Gnosis

ch. 2

CHAPTER TWOTHE ANALYSIS Ignorance is a mental condition, a simple lack of meaningful knowledge, wherein an individual remains in a bewilderment due to an absence of understanding. Ignorance is non-knowledge that prevents a proper mental grasp of the reality of things, just as an absence of air would prevent breathing. Ignorance is a lack of comprehension that obscures the functions of perception and intelligence. The only way to properly conceive of ignorance is to relate it to an absence of knowledge, wisdom, or intelligence. The fullness of perceptive clarity is opposite to ignorance; it is lucidity, sanity, and clear intelligence. Ignorance cannot be equated with the many varieties of false knowledge and wrong knowledge, for whatsoever form knowledge may exist in, it is still knowledge. False knowledge is the effect of mistaking a falsehood for a truth; wrong knowledge is the effect of a complex aberration of the faculty of discernment wherein a person gets confused by accepting partial evidence as the whole truth, or unverified assumption as fact. Wrong knowledge is an accumulated collection of information that has not been correctly discerned. False and wrong knowledge are conceptual presumptions and ideas that simply are not true in some degree, from partial untruth to complete untruth. Whether partial or complete, the deviation from truth is an outcome of irrational or defective discernment. Irrationality is the basis for the sustenance and continuity of all wrong knowledge and false views. False views are incorrect conclusions determined through faulty reasoning processes. False views always result in the continuation of habitual delusive thinking, the flow of mistaken perceptions and judgements, chronic mental-sets, and all the associated consequences. The only way to eradicate false views is to understand their falsity and replace them with truth; this can be accomplished only by the development of unflawed reasoning. Faulty reasoning is the result of unsound and inaccurate observation and its consequent defective discernment. These are the mental conditions always antecedent to any and all subsequent incorrect conclusions made in thinking. If these obstructive mental conditions were absent, thinking would be purified and irrationality would disappear. In contrast, correct observation, the recognition of things as-they-really-are, and correct discernment, the clear perception of the qualities of things, is the state of lucidity. All correct conclusions are the product of rational determinations founded upon verified facts and established evidence. Facts are verified and evidence is established through direct knowing experience rather than through rash inference, theory, or belief. Rash inference is reckless assumption, a habit of misperception that evolves from deficient, distorted, or incomplete observation. A theory is a speculative formulation of ideas based on observed phenomena or upon past theories and conjectures. If the observations are unsound or partial then discernment will be defective. Accepting something as a belief is the mistake of getting theoretical assumptions, inferences, and hypothetical conjectures confused with what is real, factual, and true. Thus, the whole process of thinking can get clouded and obscured, some degree of delusion always pollutes the function of reason, and then what is correct and true cannot be properly determined. Passive acceptance without verification through sincere inquiry, and in the same way, rejection without inquiry and verification, is the activity of delusion. Delusion is the activity of mistaken thinking with lack of reason, believing or accepting that something is true when it actually is not. With reason and clear judgement the contradictions in errant thinking could be corrected. Contradiction is the established evidence of faulty conjecture stemming from unsound and inaccurate observation and discernment, and from impulsive acceptance or rejection. Dogmatists and theoreticians readily proclaim their opinions regarding things accepted or rejected by them, having not sincerely or logically inquired into nor verified the actual status of that upon which they form their opinions. Their beliefs are based on wrong knowledge or on hopes and conjectures of imagination instead of direct knowing experience. Such beliefs are formulated from a faith which is itself built upon a foundation of conjecture based on hearing or reading about something; this is an acceptance of second-hand information. Such information is indirect knowledge and may be either true or false. Faith is imaginative conjecture, a consoling, hope-based conclusion determined aside from verified facts and without established evidence. A profession of faith is a confession of aberrant reason, an admission of faulty judgement. People who cling to faith do not usually bother to validate the procedure they have used to come to their conclusions. True sanity is a sound mind capable of properly observing and accurately discerning. Observation entails the unobstructed and clear functions of the organs of sense perception; discernment entails the synthesis of sense knowledge and the integration