[MD] The Varieties of Quality Experiences

[118]

A metaphysics is a description of reality.  It stands to reason that
any metaphysics is describing the same thing; that is "What Is".  The
arguments within a metaphysics subscribe to rhetoric using the tools
of logic in their philosophical contexts.  Such presentations of
reality abound, and can be rhetorically presented as philosophical,
mystical, scientific, religious, and so forth, allowing for subtle
distinctions between formats.

Confusion can arise if one mistakes "creating knowledge" for
"uncovering knowledge".  This is especially true for a personal
relationship with "what is".  Any static presentation is a creation
which imposes borders on an ineffable substance.  This "patterning" is
a useful arrangement of something without true pattern into a
meaningful structure for the purposes of creating a personal
relationship with What Is.  The confusion between creating and
discovering knowledge results in the misplacement of such thought
patterning as "the real thing", rather than a contrivance which is
what it is.  Therefore, any metaphysics, as written, will impose
certain restrictions to thought that do not actually exist, and be
followed dogmatically.  Freeing oneself from such static patterns
allows one to follow DQ more freely.

Because of the tendency for the replacement of fundamentally unifying
presentations of Quality with a Name and a Created Knowledge for such
substance, people tend to group themselves within factions; each
affiliation considers their truth to be the ultimate truth as it is
embodied by words.  Such camps then battle each other based on
concepts not knowing that what such concepts are attempting to
describe the same thing.  One way out of these static camps of thought
is to consider that each group is providing an explanation for the
same thing, just in different ways.  Appropriate rhetoric is certainly
nothing to do battle over.  Much can be learned by listening to others
with presentations that seem on the surface to be different with the
goal to understand a different mode of viewing.

Depending on the age, the mindset, and the audience, metaphysical
rhetoric can appear in many different forms, giving the illusion that
these descriptions are actually describing different things.  MoQ
presents reality within the vernacular of Western thought, simply
because it arises from the Western educational process.  This static
representation subscribes to a number of ideas from different venues
of philosophical thought, but always with Western terminology.  We
have concepts such as Evolution which is made to order for MoQ, but
are no different from "development" in other forms of thought as has
been presented through the ages.  The structure of the human mind
provides knowledge based on fundamental principles.

The MoQ levels borrow heavily from the levels which have been
described through the ages, whether they be mechanistic, Buddhist,
Sumerian, Christian, existentialist, new age, or even scientific.  It
is interesting to think that the concept of "levels" come from the
very core of the human experience which is something that may lie
outside the material.  A dualistic concept (DQ/sq) arising from
fundamental non-duality (Quality) is at the heart of MoQ, as with many
other successful metaphysics.  Aldus Huxley wrote a book called the
Perennial Philosophy which sought to examine similarities between
philosophies and religions in the quest for a synthesis of
philosophies based on fundamental principles which are shared amongst
the variety of depictions of reality.   It is within this fundamental
unity between all forms of metaphysics that one can compare MoQ to all
the great philosophies through the ages.  It may be along these
perennial paths that MoQ becomes understandable to the many.  Such
understanding relies solely on what personal meaning can be derived
from the rhetoric which is presented.  Perhaps one must not follow the
words themselves, but follow what they are describing.

With apologies to William James.

Mark