Metaphysical Potential, part II

In discussing the concept of metaphysical potential, its importance in the scheme of human experience and inner development can't be overstated.

This morning, my wife was trying to understand the concept. In order to grasp its implications, we had to begin with a discussion of the behavior of photons at the quantum level, where they behave as both waves and particles. This curious phenomenon has been known since the early days of quantum studies, and I remember my grandfather — one of the founders of quantum theory — explaining it to me when I was a child.

Quantum theory is all about metaphysical potential. The wave/particle duality is a direct reflection of the nature of physical reality as it is constructed. 

Put in the terms of metaphysical humanism, waves are spiritual, and particles are natural. Reality (Meister Eckhart’s Creation, which means, basically, everything that is or could be, all that we are capable of knowing or understanding) is a blend of both of these qualities; and human beings are equally the same blend of both things. 

The fact that we are made of quanta, each and everyone of which embodies this duality as a present fact in the very act of existing in the first place, demonstrates the way that both the spiritual and the natural interact within Being at every moment. 

In every instant, all of Being has a freedom to determine of itself the nature of its manifestation: spiritual or natural. Metaphysical or physical. These qualities are not contradictory; and their expression is never separated. (Remember that one can never properly express the spiritual simply by the crudely simplistic approach of rejecting the natural.) Yet an act of conscious choice is necessary in order to resolve the nature of the moment. It may be spiritual; it may be natural. Perhaps it's a blend of both. But if I am passive and simply inhabit a preconceived construct of Being, the decision is made not consciously but, as Gurdjieff said, mechanically.

So what I want to discuss this morning is the idea of freedom in relationship to metaphysical potential. 

Metaphysical potential establishes the rule that all metaphysical properties of human consciousness are embedded in the fabric of reality of itself. 

 It also establishes an inviolable rule that a freedom of choice always exists in the instant before reality manifests. It's a cosmological law.

The metaphysical potential of the present moment, as well as all moments, rests in the state of perfect stillness and nothingness which contains all possibilities; it is only in the arrival of consciousness that a determination regarding that potential is made. The Free Will Theorem demonstrates a potential in every situation and in every instant that is free – it is not determined by what came before.

It is in no way overstatement to remark that Jeanne de Salzmann’s personal notebooks about her lifelong inner effort (currently published in a highly edited form as The Reality of Being) are a record of her effort to come into contact with this shared metaphysical potential. 

To come into contact with the instant before anything exists, where inner freedom is still present. 

Every single remark that she makes about freedom—and there are quite a few of them, because this was a very large part of her own personal aim—is in direct relationship to the question of what happens before time, in this inherent freedom from cause-and-effect. Our assumptions, our habits, our association and our experience draw a set of blinds down between us and an initial state of experience that still contains the freedom expressed in the quantum fabric. She speaks of this repeatedly in many different ways.

In the same way, every one of Meister Eckhart’s sermons comes in one way or another to grips with the question of metaphysical potential, which, as he also repeatedly says, must always be invoked by stripping us of everything we are. (Eckhart and de Salzmann have much in common.) If we read Eckhart closely and often – a necessity, since his insight is of a much higher order than our own—it's only in a complete abandonment, paradoxically, of both the spiritual and the natural state that we can reach our metaphysical potential, which is embedded not in our own thought, but in the very thought of God itself. This paradoxical abandonment of even the spiritual itself—something it is quite likely did not please the Catholic Church at all—lies simply in the fact that even our conception of the spiritual is already of the natural. 

Insidious, that; and yet we must ultimately come to terms with the facts: we are wrong even about the things we have right. 

There is nothing ridiculous about the idea that we are capable of inhabiting this place: spiritual masters of one kind or another have spoken about it for millennia. Each one of them, however, brought their own intuition as fractured by their own psyche. We all suffer from this deficiency.

Some of our modern insights into the natural world, especially the world of quantum physics, have finally provided questions that speak more clearly to the exact nature of this freedom and what it consists of. 

Metaphysical potential is the key concept in exploring this from a practical point of view; and it restores our responsibilities as conscious beings to engage with nature in a radical act of unknowing, which is a profoundly spiritual and metaphysical — not natural and material — action.

 So we can fairly say that the game has changed; it is just up to us to recognize it.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.