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Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. <a href="https://kenrose51.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">kenrose51.substack.com</a>

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Recent Episodes

June 8, 2026

Recovering Being

A slightly edited version of this video is available on <a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/hGhuZXairqY">YouTube</a>. If you liked this post, consider sharing it.If you haven’t already subscribed, you can here:More of my writing in written and spoken form is available on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Kenneth-Rose/e/B00B5J3ANO/ref=aufs_dp_fta_dsk">Amazon</a> This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://kenrose51.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">kenrose51.substack.com</a>

June 7, 2026

Being, Consciousness, and Bliss

I recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago while sitting in the middle of a vast courtyard opening out from a cathedral in an old Roman city in western Germany near France and Luxembourg. It was a bright and gently warm Saturday evening. The technical quality is imperfect because I was surrounded by tourists, passersby, and townspeople enjoying the mild weather. There are gaps in the recording when I stopped recording because people began talking near me. The style is informal, unlike my written style, but this approach encourages creative sparks of intuition. Below is an edited version of this podcast episode. There may be still some imperfections in it, despite multiple readings, but that shows that it was not written by AI!It’s a luminous evening in Trier, and I’m sitting on a bench while gazing up at the Dom, or the Cathedral of St. Peter, which lies at the heart of this ancient Roman city in western Germany. The townspeople and tourists are passing the evening in the European manner of promenading through the streets, enjoying ice cream, heading to restaurants, or, sitting, like me, taking in the sunlight after a long winter. The massive Romanesque church rising above me evokes a delightful sense of uplift and exaltation, making my seat here a suitable setting for raising ontological and metaphysical issues.In this essay, I want to write about a number of concepts that are central to the Upaniṣads and Vedānta. I’m not writing as a scholar of the Upaniṣads, an Indologist, or an advocate of a Vedāntic school. Instead, I utilize concepts from the Vedāntic schools to express the contemplative and ontological contemplative vision that I have been articulating in my books. These concepts are old friends, and I have been working with them, meditating upon them, and contemplating their significance since I first began to read the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad-gītā almost almost sixty years ago. They evoke contemplative, ontological, and mystical intuitions left untapped for me by Latin, Greek, and English terms. The word Brahman has far more resonance for me than the word being, although it is an evocative term in English.This contemplative ontology is based not on the exegesis of a specific philosophical tradition, either in India or in the West but on my own contemplative experience with these concepts. Not merely guided or shaped by reading the Upaniṣads and the study of Vedānta, it has been evoked by the ontological insights coded into their venerable teachings and narratives. We can subject Vedāntic concepts to conceptual analysis, which is a venerable academic approach. But if we approach them contemplatively with a disciplined and purified consciousness, they can evoke a vision of ultimate reality and its attributes. This is the gift of a contemplative metaphysics and a contemplative ontology, which I broached in my last book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2024) and which I plan to expand in a later book called The Generosity of Being.A classic Vedāntic definition of Brahman characterizes it as having the three cardinal features, or attributes, of sat, cit, and ānanda. (In more proper Sanskrit that is saccidānanda.) Although it’s a canonical expression in Vedānta, this formula first appears in the Tejobindu Upaniṣad instead of the earlier classical Upaniṣads. In a later essay, I’ll compare it with an older formulation of Brahman as satyam, jñānam, and anantam, which occurs in the classical Taittirīya Upaniṣad. (In the European Scholastic system, these universal attributes of whatever is or exists would be known as transcendentals.) Sat is being itself and indicates the real and the true. As sat, Brahman is the bedrock reality of whatever subsists or exists. As being itself, nothing subsists or exists outside of sat. Sat grounds and guarantees the truth of true statements and genuine experiences. Sat is Brahman, or being, expressing itself in the ontological hierarchy of physical existence, mental and subtle (prāṇic) experience, and the subsistent hypostases of the formal and ideal realm of the intellect.Cit is usually translated as “consciousness,” but this wan word captures little of the plenitude of experience that occurs in cit. Over the last century and a half starting with Brentano, Western philosophy has asserted that