2. The proper conception of philosophy as mysticism and the improper way: "fundamentalism" in philosophy

The essence of philosophy is mysticism. If, however, "fundamentalism" is defined as the pursuit of literalism, then the contemporary academics' reading of ancient philosophy can also properly be called "fundamentalist", just like the Evangelicals' reading of the Scripture. And literalism has destroyed philosophy in the modern age just as much as it has destroyed Christianity.

What, then, is the true meaning of philosophy and mysticism, which academic literalism has missed or destroyed? While we try to restore the proper approach to understanding philosophy and mysticism, we will make critical assessment of three contemporary scholars who exemplify this forgetfulness and destruction. Firstly, Nicholas F. Gier, in "Is the new physics mystical" (1998), has provided a good (textbook) classification and a good working definition of mysticism, and, at the same time, a most typical, literalist misunderstanding of philosophy and mysticism in general. These can then serve as an excellent point of departure. According to his definition of mysticism, it has two essential characteristics:

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the "mystical" as "spiritual union with God transcending human comprehension." This I believe is a good basic definition but it needs to be revised to include those mystics who claim union with an impersonal reality, such as Plotinus' One or the Hindu Brahman. Both Plotinus and some Hindus (specifically followers of Advaita Vedanta) believe that in the mystical experience the individual self is completely dissolved and identified with the ultimate reality. (The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart is the best representative of this view in the Christian tradition.) In philosophical terms this type of mysticism implies what is called "absolute monism," a view that holds that all of reality is a divine unity, an undifferentiated one, and that individuals and particular things are only derivative or ultimately illusory. While mystics name ultimate reality differently, they all agree that the mystical experience is ineffable, confirming the second part of the OED definition "transcending human comprehension." Therefore, we have two necessary but only together sufficient conditions for a mystical experience: a union with ultimate reality that is ineffable.

St. Catherine of Genoa, a medieval mystic, speaks of the dissolution of the self into God in the following way: "My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself."(1) Catherine's position is a mystical interpretation of Paul's famous phrase "Not I, but Christ." This is essentially the same as the Hindu saying "Not I, but Atman (=Brahman)," or the Buddhist saying "Not I, but the Buddha nature." For the mystic the ego-self is an illusion; in Christian terms it is the fallen, sinful self. The true soul is the Godhead or the divine One. As Meister Eckhart said: "The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge."

We have already seen that the essence of "spirituality" consists precisely in the joy or peacefulness accompanying the monistic re-cognition, and we have furthermore seen that there are fundamentally two types of human endeavor for salvation, the first mode and the second mode of salvation. The divinity is the source of being, or Being. Hence the second mode, i.e. philosophy (in the classical sense, during the First Axial), is mysticism: the union of self with the ineffable source of being which is literally the underlying unity of all of reality. When the first mode attempts to reconstitute itself as the second mode, i.e. when it tries to break out of its mythic mode, its ontic comprehension (the mode correlative with thinghood), it transits into mysticism, i.e. the unity of the self with God that is thus the Self, and no longer an Other. Christianity, for example, then, becomes philosophy. Now, Gier classifies the phenomena of mysticism into the following types:

Theistic Mysticism. The mystics can be categorized according to the way in which they describe the ultimate reality they claim they have become one with. Jewish, Islamic, and Christian mystics say that they have unified themselves with God, so we can call this "theistic" mysticism. Examples are St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and the Sufi mystics of Islam. As I have already said, Christian mysticism is sometimes a mix of mystical union and vivid visions.

Nontheistic or Monistic Mysticism. Asian mystics, neo-Platonists like Plotinus, and some Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, claim that the ultimate reality is an impersonal One. We can call this a nontheistic or monistic mysticism. Eckhart speaks for them all: "This identity out of the One into the One and with the One is the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing love."

Some Buddhists and Eckhart have a provocative version of this type of mysticism. The Mahayana Buddhists call the highest reality shunyata and Eckhart sometimes called God, in his medieval German, bloss nit. Both of these terms mean nothingness -- not just emptiness, but a nothingness which is all -- a no-thing-ness -- no particular thing. [We will see later that "nothingness" in the enlightened state of mind has two meanings, nothingness as the undifferentiatedness of (the original) reality, which, however, has the tendency to transit into the second nothingness, designating reality as literally, physically, nothing. The meaning of this literal nothingness then becomes problematic.] This undifferentiated reality is the focus and true object of the mystical experience. As Eckhart states: "The Godhead is poor, naked and empty as thought it were not; it has not, wills not, wants, not works not, gets not... the Godhead is as void as though it were not." Comparative philosophers have pointed out the obvious similarity between Eckhart's Godhead and the Hindu Brahman.

Nature Mysticism. Nature mysticism is the most widespread form of mystical experience. Many people have had powerful experiences of unity with nature that they have declared to be ineffable. William Rowe's distinction between introvertive and extrovertive mysticism clarifies the difference between nature mysticism and the first two types above. Whereas theistic and monistic mysticism involves a blocking of the senses, a "self-emptying" of the soul, and a withdrawal from the world, nature mystics merge with nature and their senses become more acute, seeing things as "they really are." Zen Buddhism and Chinese Daoism are very good examples of nature mysticism. We ordinary folk think that we perceive mountains, streams, and valleys, but Zen techniques jolt us out of these banal perceptions so that we come to see mountains, streams, and valleys for the very first time. The first chapter of the Daodejing speaks of the Dao as ultimate reality, beyond God (di) and nature, and it insists that the Dao is nameless. The ineffability criterion of the OED definition is even stronger here in Daoism. Even so the Daoist agrees with the Zen Buddhist in the ability to apply names to the differentiated world of mountains, streams, and valleys.

Performance Mysticism. Even amateur musicians speak of the experience of union with their instruments and all performers have to admit that they cannot tell us in words how it is that they use their fingers or their lips. Performance mysticism is central to Zhuangzi's philosophy and his most famous character is Cook Ding, who knows the joints of the animals he carves so well that he never dulls his knife, claiming to cut through the nothingness between the bones and ligaments. One might say that in nature and performance mysticism we are straying from the experience of total union the theistic and monistic mystics claim. While the criterion of ineffability is still fulfilled, the world of the nature and performance mystic, especially the latter, is fully differentiated. One might say that the perception of a beautiful object and the playing an instrument may approach the same type of unity experience.

Chemical Mysticism. Some might speculate that the mystical experience is "all in the head," and might propose that it is nothing but an altered state of consciousness. If this is so, then the experience could be created either by some form of brain stimulation or the ingestion of a drug. In his book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley reports about his experiments with the drug mescaline and the altered states of consciousness that it produced. Most drug experiences, however, appear visionary rather than mystical, because they usually contain vivid content and most subjects appear to be able to give some account of them. Furthermore, neuroscientists such as James Austin claim that Zen satori cannot be induced by drugs. But it is possible that we will one day find a way to stimulate the brain or find a drug that simulates the mystical experience. Such a reductionistic account is unsatisfying for most religious scholars, but we cannot rule out the possibility.

The symptoms of literalism ("fundamentalism") shows up in this piece in two ways. First, the crystallization of symbols into objects-naming names, which underlies this very classification itself. Since Gier focuses only on the literal wording of the enlightened minds without comprehending the meaning behind these words, he sees actual differences between theistic, monistic, and nature mysticism, which, as textbook distinctions, are good superficially, i.e. before one understands mysticism. After understanding one would lose them automatically. That is, the three are actually just the same, the first being just the attempt to turn the mythic bound divine as the Other into the philosophic divine as the Self, i.e. to turn it into "monistic" mysticism. Nature mysticism is also just monistic mysticism. The undifferentiated original reality of One as the source of being is designated variously by theistic or monistic terms, but also experienced in different settings as in meditation or in outdoor excursion. The important point is that the underlying experience is the same, the felt conviction that reality, or its source, is at bottom just One, the ordinary distinctions being superficial or illusory. In traditional metaphysics such experience has been expressed as Being (to on, Sein, esse, etc.) but in the current scheme it will be traced to its experiential root in the experience of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe, in the logically necessary conviction of Conservation, today formulated as the law of the conservation of matter-energy. The fourth, performance mysticism, in the case of Daoism (Zhuangzi), may be taken as an outward expression of the (mystic) enlightened state of mind. Otherwise it has nothing to do with mysticism per se. Or it may be the psychological prelude to mystic experience: feeling elated during immersion of musical performance or when holding one's new baby in hand, for example, could be elevated to "wonder" (thaumastos: below) which serves as the prelude to mystic experience, the enlightened state of mind, which, in the current framework, is understood as the anamnesis of Conservation as the fundamental truth of the Universe or existence.

