(Re-)contextualizing Metareality

Mervyn

Critics of the spiritual turn sometimes assume that transcendental dialectical critical realism (TDCR) and the philosophy of metaReality (PMR) are basically the same. What are the main distinguishing features of PMR?

Roy

I would say that PMR is a sustained reflection on the spiritual, in which the traditional conception of God is replaced by the transcendent, or cosmic, envelope and the immanent divine is the ground-state. There is still the notion of the absolute, which finds expression in the cosmic envelope. In this expanded sense, spirituality has moved from being something that is involved in and perhaps a presupposition of religious practices to something that at the time of From East to West I could see as a presupposition for emancipatory projects in general and then to the PMR understanding of it as a presupposition of everyday life as such. In other words, everyday life, I would argue, cannot happen without spirituality. This opens up the whole province of the esoteric sociology of everyday life. In general there is an axiological asymmetry between properties of the spiritual or metaReal infrastructure and the levels it sustains in that you cannot have those levels without it, but you can have it without them or the present form they take. I arrived at this sense of spirituality by reflecting on unity and identity. Unity and identity are very closely related, as I argued in Chapter 8, to the idea of transcendence as overcoming dualism (e.g. contradiction) and to love as the chief transcending, or unifying, binding force in society. The three big realms then are the realm of identity or non-duality (absolute reality), the realm of difference or duality (relative reality) and the realm of dualism, split, antagonism and contradiction (demi-reality), which is duality grounded on falsity, on illusions. What we have to do is recognize and empower the realm of non-duality so as to get rid of the demi-real level. When we have done that we will still be living in a world of duality but not of dualism and split.