The pre-socratic philosopher Parmenides, in his poem On Nature, attempted to answer the perennial question : “what is real?” He concluded that ultimate reality must be ungenerated, imperishable, indivisible, perfect, and motionless. Summed-up in two words, he was talking about the Immutable Being1 : The One. But the changeless “reality” he describes is obviously the opposite of the world of our experience, where all things are relative, born of a prior cause, impermanent, perishable, imperfect, and puttering around. So, he proposed that our so-called “real” world is composed of two unreal forms, Light & Dark2. Which are equivalent to Yin & Yang. Hence, our under-standing is incomplete, because the “Doors of Perception”3 are blocked, by the clutter of matter, from experiencing the unity of the Ideal realm.
Parmenides’ poetic description of Nature born of Supernature may have been the inspiration for Plato’s doctrine of Idealism. Moreover, his Prime Mover was equivalent to Aristotle’s First Cause. These philosophical concepts imply that, in theory, we could trace all real-world effects and their causes back to a Big Bang beginning, and no farther. Beyond that ellipsis . . . we can only speculate by attributing the qualities listed above to a logically Necessary Being, as posited by Thomas Aquinas. The poem began with the challenge that, for our contingent world of cause & effect to exist, something absolute and uncaused must exist as a logical necessity. So what is it?
“It” is either a personal Creator, or an impersonal Principle, or perhaps a super-personal creative principle. In any case, as far as we are concerned, the Cause of Reality is not a real thing, but an ideal concept, with unperceived properties known only by reasoning : an educated guess. So, there is no object-ive evidence of “it”. Consequently, different people, with different assumptions, reach different conclusions from their cogitation. For example Plato’s unproven axiom was a perfect eternal realm apart from the messy space-time world. But Aristotle assumed that those abstract qualities (phenomena, appearance) were inherent in their containing objects. That fine distinction tends to divide people into Idealists vs Realists, or Romantics vs Pragmatics, or Transcendentalists vs Empiricists.
The abstract notion of a timeless spaceless entity (G*D, First Cause, etc) is a nice theory, but it proves nothing in practical fact. So, more pragmatic philosophers proposed that the fundamental element of reality is the Atom; likewise indivisible, but thoroughly physical. Others have chipped-away at the concept of an Unmoved Mover by arguing that such a self-sufficient thing would be entirely confined to itself, and could not act in the physical world, hence of no consequence for humans. Unfortunately, their materialistic bent locked them behind the closed door of perception, and they refused to look through the window of conception into the infinity beyond. Although we don’t encounter infinity in the real world, mathe-maticians deal with the abstract values of numbers, of which boundless infinity is the paradoxical upper bound. Infinity contains all possible values (the mover), but is also a “closed door” for attempts to transcend the limits of reality (the immovable obstacle). So, who holds the key to the secret room of eternity? We can only use the x-ray vision of Reason to speculate.
End of Post 94
1. Immutable Being : In my thesis, I call it simply BEING, the power to be. As the unmoved mover, it’s also the power to become, in the sense of creativity – to cause other beings to exist. Like an enzyme, BEING causes change without itself changing.
2. Light & Dark,Yin & Yang Metaphors, not to be taken literally. In modern terms this is like Positive & Negative, in the sense that all matter has an electric charge that determines how it interacts with other matter. In the unitary ideal realm the dual charges are balanced and neutral.
3. Doors of Perception : A phrase in a 1793 poem by visionary artist & author William Blake : “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” Aldous Huxley popularized the notion of a doorway to the spiritual realm in his 1954 book by the same name. He associated his raised consciousness with the use of psychedelic drugs.
ON NATURE
There is only one other description of the way remaining, namely, What Is. To this way there are very many sign-posts: that Being has no coming-into-being and no destruction, for it is whole of limb, without motion, and without end. And it never Was, nor Will be, because it Is now, a Whole all together, One, continuous; for what creation of it will you look for?
One should both say and think that Being Is; for To Be is possible, and Nothingness is not possible.
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