Author: John

As architecture stands in relation to existential mass so something stands in relation to being. What is that something?

How far out must one seek objectively for the search to become subjective?

Existential mass is the medium of architecture. Being is likewise a medium. And Life. Might life be the medium whereby matter transforms into spirit.

If space/time is curved wouldn’t one arrive where one began if journeying on a “straight” way through the cosmos? Being able to see forever wouldn’t one’s gaze end up being at the back of one’s head?

Isn’t it an illusion that anything is truly beyond, above, objective to the self. Doesn’t objectivity ultimately become subjectivity?

Onward!

In the Orient one finds statuary of meditating people usually with their eyes closed or half closed. Obviously they are not focused on the exterior world but on what is within. We learn that these poses are to illustrate the seeking of self realization of the individuals so composed by attainment of Nirvana, Samadhi, some form of the Truth. In the western world seekers of truth typically do not assume such attitudes. They rather seek the truth of things objectively, outside, so to speak, of the searcher, usually by measurement of some sort. Subjective attitudes are not the norm. God, the absolute ultimate reality is considered to be in his heaven which is above man in the sphere of perfection which perspective is shown by church steeples which always point their spires in the direction the ecclesiastics agree upon, a sign that this is the way learners, seekers of spiritual truth should follow. Soren Kierkegaard was an exception to this. He claimed that the truth is subjective not objective. He thought that, miraculously, God was in time as an existing individual. That being the meaning of the incarnation of the Christ. Significantly he further writes that truth is “that which is tending toward unity or completeness, rather than as something formed or complete in itself.”

My aim here is to discus and amplify this idea of subjective reality. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard writes that the individual begins the search for truth from the standpoint of actually being in truth. If God is in time then it follows that any self realization begins therein, with the individual existing human being starting from the truth itself. It further follows that it is a false assumption that one does not already have the truth. So, one seeks the truth from the standpoint of the truth. Therefore one does not find the truth for one can’t find what one already has. What really happens is one realizes the truth, realizes God which necessarily is always already there waiting, so to speak, to be discovered through self realization or actualization. The truth hides in plain sight and if we didn’t already possess it it could never be realized. So, inwardness is the direction of seeking the ultimate reality. Notwithstanding Kierkegaard says the “eternal is in itself in its attributes” and that the object and the subject are the same. Is in itself in its attributes. That is to say phenomenal reality actually is the substratum when viewed from the standpoint of the ultimate reality, or, at least, they aren’t unrelated. For, there is only one reality here and the only way to see God is to see the attributes, which, while they are not the same, neither are they different. The absolute informs the phenomenal, that is, and the phenomenal reveals, bit by bit, the absolute. This is an eternal process. Or, as Plato put it, “Beauty is in the object, and it is in beauty that we see through the factual reflection of reality into Being itself.” The eternal is in itself in its attributes.

I want here to state my personal aversion for writing with such familiarity of “God”. More on this later. Let it here suffice that I am uncomfortable so freely using this name, word, presuming, as it does, a relationship that is antithetical to the supposed aims of the subject of this writing.

Of the Kierkegaard writings I have I prefer Robert Bretall’s anthology published by Random House. For me the study of Kierkegaard is something I go back to from time to time. It’s an enriching study and putting it aside actually helps my understanding. I will never complete this task.

Kierkegaard’s life was just over forty years, 1813 – 1855. He is considered the father of Existentialism and was known largely by his hostility to speculative philosophy especially in the person of Hegel.

Speculative philosophy, like science, depends on what is measurable, what is outside the existing individual, what is objective and reached in dialectical stages. Kierkegaard’s great insight was that the truth is actually subjective and he bases this on what he calls the paradox of God being in time in the person of Jesus, the Christ.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The aesthetic, one’s feelings, as well as philosophical speculation, by Kierkegaard’s metrics, are obstacles to becoming a Christian. Kierkegaard thought that the enjoyment, immediacy of the aesthetic should be dethroned, not abolished, however. The aesthetical, the ethical, the religious are three great allies, he writes. And that in which all human life is unified is passion and faith is Passion. He thought that love, based on sensuous beauty, gained the imprimatur of the eternal which means that the eternal is known in the immediacy of the temporal. This is an important aspect of his thought. Beauty in life is to be lived, not seen, heard about, read about. It is real only through the living by an existing human being. The whole thrust of his writing is, he says, what it means to become a Christian.

It’s commonsensical but make note that Kierkegaard thought life could be explained only after it has been lived and in this regard he notes that “Christ only began to interpret the Scriptures and show how they applied to him – after his resurrection.” Quoting Aristotle who thought philosophy begins with wonder, “not as in our day with doubt” he takes an appreciated jibe at Descartes’s doctrine of Cartesian doubt (Ego cogito, ergo sum – I think therefore I am. This according to Descartes being the one undoubtable quanta of his being.) Kierkegaard likewise admits most live a life of calculated enjoyment (as aesthetes) instead of a life of self realization through moral decision.

