The Metaphysics of Meaning
A Quantum Platonic Take on Navigating a Life That Matters
“You, however, seem to think that knowledge of the divine is of the same nature as knowledge of anything else, and that it is by the balancing of contrary propositions that a conclusion is reached, as in dialectic discussion.
But the cases are in no way similar. The knowledge of the divine is of a quite different nature, and … from all eternity it coexisted in the soul in complete uniformity"
-Iamblichus, De Mysteriis I
1. The Problem: Knowing What Matters
Almost every leader, even the really nasty ones, believe that they are leading their people towards something ultimately Good.
Their discernment might be off.
They might be luring their subjects off a cliff.
But in the leaders' mind, however twisted it is, they believe they are doing what they do for the Greater Good of those who rely on them.
If you think of it, this should make you question your own motives.
You are no doubt motivated by Noble Ideals. But how pure are they?
To what extent are you doing what is truly Good, and to what extent are you using the idea of Good to whitewash your own, maybe more selfish than you would like to admit, agenda, tricking yourself and others into believing that you're a Good and selfless guy in order to hide the vanity of your true intentions? (most of all from yourself).
The willingness and ability to answer that question with brutal honesty makes the difference between a creative and a destructive man.
A man of order and a man of disorder.
A Philosopher King and a tyrant.
Because leading, others and yourself, ultimately comes down to directing energy and attention towards a meaningful goal.
So being able to discern meaning objectively, is imperative.
If your goal is a mirage, which it often is, you will lead yourself and others over dunes of sand without ever getting to that promised oasis where your hearts' wishes finally come true.
These are the:
Loveless and sometimes toxic relationships.
Businesses with great value statements but no real meaning.
Political revolutions that only end up exactly where they started.
The most essential question becomes, how do you know what is meaningful?
How do you navigate Good, Truth and Beauty as objective realities rather than impotent, mental castles in the clouds?
How do you lead a life that isn't only Good on paper, but which is radiating with real, heart-warming Meaning and Truth?
2. The Nature of Good: Representations vs. Reality
The role of the Archetypal Forms
In a short parentheses of philosophical history, reality was thought to be material.
There are still those who hold on to that belief. But the spiritual systems of the ancient world and the scientific doctrine of today both point towards the fact that reality is not material, but mysteriously energetic.
Quantum mechanics suggests that every phenomena you see, a table, a person or the words on your screen, are representations of a much more complex reality.
Bernardo Kastrup put this elegantly:
“Matter is always, in all cases without exception, what (consciousness) looks like. The variety of matter represents the variety of (conscious states)”
Or David Bohm:
“What we perceive as stable forms in the explicate order (material world) are maintained by a constant enfoldment from the implicate order (quantum fields)…
The wholeness of this deeper order organizes the appearance of the parts.”
This of course aligns remarkably well with Platonism, which also says that the material world is like a game of shadows, reduced and simplified representations of much more complex realities we cannot perceive with our senses.
The famous Archetypal Forms.
Intangibles like Beauty, Goodness and Truth itself.
The subtle essence which orders the material world and gives it its distinct attributes.
The sunlight that warms not only our skin but our heart.
The fire that burns in our passionate pursuit for excellence.
The spontaneous recognition of Truth that sets you on a new path in life.
Just like in Bernardo's model, Neoplatonism sees these Forms as thoughts in the consciousness of God, or the divine intellect (Nous) that through the Word, becomes expressed into the material world.
Like a thought on paper.
Appearances ≠ Essence.
One way to think of it is that humans, with our limited capacity of consciousness, generally have a hard time perceiving these subtle energies or “thoughts”. We're quite occupied with our material obligations and concerns.
Fortunately, the material world is not a separate, Godless place of its own, but a realm where the Archetypal Forms are “dumbed down”, taking shape in physical matter.
Beauty becomes a rose so we can see her. If only in a quite rudimentary format. Similarly to how a child draws a stick figure to represent her father.
In the same way, a rose is what Beauty looks like when it takes material shape.
But a rose is not beauty itself.
So what we have here are two seemingly distinct levels of manifestation:
The Energetic (vital) and the Material.
The Sacred and the Profane.
Heaven and Earth.
But as I mentioned before, these worlds are not separate. One is simply a limited representation of the other.
When the eternal transcendent Happiness, for example, manifests in the temporal matter, we get giggly girls and golden retrievers.
Wonderful little “portals” to their more subtle source.
Invitation:
June 15th I’m hosting a practical 4-week live course on the Metaphysics of Meaning for a select group of men who wish to live and build more intentionally.
We still have a few spots open. You find more info and application below.
3. The Need For Spirituality
Building Bridges
One might think that the existence of matter somehow frees us from the need of spirituality.