Second, the mystical experience is a state of consciousness -- the effect of chemistry internal to the brain -- only insofar as the consciousness of an elephant due to seeing an elephant standing in front is a state of consciousness -- the effect of chemistry internal to the brain. The real question is, that is, whether the mystical experience is a state of consciousness that corresponds to a state of reality, as the consciousness of the elephant corresponds to the reality of "the elephant standing in front." Surely it does. But it does not correspond to any particular intraworldly thing in reality, but -- conventional metaphysics will say that it corresponds to reality as a whole, Being qua Being to use Aristotle's words;¹ while we will say that it corresponds to the Conservation of all things in reality and the Oneness of reality in an unitary source of being necessitated by this Conservation. Mystical experience is bringing the memory of Conservation explicitly to consciousness and to logical consistency with the rest, i.e. with all the individual things, whose individual identities are then erased. We shall examine these two symptoms in detail presently.

That the underlying, motivating experience of mysticism is the experience of Conservation can be gleaned so easily from the philosophers' (i.e. the mystics') speech that it is truly amazing that most students today fail to recognize this. E.g. Empedocles: "Fools -- for they have no far reaching thoughts; they expect that what formerly was not can come into being and everything can perish and be utterly destroyed. For coming into being from that which in no way is is impossible, and it is impossible and un-known that what is should be destroyed. For it will ever be there wherever one may keep pushing it." What exists must have always existed and will always exist: the first comprehension of what today is known as the law of Conservation of matter-energy ("energy can never be created or destroyed, but only transformed"). And Zhuangzi on the other side of the world: "To make distinctions is [commonly] to produce [construct, complete] things; to construct things is to destroy things. There are never construction and destruction of things, but the same running through them to make them One." It will be shown how the more complex philosophies such as Plato's or the Yijing metaphysics are derived from this experience of Conservation as yet pure. Even the expression of the first mode of salvation, e.g. the Yahweh religiousness of Israel or Christianity, was founded on the experience of the necessity of Conservation. In fact, even primitive religiousness (such as shamanism and what is called "totemism") and the early polytheistic "religions" were derived from the same. God proper of the so-called monotheism is of course not the Generic Ancestor or any of the polytheistic gods. It is simply that the human experience of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe -- its fundamental structure -- reaches clarity when one sees that behind and despite all the endless series of genesis and destruction on the surface, the total amount of everything remains the same, that is, there is a constant, eternally conserved substrate which is the source of being. The law of conservation compels us to realize that something eternal, absolute, and omnipresent has to lie behind the temporal and individual things as their source. This is God, as is expressed by the Mosaic formula of the designation of God: "I am who am." The intuition of God as eternal (temporally absolute) and omnipresent (spatially absolute) is given in the immediate perception of anything. It takes then the merging of Moses’ insight with the (ancestor) cultic tradition of the Hebrews ("the God of the fathers") to actually give rise to the Yahweh religiousness of the Old Testament. But when this experience of the thermodynamic structure becomes even clearer one would choose to express this intuition of the mystery of existence, i.e. conservation behind dissolution – the mystery of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe – in other symbols, the symbols of the Self or the Same instead of the Other -- and here we have the OED definition of mysticism -- as Being of the Logical philosopher (e.g. Parmenides) or Dao of the all-accepting mystics or Atman = Brahman of the meditator. For if nothing is ever destroyed nor generated but destruction and generation are only transformation, then all the multivarious individual things that come and go must at bottom be a single material, a substrate of existence, which manifests itself here and now as this and then and there as that. It is all the same. These symbols at once answer and further mystify The Question: "Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing?" And this question itself only makes sense because of our immediate intuition of the law of Conservation, that nothing can come out of nothing.

This means that philosophy in its original form (Parmenides, the Daoists, the Upanishads) is mysticism. The two are the same thing. We note further that, firstly, to truly understand the manifold spiritual and philosophical traditions of Homo sapiens sapiens, we have to read them thermodynamically, for the governing principle of human experience is change and yet no-change; and, secondly, that the ability to consciously take note of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe -- the consciousness of the laws of thermodynamics -- is innate to the brain functioning of the human species. It is rooted in the ability to understand logic, i.e. logical tautology, which the brain acquires when its computational power reaches a certain critical threshold, for the law of Conservation reduces essentially to the logical tautology of A = A, for "nothing can come out of nothing" and "everything there is must have always been there and will always be there" say nothing more than "nothing = nothing" and "something = something", no more and no less.

The modern non-spiritual, i.e. non-mystical people, under the influence of positivism which teaches individual material things on one side and the immaterial energy on the other, tend to fail to comprehend the underlying experience of consubstantiality derived from that of Conservation ("Being" in the parlance of traditional metaphysics) but to focus instead on the symbols used to express, i.e. "symbolize", this mystic experience, thus thinking, unaware of their fault, that the mystic philosophers were talking about some thing that is either "God" (a supernatural "being") or the various "types" of spiritual or physical "substances". This is positivistic fundamentalism, i.e. literal reading. Hence Gier: "Except for some Buddhist and Chinese philosophers, traditional mysticism in both Asia and Euro-America has assumed a substance metaphysics. From Aristotle onwards a substance has been defined as an unchanging substrate somehow related to a changing world. Substances ranged from an immutable spiritual substances such as God and the soul to immutable physical substances such as the atom. The discoveries of 20th century physics, I believe, offer strong empirical disconfirmation of substance metaphysics. Instead of unchanging substances the universe appears to be a dynamic whole made up of changing processes. Heraclitus, Laozi, and the Buddha were the great 'process' philosophers of the ancient world and they have now been vindicated by the new 'process' physics. This common ground in process philosophy is the real meeting point of contemporary physics and Asian philosophy, at least the Buddhist and Chinese traditions. Unfortunately, Hinduism maintains Brahman-Atman as spiritual substance and the original Yoga philosophy had a substance dualism even more extreme than Cartesian dualism." (Ibid.) This statement shows complete misunderstanding of philosophy. There is of course no distinction between "substance" or "process" philosophy, sometimes not even on the level of mere symbols, for frequently even the symbols of the ancients are misread by the literally minded contemporaries. Again, what has happened is that the differentiation in consciousness since the Renaissance and especially during the Enlightenment has caused a whole-scale change in perspective or cultural "paradigm": that of "positivism" as previously defined. This is why ever since Enlightenment philosophy professors have, just as the Protestants have done with their Scripture, started reading past philosophies about conservational (mystic) experiences as positivistic representation of empirical, world-immanent "things", "substance", rigid material "points" or "objects". Recall, again, that the beginning of a perspective is always marked by the inability to think of anything except as "things", on the analogy of tangible, measurable, empirical objects of everyday experience, and that the Enlightenment transition from the functional to the structural perspective has begun a new immaturity that has dispensed with the maturity of the functional perspective (beyond "things") accomplished in philosophy ("mysticism") and returned to the images of "things". The older version of the conservational character of reality (which, of course, differs from the moder version of matter-energy conservation in being still compact and taking account of only the superficial, functional layer of reality) to which the philosophic and mystic symbols referred has literally disappeared when the Enlightenment mind de-animizes the cosmos and looks at the new universe in its new paradigm of positivism. Thus, when it reads ancient philosophy, this ancient wisdom, dragged into the new alien perspective or paradigm, gets literalized and is thought to refer to some aspects or some "things" in the new paradigm, as the example of Gier illustrates. In the English-speaking world such positivistic deformation completes itself in "analytic philosophy," where the theme of mysticism disappears altogether and is replaced by "critical thinking" -- about the newly differentiated aspects of the new, modern paradigm, such as the aforementioned modern version of ethics, "epistemology", "moral luck", "personal identity", etc. The Europeans have gone on another path of modernist deformation of ancient philosophy, and an abstract, word-analysis "metaphysics of Being" starts taking shape. Mis-translation of the old texts into modern languages also results, so that, just as within the Evangelical circles in the case of Christianity, the problem of literalist misunderstanding is exacerbated by language barriers as the learning of classical languages gradually disappears from modern education and the mistranslations become fixed as what the ancients really said. A further, third exacerbating factor is academic specialization that cuts off philosophy majors from knowledge of science (and of scientists from philosophy). By these, then, academia philosophy not only can no longer understand the past of its own tradition, but also that of the East, as if there were really a heterogeneity of "doctrines", as reflected in Gier's classification.

