There is no reason for necessarily seeking the cause of a phenomenon on the plane where it is produced, on the contrary one has to consider the possibility of a non-material cause.

Another point that moderns do not grasp, is that there is no reason for necessarily seeking the cause of a phenomenon on the plane where it is produced, and that on the contrary one has to consider the possibility of a non-material cause, above all when it is a question of a phenomenon whose beginning is unknown a priori, and unknowable materially, as is the origin of living beings.

 

Transformist evolutionism is the classical example of the bias that invents "horizontal" causes because one does not wish to admit a "vertical" dimension: one seeks to extort from the physical plane a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter.

 

Even within the order of physical causes, one has to take into account the simultaneous presence of the immanent metaphysical Cause: if a seed is the immediate cause of a plant, it is because the divine archetype intervenes in the physical causality. Geometrically speaking, causes can be situated on the "concentric circles" that constitute the Universe, but other causes - and with all the more reason the First Cause - are situated at the Center and act through the radii emanating from it.

 

The divine Intellect contains the archetypes of creation, and it is starting from this Cause - or from this causal system - at a given cyclic "moment" of the cosmogonic process, that the "ideas" are "incarnated" which will be manifested in the form of contingent creatures.

 

We do not ask physicists to be content with an anthropomorphic and naive creationism; but at least it would be logical on their part - since they aim at a total and

flawless science - to try to understand the traditional ontocosmological doctrines, especially the Hindu doctrine of the envelopes (kosha) of the Self (Atma): a doctrine that, precisely, presents the Universe as a system of circles proceeding from the Center-Principle to that extreme limit which for us is matter.

 

For human science does not derive solely from the need to know and to register; more profoundly its origin is the thirst for the essential; now the sense of essentiality attracts us toward shores other than those of the limited plane of physical phenomena alone.

 

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Frithjof Schuon: Roots of the Human Condition

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