ABSTRACT
All psychoanalytic progress exposes a need for further investigation. There is a ‘thing-in-itself’, which can never be known; by contrast, the religious mystic claims direct access to the deity with whom he aspires to be at one. In any object, material or immaterial, resides the unknowable ultimate reality, the ‘thing-in-itself’. Objects have emanations or emergent qualities or evolving characteristics that impinge upon the human personality as phenomena. ‘Ultimate reality’ is a term with a penumbra of associations, which makes it psychologically helpful, but this fact makes it unsuitable to represent something that by definition is unknowable. The religious approach postulates an emanation of the deity and an incarnation of the deity. Non-sensuous phenomena form the totality of what is commonly regarded as mental or spiritual experience. The mathematics evolved by the manipulation of ‘numbers’ has so far proved very successful in matching the formulation with the realization it represents.