If literalism turns mystic symbolism into idiotic opinions about the manifest reality of individual things (the reduction of the ontological to the ontic), it can also dissolve mysticism altogether and reduce it to a "good feeling" or "altered state of consciousness" and no more: what Gier names as "chemical mysticism". Livia Kohn starts off her study of mysticism (in Early Chinese Mysticism) with just this mistake. Not understanding the experiential foundation of mysticism -- not knowing that there is an objective reality correlative of the mystic consciousness -- she reduces it to Abraham Maslow's "peak-experience" which then takes its form when interpreted within a given religious worldview. "A mystic is therefore someone who, already concerned with religious questions, has a strong peak-experience.... Based on his or her religious preconception, the mystic then interprets this as an experience of a force or an agent conceived as absolute rather than as the result of some ordinary cause such as food, drink, sleep, a joyful occasion, or the like" (p. 21). This is just like the situation where the scientist, due to visual impairment, was unable to see the elephant the subject being studied is seeing, and consequently explains the subject's elation caused by the sight of the magnificent animal "as the result of some ordinary cause such as food, drink, sleep, a joyful occasion..." (ibid.). Or altered state of consciousness induced by austere practices. Starting from this fatal error her analysis of mysticism then degenerates into psychological trivialism. "The experience turns into a conversion only when it triggers a mystical quest. The mystic wishes the state glimpsed so briefly to become accessible at will and eventually be the permanent reality of his or her mind. With the help of a variety of practices -- such as fasting, austerities, meditations, and trances -- old feelings and emotions, ideas and conceptions are cleared away, and the new state is attained. First only induced once in a rare while, it ultimately becomes permanent.... In the end, the individual loses all sense of personal consciousness; he or she feels at one with the absolute agent or force, believed to be first glimpsed in the intense peak-experience. The old self is gone; a cosmic self is found. The mystic who has maintained seclusion from other human beings for the time of transformation returns to society, a cosmic and universal spirit in human guise" (ibid.). It is evident that her approach, because she has failed to see, and so to comprehend the "objective existence" of, the "absolute" (i.e. Conservation), and presumed it to be a psychological illusion, has not only failed to introduce mysticism to non-mystic readers, but also destroyed any positive effect the cosmic mystic might have on the world at all. The mystic practices and teaches universal compassion because, he says, Being is One (or we are all One with God), and this teaching has legitimacy if only Being is really One. The mystic has disclosed (erschloßen) a new dimension of reality (in Heidegger's words), or differentiated a new truth (in Voegelin's words), or discovered a new paradigm of reality, and has had to adjust his behavior, perception, and feeling to the new knowledge accordingly. But Kohn's non-comprehension of the new knowledge effectively closes off to her readers the new dimension or new truth, and consequently delegitimates the resultant Liebesakosmismus. If the mystic forgoes the ontic mode of be-ing and perceiving -- the "ordinary sense and reason" based on the distinctions between individual material things, and the "egoistic tendencies and baser instincts" -- and adopts the ontological mode -- cosmicized selflessness and universal love without partiality -- it is because the latter is true, or closer to truth than the former, not simply because s/he wants to "feel good." Kohn's subsequent explanation of the mystic experience in terms of the breakdown of the balance between ergotropic and trophotropic activation or the dominance of the right over the left hemisphere of the brain (p. 23 - 5), though it may well be true, is completely trivial.

Psychological description certainly helps and clarifies, such as Maslow's description of the ordinary, beings-oriented, ontic mode as "deficiency-oriented motivation" or "deficiency-cognition" (characterized by anxiety, fear, worry, anger) and of the ontological, Being-oriented mode of the mystic as "growth-oriented motivation" or "Being-cognition" (characterized by self-justification, cheerfulness, and compassion; p. 27). We only need to keep in mind that the characteristics in the latter case are the psychological complements to a certain awareness of truth, of an objective reality. And so is also useful Kohn's analysis of the stages of the mystic's quest: (1) Purgation, "during which the practitioner empties and purifies the old self with the help of predominantly physical practices"; (2) Illumination, the learning of "new modes of thinking and feeling in meditative and spiritual practices"; (3) Unitive life, "at which all opposites are integrated on a new level" (p. 28; or other names or characterizations of the stages: Active, Interior, Superessential or God-Seeing Life [Happold], or (1) Awakening or Conversion, (2) Self-Knowledge or Purgation, (3) Illumination, (4) Surrender or the Dark Night of the Soul, (5) Union [Evelyn Underhill]; p. 178).

The general structure of the mystic doctrine is "metaphysics", which Kohn notes has been identified by Leibniz and Aldous Huxley as "perennial philosophy":"The perennial philosophy presents a general idealized abstract of the conceptualizations presented by the various mystical traditions of the world. Its worldview can be summarized in four statements:

• The phenomenal world of matter is only a partial reality. It is actually the manifestation of an underlying, more real Ground.
• Human beings by nature cannot only know the underlying Ground by reasoning but also by direct intuition. This intuition serves in some way to unite the knower and the known.
• The nature of human beings is structured dualistically. Human beings consist of a phenomenal ego of which they are conscious in everyday reality, one the one hand, and of a non-phenomenal, eternal self by which they partake in the underlying Ground, on the other. More than that, it is possible for human beings to overcome duality, to identify with the underlying Ground and to become fully one with it, i.e., to develop a cosmic sense of self.
• It is the chief end of human existence in the world to discover and become the cosmic truth of the self. The ultimate aim of human life is to realize the underlying Ground intuitively and become fully one with it. Thereby humanity can realize the truth of the individual as well as that of the entire world.

What the perennialists wish to point out is the enlightenment consciousness directed by the intuition of the truth of Conservation: that the phenomenal world of individual material things is ultimately reducible to an undifferentiated substratum of energy ("Ground"), that the human self can either feel and behave short-sightedly according to the phenomenal "manifest truth" or "comprehensively," "spiritually", according to the awareness that it is part of that substratum "underneath" together with all manifest things, and that, therefore, the "spiritual" or enlightenment feeling and behaving are the higher (or highest) state of the self. The perennialists claim quite rightly that all the mystical systems of the world "have a common referent", that "the mystical experience is one throughout the world" (p. 37), the common referent, the one experience, being, of course, the fact of Conservation in the eternal substratum of energy. Amazingly, Kohn immediately refutes this claim:

If human experience in general is culturally determined, how can there be an identical mystical experience throughout the world? And if there is no one mystical experience, how can there be identical beliefs? The answer is that there cannot. There are vast differences in the beliefs of even two mystics living in the same century and coming from the same cultural background... How much wider must the gap be when they are farther apart in time and space (p. 38)?

This idiotic denial is what happens when traditional spirituality in the functional perspective is lost under the disintegrating effect of immature positivism. Livia Kohn is another one of those amazing modern scholars who have spent their entire life studying religion and philosophy, yet have never come to the slightest understanding of religion and philosophy, and are never aware of their non-understanding. The coincidence in structure and in doctrine among all the intraworld and salvational religions or spiritualities of the world should never surprise anyone. Just as one should not be surprised to find the Egyptians, the Indians, and the Japanese independently discovering 2 + 2 = 4 -- because 2 + 2 = 4 is simply "true" -- so it is only when one can no longer understand the "truth" embodied in religions and mystical experiences -- which is as objective as 2 + 2 = 4: this it is our goal to demonstrate -- that one either tries to invent accidental reasons to explain the by now "strange" coincidence between independently emergent traditions (such as historical contacts through Alexander the Great's invasion to explain the similarity between Platonism and Hinduism) or dismiss them and explain them away, as Kohn attempts to do here.

The attempt to demonstrate the presence of an objective truth -- in fact, the same truth, i.e. Conservation and its enlightening effects -- in religions and mysticism throughout the world leads us to explain the similarity in doctrine and practices between separate traditions in terms of structural convergence: Platonism, Hinduism, and (perhaps religious) Daoism appear independently and yet converge; Zoroastrianism and Judaism could differentiate out of cosmological religions independently and converge in structure, even if one did influence the other.

The present project of "scientific enlightenment" will take strong interest in the coincidence between philosophy (or mysticism) and physics, a popular topics nowadays, for various reasons that will be enumerated below. Since "original" philosophy is mysticism, this will amount to saying that modern physics is mystic. If Gier fails to understand the meaning of mysticism, it is expected that he would argue wrongly that physics is not mystic. He may appear to have reacted correctly against the popular approach of Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics) and Gary Zukav (The Dancing Wuli Masters.) These two have argued for such coincidence because they saw modern physics as implying a new world-view of reality as an interrelated whole, which they wrongly assumed to be the essence of mysticism, but in which they delighted because of its seeming transcendence of the analytic and reductionist materialist world-view of positivism (i.e. the immature stage of the structural perspective). See "The Problem with the Tao of Physics." But ultimately Gier's argument is worthless because he doesn't have a correct understanding of mysticism as the reference point: "Einstein thought that if we separated paired subatomic particles, we could eliminate quantum indeterminacy by measuring one particle and making up for the observational disturbance by assuming that the other particle would remain unchanged. Quantum theory fooled Einstein, not the other way around. Imagine the cosmos as a gigantic dance floor and two paired particles are doing a synchronized dance. Even if the particles were at opposite ends of the cosmos, their movements would match each other perfectly -- a change in one would affect a change in the other. At least two assumptions of classical physics are undermined completely: (1) there is no action at a distance; and (2) particles are self-contained, self-sufficient entities externally related to one another. Zukav is correct in saying that subatomic particles are 'connected in an immediate and intimate way,' but this is not a mystical relation nor a mystical unity. Rather, it is an internal relation, where one entity is dependent on another (asymmetrical internal relation) or both are dependent on each other (symmetrical internal relation). Just as our 'dance' particles preserve their individual integrity and are not dissolved into each other, so too do the terms of internal relations maintain their separate identities. The mechanical model is based on external relations; the organic model is based on internal relations; and the mystical model ultimately has no parts that can relate at all. The Buddha's doctrine of interdependent coorigination is the best Asian model of internal relations, so it is Buddhism once again that offers the most constructive comparisons with the new physics." (Ibid.) Gier's mistakes are that, firstly, philosophy, as mysticism, is really not about such triviality as a holistic view of reality and is in fact fundamentally anti-processual by definition: it expresses that changes -- processes -- are only illusory and, really, nothing changes at bottom. If physics is mystical, then it will also be anti-processual so that the search for its coincidence with philosophy in the holism of processualism is untenable. It should be sought in the holism of a "unchanging bloc" as the Total. Furthermore, his characterization of Buddhism is simply wrong, again because of his incomprehension of the meaning or experience behind the words (literalism). It should be noted here at once that, whenever a philosopher (a mystic) speaks of the impermanence of things, the point is not the impermenance of things but the constancy of "some underlying" ("Being" in traditional metaphysics) which stays always the same, or "conserved."

