Metaphysical Dissonance is what we experience when our superficial and everyday motivations are contradicted by our metaphysical convictions.
In other words; when our everyday, on-the-surface specific attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours; are contradicted by our basic understanding of the nature of reality.
Metaphysical Dissonance is the normal and almost universal state of nearly-everybody in the West today - including the religious, including the Christian.
It is maybe the single deepest cause of of our civilizational paralysis, of our mass demotivation (hence mass cowardice). Metaphysical Dissonance explains our chronic inability to do anything positive and helpful about the many potentially lethal attitudes and behaviours that beset us.
Our primary motivation in life comes from our metaphysical convictions - and ultimately everything else is merely froth on the surface.
Therefore, when metaphysical convictions fail to provide a primary motivation - then we are left with nothing-but froth on the surface...
Our behaviour becomes merely a froth blown about by the winds of culture and society. We have become the most easily-manipulated society in history - because our everyday attitudes, thoughts, actions are severed from fundamental roots.
Indeed, it is the officially endorsed and taught conviction that there are no fundamental roots.
It is officially articulated that the ultimate reality began as a dead universe of physical matter, to which life and consciousness were later added by abstract processes, forces, laws.
The ultimate reality is that we and everything-else is made of dead-stuff; the past just happened to happen the way it did by the operation of causes and chance; and there is no underlying direction, no deep purpose, no meaning, to things-in-general.
And this metaphysics is a matter of conviction - it is not treated as a theory or an assumption, but as a fact; and as such it is the underlying structure of human existence whatever religion is put on top of it: In effect, religion is just aspect of the froth on the surface of life.
Our cultural paralysis is a consequence of Metaphysical Dissonance; because our underlying metaphysical convictions can have no relation to our surface "beliefs" about values, ethics, virtue, truth, beauty.
The passions and despairs of everyday life amount just to froth, because they are unrooted, unintegrated, and motivate only feebly and briefly - the oceanic tide of existence is towards dissolution of meaning, paralysis of thought and action.
And the passivity of despair is alleviated by sporadic frenzies of hedonism, self-gratification, and self-assertion.
All this derives from the self-contradictions inherent in trying to build a purposive, meaningful, motivated life; upon foundations that deny the reality of such a life.
Because the consequences of Dissonance are so bad, and seem in-practice unavoidable; there is therefore - I believe - an absolute necessity for each of us to strive to attain Metaphysical Coherence.
In other words we need to build our surface attitudes, thoughts, behaviours upon foundations that are coherent with them - the foundations and and the superstructure need to be mutually consistent.
Instead of (as at present) being At War; our convictions need to be mutually supportive.
For Metaphysical Coherence to be possible and effective in supporting our everyday discernments and aspirations; requires that we personally are able to perform this integration between depth and surface.
This means that our metaphysical convictions must be:
1. Genuinely understood.
Beliefs cannot be mystical, nor can they be forms of words, nor taken on trust from external authority - we each must personally understand, grasp the meaning of, our fundamental convictions - in order that we can work-with them.
2. Regarded as really-real.
Our metaphysical convictions need to be such that we regard them as reality - else they will lack power to shape and motivate our lives.
We see this at present in that people regard the "physics" description of things as deep reality; and we observe that the nihilism (purposelessness, meaninglessness, indifference to the individual person...) of such conviction subverts, weakens, and negates any amount of religious "beliefs".
3. Genuinely endorsed.
So far it seems we must genuinely understand our metaphysical beliefs, and need to regard them as descriptive of reality; and on top of these we must endorse them: we need to desire that they be fulfilled.
The basis for Metaphysical Coherence is therefore to insist upon a full understanding and grasp of fundamental assumptions that we personally regard as real and desirable.
It may sound as if this is impossible, but we were all incarnated and born with innate but unconscious metaphysical assumptions concerning life.
I personally believe that these innate assumptions are God-given, because needed for anyone to live life as God intends.
Therefore, the process of achieving Metaphysical Coherence is mostly a matter of becoming-conscious-of, evaluating, and then choosing to endorse; that which already exists within each person...
(Although, in practice, such recovery may need to be achieved by conscious intellectual effort; by searching, analysis, learning from experiences etc; in other words a Spiritual Quest - whose results need to be checked and confirmed by intuition, meditation, prayer and the like.)
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