of sense data in all their relevant details in order to make valid and meaningful determinations of the evidences so gathered. Unsound minds rely upon incomplete or distorting mental processes, and these can proliferate into mental disorders and derangements in ever greater degree. Such disorders are commonly defined as insanity and delusion. Insanity is absence of sane judgement, a crippled capacity of the observing and discerning mind. The unreal then gets mistaken for the real, and the untrue is thought to be true. Doubt, confusion, frustration, grief, and superstition are the inevitable results of accepting fiction as fact. Not bothering to inquire or investigate is a passive act of self-victimization, a resignation unto ignorance and utter foolishness. Those who have allowed themselves to become slaves to imagination, superstition, or fanatical obsession with anything can expect only an increasing level of confusion, bewilderment, frustration, more conflict in living, and a coarse binding of intelligence. Just because something is heard or something is written does not make it true or real. Falsehoods, lies, and some dogmas become acceptable to those who fear truth, or to those who find solace in falsehood, having done no critical reasoning for themselves. They have come to fear truth because of their obsession with vanity. But when truth is known ignorance must collapse; as vanity is a product of ignorance, it dissolves away also. Remaining in the bondage of ignorance and confusion is inevitable as long as vain fantasies and compulsive fascinations are held dear. The fear of death is coincident with the fear of confronting reality, both fears compounded by a third fear of losing a long-cherished dream based in a false faith or belief. Everyone has the option to believe whatsoever they please, but their mistakes of irrationality cannot alter the true or change the real. Expressions of foolishness follow along in the shadow of false views forever until truth is known and accepted as-it-is and all hallucinated fictions are discarded. False views are reprehensible and pernicious; they are the foundation of errant motivation and wrong conduct and are the obstructions to lucidity. The eradication of ignorance and false views leads to the establishment of lucidity; this is the key to real contentment and happiness. In the absence of lucidity an individual actively consigns himself to self-victimization, a mechanical, habitual enslavement to the survival-level order of nature. This level of existence is a bondage ruled by a condition of mind that remains permeated by attachment, habits, compulsion, biases, and other mental activities of the semi-conscious unevolving person. On the other hand, lucidity is awakened, intelligent presence, a spontaneous and unfabricated awareness uncomplicated by the mechanistic conditioning of the mind. When lucidity is absent there is little clarity or presence in any aspect of individual consciousness. Absence of lucidity is the common state of being of the average human being. This absence supports fixation in mechanistic automatism. The absence of lucidity is the basis for the development of fixations, which are obsessive attachments and habitual, semi-conscious compulsive preoccupations. A fixated individual is nearly continually and unknowingly vulnerable to the conditioning of environmental influences, social pressures, economic, political, religious, and cultural thought formats. When some degree of desire and attachment with such ideational formats is experienced, identification with them grows and crystallizes. Obsessive identification with outer conditions produces a seeming separation from inner realities. The focus between outer and inner becomes unbalanced and the result is always more unbalance, affliction, confusion, frustration, or some type of conflict. Then, when crystallized identification with these types of conditions occurs there is a further enhancement of subtle negative internal superficialities. Without developed capacity to evolve beyond compulsive fixation with coarse external and subtle internal superficial propensities, the individual must remain in the bondage and limitations of mechanistic automatism. Mechanistic automatism is impulsive, pre-patterned, conditioned reactivity in the individual mental apparatus which produces its associated effects in the external world through physical and emotional activities. Thus, conditions in the outer world are reflections of the conditions prevalent in the inner mental and emotional states. When such conditions become a fixed pattern they create a fixation, a mental-set. The mental-set is the accumulated and fixed mental pattern of perspectives and opinions formed from repeated exposure to conditions of environment. These accumulated mental patterns form a stream of ideas based on either correct or on errant inferential supposition. Errant inferential supposition has its origin in the undeveloped capacity for correct discernment. Any inference is only superficial guesswork, a possibility of some degree. Without credible establishment of evidence through correct observation there can be only inferential supposition or