Letter to a Modern Secular Materialist Positivist Skeptic
by Eric S. Fallick
You are unwilling to adopt a definite spiritual understanding and contemplative ascetic life and practice because you think that you don't have direct empirical evidence or personal experience to know their truth. You don't realize that you are already full of undemonstrated beliefs, that it is impossible to operate without a belief structure, that you have to stand somewhere. Through lack of philosophical understanding, you have simply adopted without question or conscious awareness the most dubious and undemonstrable belief structure of the modern world and scientism that holds that only the things of the senses and individual subjective experience are actual and positively demonstrable, while actually it can be shown that these are the least reliable. This is most unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising since this is the attitude and environment all around you and is most insidious in presenting itself as self-evident rather than another most questionable belief structure and actually denies the validity of metaphysics while not realizing that it is, in fact, just based on another and unquestioned, but illogical, metaphysics—that of materialism, positivism, naturalism, sensationalism, etc. Ultimately, however, this is due to your own heavy karma and deep rooted delusion, which has resulted in both the circumstances of your present birth and, more particularly, your accepting the belief structure of the modern world around you and your inability to shift to a truer structure and your ongoing doubts and skepticism. Since, however, this is how you feel, let's see what your own personal, positivistically evident experience actually tells you.
Here is something you know directly for yourself from your own experience: You will die. Whether in five minutes or sixty years, you will die. You obviously know this to be the case since you don't know or have ever heard of anyone who hasn't or doesn't die. You also know directly from your own experience that nothing in the spatio-temporal sense world, no sense-perceptible thing, is permanent and lasts—everything perishes after a (relatively short!) time and disappears. You know this since you have never seen and can't think of any sense-perceptible or phenomenal thing that lasts forever. Thus, since you know that you will die and that everything in this world will pass away, you know that there is nothing you can pursue in this world that you can keep and have for more than a very short time and that you will have to leave everything behind at death. People, family, friends, wives, children, possessions, pleasures, worldly knowledge, etc., etc.—you can't keep anything. This you know yourself to be the case. Therefore, the only logical and reasonable thing to do under such a circumstance is to renounce and give up all these things that you can't keep and seek for something that is permanent and can give lasting satisfaction. What is there that you know from your own direct experience that is constant? Where can you look from your own experience for something permanent? In fact, it is the fact of experience itself, the soul or spirit or subject that experiences impermanence and all the passing phenomena, including the phenomena of body and mind. This must stand outside the space-time frame or it would not be possible to know of or experience the passing variety and series of spatio-temporal phenomena. Experience itself per se, the soul/spirit/subject must continue the same for any particular changing experiences to be possible at all. Thus, though you don't realize it, you really know directly for yourself from your own experience the fact of rebirth/reincarnation since otherwise it wouldn't be possible for you to know the experience of death. Since the soul/spirit/experience itself is the only thing that you have and have direct personal experience of that could possibly last beyond your death (which is coming very soon—a whole long lifetime of 100 years is only an instant compared to the whole of time), the only at all sane occupation of your life would be the purification and extrication of your soul from the impermanent, imperishable space-time world and objects. Thus, it seems to me, you actually already have the essential framework of the Indo-hellenistic spiritual systems and practice as a matter of your direct personal experience and the decision to become a renunciant/contemplative ascetic devoted to meditation, study, striving for liberation, etc. is already made for you as a matter of your direct personal experience.
