To relegate Metaphysics to a mere branch of Philosophy is a stalwart pedantic's claim, or perhaps an upstart neophyte’s determination of hierarchy in academic learning. (It may be excusable to a novice schoolboy, but it is not acceptable for a fully-fledged, functioning adult unless one is prepared to correct executive dysfunction.) This is an inversion as presumptuously absurd as constraining the force of Gravity as a minor sub-study of Fundamental/Theoretical Physics, right down theoretical frameworks for quantum gravity, or worse, nesting it as a secondary topic deep within a downstream sub-sub-branch like perhaps Ballistics.

Gravity was present when it pulled the particles of sand through many an hourglass or wax down a candle under many moons on the fringes of Europe and beyond, much earlier than it pulled down the apple knocking down upon Newton's head one sunny day. It did not become a peer to the falling apple, much like it would not submit to a projectile launched down a trajectory till its terminal impact. It is a primordial constant, as far as humans are concerned, an axiomatic law governing every physical endeavour on this earth. Physics is merely the historical human attempt at developing the language to observe, measure, decode, and articulate this gravity, within which ballistics (for a bullet, a missile, a falling apple - oh maybe not LOL - or a rocket) is the highly specialised, narrow application completely subservient to its rule. Without gravity, a projectile would fly in a straight line through the void forever, rendering the entire science of ballistics completely non-existent. To treat gravity as a localised sub-study is to mistake the vast cosmic environment for a minor chapter in a departmental textbook.

In very much the same manner, Metaphysics is not subject to Philosophy, it is Philosophy which is entirely dependent on an inherent metaphysics of its foundational assumptions; it did not author Metaphysics, just as Aristotle recognised when he termed it "first philosophy", "first science", or even "theology". To argue that metaphysics is merely a part of philosophy is itself a captive act of philosophising. Philosophy is not the source; when it was removed from that primordial anchor, it underwent a profound transmutation. It was reduced from an active, transformative way of being - Philosophia - a rigorous, lived intellectual discipline, into a mere spectator sport overlooking a live firing range or a war zone from behind a screen on social media.

Modern philosophy became a passive accountant tasked only with observing and calculating the trajectories of the human mind, downstream tracing an anxious arc through Epistemology, Ethics, onward into the mechanics and quality of Logic and Aesthetics. Philosophy today is merely perhaps, the vessel through which organic (philosophical) enquiry applying external models copied from a route based on the cartography of some individuals as it proceeds from the inward reality to an outward articulation, trying to map the unseen, internal forces of human existence that thrived long before we knew to name them.

Even Kant, in his monumental attempt to bridge this gulf, perhaps an ontological one, i may be wrong, could only reconcile the structural tension by framing Metaphysics as the generative root of human consciousness - the hardwired, internal architecture that filters all raw experience - while hoisting Philosophy as the overarching critical umbrella that governs the boundaries of human reason. Yet, under an organic gaze, this rigid, artificial umbrella softly transmutes into the living canopy of the tree itself in Goethe. The canopy represents the absolute outer perimeter of the mind's horizon; it appears to span and command the open sky as an overarching shield, but is in fact a perch on its highest branches for one to read and navigate with the stars in the night sky. But ultimately it remains entirely a downstream manifestation - shaped, sustained, and dictated by the metaphysical roots anchoring it from beneath and beyond.

Newton recognises the apple and distinguishes it from the root, which may offer a clean taxonomy on paper, and let it remain just that. But it is not the organic reality that sustains the tree; the fruit does not dictate the root. Much like Goethe recognised the entire tree encoded within the veins of a single leaf, modeling the same pattern as the branches would grow forth - a kind of geometry undergoing a living metamorphosis where the gestalt of the whole is governed by the same pattern that unfolds repeatedly (The Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790) - we must treat Metaphysics as the root discipline for our reading into our becoming human, from which we build the tensegrity of our Ontogeny. Only from this foundational grounding can we define our epistemology and our ethics, and only much, much further downstream then discuss the mechanics and quality of logic and aesthetics. Perhaps i may so boldly claim, that the gestalt of philosophy lives entirely within Metaphysics - for without the metaphysical whole to give them meaning to life, the analytical parts are merely dead fragments to the Faustian Will, the consequence of the Cartesian anxiety from pulling the metaphysical rug out from under himself with radical doubt.

 -- "The whole is other (not greater) than the sum of its parts"

All chaos and drama kills whatever sense of humour i would keep reserved and freely given for my inner circles and used sparingly for my public persona. Yes, i do have a sense of humour although that does not always necessarily get portrayed on this blog, yet. But picture how much effort i had pulled out of myself, that all I could manage for wry humour / sarcasm was a self-deprecation and debasement, reproachfully as i filled myself with blame while trying to return to my whole being, my authentic genuine self once again. Not to say that there was a time I was never authentic or genuine, I try to keep myself real with all the people i relate with, equal parts serious and equal parts jovial, but a time for this, and a time for that. In my limited yet fullest capacity that i was allowed to bring to bear, i found one side managing my own depth of thoughts and feelings, and the other side holding a logic and emotional weight that did not necessarily belong to me in a delicate, fragile balance. At some point what little of me was granted space in there became irreversibly "porous", and how well i could differentiate myself and someone else's energies became a major source of not only cognitive dissonance, but confusion.

