Hi from Amber. We’ve had many comments on our books from Wisdom Masters Press and references to the experiences and the knowledge presented therein stated variously as being esoteric, arcane, mystical, occult, and especially metaphysical.
Esoteric simply means intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest. Arcane is defined as understood by few, mysterious or secret. Hence both clearly apply to our books. Yet the terms mystical, occult, and metaphysical all paint with a broad brush and there are distinctions that members of SB may wish to consider.
Academic Metaphysics -
The term metaphysics originally referred to the writings of Aristotle that came after his writings on physics, in the arrangement made by Andronicus of Rhodes about three centuries after Aristotle's death.
Traditionally, metaphysics refers to the branch of philosophy that attempts to understand the fundamental nature of all reality, whether visible or invisible. It seeks a description so basic, so essentially simple, so all-inclusive, that it applies to everything, whether divine or human or anything else. It attempts to tell what anything must be like in order to be at all.
To call one a metaphysician in this traditional, philosophical sense indicates nothing more than his or her interest in attempting to discover what underlies everything. Old materialists, who said that there is nothing but matter in motion, and current naturalists, who say that everything is made of lifeless, non-experiencing energy, are just as much to be classified as metaphysicians as are idealists, who maintain that there is nothing but ideas, or mind, or spirit.
Perhaps the best definition of materialism is that of Charles Hartshorne (Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, p. 17): "The denial that the most pervasive processes of nature involve any such psychical functions as sensing, feeling, remembering, desiring, or thinking." Idealists assert what materialists deny. Dualists say that mind and matter are equally real, while neutral monists claim that there is a neutral reality that can appear as either mind or matter. Philosophers generally are content to divide reality into two halves, mind and matter (extended and unextended reality) and do not emphasize such distinctions within the mind half as spirit and soul.
Popular Metaphysics -
A commonly employed, secondary, and popular, usage of metaphysics includes a wide range of controversial phenomena believed by many people to exist beyond the physical. This would certainly apply to the concepts expressed on this website, and in the books from Wisdom Masters Press.
Popular metaphysics relates to two traditionally contrasted, if not completely separable, areas: (1) mysticism, referring to experiences of unity with the ultimate, commonly interpreted as God, Infinite Being, or All-That-Is, which is love, and (2) occultism, referring to the extension of knowing (extrasensory perception, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition, channeling and mediumship) and doing (psychokinesis) beyond the usually recognized fields of human activity. The academic study of the occult (literally hidden) has been known as psychical research and, more recently, parapsychology. Both New Age and New Thought emphasize mysticism and its practical, pragmatic application in daily living, but New Thought discourages involvement in occultism.
The terms metaphysics and metaphysical in a popular sense have been used in connection with New Thought, Christian Science, Theosophy, and Spiritualism, as in J. Stillson Judah, The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America (The Westminster Press, 1967), as well the New Age movement. Some of the varying understandings of metaphysics held by some founders of New Thought and Christian Science are given in the opening pages of ‘Contrasting Strains of Metaphysical Idealism Contributing to New Thought.’
Pure and Applied Metaphysics -
Cutting across the division of the academic and the popular, there is another way of dividing metaphysics: theoretical and applied. This distinction is like the division between pure science and applied science, or science and technology; one describes; the other applies the description to practical problems, putting knowledge to work. Gathering knowledge (or alleged knowledge, critics of metaphysics would say) in metaphysics traditionally is by rational thought; in a more popular understanding, knowledge gathering may be either mystical or occult; in either case the pure (?) knowledge is to be distinguished from the practical application of it.
Metaphysics then has, as both its primary purpose and its only legitimate reason for existence, the answering of humanity's existential questions. Religion has never really done this, even though it vociferously claims to do so.
Summation -
Metaphysics is the methodology which intelligent human beings utilize to answer all their most basic questions regarding the Nature of The Human Condition, their individual relationship to that condition, the place or context into which the Human Condition "fits" in the universe which is slowly being revealed to us in response to diligent scientific effort, and most important of all, to enable human beings to understand "What it all means." In other words, metaphysics is a methodology to try to answer humankind's most urgent existential questions.
There is a justly celebrated definition of metaphysics expressed by Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) who was an influential British Philosopher of his time associated with the Absolute Idealist Movement. In 1893 he wrote: "Metaphysics is an attempt to comprehend the universe not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but as a whole". Another definition is that of William James who said: "Metaphysics is nothing but an attempt to think things out clearly to their ultimate significance, to find their substantial essence in the scheme of reality and, thereby, to unify all truth and reach that highest of all generalizations which constitutes philosophy."
In our times, serious metaphysical speculation cannot be intelligently discussed without adding the input of scientific disciplines such as Quantum Theory, M Theory (string theory), and Scientific Cosmology which deal with precisely the same speculations from the scientific point-of-view. To take one of many examples, Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is clearly metaphysical in implication while totally scientific in nature. We also, of necessity, must include the very copious information coming to us through the Hubble Telescope and other astronomical-cosmological devices. The term metaphysics is a gift to us from Aristotle, but his metaphysics (and his physics as well) were limited to the parameters in which his tremendous and fertile intelligence was confined. Most of his speculations, both physical and nonphysical, were based upon his tremendous powers of observation and synthesis, and some of it related to his botanical and zoological work.
We are infinitely luckier than Aristotle, for we have the advanced efforts of our modern quantum theorists and scientific cosmologists aided by the current generation of super-computers to help us in our speculations and in our effort to understand. The findings of these scientific endeavors, if studied, can greatly assist our acceptance and understanding of mystical and occult concepts by providing an intellectual, logical, and rational basis for things esoteric and arcane.
Thank you for reading! Amber
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