Mysticism (with OED definition) is philosophy and vice versa. But philosophy in the West, in its growing abstraction during Medieval scholasticism and propositional degeneration after that, finally descends into the literalism prominent in Anglo philosophy, and becomes the abstract metaphysics of (=) Being on the European continent, even if, there, Heidegger with his Being and Time has reclaimed metaphysics, by reformulating ("updating") Plato's eidetic project in the modern, structural perspective. But the understanding of what philosophy originally was (metaphysics, mysticism) has been lost, even in Heidegger's history of philosophy. (Heidegger didn't really understand much of Greek philosophy, as shall be seen!) The "thermodynamic interpretation" of ancient philosophy is for the sake of recovering the "original" philosophy. The search for philosophy's relationship with modern science, say, physics, is not only in order to construct mysticism out of physics (or attain enlightenment through science), but also for the purpose of this recovery! As hinted at in the previous schema of the evolution of consciousness, our notion is that tribal mythic religiosity serves as the trunk from which both the salvational religions and philosophy (in general and in the specific form of mysticism and the second mode) emerge (or is differentiated out); that, then, philosophy serves as the trunk from which modern science emerges (or is differentiated out). In other words, philosophy is, so to speak, "pre-science science", and tribal intraworld religion, "pre-philosophy science." In Hellas, we see philosophers since the very beginning -- from Thales through Pythagoreans to Parmenides and Plato -- engaged in the investigation of nature (how it functions and why it functions the way it does, and also its mathematical (arithmetic and geometric) "foundation"), which is a task compacted with, or serves as the means for, their "spirituality" (as defined earlier) and eventually salvational pursuit -- that is, often as the step toward mysticism. In the Hellenistic era, "the contemplation of the cosmos, particularly the resplendent starry heavens," was considered the means for union with the divine or God in Posidonius, Vettius Valens, Philo, Plotinus... For Philo the contemplation of the heavens gives rise to philosophy, by which "man, though mortal, is rendered immortal." (S. Angus, The Mystery Religions, Dover, p. 72; Philo was talking about the second mode of salvation, salvation through that particular intellectual work, "studying.") That philosophers look to nature, even Alan Bloom has emphasized ("The Ladder of Love"). The same holds in India, and weakly so in China. Up until the Enlightenment, we still see philosophers in the West (already degenerating though their philosophy may be) engaged in mathematics and natural sciences as part of their philosophical system: from Descartes through Leibniz to Kant.² At that time science is called "natural philosophy". The specialization of philosophy into a "metaphysics of Being" and science into the "mechanics of beings" on the continent,³ and of philosophy into "critical thinking" and of science into the study of physical, empirical nature in the English-speaking world, is the function of differentiation that has split philosophy apart, and which makes us forget that scientists are really the philosophers of our time, and philosophers the scientists in ancient time.⁴ Science didn't emerge besides philosophy as a new addition to human cultural endeavor, but out of philosophy. Similarly, scholars in religious studies have largely forgotten that intraworld religiosity is the "science" of tribal people (a forgetfulness of the "ergonic meaning" of religion, as shall be seen) and have sought to reduce it to a symbolic system or sociological function. What distinguishes between ancient philosophy as "pre-science science" and "modern science" is that the former is the study of nature in the mature functional perspective, and the latter, in the structural perspective; and what distinguishes between tribal religion and modern scientific engineering is that the former is engineering in the immature functional perspective (a non-prejudicial expression of the nineteenth century identification of primitive religion as "pseudo-science"), and the latter, in the structural perspective. The functional perspective, with its lesser differentiation and shallower depth, discloses a cosmos filled with different categories of entities (or eidoi) for investigation. It is this fact which prevents us from understanding what it is really that these ancients and primitives were saying and doing, because, while the names for these categories and entities still persist into our language and discourse, their meaning is distorted and lost because what they are naming have disintegrated and cannot be seen within the more differentiated episteme of our modern structural perspective. To save the meaning of ancient philosophy then -- since it becomes impossible to speak of the real meaning of ancient philosophy within our perspective, with our language -- and to use this "pre-science science" as a guide for our "scientific enlightenment" (how to achieve enlightenment and salvation with modern science), we need to reconstruct the ancient, "functional perspective" within which that philosophy has real meaning, and then correlate each of the entities spoken of and investigated by it with the entities that occupy the same place in our perspective. This is also how we will approach ancient and primitive religions.

The important distinction between the functional and the structural perspective is introduced specifically to recover these categories of being, these eidoi, of human consciousness up to the First Axial -- encompassing tribal religiosity and all the world philosophies and salvational religions (e.g. the formation of Christianity) -- which takes place entirely within the "functional" perspective. The most oft-heard-of examples of such categories, which persist into the structural perspective to generate confusion about past wisdom and experience, include "soul", "spirit", "mind" (nous), "qi", "kundalini", the various designations for the "sacred" (Dao, Maat, Mana, Orenda) and so on. Moderns, failing to see the distinction between the functional and the structural perspective, often mistake these functional entities as structures, hence doctors dissect the human body and can never find "qi" in it. This is the same as the behaviorists' dismissal of the psychoanalytic "ego", "id", and "superego" because they cannot find these in the "brain", i.e. when they open up the brain. Ego, etc., just like qi or kundalini, are functions felt in human reflective experiences and so the effects of the physical constituents of the human body and not among these constituents themselves. The past humans living in the functional perspective have only these functions filling their awareness and experience of reality and of themselves, and consequently their world, in addition to being an equipmental whole (to speak in terms of Heidegger's phenomenology), is also filled with gods and manas in consequence of their belief in spirits ("spirit" or "soul" as the category compacted of consciousness and metabolism: the "animators") as objectively existing and free-floating, i.e. as "entities", un-anchored in a physical constituent (brain and the cardiovascular system). Their world is sacred Weltlichkeit. The present humans living in the structural perspective, on the other hand, live in a pure equipmental whole, simply Weltlichkeit as analyzed in Part One of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit.

The failure of contemporary academics to recognize that the ancient geniuses and spiritualists were in fact operating in a different perspective within which their categories and entities made perfect sense is what is responsible for the oft-heard denial, in philosophy, that Plato really believed in "soul" as an entity which, through philosophic contemplation, can be cared for for its eternal bliss after-life: "Socrates in Phaedo is not really committed to the idea of the immortality of the soul; he's merely suggesting that we should live as if we had an afterlife to care about"; and the frequent attempt, in religious studies, to reduce religious rituals to sociality-engendering mechanisms or symbolic systems or what have you. Perhaps it is normal for most people to be unaware that there might be a perspective (a "paradigm") other than their own with which to see a different world while looking at the same world, that their way of seeing the world, which results in what they see in the world, is not the only way.⁵

Another difference between the ancient and the modern is that the ancient metaphysics of Being qua Being, can be said to be the investigation of the origin of things on the synchronic axis, on the plane of logic. This, at least in the sense that it speaks of Being per se, then of Being in and as beings as their origin, but does not trace the actual history of their origination. Then, the differentiation of consciousness also stretches the "static synchronic" into a "dynamic diachrony", adding a time dimension to the genesis of things. Compare Anaximander's apeiron or Huai-nanzi's Dao with the modern Big Bang theory. History so often attests to such development, even in mathematics: compare Hellenic geometry to Enlightenment mechanics.

