As a holist I presume to roam in the specialities of many different disciplines, but it is finally, to recombine and link the wisdom thus distilled back into the larger picture it was a composition of.

The picture of reality that was broken up and lost at the very beginning of historic time by the Civilisational march of the Greeks to Materialism [see footnote 1] and now joined by the whole world, is the picture that preceded it. Plato’s’ picture of Reality, a Perennial Philosophy, [see footnote 2] the same as the Sanatana Dharma or Eternal Law, of Hinduism and the Vedas. [See footnote 3]

To day it’s very clear to every one what reality is; Real Estate gives us the clew, its something solid, bankable, what you can see and touch, that’s Material. Well nearly every one is wrong and whatever it is, it isn’t matter or what we thought we meant was matter. Matter like the Indians realised many years ago is more akin to Maya or illusion.

This is all very confusing, so we will need to take our time to sort it out.

The present picture of Reality has taken thousands of years to build up really started with the Greeks, as Democretus’ nomenclature for the ultimate bit of matter the Atom, indicates, was adopted when modern day physicists, finally thought they had found it. [See footnote 4]

But what they had found in the atomic or quantum world was very different from the irreducible bits of matter of classical physicist’s expectations. First of all it was mostly empty space, extremely energetic, refused to obey the laws of physics such as locality, in other words could be two places at once, and other “strange” mysteries, no need to mention of now. This breakdown of the materialistic picture is very embarrassing for the Positivists [see footnote 5] who have waged a relentless war since the late 17th century in support of Materialism.

Then it held sway by virtue of gathering empiricism of the investigation of the physical world begun by the Greeks. By the time of Newton and the coining of the term scientist to denote an investigator of the physical as opposed to the spiritual realm of existence. The world of consensual reality became more and more primary and important, more real more substantial more alive, or so it seemed.

It needs to be understood how the consensual idea we all have of reality is based on a sense illusion very much like the flat earth one, humanity has recently overcome. Senses seem to prove the existence of a flat earth, Euclid’s axioms claim its truth, but mind in time proves otherwise.

The Sages of old up until Plato’s time had a different picture of Reality which has over the last two thousand years degenerated into what I call the current orthodoxy: Atheistic Scientific Materialism, what Positivists proclaim is the truth, but has turned out to be anything but.

The history of Physics and Science has taken two thousand years of steady development with a tremendous efflorescence in the late 18th century with an Atomic power climax and sudden collapse last century with silence now at the scene of the event, the quantum world.

The picture the world has of reality has mirrored the fluctuating fortunes of materialism, at the beginning a poor relation to the spirit world till its rise to undisputed unipolar omnipotent existence and then at the very height of its power brought undone by the very revolution its victory brought in.

From a modern Darwinian perspective mankind has crawled up from the slime and mud of matter our mother, but with the help of new tools of analysis such as semiotics, structuralism and symbology, a different view emerges from cultural studies. In this view we have fallen from a previous Divine Adamic Consciousness and Order.

According to Swedenborg a scientist come mystic who spent much of his adult life a scientist for half of the 18th century and seer until his death in the 1780’s we have put things upside down and back to front. Heaven which was up has been put down and eviscerated and the body and the physical which used to be behind the mind or spirit has now been put in front, the former primary elements now displaced undergo a sort of debilitation that fades into a sort of non existence and then we wonder why life is so impoverished.

Here at the start of the third millennium after the upheaval of the last century and the breakthrough or down into Atomic energy, this, the crowning glory of the Queen of Sciences Physics, is at the same time its fall. Physics since Newton and his Principia had swept the world revealing the Universe as a huge mechanical clock like creation that had been wound up by God and was now winding down ticking away, to the heat death of the Universe, its entropy, according to the second law of thermodynamics.

His French rival Laplace when asked by the King where was God in the new Heavenly order governed by the new maths, said he didn’t need him, he had become superfluous. This was the beginning of the powerful 19th century push to Materialisms ultimate and pyrrhic victory in the first and second world wars.

Newtons specialisation was mathematics; so the new measurement of everything that was Celestial Mechanics, become very fashionably the latest science, all other sciences as well had, began to mimic its empiricist ways; testing, hypothesis and experimentation combined with sense observation. The incredible wealth and technological breakthroughs generated by this methodology outlined by Francis Bacon as new Science propelled the world into the modern era. The steady development with the occasional stunning breakthrough in technology was enough to keep a fractious world in some sort of order, even though the guiding principle for the last thousands of years since the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 bc, had been lost, a Divine Principle of Order, Balance, Justice, Righteousness that had been the guiding light for mankind from ancient time regardless of the oral culture.

Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead and followed it up with going mad himself which turned out to be the signature of the next century and its incredible denouement. Due to the contingencies of the coming Second World War and the implications of Einstein’s energy matter equations, attempts were made to see if they could be proved for the demonstration of an awesome weapon of mass control, the Atomic Bomb. Though Einstein was proved right on this issue, it made the very thrust of physics and all the sciences the age old belief in physical matter of measurable mathematics, so called solid reality became instantly problematic. Why is that?

Its because, what you found when you smashed and broke atomic matter up into bits, was an incredible amount of energy. The whole basis of the age had immediately shifted to energy as the substance of existence, Energy that was also intelligent; one only had to look at the design of life to see its intelligence. In one fell swoop the whole arc of civilisation had made a complete circle and had arrived here at the start of the Third Millennium with the same conditions prevailing as with Plato and his Perennial Philosophy, and which today now seems just as fresh and new.

Lets reprise our journey in minds eye once again, as it is so hard to visualize the progression of an idea; to track the idea of reality over two thousand years, but already at the beginning then, there were clear signs of the increasing concretisation and solidification leading finally to the atomic breakthrough last century and the re emergence of a Spiritual Divine Love and Wisdom at the core of life and heart, with the Plasma Cosmology of the Electro-Magnetic Cosmiverse now being revealed. See footnote 5 and website for Divine Cosmos.

The story of physics and science over this period is basically the story of reality over the same time, always fluctuating and changing but also with increasing density.

The mystical core of this entity this civilisational reality or Pyramid, the eye representing the Ruler Pharaoh Sun King Adam Adonai Quetzcoatal take your pick they are all the same, once in the Leo Age when it was started twelve thousand years ago the rulers were ideal Divine representatives; mediators in this world for the Creator, and as such did their job, did what they were paid to do and as such were worthwhile.

Today we have the same creaking apparatus in control; we still have the form but no longer the content, because Atheists who don’t believe in what they are doing are in charge. The Pyramid model was invented in Sumer long before it was codified and built in Egypt, its an autonomous beast made of men built on subsistence farming and existence, this has been the template for all the great civilisations ever since but now faced with redundancy and irrelevance in a post industrial age of amazing technological promise now dawning.

Even though we live in an age of incredible abundance wealth and technological advancement, the way money works and how we are ruled has changed little from the days of subsistence existence of yore. The population of the earth has gone from 1 billion the beginning last century to more then six now, at the same time, post industrial revolution combined with Cybernetics and robotics, is generating more wealth goods and services then ever. At the same time we are told that there is no money for education for schools, a living wage, all work is being off shored or automated, while the very top of the apex has never been richer. These grand historic displays of civilisational power and wealth while carrying the seeds of their own dissolution within them is also a light for the generations of men to contemplate.

At the moment all we have done is build a Temple to debt greed and Mammon, all the while subjecting the biota to a human led mass extinction crisis.

The reason for this lop sided development is as Carl Jung explains in the Afterword to the Secret of the Golden Flower, talking about the profound psychological knowledge embedded in this Chinese and Taoist alchemical text, ” One sidedness lends momentum but leads to barbarity.” He is right there. Somehow there was severed the original Divine balance whereby all opposites by proceeding from the one end cause and effect were reciprocal factors for enhancing each other, each helping the other to maintain existence.

Let’s do a stock take and see where we are in the flux. We have seen that due to the worlds increasing secularisation and its twin materialism and the nature of human fear and greed and their sheeple nature, that certain minorities have been ruling/farming human beings for thousands of years, though probably began ideally it has corrupted over time into the Vulture Capitalist fascist Corporatocracy that I call The Pyramid the “Ponzi scheme” that controls all life and holds the biosphere to ransom with its pernicious and dysfunctional monetary and banking system that treats nature as a given with a book value of nothing and trashes it with no compunction for profit.

This is not necessary it is possible to have a view and a picture of reality that is not biased or lop sided or split as I call it, but one whole healthy Supramental Divine Love Life/Wisdom manifestation in Existence and that is what will be described now.



Goddess Durga or Age of Aquarius riding her vahanna the Lion of Leo, Sign and Age

The Pyramid was invented in the Leo Age twelve thousand years ago by very rich and powerful men to stay very rich and powerful forever, however nothing in this world lasts forever, and so as the Ching says in Hexagram 49 Revolution: “Times change and with them their demands.”

