Introduction to The Metaphysical Compass
A Tool for Navigating Through Complicated Times
Old and New. The landscape of human beliefs has become more complex and confusing, and we may often feel lost. Discovering what we believe now demands more thought and time.
The world has become too complicated.
Technology has changed the landscape of human beliefs. It has served both to educate and to confuse us. We now have more knowledge to digest, more concepts to grasp, more worldviews to evaluate. Knowledge has progressively become globalized.
The invention of the printing press was a key milestone for the globalization of knowledge, and modern computing has exponentially accelerated this process.
A few centuries ago a person had to decide if they believed what was handed down to them or if they rejected it (e.g., are you a believer or an atheist?). Maybe they also decided that a particular denomination was somewhat better than the others (e.g., Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant Christianity? Theravada, Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhism? Shia or Sunni Islam?). More often than not, they might not even have been aware of all the different denominations of their own religion. Maybe they did not need to.
However, never in the past had an individual access to all of humanity´s worldviews and deepest beliefs. Neither did they have to analyze and decide which, if any, incompatible set of doctrines they followed and believed in.
Even just a few decades ago, without the existence of the internet and worldwide information sharing, most people continued living the life of their ancestors. They, with greater or lesser faith depending on the individual, mostly followed the set of beliefs handed down to them by their family and community. They may have argued about some aspects of their faiths (when has mankind not argued?), but the basic framework of a specific society´s beliefs was mostly fixed. This, in turn, allowed for greater behaviour predictability, societal stability and just an overall greater cohesion than we have now.
The Big Consequences of Small Variations in Beliefs
The consequences of small changes in abstract beliefs do not limit themselves to the realm of the mind, but also affect common everyday life.
Is God an impersonal force or a Person Who we can have a personal relationship with? Each view has different implications on how we should live. This difference in behaviour, in turn, will lead to the creation of different types of communities with different behavioural patterns. In time, the traditions and symbolism used and propagated by each community will be radically different from each other based on their original assumptions and beliefs regarding Who, or What, God is.
If God is a blind Force (e.g., Deism) instead of a Person who possesses a will, morality, etc., then we are justified in living in a certain way. However, if He is a pre-existing Person who became incarnated in human form, and in fact we are made in His image (as Christian theology teaches), the implications and what is expected of us are very different.
Let´s see another example. In worldviews where it is believed that we are all eventually one with God or ultimate reality (e.g., Panentheism), we might become “liberated” or facilitate our own ascension (Self-Deification) by means of the application of the correct knowledge and the correct practice. In most Far Eastern worldviews this is believed to be possible because, in fact, we are and always have been one with ultimate reality itself, each one of us being a particular manifestation of the Ultimate of which we are not yet aware. In other worldviews, such as Christianity, even though we are an important part of the process of salvation and we are expected to put effort towards it, we need God to collaborate with us in a synergistic fashion, because we alone are not enough. This, in turn, puts emphasis on humility and reliance on God, as well as on God´s transcendental aspect. The overall picture is quite different.
Two further classic examples follow. The first: is existence linear or cyclical? Cyclical time doctrines state that there is an unavoidable succession of differentiated periods of time or ages, each successive one more ignorant and morally corrupt than the last, until a restoration takes place. One of the possible consequences of sharing this belief is that we might be tempted to stop trying to make the world a better place. It could even be argued that promoting degeneracy is instead a better thing to do in order to hasten the reappearance of a better age. If we have to fall to rise again we might as well do it sooner than later.
The second example involves the Indian doctrine of liberation (e.g., Buddhism, Hinduism). If liberation, for the majority of people, is gained after a multitude of lifetimes, we might be drawn to wait for better conditions to work on our liberation. We could devote this life to just acquiring merit by doing good deeds that would be “cashed out” in the next, not struggling to acquire wisdom or insight. However, if this is really the only life we get, we would be making the biggest possible mistake, with consequences beyond life and death, since we would not be getting another opportunity to further our spiritual progress.
Let´s see a last example. What do you believe to be the origin of evil? Is it related to matter and the “density” of the lower and unspiritual planes of reality? Is it due to ignorance? Maybe sin? The first cause is external to us as individuals, while the second is based on a cognitive deficiency and the third on our own wilful rebellion, made possible by the Fall of the original human person and archetype, Adam. Our belief in this matter has radical implications for the way we see the world, ourselves and others, with different attitudes deriving from it.