The attempt to trace the origin of things during the contemplation of the cosmos, whether simply on the synchronic plane or already along the diachronic axis, will eventually lead one to the conclusion that Being is One -- which constitutes the OED definition of mysticism in its formal aspect -- and to the strangeness that this Being has come from nothing. The investigation of the nature of reality under this resultant total aspect (All is One...) rather than under its particular abstractions also always entails a fundamental change of attitude. "The entrance into and the abiding in the philosophic standpoint has traditionally been called 'wonder'. The Greeks... say that thaumazein (to wonder, to be astonished, to marvel) is the source of philosophy... In contrast to wonder stands the passive satisfaction of the utilitarian attitude. The work-a-day world, unquestionably there, is the world immediately at hand; beyond its usefulness, it is the object of our idle curiosity and chatter. It even tends to become ultimate for us. This ultimacy, however, is shattered by wonder. Wonder may occur in moments of great joy, when things are transformed into goodness and seem to be there for the first time; or in love, when our own existence is transformed into a gratuity for us; or in the proximity of death... Wonder is the experience... [t]hat anything at all is becomes startling." "Wonder is the experience of the startling fact of be-ing." (D. G., ibid.) Or rather, the origin of beings, their marvelous complexity, and their oneness. What is noted earlier under "performance mysticism" is the attitude-change associated with the transition from "the passive satisfaction of the utilitarian attitude" to "wonder", the philosophic attitudinal standpoint but not yet philosophic investigation. Wonder is the beginning attitudinal aspect of mysticism next to its formal aspect. Guerrière here is speaking in the (incorrect) Heideggerian terms.⁶ Although scientific investigation (the modern form of the "contemplation of heavens") does not necessarily entail wonder, in its strive for objectivity it frequently transits into the philosophic wonder and lays down the foundation for mysticism or enlightenment. (See 2.B.3.8: Zhuangzi.) Mysticism is reached when this wonder attains its fruition in a non-judgmental, loving acceptance of all that is, which Weber has named "Liebesakosmismus". Our definition of mysticism as true philosophy-science or the enlightened state of mind -- come about through contemplation or meditation -- is thus: on the cognitive side, the recognition that All is One, that All has come from nothing or can be here at all, and that Everything is just the way it is, complex, orderly, and beautiful; and, on the emotive side, the amazement in these three recognitions, and the feeling of love for All and the acceptance of All in the way it is.⁷

We are not satisfied with the mere complementarity between philosophy with physics, as suggested by the continental conception of philosophy (noted in ftnt. 2).⁸ A thermodynamic reading shows otherwise. If "Being" be not just the designation of the fact of be-ing but the symbolic expression of the fact of the eternal conservation of be-ing (and so beings as well), i.e. of Conservation, then the complementarity between physics and philosophy dissolves into identity at once, especially if it be shown that the laws of physics eventually reflect Conservation. Modern physics is the repetition of philosophy of the functional perspective in the structural perspective. In this way modern physics is mystical. Not surprisingly, if the "contemplation of the heavens" would lead to mysticism in the past. This means that the recognitions and feelings just narrated in our definition of mysticism or enlightenment must eventually be present in science-doing when this doing is in the right way.

As a genealogy of human spirituality, the project of scientific enlightenment in another way traces the evolution of consciousness (the way we look at the world) under its understanding of Conservation. This history of consciousness is divided into the two "macro-stages" of the "functional" and the "structural" perspective, as seen, and its course (in its spiritual dimension) consists in the progressive articulation of the memory of Conservation, firstly early in the functional perspective worldwide as the ancestral ghosts (while the associated praxis and mythopoesis of tribal religiosity belong to the primitive understanding of entropy), then late in the functional perspective as Being (the source of being in the parlance of metaphysics) or the eternally conserved substrate of existence (in the thermodynamic parlance), in any case Eternity or the hupokeimenon; secondly early in the structural perspective, through the deformation of hupokeimenon into substantia, as the substantia in motu which in classical mechanics gradually crystallizes into the various conservational principles Dp = 0 or DT - DV = 0 that serve as the basis for the laws of motion (since the governing insight in the formulation of the laws of dynamics is that force is proportional to the increased acceleration or increment of (mechanical) energy, which proportion would be impossible if energy or momentum were not conserved but could increase arbitrarily). Late in the structural perspective the mysticism achieved late in the functional perspective as philosophy is supposed to be aufgehoben into a new (mystic) intuition of the conservational Source of all existence. This is scientific enlightenment. The beginning of this scientific mysticism is set going by the energy-mass equivalence demonstrated by Einstein's special relativity, to which Wolfgang Pauli responses: "... what remains of the old idea of matter and of substance? The answer is energy. This is the true substance, that which is conserved; only the form in which it appears is changing": the mystic insight. (See the parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny in the understanding of "permanence" or conservation in 1.1. Ch. 4: The "Logic of Sacrifice".) Here we have an instance of how "the contemplation of the heavens" can lead to mysticism in the modern present.

We will enumerate and analyze all of the "shifts" or "transitions" in this account of the evolution of consciousness, a course of evolution that is universally valid, which every civilization takes, with varying speed (though many may get stuck in the middle of it and fail to ever move on): its upward movement consisting in the shift from the qualitative to the quantitative, from synchrony to diachrony, from multi-dimensional to less dimensions... in short, from provincial concreteness to ecumenic abstraction; and its downward movement, from the experiential to propositional fossilization, from wisdom to mechanization.... But, despite all these shifts, one thread remaining invariant throughout the transitions is the thermodynamic structure of conservation and entropy-process. The interplay between these two aspects -- one changing, one unchanging -- of consciousness' evolution is the factor that results in the Comtean succession, as consciousness shifts, of religion, philosophy, science... and scientific enlightenment?

At this preliminary stage it shall only be said that the claim that modern physics is mystical is really trivial. Gier is led to the contrary claim due to his literalist misunderstanding of mysticism: "In The Tao of Physics Capra repeatedly claims that Asian mysticism has been confirmed by contemporary physics. Here is one sample passage: 'The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to the Atman, the reality within.'... But of course there is no such confirmation. Atman and Brahman are immutable spiritual substances, and I maintain that this is incompatible with today's physics for at least two reasons: (1) contemporary physics appears to make the idea of any substance impossible; and (2) physics is irreducibly pluralistic not monistic. (It may be said to be monistic only in the sense that all things come from energy.) One might say that the naked singularity of the moment before the Big Bang is such a mystical reality, but just a little scrutiny will show what a rash claim that might be. We know that the singularity would have been infinitely dense, but the mystics tell us that the divine unity is infinitely expansive." (Ibid.; emphasis added.) Capra's misunderstanding of Indian mysticism aside (as already mentioned), Atman and Brahman are certainly not "spiritual substances," but are both "Being" (in metaphysical parlance), i.e., the conserved substrate of existence (in thermodynamic parlance), and the formula Atman = Brahman is simply a designation for the enlightened state of mind, salvational "Being is Self" achieved in and through the realization that "Being is One" (like Parmenides' identity between einai and nous). It is the positivistic mind that cannot think of anything except as a "thing" and which therefore misreads such metaphysical symbols as Being or Brahman as meaning literally "thing-like", hence a spiritual "substance". Then Gier, a non-spiritual soul, completely misses what, as we have seen, Wolfgang Pauli has seen relativistic physics implies, the fact that physics is "monistic" precisely because everything in the end is reducible to energy and came from the original "hot soup" of energy during the early periods of the Universe. Finally, there is the senseless proclamation that the mystics were experiencing the infinite expansiveness of the divine unity. So Gier continues his error:

Zukav claims that Bell's theorem demonstrates that there are no such things as separate parts, a conclusion that he says is the same as the mystics. I propose that this is better explained by a theory of organic wholes, with internally related parts, not mystical wholes with no real individual parts. In a strict sense modern physics is the very opposite of mysticism, because it has divided up reality into literally hundreds of discrete subatomic particles, each with its own distinct signature. Each of these particles is an instantiation of a holistic energy field, but each maintains its identity nonetheless. What we have is a radical pluralism not an absolute monism. The cosmos is an organic unity with diversity, not a mystical union without remainder. (Ibid.)