And so now here at the Dawn of Aquarius, the sign opposite to Leo and the vertical pyramid, Aquarius, is therefore an inverted Pyramid with the focus now down to earth, to the bottom, to foundations, to democracy, will be the operating model. And as in the picture here served by the vertical Leo and ruled harmoniously by Durga aka Aquarius.

The very first requisite will be a healthy functioning banking credit and monetary system, and not the present dysfunctional and chronically sick version. In a healthy body politic the banking and monetary system acts like a blood supply and performs an exactly analogous function. What we have at the moment with the hijacking of our Banks and Banking system by Privatisation by stealth is an endogenous civil war where divide and conquer is the rule which keeps everyone subservient, lost and enslaved.

The advancement of technology and its stupendously inventive and powerful tools has stayed just far enough ahead of humanities expectations, to stave off rebellion, but now with the whole worlds middle classes pencilled in for oblivion, while the beneficiaries the rich plutocracy and corporatocracy, will find it harder and harder to stay in control, especially if the truth now on the internet continues to get out.

The big secret is that there is so much money now accumulated up in the top one percent in the now one world economy, that it is now possible to look after every single human being creature and life whatever its form, there is more then enough to go around, just as the Sumerian Kings thought of themselves as divine husbandman and Gardener, so must we do so again. Only this time just not siphoning it upwards but down as well, a double movement that all life shares.

Post Industrialisation and Computerisation have combined to produce a cornucopia of goods and services an exponential wealth with less and less need for any workers. As Norbert Weiner the father of Cybernetics addresses in the title to his book the real question is what is “The Human Use of Human Beings”?

So there is plenty, the real problem is its distribution that is why a credit economy where people are paid to prime the economy rather then the present debt and debit system where people are charged interest for money, usury, which was condemned by the early Christians but snuck in the back door in the middle ages by Jewish bankers, who had since Babylonian days practiced it.



What is required is a return to the Garden, as Beaudelaire the poet reminds us, all true progress is measured in the reclamation of our fall and return to the Garden or the Kingdom of Heaven as updated by Jesus also a Perennialist Philosopher.

As Hermetic Philosophy aphorisms makes clear “As Above Below” and “Man is a Microcosm of the Macrocosm,” Heaven is our mind at peace, we must restore the rule of our higher self the Spirit and Soul of our Mind and Being over and above the body and ego, then order divine will be enshrined. The one mind is our mind and when the mind is at peace then all the money we need and the means to find it becomes available.

The reason why reality, truth, the soul and the divine are so hard to find is that we look always in the wrong place for them, we are always looking out, there is nothing out there in appearances in the world, only what we imagine, certainly not the source, substance, which is buried deep inside the heart of every cell and atom; that’s where to find the Soul. Until it is sought for there, it will never be found.

But then once it’s found what a fire of love and truth is there as well infinity of Eternal Life as Divine Love and Wisdom, the Lord of the Spirit world an infinite Sun whose warmth and heat is Divine Love and feeling and whose light is pure truth and understanding. May Swedenborg have the last word from “True Christian Religion” chapter God the Creator 46

These [Three] Properties of the Divine Love were the reason the universe was created, and are the reason it is preserved in existence.

A thorough scrutiny and examination of these three essentials of the Divine Love can lead us to see that they were the reason for the creation. That the first, loving others then itself, was a cause is clear from the universe being other then God, as the world is other then the sun, and something to which His love could extend and on which it could be exercised and so come to rest.

The second essential, wishing to be one with them, was also a cause as is clear from the creation of man in the image and likeness of God. By this is meant that man was made as a form to receive love and wisdom from God, that is someone with whom God could unite Himself, and on his account with every single thing in the universe, since these are nothing but means to an end.

The third essential, devoting oneself to their happiness, was also a cause, as is clear from the heaven of angels, which has been provided for every human being who receives the love of God; all there are made happy by God alone. These three essentials of Gods love are also the reasons why the universe is preserved, because preservation is perpetual creation, just as remaining in in existence is a perpetual coming into existence; and the Divine Love is from eternity to eternity the same. So as it was in the creation of the world such too it remains in the created world.

