Metaphysics is one of the many “fallen words” that our poor, damaged, next-to-illiterate English language is littered with. To some it will suggest a sort of esoteric academic enterprise that could only be carried on in the kind of “ivory tower” that most of us will never see; to others it will call up visions of subtle energies, channeled entities, the whole so-called New Age approach to “the unbearable lightness of being”. But how could either of these worlds, or worldviews, help us in any way in these times of war, disease, environmental breakdown, social unrest, bone-gnawing isolation, and the engineered deconstruction of both the human body and the human psyche by what C. S. Lewis called “that hideous strength”—a strength composed of inhuman spiritual forces wedded to a grim, arcane, and quasi-omnipotent technology, of an unimaginably vast and weaponized accumulation of wealth, of brute political and military power, and of a fully-developed science of mind control and social engineering, generations in the making, whose tendrils reach into every corner and every moment of our lives? How could this condition of total terror be countered with the flimsy weapons of mental gymnastics and/or lightweight spiritual fantasy? Wouldn’t any well-designed video game be ten times more effective at distracting us from our inevitable and fast-approaching doom?
Extreme Neo-Liberalism...has undergone an abrupt "pole-shift," both nationally and globally, toward "Woke" authoritarianism, which has in turn called up a counter-authoritarianism in the form of "Trumpism"
Certainly, it would—which is why the word metaphysics must be restored to its ancient and traditional definition, as denoting the science of ultimate meanings. We have been engineered to believe that the only way we can face the terrors of our time is to eliminate meaning, to accept the premise that “life is random,” to reduce ourselves to mere genetic or digital simulacra of human beings—so that, when the Day of Judgement finally arrives, hopefully by the agency of some errant asteroid so that the destruction of the earth, which we so obviously long for, will not be our fault—the anguish and tragedy of apocalypse will have been reduced to manageable proportions, simply because by then there will be so little left to destroy.
As opposed to this strategy of survival by means of suicide, metaphysics—which is inseparable from faith but not limited to belief, inseparable from religion but not limited to ritual or dogma or morality—teaches us that humanity can endure any ordeal, at the hands of the natural world or dark spiritual forces or our fellow human beings or our own self-contradiction and self-sabotage, as long as we can find meaning in it. Both theBiblical Book of Job and Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, his saga of spiritual survival in the Nazi death camps, were written to demonstrate precisely this.
Traditional Metaphysics, as a primary and transcendental intellectual context that is applicable in many fields, has its echoes in areas as diverse as contemplative spirituality, psychology, physics, biology, alternative archaeology, the history of consciousness, social criticism, and political action. The value of this many-faceted relevance is that it can work to expand our sense of meaning—as against a contemporary world that is dedicated to shrinking this sense to the smallest conceivable proportions—and thereby give us room to breathe. To the degree that our insight is contracted, our ability to respond appropriately to hard situations, and to renew ourselves after their repeated onslaughts, is seriously curtailed.
One of the dominant ideologies operating in the present climate of fear and uncertainty—possibly the penultimate ideology to the terminal global tyranny—is postmodernism, the sworn enemy of verticality in any form.
In a society that has lost any sense of an objective metaphysical order, a plane of reality mediated not only by intelligible concepts but by higher, more capacious, more fully actualized worlds of form, Chaos and Oppression—which act to create each other—are the only conceivable alternatives.
The postmodern ethos supposedly allows “other voices” that are excluded from various traditional “overarching paradigms” to speak; its initial impulse was to embrace every conceivable way of construing reality as equally valid—or equally invalid, since when all conceptions are given equal weight they are effectively emptied of meaning. Today, however, we are seeing that postmodernism can be every bit as inquisitorial against opposing perspectives as any religious orthodoxy, now that the universal “tolerance” of extreme Neo-Liberalism, the political expression of the postmodern worldview, has undergone an abrupt “pole-shift,” both nationally and globally, toward “Woke” authoritarianism, which has in turn called up a counter-authoritarianism in the form of “Trumpism”—an inversion that happened so rapidly that Traditionalist / Perennialist social criticism, which still tends to concentrate on a more-or-less antiquated critique of modernism, has hardly caught up with it. Chaos, which initially seemed so liberating, is now finally revealed as a dark and constricting prison, since any conception that is so expansive that it might conceivably become “overarching” must immediately be rejected due to the fear that it will limit a supposedly-liberating field of infinite “choices”—which is to say that the only “redeemer” from the prison of Chaos (once it is recognized as a prison), at least to those who have lost their belief in God, is an iron tyranny.
