Glosar Termeni - Metafizică Optiuni

[shapeshifter]

Argument
The Greek word kategoria, “argument,” means in the last analysis: an ultimate form of thought, that is to say a key-notion capable of classifying other notions, or even all the notions having a bearing on existence.

Detachment
Detachment is the opposite of concupiscence and avidity; it is the greatness of soul which, inspired by a consciousness of absolute values and thus also of the imperfection and impermanence of relative values, allows the soul to keep its inward freedom and its distance with regard to things. Consciousness of God, on the one hand annuls, in a certain fashion, both forms and qualities, and on the other confers on them a value that transcends them; detachment means that the soul is so to say impregnated with death, but it also means by compensation, that it is aware of the indestructibility of earthly beauties; for beauty cannot be destroyed, it withdraws into its archetypes and into its essence, where it is reborn, immortal, in the blessed nearness of God.

Detachment / Attachment
It is to be observed first of all that attachment is in the very nature of man; and yet he is asked to be detached. The criterion of the legitimacy of an attachment is that its object should be worthy of love, that is, that it should communicate to us something of God, and, even more importantly, should not separate us from Him; if a thing or creature is worthy of love and does not alienate us from God, – in which case it indirectly brings us close to its divine model – it may be said that we love it “in God” and “towards God”, and thus in keeping with Platonic “remembrance” and without idolatry and centrifugal passion. To be detached means not loving anything outside of God or a fortiori against God: it is thus to love God ex toto corde.

Devil:
The devil being the humanized personification – humanized on contact with man – of the subversive aspect of the centrifugal existential power; not the personification of this power in so far as its mission is positively to manifest Divine Possibility.

Dialectic (spiritual):
When the notion of dialectic is applied to the domain of spirituality, it must be amplified to include more than the art of reasoning correctly, for what is at stake now is the whole problem of spiritual expression itself; before knowing how to reason, it is necessary to know how to express oneself, because spiritual dialectic is first and foremost the capacity to give account in human language of realities that transcend, if not man’s mind, at least his earthly experience and his ordinary psychology. In other words, dialectic is not only a question of logic, it is also a question of verbal adequation; both things require principles and experience.

Doctrine:
Doctrine offers the whole truth, first by virtue of its form, and then in regard to the capacity of the properly qualified intelligence to receive and actualize it; it lays open its content in a way that is doubtless elliptical, since it is a form, but in a way that is also total since this form is a symbol and is therefore something of what it has to communicate.

Doctrine (exoteric / esoteric):
A doctrine or a Path is exoteric to the degree that it is obliged to take account of individualism – which is the fruit not so much of passion itself as of the hold exerted by passion upon thought – and to veil the equation of Intellect and Self under a mythological and moral imagery, irrespective of whether a historical element is combined with that imagery or not; and a doctrine is esoteric to the degree that it communicates the very essence of our universal position, our situation between
nothingness and Infinity. Esoterism is concerned with the nature of things and not merely with our human eschatology; it views the Universe not from the human standpoint but from the “standpoint” of God.

Doctrine (limitation):
A doctrinal limitation does not always denote a corresponding intellectual limitation since it can be situated on the level of mental articulation and not on that of pure intellection.

Doctrine (quintessence):
When one speaks of doctrinal “quintessence,” this may mean one of two things: firstly, the loftiest and subtlest part of a doctrine, and it is in this sense that Sufis distinguish between the “husk” (qishr) and the “marrow” (lubb); and secondly,
an integral doctrine envisaged in respect of its fundamental and necessary nature, and thus leaving aside all outward trappings and all superstructure.

Doctrine (truth):
It is sometimes said that no doctrine is entirely wrong and that there is truth in everything; but this is altogether false, because, while fundamental – and thus decisive – truths can neutralize any minor errors in a doctrine, minor truths are valueless within the framework of a major error; this is why one must never glorify an error for having taught us some truth or other, nor look for truth in errors on the pretext that truth is everywhere the same – for there are important nuances here – and above all one must not reject a fundamental and comprehensive truth because of a minor error that may
happen to accompany it.

Dogmatism:
Dogmatism is characterized by the fact that it attributes an absolute scope and an exclusive sense to a particular point of view or aspect. [Dogmatism as such does not consist in the mere enunciation of an idea, that is to say, in the fact of giving form to a spiritual intuition, but rather in an interpretation that, instead of rejoining the formless and total Truth after taking as its starting point one of the forms of that Truth, results in a sort of paralysis of this form by denying its intellectual potentialities and by attributing to it an absoluteness that only the formless and total Truth itself can possess.