A proper perception of these matters may show that the universe is a coherent whole from first to last, since it contains ends, causes and effects bound up in an indissoluble knot. Since every love has an end in view, and all wisdom is the advancement of the end through mediate causes, and through these proceeding to effects, which are the purposes it serves, it follows too that the universe contains the Divine Love, the Divine Wisdom and services, and is thus a coherent whole from first to last. Every wise man can study as a mirror the fact that the universe is composed of a perpetual succession of services brought about by wisdom and initiated by love, if he forms for himself any general idea about the creation of the universe, and examines its details. For the details adapt themselves to the general pattern, and this arranges them into a consonant form.



Webster’s

* Semiotic: A general Philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals esp with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises the three branches of syntactics semantics and pragmatics.

Positivism: A system of Philosophy holding that theology and metaphysics belong to an earlier or imperfect modes of knowledge whereas positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their spatiotemporal properties and invariant relations or upon facts elaborated and verified by the methods of the empirical sciences.

Footnotes

1

Materialism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia

In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions; that matter is the only substance. As a theory, materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. In terms of singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism stands in sharp contrast to idealism

Overview

The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, famously by René Descartes. However, by itself materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In practice it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another.

Materialism is often associated with the methodological principle of reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description — typically, a more general level than the reduced one. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects, properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material constituents. Jerry Fodor influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws and explanations in “special sciences” like psychology or geology are invisible from the perspective of, say, basic physics. A vigorous literature has grown up around the relation between these views.

Materialism typically contrasts with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, vitalism and dual-aspect monism. Because it is now a scientifically established fact that less than 4% of the universe is composed of matter as commonly understood [1] modern philosophical materialists attempt to extend the definition of matter to include other scientifically observable entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space. However this opens them to further criticism from philosophers such as Mary Midgley who suggest that the concept of “matter” is elusive and poorly defined [2]

Materialism has been criticised by religious thinkers opposed to it, who regard it as a spiritually empty philosophy. Marxism also uses materialism to refer to a “materialist conception of history”, which is not concerned with metaphysics but centres on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labour) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history).

History of materialism

In Ancient Indian philosophy, materialism developed around 600 BCE with the works of Ajita Kesakambali, Payasi, Kanada, and the proponents of the Carvaka School of philosophy. Kanada was one of the early proponents of atomism. The Nyaya-Vaisesika school (600 BCE – 100 BCE) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism. The tradition was carried forward by Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school.

Xun Zi developed a Confucian doctrine oriented on realism and materialism in Ancient China. Other notable Chinese materialists of this time include Yang Xiong and Wang Chong.

Ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, and even Aristotle prefigure later materialists. The poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius recounts the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena are the result of different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called “atoms.” De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena, like erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound that would not become accepted for more than 1500 years. Famous principles like “nothing can come from nothing” and “nothing can touch body but body” first appeared in the works of Lucretius.

Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century CE) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha (”the Upsetting of all principles”) refuted the Nyaya Sutra epistemology. The materialistic Carvaka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400 CE. Later on, Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi represent the materialist tradition, in opposition to René Descartes’ attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. Later materialists included Denis Diderot and other French enlightenment thinkers, as well as Ludwig Feuerbach, and, in England, the pedestrian traveller John “Walking” Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral dimension had a major imnpact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth.

Schopenhauer wrote that “…materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” (The World as Will and Representation, II, Ch. 1). He claimed that an observing subject can only know material objects through the mediation of the brain and its particular organization. The way that the brain knows determines the way that material objects are experienced. “Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time.” (ibid., I, §7)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s, turning the idealist dialectics of George Hegel upside down, provided materialism with a view on processes of quantitative and qualitative change called dialectical materialism, and with a materialist account of the course of history, known as historical materialism

Defining matter

The nature and definition of matter have been subject to much debate [3], as have other key concepts in science and philosophy. Is there a single kind of matter which everything is made of (hyle), or multiple kinds? Is matter a continuous substance capable of expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism) [4], or a number of discrete, unchanging constituents (atomism)? [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Does it have intrinsic properties (substance theory) [11] [12], or is it lacking them (prima materia)?

Without question science has made unexpected discoveries about matter. Some paraphrase departures from traditional or common-sense concepts of matter as “disproving the existence of matter”. However, most physical scientists take the view that the concept of matter has merely changed, rather than being eliminated.

One challenge to the traditional concept of matter as tangible “stuff” is the rise of field physics in the 19th century.

