Metaphysical Triangles

This is an old thought I had, and when I ran across this, I decided to post it. After all, in my first "India" post, I promised that this thread would devolve from a purely narrative form into something less tangible, so here it is.... This post is about a TRIANGLE, which is a metaphor for the way philosophers and theologians describe and think about metaphysics (a.k.a. the nature of reality).

The multiplicity of all experience and all natural phenomena is the foundational aspect of these triangles, the "base." At the tip of this triangle, the point of unity, is "perfection;" Socrates called this perfection "the good," theologians call it "God," but I think the general idea is similar enough (some may even say "logic" "reason" or "mathematics"): that is, the most perfect, divine, highest reality possible within your conceptual framework.

The sticking point for the divisions in philosophical or religious thought hinges on how our intuition draws this triangle. That is, do we place "perfection" as the pinnacle of the triangle, and consider it the highest and most real truth? Or, do we alternatively say that multiplicity, the visceral, the experienced, the everyday phenomena are the most real, and claim the triangle builds down from there?

So there's the picture. Socrates, the Judeo-Christian traditions, Vedic Hinduism, and many others subscribe to the upward-facing triangle. Unity with the divine, however you mean it, and whether your vehicle is yoga, prayer, or mathematics, the idea is that the process of unification is a spiritual path towards something greater, or "more real," than the common states we find ourselves in. Generally, the idea is that there is some "more real" part of ourselves (the "soul") which has an affinity, or some connection, to this divinity, and is seeking to return to it...

On the other side of this division is the heterodox inversion of this intuition of the upward-facing triangle. The perfection the human mind intuitively seeks is illusory, a short-cut of mental functionality. Mathematically, I may be able to describe a perfect isosceles triangle, for instance, but to realize such a shape in the phenomenal world is completely impossible. Any shape I actually create is merely my best approximation of that perfect concept.

Heraclitus, the Buddha, the Skeptics, and others have subscriptions to the downward-facing triangle. Modern, secular scientific intuitions probably fall into this side of the division, too. The bubbling, ever-changing, transient phenomenal world is the "more real" world, and we ourselves are nothing more than part-time participants in that...