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FRAGMENTATION OF BEING and the Path Beyond the Void by Kent D. Palmer
copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
Up to this point we have dealt with the structure of the Indo-European worldview from its origins. This was done in order to see how that worldview had unfolded and in order to understand it as thoroughly as possible with a view to effecting an escape. The premise was advanced that unless one escaped through the depths of one's worldview, there was no possibility of an real escape. We began with the fragmentation of Being and saw how that fragmentation has historical roots in the fragmentation of Primordial Being. We saw how Conceptual Being was truly a false unity and that the fragmentation of Being in modern ontology was foreshadowed by the original disunity of Being that was artificially fused over thousands of years as a linguistic project of the Indo-Europeans. Now it is time to use the phenomenon of the fragmentation of Being to effect our escape from the house of Baal. The fragmentation of Being provides the window in the house of Baal through which Death (Mot) arrives. That death is the result of the deep disunity of the Indo-European worldview in spite of every attempt to produce surface unity. Slowly we need to realize the difference between the Indo-European worldview and the superior worldview with deep unity and surface disunity. In our case, the example of a worldview with surface disunity and depth unity is Islam. But we will transition to the Islamic worldview through a series of phases. We will pass first from the Indo-European worldview based on Being to its counter worldview based on Emptiness. Then from that, we will pass to the Chinese worldview based on the Void which we will differentiate from Emptiness. And finally, we will move beyond the Void to the worldview of Islam. Islam cannot be understood in the context of Judaism or Christianity. It can only really be understood in relation to worldviews that recognize the key part played by Emptiness or the Void in the understanding of existence. Thus, we will effect this comparison though the transitioning out of the Western worldview though the fragmentation of Being into Emptiness of the Buddhists which will be, in turn, transformed into the Void of the Ancient Chinese. And finally, we will go beyond the Void to attempt to grasp the significance of the propheticly-based worldviews.
The basic premise of this essay is that we can exit the Western worldivew only through its center which we discover to be empty through the phenomenon of the fragmentation of Being. We have shown that there are four ontological meta-levels beyond the ontic level of beings. Once ontological difference has been posited, then we successively uncover these ontological meta-levels which are equivalent to the archeological deconstruction of pre-ontological understandings of Dasein within the Western worldview. We have posited that there are only four of these ontological meta-levels and that the fifth level is unthinkable. This unthinkability renders our ontological theory empirically refutable and thus scientific. If anyone ever succeeds in thinking the fifth meta-level of Being, then the fundamental structure posited in this work will have to be re-thought from the ground up. However, the author of this work is convinced that the fifth meta-level is ultimately unthinkable by the successive attempts to think it and also find others who have thought it as a unique way of apprehending the world. But this negative evidence dose not show by any form of proof that it cannot be thought in the future. If such an attempt to think the fifth meta-level ever succeeds, then it will open the question whether there are infinite meta-levels of Being or if there are really only five. With each new meta-level thought this question will be reopened. With each one we will learn more about the depth of the Western worldview. This refutability through thought experiment renders by Poppers definition of science this ontology of the fragmentation of Being scientific. No longer is ontology merely conceptual, but it is now experimental. We can continually try new thought experiments to attempt to think the unthinkable. And if ever we succeed, then a new theory of the fragmentation of Being will have to be constructed as all the previously thought levels will have to be reappraised in the light of the new meta-level Beingn. The diacritical relation between all the meta-levels will shift with each newly discovered meta-level, and our understanding of our worldview will change fundamentally. This process could theoretically go on forever as new meta-levels are discovered and thought out. With the advent of the meta-levels of Being, ontology finally achieves the status of the ultimate manifestation of theoretical science and displays its empirical basis which prior to this has always been hidden.