Dogmatism / Empiricism:
A few words must be said here on the antinomy between dogmatism and empiricism: the empiricist error consists not in the belief that experiment has a certain utility, which is obvious, but in thinking that there is a common measure between principial knowledge and experiment, and in attributing to the latter an absolute value, whereas in fact it can only have a bearing on modes, never on the very principles of Intellect and of Reality; this amounts to purely and simply denying the possibility of a knowledge other than the experimental and sensory. On the dogmatist side, on the contrary, it is necessary to guard against the danger of underestimating the role of experiment within the limits where it is valid, for even thought based on an awareness of principles can go astray on the level of applications, and that precisely through ignorance of certain possible modes, without such misapprehension however being able to affect knowledge in a global sense. It is self-evident that dogmatism – whether rightly or wrongly so called – has value only insofar as the immutability of its axioms derives from
that of principles, hence of truth.

Doubt:
Doubt is nothing else but the void left by absent certainty and this void readily makes way for the false plenitude of error.

Ego:
The ego is at the same time a system of images and a cycle; it is something like a museum. The ego is a moving fabric made of images and tendencies; the tendencies come from our own substance, and the images are provided by the environment. We put ourselves into things, and we place things in ourselves, whereas our true being is independent of them.
The ego is, empirically, a dream in which we ourselves dream ourselves; the contents of this dream, drawn from our surroundings, are at bottom only pretexts, for the ego desires only its own life: whatever we may dream, our dream is always only a symbol for the ego which wishes to affirm itself, a mirror that we hold before the ‘I’ and which reverberates its life in multiple fashions. This dream has become our second nature; it is woven of images and of tendencies, static and dynamic elements in innumerable combinations: the images come from outside and are integrated into our substance; the tendencies are our responses to the world around us; as we exteriorise ourselves, we create a world in the image of our dream, and the dream thus objectivized flows back upon us, and so on and on, until we are enclosed in a tissue, sometimes inextricable, of dreams exteriorized or materialized and of materializations interiorised. The ego is like a watermill whose wheel, under the drive of a current – the world and life – turns and repeats itself untiringly, in a series of images always different and always similar.

Empirical “I”:
The empirical “I” is nothing but a shifting tissue of images and tendencies; when the ego of an individual eight years old is compared with the ego of the same individual at eighty years of age one may well ask oneself where the real “I” is. And if a man could live for a thousand years, what would remain of that which was his “I” in the first century of his life? We live at the same time in the body, the head and the heart, so that we may sometimes ask ourselves where the genuine ‘I’ is situated; in fact, the ego, properly speaking, the empirical ‘I’, has its sensory seat in the brain, but it gravitates towards the body and tends to identify itself with it, while the heart is symbolically the seat of the Self, of which we may be conscious or ignorant, but which is our true existential, intellectual, and so universal center.

Error:
The fact that errors exist does not in itself amount to a proof that the intelligence suffers from an inevitable fallibility, for error does not derive from intelligence as such. On the contrary, error is a privative phenomenon causing the activity of the intelligence to deviate through the intervention of an element of passion or blindness, without however being able to invalidate the nature of the cognitive faculty itself. To give to partial truths an absolute significance is the very definition of error.