imaginative ascription, which is concept-only. Then what is merely conceptual imputation can be easily mistaken for fact. Mistaking supposition for fact presents a nearly insurmountable obstacle to the development of any reality-based understanding. Any foundational errant supposition is the structural basis for endless subsequent errant perceptions, observations, discernments, and conceptualizations which result in a mental-set of nescient false views. Thereafter, all thinking and perspective become tainted by the mental and emotional impressions of memory fabricated through lack of proper discernment, and will at some time eventuate in the circumstances of living within a perpetually recycling matrix of suppositional delusion and the consequent outcome of mechanistic automatism. Objects and events cannot then be known as-they-really-are and delusion will persist until all the perceptual and cognitive filters and obstructions based on errant supposition are dissipated. Errant supposition is a mental poison and keeps the mind non-lucid. The non-lucid mind is an automaton of the metamorphic matrix. The mental equation of the unevolving individual is beset with chronic conceptual fixations, but he is not usually aware of this fact. In the inattentive and non-introspective person fixations and their consequent results develop mechanically, according to a definite ordered process. All of phenomenal nature is a living mechanistic organism in which causal factors result in definite associated effects, and these effects then become causes producing their subsequent future effects, ad infinitum. In the same way, the human mind, as a biologically functional nature-apparatus, operates in a definite conditioned mechanical pattern. Chronic nescience is similarly a natural product of a definite conditional mechanism which keeps the mind non-lucid. The metamorphic matrix is thus the mechanical level of coarse and subtle objective existence which produces itself out of itself, and which we perceive as visible, detectable nature, the worlds, and the universe. Every structured complexity of objective being is only what it actually is, a mechanistic event-process of movement within the realms of phenomenal relativity. Everything has the same subjective base and so all things and events are a movement of flux and change within a multiplex field of scales of relativity. The mental functions of any individual are parts of scalar fields of change and like all the other parts are subject to change, restructuring, conditional morphation, and patterning. Subtle and gross phenomena in the processes of event-fluxation are the perceptual conditions for the operations of the human mind, the consciousness within which these matrix events arise, so consciousness and objective things and events are an interdependent causal process completely immersed within the same holistic identity. The worlds and universe as well as individual sentient beings are mechanistic, without an inner objective self which is separate from the rest of objectivity. The absolute subjectivity is not a differentiated internal entity which inhabits phenomenal things or is located somewhere within a sentient individual. The absolute subjectivity is immanent and transcendent, both absolute and relative, both noumenon and phenomena. There is nothing other than It. To realize the coalescence of all apparent dualities is to be free of the conceptual implications and limitations of the phenomenal universes and the vehicles of sentiency. This is perfectly obvious to one who has developed ratiocinative certainty of understanding through experience. This kind of understanding is not a product of the mere intellect; nonetheless it must come through the intellect and conventional knowledge by way of ratiocinative analysis until the certainty of understanding crystallizes. Eventually, in this way, the intellect then can non-conceptually intuit the truth of existence as coalescent subject-object. All perceivable objects and events are movements of vortex energies, either swirling or linear in their interdependent motions, and patterned fractal holons in microcosmic diminution of the macrocosmic holographic energy of consciousness itself. Each fractal holon is a microcosmic copy of the macrocosmic hologram. The universal hologram has no existence separate from the multitude of individual holons and no holon is separate from the universal or from other holons; thus homogeneity and heterogeneity are identical. All relative phenomena co-emerge and co-exist within an interdependent and integrally operating functional matrix of objects and events in spatiotemporality. Each holon is an imagery of the whole hologram and identical to it in its essence, yet each holon has the power to create change throughout the whole hologram. Thus, individuality is relative heterogeneity while at the same time being essential homogeneity. Morphic, or changing-and-adapting qualities of all apparently individual objects and events are simply formative structural patterns and conditional limitations continually arising and dissolving within the flux of the integrated matrix of the totality of existence. The totality of all