all consciousness is intentional—that every state of consciousness has an intentional object. This conception of consciousness is richer than bare awareness but it introduces an insuperable divide between a mental intention, or representation, and its object, whether internal or external to the mind. On this approach, consciousness is always divided into an intending subject and its mental objects. Consciousness is always about something that a subject intends or points toward mentally. To avoid this necessarily dualistic conception of consciousness, contemporary spiritualities that posit pure, undivided, objectless consciousness as ultimately real replace the word consciousness with awareness. Contrary to Brentano’s intentional consciousness and the rich contents of phenomenological elaborations of consciousness, awareness on this approach is what remains when everything has been eliminated from consciousness except the bare registration of uninflected awareness. But there is far more to consciousness than the mindful registration of events such as my sitting at this table and writing while being surrounded by people.The third term, ānanda, which usually translates as “bliss,” seems the easiest to translate, although there is far more to ānanda than this overused translation suggests. Ānanda is not just ordinary happiness; it’s complete and unsullied bliss. It is supreme happiness. I’ll have more to say about it later.As being itself, or absolute reality, Brahman is the fullness of reality. The Sanskrit word for the fullness of being is pūrṇam, which implies that nothing that subsists or exists stands apart from Brahman. That is the sat aspect or Brahman. The aspect of cit suggests that Brahman is not only the real, or the ontological foundation or bedrock, of what subsists and exists, it is also conscious. It’s aware. These nonduality of Brahman implies that wherever there is being, or sat, there is consciousness, or cit. Conversely, wherever there is consciousness, there is being. These are convertible terms. You can’t have the one without the other. The conception of saccidānanda not only suggests this coincidence of transcendental attributes in Brahman, it necessarily implies them as well.This is an example of a priori metaphysics, which Hume, were he still among us, would cast into the fire. Contrary to Hume, I contend that an a priori metaphysics is what we’re lacking. We’re unable to construct a grounding ontology that unifies the totality of knowledge, being, and existence without recourse to an a priori approach in metaphysics. An a priori metaphysics is not merely grounded in conceptual analysis, nor is it merely a logical operation. Instead, it charts, designates, and symbolizes the fundamental structure of being. Because being precedes and undergirds everything else, an a priori analysis of the concept of being deduces the necessary undergirding structure of whatever subsists ontologically and exists physically as their realizations. This view implies that logic is ontology and that ontology is logic, a view famously associated with Hegel. In a priori metaphysical thinking that has not been stunted by Kantian transcendentalism or by the linguistic turn, the analysis of an ontologically grounding concept like being is also an analysis of a way that being presents itself. Because being as such precedes, or grounds, whatever subsists or exists, it’s impossible to do ontology except as an a priori exercise of the intutive intellect. Ontology and metaphysics are not inductive sciences. They are not empirical. They uncover and articulate the categories that ground experience and that make empirical research possible.Now, to return to ānanda, Brahman’s third cardinal and transcendental attribute. As such ānanda is also convertible with being and consciousness. So, wherever there’s being, there’s not only consciousness, or awareness, there’s also bliss. Conversely, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. Looked at from the standpoint of ānanda, it’s logical and not at all controversial to hold that, as in the case of sat and cit, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. But here we hit a sticking point. One might object at this point that an a priori metaphysics that depends upon the analysis of the concept of being, or Brahman, as being constituted of saccidānanda, fails for two reasons. First, the claim that where there is being, there is consciousness fails because we’re not conscious when we sleep. Second, the claim that where there is being, there is bliss fails because no one is always blissful. We live in a world where there is much woe, suffering and misery existing alongside much beauty, truth, and goodness. There’s too much suffering and pain in the world for anyone to countenance an a priori claim that where there is being, there is also bliss. If I were approaching the meaning of saccidānanda from the standpoint of an empirical, or scientific, metaphysics, this would be the place where I would have to abandon that project.There are a number of ways of dealing with these objections. Buddhists claim over against Advaita Vedānta that consciousness is, like everything else, anitya, or impermanent. It comes and goes. When we fall into deep sleep, consciousness