Evil:
From the spiritual point of view, which alone takes account of the true cause of our calamities, evil is not by definition what causes us to suffer, it is that which – even when accompanied by a maximum of comfort or of ease, or of “justice” so-called – thwarts a maximum of souls as regards their final end. Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil. This is to say that the cosmogonic ray, by plunging as it were into “nothingness,” ends by manifesting “the possibility of the impossible”; the “absurd” cannot but be produced somewhere in the economy of the divine Possibility, otherwise the Infinite would not be the Infinite. But strictly speaking, evil or the devil cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of God and the movement towards the divine. With the intention of resolving the problem of evil, some have maintained that evil does
not exist for God, and consequently that for Him everything is a good, which is inadmissible and ill-sounding. What ought to be said is that God sees the privative manifestations only in connection with the positive manifestations that compensate for
them; thus evil is a provisional factor in view of a greater good, of a “victory of the Truth”; vincit omnia Veritas.
In order to resolve the thorny problem of evil, some have claimed that nothing is bad since everything which happens is “willed by God,” or that evil exists only “from the standpoint of the Law”; which is by no means plausible, first because the Law exists on account of evil and not conversely. What should be said is that evil is integrated into the universal Good, not as evil but as an ontological necessity, as we have pointed out above; this necessity underlies evil, it is metaphysically inherent in it, without however transforming it into a good. Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility –and necessity – of evil; seen from this angle, what we term evil is thus indirectly a result of Infinitude, hence of the Divine Nature; in this respect, God cannot wish to suppress it; likewise, in this respect – and only in this respect – evil ceases to be evil, being no more than an indirect and distant manifestation of a mysterious aspect of the Divine Nature, precisely that of Infinitude or of All-Possibility. One could also say that Infinitude engenders Possibility, and Possibility engenders Relativity; now Relativity contains by definition what we could term the principle of contrast. Insofar as a quality is relative – or is reflected in Relativity – it has ontological need of a contrast, not intrinsically or in virtue of its content, but extrinsically and in virtue of its mode, thus because of its contingency. Indeed, it is the relative or contingent character of a quality that requires or brings about the existence of the corresponding privative manifestation, with all its possible gradations and as a result, its defect, vice, evil. Evil is the possibility of the impossible, since relative good is the Possible approaching impossibility; for it is from this paradoxical combination of Possibility with
impossibility – impossibility becoming real only in and through Possibility – that Contingency or Relativity originates, if one may be allowed an ellipsis that is complex and daring, but difficult to avoid at this point.
If God cannot eliminate evil as a possibility, it is because in this respect evil is a function of His Nature and, being so, it ceases as a result to be evil; and what God cannot do, on pain of contradiction or absurdity, He could never will. However, the Divine Will opposes evil inasmuch as it is contrary to the Divine Nature, which is Goodness or Perfection; in this relationship of opposition – and in this alone – evil is intrinsically evil. God fights this evil perfectly since, on all planes, it is the good that is finally victorious; evil is never more than a fragment or a transition, whether we are in a position to see this or not.
The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence. But beyond earthly destructions there is the Indestructible: “Every form you see,” says Rumi, “has its archetype in the divine world, beyond space; if the form perishes what matter, since its heavenly model is indestructible? Every beautiful form you have seen, every meaningful word you have heard – be not sorrowful because all this must be lost; such is not really the case. The divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped, wherefore do you lament? . . . From the first moment when you entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before you . . .”
Now, if we start out from the idea that, metaphysically speaking, there is no “evil” properly so called and that all is simply a question of function or aspect, we shall then have to specify on the following lines: an evil being is a necessary fragment of a good – or an equilibrium – which exceeds that being incommensurably, whereas a good being is a good in itself, so that any evil in the latter is but fragmentary. Evil, then, is the fragment of a good and the good is a totality including some evil and neutralizing it by its very quality of totality.

Evil / Good:
The distant and indirect cause of what we rightly call evil – namely privation of the good – is the mystery of All-Possibility: that is to say that the latter, being infinite, necessarily embraces the possibility of its own negation, thus the “possibility of the impossible” or the “being of nothingness.” This paradoxical possibility, this “possibility of the absurd” – since it exists and since nothing can be separated from the Good, which coincides with Being – has of necessity a positive function, which is to manifest the Good – or the multiple “goods” – by means of contrast, as much in “time” or succession as in “space” or co-existence. In “space,” evil is opposed to good and by that fact heightens the latter’s luster and brings out its nature a contrario; in “time,” the cessation of evil manifests the victory of the good, in accordance with the principle that vincit omnia Veritas; the two modes illustrate the “unreality” of evil and at the same time its illusory character. In other words: since the function of evil is the contrasting manifestation of good and also the latter’s final victory, we may say that evil by its very
nature is condemned to its own negation; representing either the “spatial” or “temporal” absence of good, evil thus returns to this absence, which is privation of being and hence nothingness. If one were to object that good is likewise perishable, we would answer that it returns to its celestial or divine prototype in which alone it is wholly “itself”; what is perishable in the good is not the good in itself, it is this or that envelope limiting it. As we have said more than once – and this brings us back to the root of the question – evil is a necessary consequence of remoteness from the Divine Sun, the “overflowing” source of the cosmogonic trajectory; the mystery of mysteries being All-Possibility as such. A remark is necessary here: one might object that evil likewise, by its very nature, tends to communicate itself; that is true, but it has this tendency precisely because it is opposed to the radiation of the good and thus cannot help imitating the latter in some fashion. For evil is by definition both opposition and imitation: within the framework of opposition it is ontologically forced to imitate; “the more they curse God the more they praise Him,” said Meister Eckhart. Evil, insofar as it exists, participates in the good represented by existence.
Good and evil are not, strictly speaking, existential categories as are the object, the subject, space and time; because the good is the very being of things – manifested by the categories precisely – such that they, the things, are all “modes of the good”; whereas evil indicates paradoxically the absence of this being, while annexing certain things or certain characteristics at the level at which they are accessible and by virtue of predispositions allowing it. But despite this reservation, one may consider good and evil as existential categories for the following reasons. The good includes on the one hand all that manifests the qualities of the Divine Principle, and on the other hand all things inasmuch as they manifest this same Principle by their existence, and also inasmuch as they fulfill a necessary ontological function. Evil for its part includes all that manifests a privation from the standpoint of the qualities or from that of Being itself; it is harmful in various ways, even though this harmfulness be neutralized and compensated, in given cases, by positive factors. That is to say that there are things which are bad or harmful in principle but not in fact, just as there are others which are good and beneficial in the same way; all
of which contributes to the unfolding of the cosmic play with its innumerable combinations.

