by Horatius Piscinus on Sun Apr 18, 2004 5:18 pm
Salvete
I am not sure Heraclitus would agree in a distinction between physics and metaphysics. He would probably say something on how they were one, two sides of the same coin, and if you'd agree, he'd say "Arguing the same we disagree; singing together we compete."
Heraclitus said, "The river where you set your foot just now is gone - those waters giving way to this, now this." Ovid echoed Heraclitus by saying that, "Life is like a river, our time flies and is always made anew," and Ovid also said that, "Our bodies are always changing, this that we once were, or else what we are now, tomorrow we will not be." It is easy to see how the metaphor of a river can be taken to mean our life, or time in general. "Behold: the baby born under a new moon, under the old moon holds her grandchild in her arms.? But Heraclitus held that all in the universe we live is constantly in a state of transformation into something else. "What was cold soon warms, and warmth soon cools. So moisture dries, and dry things drown." While this is all perhaps more easily seen with our corporeal existence, I think Heraclitus would apply it to the mind as well. The flow of the river of consciousness has the mind constantly moving its attention between sense perception of physical stimuli to the sympathetic and asympathetic nervous systems, greeting these with conscious thoughts and subconscious memory, unconscious thought and even entering at times into the collective unconscious, where beyond lies universal consciousness. The four levels of the mind was explored more in Indian philosophy than has been in the West. They assign these four levels to waking consciousness, dream state, the state of dreamless sleep, and the other is known simply as ?the fourth.? To some extent Greek philosophers, and more so Indian, have associated these levels of consciousness to the four levels of the metaphysical Universe. The state of dreamless sleep is reported to be one of bliss, while ?the fourth? lies beyond bliss, where the atman, or the foundation of the self, unites in Brahman.
The way that I reconcile these views is to recall a near death experience I had long ago. It was the classic example, brought on by the loss of a tremendous amount of blood, I found myself aware of floating over a hospital bed, looking down on my body as a doctor and nurses frantically tried to bring me back. Looking up then, there was a light above me, and a presence that advised me to return, and suddenly I was once again aware of being in my body and looking up into the faces of the doctor and nurses. To that I can add my mother?s experiences as she lay dying, especially her vision of deceased family members advising her to join with them. In my own way of thinking, the bliss experienced during the state of dreamless sleep, the entry into the collective consciousness, is a transfer of the self aware mind to the Blessed Isles where live our Lares who walk among the Gods. And beyond then would be the realm of the Gods, attainable by only a unique few who can achieve a state of universal conscious through an ex stasis. In our conscious state of mind we are constantly transferring between conscious thought and unconscious memory as part of our thought processes, at times interrupted with those daydreams that take our attention elsewhere. So we are normally aware of moving from the physical world into the lower levels of the metaphysical. And if you are open to it, higher levels of the metaphysical realms can even enter into your conscious awareness, allowing you to speak with and see visions of the Lares and Gods.
Now Heraclitus may see things a little differently, and would certainly explain it in a different manner. Agreeing, we will disagree. But I think he would see that in the flow of our being we constantly move between the physical and the metaphysical. And since this rather limited, three dimensional physical world is contained in the greater ?physical? world, as modern physicists struggle to understand the multi dimensional structure of the universe, we can accept, if not understand those string theories, that the physical universe is part of and supported by the greater metaphysical Universe. The physical and metaphysical are one. Even our empirical minded scientists have today begun to discuss the physical universe within a metaphysical existence, speculating on what lies beyond the border of the physical universe, into which it expands and from which it contracts, the flow of our reality passing out of black holes and in from white holes, and what may exist beyond time, before the existence of time in our small universe came to be. As the Greek philosophers argued, the universe moves, and therefore it must move in some other that lies beyond the universe. Our modern understanding of the universe may have expanded since Heraclitus? day, but human existence remains the same, and Heraclitus would acknowledge that our authentic existence lies within more than is empirically perceived.
Valete optime
M Horatius Piscinus
Sapere aude!