disappears. Some consciousness remains while we’re dreaming, but in deep sleep, we’re completely unconscious. The traditional retort of Advaita Vedānta is that when we wake up, we yawn, and happily exclaim, “I slept well and didn’t know anything” (sukham aham asvāpsam, na kiñcit avedisam). We wouldn’t be able to say that we slept well if consciousness were not present in deep sleep, which allows us to report later that we slept well.In the past I was not persuaded by this argument. It seemed like a weak and specious dodge. But I am more persuaded now than I used to be because of deeper meditative experience over the years. The claim that when you’re asleep, you’re not conscious relies on a shallow sense of what constitutes consciousness. This claim identifies consciousness too closely with waking consciousness. As a contemplative metaphysician, it’s clear to me now that we can distinguish between the waking consciousness that disappears when we fall asleep and a deeper awareness, a kind of deep, brooding general perception, which persists in the state of deep sleep. Through a sensibility shaped by contemplative practice and meditation, we learn to distinguish between ordinary waking consciousness, which I am experiencing right now while looking at the church in front of me, and a broader background awareness that doesn’t flicker out under any circumstances.I haven’t gotten to the place where I can say that my consciousness doesn’t flicker out in the middle of the night. But meditatively honed intuition suggests that the reason I can say that I slept well when I wake up is that I was aware throughout the night of being at rest from the tumult and turmoil of everyday consciousness and the chaotic imagery of dream consciousness. When we begin to perceive this deeper background awareness, we’re moving into the deeper ranges of consciousness, which are not dependent upon sensations or the mind. To help make sense of the claim that because being is consciousness, there is never any break in or loss of consciousness, we might recall the different levels of consciousness enumerated in Vedānta. Vedānta classically distinguishes between waking consciousness, consciousness while dreaming, and the deeper, more difficult to thematize, consciousness that persists in deep, dreamless sleep. Vedānta also speaks of a fourth stage of consciousness, which is consciousness itself, or awareness alone and which is not mediated by the body, the mind, or prāṇa. It’s pure, absolute, unadorned, universal awareness, or consciousness. On this model, it’s clear that neither waking consciousness nor dreaming sleep is the deepest and most profound level of consciousness.If we to restrict our attention to our physical existence, sensations, and ordinary mental awareness alone, then most of us go dark for a few hours every night. But when sleep is situated within the larger context of multiple levels of consciousness, it’s reasonable to hold that an unblinking awareness, which is being itself, infuses the other levels of consciousness. (In a later podcast, I’ll take up the question of why there are limitations like these levels of consciousness in pure consciousness in the first place.)Recently, I sat in the waning light of dusk in the stairwell of an old stone house alongside the Mosel River, which runs through Trier. Like many houses in Europe, it was built with stones in order to last, not for a few decades, but for hundreds of years. If you were to come back here in two hundred years, you might find this building still standing. The windows might be different but the structure itself and the steps would remain. As I reflected on these venerable old stones, I felt a palpable sense of a deep, brooding awareness coming through them. It was an ancient awareness, one with the red sandstone cliffs that tower over the river. Now, when I gaze upon the bricks in the cathedral towering over me, I feel the same sense of a deep, brooding consciousness. It’s significantly different from human consciousness, but it’s consciousness, nonetheless.While sitting meditatively in the stairwell, I noticed that ivy was growing along its stone walls. Contemplating it, I gained intuitive access to the consciousness of this wonderful plant. It was quite different from the consciousness emanating from the stones. It was more vibrant, although more transient. This ivy plant will exist for a minuscule amount of time in comparison with the stones. Odd as may sound to a some readers, this sensitivity to other forms of consciousness can be cultivated through meditation and other types of disciplined spiritual practice. I am reminded of Michael Pollan’s books, where he writes convincingly about the consciousness of plants, an idea that is becoming more widely accepted in scientific circles.A skeptical response to this intutive approach to understanding consciousness is that it’s merely anecdotal, grounded as it is in my own personal experience. The critic might say, “Your meditative communing with stones and ivy is is merely a product of your vivid imagination?” I agree that it’s anecdotal, but, more importantly, it’s also the fruit of the meditative cultivation of the imagination over the decades. The imagination is a portal, or doorway, into insights