Roy Bhaskar's meta-Reality

Dear 4 Readers,

Forgive me for failing at NaPoWriMo. I'm going to write a long list of things I enthusiastically claimed I would do but failed to accomplish:

Nevermind.

Instead I will suck you into the joy that I am currently experiencing in reading Roy Bhaskar's meta-Reality: Volume 1: Creativity, Love and Freedom. My buddy Roy's biggest claim to fame is the fact that he founded Critical Realism in the seventies. Since then, the Critical Realist movement has taken a controversial "spiritual turn," and Bhaskar has started writing about a new philosophy which encompasses but transcends Critical Realism. He calls this philosophy meta-Reality.

Critical Realism has potential for becoming the middle ground between the desire for truth and origin and the more existential tendency of freeplay. Coming right after postmodernism, it couldn't have better timing. In some circles, for awhile at least, it was even taken seriously. Unfortunately the proponents of Critical Realism have jumped the gun. While I consider Andrew Collier, Douglas Porpora, and Margaret Archer to be excellent scholars who maintain their academic integrity; I worry that they may have promoted Critical Realism too zealously, associated with Bhaskar too closely, promoted each other too frequently, and prematurely broached subjects that are too generalizing to be taken seriously (yet). Gee. Sounds a lot like ME. In fact, for these reasons, I find myself associating with the movement on an emotional level. I find myself being loyal to these scholars I've never met. I find myself wanting to sit at their feet, write about Critical Realism, and *maybe* (whisper this part) explore Bhaskar's meta-Reality with secret anticipation.

In fact, I'm coming out of the closet: I'm probably devoting my entire academic career to the Critical Realist movement. That doesn't mean that I'm unaware of the stigma I'm bringing upon myself for doing so.

I'll be blogging about Bhaskar's meta-Reality here for awhile. Forgive me if this is a boring subject. I think, however, once you discover that dragons are enfolded within you, you'll come to love it as much as I do:

And the claim of the philosophy of meta-Reality is that all other beings are enfolded within myself, or at least the alethic truth of all other beings, and I accordingly am enfolded within all other beings too. So the distinctiveness of beings remains, you are different from me, you are spatio-temporally, karmically and constitutively different from me, but you are nevertheless enfolded within me. The fact that all beings are enfolded within me enables me in principle to discover the alethic truth of those beings, such as the molecular structure of a crystal or the nature of gravity or what it is like to be a dragon... (xviii)

YES! The nature of the universe empowers me to experience dragonhood, and THAT is worth ANY stigma!