Metaphysics on Existence

When we study Metaphysics, (Metaphysics is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world), we come to understand that the world is one. There is no separation between the spiritual, the material, the mental, and the world of energies. They are all one, but appear different.

Also, when we think of ourselves as a body, we forget the mind, and when we think of ourselves as a mind, we will forget the body. We see only one aspect at a time, either matter or body or mind or spirit depending where we place our attention. It is all a matter of perspective.

The same applies to birth, life, and death. No one was ever born, none will ever die; one changes one's position and that is all. We are existence and consciousness.

Western thought makes a lot of death; always trying to catch a little more life. We ponder life after death. We say, give us life! We are so happy if someone tells us that we are going to have an afterlife. Yet how can we ever doubt that we are eternal? How can we imagine that we are going to be dead?

Let’s try to imagine ourselves as being dead, yet we see that we are witnessing our dead body. We may as well doubt that we exist. The first fact of consciousness is, I am. Existence is the most self-evident of all truths. The idea of immortality is inherent in man.

We must learn to see the whole universe is a unit, from whatever standpoint we view it.  But it is not what it appears to be to our sense perception.  Just now, this universe appears to us as air and space, of force and energy. But like all other basic principles, this is also contradictory. For what is this force that which moves matter? And what is this energy which is moved by force? Some of the fundamentals of our reasoning are most curious, in spite of our boast of science and knowledge. In Sanskrit this state of things has been called Maya. It has neither existence nor non-existence. We cannot call it existence, because that only exists, which is beyond time and space, which is self-existence. Yet this world satisfies to a certain degree our idea of existence. Therefore it has an apparent existence.

There is however the real existence in and through everything; and that reality is caught in the meshes of time, space, and causation.

There is the real man, the infinite, the beginningless, the endless, the ever-blessed, and the ever-free. He has also been caught in the meshes of time, space, and causation. So has everything in this world. The reality of everything is the infinite.

This is not idealism; it is not that the world does not exist. It has a relative existence, and fulfills all its requirements, but it has no independent existence. It exists because of the Absolute Reality beyond time, space, and causation.