granting knowledge and experience of the independent reality and character of being. The imagination, when attuned to being itself and to metaphysical and spiritual realities, allows us to commune with being and to consciously resume our innate identity with being. We resume this natural identity with being by becoming sensitive to the imagery that being evokes in us when we meditate, read or write poetry, brood over an artwork, or contemplate a field strewn with colorful flowers. We need to recover an understanding of the imagination as ontological, as metaphysical. This is not a new idea for poets, novelists, artists, and mystics. In our ontologically impoverished era in which there’s been a revolt against traditional philosophical and spiritual wisdom over the last few centuries, it may seem like a stretch—like metaphysical fiction. But it’s not, and the test for its truth is the cultivation of the imagination as a channel for metaphysical and mystical insight.A more serious objection to the a priori claim that Brahman is always attended by the three fundamental attributes of reality, consciousness, and bliss is the fact of suffering. That’s a difficult challenge. To address it, it’ll help to go recall the a priori claim that wherever there’s being, there’s always a consciousness. Similarly to the claim that consciousness is present in deep sleep, I hold that Brahman is always blissful because, as infinite, it can only be blissful. Brahman knows neither fear nor suffering because it has no divisions, no opposing other, no struggles, no lack, and no wants. As a consequence, being as such is always blissful. That’s not typical of human beings under ordinary circumstances, but when we meditate or engage in deeper forms of prayer, we often experience spiritual bliss, or ānanda. Because the essence of spirituality and deep spiritual experience is unitive consciousness, whether with God, the Divine, or ultimate reality, it’s characterized by freedom from suffering and a sense of ease, oneness with the whole, and joy. Unitive consciousness, which is identity with what’s ultimately most real, is essentially characterized by the bliss of infinite, unending happiness. When we attend to divine or universal consciousness, we become calm and happy. For eminent saints and illumined sages in the world’s spiritual religions and philosophies, no physical or mental impediment obscures their deep and profound sense of being situated in the blissfulness of the divine. That’s a high standard, but it is the lure and the promise of spirituality. Salvation or enlightenment in religious traditions is associated with profound joy and peace. In all major religious traditions, the ultimate conception of the Divine, of ultimate reality, is always associated with profound joy and bliss. It’s always portrayed as the ultimate goal of life, and life’s greatest gift is to experience the peace of divine happiness.People who respond to this line of reasoning by professing unfamiliarity with bliss that is not produced by the senses might probe the difficult situations they have passed through in search of moments where they may have experienced, if only briefly, a radiant intuition of hope that all will somehow turn out well. (Considering a person’s lifestyle and background, this intuition may or may not be clearly apparent, or it may not appear at all.) If we reflect on the difficult circumstances through which we have passed, we often realize that we have gained transformative insights through them. This discovery should inspire a sense of elation and gratitude for the fruits gained in these difficult experiences. Bliss is at the heart of being, even if we don’t experience it all the time.There are many difficult situations in life, and it would be unkind and uncharitable to suggest that they point to bliss or hope. I won’t presume to make that claim for anyone, but we shouldn’t overlook narratives that witness to the profound peace and bliss that may bloom in the most difficult of circumstances. (In a later podcast, I’ll suggest that the bliss of being is not always apparent to us is because of conditions that we and nature create. They mask being and obscure the blissfulness of our innate Self, or ātman.)Another indicator that being is essentially bliss is that the quest for bliss, for supreme happiness, motivates much of our activity. This ancient insight is traceable to the Platonists and has its counterpart in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. There, an illumined spiritual guide teaches that whatever we cherish as a source of happiness is actually a veiled quest for the supreme and undimmed happiness of ānanda, which is a central attribute of our true Self, the soul or ātman. We intuitively seek bliss in whatever we do, even when our actions are misguided. Although the moments of joy in each life may be few or many, we seek it in our countless activities. Whether through sports, care for others, aesthetic appreciation, or hobbies and avocations, we seek the joy that an a priori metaphysics of being tells us is our innate nature and birthright. Even destructive behavior can be seen as a negative and counterproductive attempt at accessing our blissful selves. Indeed, the most foolish acts can be seen as