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The wise did just that. One story tells of how the learned man Uddalaka Aruni advised his son to look behind the ‘names and forms’ of the empirical world, ignoring the misleading ‘word handles’ we give individual things. If we can identify the features they all share, then we start to see the underlying fabrics and forces that span time and space. This power to speculate eventually earned a name: the Samkhya Karaka, a philosophical text composed c350 CE, called it anumana or ‘inference’. Learning to see the world with anumana meant always seeing the unchanging substrate of reality behind its changing identities, and noticing the way that our own existence is taking ever new forms, even as we experience it. The Samkhya Karaka’s particularly daring ‘Satkarya’ theory of causation taught that all things, past and present, always exist in a subtle potential form as a power of the material that constitutes it. The present moment is just a spotlight that shines on one small corner at a time – but metaphysics reveals all of reality in its richness.
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