In a society that has lost any sense of an objective metaphysical order, a plane of reality mediated not only by intelligible concepts but by higher, more capacious, more fully actualized worlds of form, Chaos and Oppression—which act to create each other—are the only conceivable alternatives.
When all views of reality are placed on the same level, the result is nihilism. Traditional Metaphysics however, because it is based on the hierarchy intrinsic to Being itself, not on any established hierarchy of privilege or power, can allow room for every conceivable perspective on the nature of reality, put it in its proper place in the scheme of things, and discern and accept its full value and meaning, whether exalted or humble, relatively permanent or ephemeral, of near universal significance or else restricted to a specific field of application; only the ontological verticality of the Great Chain of Being can accomplish this. This ability to give to each thing the precise weight and import proper to it is what is called, in traditional metaphysical terminology, “Justice”.
As we all know, the central doctrine of the Traditionalist School is the Transcendent Unity of Religions: the notion that all truly revealed faiths, along with the full spectrum of their necessary and providential differences, spring from, and refer us back to, a single Source. And the Transcendent Unity of Religions itself can be seen as a subset of what might be called the Transcendent Unity of Worldviews, each one of which is a uniquely privileged—or uniquely restricted—view of Absolute Reality, placed on a spectrum stretching from almost-absolutely-objective views of the nature of God to nearly absolute examples of self-interested and/or self-deluded fantasy—each one of which, however, having its proper use and application in some manner and on some level; as William Blake said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “everything possible to be believed is an image of Truth.” This notion of the universality of Truth echoes the Islamic doctrine that Allah created the heavens and the earth with [nothing but] truth [Q. 45:22], and that the Names of Allah, each of which contains all the others—Names which are neither various parts of Him nor quasi-independent gods, but rather His unique and particularized relationships with the many and varied aspects of His Creation—are arranged hierarchically in ranks, stretching from comprehensive Names like Al-Rahman, “the All-Merciful” or Al-Haqq, “the Truth,” to relatively contracted and “eccentric” Names such as Al-Khafid, “the Abaser” or Al-Mu‘akhkhir, “the Postponer.”
Like no other paradigm, the Transcendent Unity of Worldviews has the power to refute postmodernism by criticizing the unjustifiable absolutism of limited and self-enclosed belief-systems, which postmodernism claims to do, without deconstructing them. According to this principle, differing views as to the nature of Reality are not, in essence, self-enclosed belief-systems at all, but rather divergent perspectives on the single, Unitary Being that transcends them, and thereby also encompasses them. Like the necessarily multiple perspectives on any stationary object when seen from different points of the compass, no two views can be identical, yet all of them approximate in some degree to identity because they are views of the same Object: “Phenomena triangulate the Noumenon.” The Unitary Being that is the ultimate Object of any view of anything never appears in its Essence in the world of manifestation, precisely because Its manifestation must be multiple; if the Essence of this Unitary Being were to appear in the world of multiplicity, that world, including the limited human perceiver, would be annihilated. In Islamic terms, the principle of the Transcendent Unity of Worldviews appears in the hadith qudsi as “I am as my servant sees Me”, as well as in Q. 6:103, Vision comprehendeth Him not, but He comprehendeth [all] vision.
Thus we could say that God is not polymorphous but polyvalent, in the sense that He embraces an indefinite number of unique relationships both with His various creatures and with the different events, locations and occasions that affect them, without His Transcendent Unity in any way being compromised; the universe, which is God’s dimensional manifestation, is multiple precisely because God is One.
Such conceptions are one of the things Traditional Metaphysics can offer to help us to withstand against both postmodernism and the authoritarianism that inevitably grows out of it. However, to practice this Metaphysics in these supremely trying times simply by maintaining our intellectual scope and our openness to spiritual insight through creative expression, while necessary, is clearly not sufficient: it is also crucial for us to learn how to spiritually survive as human beings. We tend to think of God—those of us who still believe in Him—as our refuge from the sufferings and terrors of this terrestrial world. He certainly is that, and infinitely more. What we tend to forget, however—or perhaps have never known it—is that one of the ways He saves us from the rigors of our earthly experience is by being immensely more rigorous even than the many terrors we see around us, or find inside us, even in the midst of His Mercy—a truth which is the origin of the saying “he who keeps the fear of God in his heart will have no room for any other fear.” Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said “I come not to bring peace but a sword; take up your cross and follow me”; it is certainly what the Holy Qur’an is referring to when it tells us: There is no refuge from Allah except in Him.
