguments, ad hominem circumstantial (attacking the sanity or judgment of the arguer, rather than his argument), intimidation, and posturing. Such methods never satisfy the heart and mind of a true contemplative.

Chapter Six: "The Matrix" as a depiction of materialism

Some people mistakenly believe that the movie “The Matrix” depicts a philosophical position known as idealism. In fact, it portrays many of the aspects of materialism.In the movie two worlds are depicted, analogous to the dualism found in materialism. On the one hand there is the world of sense experience (secondary qualities) that Neo enjoys when he is plugged into the computer – the plugging in being analogous to the network of nerves and brain that, according to materialism, feed us illusions from somewhere the materialist cannot isolate. At the prompting of Orpheus, Neo experiences the primary or real world, depicted in the film as a gruesome parallel duplicate of the sensory world of experience, only more hard-core and older. The twin real world is distinguishable only by Orpheus. Anyone stumbling around wouldn’t be able to tell.

This is the view of materialism – a confused notion of a parallel world analogous to the one you see. Where you see the film’s logic break down – very much at the point that materialism breaks down – is when Neo is freed by being unhooked from his patch that is analogous to his nervous system. So he sees clearly when he gets unhooked from his own head (????). This is like removing your eyes in order to see properly.

This movie confuses the dualism of materialism with mysticism or even Buddhism. In real mysticism there is no such nonsensical dualism. For the actual mystic, the Supreme Reality is not analogous to the world of sense experience – but to the witness of things seen.