Metaphysics: The Great Mystery: The Known, The Unknown, and The Unknowable

Faith and Reason:

All of choice is uncertain; one can never know all the consequences resulting from one’s least action. Reason can provide only a partial basis for effective (ethical) choice. It is also necessary to make a careful, deep, and honest evaluation of the totality of one’s feelings. Reason: The use of a fullness and completeness (accuracy) of thinking as the primary basis for one’s choices. Faith: The use of a fullness and completeness (precision) of feeling as the primary basis of one’s choices. No effective choice can be made only on the basis of reason or faith alone. All natural choices involve some elements of reason and some elements of faith. These work best when used in an intimate mixture with one another, especially after validating that each can stand completely on its own without the other. To have faith in a world (universe) is to have wisdom, knowledge, peacefulness, and insight. To have faith in oneself is to have security, skill, creativity, and playfulness. To have faith is not to have certainty; it is to allow Trust. Faith and reason are not in opposition; they are mutually reflective, complementary aspects of a deeper whole. Faith is not blind; it is vision wide open. Faith is an acceptance of potentiality and creativity, rather than an ignorance of reality and actuality. To have faith is to embrace the mythic, rather than to be rejecting the factual.

The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable:

Beingness encompasses the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. No amount of any one of these three will ever diminish or replace any amount of the other two; they are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable (Axiom I). It is a fallacy of science to believe that an understanding of physical dynamics will eventually explain everything. There are aspects of being which will always remain completely mysterious. All understanding has limitations. “Perfect” consciousness (pure action or doing) and pure spirit (as perfect continuity and potentially) are inconsistent with being/actuality (symmetry). This yields that there can be no purely undivided consciousness, only the close approach of such. Some degree of unconsciousness, unawareness, unknown must always be present in order to ensure a separation of identity, individuality, and uniqueness of self. Only the set of interactions in the immanent modality can be known. The interactions between events viewed in the omniscient modality can only be hypothesized, never known. The absence of interactions between eventities in the transcendent domains can not by hypothesized or known, and are unknowable. The unknowable (the nature and meaning of The Great Mystery) is always and absolutely distinct from the merely unknown. Although it is possible to describe the basic nature of the Great Mystery, it will never be possible to ‘solve’ it, or make it any less mysterious. Mystery is infinite and unassailable. No finite knowing, wisdom, or understanding – metaphysical, scientific, mathematical, or otherwise – will ever make the absolute unknowable into the known or knowable. The true mystery of magick cannot be diminished by any understanding of it. A complete and total knowledge of physics and metaphysics (a knowledge of one world or many, or even of the basis of all worlds) does not diminish, and cannot even slightly diminish, the Great Mystery. There will always be a place in which knowledge terminates and mystery begins. To work magick (create, manifest) requires a leap of faith, a vision that goes beyond what is currently known or knowable. One cannot know, or predict, the product of even a small act of magick or creation in the same way that one can predict the outcome of a technological process using detailed scientific theory. An ability (the courage) to interact with the unknown and unknowable, the ultimately mysterious, is a prerequisite for working magic. There can be no firm or absolute line drawn between the known and the unknown. There can be drawn a fixed and absolute logical line between the unknown and the unknowable. The boundary of the unknowable is real in exactly three locations, as described below…

The Edge of Light

The Great Mystery refers to the unknowable as well as the unknown. The true mystery, the deeply mysterious is that which is inherently inexplicable but which is not therefore paradoxical (nonsense). Although elements of the Great Mystery cannot be explained or reduced to pure reason, it is that from which all reason and reasonableness itself arises. Where there is always a desire for creativity and experience (basal motivations), there are forever three Great Mysteries or avenues of exploration; the macroscopic, the microscopic, and the mesoscopic. They define the boundaries and distinctions between the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. The Mystery of the Horizon refers to the macroscopic limit of a domain, beyond which is the unknown and unknowable; that place which is so far away in time and space as to be into the absolute elsewhere. The absolute horizon, the macroscopic limit, is a hard limit that cannot ever be surpassed. Building a stronger telescope may move the boundary further away (its position), but it does nothing about the fact that the boundary remains real. Stronger telescopes will allow the scientist to see farther and know more, but no telescope will ever see everything. In addition, the farther one focuses outward, one loses information about local conditions; when shifting the macroscopic limits, the microscopic and mesoscopic boundaries are shifted as well.

The Mystery of the Infinitesimal refers to the microscopic limit of the domain; that scale at which knowledge of definite state or quality becomes impossible (Heisenberg uncertainty limits). While the macroscopic limit is one of position (distance and measurement), and the mesoscopic limit (of a self) is defined by direction (it establishes the zero), the microscopic limit is one of scale. The microscopic limit is a hard physical limit, for both practical and theoretic reasons (reasons of principle). Regardless of how technically advanced our equipment, no microscope will ever be able to ‘see’ down to the ‘scale’ of absolute zero (an identity of nothing).