Now, at this point, with your doubting mind, you might say, “OK, now I know from my own experience the facts of the immortality of the soul, the cycle of reincarnation and the logical desirability of release from this, but how do I know that there is actually something else besides this endless cycle of rebirth and that I can attain to it and attain release and thereby should exert the effort to do so?” From your own personal experience, you know that experience consists not only of your own self or soul, of the subject only, but also that there are objects of experience and that other souls are included in your own experience—that you experience the existence of other souls and of objects of experience, that you know yourself as bounded, with other selves and things beyond this boundary. This would not be possible if there were not another greater overarching mind that experiences the whole and with which you are connected and in which you are rooted, that goes beyond the boundaries and lets you experience beyond your own boundaries and, to a limited extent, the whole. Further, you know from your own experience that your knowledge is limited and imperfect and that you can err. You would not be able to recognize limited and imperfect knowledge and error unless there were a standard and fact of complete perfect knowledge and truth to compare it to greater than your own limited knowledge and unless you were in some way in contact with and rooted in it. Knowledge must exist in and for a mind. Thus, there must be a greater, all complete, all encompassing, true, unerring mind that you have contact with and that provides the standards by which you know that your own knowledge may be incomplete, imperfect or erroneous. Thus, you also know from your own personal experience that there is an Absolute, an Absolute Mind, greater than yourself outside of the limited time-space world of rebirth and finite experience and that you are already somehow and to some extent in contact with it. How do you know that you can attain union with this Absolute Mind and come yourself to be outside the finite world and cycle of rebirth? You know from your own personal experience that your own knowledge can become better and more complete and truer and you don't know and have never experienced a limit to this process. Since your own knowledge is by nature limited, your increase in truer and more complete knowledge and knowing that it is so can only come from gaining such knowledge from the complete true knowledge of the Absolute Mind, from greater contact with the Absolute Mind. The more complete and true your knowledge becomes, the more you have contact with the Absolute Mind, the more your knowledge resembles and is that of the Absolute Mind. When your knowledge would become coterminous with the complete knowledge of the Absolute Mind, there would be nothing left to distinguish you from the Absolute Mind, you would be the Absolute Mind. Thus, you know that it is possible to attain union with the Absolute Mind and come to be outside of birth and death.
Now, finally, you may doubt, “OK, I see that I have to logically grant all this, but how do I know for sure that contemplative asceticism is the way to this re-union and release? How do I know that meditation or contemplation is the method to accomplish this? Even if it is, how do I know that renunciation is necessary in order to do it?” You have already granted that the way to re-union and release is to merge your mind with the Absolute Mind, to make your mind coextensive with the Absolute Mind. How else is this to be accomplished but in formal contemplation or meditation, along with ancillary study? Contemplation is the very practice of consciously and continuously exerting your soul to come into contact with, be filled by, receive knowledge from and merge with the Absolute Mind. This obviously requires the formal sitting practice of contemplation in which you attempt to free your mind from other content and concerns to fill it from the Divine Mind. How else could your soul receive the impress of the Divine Mind if it is not trying, at least for the period of contemplation, to be free from the content and impresses of the limited sense world? Your mind or soul cannot be directed in two opposite ways and be filled with two mutually conflicting contents at the same time! Thus, it is clear that formal contemplation practice is the necessary way—though, of course, it needs to be informed by a proper understanding gained through study and reflection so that you know what you are doing. It is also obvious, upon even a little reflection, and logical that this requires full world renunciation and asceticism to such an extent as is possible. First of all, even a little beginning effort will show you empirically that this is a most, in fact, supremely difficult and lengthy task. It clearly requires all the time and energy you can give to it. How could you possibly devote such necessary effort to the spiritual path while still occupied with pursuing and indulging in worldly desires and pursuits—sex, relationships, family, career ambitions, entertainments, fancy food and drink for pleasure, hobbies, literature, activism, news, etc., etc.—all of which require much time and energy and thought and take all this away from contemplative practice and study, which, it should be obvious, requires all the time, energy and effort you can muster if it is to be at all successful. How in the world, again, also, can you fill your mind and soul with all these things outside of contemplation and then expect to suddenly empty yourself of them in contemplation to receive the impress of the Absolute Mind? It would be like trying to put out a fire while at the same time stoking it with fuel and gasoline, or trying to erase a chalkboard at one end while continuing to write on it at an even greater rate at the other end, or trying to record a disk with two completely different and discordant sound sources at the same time! All worldly pursuits and desires and indulgences, as you can easily verify in a short time from your own experience if you try to practice contemplation without renunciation and ceasing from these worldly things, turn the soul completely towards becoming, which is the state of the finite soul, as is clear from the discussion above, instead of to being, which is the state of the Divine Mind that you are trying to attain to. Can it be any more obvious and logical, even just from your own experience and reflection, that you can't turn in two opposite directions at the same time? Thus, it is clear without doubt that contemplation, meditation, renunciation and asceticism are the Path and the only way to accomplish the goal that has appeared as incontrovertibly logically necessary even just on the basis of the personal experience that each person indubitably has, if they would only reflect on it.
So, there you have it. Even just on the basis of everyone's common human experience, the understanding is clear and the only possible reasonable way to proceed is manifest. Slough off your deluded modern physicalist conditioning, my friend, and rouse yourself from your positivist slumbers. Awaken the innate understanding and aspiration of your soul and get going full speed ahead on the Path to freedom from rebirth and sensate existence and misery. You have nothing to lose but your bondage and suffering and ignorance!
©2016 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (with) (Gee) mail (period) com