So the two fallacies which Gier commits due to his literalist understanding are mistaking the mystic experience as consisting in the processual and organic holism of Nature, and the "pluralism" of modern physics. But other than Gier's literalist misunderstanding of mysticism and Kohn's psychological trivialism, another common mistake is exemplified by Ken Wilber's comment in his introduction to Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists, 2001: "[All great physicists] realized that, at the very least, physics deals with the world of form, and mysticism deals with the formless... Physics can be learned by the study of facts and mathematics, but mysticism can only be learned by a profound change in consciousness...." The change of consciousness can in fact originate from the study of facts and mathematics, as Pauli (and many other scientists, as shall be seen) has demonstrated above. Mysticism is about the "formless" because the conserved energy that is our Source is formless; similarly, physics at a certain point becomes also about the "formless" when it realizes that all material "forms" can return to the "formless" field of energy via E = mc². Thus, Wilber's mistaken view results from his erroneous definition of mysticism, from, that is, his non-understanding of mysticism: "In the mystical consciousness, Reality is apprehended directly and immediately, meaning without any mediation, any symbolic elaboration, any conceptualization, or any abstractions; subject and object become one in a timeless and speechless act that is beyond any and all forms of mediation.... [Hence]: 'suchness', 'isness', 'thatness', without any intermediaries; beyond words, symbols, names, thoughts, images." While, he argues, modern physics is only consciousness of a set of highly complex differential equations. Wilber has erroneously thought that the essence of mysticism consists in "intuitive comprehension of Reality" because he fails to grasp the object, or motivator, of mystic consciousness. If, as we have argued, what unites mysticism and physics is the idea of conservation, then the fact that mystic consciousness in the functional perspective is arrived at immediately -- or rather, through logic -- while a scientific mystic consciousness -- that is, mysticism of the structural perspective -- is arrived at via mathematical equations -- this fact is completely secondary. Conservation and the formless source of the formal matter can be intuited via logical insight or demonstrated mathematically and experimentally after a long series of mathematical development of physical concepts up to special relativity. Finally, Wilber quotes a famous question: "'If today's physics supports mysticism, what happens when tomorrow's physics replaces it? Does mysticism then fall also?' Mysticism needs to offer its own proof, defenses, evidences." Since the "object" of mystic consciousness -- conservation of the formless source of matter -- is indisputable truth, then we can be sure that tomorrow's physics will support mysticism also.

The only positive value of all these erroneous views is perhaps Gier's isolation of the word "mysticism" from its corrupt use. After pointing out that people have frequently confusingly and confusedly used "mysticism" to mean something "mysterious", he says: "When people say that a book, a religion, or a philosophy is 'mystical', they usually mean that it is deep, profound, speculative, metaphysical, esoteric, or just plain philosophical. (They could of course be using the word correctly if the book fit our OED definition.) The confusion between metaphysical [meaning: speculative, esoteric] and mystical is especially common. To a trained philosopher metaphysics is simply a study of being or reality, which could range from a belief that all things are material to all things being mental or spiritual." Literalist misunderstanding! But then he gets it right: "We can contrast this with the New Age movement, where 'metaphysical' means esoteric or occult teachings, ranging from reincarnation, lost civilizations, to alien visitations. This means that, according to our definition, many New Age ideas are not mystical either." True. But many are: those that see All as One... and the rest of our "definition." "Aside from some Buddhists and the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, most mystics assume a metaphysics, but, as we have seen, a very specific monistic system based on an ineffable union with spiritual reality. In our English literature classes we learn that William Blake was a great 'mystical' poet, but his major poems describe visions not mystical experiences. A vision is full of vivid images and has a narrative line, one that can be explained in words. By contrast the ultimate mystical experience has little if no content and the mystic confesses that the experience cannot be expressed in words. Christian mystics speak of themselves being dissolved in Christ or God, but they also say that Jesus sometimes appeared to them and spoke to them. I believe that it is essential to distinguish the first as mystical from the second as visionary, or once again the word mystical loses its meaning." (Ibid.) A good point!

Philosophy, finally, is however about salvation, which is the goal of the testamental religions as well (the first and the second mode). Salvation means the negation of the (fundamentally terrible, flawed) existence in the temporo-spatial world through the returning of the self to the eternal and non-spatial reality that is the source of this temporal world: returning to the source. Mysticism, the mystic experience, is thus the means to salvation, though not necessarily always used thusly. The general structure of human salvation has been summarized. "Scientific enlightenment" thus includes the exposition of the general structure of salvation through a comparative study, the project of enlightenment/ philosophy/ mysticism raised to the "structural", scientific level, and, together with these, a narrative of the growth of consciousness from the functional to the structural perspective, specifically in regard to its comprehension of thermodynamics.

3. The functional and the structural perspective as historical breaks, the second and the first mode as parallel developments, and the differentiation of consciousness

The distinction between the functional and the structural perspective subsumes Eric Voegelin's. Voegelin sees the order of history as resulting from the (universal, natural) movement of consciousness from compactness toward differentiation, and, as mentioned, he sees the cosmological mode diverging into two different modes, the historical or revelatory of Israel and the anthropological of Hellas (with the Chinese being an incomplete breakthrough to the historical, or a weak differentiation resulting in a philosophical, empirical cosmological order). All three, together with the mode of tribal religiosity which Voegelin did not write about, are subsumed under the functional perspective. Of this divergence Voegelin writes:

[T]he Hellenic experience of God as the unseen measure of man is neither a sequel to the Israelite experience of the God who reveals himself from the thornbush to Moses and from Sinai to his people, nor even an intelligible advance beyond it in the sense in which both of these experiences differentiate a new truth about the order of being beyond the compact truth of the myth. The leap in being, the epochal event that breaks the compactness of the early cosmological myth and establishes the order of man in his immediacy under God -- it must be recognized -- occurs twice in the history of mankind, at roughly the same time, in the Near Eastern and the neighboring Aegean civilizations. The two occurrences, while they run parallel in time and have in common their opposition to the Myth [the cosmological mode], are independent of each other; and the two experiences differ so profoundly in content that they become articulate in the two different symbolisms of Revelation and Philosophy. (The World of the Polis, p. 1)

In other words, the differentiation of consciousness that results in the history of order is, though linear, of two pathways. If we add the Chinese differentiation, of three! It is evident that these two parallel differentiations of Voegelin's correspond to the second and the first mode of salvation. (It seems that a lesser stature than Voegelin, Leo Strauss, has a similar opinion when saying that "Reason and Revelation, originating from these two points respectively, are the two distinct sources of knowledge in the Western tradition, and can be used neither to support nor refute the other". See also Alan Bloom's comparison of these two traditions in "The Ladder of Love".) Our view modifies Voegelin's. First of all, Voegelin continues: "Moreover, comparable breaks with the myth, again of widely different complexions, occur contemporaneously in the India of Buddha and the China of Confucius and Laotse." (Ibid.) The Indic and Chinese salvational modes will be seen to belong to the second mode as well. (Some of the Indic modes, such as the Krishna movement, are a mixture between the first and the second mode.) There are then four occurrences of breakthrough running parallel in time. (In the Iranian sphere, Zoroastrianism seems like a breakthrough in the historical mode, same as Israel's). Secondly, the differentiation leading to the Israelite first mode is not here regarded as of the same value as the Hellenic, Indic, and Sinic second mode. In Israel, the extrication from the cosmological myth becomes historical when the full articulation of the salvational mode is released through the linearization of primitive religiousness but as such remains within the bounds of that primitive religiousness -- and its unit of salvation remains also the social collective. But when the articulation of the salvational mode completely breaks through the primitive mythic mode then it becomes anthropologic (or a empirical type of cosmologism: the Mandate of Heaven of the Confucians), i.e. the second mode, with (Plato, Hindu, and Buddhist) or without (Daoist) the persistence of mythic content within it. What Voegelin characterizes as the "anthropologic" is just (the Western strand of) the second mode. (But, in any case, both the Hellenic anthropologic and the Chinese empirical cosmologism remain variations of the macrocosmo-microcosmic concentricism, albeit newly differentiated: one moving from the human to the cosmos, the other from the cosmos down to human.) "Society [of the cosmological mode], in spite of its ritual integration into cosmic order, has broken down; if the cosmos is not the source of lasting order in human existence [relating to minor salvation], where is the source of order to be found? At this juncture symbolization tends to shift toward what is more lasting than the visibly existing world -- that is, toward the invisibly existing beyond all being in tangible existence [which is differentiated out after the disintegration of the cosmological mode]. This invisible divine being, transcending all being in the world and of the world itself, can be experienced only as a movement in the soul of man; and hence the soul, when ordered by attunement to the unseen god, becomes the model of order that will furnish symbols for ordering society analogically in its image. The shift toward macroanthropic symbolization becomes manifest in the differentiation of philosophy and religion out of the preceding, more compact forms of symbolization, and it can be empirically observed, indeed, as an occurrence in the phase of history which Toynbee has classified as the Time of the Troubles." (Order and History, vol. 1, Israel and Revelation, p. 6) Note that the ordering of this world through attunement to the other world is minor salvation, and further that in the Chinese sphere the soul (with both the Confucians and the Daoists) is moving not toward the transcendent, but still toward the immanent, albeit empiricized and de-mythized, Heaven (cosmos). In any case, the movement in the soul means the divine spark within which indicates the identity between the source and the self, and which thus constitutes the goal of the second mode. But we regard the mythic or narrative bound of the Israel case to be the index that the Israelite breakthrough remains inferior to the Hellenic, Indic, or Chinese breakthrough (differentiation).