But even in such a situation where levels of Being where n > 4 are discovered, the basic form of ontology will not change. We can define the provisional unthinkability of whatever level is currently unthinkable, and state that this provisional unthinkability will always bee there as the difficulty of thinking each new level of Being goes up exponentially. It is like solving the three body problem which is, for all practical purposes, unsolvable. Or like the next equation up from the Schroninger equation. The four kinds of Being and their interrelations are like the solved Schroninger equation. They show us the underlying structure of the Western worldview like the Schroninger equation shows us the workings of the hydrogen atom. But the very next equation for helium is so difficult to solve that it is basically thought of as impossible. But this impossibility is provisional because it may be that some day the next equation for helium is solved. So too, with the levels of Being. Someday someone might think the fifth or higher meta-levels of Being. But however they manage to do this provisional unthinkability at the very least will always be there because like n-dimensional space, there are theoretically infinite possible meta-levels of Being.
Another point is that as new meta-levels are discovered, the whole understanding of the worldview must change. It is a basic paradigm change for a new meta-level to be discovered. It is equivalent to the discovery of a new force in nature. It changes our way of conceptualizing the worldview completely. However, the analysis at four meta-levels will always remain more or less the same. Meaning that like the movement from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, the discovery of new meta-levels of Being will merely improve our accuracy of understanding the workings of the Western worldview. The four meta-level will always be approximately correct for its own level of understanding. The new meta-levels will change the basis of understanding the worldview, but it will not completely invalidate the meta-levels already uncovered.
So I argue that the structuring of the worldview into meta-levels and the presence at the center of at least provisional unthinkability will always remain the same even if the claim that there are only four meta-levels of Being is proven false. This is important because the unthinkability at the center of our worldview does not have to be absolute in order to provide us with the door out of the worldview. We can always find that door through the thought experiments that uncover successive meta-levels of Being. And it is our straining against the limits of unthinkability that is more important than the actual proof that four is a hard limit to the number of meta-levels. We can call the identification of four meta-levels as a provisional empirico-ontological theory. The theory of the successive approach to the limit can be seen as provisional instead of the unthinkability that forms that limit. The understanding of the inner structure of the Western worldview in terms of the fragmentation of Being is such an advance over previous ontologies that little is lost by calling it provisional. In fact, much is gained because for the first time, we can truly call ontology a science in Popper's strict sense, and the fundamental structure of receding meta-levels tending toward unthinkability gives us a fundamentally new understanding of our Western worldview. And it is an understanding that defines exactly the "way out" of the Western worldview that we have been seeking in this series of working papers.
The fundamental transformation necessary to understand the way out of the Western worldview that has been found depends on changing our understanding of unthinkability. If we interpret unthinkability as Emptiness (sunyata) in the Buddhist understanding of that word, then we will have succeeded in producing the means of escape from the Western worldview. And we immediately comprehend that this is an escape that has been effected before. We are merely rediscovering this escape route. When we look back, we realize that the Buddhist tradition is essentially an Indo-European phenomenon growing out of Hinduism. Hinduism explored the significance of Being as "Sat" within the Indo-European worldview to a far greater degree than it has ever been explored in the West. Buddhism was essentially a reaction against the excesses of Hinduism. The Buddha attempted all manner of Hindu asceticisms, and in the process, realized the limiting possibility of Emptiness that provides an escape route from the Indo-European worldview based on Being (Sat). Buddha realized basically that all the striving to identify with the substance of the Cosmos generally identified with Being was futile because Being was an illusion and did not exist. Thus, all the striving within Hinduism was for nought. Buddha realized that the Self did not exist and that all the essences of things were empty. This is to say that at the heart of everything in the World there is an inherent emptiness including persons who project the world. Buddhism calls for cessation of clinging and craving to which all Being ultimately reduces, which results in humans finally refusing to continue projecting the illusions generated by ideation that sustains the Indo-European worldview.
Emptiness in Buddhism is a very subtle non-concept, and we will not pretend to understand it completely in all its nuances. Here we are interested in defining what will be called Minimal Emptiness. That is the emptiness which is indicated and which is achieved by the cancellation of the four meta-levels of Being. At this point, we are only interested in the minimal amount of emptiness necessary to escape from the Western worldview. That minimal emptiness is recognized by us as the doorway out of the Western worldview and is equivalent to the window in Baal's house which was the doorway of Death into the house. As recognized by Heidegger, it is the possibility of death that renders experience authentic. Ultimately, all clinging and craving is futile. Ultimately, death comes and takes us. Emptiness is a recognition of the fleeting nature of existence. Existence fleetingly dependently arises, and what arises together as co-dependent is empty. Our task now will be to locate minimal emptiness as the center of the vortex of cancellation of the four meta-levels of Being.