the apparently individual things in existence is an interrelated unity of functional processes in conditioned mechanical patterns. Mechanistic automated patterning eventuates in dichotomous perception. This is the mental patterning that inhibits or organizes all of a person's thinking; it is the unnoticed format and filter through which all perceptions and concept-makings are structured. The patterned structure of impressions in the subtle memory record always adds something of the mental-set to otherwise untainted perceptions and discernments, just as ignorance always leaves out something from lack of correct knowledge. The effect produced by mechanistic automated patterning in the mind is called dichotomous perception. Dichotomous perception occurs when the dysfunctional, non-lucid mind divides objects and events into presumed conceptual singularities which the perceiver, in his errant thinking, does not understand as actual integral relationships in a functional unicity of the phenomenal metamorphic matrix. Since there is really no such thing as a separately existing or exclusively self-produced phenomenon, the dichotomizing intellect is obviously mistaken in its dualistic presumptions. What is usually thought of as an object separate from other objects or events is a mistaken thought, an errant conceptual illusion, a delusory idea of pseudo-existence based on suppositionary mental formulas which add to and leave out basic verities. The primary basic truth or verity is the fact of functional unicity. Although seemingly individual things in the objective realms may be supposed to exist substantially as entities unto themselves, apart and different from other seemingly individual things and events, in fact, all things co-emerge and co-exist as morphic conditions in the incessant fluxing of the universal holographic matrix. All objectivity is a phenomenal fluxing of integrated and interrelated energies, so all objects and events are reciprocal, mutual, and complimentary. A change occurring anywhere within the universal holographic matrix produces a change everywhere therein. Dichotomous perception is the chronic delusion which the individual must recognize and correct before understanding, or Gnosis can come about. Dichotomy, or dualistic perception, is a matter of illusive appearance-only, a product of irrationality, or undeveloped rationality, whereas lucidity is a matter of truth perception. At a deeper level, dichotomous perception can be equated with perceiver versus object of perception. This is also a dualism which is conceptual-only, having become a pervasively chronic habit of the non-lucid mind. This presumed dualism seems to exist only because the perceiver has not yet fully understood that all arises interdependently, even object and perceiver. But everyone gets absorbed in conceptual and perceptual dualisms, and then consciousness, because of attraction to some objects or repulsion from other objects, gets identified with particular objects and aspects of perception. The individual then begins to suppose he is a body-mind, a person that is a body and a mind – instead of that consciousness which is the pure perceiver of all objects, coarse or subtle, external or internal, within the phenomenal matrix. The individual forgets, or does not understand, that not only his body and mind arises from conditions of the matrix, but also the same is true of all "other" bodies and minds and all "other" consciousnesses. Even sense organs are, in each individual biological organism, functional objects of nature which mechanically transmit impulses and impressions to consciousness. Senses mechanically react to external stimuli and influences and then from this input of information the mind structures ideas and correlative pseudo-images, according to past psychological impressions and tendencies. Yet, in all formats of dualistic perception and consequent concept-making the perceiver and whatever is being perceived appear as a presumed duality because dichotomous discrimination leaves out the recognition and understanding of functional unicity. The act of perceiving is a universal function occurring when there is consciousness and objects of perception. The function of perceiving requires both object and perceiver together; there is no real plurality. Without this understanding perceptions are always subliminally tainted through the suppositions of dichotomy which always superimposes something unreal from the mind onto whatever is being perceived. Perceiving is a self-function of the universal matrix, and both consciousness and objects of perception are the polar aspects of this self-function. There is no real separateness, no absolute individuality, and no real dichotomy, but this errant discriminative process maintains the mental factors producing irrationality and the resultant afflictions of confusion of various sorts and permits an increasing potential, in an already aberrated mental-set, for irrational supposition and increasing delusion. But there are answers to these problems when the problems are recognized. If we investigate into our real condition, we eventually recognize that we have long been under the influence of