misdirected quests for happiness. (If our life offers little bliss, whether spiritual or physical, we may settle for a simple lack of pain and suffering. No one wants to suffer—unless, as with some medieval saints—they see it a faster path to undivided eternal bliss.)The Taittirīya Upaniṣad offers a sublime thought experiment in the form of a hierarchy of bliss. If we take the bliss enjoyed by a healthy young emperor as the baseline, we can increase the degree of bliss that is enjoyable by successive multiples of one hundred of the bliss of the young monarch. This continues until we reach the almost infinite degree of bliss reserved for the highest deities in the traditional Hindu pantheon. (The Upaniṣad points out that even this greatest degree of bliss does not equal the bliss attained by the devoted student of sacred writings.) This suggests that there are lesser and greater degrees of bliss, which can be attributed to where and how we seek bliss. Compared to inner spiritual bliss, bliss derived through the senses is genuine but of low wattage. It’s like sucking on an orange, which gives momentary pleasure but soon becomes a tasteless husk. Too often our quest for bliss is like this, as we feverishly seek more bliss from limited vessels.An a priori metaphysics of Brahman holds that bliss, as much as consciousness, is our nature, although it can be obscured. But spiritual disciplines can reawaken our awareness of the bliss that is an essential aspect of our deepest and most authentic selfhood. If we contemplate being, either directly or under the form of a divinity that resonates with us, we will reawaken to spiritual bliss. It will then become increasingly accessible by turning our attention within. Spiritual practice is a portal into ānanda, which continually expands as we enjoy it contemplatively, and our highest happiness is to become absorbed in currents of transcendental bliss.If you liked this post, consider sharing it.If you haven’t already subscribed, you can here:More of my writing in written and spoken form is available on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Kenneth-Rose/e/B00B5J3ANO/ref=aufs_dp_fta_dsk">Amazon</a> This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://kenrose51.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">kenrose51.substack.com</a>

May 10, 2026

The Fullness of Being:

The question of why there is something rather than nothing is familiar in metaphysics. First asked by Leibniz, it was made more famous by Heidegger. More fundamental than the question of why there are beings rather than nothing is, in my view, the question of why there is being in the first place. Related is the question of why there are qualities, or qualia. So far, science hasn’t provided us with an answer to this latter question. As for being itself, it remains invisible to disciplines focused on beings rather than being. They measure the causes and effects of qualities, but why there are qualities and from where qualities come rank among the most intractable metaphysical questions. They rank with the question of why there is being in the first place and not just beings. Not only must we distinguish between beings and being, we must also inquire into what allows being to be? These questions will appear meaningless to some readers, but others will find them engrossing issues that appeal to the essence of ontology, metaphysics, and philosophy in their truest sense.Over the years, my ontological reflections have been formed fundamentally by the Vedāntic teachings in the Upaniṣads. Reflecting on these Hindu books has provided me with my clearest insights into being. My early upbringing in a traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic milieu in New York influenced me unconsciously as I imbibed aspects of Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy. These were not communicated directly by my teachers or the parish priests but were implicit in the formation that I received in that traditional Catholic setting. My first conscious interaction with metaphysics came through reading, first as a teenager and then more seriously as I grew older, the Upaniṣads. The insights they afforded me were fortified through the practice of jñāna-yoga and bhakti-yoga, which draw upon Vedānta and the Upaniṣads.My intellectual awakening to the question of being happened while reading Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers. I spent many months in the 1980s poring over this book and meditating over virtually every sentence. It took a couple of years before I sensed that I had grasped the import of Gilson’s critical views of essentialism. It took more years of rereading and reflection to comprehend the significance of the Thomist existentialism that he defended in the last chapters of the book. But understanding does not equal agreement, for the more I understood Gilson’s views, the less I agreed with him. That’s because I am congenitally a Platonist and not an Aristotelian. Those two words code contrary approaches to metaphysics. My early predilection for the Upaniṣads already predicts my penchant for a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian metaphysics. Despite my appreciation of Aristotelian defenses of universals against austere, deflationary