The fundamental concept here is that when one encounters unthinkability, even if it is provisional, that one comes up against the basic limits of one's humanity within the Western worldview. If on encountering those limits, one realizes that everything prior to those limits are expressions of clinging and craving, and that at the limits one recognizes the futility of clinging and craving, then at the limits one recognizes the inherent emptiness of all things within the Western worldview despite all the illusions generated to the contrary by that worldview. So one comes to understand unthinkability as a manifestation of emptiness. Once unthinkability is recognized as emptiness, then one has achieved the fundamental understanding of the flawed nature of the Western worldview and its warpage of existence based on the illusion of persistence projected by Being in all its kinds. An intrinsic relation between Being in all its kinds and Emptiness is then set up. This is to say we encounter emptiness at the heart of the Western worldview. Thought that empty doorway we are able to exit into the transformed worldview discovered by the Buddhists long ago. To my knowledge, this is the first time any direct ontological relation between the Western worldview and Buddhist Emptiness has ever been enunciated. It means we have realized that there is a basic relation between Buddhism and the Western worldview -- not just with Hinduism. The Western worldview is merely a poor cousin of Hinduism. A kind of dumbed down version of Hinduism kept from manifesting the variety and sophistication of Hindu thought and mysticism due to an obsession with control as expressed in Aristotelianism and Catholic Christianity to name just two major inhibitors. Never reaching the sophistication of Hindu thought or mysticism, the poor Western cousin never reached its limits sufficiently to spin off Buddhism or its equivalent through the recognition of inherent emptiness. However, the fact that repression in the West prevented the arising of any equivalents of Buddhism does not mean that the Western worldview does not have the same limits as Hinduism embedded within it as expressions of basic limits that are Indo-European in origin related to the arising and dominance of Conceptual Being. So by finding the empty center of the Western worldview, we are showing that in potential there is a possibility of spinning off a minimal form of emptiness that is indicated by the structure of the meta-levels of Being and is the product of their cancellation.
Another point of importance is to locate this minimal emptiness. We do this by taking the ontological difference between ontic beings and the Ontological and repeating it at a higher level in the identification of the difference between the meta-levels of Being and what will be called the Abyss. The Abyss is the endless levels of illusion produced by the four meta-levels of Being working together as the basis of ideation. The abyss has probably infinite higher logical types of illusion which are produced by the mechanism of the four ontological levels of Being. Here we distinguish between the mechanism underlying the illusion and the illusion that is produced. Like the difference between electric generators and all the artificial lights produced by such generators, we differentiate between the means of production of illusion and the produced illusion itself. We posit that the means of production balances and is the dual to the infinite variety of the illusion produced. There is a fundamental difference between these two: process and product -- and that difference is the location of emptiness. Emptiness is the difference between the process of producing illusion within the Western worldview and the product illusion itself. When the process is stopped both it and the product disappears. In Buddhism this is called "cessation" -- Nirvana. Just as when the generators stop, all the artificial light disappears. The generators in some way stand as a complete summary of all the various manifestations of artificial light. It is not necessary for us to explore this infinite adumbration of illusion (maya) because we have dealt with the source of all that illusion, and by dismantling the source, we have shown how the illusions in all their infinite variety are to be quelled.
Emptiness is the difference between the process of producing illusion within the Western worldview and the illusion produced. In this way, we locate emptiness in relation to the different kinds of Being as their limit in unthinkableness. Across the divide of unthinkableness all the endless illusions appear as the false hope of indubitable grounds which all illusions falsely claim. There is infinite variety to Maya, or Illusion (groundless epiphenomea of Being) produced by the Western worldview. The people encompassed by the Western worldview swim in these empty illusions continually. Within the Abyss, myriad apparent forms appear and disappear in bewildering array like the Hindu gods. They all appear to have stability and permanence until we confront their experience with the non-experience of emptiness. Then they vanish like so many smashed idols into floating dust.