the presupposition that everything comes to be as a result of causation, that there may be an external creator or force behind all that happens. Another related presupposition is that each individual is an autonomous being, or a self which is inhabiting a particular mind and physical body as the "true person" which is implicated by perceived individually separate intention or will. These are two presuppositions which are hidden in the mental-sets of nearly everyone. Only those who undertake thorough contemplative introspection will experience this revealing. Then it will be surely known that cause-and-effect seriality, as usual perceived, is only an appearance, a seeming reality to those who do not understand the mental overlays which are unconsciously always added onto perceptions. Neither causes nor their supposed effects are things in themselves. Neither is the feeling of being separately existing to be rationally considered as an individual "self". Apperceptive Gnosis is the knowledge that consciousness is the basis of all thought and all conditional events in the flux of the matrix and is itself not caused from an external source. Consciousness is inherently free and there is no ultimate necessity for it to be under the supposed bondage of illusion. Freedom from the apparent bondage of the limitations and conditions of all phenomenal existence arises as the result of a radical and comprehensive understanding. This understanding concerns the totality of the matrix of existence, life and events in inconceivable flux. There is no single "creator" or "being", as a separate individual being prior to other beings, directing the matrix of events or initiating any special event as a cause producing further effects. But the essential nature of all existence, and subtle potentiality itself, does not change or create motion outside of itself. All flux and all conditions are modifications and transformations of that inconceivable essence Itself in spontaneous fluxing. Within and through all existence there is no separate independent thing or occurrence-condition which is beyond or apart from this essential potentiality. There is no thing related to it as an "other", and it can be comprehended neither as "the one" nor as "the many", nor both "the one and the many". As such it is simply not conceivable. But it is the reality and there is nothing but it or other than it. The totality of manifestation, as events, appears and disappears, assembles and dissolves, as inevitable spontaneous fluxing, without perceivable reason – an inevitable morphing of conditions in their infinite interrelationships. But no condition or event is ever independent of the totality of fluxing. Even the flux itself is no independent thing conceivable as a thing or as an object. It is Pure Event. External to, or separate from objects, events, and conscious beings there is no independent causal factor or creative entity which chooses to produce any thing or event. All conditions which arise are inevitable, but no single condition or sets of conditions are a necessity or are a crucial aspect of the matrix of flux, but exist only relative to all else in existence. What presently exists as conditioned events is nothing other than the modifications of previous event-fluxation spontaneously arising without any willful direction of an interested creator or cause which is independent of any and all conditions and events themselves. Conditions and events do not imply or contain any separate entity or force which moves them into manifestation. If this truth can be recognized then attention can be freed from the drama of ego-identification. This freedom or liberation is not a structure which results from the accomplishment of practices or transformation of human experience; it is merely the absence of delusion. The incessant fabrication of bewilderment and conflict is a structure which can never be overcome or transcended through any willful motivation or manipulation. Simple recognition of the truth is all that is needed. This is the essential understanding. Inattentive dichotomous perception is the individual base propensity. Individuality is only so within the context of the totality of phenomenal relativity, so there is no absolutely separated individuality. The word "individuality" defines itself remarkably well when analyzed through its syllables. "Individ" means undividable or indivisible; "duality" means "two". So the word "individuality" really means "indivisible duality". This perfectly describes the actual state of being of anything; there is an apparent, but not absolute, duality or separation between two individual things, yet these things are not completely separate since their very being depends on all else that exists. No thing can arise into existence out of itself; it comes from conditions other than itself, hence, all relativity is "indivisible dualities". Any duality is only an apparent, but not real, appearance. The true state of all is nonduality. Thus, any supposed identity is merely conceptual-only because every individual is defined and identified by specific characteristics in relation with the characteristics of other individuals. Individual