Certain beliefs regarding this topic may even have created historically contradictory ways of acting. For example, in worldviews were matter is viewed as intrinsically evil (e.g., Gnosticism), the aim is to detach yourself completely from the world (not only from the passions or bad aspects of life, but also from the apparently good ones) while focusing on obtaining the right intellectual and ceremonial knowledge in order to be able to escape from this life, conceptualized as a prison for the soul. You might want to purify yourself completely of everything material, including sexual relations with a spouse. However, in other worldviews (e.g., Christianity), where creation was initially deemed good by God, marital sex is thought as wholesome and without fault.
Figure 1. Examples of faulty thinking. When evaluating our beliefs, we want them to be logically sound and coherent in order to avoid self-assertions and self-refuting arguments (e.g., everything is relative). Other beliefs may be able to justify radically opposite behaviours, therefore becoming useless to guide us in life.
This idea that matter is intrinsically evil, however, can also justify the opposite behaviour. If this world of matter is conceived as being originally bad, you would be justified not only in retreating ascetically from it, but also in abusing it. This could be done to obtain a feeling of saturation, detachment and freedom from matter and desire (e.g., the Phibionite gnostic sect and left hand paths of certain tantric and esoteric traditions, even though the later may consider matter illusory altogether). You may even be theoretically justified in defiling nature or your own body, since you would consider matter as intrinsically evil and only soul or spirit as worth saving once liberated from this fleshly prison.
If ignorance is the root of evil, in turn, you should value knowledge above all else. This involves only the cognitive aspect of a person. Striving for relative purity might be of help, but if the solution is mostly cognitive, the moral and behavioural aspects of the person are not emphasized. Hence, we could conceive of someone who has attained great power because they possess great knowledge that allows them to tap into primordial forces, but wields it for egotistical purposes (e.g., similar to some modern views on magic, which include white and black magicians).
However, if sin is the problem, repentance is key in order to turn in the right direction and stop “missing the mark” (which is the original meaning of the word sin). This would involve, especially, the willing and behavioural aspects of the person, in addition to knowledge. This view considers the person as a whole.
Finally, we may take a materialist approach and think that existence has no ultimate meaning and that everything sprouted from a statistically improbable fluctuation of the forces of the Universe, which we do not know where they come from 1,2. In this case, the concept of evil might not even make sense to us. “Evil” could then be a somewhat useful relative human construction, variable in time and dependent on the social and cultural context.
In this last scenario, we could argue that we are justified in doing everything that gives us satisfaction and saves us from pain, however “evil” it might seem to others. This would be so because the concept of evil itself would be relative for us and, therefore, there would be no ultimate truth or standard of behaviour that we have to abide by.
In summary, our beliefs in particular metaphysical concepts can have drastic consequences in our outlook on life and how we plan the way we live. It can even affect how we evaluate others and what we feel for them.
Metaphysically Neutral Behaviour Does Not Exist
So, we have seen that beliefs are not vague abstractions with no contact with reality. They have very real and tangible consequences in our lives.
Our actions may even be judged by others depending on their underlying presuppositions on how the world works and what reality and life really are. The same action may be labelled as murder or morally neutral (even morally good) by reading it through a different worldview or metaphysical lens (e.g., abortion of a baby conceived by rape).
This underscores the fact that metaphysical neutrality does not exist, and even atheists or agnostics are incapable of acting in a metaphysically neutral way 3. We all carry our own metaphysical presuppositions on how reality works, who or what we are and what the ultimate truth is, even if we are not consciously aware of them.
We often feel very attached to our own values and feel that they define us (e.g., pro-life or pro-abortion), but we are not always aware of the metaphysical principles and presuppositions that are at their core, or where do they come from.
1. “What men call chance is simply their ignorance of causes; if the statement that something had happened by chance were to mean that it had no cause, it would be a contradiction in terms.
― René Guénon (1927). The Crisis of the Modern World. Ch. VI: The Social Chaos
2. “[Modern scientific] theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory.”