In a way, i was guilty to myself of self-abandonment, trying to know another through their own standards and dictionary of means and experience, where it seems i thought i found a "third way" - non-judgementally - between the right-and-wrong extremes, focused on finding truth, certainty, but the outcome determined that there wasn't a way at all. Just an illusion created from vulnerability and insecurity that sat atop years of wounds i did not create, the price of which i paid for with myself at stake. There in that space I could not fully and truly be myself, authentically, but i could only be present as this small part of myself, for as much space as was afforded to me, for there never was truly any room for the whole of me to take space to begin with. It was either only my thoughts or my feelings that could get through, never both integrated with me with whoever would share that space, and the way i found out that this fragmentation occured would be in the worst ways i could imagine. The third way does exist, but it is not in the way I had initially figured. The third way can be walked, the way I went through was a lost cause from the get-go but i thought I could fly through it even with broken wings of fear and hope.

There in that space which identifiably was now only mine and mine only, because i was the only one suffering alone in that agony where i found no other person in the end, was where I realised that there was a fragmentation between what I should always have known as the two twin faculties of equal, mutually dependent cognitive processes of knowing and learning as one coherent whole. I thought I had been in a shared space created with the people involved but no they were never truly present with me all along. They were just projections, part light and part shadow, puppetteered by the players in that absurd game of manipulation of covert, vulnerable, narcissistic behaviours. In the end it was a space created temporarily - by me - with fluency in emotional and intellectual capacities, albeit with borrowed force and energy from the inhabitants of that space. That space had been meant to be co-owned by its individual members, but when the time for assuming ownership and accountability together, only one remained. It was in that space where i saw the separating of my feelings from my thoughts, my "intuition" from my better judgement, my reasoning from my rational self that I realised, all along whether through self-abandonment and betrayal, whether from beyond or from myself, at some point in modern life we all have been separating what should have originally and always have been one whole. When i could make neither heads nor tails, squinting through that headache that was when I saw it whole, blurred, but whole, beginning and end, that I stayed as long as i needed to comprehend. I could have cut short the lesson, but the experience would not have been as deep as it got within myself, that i could safely say, when "i thought" met "i felt", a sense and meaning I never truly quite grasped returned to me whole. In a sorry mess, sure, but whole. In addition to that, there was a fundamental, almost axiomatic truth which I had kept at a distance which I had learned some time ago; while the ego can only grow (or more like, evolve and transform) by breaking itself and being reborn, like a struggle of breaking out of a cocoon to develop wings that could truly fly, the (core, whole) identity cannot change its base or its position, at least not without the alchemy of fire (and this would be a separate subject altogether) cast within the right crucible or mould, with the hammer of truth on the anvil of the soul. (I am NOT subscribing to Freudian psychological theory although I use similar-sounding words.)

But none of space-holding can occur without making-time, although it sounds like a complexification of a simple thing, it is no mere thing or concept when you are living in a system where time and energy is traded for wealth and power like commodity, like currency. You cannot really hold a space you haven't truly recognised, like that which you own, because a true boundary at the edge of your self does not become "porous" except that you haven't really come to terms with it that you are capable of naming it when you encounter it. To carve out time in your life for anything now it must be acknowledged carries real cost, costs that one may not be able to afford, ill-prepared for, or may be irreversible, maybe irreplenishable. It can cost us energy, in the sense of emotions and feeling, which in turn costs us attention and presence, all of which functions on time, or rather, being in-time. 

The system of time, and how we feel in it, that we carry within ourselves may either be philosophically secular or prophetically sacred. If we don't recognise time as something that feels as though it is getting faster or running out, or without this urgency and consciousness of one's mortality, we will not find the worth of meaning in anything we do, and we fail to give value where it is due. We may only realise it after its time has passed, and waste that resource which never returns. That is what it means by waste of time. That then i would say is the moral failure, the evil that we want to fight. A wasted life where one never grows and expands beyond one's illusion of ego, stuck in a perpetually immature state, a Peter Pan syndrome. Child-ish, not child-like.  It is when we will be blinded by the illusion or delusion of options, of choices, instead of obligations, and decisions, whether ethical or moral, maybe even spiritual. Arguably this speaks to the mores and excesses of the luxuries of privilege and grand notions of an ideal in life that we should never reach, because the truest most vilest form of poverty is not in having nothing, but being able to give nothing despite all that we have - despite having everything - of experience, of knowledge, of wisdom, of wealth, of health, so on ad infinitum. That is when we no longer own anything, but everything owns us when we are beholden to it, at its behest, when we what we think we hold in our hand is actually what we hold in our hearts. Cue that phrase tat sounds like people are meant to be loved, and things used, but now we love things, and use people.  That sentence actually speaks to us a moral anxiety; we don't know it yet but actually we hate who we are. To that outcome, we would forgo a path of growth and maturity, self-development when we do not invest and manage the time that is the cost for such valuable and powerful experiences and observations. Instead if we spend it into forms of entertainment or self-amusement and other such dopamine addictions, which is the extreme but equal opposite of ennui or self-pity, we would have taken a biological sledgehammer to our inner world by limiting its receptivity to only one set of brain juices. We then end up loving an idea of who we can be (which is anything to any extent, really) instead of loving who we are. No, we don't even know how to love ourselves, gently, kindly and compassionately hold ourselves accountable with responsibility, in complete presence with sincerity, a kind of honesty unto oneself. Such that when chances and opportunities come for us to return to that primordial truth of ourselves, we skip or break it in the most violent and vehement tantrums and denial like a child(addict) or toddler(dreamer) losing its favourite candy(drug) or toy(totem). We hate the sobriety of lucid reality and reach for the drunkenness of a fantasy ideal. 

