Metaphysics requires metacognition. Metacognition is knowing about knowing, specifically, understanding the way and by what your understanding is conditioned and conditional.

This means that you actually see and know that all of your conscious experience is actually something going on within your mind instead of being unknowingly immersed in it. It is possible to do this through meditation; in fact maybe this is what meditation is. And is not that big a deal, but you have to be really committed to understanding it. It is not something you can play with.

This ability to see through your own machinations is very roughly analogous to what Plato called 'noesis' which is the only way that metaphysics can really be known. I say 'very roughly' because the style of meditation I practice, which is Zen, is probably very different to what was taught and practiced by the Greek philosophers. However I am ordering a copy of Plotinus' Enneads, which might help me to understand that view a little better.

And it is perfectly true, without this kind of practice and understanding, metaphysics is entirely meaningless. But it is not meaningless because it has no value: it is meaningless because you completely fail to grasp it.

ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

But it is not meaningless because it has no value: it is meaningless because you completely fail to grasp it.

I am not much interested in arguments, except for as a means of 'sharpening the sword'. Metaphysics is a matter of changing your frequency, but you have to be up for it. Not many are.

On the contrary.
Metaphysics is how we build more complete and hopefully coherent worldviews. We all engage in it and it is how we impart meaning to our worlds. Values and aesthetics are always a form of engaging in metaphysics not physics. You should not ignore science and physics in constructing a worldview but they alone allow the construction of only parital and incomplete worldviews or guides to living well.

We can only build that complete and coherent world view by supplying the missing pieces with faith.

What you are saying is quite true, in many respects. However, my attention was drawn to the connection between Buddhist thought and Western metaphysics through several sources.

One is the early translations of various Tibetan texts by W.Y. Evanz Wentz such as The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. The forward quotes at length from Plotinus and compares texts from both sources. Secondly I have been reading from a text called The Shape of Ancient Thought by Thomas McEvilly. This book has extensive comparisons between various aspects of Platonism and ancient Indian philosophy, including Buddhism. It theorizes that there was substantial contact between the two traditions via the Silk Route and says that some pre-Socratic schools, particularly Skepticism, were very much influenced by Buddhism.

I believe that many of the metaphysical concepts you are referring to are more Aristotlean than Platonic, which is actually quite proper, as the term 'metaphysics' itself comes from Aristotleanism, as is well known. In some ways what we now know as metaphysics is Platonism, as critiqued by Aristotle.

Nevertheless, I still believe that the Zen intuition has something in common with aspects of Western metaphysics, although as you say, the comparison must be drawn carefully. That is why I used the term 'rough analogy'. But at least both schools are very much aware of the nature and limitations of the ordinary worldly outlook which nowadays most people assume is the sole reality.

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I very much appreciate your comments and perspective. I agree that recognizing the differences as well as the similarities in these traditions is important and understand the shortcomings of syncretism. And I agree with your point about the Buddhist attitude to ontology. The reason why Buddhism in particular has been of great influence on me (and others) is because the traditional teaching, which is very much consigned to history in the Western world, is still alive and kicking (and even re-inventing itself.) So it is has given me a 'traditional-spiritual' perspective which despite its differences, illustrates something very important about the Greek philosophy, which is that it requires 'metanoia' or a change in the nature of mind, to understand it properly. This is a challenge for the typical modern outlook which likes to hold everything at arm's length, so to speak. Its actual import can only be understood by really engaging with it.

(If that McEvilly video is on Youtube, I might suggest it as an upload for the Videos section.)

Substance, the first of Aristotle's categories, signifies being as existing in and by itself, and serving as a subject or basis for accidents and accidental changes.

Perhaps this question is relevant in the consideration of metaphysics.

The definition of substance:

Now I do wonder whether, prior to Aristotle's thought, there was any similar notion of 'substance' for example in Plato or in the pre-socratics. I am very doubtful whether substance, conceived in this way, actually does correspond to anything; whereas I do believe that the Ideas of Plato are real.

I am inclined to believe that the notion of substance was one of the ways in which metaphysics went fundamentally astray. It think it might have been what was later to have been understood as a reification.

And that is the difference between metaphysics and religion. It is true that over the centuries, they became fused into one corpus of 'traditional philosophy' but if you trace it back to Plato and Plotinus, you will find that 'faith' barely plays a role in it. In fact Plotinus was fiercely critical of early Christianity, and Augustine, who was strongly drawn to Plotinus, had to re-interpret a great deal of Plotinus because of its heterodoxy from the Christian viewpoint (i.e. Plotinus was close to heretical).

In short - attaining metaphysical knowledge is not a matter of 'having faith'.

In the books of Aristotle, it was called that because one of the editors of the work placed it after the books on physics, therefore 'after physics' - me ta physica. Or so I believe. But they are the books dealing with the nature of being, definition of first principles, and so on.

The word 'metaphysics' is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up "Aristotle's Metaphysics." Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: 'first philosophy', 'first science', 'wisdom', and 'theology'.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle's death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) entitled those fourteen books "Ta meta ta phusika"-"the after the physicals" or "the ones after the physical ones"-, the "physical ones" being the books contained in what we now call Aristotle's Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotle's philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered "the physical ones," the books about nature or the natural world-that is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world.

This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things that do not change. In one place, Aristotle identifies the subject-matter of first philosophy as "being as such," and, in another, as "first causes." It is a nice-and vexed-question what the connection between these two definitions is. Perhaps this is the answer: The unchanging first causes have nothing but being in common with the mutable things they cause-like us and the objects of our experience, they are, and there the resemblance ceases. (For a detailed and informative recent guide to Aristotle's Metaphysics, see Politis (2004).)

Politis, Vasilis (2004): Aristotle and the Metaphysics. London and New York: Routledge.