ontologies, I see universals as subsisting whether or not there’s a physical world. Universals—along with qualia—don’t require instantiation in the physical universe because they subsist independently of it. On this central ontological issue, I depart from Aristotle and move decisively toward Plato, whom I find to be much closer than Aristotle to the the spirit of the Upaniṣads.This is the background for the issue that I want to talk about today. This isn’t the question of why there are beings, which is a mysterious issue, but rather the question of why there is being in the first place. To have any chance of answering that question, we first have to suggest an answer the question, “What is being?” Heidegger famously raised this question in Being and Time, but in an unsatisfactory way in my view. By temporalizing being, he reduced being to the status of a being. But being can’t be a being. It can’t be a something like numbers, essences, substances, or human beings because it is the ground of these various types of entities. Were it possible for being to become a being, a something, it would stand on the same level with other beings, or somethings, and would fall—which is impossible—from its status as being itself. A fundamental ontological truth is that being can’t be anything other than itself. This insight authorized Heidegger’s ontological difference and evoked Gilson’s relentless analysis of virtually every metaphysical school that he was familiar with as ultimately reducing being to beings. (In Advaita Vedānta this is the error of failing to perceive the difference between saguṇa-brahman and nirguṇa-brahman, which transforms Brahman into something less than itself.)Despite diversionary moves arising in deflationary, positivist, analytic, and scientific variants of metaphysics, the most fundamental questions in ontology and metaphysics are what being is and, crucially, why there is being. The clue that hints at answers to these questions is suggested by considering qualities, qualia. It’s a delightful spring morning at the Yoga Vidya ashram in northern Germany where I have been on retreat for the last four months. I am outside standing in the fresh spring grass gazing at a stand of flowering trees. When I consider the greenness of the leaves and the grass, I am not looking for a biological answer but rather for the source of the greenness of the leaves and the grass—for greenness itself. What is green? What is it to be green? Where does green come from? How is it that there’s a quality of greenness that suffuses these leaves, the grass on which I’m standing, the green shirt that I’m wearing, and the green lawn chair standing at my side. What is this quality of greenness?Related questions concern the other qualities that we experience in life. We might ask, “What is a virtue?” “What is goodness?” “What is honesty?” and “Where do virtues come from ontologically?” We can ask after the source of other qualities such as the devotion of religious people, the integrity of a reliable person, the feeling of friendship, the feeling of connectedness, the feeling of wanting to do something for others. We might ask after the source of melody, rhythm, language, cognition, and obligation. Besides these vexing issues concerning the source of qualities are questions about numbers and universals. When we analyze everyday experience, we see that it is pervaded with an ensemble of ethical, aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, and metaphysical qualities. None of these qualities can be excised from our experience through a monotonic physicalist understanding of life. We can’t easily and plausibly explain them away. Physicalist attempts to reduce them to something else inevitably fails. How do you reduce a virtue to a physical process? It’s just not possible. Attempts to explain away qualities as referring to or reliant on physical processes will fail for anyone with a classical formation, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Catholic, or Orthodox Christian because they fail to come to terms with the fundamental, existential, phenomenological, and ontological reality of qualities, which pervade our existence and make our lives meaningful.Inquiring into their source and persistently asking why they exist leads me into deep meditative reveries in which I become quiet and still. These reveries kindle philosophical, metaphysical, and ontological insight at their highest pitch. Philosophy at this contemplative level is not the analysis of words and arguments. It’s not a reductive program dissolving all phenomena into physical processes. These contemplations lead to the contemplation of being itself, or Brahman in Sanskrit.As I am using the term being, it is equivalent to the most fundamental standpoint, which is the ground from which everything else emerges. The word itself is not as important as being’s status as that which is always prior to whatever is or exists. When the word being is reduced to a mere abstraction, we can drop it and speak instead of whatever it is that is prior to this reduced concept of being. In Platonic metaphysics, which is not as much studied or as widely known as Aristotelian metaphysics, being is not the ultimate reality but is a product of the interaction