But this location of Emptiness as the difference between the process and the product of illusion creation is a static definition that needs to be supplemented with a dynamic definition such as the center of the vortex of cancellation of illusory opposites and the self-destruction of the four meta-levels of Being. We must strive for this more dynamic indication of Emptiness so that it is clear how the Western worldview indicates emptiness in a fundamental way. The Western worldview constantly indicates the emptiness at its own center. The whole reason for the process of illusion creation is to continually indicate anew the emptiness at the center of the Western worldview -- even though those engaged in that worldview are oblivious to it as they drown in the Abyss. Emptiness is not just a static element of the structure of the worldview. It is continually affirmed by the continual cancellation of the worldview that constantly re-proves its inherent emptiness at each moment. This is the source of the dynamism of the process of illusion production and the inner necessity of the overwhelming variety of manifestations of illusions within the context of the Western worldview. The Western worldview produces Illusions not as a side effect, but as its major activity. And it must make sure that these illusions are empty at each moment in order to guarantee that they are illusions so that it is constantly indicating emptiness every instant via the illusions it creates and via the configuration of its meta-levels of Being that are the mechanism by which the illusion is produced. Both the products and the processes of illusion production are thoroughly empty. Showing the dynamic location of emptiness in the midst of illusion production is the next step which calls for a more complex and deeper argument.
We will begin by looking at language and noting that there are four tropes. We have concentrated on Truth, Reality and Identity in most of this study, more or less only mentioning Metaphor as a fourth fundamental component of Being. Now we will turn our attention to Metaphor. Metaphor is one of four Tropes identified by Burke1 and others2. The other three are Synecdoche, Metonymy and Irony. These are all ways of speaking, and they all have meaning in relation to Metaphor. In this argument, we will attempt to define these Tropes in relation to each other using the Gremas square of opposites and contradictories. In that we will develop the theory that Irony is non-metaphor and Metonymy is anti-metaphor so that Synecdoche is anti-non-metaphor. This is a new understanding of Synecdoche. It raises the importance of Synecdoche to a higher degree as the contradictory of Metaphor.
Consider the following reasoning which derives Synecdoche from Metaphor. Metaphor sets up a relation via Being between, say, a King and his people. The King IS the Nation. Metonymy withdraws Being and institutes juxtapositions like the juxtaposition of the Crown to the King. Irony asserts that the King IS (NOT!) the Nation. Synecdoche inserts the Crown for the King to assert the Crown IS (NOT!) the Nation which combines the Metonymy and the Irony within the compass of the Metaphorical relation.
If we take Sailer's point that Finnegan's Wake, for instance, must be read by applying the four Tropes to each point within the text, and we recognize this book as one of the few literary examples of a complete working out a text at the level of Wild Being and encompassing all other meta-levels of Being above that level, then we see that the alienness of language comes form the concurrent application of the four tropes so as to embed the contradictions between them within the text unmediated by their oppositions. This allows us to approach the expression of what Burns3 following Hiedegger calls the physus of the logos, the alienness within language.
So it is the application of the four Tropes simultaneously, as Joyce did in Finnegan's Wake, his book of the Night, the ultimate book of the Western Tradition, which allow us to reach the limits of language by manifesting the contradictions between the Tropes within the text which allows it to approximate Wild Being in language. This displays the alienness of Language which owns us instead of being under our control by constantly thrusting us against the limits of what is expressible in language and thus what is thinkable in as much as the limits of expressiblity dovetail with the limits of the thinkable. This is because the thinkable must be expressible to at least one's self. What is not expressible even to one's self is not thinkable at all. So that when we approach unthinkability, it is not some abstract impossibility of rising to another meta-level of logical analysis only, but also an encounter with the limits of language which neither poetry or thought, working separately or together, can transgress.