Even when we sit in lucidity in sober reality, we could still negotiate with it searching for the high of fantastic idealisms lulling us into a lost high that distracts us from the low we find ourselves in, or a daydream that obscures us from the sleepwalking we feel in ourselves. All anger, pain, grief, shame, hatred stems from the jarring threat of ending the illusions of our spiraling search in circles for that comfortable cradle in our early life that we should be able to remember but have forgotten due to reasons, perhaps not of our own but the reasons we give ourselves are often that which stops us from becoming, or at least building that cradle within us which we can give to someone else. The work that we need to do for legacy, for posterity, so that life can truly continue with the vitality that it deserves so that life doesn't just move on, with or without us anyway; it is living in the truest sense not going through the motions of routine but the steady stillness of presence from which all movement would carry meaning. When we do not take charge of ourselves, with accountability and responsibility, it should then be no wonder that our biographical history may carry endless unresolved darkness and tragedy, because so much energy and untapped potential in sense and meaning was not properly expressed, exacerbated with self-limiting beliefs and self-fulfilling prophecies. Even if we believe we have grown past that, but the avoidance of effort and pushing through discomfort costs us more than we actually want to give credit for. 

When we break structure in ourselves and sacrifice depth, the shallow and/or even deformed inner world risks warping perception of reality and being warped by it also. This structure is not even just about an order of rules in hierarchy, but the scaffold of a system of axioms and laws, a backbone of being, the spine of a book if you may see so. It is not a simple two-dimensional point A to point B start to end where nothing else exists or matters beneath or beyond, but at least a three-dimensional point of departure with intention, and recognising the impact in and of our presence at that destination of interest. The entire journey from departure to arrival, or arrival to departure, depending on where you are looking from, is the becoming of our true self, and all the time spent and space occupied in between creates the breadth and depth that broadens and expands our horizons and perception of our being in reality. 

Perhaps some of us may feel that we aren't "enough" if we haven't "become" anything but that would not matter if we don't even know our true being that fills up this biography of our individual lives, that we try to "become" everything we are not through not recognising what our beings truly are. With the limited time of our finite lives, perhaps we will never truly be "enough" because we are each figments of a humanly indeterminable collective of human history, at the late afternoon of world history, in the midst of transcendentally infinite time. But surely we will weigh a certain amount that suffices a certain vessel once we know what and how we are being in-time, in contentment. But if time is sacred, and therefore so space is honoured, perhaps we can value ourselves and each other better when we recognise virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, as qualities of the same, like both light, colour, and darkness, shadow, artefacts of the same source, instead of impertinence in ignorance and entanglement, but intentionality in illumination and enlightenment, from beyond-time, that has existed before we are born, and will exist after we are gone. Then we will perhaps understand the dimensions of our being and hold each other to the best of our capacities in best regard and respect, in a state of both clarity and certitude, not a simple confidence or certainty, born of honour and not just pride.

The above illustration presents to us a simple rule - while dimensionality in thinking provides our structure of knowing and sensing for our learning, then temporality, from which we explore the depths of our feeling, and the system of knowledge and meaning we hold in our experiencing time, forces us to require and adopt an organic system of meaning in our soul, that tracks through our life downstream and upstream through time that we fill, instead of only a hierarchical structure of existing in the body that we carry uphill or downhill through all the spaces we visit. The value of what we make of ourselves in existence is determined by the quality of its foundations. It is combining both when we say, we recognise. This is at once exceedingly complex yet profoundly simple because we are using the language of philosophy, psychology, combined in metaphysical discourse. But in an increasingly, maddeningly polarised world that goes insane with semantics fighting with "my truth" vs. "your truth" - which is really another way of saying "this is how i want and need reality to be like for me", I take great pains in not forcing down anybody's throats things like "rules" or "order" so that people stay engaged with a concept or an idea and find no time or meaning to begin to mount an assault on the messenger. But much of that sounds like a pipe dream, because the Faustian Will that has shaped today's world does not see it as a living organism but dead matter meant to be used. Yes, even you and me as units of labour and statistics calculated in a corporate ledger. But we are not about to wallow in self-pity just because it feels safer to humility, which exposes us to the truth, forgoing which we escape from temporary discomfort into humiliation.

Now then that we have identified that space where both belong, can we begin to explore the core of the matter at hand.