All known solid, liquid, and gaseous substances are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. All three are fermions or spin-half particles, whereas the particles that mediate fields in quantum field theory are bosons. Thus matter can be said to divide into a more tangible fermionic kind and a less tangible bosonic kind. However it is now known that less than 5% of the physical composition of the universe is made up of such “matter”, and the majority of the universe is composed of Dark Matter and Dark Energy – with no agreement amongst scientists about what these are made of [13]. This obviously refutes the traditional materialism that held that the only things that exist are things composed of the kind of matter with which we are broadly familiar (”traditional matter”) – which was anyway under great strain as noted above from Relativity and quantum field theory. But if the definition of “matter” is extended to “anything whose existence can be inferred from the observed behaviour of traditional matter” then there is no reason in principle why entities whose existence materialists normally deny should not be considered as “matter”[14]

Some philosophers feel that these dichotomies necessitate a switch from materialism to physicalism. Others use materialism and physicalism interchangeably. [15]

Criticism and Alternatives

A number of philosophers and scientists are highly critical of materialism.

Religious and spiritual objections

It is incompatible with Islam, Hinduism, some schools of Buddhism and almost all forms of Christianity (including Thomism). Theologian-philosopher Alvin Plantinga criticises it, and Theologian-philosopher Keith Ward suggests that materialism is rare amongst contemporary UK philosophers: “Looking around my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists.”[16].

Coherence as an idea

Philosopher Mary Midgley [17], among others [18] [19] [20], argues that materialism is a self-refuting idea, at least in its eliminative form. While some critics hold that matter is an ill-defined concept, it is not clear that substitutes, such as Spirit, or Hegelian Geist fare any better.

2. Perennial Philosophy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The notion of perennial philosophy (Latin: philosophia perennis) suggests the existence of a universal set of truths and values common to all peoples and cultures. The term was first used in the 16th century by Augostino Steuco in his book entitled: De perenni philosophia libri X (1540), in which scholastic philosophy is seen as the Christian pinnacle of wisdom to which all other philosophical currents in one way or another point. The idea was later, and more famously, taken up by the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, who used it to designate the common, eternal philosophy that underlies all religions, and in particular the mystical streams within them. The term was popularized in more recent times by Aldous Huxley in his 1945 book: The Perennial Philosophy. The term “perennial philosophy” has also been used as a translation of the Hindu concept of Sanatana Dharma, the “everlasting or perennial truth, or norm”.

The existence of a perennial philosophy is the fundamental tenet of the Traditionalist School, formalized in the writings of 20th century thinkers René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon. The Indian scholar and writer Ananda Coomaraswamy, associated with the Traditionalists, also wrote extensively about perennial philosophy.

Main principles

According to the tenets of the perennial philosophy, people in many cultures and eras have experienced and recorded comparable perceptions about the nature of reality, the self, the world, and the meaning and purpose of existence. These similarities point to underlying universal principles, forming the common ground of most religions. Differences among these fundamental perceptions arise from differences in human cultures and can be explained in light of such cultural conditioning.

Among these perceptions are the following assertions:

a.. The physical or phenomenal world is not the only reality; another non-physical reality exists. The material world is the shadow of a sublime reality which cannot be grasped by the senses, but the human spirit and intellect bear testimony to it in their essence.

b.. Humans mirror the nature of this two-sided reality: while the material body is subject to the physical laws of birth and death, the other aspect of human existence is not subject to decay or loss, and is identical to the intellect or spirit, which is the sine qua non of the human soul. In the modern West, this second or other reality has been frequently discounted or ignored.

c.. All humans possess a capacity, however unused and thus atrophied, for intuitive perceptions of ultimate or absolute truth, and the nature of reality. This perception is the final goal of human beings, and its pursuit and flourishing are the purpose of their existence. The major religions try to (re)establish the link between the human soul and this sublime and/or ultimate reality. This ultimate reality, in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), is called God; God is the Absolute principle from which all existence originated and to which all existence will return. Non-theistic religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism and Taoism, may characterize the ultimate or absolute somewhat differently than the Abrahamic religions, but the fundamental concept is the same. Clarify]

In a non-local implicate order, information cannot have a locality, but “permeates” and/or “transcends” all localities. And information that has no locality sounds a great deal like the Hindu divinity Brahma, the Chinese concept of Tao, Aldous Huxley’s “Mind at Large”, and “the Buddha-Mind” of Mahayana Buddhism. Any of those concepts must mean information without location. … The Buddha-Mind is not “God”, Buddhist continually explains, and Occidentals blink, unable to understand a religion without “God”. But Brahma, in Vedic Hinduism, does not have any of the personality, locality, temperament (or gender) of Western “gods” and, like Buddha-Mind, seems to mean a kind of non-local implicate order, or information without location.…

Robert Anton Wilson’s “Quantum Psychology”

The Buddha declined to make any statement in regard to the ultimate divine Reality. All he would talk about was Nirvana, which is the name of the experience that comes to the totally selfless and one-pointed. [.] Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the object and (since in contemplation the knower, the known and the knowledge are all one) at the same time the subject and substance of that experience.

