In some recent work of poetry, I’ve expressed the idea, that the only person truly alive, is me. I get the feeling, that those who read my works and come across this idea, think it’s a symptom of what they called ‘autism’.
Anxious to make mincemeat of that suspicion, and more than ever convinced that I am right, I will set out the metaphysical theory, which justifies my belief, that I am alone alive and at the centre of everything which can and does happen in the world.
For a start, I can allude to my precursors in the history of philosophy; some have said something similar to me, but in the interests of time, I’ll get straight to the point.
We think about the problem of what is really real, what is unquestionably real and existing, as follows: to our way of looking at the world, there are two distinct areas in which life plays itself out for us. First, on the one hand, mind; and, then, on the other hand, matter. These are considered opposites, but you can’t choose one as your chosen characterisation of life and reality, because it always entails or implies the other.
Nevertheless, scientists do choose. They consider ‘the mind’ to be an epiphenomenon of ‘matter’. They speak of the ‘mind’, as an effect of matter. They say that the perception of matter is something which takes place in the mind. So it is that these two separate worlds come together, according to academic science.
So, they have split the world up in to two realms. Two realms, two substances, isn’t anywhere good enough for me. As an explanation of reality, conjuring with two realities is just lazy. I can’t accept two worlds, simultaneously existing: material world and mental brain. So, neither of them is real.
Next, I posit that there is only one substance. That substance has both what they call mind, and also matter. But it is neither, of course; since the concepts of matter and mind are redundant now. You can’t say: all matter is an effect of the mind’s perception. Or, external reality has secondary and primary qualities, and the secondary ones exist only in the mind (as Locke said).
No, rather, the substantial basis for reality is broadly speaking ‘me’. It includes all perception, all ideas, and everything that has ever happened. You would be right to ask, how can you contain everything that has ever happened? The answer to this question is simple. Even for scientific people, a human being is the result of all his surrounding conditions and the pre-existing history of the entire world.
But talking about ‘me’ is ridiculously limited in some instances. As just described, this ‘me’ is the result of world history – and not its centre and ground. And, often I am asleep; often I am stupid and uniformed. A stupid sleepy being can’t be the centre of all reality. I therefore don’t want to mean ‘me’. I mean, something more like the human soul. As a creation of God.
For I do bring God, the creator into my metaphysics. The only thing which exists outside of me, is God. But even God does not need to exist outside of me; for, I consider that God, the creator of the substance, the creator of the one single existing real thing, is himself, in part, myself. In other words, when I say ‘me’, I mean me as the substance which is a part of, or a reflection of, God.
God, or substance, contains all ideas, all perceptions, all events, all the world. When it comes to an individual substance, such as I intimately know every day myself to be, everything is kind of contingent. I die, I change. But in God I do not die; and in God all change is eternally present.
In fact, if we consider that a certain form of me is the one unique unified substance, the only existing thing, then it would be impossible for that thing to die or change, really. What is at the basis of all things, and what was created by God, cannot die. It can only be annihilated. It is the same when physicists speak of the universe: it cannot have had a start, and cannot end, because it is unthinkable that it never existed in the first place.
So, my autistic vision of what reality and substance are, is dependent on the notion of God. And God is the only thing outside of ‘me’. God is the Being of being. And being, substance, has characteristics of mind and matter together. In a certain type of way of looking at yourself, you are the absolute ground of all existence; you are the one substance outside of which is only God.
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Now, it was Leibniz who also proposed this metaphysics. It has attractive features as follows: firstly, it is experimentally verifiable; and second, it has a logical proof, and is what mathematicians describe as ‘elegant’. There is only one substance; not many, or two, but just one – and no other substance need ever be required, in order to explain reality.
