Metaphysics points to a higher consciousness but cannot itself touch it. It provides the truest concepts of that consciousness, but being concepts only, they merely symbolize it. We must not confuse two entirely different things: the feeling of fundamental unity which the realized sage possesses and the concept of fundamental unity which the metaphysical thinker possesses. The sage will make use of the metaphysician's concept when he seeks to make the content of this felt unity articulate and intelligible in communication to others. The metaphysician cannot get beyond his concept, do what he may, unless he rises beyond metaphysics altogether. For when he tries to determine the indeterminable he merely fumbles through a series of empty words and finally fails in his attempt, his last words being purely negative ones. The metaphysician is utterly helpless when confronted by the problem of realizing his own ultimate concept of reality, for he can only express it in negative terms, which is tantamount to a failure in expressing it at all. The moment he endeavours to determine it in affirmative thoughts is the moment when he destroys its reality altogether, for it then becomes a mere thought among the numerous others considered by his mind. Just as cold scientific analysis deprives the warmest artistic emotion of its content and thus destroys the emotion itself, so the process of thinking deprives the profoundest mystical experience of its actuality and effaces its transcendental character. For reality is beyond the demonstration and inaccessible to the grasp of reason. Metaphysical reasoning is a self-destructive process for it can only reveal its utter inadequacy to grasp the Real other than as a thought. Consequently the Vedantic metaphysicians who claim that their path of discriminative reasoning is alone sufficient to gain God-realization without any kind of yoga practice at all always fail in their attempt. They can offer nothing more than mere sounding words, empty talk which leaves its victims as much in the realm of illusion as they were when they first sat at the feet of these babbling gurus.
The final work of metaphysics, after it has finished its corrective and disciplinary work upon the personal emotions and mystical experience, is to abolish itself! For it must then show that all intellectual questioning and all intellectual responses are dealing with a level of reference which is mere appearance. When metaphysics realizes that it cannot touch the Real, it silences its own agitations and disdains its own edifice. A genuine metaphysics will thus always be self-destructive. Metaphysical thinking strenuously manufactures isolated and fragmentary patterns of the Real and then puts them together to make a harmonious whole. But both in the method which it uses to attack the problem of the Overself and in the result which it reaches it never gets beyond mere representations, that is, it never gets to the Real itself. It runs away within the range of a circumference which limits it in the end. Every effort is like the effort of a man seeking to lift himself up by his shoestrings--it cannot be done. The Overself of an unvivified metaphysics will always remain a mere mental construction.
-- Perspectives > Chapter 7: The Intellect > # 31