Aldous Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy”

The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi (’That art thou’); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is.

Aldous Huxley

These worldwide perceptions are thought to be amendable with one another and reliable in themselves because of their internal consistency and due to the similarities among them, in spite of their often independent origins.

The life’s work of Yahya Suhravardi was to link Hinduism, what he called the “original oriental religion” with Islam. He claimed that all the sages of the ancient era had preached a single doctrine. This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative. Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people. This was the finding of Karen Armstrong in her study on Sufi gurus, [A History of God P. 265]

According to Huxley, the perennial philosophy is: “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions” (The Perennial Philosophy, p. vii).

3. Hinduism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Sanatana Dharma)

Hinduism (known as Hindu Dharma in modern Indian languages [1]) is a religious tradition [2] that originated in the Indian subcontinent. In contemporary usage Hinduism is also sometimes referred to as Sanatana Dharma, a Sanskrit phrase meaning “eternal law”. [3]

Hinduism, many of whose origins can be traced to the ancient Vedic civilization,[4] is one of the world’s oldest extant religions.[5][6] A conglomerate of diverse beliefs and traditions, Hinduism has no single founder.[7][8] It is also the world’s third largest religion following Christianity and Islam, with approximately a billion adherents, of whom about 905 million live in India and Nepal.[9] Other countries with large Hindu populations include Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.

Hinduism contains a vast body of scriptures. Divided as revealed and remembered and developed over millennia, these scriptures expound on theology, philosophy and mythology, providing spiritual insights and guidance on the practice of dharma (religious living). In the orthodox view, among such texts, the Vedas and the Upanishads are the foremost in authority, importance and antiquity. Other major scriptures include the Tantras, the sectarian Agamas, the Puras and the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana. The Bhagavad Gita, a treatise excerpted from the Mahabharata, is sometimes called a summary of the spiritual teachings of the Vedas. [10]

4.

Democritus (460-360 B.C.)

Current Atomic Model

1… A philosopher/scientist who theorized that all matter was made of indivisible particles (atoms).

2… His theory was based on logical reasoning, not empirical data. Philosophers/scientists of this time period did not think doing experiments was necessary. They thought you could reach the truth by pure logical reasoning, its interesting to note how right he may have been. contrast with Positivists.

5.

Positivism

(From the Dictionary of Philosophy, Progress Publishers)

A trend in bourgeois philosophy which declares natural (empirical) sciences to be the sole source of true knowledge and rejects the cognitive value of philosophical study. Positivism emerged in response to the inability of speculative philosophy (e.g. Classical German Idealism) to solve philosophical problems which had arisen as a result of scientific development. Positivists went to an opposite extreme and rejected theoretical speculation as a means of obtaining knowledge. Positivism declared false and senseless all problems, concepts and propositions of traditional philosophy on being, substances, and causes. etc. that could not be solved or verified by experience due to a high degree of abstract nature. Positivism claims to be a fundamentally new, non-metaphysical (”positive”) philosophy, modelled on empirical sciences and providing them with a methodology. Positivism is essentially empiricism brought to extreme logical consequences in certain respects: inasmuch as any knowledge is empirical knowledge in one form or another, no speculation can be knowledge. Positivism has not escaped the lot of traditional philosophy, since its own propositions (rejection of speculation, phenomenalism, etc.) turned out to be unverifiable by experience and, consequently, metaphysical.

Positivism was founded by Auguste Comte, who introduced the term “positivism”, historically; there are three stages in the development of positivism. The exponents of the first were Comte, E. Littré and P. Laffitte in France, J S Mill and Herbert Spencer in England. Alongside the problems of the theory of knowledge (Comte) and logic (Mill), the main place in the first Positivism was assigned to sociology (Comte’s idea of transforming society on the basis of science, Spencer’s organic theory of society).

The rise of the second stage in Positivism – empirio-criticism – dates back to the 1870s – 1890s and is associated with Ernst Mach and Avenarius, who renounced even formal recognition of objective real objects, which was a feature of early Positivism. In Machism, the problems of cognition were interpreted from the viewpoint of extreme psychologism, which was merging with subjectivism..

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