The Now and Eternal - an introduction

Philosophically speaking, all knowledge (and Truths) are either epistemological or ontological in nature. Putting this in layman's terms, the doctrines of both logic and intuitive experience can explain to us the whole world.

Indeed, I would wish to re-iterate once more that this little project we have here today (I don't want to make it sound too exclusive to me) tries to explain the true meaning of life, and hopefully identify the best way of living life should the previous statement itself be true. We have started our search by identifying the existence of truth, and working it down to prove that via the philosophical doctrines of epistemology and ontology, this truth is integratory, and it exists somewhere in the spectrum between our thoughts and feelings.

Of course I could have came out with a whole new set of posts to convey the same message across. Most books that attempt to make (themselves and others) the best of their lives usually come in the form of optimistic sounding self help books to either waking up saying yes to life or to smile at someone even though the other person just pissed you off again. Indeed these books have their groundings, and the groundings they had built up such 'techniques of making you a better person' are actually from the doctrines of epistomology and ontology. However, these books are also very noctorious for the introduction of very idealistic and impractical claims. Smiling regularily at someone who just pissed you off can make truly make your life better, but they don't really explain why and how, and doing something that you don't fully understand may end up making your life even more screwed up in the first place.

And henceforth the reason why I had intended to build up this 'aim to a better life' on a method of reason. On face value, it would give future ideas at least a solid grounding lest it be criticized as un-based and idealistic. But such reasons do not end just there- I sincerely wish that we (especially I myself) can appreciate that the true aims of philosophy and it's daughter subjects is to perfect life and living; that such subjects that we conventionally know as 'cheem' is actually very simple in essence, and very practicable in our everyday lives.

Now that we have identified the two chief 'ingredients' to the true way of life, it is imperative for us to synthesize such ingredients into a single comprehensive model to attempt to conceptualize and explain life from there. Yet we know that even within the faculties of 'logic' and 'feelings', toned down from the philosophical doctrines of epistomology and ontology, are still extremely diverse and abstract. We still can't explain why the world seems materialistic and superficial, we can't explain what needs, commitment, passion and appreciative trust have to do in common although we have a rough inkling that it loosely ties up to the partial concepts of love. we still can't explain whats wrong with going to the church to socialize if both socialism and belief in God is intuitive/feeling based and religion be the advocate of the 2nd doctrine of intuitive experience and being.

Indeed, such abovementioned problems can be expalined with the doctrines of 'epistomology' and 'ontology', or if we were to integrate the thoughts and feelings of all of us humans into one complex equation via the disciplines of psychology and sociology and simplifying from there. Even so, it is already asserted from these disciplines that we may at most identify tendencies within groups to such truths. We have yet to have such precise knowledge to read the workings (integrated thoughts and feelings) of individual minds, and divination is definitely a subject I will not be entertaining anytime soon in this project. So how are we to link and explain much of our world today with such abstract concepts of epistemology and ontology via our thoughts and feelings? We definitely have to still sub-divide the cake up into smaller, conprehensible pieces.

Do take note that while I had touched on the workings of logic and intuitively feelings, I have made certain allusions to the concept of Time from point to point. i.e. On Logic, Education and our lives- I had raised an issue of 'technicalities' against 'true philosophical aims' of the subject of education. Now, 'technicalities' I had alluded to a sub-concept of 'logic now' and 'true philosophical aims' under another sub-concept of 'logic eternal'. On Intuition, Feelings and Emotions I had put forward the example of socialization and religion (see above), now do note that I can easily coin 'socialization' as a 'intuitive feeling now' and religion a 'intuitive feeling eternal'. These concepts may not truly fit into the subjects we are talking about, but at least they do bear certain similarities.

Now, it is true in philosophy that epistemology and ontology are independent the concepts of time and space. Such philosophical concepts are by itself eternal, and being concepts themselves, they persist without change over time and space. It is no wonder that the philosophies of the ancient greeks are mostly still held valid today, or the findings of Hume and Kant still widely studied three hundred years later in universities and books. Indeed, the concepts of Epistemology and Ontology has remained virtually unchanged since the times of Paramedies and Heraliticus (ancient greeks), they had always aimed the understanding of life, but somehow they are still incapable of giving even a satisfactory explanation of our world today.

Life that we know of is dependent of time. Epistemology and Ontology may be independent of time, but as we move down to the more familiar concepts of Thoughts and Feelings, we have to undertand that by this process we have in a way em-bodied such time-less concepts into another bounded by time and space- ourselves. We human beings, unlike concepts, are bounded by time and space. The concepts that we come up with may be eternally recorded within paper and logic, but we are bounded by conciousness (preconciousness) and memories- Intuitive feelings now become sensations to remember tomorrow. Generally speaking, when we attempt to explain life actual from concepts, it is imperative that we should at least factor in the concepts of time and space.

As I have introduced in The Moderation Doctrine - An Introduction, the two additional concepts of time I would be introducing would be the concepts of Now and Eternal. These two concepts are loosely based on the philosophical concepts of Realism and Idealism (realism for now, idealism for eternal), I would not wish to explain in very great detail about the derivations of such idealistic concepts into reality as it is- partially because these two concepts are far more abstract than that of epistemology and ontology, and partially because this project is not a project aimed for the the understanding of philosophy but the understanding of life. Nevertheless, the factor of Now and Eternal into the pre-existing concepts would hence explain life better.


In the next post, I shall attempt to give a very short derivation of the concepts of Now and Eternal- on how it had been derived from Realism and Idealism, and how relavent is it to our lives. Hopefully, I would by then be able to integrate these four primary concepts into one map which may fully construct the individual, and from the individual in turn construct the world as it is today.