5.
The Sabian Philosophy

 • The Primary Statement  • The First Axiom
The Second Axiom  • The Third Axiom  • Summary

Philosophy is of great value to some aspirants, and little more than meaningless jargon to others, depending entirely on temperament and background. It is a useful tool of mind, but by no means a necessity of illumination.

The term was coined by Socrates, and its original meaning was love of wisdom. Now philosophy is the established systemization of the knowing process, or of thought and thinking, and on the practical side it is the analysis of the abstract or generalized realizations on which theology, science and all moral and aesthetic conception depend. In any ultimate sense it is the ordering of the mind's inreach to an understanding of man and its outreach to a parallel understanding of the world or the total complex of existence of which man finds himself a part.

Sabian philosophy classifies as a dynamic idealism, since it considers reality the actualization of a potential and never an existent in itself. It classifies also as an experientialism, since the real is accepted as that of which anything in question is ultimately the source rather than the product.

The Primary Statement

The world is ideal, but its ideality is expressed by its continuous maintenance of itself and not by an intellectual derivation of its existence from an idea or from any agent or source fundamentally or originally exterior to itself. At no point is it the end result of a process or of any mechanism. Rather it is organic and both (1) material, as encountered by the senses or measured by the tools of science, and (2) rational, as ordered by law or principle when approached through the mind.

Man also is ideal, with his ideality revealed in his moral nature or inner life, and he no less is both a material and rational being in his everyday manifestation of a physiological and a psychological identity.

The world and man are directly complementary to each other, and experience is the actuality of the interaction involved. Experience is (1) inclusive, since it represents nothing other than itself, and (2) competent, since it is always a conjoining of cause and effect.

Anything whether tangible or intangible is known through its characteristic behavior, or as it presents itself in experience.

The distinction between sensory and rational experience, or man's two modes of realization, is a functional division of labor and not the representation of an actual dichotomy in nature. Reality may be approached on the side either of the senses or of the reason, or on what the esoteric tradition knows as the heart or the head path of experience, as convenience may dictate.



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