The Mystery of the Subconscious refers to a mesoscopic limit; one’s knowledge of one’s own inner nature. This last limit, in contrast to the more objective nature of the other two mysteries, refers to the subjective nature of knowing itself (the boundary where inward consciousness transitions into the subconscious or unconscious or super-consciousness). It is the mystery of interaction. It is the mystery of the subjective, the subconscious; the essential nature of one’s own mind and personal being. Built into the dynamics of knowing – by the knower and of the known – are certain hard limits. The concept of knowing cannot ever by fully applied to the concept of the knower. For example, light, as an instrument of measurement, cannot use light to see. In practice, light is transparent to itself and rays passing through the same space do not interact. Similarly, measurement cannot measure itself; measurement cannot measure measurement.

Mystery in the world is not a feature of the world. Anything that can be pointed to and described objectively will be at most something that elicits mystery, it will not (and cannot) be the mystery. The unknowable, Mystery (awe) does not have or admit measure, degree, quantity, or value. Mystery cannot be regarded as finite.

Mystery is neither conserved nor diminished by any degree of knowing, understanding, reason, or science. While knowing can affect the unknown, it cannot affect the unknowable. The quality of the mysterious (that which is awe inspiring) in the universe is unchanged regardless of one’s degree of knowing (or unknowing) of the dynamics of worldly causality.

The Edge of Night

Irreducible Uncertainty: No amount of communication or interaction (familiarity) in any domain or world will ever allow one to predict with certainty what will be said next, what will happen next. Communication, self, and magick, are emergent. There are always some aspects of the content of these which are indeterminable and surprising. The process of learning (and the process of evolution, life, conversation, magick) is as dependent on forgetting as it is on remembering. One has to ‘remember’ and build upon past memories for learning, and yet, one must also ‘forget’ the myriad details and ‘fine choices’ required for each action, to become free (to make sue of the learning that one has gained). The limitation of habitual action at one level of being is a freedom of unconstrained action in other levels of being. Habituation and unconsciousness are as important and valued to self as is the immediacy of awareness and consciousness. In habituation, the choices that are made become automatic (and stay made) so that one does not have to keep ‘re-choosing’ the same details over and over again. (Like riding a bike.) In entering into a world, one must involve some degree of forgetfulness on the part of the transcendent self, in direct proportion to how much immersion, interaction, and intensity of the world entered into. Example: One may forget what came before birth, and may not know the every intimate thought that occurs in all of the people that one knows in one’s life. This allows space for a focus of attention in one’s own thoughts, one’s own life, now as it is. Self choices ‘to forget’ all that one can be, to be all that one is.

The Veil

The Veil of Secrecy: The omniscient cannot ever contain, or view/observe, the transcendent. In that the process of knowing is itself immanent, one cannot directly know the transcendent from within the perspective of the omniscient. It can only be that transcendent can perceive/know the omniscient, never the reverse.

Example: Science will not ever be able to know and perceive magick, creation, and choice, although these subjects can themselves view science.

The Veil of Secrecy that separates one from the memories one’s past lives, also separates one probable reality from another, and one word, and one world, from another. In Life, there is a Veil of Secrecy between the self, the soul, and the world. It is necessary invisibility, a difficulty of the knowing necessary to being. Oneself is never another; in each self is a unique identity of being. In Death (a necessary separation between self and world, a non-interaction of being), is created potentiality, creation, the creation of new selves, new lives. Note: The interaction between self and world can be viewed as a type of conversation. A conversation depends on not-listening and not-knowing as much as it does on listening and knowing. Otherwise, a confusion of all conversations in all worlds throughout all of time would result. A selectivity of listening, to her one expression, at one point, in one time, out of all of possible being, is necessary and intrinsic to the very actuality of attentiveness. Silence, secrecy, and death (the Veil) are as necessary to being as interaction, openness, and life. Only from the unknown can one realize true potentiality and creation. The Veil of Secrecy is that which separates the unseen light that crosses before us, from the light that enters into us, into the eyes, and is thus seen. The Veil of Secrecy is the realized symbol of Night and Day, the very life dynamics of/on the Earth. The boundary of Death and the Veil is between lives. As with all boundaries, it is semi-permeable with sufficient energy. The development of significant potentiality (energy) within one life allows for greater degrees of ‘quantum tunneling’ between one life and others. In this way, with enlightenment (having more energy, potentiality, and clarity in/within one’s self and in/with life) comes greater knowing of the qualities (events) of adjacent lives in space (empathy and telepathy), time (reincarnation, past lives), and possibility (alternate personal choices and world histories).

© RB Breighton Dawe, Kathleen Dawe, Forrest Laundry and Stone Circle Alternatives