Sepher Khasifa - A Sceptics Guide To The Eternal

 This is my second hub to publish extracts from a book that I have been working on called sepher khasifa. If you haven't read the first one then I suggest you start there before reading this one - Sepher Khasifa - Towards A Reasonable Religion

The starting point for this is to properly identify what our object of study actually is, as well as precisely what our method should actually be. This is the question which also vexed the alchemists in their search for the ‘first matter’. Fortunately the answers to those two questions are interwoven and easily found.

I have already mentioned the philosophy of radical doubt. This is the method by which we attain certainty – by doubting everything which can possibly be doubted you are left only with that which you can be totally certain of. For writing his book on this method Descartes is known as the father of modern philosophy, and It is upon his foundations which the whole edifice of the scientific method was built. But yet as much as radical doubt influenced the birth of science, science did not remain completely true to its vision.

I think that it was actually Schopenhauer rather than Descartes who said it best when he writes that we do not know a sun and we do not know an earth, only an eye which sees the sun, and a hand which feels the earth.

You see the thing is that science begins with an assumption about the object of study. Science assumes that universe exists independently of our perceptions of it. Now that might seem like a reasonable assumption to make – and one that we all must surely make ourselves in order to get through life without going crazy. But is it valid according to our sceptical method?

The answer is no, that it is not. We know that we percieve our world, but as for this mythical substance called ‘matter’, which exists independently of our perceptions, we have no evidence for that and nor could we ever have any evidence for it. Given that there is no hard evidence for the existence of such a thing we must admit that it is purely a belief, and not proper for inclusion in any strictly sceptical science.

So the object of science should not be the physical universe, but rather the totality of our experience, of our own existence, devoid of any a priori assumption about its nature.  That is the science of the spirit and the proper application of scepticism that I want to present.

The first things that we can say is that the whole of reality as we experience it can be divided into two fundamental classes – the subject and the object. This is true for all of us and is an ‘a priori’ truth, because it is inherently neccesary for any knowledge / experience / perception that there be both a subject of experience, or that which knows, and an object of experience, or that which is known. Knowledge simply cannot exist without these two parts.

We then turn to a consideration of what can be known about the subject and the object, without making any assumption and simply sticking to that which we can be certain of.

The object is clearly equivalent to the material world. When we talk about the object we are almost always going to mean the same thing as a person who talks about the material world. The only difference is that we have removed an unwarrented assumption and are simply calling that same thing by a term which describes it ony by the characteristic which we know it to posses, without the presumption of other unproven characteristics. This is a very important point, because I am not trying to say that the world has no independent existence beyond our perceptions. That would be just as much of an assumption, only one which is less useful and more unlikely. All we are doing here is sticking rigidly to the objective method of radical doubt. Actually, the issue of what the object may be other than simple perception of the perciever is one which we will return to later. For now I want to move on to look at the nature of the subject instead.

Knowledge of the subject is a very difficult thing indeed, because that which is know is by definition the object, whereas the subject is, again by definition, always that which knows and never that which is itself known. So it seems that there is nothing that we can know about the nature of the subject, and that if we ever did come to know anything, then it would cease to be the subject and become the object.

But there are some things which we can say about it. That is because although we can know what the subject is, we can most certainly know what it isn’t – and it isn’t the object. Now that may not seem like much, but in fact we can infer a great deal from that, because we can know a great deal about the various properties of the universe as object.

One thing that we can say about it is that it isn’t an object, it is lots of objects. Through this plurality time and space come into existence. Time and space, being simply descriptions of the separation and movement of objects, quite clearly belong to the object and not to the subject. Without this plurality of objects there is not time and space, and as we have seen the subject cannot itself be an object by definition.

So time and space have no relevance to the subject. Another way of saying this is that the subject has no position or definition in time and space, and therefore has no limits. And another way of saying that is that the subject is eternal and infinite. So we have an innefable or unknowable consciousness which  possesses the fundamental properties of being eternal and infinite. Of course this is a slightly different way of thinking about the meaning of eternal and infinite that we may be used to. Usually one might think of these terms as meaning something that occupies all of time and all of space, rather than something a priori which stands outside of them and therefore has no limitations within them, but still the essential meaning is the same. And without time and space, without plurality, we can also say that the subject exists in a state is singularity – of total unity. These are all things which are often associated with the spiritual side of existence as well.

It is worth clarifying a minor point here. We must be very careful not to simplistically equate the subject with the mind. One might ask, for example, why, if I am the knower and the perceiver, do I not experience my mind as being infinite. The answer to this is quite clear – your thoughts and feelings can be known to you, and therefore belong to the world as object. So your mind, whilst seemingly being closer to the subject, is not itself the same thing as the subject.

I think that it is also worth mentioning that although this may all sound a little bit far fetched, there is actually ample supporting evidence for this view in science, or more specifically in the field of quantum physics.