The Ontological War

I recently commented on an article at The American Catholic and found almost no surprises to the kinds of responses to my comments. Several people stopped replying to my comments, which is very common: we are all afraid of increasing our degrees of realself—of who we might truly be—and so for many people when they are confronted by that increase they … leave. Two or three other people copy-and-pasted Catholic dogma and thought that was an intelligent response, seemingly without ever taking into consideration that that dogma might mean less than nothing to a non-Catholic. One person was aware that realself-to-realself relationships are better than socialself-to-socialself relationships.

One of the commenters, Zach, later wrote on his blog a wordless post, “Philosophy gone Wrong,” and says he can’t comment because I make up words,

Scott, I think you have an idiosyncratic and ultimately inaccessible way of talking about things. I’d love to continue the conversation, but you need to explain yourself in words that aren’t made up. I don’t mean to be cruel but it seems that’s is what you have done.

Ontologically, of course, one can’t help but think that his response is just another of the countless excuses people come up with to keep from having to consider who they truly are. Instead of asking difficult questions such as “Are we living in reality?”; “What is the connection between the self we are being and reality?”; and “If we are being a self that is not who we truly are, doesn’t that inevitably mean that we cannot also be living in reality?”; it is much easier to say “you are using a word incorrectly” and go on with one’s happy and unexamined life.

Indirectly, though, Zach does bring up an interesting question, my use of the word “ontology,” as compared to what he probably considers real “ontology.”

We all like to think we are living in reality, but we are not, and people learn this by increasing their degrees of realself. Ontologically, the day-to-day world now is a socialself world, because we are all being our socialselves, and because of this most of us are able to fool ourselves even more into thinking that the socialself world is reality. At the same time, by fooling ourselves that we as our socialselves are living in reality we can also fool ourselves into thinking that the self we are being, our socialself, is the true and authentic self of us and of all humans. In fact, though, all we’ve done has been to create a self-reinforcing, circular delusion that, as our socialselves, makes perfect sense to us.

However, as people move forward ontologically by increasing their degrees of realself, they see that with each forward step they take their own ontological world changes slightly: it becomes a little more the ontological world they will live in once they become all their realselves, which I call the realself world, and they also realize that that world truly is reality.

From one perspective, then, one can say that increasing realself people are aware on some level that we are not living in reality, and they intuitively sense that the path to reality is, surprisingly, the path that leads directly to the very center within us.

Getting back to the word “ontology,” I needed a name for this huge area of human thought, and “realself ontology” was the best, even though I frequently refer to it as just “ontology.” The definition of realself ontology is in the Glossary, but the term actually has a very simple meaning: it refers to anything having to do with the realself.

For those who think the word “ontology” should be restricted to the other ontology, they do have one thing to look forward to: if the world ever becomes the realself world and everyone is truly living in reality, there will be no need for realself ontology, and all the ontologists then will be considering what truly is reality and existence, and not badly distorted perceptions of them as they are doing now.

I’ll probably write more on my comments at The American Catholic in future posts.