The Book

In Pursuit of the Inconceivable
An Investigation of Metaphysics and Mysticism
Peter Guy Jones
Essentia Books 2025

Description

In Western society most people hold a low view of philosophy, believing it to be a hopeless muddle of intractable problems. Our most prominent scientists and philosophers generally hold this view, so there seems no reason why the rest of us should not share it. But what if this view is a misunderstanding? What if we are being misled, and are making a mistake when we place our trust in the scholarship and disinterestedness of scientists and philosophers? What if this mistake is demonstrable and not difficult to identify?     

In Pursuit of the Inconceivable is an exploration of fundamental questions about existence, reality and the meaning of life that challenges the prevailing scepticism of Western thought. Peter Guy Jones demonstrates that a close examination of the relationship between metaphysics and mysticism is necessary for an intellectual understanding of either, and in this way explains the failure of the Western tradition of philosophical and religious thought to make sense of the world.     

While there is an extensive literature associated with each of the individual topics it discusses, In Pursuit of the Inconceivable is unique in the way it brings them all together.  Overall, the topics will be relevant and interesting to any reader who is curious about spirituality, mysticism, religion, philosophy and their own essential nature as a human being. The discussion is deliberately prosaic and targeted towards scholars, especially those who are sceptical, rather than practitioners, leading the reader through the steps required to verify, for themselves, that there is only one global theory or ‘theory of everything’ that works and allows sense to be made of philosophy and the world.

The book is divided into two parts. In Part One the focus is on formal metaphysics and the logical analysis of fundamental questions. The principle of nonduality is shown to be a universal solvent that overcomes all the many ancient and seemingly intractable problems that plague mainstream Western philosophy, where even today this principle remains largely unknown and unstudied.

In Part Two the wider ramifications of a neutral or nondual theory are explored in a discussion that ranges across religion, physics, psychology, ontology, epistemology, ethics, soteriology, karma, rebirth, altruism, compassion, life and death and more. The findings of philosophers in the Western analytical ‘rational’ tradition are compared with the teachings of the Perennial tradition and shown to be in complete harmony. Both logic and experience indicate that the Perennial philosophy describes reality correctly.