The Greimas square of the four Tropes allows us to understand the encounter with limits as a linguistic phenomenon as well as a logical phenomenon. When the contradictions that the square epitomizes manifest in a text by the concurrent application of contradictory Tropes, then we reach the limits of Wild Being. Now let us take this same logical square and apply it back to Being itself. We do this by looking again at the mythic situation in which Conceptual Being arose. In that situation, Parmenides met the Goddess who is not identified except by her persuasiveness. She outlined three paths. There was frozen static Being, Appearance or Illusion, and Non-Being. The path of frozen static conceptual Being was said by the Goddess to be the only real path, and that Non-Being was no path while appearances was an illusory path. Now if we take these three paths and apply Greimas square of Tropes to them, then we find that Non-Being is equivalent to Irony, and Appearance is equivalent to Metonymy. We can apply the Tropes to Being because it is being described here in language. Non-Being is the declaration of the non-path through negation inherent in the statement of the path as the opposite of the path of Being. Appearance is another kind of opposite from the path of Conceptual Being in which Being is withdrawn instead of negated. Appearance and Non-Being are contradictories due to their different kinds of oppositeness distancing them from Being. However, we see from this analysis that there is a path that was not mentioned by the Goddess. That is the path that is the anti-non-Being that is the contradictory to Conceptual Being. I would call this path that was not mentioned by the Goddess "Nothingness." It is Nothingness because it is the contradictory to Static Being which withdraws and negates at the same time. The path of Nothingness is equivalent to Synecdoche, as we derived it above, which is produced by combining the two opposites of Being that are contradictory. This Nothingness is the same thing that Sartre explored in his work Being and Nothingness. It appears explicitly when we invert the relation between existence and essence as he did. It is the self-destruction of manifestation, or consciousness, that as it turns in on itself begins cancelling.
Now we ask the question: if there are really these four paths -- Being, Non-Being, Appearance, and Nothingness -- then what happens when we bring Conceptual Being that is static together with Nothingness? When we consider this question, it becomes clear that there are really two viewpoints on both Static Being and Nothingness. From one viewpoint we see Static Being and Nothingness as contradictories, while from the other we see Death and Process Being. Process Being and Nothingness are antinomic opposites. Static Being is death from the point of view of Process Being. Nothingness is the necessary moment of difference that Static Being must pass through in order to be the Same with itself. These two viewpoints are worked out by Sartre and Heidegger respectively at the beginning of the era of modern ontology. Eventually it was realized that these two viewpoints were antinomic opposites that cancelled, and in cancelling, they produced the new kind of Being called Hyper Being or Being (crossed out). Wild Being, as has been said, is what is left after the cancellation occurs.
But let us take a different approach to understanding these two viewpoints. When we attempt to bring them together, we realize that they are antinomies, and they cannot really be brought together. They are held apart by the square of contradictions. But what we can do is look at the relation between Static Being and Death on the one hand, and between Nothingness and Process Being on the other. When we do that, it is clear that Process Being cancels Nothingness and Death cancels Static Being. For Process Being there is a constant orientation to Death which gives it authenticity. For Conceptual Being there is the constant orientation to the difference and Otherness of Nothingness in order to be the Same with itself and effect the Eternal Return of the Same. Will to power as the obsessive domination of the Other by the West is actually the tension between these two viewpoints. Western consciousness walks between them like they were a tightrope. They are equivalent to the difference between passive and active nihilism. Active (Mithraic) nihilism is a process which occurs through the projection of Nothingness. Passive Nihilism is a static domination which freezes everything, and that causes death through neglect. The two viewpoints work together to destroy other worldviews and cultures that come within the grasp of the dominant worldview.
