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… Many readers may feel overawed by the breadth of knowledge which is called upon in order to provide evidence for the existence, or at least assumed existence, of an unus mundus, a unity which underlies the multiplicity of phenomena in the empirical world. This unity ‘denotes a potential structure which becomes only sporadically actualized in the real inner and outer worlds’ (p. 9). Quoting Jung, the author states,'that there is little or no hope of illuminating this undivided existence except through antinomies’, and she continues, ‘we do know for certain that the empirical world of appearance is in some way based on a transcendental background’ (author's italics). By transcendental she means transcending consciousness.
Personally, I find it hard to be certain of anything that transcends consciousness. All I can be sure of is that such speculations about the background, about what lies behind the observable phenomena, are both fascinating and require a theory of knowledge (epistemology). In other words, I feel that the above quotation relies too heavily on the vagueness of ‘in some way’, as well as on the fluidity of what consciousness may mean at any given moment. In order to be certain when it has been transcended one would have to be sure of the limits and location of consciousness.…
… However, it is well to remember that the separation of science from magic took several hundred years to complete. Perhaps it is not yet complete or cannot be completed because analogical thinking is a human propensity just as much as the acquisition of logical thought processes. After all, Isaac Newton had a private and unpublicized interest in alchemy, and although his model of the universe was based on mathematics, the master mathematician was God and the apocryphal apple which fell on his head triggered off a theory which, in turn, was in keeping with the old idea of the harmony of the spheres.
It would indeed be stupid to dismiss analogies and so forth as worthless mumbojumbo.