It is our contention that the profound wisdom achieved in the past cannot be understood in and taken up (aufgehoben) into the current perspective unless the radical difference between the functional and the structural perspective is taken into account. (The whole history of human consciousness in this respective is given later in "Zeno's Defence of Parmenides.") As for the two-tiered structure of each perspective, formerly explicated as the immaturity of the inability to transcend the perception of things ("there are only beings") and the maturity of such transcendence ("all beings are One, i.e. Being is One"), it can be more deeply understood by the way in which Maurice Walshe explains the two levels of truth on which Buddha's discourse operates:

Very often the Buddha talks in the Suttas in terms of conventional or relative truth (sammuti- or vohara-sacca), according to which people and things exist just as they appear to the naive understanding. Elsewhere, however, when addressing an audience capable of appreciating his meaning, he speaks in terms of ultimate truth (paramattha-sacca), according to which "existence is a mere process of physical and mental phenomena within which, or beyond which, no real ego-entity nor any abiding substance can ever be found"... [In other words, the common sense of individual real things is transcended, negated by the enlightened perception of "Being is One and Unreal (i.e. came from nothing)". When the transcendence is achieved, the two perceptions co-exist in the mythic mind, which however no longer takes the illusory common sense seriously and deals with the apparent reality of individual real things only as it is convenient and/or without attachment to them.] There would seem in fact to be a close parallel in modern times in the difference between our naive world-view and that of the physicist, both points of view having their use in their own sphere. Thus, conventionally speaking, or according to the naive world-view, there are solid objects such as tables and chairs, whereas according to physics the alleged solidity is seen to be an illusion, and whatever might turn out to be the ultimate nature of matter, it is certainly something very different from that which presents itself to our senses. However, when the physicist is off duty, he or she makes use of solid tables and chairs just like everyone else. (Digha Nikaya, p. 32)

Here the conventional truth of Buddha corresponds to the immature tier of the functional perspective, and the ultimate truth to its mature, second tier on top of the immature, first tier. Walshe then speaks of our contemporary ordinary experience of solid objects in our Weltlichkeit, which, although it is similar to the immature tier of the functional perspective (and hence parallel to Buddha's level of conventional truth), is not really this latter, but somewhat a repetition of this within the higher level of the structural perspective. This is because, insofar as we have been immersed in a scientific perspective due to basic education and its world-view in which we have grown, even though we still stick to the individuality of these solid things -- and of ourselves -- these things are not really the same as they were in the mythic perspective: they have been rendered present-at-hand and, most importantly, de-sacralized, i.e. de-animized, without embodying the ancestral spirits and without their origins explicated by stories involving semi-divine ancestors and gods. They are semi-scientific "objects". But the scientists' disillusionment with their individuality through the discoveries of new sciences, of which Walshe speaks here, is not yet the total transcendence of these illusions of "individual", "solid" things (including ourselves). Scientific Enlightenment is to push this transcendence through, and in this sense it is the repetition of classical philosophies now in this higher level perspective.

The linear conception of the evolution of human consciousness -- from less to more differentiation -- entails the labeling of the later stages as more "advanced" than the earlier stages. Just as in the earlier thermodynamic interpretation of history, the term "advancement" here is used purely in its temporal or sequential sense: the more advanced consciousness is a consciousness farther along the natural trajectory of its growth than the less advanced consciousness; it is more differentiated, and perhaps larger in content, but it is not "better" in the moral or spiritual sense. In fact, quite often, it is less so. This phylogenic situation can be perfectly illustrated by its ontogenic equivalent: an adult who thinks all day about the price of stocks, the movement of the market, or the refurnishing of his lovely house, but who pays no attention to loneliness of the family dog whom he is too busy to care about, is more "advanced" and differentiated in his consciousness -- and knows more -- than his child who cannot feel undisturbed by the feeling of the dog but who understands nothing his father worries about all day. When the adult dismisses his child's concern for the dog's feeling as "worthless" and "unimportant" compared to the important business he conducts in the human world, perhaps he's right, but it is clear that the adult, in becoming "mature" in mind, knowledge, and concern, has spiritually degenerated, has lost touch with a dimension of reality. The differentiation of consciousness is not an unqualified good, as we have repeatedly emphasized, not the least because the price paid for has precisely been spiritual depravity. Each gain is always accompanied by a loss. Scientific enlightenment attempts to keep what consciousness has gained in maturing to the scientific age while regaining the spirituality lost.

4. Repetition

Within Plato's philosophy and Buddhism, the idea of reincarnation persists from the mythic past (Orphism and Veda) into philosophy so that salvation and enlightenment are articulated within this mythic framework (i.e. as extrication from the cycle of reincarnation so as to eternally be conserved within the Source and never to come back to the mode of temporal and spatial existence that is subject to entropy process; note that Buddhists, because of their conception of time as disconnectedly quantized, do not believe in reincarnation per se, but in "rebirth"). The soul persisting after death, its reincarnation, and the law of equilibrium of happiness and suffering governing reincarnation (law of karma) -- these are entities of independent existence only within the functional perspective and no longer make sense within the structural perspective because either their reality has dispersed among the structural constituents underneath and newly discovered (as "soul" among the network of neurons and neurotransmitters) or the structure (the "laws") of reality constituting their existence has sunken onto a level below and newly discovered (as the law of equilibrium has shifted its realm of application from the surface layer of psychological dynamics to the deeper layers of sub-atomic particles and energy). As such the salvational enlightenment has not finished its path because we have moved from the functional perspective of myth and the cosmos to the structural perspective of Universe, galaxies, elements (periodic table), atoms, the subatomic quantum world. There is no conservation (immortality) of the soul now. Thus to finish human salvational enlightenment once and for all, we need a Wiederholung of the philosophic enlightenment of the past -- i.e. mysticism -- within the structural perspective of scientific categories.

The reason for the necessity of a Wiederholung rather than an invention of enlightenment anew is that the mysticism of the philosophy of the past is correct -- and there is only one correct "answer" and no other to be sought -- so that there is a "some" in the structural perspective that can be found to be correlative with, i.e. to be the content of, the mystic consciousness. Insofar as the purpose of salvation remains the same -- except that we have re-formulated it in scientific jargon, the extrication from the limited temporal-spatial existence becoming the liberation from existence determined by the second law of thermodynamics as open dissipative structure -- its completion through the reunion with this "some" will entail a re-formulation of this extrication and of the path toward this extrication.

In other words, mysticism is the only path toward salvation (in Buddha's words, ekayano maggo: the one and only path): hence the necessity of repetition, and hence the finis of human pursuit of salvation through enlightenment has to be the search for that in the revelation of sciences which corresponds to the that ineffable of the ancient mystics (tat tvam asi: thou art that) -- i.e. the project of the parallel between philosophy and science in general and physics in particular; i.e. the reformulation of the content of mysticism in terms of the sciences of the structural perspective. But this reformulation involves only the surface change of "images" (from the functional, less precise to the structural, more precise and genealogic) and so quite unlike the reformulation of the path to "that" which involves, so to speak, a fundamental change of content -- because the mystic truth of consubstantiality with what it entails ("Being is One, Being came from nothing, and all being is just as it is, no good, no bad") is the truth no matter how the truth of beings is conceived, functionally or structurally, i.e. mythically or scientifically. The logical conclusion of one perspective (Liebesakosmismus) has to be the same as the logical conclusion of the other ("scientific" Liebesakosmismus).

Certainly, if there is no reincarnation then liberation from temporal existence can no longer be sought in terms of the extrication from the cycle of reincarnation (samsara, the Wheel of birth and death). The path toward it -- insofar as it is anamnesis, e.g. of the world of forms and the Form of the Good as with Plato or of the enitre structure of reality including all the reincarnated lives with the unfinished payment of debt (accumulation of karma) as with the Buddhist -- will as well have a different content to remember.

With Plato (Phaedo), as anamnesis is completed through the study of forms, the soul is purified and conservation back to the source is guaranteed, so to speak; the philosopher then has nothing to do but wait to die. The Buddhist is the same, as All is remembered and clearly perceived: "And through his knowing and seeing his mind is delivered from the corruption of sense-desire, from the corruption of becoming, from the corruption of ignorance, and the knowledge arises in him, 'This is deliverance!', and he knows: 'Birth is finished, the holy life has been led, done is what had to be done, there is nothing further here [naparam itthataya, no more thusness]." (Sutta 2, The Long Discourses of Buddha, trans. Maurice Walshe.) Suffering because of attachment to the material meaning of life has ceased because the person -- as desiring -- is basically dead; no karma is any longer accumulated, and the meditator waits peacefully to die, after which the dissolution of the ego (our individuality) means the conservation back to Nothingness, eternally because the illusion of re-birth into the world of temporo-spatial existence will never again arise.

Suffering cannot cease by this manner if one no longer believes in the continuation of soul after death and the law of karma. But suffering can still cease through anamnesis -- only that what is to be remembered has to be something different than platonic forms or the structure of samsara. The simplest way is to seek the equivalence of these functional entities in the structural perspective: the "some" in the structural perspective that is correlative with, i.e. the content of, the "some" of the functional consciousness. For Platonic forms the laws of nature, for samsara the history of the Universe... The lesson we have learned is that the anamnesis -- but in the proper manner, within the framework of mystic spirituality -- of the true nature of and the history of the Universe leading up to oneself has a redemptive effect on one's comportment toward the thermodynamic nature of one's existence that lies at the root of suffering. The means of salvation has always remained the same: the rememberance of the arche.