But though they are held apart, it is not impossible for cancellation to occur. Cancellation occurs from within each side of this nihilistic opposition. Static Conceptual Being without the difference of the Other becomes Death itself. Nothingness and Process Being as antinomic opposites logically cancel as objects of pure reason, just as Kant warned us would happen in his Critique. When each side of the nihilistic contradiction between Conceptual Being and Nothingness cancels, then this begins the self-destruction of the Greimas square of Ontology. What is left is Appearances and Non-Being. Wild Being is the micro cancellation of Appearances with Non-Being that complements the macro cancellation of Being and its contradictory from within. When this micro cancellation occurs, there is nothing left. We can note that one of the things about the Gremias ontological square derived from Parmenides' paths is that it has a place within it that holds nothing. It is hollow due to its being held apart by dual contradictions and fourfold opposition. This hollowness where nothing appears at the center of the square is not emptiness. That hollowness due to the structuring of the square is something, not nothing. But it is a something that appears as a lacunae in the structure of the Greimas square. We note that Conceptual Being is no-thing and that all of its opposites and its contradictory is also no-thing but these are not emptiness. When cancellation occurs, it is a non-thing which appears as an event that occurs to concepts as the square self-destructs. The non-thing of cancellation is also not emptiness. But as cancellation occurs and the square self destructs, the cancellation occurs as a vortex around an emptiness which can only be apprehended by the indicating of the entire framework in the process of cancellation itself. This is the location of minimal emptiness. It is located by dynamic indicating in the process of micro and macro cancellation. We posit that the operation of the four meta-levels of Being together to produce illusion constantly hearkens to the result of their own cancellation which is always already established within them as their ownmost possibility. This means that the authenticity of the four meta-levels of Being appears in their orientation toward emptiness that is continually being renewed as they produce their illusions, just as Dasein gains authenticity via orientation to death. The illusions produced by Being as it acts as the foundation of ideation, are constantly being made empty, and that is the fundamental reason that they are illusions. There is a constant orientation toward emptiness within the production process that realizes the effects of its own cancellation at every moment, even in its operation.
Thus, emptiness is not just statically located as the difference between the process of illusion production and its myriad products, but it is dynamically located as the center of the vortex of cancellation inherent in the structure of the four meta-levels of Being as they hold up Conceptual Being through its difference with its images in Non-Being, Nothingness, and Appearance. The center of that vortex of cancellation is empty. It is not just nothing, no-thing, nor a non-thing -- it is minimal emptiness.
Emptiness is a non-concept. This means that it cannot be conceptualized. All concepts merely indicate it without ever capturing its non-essence. When we attempt to approach emptiness as a non-concept and realize it in experience as non-duality, we realize that it also must be understood as a non-experience instead of an experience. What is interesting is that this non-concept/non-experience is located precisely by the cancellation of antinomic opposites during the self-destruction of the kinds of Being. It is the center of the vortex of that cancellation. All of the Western worldview is continually indicating minimal emptiness through its ontological structure. When we think of what this means, we arrive at the formulation that the indication of emptiness escapes the pointing, grasping, bearing and encompassing that are the primary modalities by which we relate to things in the world. Because of this, emptiness escapes everything within and concerned with the world, even as it suffuses the world. The world is full of references (pointings), conceptualizations (graspings), experiences (bearings) and understandings (encompassings) but none of these can capture emptiness. It takes the whole worldview in its inherent dynamism to indicate emptiness which is ultimately ineffable and inexpressible. Since the Western worldview is not the most subtle and sophisticated to have ever existed, it is clear that there are other more sophisticated and subtle comprehensions of emptiness that are possible. We see these in India as an offshoot of Hinduism, and in China where the comprehension of emptiness gained immense depth, going far beyond what is circumscribed by minimal emptiness. Here we are only concerned for the moment with the emptiness that is indicated by the crude Western worldview. However, in all cases emptiness is indicated by the entire worldview operating together. What is beyond the world cannot be conceptualized and cannot be experienced. So this is why emptiness in all its forms remains ineffable to the extreme without becoming "nothing at all." It balances perfectly everything that appears as worldly convention. It is a still center that forms at the center of the vortex of the world around which the whole world organizes itself. The more sophisticated the worldview, the finer the indications of emptiness. In the Western case, it is merely the basic ontological layers that need to cancel in order to indicate what we have called minimal emptiness. As we move to other more sophisticated