objects and events can then be considered to exist as the identity they seem to be only because they are not any of the other supposedly individual things that exist. The characteristic internal and external qualities, inclinations, preferences, and biases of persons are accumulated as they are each subjected to the experiences of pleasure and pain. When experience is judged on the basis of attraction and repulsion to pleasure and pain received and transmitted by sentient processes of the psychosomatic organism, life becomes permeated by the overlay of accumulated tendencies and predispositions. These tendencies form a structure of mental processes, a patterned and conditioned mental-set based upon developed preferences and prejudices, biases, fixations, and obsessions. All these conditioning factors evolve into the characteristics of individual personality. Thereafter, when the individual becomes attached and identified with these propensities and proclivities, the impression "me" emerges as a notion; "others" also emerge. By not understanding the process of attachment and identification and the consequent errant notions of duality and absolute separateness, one begins to habitually and mistakenly believe he is a body-mind persona, contending with separate "others". The "me" quickly becomes conceptualized as separate from all "others" who are similarly misidentifying themselves. This happens in early childhood before a person has sufficient opportunity to develop a modicum of reason. Considering oneself as a definitely independent and separate entity is nescient supposition. A person develops this notion because he has come to identify himself as a body and a mind with a history and unique qualities. Along with the dualistic notions of "me" and the "other" as separate objects comes the forgetfulness of the integral interdependence and relative mutual correlations within the flux of the holographic structures and processes of the matrix of Being. The individual base propensity is just this constant mechanical tendency to misidentify subjective perceiving consciousness with a particular object. To this activity is also added the superimposition of memories of past events and imaginative projections into future time. In all these mental dichotomizations and overlays what is left out of the cognitive sequences is the realization that there is a functioning occurring with perceiver and perceived as the two necessary conditions of that functioning. Perceiving as functioning is the event that is beyond all dichotomies. True understanding of the function of universal perceptual consciousness is the recognition of the interdependent relativity of all subject-object events within the unified field of energies of the metamorphic matrix. The dualisms seem to be real until understanding dawns. Through the processes of attachment and identification, which can occur only in the presence of non-understanding and in the absence of reason, an individual becomes easily convinced that he is a separated body-mind object, an ego, a persona, and this is the individual base propensity from which arises all delusion. From this base arises the delusion called volition. Although the ego-notion has a sort of conventional usefulness in mundane relations and communications in the everyday social domain, as pertains to lucidity and awakening to perfect reality, the notion is the primary hindrance. This hindrance is a progressively conditioned artificial fault of the mental functioning which results in the creation of an hallucinated conceptual counterfeit, the ego, the "me", the false identity, with its characteristics endowed to it by the errantly operating imagination. All phenomena, external or internal, are functional movements, abstractions of the appearance of heterogeneic multiplicity in the matrix of patterned formations. All natural mechanisms are limited to the functional processes of action and reaction, and therefore no object within the mechanical structures of phenomenal existence can possess autonomous free will, or volition. But, such a notion commonly emerges in the aberrated movements of a mentality in which good reason is absent. Pseudo-volition is a basic factor in the support structure of incessant fixations and delusions. All nescient delusion and its activities can create the discomforts and discontents of physical, emotional, and mental afflictions. Such afflictions perpetuate the cyclic recurrence of conflict brought on by reactive and compulsive mental movements. Even physical afflictions can be caused by a mental attitude strong enough to produce tension, stress, and disharmony in the nervous system of the human organism. Emotional afflictions can be caused by wrong thinking regarding any circumstance of the mundane world, its social interactions, and the resulting frustrations resulting from unfulfilled egoistic motivations. Mental afflictions arise from long-repeated formation and the deepening of psychological impressions, the intensification of mechanistic patterning through dichotomous thinking and its resultant delusions, and then the crystallization of the individual base propensity which then supports even more