The Ultimate Sacred Reality Throughout The History Of Philosophy And Religion

Reason has played a major role in attempting to understand the Ultimate Sacred Reality throughout the history of philosophy and religion. Many people have conceived of varying roles and limits to reason itself when searching for an understanding of the Ultimate Sacred Reality. While reason is a useful tool for solving problems in the natural world, its usefulness in the abstract battleground of metaphysics is unclear. For thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Al-Ghazali, reason is the means by which one can reach and understanding of the Ultimate Sacred Reality. Reason’s practical application in the natural world extends beyond the corporeal, and serves as a reliable language for understanding things beyond our experience. This presupposition of

The first objection, drawn from Mahayana Buddhism, is that reason had linguistic limitations that, if not recognized, can lead to the reification of non-things, and a misunderstanding of the Ultimate Sacred Reality. This ideology’s concepts of emptiness and co-origination challenge the concept of own-being and lead to an approach toward understanding Reality outside of linguistic boxes. The second objection comes from Zhuangzi and Kierkegaard who are generally regarded as antinationalists. While these two greatly disagree on the nature of Reality, they both argue that reason alone cannot lead someone to an understanding of the Ultimate Sacred Reality, rather understanding is reached through some alternative source of wisdom. The third objection comes from Hume who argues that reason inherently fails as a means for drawing deductions about the Ultimate Sacred Reality. The vast and innumerable possibilities produce and endless list of equally justifiable oppositional positions with any given assertion, and no logical deduction can be drawn to support one over the

The concept of Emptiness challenges Ghazali and Aquinas’s substantialist approach to reality, and the concept of co-dependent origination challenges their belief that infinite regression is an absurdity. For Mahayana Buddhism, the search for the Ultimate Sacred Reality is somewhat an endeavor to understand that there is no such thing; rather, the ultimate is emptiness. Emptiness in this ideology is the “thorough-going negation of independent self-existence and a refutation of substantialist conceptual approaches to reality.” This can be understood by the concept of co-dependent origination, which is the ideal that all things lack “own-being,” but rather must be understood as one manifestation of the totality of casual relations. A coffee mug, for example, does not have an essence or thingness related to the Form of coffee mug. Rather, the coffee mug is better understood as an arising event of casual relations: the mug is an event, rather than a thing, and an indistinguishable causal event at that. Moreover, the entirety of reality in this ideology is co-dependent origination which is, essentially, emptiness. Mahayana Buddhism, by virtue of the concept of co-dependent origination, also accepts the idea that the universe has simply always been. The chain of casual relations does, in fact, regress infinitely, and