worldviews that have discovered and pointed at emptiness, we gain much more subtle and sophisticated perspectives on the ineffable. The materialistic and objectivist bent of our worldview tends to make it thick and clumsy at indicating emptiness. However, we can stand amazed that it indicates it at all because there is no indication within the worldview of any knowledge of emptiness. The Western worldview inside has remained blind to emptiness. The one example that is sometimes given as an indication that emptiness is known within the Western tradition is the Cloud of Unknowing. But there is very little evidence of any sustained exploration of the possibility of indicating emptiness within our worldview. Yet in spite of this, the worldview can be seen to indicate emptiness, and thus provides from its center an escape route into more subtle and sophisticated worldviews that consciously indicate emptiness as a significant part of their tradition. One might say that the indication of emptiness within a worldview is the consciousness of that worldview of itself. Emptiness represents the limits of any given worldview. It is that which is completely uncapturable by that worldview but which, in spite of that, suffuses it. A worldview is like a net. The more sophisticated the worldview, the finer the net. Emptiness is what moves through the net without being detected. Ultimately, one might say that it is the holes in the net of the worldview. A worldview that consciously represents emptiness is aware of its own limitations. It is aware of the non-conceptual and non-experiential aspects of existence that permeates everything within the worldview. This awareness of what goes beyond the worldview from within the worldview is its consciousness of itself and constitutes wisdom. The Western worldview lacks all wisdom because it is deeply ignorant of its own limits. It is due to this ignorance of its limits that it attempts to impose itself on all other worldviews attempting to become the measure of all things. That deep ignorance of itself is the source of the destructiveness and the atrocities that are blindly perpetrated by the humans engulfed by the Western worldview. In this series of essays, we have attempted to admit that we are those destructive ones in order to move beyond our history of destruction in order to embrace emptiness and thus allow our worldview to become conscious of its own limits. The whole project of escaping from the Western worldview is an attempt to dive deep in order to become aware of those limits and how the limits of our worldview interface with the limits of other worldviews that are more aware of their limits. In particular, we are interested in the relation of the Western worldview to the Buddhist, Chinese and Islamic worldviews.
The minimal emptiness we discover at the center of the Western worldview, which we have brought to our awareness and attempted to indicate, is the door to other worldviews that are conscious of their own limits. By indicating this minimal emptiness, we hope to make our own worldview conscious of its limits. And we hope to draw upon the resources of other aware worldviews to make our own worldview more aware and give it a more sophisticated view of its own limits. Hopefully, by becoming more aware of its own-most limits, it will cease to think it is the only measure of everything in all the worlds which is the cause of much of its blind destructiveness and intolerance. However, by unearthing the emptiness at the center of the Western worldview, we have done more than merely provide a bridge to other self-aware worldviews and hopefully transformed the Western worldview into a self-aware worldview. But we have also opened up a portal through which meanings and incipient intentions may arise directly out of emptiness in a way that is not repressed. The blindness of the Western worldview to its own limits causes repression of primary impulses that arise spontaneously out of the emptiness. By locating the empty heart of the worldview, the repression of these impulses are perhaps for the first time cleared away. Non-dual action, perception, and thought are based on these incipient intentions or tendencies and meanings arising from nowhere. Therefore, the freedom of spontaneous non-dual perception, thought and action is actualized within the Western worldview through the recognition of its empty center.
Previously we spoke of the four social science disciplines -- Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Dialectics and Structuralism. Each of these disciplines depend on distancing in order to objectivize its subject matter. We contrasted this to Heuristic Research that identified wholly with its subject matter and rejected distancing. From the first we have identified with the destructiveness of the Western worldview and attempted to go deep within it to understand it and to find an exit from it from within. This approach of identification with our subject, in this case the Western worldview, has paid off because we did indeed find an escape, a bridge through emptiness to other self-aware worldviews. Now however, we can go back and reappropriate the disciplines of distancing and realize that each one of them is oriented to something that emerges from the empty center of the worldview. We mentioned meaning and tendencies before but these are not the only things that can be seen to emerge. There are also distinctions and natural complexes. Hermeneutics deals with the significances of texts via the operation of the hermeneutic circle. But when we realize that the hermeneutic circle is empty, we suddenly unblock that empty center to allow meanings to pour in from that emptiness. Phenomenology attempts to look at the immanent structures of consciousness. We have tried