Resistance to evil has a quantum of power to it, but non-resistance is the ultimate power because it taps the Will of God in conditions, otherwise known as the essential nature of things.
So, Meaning is the great liberator from the terrors of the world. And the inevitable manifestation of Meaning, the power or shakti of it, is principled action, either within the temenos of the soul, against the Antichrist within, or within both the soul and the world. Work in and on the world, the struggle to change outer conditions, will never have enough power to reverse the downward course of the manvantara, to roll back the Apocalypse, since these developments are in line with the Will of God as Al-Adl, “the Absolutely Just.” Yet if outer action is oriented toward inner purification (which is certainly easier said than done!) then it will be strictly in line with both the Will of God and the quality and needs of the times.
To consciously and deliberately stand against the terror of the world is to fully invoke that terror, which is nothing less, in essence, than the Divine Rigor, otherwise known as Al-Jalal, the Majesty of God. And one of the central mandates that must emerge from this invocation is the command to fight evil, first and foremost in the Greater Jihad against the veils of self-identification and world-identification known as the nafs al-ammara bi’l su, “the soul commanding to evil,” and secondarily—if God so wills—in the lesser jihads of intellectual and social action. We need to be willing to combat evil and illusion to the best of our ability and the limit of our endurance, within both ourselves and the world—but when the moment of truth comes, the operative principle and the most appropriate strategy becomes (in the words of Jesus) “resist not evil.” Resistance to evil has a quantum of power to it, but non-resistance is the ultimate power because it taps the Will of God in conditions, otherwise known as the essential nature of things. We inevitably dream, of course, that this power might come under our control, to wield according to our own self-will—but such an outcome is not possible, because “control” and “resistance” are the same thing. Control is resistance to chaos; non-resistance to chaos, supremely dangerous though it is, is the root of harmony and the way through the ultimate impasse generated by the attempt to impose order to “the Kingdom of Heaven” which is intrinsic order—but only if our acceptance of the Will of God is radical and total.
This is the operative principle of the Chöd Rite in Tibetan Buddhism, where all the demons that perpetually menace every aspect of the human enterprise are invited to devour the totality of the yogi’s body, speech and mind, as (speaking in Vedantic terms) he progressively dis-identifies with all these koshas, these sheathes of the Atman. If you aren’t capable of that degree of self-sacrifice, then you’d better defend yourself to the best of your ability against the evils that menace you, or else they will eat you, skin flesh and bone—they will eat you alive, by which I mean: while still in a state of full identification with all that you must inevitably lose. Only if you can accept such a degree of self-annihilation that you present no visible target for that demonic hunger, just as Siddhartha Gautama quelled Mara the Tempter not by opposing him but simply by disappearing in the face of his attack, will you be able to offer all that was once you, all that you used to identify with, to satisfy that hunger, in the full understanding that all your resistance to the demonic, unless it is commanded by God, will ultimately go to serve the demonic, seeing that the roost of all the demons in the universe is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is another name for the nafs, the foundation of self-will, the Ego—that Ego who would gladly sacrifice the entire universe and everyone in it if only this meant that it would never have to die.
In the cosmos of Christianity, Christ’s Crucifixion, which we are invited to recapitulate in our own lives, was his own Chöd Rite, his Yoga of the Mystic Sacrifice. The Crucifixion, the Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection from the Dead—all these are nothing but the final fruits of “resist not evil,” of a strategy that seems, when we first hear of it, so harmless, lamb-like and compliant. But watch out! That Lamb has teeth—the teeth of the Lion.
In the Qur‘an, in the Surah at-Tawbah or “Repentance,” ayah 118, the essence of “resist not evil” is perfectly and definitively enunciated, with the quintessential concision that at all points characterizes the Holy Book: There is no refuge from Allah but in Him.
On the outer fringes of the storm of universal manifestation, the great Wind of Existence blows all sentient beings from death to birth to death again in vast and endless rounds of remembering and forgetting—but in the Center of that whirlpool, that sangsara, in the Eye of that divine storm (which is none other than the Eye of the Heart), all is calm, all is bright; the seabirds soar in the gentle breezes, and rest on the face of the Ocean. On the periphery everything is war, a war that can never be won; in the Center, all is peace, because the outer war has drawn out of us all that would want to defiantly hurl itself against the face of existence, leaving only that which is at peace with Being, and at home in it, to rest in the heart of it. And so: asalaamu alaikum, peace to all sentient beings, in the teeth of the universal struggle—a blessing that springs from the unbreakable knowledge that when God draws His sword and takes the field, He encounters no opposition, He meets no enemy: because only God is.
