Guenon describes a magnificent vision of the Supreme Identity with God. You reach the fullness of your potential, no longer limited by the particular circumstances of your life. Your negative experiences — disappointments, suffering, negative emotions, sins, etc. — disappear, since from God’s viewpoint, they are illusory and unreal.

Everything positive in your life is retained, no matter how partial, even if they seem to be failures from the human perspective. For the Knight of today, that means that all his Loves, all his Adventures, his quests for Knowledge and Justice, have eternal value and worth. He writes, in The Multiple States of the Being:

Concerning the relations between Being and Non-Being, it is essential to note that the state of manifestation is always transitory and conditioned, and that, even for the possibilities that manifestation includes, the state of non-manifestation alone is absolutely permanent and unconditioned. And let us add in this connection that nothing of what is manifested can ever be lost.

Ens Rationis

What Guenon calls ‘possibilities of non-manifestation’ correspond to the Ens Rationis of Scholasticism. “Entia rationis” includes those objects which do not and cannot exist in reality but only within the mind.

Many of the worries, concerns, or anxieties that may plague us in life, turn out to be possibilities of non-manifestation that never became part of reality; that is, they exist only in the imagination. Or they may be logically inconsistent with it although we did not notice it. Still others represent privations of the good; although they are painfully experienced, they are not eternal. Some examples of the Ens Rationis are:

• Impossibility: logically inconsistent concepts like “circular triangle”.
• Chimera: a horrible or unreal creatures of the imagination; vain or idle fantasies:
• Privation: These represent the lack of a real being, which has being in itself. Thus the Void is the privation of manifestation and Silence is the privation of sound. Privations cannot exist together with its opposite; being dispels privation. Ignorance is the privation of knowledge. Privations affect our experiences as humans, but are not eternal.
• Negativity: Such as we are, we are prone to negativity. Our emotional life is a conflict between positive and negative emotions. Thought life is a battle of opinions. These result from dualistic thinking. In higher states of nonduality, there are no negative emotions nor thoughts.
• Second intention: These include the notions of genus, species, specific difference, that is the general ideas by which we categorize things. Only individuals are manifested. For example, you cannot draw a picture of an “animal”, which is too general, but you can draw a recognizable picture of a horse.
• Abstraction: Abstractions like truth or justice or love cannot manifest as such in the world. Rather, it takes effort to bring truth and justice and love into the world.

Experiencing Life

As I was writing this, suddenly Chopin’s Nocturne op.9 No.2 began on my music feed. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of nostalgia. I remembered myself as a boy learning to play that tune, which I loved. I struggle to recall more of that happy time. Then I realized how much of my time has been spent among the entia rationis, preventing me from fully experiencing the actual events of my life. Fantasies, wishful thinking, distractions and so on have robbed so much of my life from me. Such memories will ultimately be restored.