Layers & Levels Chapter 10

The Neoplatonic Tripartite Cosmos

I have recently stumbled upon the work of Wolfgang Smith, a distinguished Professor who graduated from Cornell with three degrees at the age of eighteen, about sixty years ago. He has been quietly revolutionizing philosophy, as it appears many have been doing far from mainstream recognition, first by debunking the core tenets of materialism, and then by rediscovering the Platonic view which can be expressed as a dot in the middle of a circle drawn around the periphery and a line connecting that dot in the middle with a similar dot on the circumference. (!)

To draw this image correctly, IMO there should be no dark area outside the circumference, only between it and the centre. I shall try to make one later.

Before reading further, I highly recommend first reading this article, one of several on his site: https://philos-sophia.org/cosmic-measurable-time/ Then, if you like them, his latest and very short book sums up a productive life’s work with great simplicity and depth: Physics, A Science in Quest of an Ontology available in hardback, paper and on Kindle.

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Now, assuming you have read the article (!) or watched one or more of many interviews with him on Youtube, we can make some remarks about it tying it in with some of the previous Layers and Levels list, first among which, as I mentioned in a recent chapter, can be regarded the Body, Speech and Mind trinity or triad. In the context of this series, it is also the notion of Mandala which literally means something like a zone or sphere with a centre and fringe and something in between – again a unitary triad in principle. There are your three levels, though one can subdivide or interpenetrate ad infinitum. The father’s mandala inside the marriage mandala operating clumsily one morning in the kitchen mandala having slept in the bedroom mandala within the nearby village mandala where last night there was a bad fire sending the mother to the hospital mandala in the larger town mandala in the national mandala; all such mandalas being distinguishable but also inter-related, inter-penetrating.

We will be re-examining the Mandala notion many times in upcoming chapters. For now let us take a look at Smith’s cosmology, another triad.

He labels the central spot the ‘aeviternal’ which is outside time; he labels the periphery ‘the corporeal world’ which exists within our experienced spatial-temporal dimensions; and the zone in between the two he labels ‘the intermediate’ ‘bounded by’ time but not space. So the aeviternal center is beyond time; the intermediate is bounded by time but not space; and the corporeal world at the circumference is bounded within both time and space.

This all involves what he terms ‘vertical causation’ which acts, from outside time and space, upon the corporeal world in space and time, outside the chain of what he calls ‘horizontal causes’ which in Buddhist terms is known as the karmic law of cause and effect.

The key point here is that physicalists, such as most materialist scientists for example, keep looking for ‘theory of everything’ to be found on the material, causative plane but they will never be able to do so.

And indeed this is for an extremely simple, drop dead obvious reason which physicalists have been training themselves for centuries now to be unable to see, namely the wholistic nature of phenomena. By wholistic I mean that an apple is an identifiable whole. As opposed to a brick, or a door, or a tree, or a house. None of these things exist as such on the physical level. A car comprises many different metal and plastic parts, bit by bit, piece by piece, but there is no actual ‘car’ there as such which can be identified using only physical criteria. No, there is a mind observing the car and can see it as such, just as it can instantly identify, pick up and bite into any apple. This ability to recognize the wholeness of the apple is a type of deus ex machina, the connection between the aeviternal and the corporeal, so basic it gets overlooked.

Then I stumbled on another Western philosopher, John Vervaeke who has formulated what he calls ‘neoplatonic zen’:

This is a long talk; there are shorter ones available. From the introduction:

as Thomas Plant in his book the LostWay to the Good argues: ‘neoplatonism was the philosophical version of the Silk Road that bound the East and the West together giving them a shared lingua franca, lingua philosophia, by which they could deeply enter into transformative dialogue and intercultural exchange with each other.’

The lecture is entitled: ‘Levels of Intelligibility, Levels of Self’. So he is all over the ‘Layers and Levels’ notion. He explains how Plotinus argues that both reality and the self comprise various ontological levels, so that examining the one involves examining the other. There is no fundamental split between self and other, between subjective and objective. In this sense, the platonic philosophical view is fundamentally spiritual, though of course not necessarily bound to any particular religious doctrine.

I don’t want to say much more in this chapter. Those interested can watch and enjoy the lectures. But I do want to give a hint at where we might be headed. I say ‘might’ because I don’t have a clearly formulated plan. The contemplative approach from the Buddhist tradition generally involves uncovering the truth, aka ‘dharma’, found within one’s own experience. My teacher sometimes referred to this as ‘kitchen sink reality’. Any ontological levels that exist in philosophically explicated ‘reality’, to be valid, must be observable in our own nature and experience. What this means is that high-falutin’ concepts, or rather basic concepts that sound other-worldly or remote to our ear, to our minds, are in fact simple and continuously manifest in ordinary life.

As simple, for example, as our ability to perceive an apple as an apple. Right there we have multiple layers and levels happening: there is the bare physical level of the object on the wooden table; there is us observing it, in a corporeal, living, breathing form with eyes, lungs, beating heart; there are the particular qualities of the apple, colour, aroma, shape, density, position relative to other phenomena; not to mention how it feels and tastes when bitten into by a mouth with teeth and tongue. The level at which the apple is seen as an apple by ourselves is quite different from the level at which the apple rests on the table as such. The level at which it is tasted is entirely different as well. These levels, ordinary and commonplace as they are, can also be described as ‘ontological dimensions’. Sight dimension. Taste dimension. Time dimension – how long it sits there, and then gradually decomposes, our ongoing breathing and heartbeat as we observe or bite into. Space dimension – relation to other objects around, how it sits there. Emotional dimension – what apples mean to the observer, how its qualities resonate. All these layers and levels are simultaneously ongoing.

Although almost childishly obvious, such ontological layering gets generally overlooked. Indeed, the modern materialist approach tends to oversimplify and then negate too many of these experiential aspects such that when societies are organized around such excessive cancelling, the result is something far from from ideal, indeed not truly human somehow.

In any case, this Chapter provides two examples of contemporary Western philosophers who are bridging a multi-century divide between ancient and modern mentalities. We can see similar work happening in the geopolitical spheres which will no doubt be touched upon later. Indeed, we may well be at the end of the ‘introducing lists’ stage and soon will go into applying some of them to various different scenarios.

[Autobiographical Note: we are in the final stages of building a house, meaning that the bathroom and kitchen fixtures are going in, plus basic kitchen cabinetry, final plumbing, heating systems and so on, all of which require more hands-on oversight than usual. In about a month we hope to be moving into this new home and once settled in I intend to spend the next year steadily working through this series until it finds its natural completion. Until that move and settling-in unfolds, however, I shall probably only offer occasional pieces like this. Once am set up with a new desk, chair and home all around, including banana, macadamia nut, lemon and orange trees, along with delightful accompanying birdsong, production rate will pick up!!]