pseudo-volitional notions and motivations in the realms of activity. The active expressions of this pattern are all the afflictions of life which bind a person to the results of unconscious compulsion. Absorption in compulsive delusion generates conflict. When patterned habitual mental sets become so deeply ingrained that the majority of thinking and conduct fall below the level of attentive awareness and into subconscious automatism, the individual becomes regularly absorbed in the compulsive and reactive levels of physical, emotional, and mental experience. Absorption means being engrossed, captivated, and perpetually locked into inattentive modes of passivity and distraction. Absorption is the deluded state of passivity of attention in which one is almost continually lost in dichotomous identity fixation and the activities of mechanistic automatism. Human beings, when thinking of themselves as their imaginary conceptual counterfeit, the ego, then believe their thoughts and subsequent actions are acts of a decided volition, or free will. But this cannot be true because individuals only react through the mechanics of stimulus within the limitations of conditional phenomena and the psychosomatic organism, and all completely within the chain of metamorphic cause and effect sequentiality. Volition, or free will, that an individual may suppose he possesses as uncaused, unlimited, unbound, unconditioned, and free power of choice, cannot be and does not exist as such. The notion of volition unbound is an errant judgement and not true because every object and event within the various aspects of environments are factors of relative mechanical causality and result in the development of tendencies, propensities, and traits of personality and character. Any decision or supposed willful choice is inevitably linked to the multitude of conditions within the chain of causality. Choice-making which is totally and completely separate from conditions of the causal nexus cannot exist. The notion of free will rests upon the antecedent errant notion of ego, the base propensity. The deluded notion of having free will is another fundamental hindrance to the recognition of the true and the real. All volitional acts are always linked with accumulated mental propensities such as preference or prejudice, for-and-against attitudes of attraction and repulsion. However, a spontaneous act of free volition might be possible by beings who are not self-identified as egos, but this is an extreme rarity as there can be spontaneity only in the absence of compulsive absorption. The chain of events generated by absorption leads always to conflict in some degree. All misery and turmoil in the life of any individual or in collective social groups is generated and spawned into existence inseparably entangled within the chain of conditioned events, from ignorance through resultant affliction until conflict. Just as the associated train of thought continues mechanically in the non-lucid mind, so also does absorption continue automatically in the same way, producing the continuity of conditioned afflictions and conflict. Conflict is a natural link in evolutional metamorphic flux. The generation of conflict is innate in the integral relations and metamorphic processes throughout the fluxations of all the coarse and subtle phenomena of external and internal realms of existence. Metamorphic causality is an integrated matrix of cause-and-effect sequentiality whereby all objects and events are generated from the subtle inner realms outwardly, to be eventually manifested into the coarser external realms. The subtle inner realm of thought and image-making mental activities is the genetrix of all the phenomenal relativity which then becomes the basis for the generation of further subtle mental activity. Thus, a reciprocal mechanical process is actuated which continues sequentially until the process is interrupted. All discernible events are temporal and in consciousness are extant only as a perceptive moment within the flux of conditional factors which also have no substantial fixed or permanent existence or being. Seen with correct discernment, objects are more like temporal integrated events rather than like things apart from other things. When disharmony on subtle levels eventuates in coarse events of affliction or conflict, an event matrix of functionality is established whereby resultant external phenomena become perpetuating agents, or localized patterns of flux, fluctuation, for the further deepening, extension, and sustenance of nescient misunderstanding and ever more fixated absorption. The integral flow of this event matrix is entirely mechanical and is the basis for the eventual development of the individual's desire to escape from or to avoid the turmoil and adversity of its conditions. This is the desire to be free from the trap of perpetual absorption in the nexus of afflictive predicaments and a bewildered life, in whatever degree, and the core of the insatiable longing to discover that which will give relief from the turmoil and conflict experienced in life. It may be asked if anything good can come of this type of negative situation. The positive answers follow.