If the spiritual essence of beauty and happiness is represented in beautiful roses and happy retrievers, then what do we need spirit for?
The problem with representation is that it’s not the real thing, and it’s only valuable to the extent it helps you connect to the real thing.
It’s sort of like having links to youtube videos that you for some reason can’t or won’t click.
If they’re not taking you to cat videos or audio recordings of Plutarch’s Lives, those strange strings of letters are in themselves impotent.
Without meaning to you.
From the Neoplatonic perspective, matter is heuristic in nature, meaning that it’s meant to point us towards a more rich and meaningful reality.
The purpose of a smile is to connect you with an inner, radiant state of happiness and the purpose of a romantic poem is to evoke love and adoration.
Without the experience of these higher ideals which are energetic in nature, their representations are empty decorations.
Most often, the problem is not that the smiles and poems lack any deeper meaning, but that we are not able to perceive that meaning through the veil of appearances.
Like Rilke brilliantly wrote to the young Herr Kappus:
“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
-Letters to a Young Poet
So there appears a need for a trained ability to consciously relate to the Archetypal Forms, the subtle reality itself.
Not the least when it comes to serious matters like business, family and statesmanship where it’s essential to read the room, see beyond mere words and participate in a much more subtle landscape of meaning.
Otherwise things go terribly wrong…
The Lame Trap of Convention
If we are not guided by actual Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Justice and Courage in these things, we will replace the Absolute Reference Points (the Archetypal Forms) with cultural conventions.
Slogans and platitudes that often are completely arbitrary, having little to nothing to do with the true, sublime but silent ideals they're supposed to represent.
Dignity and harmony in a relationship, for example, does not automatically follow the “trad-wife” institution that today is seeing a revival.
Being able to quote old books does not, in any way, make you wise.
Just like dying in a fist-fight is not heroic unless it's for a greater, essentially Meaningful and Just cause.
Without this direct participation in values that lends not only intellectual justification or palpable vitality, but meaning in the form of personal, lived relationships with eternal and absolute realities, being a channel for their manifestation, cultural movements like the revival of Traditional Values and the Return of the Strong Gods can be little more than empty conventions, institutions that lead only to a cosmetic change, seasonal fashion, instead of a true transformation of man and his civilisation.
At the level that matters, we’ll end up exactly where we started.
So how do we make this discernment?
How do we pierce the material veil that clouds our consciousness so we can see and navigate by the stars above? Making real progress along a scale of absolute values?
Navigating the realm that Iamblichus characterised as Godly, and which he said needs a completely other mode of knowing?
Here, Plato distinguished between two distinct faculties of consciousness that have the ability to relate to the intelligible world. Intelligible meaning that which is beyond matter.
This distinction also shows up in other authentic systems such as Kashmir Shaivism and Yoga.
In my personal experience as a teacher but most of all a practitioner, the difference between these two faculties of consciousness is one of the most misunderstood elements of philosophy and an essential key in our pursuit for a righteous life, and by extension, a righteous world.
Plato called these Dianoia and Noesis.
4. The Key distinction: Dianoia vs Noesis
The problem with discursive reason.
Dianoia and Noesis are the two distinct modes of knowing that Iamblichus referenced in the beginning of this article.
“You, however, seem to think that knowledge of the divine is of the same nature as knowledge of anything else (…) But the cases are in no way similar."
The discursive mind is “reason” as we know it.
It takes complex phenomena and breaks them up into smaller pieces.
The man who analyses a rose or a business proposal doesn't see his objects as wholes, but as made up of parts.
He sees the benefit, the risk, the petals and the leaves all as distinct and separate elements.
But the essences of these things, if we can bluntly sum them up as beauty and opportunity, are much more than the sum of the parts. They are wholes that lose their deeper meaning when broken up into pieces.
Imagine that you'd do that to art, that you'd listen to Vivaldi’s violin concerto Spring I, but only one instrument at a time. It might be an interesting experience, but the magic of the work would be lost.
Or to the poetic atmosphere of a moon lit night which obviously cannot be captured in a bullet list of its constituent elements.
Which is why poets write poems and not shopping lists. Bold attempts to convey the sublimely mysterious world hiding just out of sight for others, but which they have learned to see.
In the same way, you can perfectly count all the petals of a rose and still not be touched by its beauty, just like businessmen analyse opportunities to the bone every day and still don't know if they matter. Not to themselves nor to the world.
It's a form of reason well suited to attain worldly knowledge, and to calculate and engineer sliced bread and rocket ships in the realm of matter. But it's not made for meaning.
Love me, love me not
The absurdity of this reductive thinking becomes clear in the case of love, where we sometimes say that “love is when you offer her flowers” or “love is when you kiss her on her forehead when she’s sleeping”.