to explore the roots of social phenomenology and show that the layers of Being allow us to solve the problems of subjectivist phenomenology. In that we discover the spontaneous arising of tendencies at the level of Wild Being to be the source of actions. Realizing that there is at the center of the social an emptiness that lets these tendencies arise spontaneously opens up a world denies social and subjective repression. We have seen that there are different truths for each meta-level of Being. The most superficial kind of truth is verification. Then there is Aletheia, the truth of manifestation. Then there is the truth of the individual unconscious, and finally the truth of the collective unconscious. It is the collective unconscious that provides the sources upon which social phenomenology is based. However, at the center of the this series of concentric rings of truth is emptiness out of which the tendencies of social action arise which if not repressed, if not forced to be unconscious, become the source of freedom within the world. Moving on to Structuralism, we see that discontinuities appear in the world which structuralist theories attempt to bridge. However, beneath the repression of structuralist distancing is the apprehension of non-nihilistic distinctions that arise out of emptiness and become the means for us to anchor ourselves in the world in a non-nihilistic fashion. When these non-nihilistic distinctions are suppressed then we are overwhelmed by the storms of nihilism that rage within the repressed worldview. Finally, there is dialectics with its distancing movements from part to whole and back to parts. But at the center of all things within the world there is emptiness. Arising out of that emptiness are the natural kinds and natural complexes which have inherent part-whole relations. Only if we do not repress these natural part-whole relations with artificial and blind distinctions can we see the world as it arises naturally -- as it appears outside of Plato's cave -- the cave of the world.
These four things arise from the emptiness:
They overflow into our world and inform it with the effervescence of life that makes life worth living. Their unity is called the water of life. By opening up access to the empty heart of the worldview, the possibilities of repression are thwarted in an essential way and the potential for the renewal of our dark worldview becomes clear.
The roots of our worldview go deep. When we look at the manifest structures of our worldview, we do not realize the long history that has led to these visible structures. This series of essays has attempted to explore some of these hidden roots. When we look at the worldview, we see it as a great tree that unfolds from the trunk of the kinds of Being into its myriad branches in things. We can see the tree as a snapshot that is purely present. Or if we look closer, we can see that the tree is a process that changes with the seasons and which buds and sends forth leaves which in turn wither as things come into and out of existence. So the tree manifests the alterations of Process Being. Thinking further still, we recognize that many times the tree will send forth branches exploring possibilities for receiving light, and then it will allow those branches to die in favor of other branches. These dead branches that the tree has somehow chosen to allow to wither remain in the tree as artifacts of its exploratory process. These explorations are connected to Hyper Being as the exploration of possibilities which produces the discontinuities between realized and unrealized possibilities. Finally, we realize that the branches of the tree are really a rhizome, a network in which the relation to the trunk is not nearly as important as the relation of all the branches to each other. We can start at any branch, and via the trunk we can enter and explore any other branch as they criss-cross and reconnect in myriad and sometimes surprising ways. This realization of the profusion of the branches is our entry into an appreciation of Wild Being. But when we look at the tree, we realize that the whole thing appears out of emptiness. At a certain point the tree appears out of the ground, and in the case of the worldview, the ground is ultimately groundlessness. This groundlessness ultimately resolves into emptiness when the worldview becomes self-aware. We realize that the abyss of illusions are all ultimately groundless and empty. The tree of our worldview is rooted in this emptiness. It appears full blown from it. And it is only to the extent that it is informed by the water of life that the tree of the worldview lives and gives us life. The primal scene ultimately contains our orientation toward emptiness encoded within it. To the extent we realize that emptiness -- that is the extent to which our worldview becomes capable of realizing wisdom within itself -- and that is also the extent it is able to realize the wisdom achieved by other self-aware worldviews. The moment we find the way out of our dark and dangerous worldview is the moment we no longer need to use that door because finding the door is the act of transforming our worldview from a malevolent monster into a place where wisdom may be realized. At that point, the task becomes the transformation of our worldview into a benign receptacle of the sacred from its heritage as the house of Baal, the god of covetousness. It is the window in Baal's house though which death enters; the fragmentation of Being, that allows us to take the path beyond the Void. Realizing minimal emptiness is the first step on that path.
1See The Grammar of Motives
2See The Void of To Be (U. Michigan Press, 1993)
3See Heidegger's Estrangements (New Haven: Yale U.P. 1989)
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