Evil / Good / Absoluteness:
Evil cannot be absolute, it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say “good” is therefore to say “absolute,” and conversely: for good results from Being itself, which it reflects and whose potentialities it unfolds.

Acest topic a fost editat de shapeshifter: 13 Jul 2009, 11:09 PM

[shapeshifter]

Maya:
Maya is an exclusively Vedantic term, often rendered as “universal illusion”, or “cosmic illusion”, but she is also “divine play”. She is the great theophany, the “unveiling” of God “in Himself and by Himself” as the Sufis would say. Maya may be likened to a magic fabric woven from a warp that veils and a weft that unveils; she is a quasi-incomprehensible intermediary between the finite and the Infinite – at least from our point of view as creatures – and as such she has all the multi-coloured ambiguity
appropriate to her part-cosmic, part-divine nature.
It has been stated that from the standpoint of the Self there is no confrontation between a Principle and a manifestation, there is nothing but the Self alone, the pure and absolute Subject which is its own Object. But, it will be asked, what then becomes of the world that we still cannot help perceiving? . . . The world is Atma, the Self, in the guise of Maya; more especially it is Maya insofar as the latter is distinct from Atma, that goes without saying, for otherwise the verbal distinction would not exist; but while being Maya, it is implicitly, and necessarily, Atma, in rather the same way that ice is water or is “not other” than water. In the Self, in the direct or absolute sense, there is no trace of Maya, save the dimension of infinitude . . . from which Maya indirectly proceeds, but at the degree of Maya the latter is “not other” than the Self; . . . since the polarities are
surpassed. Maya is the reverberation of the Self in the direction of nothingness, or the totality of the reverberations of the Self; the innumerable relative subjects “are” the Self under the aspect of “Consciousness” (Chit), and the innumerable relative objects are once again the Self, but this time under the aspect of “Being” (Sat). Their reciprocal relationships, or their “common life,” constitute “Beatitude” (Ananda), in manifested mode, of course; this is made up of everything in the world which is expansion, enjoyment, or movement.
From a certain point of view, Maya is the Shakti of Atma just as Infinitude is the complement of the Absolute, or as All-Possibility prolongs Necessary Being. From another point of view, Maya is relativity or illusion, and is not “on the left” but “below.” As the universal archetype of femininity, Maya is both Eve and Mary: “psychic” and seductive woman, and “pneumatic” and liberating woman; descendent or ascendant, alienating or reintegrating genius. Maya projects souls in order to be able to free them, and projects evil in order to be able to overcome it; or again: on the one hand, She projects her veil in order to be able to manifest the potentialities of the Supreme Good; and, on the other, She veils good in order to be able to unveil it, and thus to manifest a further good: that of the prodigal son’s return, or of Deliverance.
Opposing and inverting differentiation is due to the dark pole of Relativity, of Maya; this is the metaphysical basis of the “fall of the angels.” Maya brings forth the world by “radiation of love” and by virtue of Divine Infinitude but also – through its other
dimension – by centrifugal passion both dispersive and compressive; thus there is at the root of the world the luminous Logos on the one hand, and the tenebrous demiurge on the other hand; and the ultimate Cause of this second pole is, we repeat, that the Infinite cannot exclude what appears to be opposed to it, but which, in reality, contributes to its radiation.
The sun, not being God, must prostrate itself every evening before the throne of Allah; so it is said in Islam. Similarly Maya, not being Atma, can only affirm herself intermittently; the worlds spring from the divine Word and return into it. Instability is the penalty of contingency; to ask how we can know why there will be an end of the world and a resurrection amounts to asking why a respiratory phase stops at a precise moment to be followed by the opposite phase, or why a wave withdraws from the shore after submerging it, or again, why the drops from a fountain fall back to the ground. We are divine possibilities projected into the night of existence, and diversified by reason of that very projection, as water scatters into drops when it is launched into space, and also as it is crystallized when it is captured by cold.