While love can be expressed in these ways, all “acts of love” can just as well be performed without love being involved at all. And most of us do this, in moments when our hearts love less than we think they should, and we try to compensate by mechanically carrying out the actions we “know” we should do but our hearts don’t inspire us to spontaneously. The behaviour might look exactly the same, but the difference is felt.
All this is to say that the reality of any one thing cannot be reduced to its material parts without losing its essential meaning, yet this is how the discursive mind works.
It doesn’t see any difference between a genuinely loving gesture and an apparently loving gesture.
But because we've so successfully used discursive thinking in our material lives, we tend to assume that we can use the same kind of reason in the essential. We rely also in matters of meaning almost exclusively on the discursive mind.
We are like botanists who try to understand the mysterious beauty of roses by pulling them apart. We are also the blue-eyed consumers who instead of taking on a meaningful challenge to transform ourselves into more virtues men, simply assume behaviourisms and beliefs that signal that virtue. Playing charades.
And so we further distance ourselves from the essence of what we so fervently wish to participate in.
It’s a sad irony.
And even more ironic is that overcoming this limitation is one of the key purposes of philosophy, yet almost all academic intellectualism is performed using this limited, discursive mind that is entirely unequipped for the task.
All it does is build enormous, but dead, networks of mental association that rarely if ever come alive with life-transforming insight through direct experience.
Which is why philosophy rarely produces radical levels of virtue in the lives of modern men, and why Julius Evola attributed this to "the amateurishness of intellectuals".
The Mind of God
To wrap this segment up, I want to point out that while the discursive mind, which is what western philosophers tend to equate with reason, obviously do steal a glimpse from beyond the veil of the material world (thoughts are after all more subtle than roses) it does not perceive the world of the Forms directly.
It's a subtle but essential distinction.
The “rational mind” is not the same as what is sometimes called the “mind of God” that houses the Archetypal Forms. In Greek, we find this in the distinction between psyche (mind) and nous (Godly intellect or consciousness).
To perceive and participate in the Forms of Good, Truth, Beauty, Judgement and Wisdom (and many more) directly, seeing the essential, radiating nature of things-as-they-are, we cannot rely on reductive, logical thinking.
We need to use the second, superior faculty of consciousness.
Plato called it noesis. Aurobindu The Supramental. Dionysius the Supramundane Sight and modern classicists sometimes translate it into Intuitive Reason
Seeing Beyond Appearances
“The soul must ascend again towards the Archetypal Forms, and there see, with the eye of noesis, not with discursive reason (dianoia), but with the immediate presence of consciousness itself.”
Plotinus, Enneads V.3.10
Quantum mechanics has offered us yet another beautiful way to understand the nature of the superior knowledge characteristic to the supramental.
"Normal" information that belong to the material world (in physics called classical information) - like the measurements of a table - can be recreated.
You can pull out a ruler, scribble down some numbers and build yourself an exact replica of a table you see in your friends house.
If you have the skills, of course.
But quantum information, if we allow ourselves to draw a parallel between quantum states and the particular state of consciousness animated by beauty you experience when admiring your friends table, as you share a jug of tea, cannot be recreated.
You cannot measure the inner experience of admiration. You cannot jot down the neurochemicals involved and remake the recipe when you get back home.
Because quantum information, like the Archetypal Forms, are complex systems that operates as wholes that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts.
But then how on earth do you know something without reducing it to representations?
How do you draw a rose exactly as it is without ending up with exactly the rose you're trying to represent?
A rose, after all, is already the most precise possible representation of a rose.
In this way, meaning and values like Truth, Good and Beauty can never be described. The only way to know them is to know them as they are.
The mechanism for this is completely different than discursive thinking.
The Tradition say that the only way to truly know, is to become that which you wish to know.
“Consciousness is the cause of the Archetypal Forms not inasmuch as it thinks them discursively, but insofar as it is them.”
Damascius, On First Principles I.20
We can recognise the same idea in our already mentioned quote from Iamblichus:
"The knowledge of the divine is of a quite different nature, and … from all eternity it coexisted in the soul in complete uniformity"
Iamblichus, De Mysteriis I
And in the Yoga Sutras:
“In Samadhi, the knower, the known, and the knowing become one.”
This of course doesn't mean that you need to grow thorns and smell nice if you wish to know the beauty of a rose.
It's not the material representation you need to emulate, but the energetic essence.
There are a bunch of principles and mechanisms here that this is not the right place to clarify. Mostly because it would make this already long article 10 times as long.
But the core principle is that everything we perceive and interact with in life, everything we could possibly want to know, are like thought-shapes in a gigantic ocean of consciousness.
And since we also are consciousness, we can modulate ourselves like a piece of clay to recreate the essential nature of anything we wish to know.