― René Guénon (1945). The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Ch. 18: Scientific Mythology and Popularization
3. “In short, the majority of men “without religion” still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies, There is nothing surprising in this, for, as we saw, profane man is the descendant of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history—that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today.”
― Mircea Eliade (1957). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Ch. IV: Human Existence and Sanctified Life
Did we evaluate them personally? Do we know the alternatives? Or did we just accept a set of principles as part of our cultural heritage? Maybe we were unconsciously influenced by mass media? Have we just internalized a set of values transmitted by our school? In that case, the values transmitted may be different in different places, times, or in institutions under different political regimes.
Given the importance of our core beliefs and presuppositions in how they shape our lives and even our connection with others, and the fact that they are rarely obvious (we usually have to dig deep to find them in us), it would be ill advised to not go on a journey of self-discovery and let them go unchallenged, influencing us from the shadows.
It would also be unwise to adopt an indifferent attitude towards our core beliefs and just follow the easy but dangerous path of being a follower of whatever trends are being put forth by the media (the fourth power) and whatever the educational institutions of the time (a part of the ruling state) promote.
Recapitulating, different sets of beliefs imply different approaches to how we live our lives and promote radically different behaviours. Most of the time, however, we are not even aware of what our core metaphysical presuppositions are. Especially when we are young and finding or ground in life, our core beliefs might come from cultural osmosis.
A Battle Between Conflicting Worldviews Being
Waged
in Our Minds
Now, going back to the complexity of our times, we do not only have to decide if we think a particular denomination has the fullness of the truth (e.g., Orthodox , Catholic or Protestant Christianity? Shia or Sunni Islam? Theravada or Mahayana Buddhism?). We also have to evaluate which faith, if any, is closer to the truth, and the correct path for us to follow. Is it one of the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) or is it perhaps one of the Dharmic ones? (Buddhism, a specific variety of Hinduism, Jainism or Sikhism).
Furthermore, is the truth found in the exoteric religions that everyone knows, or only in the esoteric schools that are part of these religions? (e.g., Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism, while Sufism is the one derived from Islam).
Is the truth revealed to the initiates of these different mystical traditions the same? Maybe the truth was lost to time and all we can do is to get as close as possible by distilling the common denominator found in all these esoteric traditions while abandoning any particularity as something superfluous? (Perennialism).
This is a complex issue. In order to make sense of all of this, some people even create their own personal metaphysical system by mixing different beliefs that seem right to them in an incoherent and syncretistic 4 way that has no historical roots (e.g., New Age, Wicca).
Moreover, we now even have to decide which individual doctrines we believe in! Do we believe in a cyclical cosmology or in a linear one? What about reincarnation and past lives? Is God an absolute Monad (unity) or can He/It include multiplicity in Himself because He transcends the concept of number, which He created? Are we aware of the consequences of each different belief and how it sheds light on how we should live?
Influenced by modern philosophy 5,6, we can go even further and ask ourselves, does Truth even exist? Can it even exist in principle? (e.g., Subjectivism). Are post-modern philosophers right? Is truth a construct? What path should we follow, then? Is Nietzsche´s will to power a worthy ideal to follow that will liberate us from both old gods and Nihilism? 7 Or maybe we should embrace selfishness, which is a virtue and nothing to be ashamed of, as Ayn Rand 8 proposed?
This is a lot of work! Do we even have to complicate our lives by thinking on these things? Maybe we can live in a hedonistic way, looking only after pleasure and avoiding pain (e.g., Epicureanism 9 ), or just adopt a Stoic attitude against “fate”, trying not to fall into Cynicism.
Or maybe it´s better if we just forget about all this pretentious nonsense that comes from minds with too much available free time. We could then put our faith in the technical knowledge of a gifted few, while we keep pushing technology forward until we can upload our consciousness onto a more enduring non-biological substrate.
4. “[…] if he then should wish to perform rites belonging to many different forms, claiming to use them concurrently as means and ‘supports’ of his spiritual development, he will not really be able to combine them except ‘from the outside’, which amounts to saying that what he accomplishes will be nothing else than syncretism, which consists precisely in this kind of mingling of disparate elements that nothing really unifies.