of the One, or the Good, and the Dyad. Being on this view is subordinate to these hierarchically superior aspects of reality. Both Plato and Plotinus refer to the most superior or most prior dimension of reality as that which is “beyond being,” or hyperousios (ὑπερούσιος) in Greek. This is not a mere terminological distinction but a contemplative gesture toward the hyperousios, toward that which goes beyond being—or, in Sanskrit, nirguṇa (qualityless) Brahman. As a contemplative move, it’s like trying to view the back of your head with your eyes. It’s bending the mind back to its ground to see that from which it emerges. The insights kindled by this contemplative gesture yield an intimate familiarity with being as such rather than conceptual schemes and verbal doctrines.As we become inwardly still in contemplative reverie, the mind perceives its ontological ground through noēsis, which is its highest capability. This is the intuitive seeing, or cognition, of the intellect, understood in its pre-modern sense of nous in Greek, or buddhi in Sanskrit. The intuitive intellect perceives being as a continuous movement of deferral whereby whatever we say about being recoils back upon us. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad characterizes Brahman—or being—as that “from which words along with the mind return without attaining it” (yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha, यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते अप्राप्य मनसा सह, 2.4.1, 2.9.1). This is not a counsel of despair or frustration but a contemplative guideline. In the falling back of language and the mind from being, we catch sidelong glances of what being is.These sidelong glances of being show it as continuously evading capture within categories, ideas, or language as they approach it. The twinned moves of approach and evasion comprise the fundamental creative act at the level of the mind, language, and nature. This refined contemplative move, which approaches being even as it is deflected by being, generates language and the categories and essential ideas of ontology and metaphysics. These, in turn, endow matter with structure and meaning in a hierarchy of forms rising from the subatomic level through physics, chemistry, and biology to the entire physical universe.The contemplative move of approaching being while being deflected by being is the way that being shows itself, even if obliquely. Because being has priority over beings, it’s always prior to every attempt to say what it is. Approaching being, the Always Prior, through language, thought, and contemplation leads to their deferral. The priority of being over beings implies its unbounded openness, freedom, and generosity, which allows every potential within it to become actual. By posing virtually no check or impediment on what may emerge, being as the Always Prior sponsors the perennial movement of approach and deflection that is generative of the realm of experience.In answering the question about the source of the qualities and ideal forms that permeate experience, I move beyond Plato, Heidegger, and Gilson to the Upaniṣads and its teaching of pūrṇam, or the fullness and perfection, of Brahman. Brahman is neither formless nor differentiated in its ownmost priority. Brahman—or sat—is the totality, the fullness, of being. On one hand, being is infinitely divided into the qualities, ideal forms, and entities that make up our experience, while, on the other hand, it is undivided and uncut fullness. Brahman is, in the language of the Thomistic tradition, supereminent. It is the supereminent expression of every quality and formal idea that we encounter. To bring Thomism into dialogue with the Upaniṣads, we might say that being, or Brahman, is nondual supereminence. As supereminent fullness, or pūrṇam, being is the never-defective and Always-Prior realization of each quality as undivided from every other quality. This fullness is the ground, or source, of the qualities and ideal forms that both divide and unify experience into trees, grass, birds, numbers, universals, and virtues such as goodness and integrity.The qualitative nonduality of Brahman, of being, animated the poets who first chanted the hymns of the Vedas and who confided to their students the mystical teachings of the Upaniṣads. When, like them, we turn from being and study our experience as individual beings, we know being as differentiated fullness, differentiated pūrṇam. When we turn towards being itself, towards Brahman, we enter a contemplative arc that leads us from differentiated fullness into the contemplative vision of perfect being in its undivided, supereminent perfection. So, on this lovely spring morning in northern Germany, this is my attempt to address the question of why there is something rather than nothing. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://kenrose51.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">kenrose51.substack.com</a>

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What is Outtakes and Fresh Starts Podcast?: Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. <a href="https://kenrose51.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">kenrose51.substack.com</a>
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