This is the essential meaning of Plato's:
"One is Just insofar as he participates in the Archetypal Form of Justice"
In a way, the Forms are moulds that give distinctive shapes to consciousness, revealing that which in all eternity already existed inside of ourselves.
Knowing From Within
Let's make this feel a little less sci-fi.
It sounds crazy, but we all have these experiences.
If you for example think of someone who is dear to you, you might see them as images in your head.
But you also feel them.
Something ineffable that might be best explained as their energetic essence is mirrored inside of you.
If you pay attention, you can study a person or object we contemplate as they’re reflected inside of our own consciousness. We can observe the specific way this person loves. The specific way she is happy, courageous, graceful.
You can learn a lot from this.
Both of the other person, but also of yourself, as you can effectively "borrow" or assimilate any beneficial qualities you find there.
And you can also notice and be careful with disharmonious ones.
This is how virtue is emulated.
This is the essential mechanism behind theurgic ritual where the practitioner assimilates Godly Attributes from the gods and angels, and the foundation of really any transformative spiritual practice.
And it is how the real Truth behind words, be them from colleagues, business partners or holy men, is recognised - like traveling through a silent yet melodious landscape of meaning.
Using this supramental, noetic mode of knowing, we begin to see behind the appearances of material life and participate in the glorious, unspeakable, eternally Beautiful and Good essential Godly Reality.
The clouds over our heads part, and we can finally see the stars above. Recognising, through direct perception, the True, the Good and the Beautiful, they serve as Absolute Reference Points for us to safely navigate across the treacherous sea of becoming and create a life and world that truly matters.
5. Conclusion: Preparing the Way
Now we're getting to the part where all this becomes operational.
If you've begun to grasp the nature of the supramental noesis and it's role in perceiving and participating in Absolute Values such as Truth, Good and Beauty, you might wonder why you're not using it all the time?
What is keeping you from taking a stroll in the park and intuitively know all the mysteries of the universe?
Why aren't you spontaneously knowing the meaning of your options and the purpose of your suffering?
Traditionally, the condition put to access the supramental faculty of reason is katharsis - purification.
There is a lot said about katharsis, here is for example Maximus the Confessor’s take on its role in perceiving the essential, transcendent reality:
“Having removed … every material attachment from their intellective eyes, the saints were able to perceive in all things the ray of true knowledge"
Ambigue 45.2
Though poetically meaningful, the testimonials from the Neoplatonic Tradition rarely refer to First Principles in the same practical way that for example the yogic does.
Here are two sutras from Patanjali:
“When the mental associations are purified and the mind becomes free of its subjective distortion, one is able to perceive subtle meanings and the state of awe arises.”
Yoga Sutras 1:41
And
"Seeing things as they are follows the cessation of all involuntary movements of consciousness"
Yoga Sutras 1:2
From this we can derive that the fundamental principle of katharsis is to shut up the chattering mind.
If our consciousness is like a lake that when still reflects the heavens above perfectly, our compulsive mental activity is like little ripples that run upon the surface of the lake, messing up the reflection.
Only when free from these involuntary movements can the consciousness accurately reflect. It is this inner stillness that is the prerequisite for knowing the essential Truth, the hidden meaning of everything we encounter in life.
Now, this is not the end, but the beginning.
It’s from here we take off on our journey of learning to navigate this subtle world of meaning.
Discerning between the endlessly rich variety of phenomena and marvel in their never ending glory.
Both of these aspects:
Purification of consciousness
Navigation of subtle meaning
is the practice Authentic Meditation is developed to train and perform.
There are of course other methods too, many others, but correctly understood and performed meditation (which is the same as mystical contemplation in Neoplatonic and Christian Mysticism) is the most systematic, direct and often favourite practice of initiates, which also greatly enhances the efficiency of all other methods.
As a bonus, it’s remarkably approachable for modern men who live otherwise busy lives.
It may sound like this supramental peak into the eternal reality is a big achievement reserved for the few. And it is. But for those who aspire and practice, remarkable results can be seen in a very short time.
Though I'd love to go deeper into the practical elements, it's not possible in this format.
So I will end on this note:
If you're interested in going deeper in the Metaphysics of Meaning and how to put it in practice to improve your decision making, productivity, leadership skills and overall experience of life, I'm hosting a 4-week live course with a small group of men.
Starting June 15th.
We will go deeper into the theoretical notions from this article, get hands on practice and discuss real life application.
You'll find more information and a form to apply here:
Thank you for your time and attention.
I’d be very happy to hear your reflections on what you’ve read, and wish you a glorious day!
Godspeed.
Teodor
Very nice tying together many metaphysical views and Patajali together
Meaning is nothing more or less than a complex version of the same avoid/approach mechanism in all biological life.