People will say to me: but the external world happens after you’ve died; or, they will say: the world is real - its simply out there. But I deny that this is something you can prove. You can’t prove the world is separate from you, for the proof involves you. And if by hearsay, I am given to understand that life is happening to other people, too, then I reply that I only know this by hearsay, but not directly. There is only one life with which I have ever had any experience; it is mine, and it seems to continue indefinitely with me as its ground.
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There are other advantages to this metaphysics. It leads the one who thinks about it necessarily to become a Christian. For, it proposes that God gives himself to man, and shares himself with man, as the Son of God.
Equally important, the understanding of reality as a field, in which only subjectivity is considered to be truly existing substance, leads the philosopher to try to become more Godlike. To achieve this, he must purify what we call ‘consciousness’, or ‘the mind’. To achieve this, there are known methods, namely the silent prayer. The prayer is not taught as part of Christian theology for any other reason than this: the subjective soul or mind, or being, or substance, is a unity, and with a method of unifying and concentrating it, I propose that you can make the substance more single and Godlike.
This is how it becomes possible to no longer say ‘I’ am the centre of all being, but to say rather, that having been divested of my personal concerns and pride, having got rid of my personal desire and ambition, I have become selfless. And therefore, I don’t exist. Therefore, having been purified, there is now pure Being where ‘I’ used to be. The being of worlds. When I present this theory, I do offer it for your consideration, as the core doctrine of the Church, the message of St Paul, and also the key to the healing and salvation offered by Christ.
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I should examine the main problem which this metaphysics raises: what about other people? Yes, what about them? Firstly, other people are not actual people. Given that they exist in some sense, they are each of them ‘the being of worlds’. They are not other people, they are eternal souls who exist as the Being of Worlds. They are like me, so to speak, and they are each an entire universe all to themselves.
So, how does it appear, that other people exist, when they are not the same as me, and when there is only one unique substance in this world of mine? And how is it possible for these utterly separate, isolated, unique worlds – each lamb as it were, entirely loved by God above all others – to also exist, if I alone exist? The answer is this: by virtue of God, who co-ordinates and sustains the separate substances.
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What also attracts me to this metaphysics, in addition to the way it presents itself to me as self-evident, is this. Leibniz (1646-1716) also espoused the same metaphysics. He co-discovered the calculus with Sir Isaac Newton. He is said to be the last man of history to have known everything it is possible to know. He expounded his metaphysical scheme early and late in life, in the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), and the Monadology (1714). It was his philosophy. It is, as it were, the origin of German philosophy, and the product of Europe’s finest mind.
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I have one final remark to make, about the problems which physics or ‘science’ faces in our time. After a near century of avoiding German metaphysics, in favour of the Anglo-Saxon school of philosophy, it is probably time for scientists to start reading German again. I once wrote on this, in a book published about Heidegger in 2007, and I have struggled with his works for a good decade in my life. But I think of his work now, as not much more than a tangled and overwrought expression of the same idea I express here in such simple terms, appropriate to it.
There are two great scientific or physical discoveries of unquestioned applicability and truth to nature. Quantum Mechanics, and the equations of General Relativity. These two sets of mathematical explanations of the world have never been reconciled. As we know, I consider the physical world to be a part of the one substance. It is no coincidence to me, therefore, that belonging to both of these unreconciled mathematical schemes of the physical world, there is a common feature: the observer; and that the observer at the extremes can see some pretty weird subjective things taking place in ‘material things’.
Both in Quantum Mechanics, and in the General Relativity, the observer determines how reality shall appear. The activity of electromagnetic things is determined by what the observer, or what I call, the substance, is doing. And, likewise, at the large scale, the physical universe’s shape depends on the substance or the observer relative to time and space and mass.
But it is my suggestion that the nature of reality is the substance of the observer himself. And that not only Electromagnetic effects, and large scale physical effects are determined by the observing subject; but that the entire universe is so.
But the works of scientists are mere hobbies and techniques, compared to the great truth that, even if there were trillions of physical universes, the pure human soul would be at their basis, and without that, there would be nothing at all.