The Problem of False Halts and Captivity
Captivity Within This Process Of Naturing Is A Restraint That Cannot Be Broken
Whenever we attempt to transcend our existence we are faced with the problem of halting our ‘transcendence’ within some aspect of our phenomenal existence. Such a false halt results in a state that cannot be considered truly transcendent, but merely transcendentally-inclined, yet still captive within existence.
Thus, for instance, when one redirects one’s attention from some phenomenon, onto the essential structural construction of our consciousness of it — as we do when we want to look into how we know anything at all — we have not transcended anything. We have merely turned our attention from the structural construction of some concept object onto an objectification of our original awareness of it. We believe that we have gone deeper, but we have merely crab-walked through our understanding.
Thoughts that arise in conjunction with our acts of reflection are just more phenomena that arise as part of the naturing of all appearances — even though we consider them to be within us, or as our own.
Can there ever be such a thing, then, as a state of transcendence? Or is it always merely another intellectual construction that we arrive at?
Any act is an act of becoming. Thus to act is not to transcend, but is to continue in the unfolding of appearances.
This is why there are so many different philosophical systems. Each reflective person who is transcendentally-inclined, arrives at some point in their analysis of Being itself, or modes of Becoming, and deems it to be the correct stopping point — the transcendental state of affairs — when in fact all that has occurred is that they have arrived at a certain construction of thought which they find appealing to their understanding and upon which they then build a system.
To truly ‘transcend existence’ would be to arrive at some place outside the intelligible, but that is impossible as there is no such “place” (for if there were such a place, or state, it would be intelligible).
Captivity within this process of naturing is a restraint that cannot be broken. This is one reason why the world always intrudes itself upon us. Its intrusions cannot be denied — though we may choose to ignore them — in the same way that we cannot deny our own existence — for who, after all, is doing the denying?
To attempt to do so is a fool’s errand doomed to final frustration. What is worse, it is a missed opportunity. The idea of transcending existence, then, is a chimera — nothing but a fantasy of the mind. It leads to many false halts in our reflective analyses of existence.
The goal of transcendence is to “get to the bottom” of reality in order to discover its true nature. And this idea leads us off on a “wild goose chase” following ever more intricate systems of thought, all built upon false analytical halts.
The only way to “get to the bottom” of reality, reality being used in its familiar sense as meaning all the appearances that we can be aware of, is to look to the source of the necessary validity of our imperiences because we can no more doubt that they appear, than we can doubt our own existence.
And how rarely has this been done in human intellectual history! Philosophy starts with Ontology, the study of Being and makes a brief side trip to Metaphysics, which it suddenly realizes it needs in order to prop up the ontological structure currently at hand.
Why this need for Metaphysics? The argument here is that we require such constructions because we already had an endpoint in mind — thus, we start from where we want to end up and metaphysics is where we place all the unsightly struts and supports to prop up that endpoint’s desired structure.
The source of existence cannot be separate from that which gives rise to all that appears, because if the source itself appears out of some other source, then we have merely swept the problem under the rug; and if the source and what appears are somehow fundamentally different, we have just shattered reality into a plethora of natures, thus multiplying our problem, rather than solving it.
And that is our habitual way. How then can we possibly gain an understanding of Reality?
Take this work as an example. Its purpose is not to present an analytical discourse on a system of thought. It does seem to do this, of course, as language is hard-pressed to do other than that. Instead, its goal is to unsay all of the things that have been heard by the reader over their lifetime — a process that more usually occurs through the personal interpretation of intuitive insights gained during a lifelong process of meditation, and the contemplation of, and through, the necessary validity of our own imperiences.
These intuitive insights come as the result of the felt presence of certain imperiences that arise as the result of using advanced mind-training practices, and these insights are not conceptual in form — i.e., they are not experiences — until they are apperceived into the understanding after the fact.
These insights, which come along as imperiences of certain phenomena which arise during meditative practice, begins to change our perspective, so that they can no longer be apperceived into our existing understanding as it is. Concepts are broken, assurance is undermined, and past experiences are no longer seen to be true. New concepts may begin to take form, and as their form solidifies for us, we place symbols to mark them — we put them into words.
Thus we contemplate rather than transcend — but not in the sense of “ruminating” or “thinking about”, as that word implies at the time of this writing. We find what we are looking for not in endless trains of analytical thoughts, but in contemplative awareness and intuitive insight. That is, we do not look for the “bottom” of Reality (as there is none); we look, instead, for an understanding of the existence of all that appears.
It is interesting to note that Transcendentalists — whether poets, essayists, or philosophers — have historically been the most minutely detailed and intimately connected observers and celebrants of life; rather than the most geeky analyzers of its ‘transcendental’ structure.
One thinks of a Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, or Dickinson, not as engineers hard-pressed to reverse-engineer existence, but rather deeply contemplative and sensual individuals who wanted nothing more than to savor and celebrate the intricate flavors of, and their curiosity toward, existence.
Their goal was not to “get to the bottom” of it, but to fully engage with it, in contradistinction to those around them who saw themselves separate and apart from “Nature”.
Their being labeled as “Transcendentalists” was derived from either the prevalent misunderstanding of phenomenal existence as a pointless, chance event, as it is seen in mechanical materialism of modern Science, or the doctrinal belief that existence is the “fallen” creation of an anthropomorphic supreme being, as it is viewed in various religious systems.
In contrast to those views, these individuals found an intricate fullness of Being and an implication of power and responsiveness therein that stunned their less-engaged contemporaries.
To find such sublime bliss as these individuals did within such an ‘unintentional hulk,’ or corrupted creation of divinity — as the majority view the world — became thought of as an act “transcending” the world to its “hidden” metaphysical or spiritual substrate.
This could not have been a more misleading categorization.
But does this contemplation of imperiences in and of itself represent an escape from existence or is it still just a false halt? The answer to this question should be clear — it is just another false halt, but one that is hopefully closer to a true vision of reality.
We are, even in this stance of contemplative awareness, still an individuated perspective on reality. It is this that limits us. But this limitation is not insurmountable. If this contemplative awareness is developed through deep meditative practice, using inner spontaneous sound as signposts to the spontaneous and responsive naturing that underlies all that appears, then a true vision of reality becomes possible — and objectively so, because it undermines the distinctions already placed between the mundane and the divine, the objective and the subjective, the self and other, the mind and body.
It is important to start from the position that there is no hidden metaphysical or spiritual substrates. There are no higher or lower levels of existence. That these are merely speculative ideas aggregated onto abstract concepts generated within an analysis of reality starting from false halts — that have never been founded upon anything other than intellectual preference.
Abstraction can be a useful tool, but it must never take the place of real meditative imperience. The tool can help us by allowing us to find signposts along the way to intuitive insights about reality; or it can mislead us, leaving us wandering in self-created circles of misunderstanding and unsupported beliefs.
What is important is that we understand the fundamental nature of existence as the spontaneous and responsive naturing of all that appears — as an abstraction useful for an intuitive grasp of understanding of the real, but not the Reality (itself). That can only be recognized in profound states of meditative absorption, in which understanding takes no part.