The very notion of cosmic “manifestation” – or of “creation” – implies by way of consequence that of “reintegration”. A Red Indian, speaking of the “Great Spirit”, very rightly called attention to the fact that “all that the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The Heavens are round . . . even the seasons form a great circle in their succession, and they always come back to their point of departure”. Thus it is that all that exists proceeds by way of gyratory movements, everything springs from the Absolute and returns to the Absolute; it is because the relative cannot be conceived otherwise than as a “circular emergence” – therefore transitory because returning to its source – from the Absolute . . . relativity is a circle, and the first of all circles; Maya can be described symbolically as a great circular movement and also as a spherical state . . . According to the degree of its conformity to its Origin, the creature will be retained or rejected by the Creator; and Existence in its totality will finally return, with Being itself, into the infinity of the Self.
Maya returns to Atma, although strictly speaking nothing can be taken away from Atma nor consequently return thereto . . . Atma became Maya so that Maya might become Atma. Maya includes not only the whole of manifestation, she is also affirmed already a fortiori “within” the Principle; the divine Principle “desiring to be known” – or “desiring to know” – stoops to the unfolding of its inward infinity, an unfolding at first potential and afterwards outward or cosmic. The relationship “God-world”, “Creator-creature”, “Principle-manifestation”, would be inconceivable if it were not prefigured in God, independently of any question of creation.
And let us recall that Maya does not coincide purely and simply with the manifested Universe, since – beyond the Universe – it encompasses Being itself, that is to say that the discernment between “God” and the “world” is metaphysically less rigorous and less fundamental than that between Atma and Maya, “Reality” and “illusion.” The protagonists of Vishnuism, whose sanctity is obviously no more in dispute than that of the great spokesman of kalam, see fit to assert against the Maya of Shankara that souls, like the physical world, are real – something that Shankara never denied, for the notion of Maya does not contradict relative reality, but simply annuls it at the level of Absolute Reality; now it is precisely this spirit of alternatives, this inability to reconcile apparent antinomies on a higher plane, as well as the failure to understand relativity and absoluteness, which are common to Semitic exoterism and Hindu bhaktism.
For the Vedantists, Maya is in a sense more mysterious, or less obvious than Atma. If there were no Maya, Atma would not be Atma. As for Maya, it proceeds necessarily from the very nature of Atma – on pain of being a pure impossibility – and proves the Infinitude, All-Possibility and Radiation of Atma; Maya exteriorizes and unfolds the innumerable potentialities of Atma. Maya cannot not be, and to deny it is to be unaware of the nature of the supreme Self.
Cosmic Maya, and with all the more reason, evil, is in the final analysis the possibility of Being not to be. All-Possibility must, by definition and on pain of contradiction, include its own impossibility; the Infinite must realize the finite on pain of not being the Infinite.
There is a Maya which is divine and attracts to God, another which is satanic and takes away from God, and an intermediary one which a priori is innocently passional and seeks only to be itself, so that it remains provisionally neutral in relation to the other two qualities.
An essential distinction must be made between the Maya that is divine (=Ishvara), another that is celestial (= Buddhi and Svarga), and a third that humanly speaking is “earthly” but which, in reality, encompasses the whole domain of transmigration
(Samsara), the round of births and deaths. One can likewise distinguish in Maya an objective mode, which refers to the universe surrounding us and partly transcending us, and a subjective mode which refers to the experiences of our ego; in principle, man can act upon the magic of the world by dominating the magic of his soul. Some near synonyms of the term Maya – which roughly signifies “magic power” – are lila, “play,” and moha, “illusion”; Maha-Moha is the “Great Illusion,” namely Manifestation in its full extension, metacosmic as well as cosmic.
Atma became Maya so that Maya might become Atma.

Acest topic a fost editat de shapeshifter: 14 Jul 2009, 01:53 PM