Philosophy, the logical conclusion of the functional perspective, operates on the contents of the myth below, the beginning point of the functional perspective; and scientific enlightenment, the logical conclusion of the structural perspective, on the contents of sciences below, the beginning point of the structural perspective.

Daoism (of Laozi and Zhuangzi: i.e. in its original philosophic form) is the one exception which is devoid of such mythic remnants. Because of its lack of a mythic view of the structure of existence (cycle of reincarnation, etc.) Daoist type of salvation often seems on the surface like a pre-salvational pursuit, merely a philosophy instructing proper conduct that allows one to live to the fullest natural term of life and not be cut off halfway. This, despite the recognition that it is philosophy, i.e. has achieved the mystic insight of reality, "Being is One", "Everything is just the way it is", designated by Dao. It is only with its later religious forms that the "quest for immortality" through cosmic (re-)union has become the goal: thus can Daoism be classed as the (indigenous) Chinese version of the second mode of salvation. In the original, strictly philosophic form, the complete extrication from the temporo-spatial existence, from the thermodynamic conditions of existence as open dissipative structure, through the conservation of the self, after death, in the Eternal source of being, is absent. This is true, and the lack of a fantastic metaphysics among the Chinese philosophers of the classical period (from Warring Kingdoms period to Han) and of a search for a life eternal and otherworldly in Chinese philosophy in general is really what motivated Voegelin to consider the breakthrough of the cosmological mode in the Chinese case to be incomplete, muted (The Ecumenic Age). The Chinese have essentially been thoroughly empiricistic in their worldview, practical rather than theoretical, and earthly, if one wills, without monotheism and transcendental philosophy, even though the buddings of both were there. (And this is why one could re-designate Daoism as a third mode of salvation.) But, the absence in it of otherworldliness aside, Daoism is thoroughly second mode in its structure ("salvation" through the identification of the self with Dao, i.e. mysticism). And, because of this lack of the metaphysics of the afterlife of the soul, one can speak of a certain "triumph of Daoism", because it is just this persistence of the mythic content within that falsifies in the structural perspective not only Christianity but also Buddhism, Hindu philosophies, Platonism, etc., requiring that they be "repeated" in a new perspective rather than simply taken up. The cycle of reincarnation and the myth of the Resurrection and the Second Coming are un-believable nowadays from the scientific perspective. But the wisdom of Laozi and Zhuangzi can be read and appreciated by the most hard-core positivistic scientists today without the slightest ground for repudiation because they speak nowhere of reincarnation or of the metaphysics of "forms" which only makes sense in the functional perspective and can get falsified by the discoveries of sciences and the constitution of modern phenomenology (ultimately, Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik). Their words, thoroughly about this, empirical world, are written as if just yesterday. There is not much a need of a Wiederholung of Daoism in the structural perspective, but simply its taking-in.

Finally, we can elaborate on the concept of repetition in the history of consciousness (in its spiritual dimension) by drawing a quick analogy with Kierkegaard's notion of it (following Julian Roberts in German Philosophy, 1988). Kierkegaard apparently uses "repetition" to "explain genuine change" (i.e. against Hegel): "a category that took account of the leap into being, the point at which immanence was transcended by the mystery of movement itself" (p. 201 - 2). In our context, this only makes sense with regard to the "second axial" (the transcendence of thinghood within the matrix of empirical sciences), of course, since the "model" has to have appeared beforehand (the "first axial", the transcendence of thinghood within the matrix of myth) so that it can be "repeated". With Kierkegaard, "repetition was the category that blew apart [Hegel's] assumption of a continuous and logical historical development." It differed from this latter "in that it did not generate novelty or variation... Variation, too, was a distraction from real transition, a casual systemic eructation that merely disturbed true repetition. 'Freedom's supreme interest is precisely to bring about repetition, and its only fear is that variation would have the power to disturb its eternal nature'" (p. 202). This concept of repetition, in its most radical form, seems to characterize the Straussian notion of philosophy as a timeless truth (independent of "perspectives") that erupts (in the form of the "superman") within the non-historical world of illusions from time to time (Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right). Our notion is much less radical, since we do admit of some sort of historical evolution and the dependence of truth on a "perspective" that is bound to a particular epoch of world history (i.e. the "order of history" as the "history of order"). The consciousness of thinghood has always the tendency to evolve from myth to positivistic sciences: this is the profane history of "systemic eructation" within which, however, the eternal sameness of the transcendence of thinghood can erupt at this point or at that. Hence even after the definitive beginning of positivism in European history Christian mystics emerged one after another in Middle Ages all the way to the theosophism of the nineteenth century, all of which, however, have been the transcendence of myth, of the functional perspective -- even if more and more under the influence of the (beginning) structural perspective. What if this transcendence erupts in the (mature) structural perspective? The parallel between philosophy and physics! "In what sense is there an 'eternity' which repetition repeats, and from which novelty only distracts?... figuralism. Figuralism is the basis of the allegorical and analogical readings of Holy Scripture. According to the hermeneutic theory, the events of the Old Testament may be prefiguring those of the New (allegorical interpretation); and the Bible generally may be read as a signification of the things that lie ahead in eternal glory (anagogical interpretation...)... It is not that things do not change; but the way that change happens is figural. A significant change... involves a figure's entry, or re-entry, into the affairs of humanity. All other changes are merely casual... But [repetition's] interventions are significant in the... more fundamental sense that they change the status quo; they burst it out of the desultory immanence of its accustomed continuum, and reintroduce a lost figure... Allegory by itself looks only the figuration of what is already past; but anagogy completes the sense of this by pointing towards future salvation, the only true fulfilment of Christian history. Therefore repetition, strangely enough... is always associated not with going backwards but going forwards. Repetition is the citation of an eternal figure, and thus, on one level, returns to what has been, namely history; but on another level, it only carries out that repetition because of its concern for the future." For Kierkegaard, "[t]he fundamental figure, the paradigmatic moment of transcendence and the root point of all further repetition, is the mystery of the Incarnation" (p. 203 - 4). "The one 'has been' of Christ is the figure for the whole history of humanity" (p. 205). But he was careful enough to emphasize that the repetition of the Christ figure in history was a purely personal affair. "For the Christian... 'the notion of marching forward triumphantly en masse' could only be ridiculous." (Ibid.) Apparently this shuts all doors to the immanentizational shortcuts by mass social change studied earlier. We here too, of course, emphasize that the "savior" (swthr) is always a personal matter (never a group, like "women" for the cultural feminists, the "proletariat" for the Marxists, the "Aryan" for the white supremacists, and so on) and "saves" only a special few. Moreover, the figures to be repeated are the enlightened philosophers in the past, not merely Christ. A Buddha, for instance, is a good figure to be repeated.⁹

The "models" or "root point[s] of all further repetition" seem all to cluster around what Karl Jasper has called the "axial time", the millennium from 500 B.C. to 500 A. D. We here delimit this to the period 500 - 200 B.C., the Age of the philosophers, the "First Axial". After the Axial Age, of course, mystic philosophers still abounded -- because of repetitions. Furthermore, at recent times, scientific parlances appear more and more among the mystic types of speech (e.g. among the mass of New Age gurus). A "Second Axial" may be said to be at hand, where the repetition of mystic philosophy is to be entirely a transcendence of empirical science, not of myth. This work is intended to mark the definitive re-entry into history of an old form to make a entirely new, if there be still time for that.

9. "Kierkegaard's successors were not, generally, Christians. Nietzsche and Heidegger are probably the most important. The most telling representation of 'repetition' was, perhaps, in Wagner's The Valkyrie. In the first acts of the opera, when Siegmund finds precarious refuge in the house of one his pursuers, he encounters Sieglinde. Unknown to either of them, they are in fact brother and sister. But, as they await the morning, and the combat that Siegmund will then face again, they fall in love, and their love becomes an intuitive 'repetition' both of the fact that they are siblings, and of the fact that their love can only be fully realized beyond the sordid life that confines them. The love in extremis of Siegmund and Sieglinde is the 'repetition' of a love that necessarily transcends the conditions of their existence. The incestuous nature of their love serves to emphasize both its incompatibility with the norms and expectations of bourgeois society, and also the profounder level at which it is entirely right and natural that they should love one another... The Valkyrie is a drama of repetition. [This] opera places no faith in the future; the only prospect of transcendence is in the possibility of repetition, or, to put it another way, the dream that we can recognize ourselves for what we really are in some other level of Being." (Roberts, ibid., p. 289) We keep this in mind in face of the threat of our extinction.