Unfettered by fact, metaphysics dazzles with flights of fancy weaving webs satisfying and for all the world real, coherent but selfcontained systems.  The point about which the endeavor flutters hasn't moved for millennia.  Physics on the other hand has since it got the method been hobbled by the matter of fact "not so" yet moved forward, fast and furiously of late . Wittgenstein notwithstanding, however, metaphysics is still in the running--verifiability isn't one with truth and fancy may be more than airy nothings.

Even in physics, full of local habitations and names, fact is the lower form of verification--relativity ruled before Eddington left for Africa.  Beauty first, said Poincarré but "elegance" is better and comes down to correlation and explanation.  By accounting for broad batches of data, simple concepts make sense of what we've seen and point to what we haven't.  Methodological consequences could come to metaphysics only once, of course, with a din of cases closing, and it hasn't happened.

Alexander solved nothing with a sword and Updike's gauche Quixote came no nearer loosing the Gordian knot (physics points beyond itself no more than zen does) with his processor.  The tool for the job is Occam s razor--the admonition not to multiply entities beyond necessity.  At a stroke the knot slips, falls to the floor and it's made just there, at the nature of the self and its corollary query the existence of the soul, two questions with one answer.

The soul is a metaphor for the self.

Immortality's the rub but with personality in the brain's configuration (if there were a spirit the physiology--all the country's computers linked by all the phones right there in your pretty little head--would be redundant, but given the metaphor it is expansive ground for theism) one could be transferred intact in a twinkling to the moment of redemption, each death at the end of time.  There is no afterlife (somewhere else) but only life (here) and this is prelife, tunnel to the world to come.  Which is not for everyone but the rule is simple: choose life.

The hope that humans should act as if they had souls (implying an absolute autonomy of the self and an absolute equivalence of the other) goes largely unrealized in a world overrun by those laying their wills at any old feet and others imposing theirs at every opportunity, but evil is on new footing if there are only physical creatures, born blank and free to draw conclusions.  Poof!Eden leads inexorably to a dilemma requiring for resolution something very like this.  Since this had to happen anyway Poof! didn't but this had to as if that had:  the theodicy is an adequate, requisite metaphor for the human condition.
 

History is nearly over and the import of it is that Judaism is true.  Israel is messiah, servant of the Lord whose trial is ended and whose righteousness will shortly be made evident. Her light will shine on the nations.
 

I am God, and there is none like me.
I declare the end from the beginning.
From ancient times I reveal what is to be.
 

Mark this: I have spoken,
and I will bring it about.
I have a plan to carry out,
and carry it out I will.
 
 

With human behavior on the modern (quantum mechanical) model, no single response predictable even in principle but behavior in general another matter, patterns and probabilities empowering demographic projection (bestguesses, worstcases and the like), take 30 C.E. as given.

The outcome: history proper is between the good and power secular and cleric with the righteous fighting one, then the other and then both in periods of equal duration while the stage is set for the final battle.  The full projection is the sweep itself minus names and faces, but the scheme is behind a smokescreen of Foreseeing and Intervention in the apocalypses, as four numbers.

Two are in Revelation:

the woman who has borne a son goes into the wilderness for 1260 days

the adversary is bound for 1000 years

This gives us 450 as the end of the secular, 1030 the birth of the cleric, 1450 the rebirth of the secular and 1870 the emergence of Israel from the wilderness.

The final numbers are in Daniel:

from the end of the daily sacrifice (70)
to the abomination, 1290 days

blessed are they who see 1335 days end.

The tale of the man who thought he was messiah was bound to undergo a particular rewrite on the road to Rome, become a foreordained misapprehension.  The Passion was a play the first time:  paradigmatic relation dictated the gospel as the cause and context of the conflict, but in the last analysis as a prefiguration of Auschwitz.  Deicide hadn't happened but would, when a people which for ages had maintained an expectation of messiah did not know him when he came, killed him or acquiesced and failed to recognize him even when he rose from the dead.

Whatever shared experience of a friend returned energized the sect, resurrection on the third day predicts the rebirth of Israel in 1948.

God is only seen from behind: history is a revelation to be read in retrospect.  Field theory renders the record legible.
 
 

The metaphysical field is geometric and simple, composed of two terms, perpendicular polarities.  Identity and relation (free of ambiguity) can be shown laid out:
 

or strung:

time :perpetuation/innovation
life :affirmation--negation

This is contrary polarities superimposed, life hidden as it were between the line but before differentiating we save this view:  it implies an apparent equivalence of opposites.

Separating polarities with a polarity produces a configuration (+ H -) implicit in four terms:

If the lateral is the real conflict (if it's not about change, time, death but about life, like it or not), A/B and C/D are entities and there is vertically an apparent opposition.   The apparencies conspire to shift the battle ninety degrees and blur perception fullfield, but far more fully for negation.

Relations in the matrix hold for any A/B--C/D but, for instance, time and life generate the human field:

A and B are antithetic affirmations in creative tension.  C and D are antithetic negations in (apparent oppositions separated by a polarity are opposite) destructive conflict. C is the negation (denial, fear, hatred) of B but presents itself as affirming A.  D denies A, seeming to affirm B.

Applications of the matrix correlate aspects of the condition (as a magnet tapped up against filings on cardboard pops pieces out of place and positions them as they fall to reveal a field), but also show aspects of the field itself.  The method grows more powerful, but the magnet is pulled away clean each time.
 
 

Each instance of the matrix is apparent oppositions vertically, laterally a real conflict.  History is between theism and authoritarianism:

This is a plethora of statements and while the inversions it takes to read them do not come naturally, explication is redundant.  The matrix for Judaism does not lead to the conclusion that the opposition is apparent; it states that Israel is one:

Further matrices are specific, so as antagonists:

reality:the good:biophilia:affirmation:
form/freedom: theism:Judaism/humanism

appearance :power:biophobia :negation:
order/anarchy:absolutism/relativism
 

For art and antiart there are form and content:

Others:

World woe two:

An antisemite saw Israel as source of both bolshevism and humanism the political and metaphysical conflicts as one.  The method deals most forcefully with personality, identifying criminality as biophobia: seven traits, a set of relationships and a selfimage.  Narcissism is "I can do no wrong"/"I am no good" and the matrix points on the other hand to the Hasidictum that one should pocket two stones, inscribed "For my sake the earth was made" and "I am dust and ashes."  Reflexive behavior and reflective, Laertes and Hamlet. The wind is southerly.