I. The Present Confusion
It has become fashionable in certain circles to speak of “metaphysics” as though it were a form of psychology, speculative abstraction, or vague spirituality. One encounters endless talk of “my metaphysics”, as though the highest knowledge were a matter of personal taste.
This usage is not simply imprecise; it is a betrayal of meaning. To reduce metaphysics to subjective experience is to deny its very essence. For metaphysics is not “my truth” or “your truth” but the science of principial reality.
Guénon once wrote: “The modern West no longer possesses metaphysics properly so called; it no longer even suspects what metaphysics is.”” Nearly a century later, his judgment remains exact.
II. What Metaphysics Is Not
Metaphysics is not:
- Psychology: the study of the mental states of the individual.
- Cosmology: the study of the manifested world in its multiplicity.
- Mysticism: the realm of impressions, emotions, and visionary phenomena.
- Philosophical speculation: discursive thought operating within rational limits.
All of these have their domains, but none of them are metaphysics. To confuse them with metaphysics is to place the accidental in the place of the essential.
III. What Metaphysics Is
Metaphysics is the knowledge of the Absolute. It concerns not becoming but Being; not phenomena but Principle; not the contingent but the necessary. It is not discursive but intuitive in the highest sense: a direct participation in the order of truth.
To speak of metaphysics is to speak of that which cannot be otherwise, which precedes all worlds, which grounds every possibility. It is, as Coomaraswamy said, “Metaphysics is the science of Reality, the science of the Absolute as such.”
Those who fail to recognize this fall into confusion, treating metaphysics as a poetic embellishment or an obscurity. They desecrate the word by applying it to the most banal forms of subjectivity.
IV. The Consequences of Error
When metaphysics is reduced to sentiment or opinion, several errors follow:
- Relativism — “everyone has their own metaphysics.” This is nonsense; metaphysics, by definition, concerns what transcends individuality.
- Psychologism — treating higher knowledge as merely inner states. This confuses accidents of the psyche with the reality of spirit.
- Materialist spiritualism — seeking “energies” and “vibrations” in place of principial truth. This is nothing but inverted materialism masquerading as spirituality.
- Profanation of doctrine — quoting symbols without grasping their principial meaning, turning sacred language into empty ornament.
Such errors do not simply mislead the individual; they contribute to the wider dissolution of meaning in an age already drowning in confusion.
V. The Ompyrean Response
Ompyrean rejects all such counterfeits. We stand with the great expositors of metaphysics — Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Shankara, Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart — in affirming that metaphysics is not subjective but universal, not temporal but eternal, not speculative but principial.
At the same time, we affirm with Aurobindo that metaphysical truth is not to be preserved as dead letter, but lived as transformation. True metaphysics is the foundation of the future, the axis upon which the supramental must descend.