[…] This situation is similar to that of someone who, hoping to secure his health the more effectively, makes use at one and the same time of many different medicines the effects of which neutralize and destroy each other […]”
― René Guénon (1946). Perspectives on Initiation
5. “Indeed, in many cases, discussion can be carried on indefinitely without arriving at any solution, which is the reason why almost all modern philosophy is built up on quibbles and badly-framed questions. Far from clearing up these questions, as it is commonly supposed to do, discussion usually only entangles or obscures them still further”
― René Guénon (1927). The Crisis of the Modern World. Ch. V: Individualism
6. […]“the contentions of philosophers are often much more justifiable when they are arguing against other philosophers than when they pass on to expound their own views, and as each one generally sees fairly clearly the defects of the others, they more or less destroy one another mutually.”
― René Guénon (1945). The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times. Ch. 14: Mechanism and Materialism
7. “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche (1960). The Will to Power. Vintage Books, p. 550
8. “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”
― Ayn Rand, “Introducing Objectivism”, The Objectivist Newsletter
We could thus escape into a substrate-independent existence which would grant us something similar to an immanent “immortality”, a continuous existence in this Universe. However, Functionalism must be true for this to be a possibility, and we would have to gamble on it. This is what the “religious” or metaphysical side of Transhumanism is looking for 10, as a modern version of Gnosticism resurrected in the language of the twenty-first century.
In summary, things are now more complex. They were never easy, but there was a time when a person could know much about a lot of things.
Now it is difficult to be an expert in even one small aspect of reality, especially regarding the biggest questions of life, as there is metaphysical, philosophical, theological and scientific knowledge required to tackle the deeper questions of spirituality and meaning in our lives.
Never previously in history has humanity been confronted with so much metaphysical information and possibilities on what to believe, how to behave, and what to pursue as the aim of their life. However, never previously in history has humanity had at its disposal so many resources for learning and discussing these topics.
The Metaphysical Compass: A Tool to Help You Navigate this Complex Conceptual Landscape
The Metaphysical Compass is now born as another tool in the digital age that you can use to try to find your way in this exceedingly complex landscape of beliefs, doctrines and symbols that we are faced with. Information overload and cognitive complexity is a unique battle that the digital generations will have to face, and we will need different tools to navigate ourselves in this sometimes obscure and serpentine path.
If you use this tool you will be confronted with your own self, with your own core beliefs and presuppositions that you probably did not know you had. Why do you believe what you do? Are you even aware of what you believe deep down? Do you behave like you do because of some pre-supposition on how reality works?
You will also learn of the alternatives, and about the beliefs other people nowadays and throughout history have lived and died for.
Finally, you will discover that it seems the modern world is trying to push us towards certain worldviews and apart from others. You will be asked if you think this is for our own good or does not have our best interests in mind.
In the past, life may have been more physically demanding, but in general it had meaning. Today, it is common to feel lost or unsure about our beliefs and embrace different worldviews in different periods of our life. We suffer from metaphysical anxiety, we could say, and it is not going away.
Pandora´s box has already been opened and the excessive amounts of information about conflicting worldviews, what to believe, and how to live our lives has sowed doubts and restlesness in vast amounts of people.
Therefore, The Metaphysical Compass exists as an invitation to enjoy ourselves while navigating and discovering additional layers of meaning in the tumultuous waters of this complex world. A world filled with ancient symbols, deep concepts and different visions of the beyond.
Maybe you will find new meaning. Maybe your current worldview and beliefs will become more solid. But nevertheless, hopefully you will end up knowing more about yourself and the world, about why you believe what you do, and about the different answers provided throughout time to the most fundamental questions of all.
Journeys of self-discovery are seldom easy, since they involve moving away from our comfort zone, but they are always fulfilling and full of meaning.
9. “Don’t fear the gods; Don’t worry about death; What is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure.”
― Epicurus. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Hackett Publishing, p. VI
10. “Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be “achieved through science and technology steered by human values.”
― Ray Kurzweil (2005). The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin Books, p. 548
Recommended Reading
- Nihilism: the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. Hieromonk Seraphim Rose.
- The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times. René Guénon.
- The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Mircea Eliade.
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Symbolic Patterns in Popular Culture
What is a symbol? Why are certain symbols and motifs so prevalent in popular culture? Where do they come from and what is their meaning?
