Ways of Knowing

Aristotle (science) can arrive at Plato (religion-philosophy) because the material world (Aristotle) evolves to Godhood (Plato). Plato represents the Inward Path and Aristotle the Outward Path, more or less, which defines the Twofold Path. But these two were never really separate because the spiritual is really supermaterial (Aristotle) and not the other way around (Plato).

Religion can be explained in the rational mode but the rational mode deals in generalities, as Frithof Schuon taught, and not in transcendent truths. But there can be room for both. Intellectual intuition is used mainly by mystics, but also occasionally by scientists, and it reaches a kind of direct knowledge of truths which can be later, at least partially, explained by rationality. Intellectual intuition often brings esoteric truths and rationality brings exoteric truths.

Sometimes “solitary ones,” called “Fard” in Sufism, obtain knowledge “spontaneously” without initiation, but they usually can't be spiritual masters because they didn't follow a set guru-group path to realization. Divinity manifests itself through each particular religion. I agree with those who say that a Primordial Tradition lives in every Orthodox religion, which I think is the basis for ecumenism, but this connection is exclusively of the Involuntary Inward Path and is missing the Evolutionary Outward Path.

The goal of the Jesus Prayer as well as the goals sought in Buddhism, and Sufism, and other religions, that is, Holy Silence, or Nirvana, or Fana, are not, as is thought, an integratiion into the infinite, they are experiencing the material inward Soul emptied of all material desires. This means that “turning the other cheek” is not meant as social action but is a turning inward to find the Father Within the Soul by ridding oneself of material desires.

The divine principle does not come from outside in, like the sun, or from God. The connection we have with divinity is the material Spirit-Will within life that seeks Godhood by activating material life, which is later shaped by evolution. The Spirit-Will is not God. All matter may be energy but it is supermaterial energy and not spiritual energy. The world is not double, not a duality with the material on one side and the spiritual on another side, they are the same reality defined as supermaterial and material and not merely spiritual.

Too much importance has been given by mystics to the Inward Path to the God Within while blocking the Outward Path of evolution to Godhood in the cosmos. We cannot reach God by being human and knowing, we can only become God by evolving to Godhood far beyond the human. We can know the Soul and Spirit-Will within, but they are not God. The Soul can only give us the symbolic experience of God if we rid ourselves of all material desires, and the Spirit-Will can only activate life to evolve to Godhood which It seeks.