Kierkegaard is about twenty five when he makes these observations and the crown of this early work is his consideration of the meaning of Christ as God in time of which he thinks this is a profound paradox – and, importantly, if one is to believe this hypostatic union of an eternal God and temporal man one must have bequeathed to him a condition, a faculty, a device, which is a new organ of seeing, understanding, and that condition is faith, which recall he says is passion. Faith must be exercised in which regard man must overcome his error ridden guilt, his sin. God thus becomes a teacher from whom man learns of his erring which tracelessly vanishes – nothing changes apparently – yet all is nevertheless new as said man is born again through redemptive conversion. This understanding, I think is closer to love than knowledge. and should rightly be characterized as love of truth. “Consciousness of sin is the conditio sine qua non of Christianity.” Also, “despair is the anatomy of melancholy”, he writes. “Man is spirit” but not yet a self. Man is not what he is in principle, rather, the polar opposite. Thus despair, which is more commonly known as sin. The task of true Christianity is to lift man out of this disunity and by joining with God make of him a true self thereby saving him from a “Sickness Unto Death.”

Man is spirit, is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal. There is the temporal self and the eternal self. Failing to understand this is a corruption which manifests as despair, a death instinct. “Every individual…despairingly unconscious of having a self and an eternal self has willed to tear his self away [from the eternal]. This is sin and its opposite is…faith”

Our own self is the self of the entire universe and the “torment of despair is precisely this: not to be able to die.” It is such profound hopelessness that even the last hope, death, is not available. Suffering and sorrow – despair – can be so overpowering “that death has become one’s hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.” When one would become nothing, cannot endure to be oneself then all is lost. Yet Kierkegaard writes that “If there were nothing eternal in a man, he could not despair.” Kierkegaard notes here that which Socrates reminds us, the “immortality of the soul [we know] from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as sickness of the body consumes the body.”

Conferring on man eternality is demanding of him infinite obeisance. “And thus it is eternity must act, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time it is eternity’s demand upon him.” And. Despair which turns to hatred for existence has become daemonic; it wills to be itself. But “The despair which is the passageway to faith is also by the aid of the eternal: by the aid of the eternal the self has courage to lose itself in order to gain itself…He went forth in sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.”

On sorrow. Writing, of course, about the ancient Hebrews he says “There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought no man could see God and live. – Who grasps this contradiction of sorrow: not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved! …They do not even dream that there is sorrow in heaven as well as joy, the deep grief of having to deny the learner what he longs for with all his heart, of having to deny him precisely because he is the beloved.” God. Yahweh! If I give man what he longs for with his entire being he will die, my glory is so great*. This terrible conundrum is addressed by God making himself into the likeness of man, a humble man, a carpenter, a servant. I have this to add: God has the power to self manifest. The phenomenal world is his handiwork. Does this mean man is (potentially) God? Is that what we are to believe? Miraculous. If so, then his character – if he can be said to have character, attributes – is more anthropomorphic than not – isn’t that the implication of so glibly using his “name”? Rather he is more like man than man is like him. Perhaps, too, he is anthropogenic. Is God a creation of man as man is a creation of God? What is the truth of this? Where is the illusion? Where is the real? From the Mandukya Upanishad (Guadapada and Sankara) Advaita: (Brahman or Atman) God, being beyond time, space and causality, is ever incomprehensible through any empirical means. It is the eternal subject having no object through which one can comprehend it.

Our speculation is a kind of measure coming as it must out of our temporal being. Any such measure results in an illusion, I think, for the eternal is not subject to the temporal. Our speculation is reduced, if one is to be honest, to child’s play. We presume to define the infinite. Now, that’s arrogance to be avoided. We do not know. Our understanding is small. Really, we cannot in ourselves fully understand.

The mystery is to be lived, not known, and is wrapped up in the quote of Lessing by Kierkegaard that God stands before us his hands outstretched. In his right hand he holds the ultimate truth. In his left the unending search for the ultimate truth. We must choose. Lessing chooses the left hand. We may glibly talk of God but this is to be taken charitably as a learning device for the unending search to which we have dedicated ourselves and is perhaps to be taken as a small recognition that the Real being process, process of becoming, then a ceaseless search is the only authentic choice available. But. Take note. The becoming, too, some say is illusory.

Walter Lowrie, Doctor of Divinity. whose life long study of Kierkegaard’s works writes in my anthology that the so called stages on life’s way of Kierkegaard are best considered as realms or spheres of existence and they are the Aesthetic, the realm of pleasure, of perdition, the Ethical, realm of action and victory, and the Religious, realm of suffering. These merge into one another and the Religious realm retains a bit of its precursors.

Hegel, of whom Kierkegaard was at times very critical thought in part that pure being “accompanies everything but is never observable itself.” This, by the way, bears a striking resemblance to the thought of ancient Oriental sages such as Guadapada and Sankara. Kierkegaard said if Hegel had added a foot note to the end of his work stating that all of it was a thought experiment he would have thought him a most intelligent philosopher. The thrust of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel was that he didn’t conduct his life in accordance with his philosophy, and that he was a speculative thinker and held that the ultimate reality is objective. Kierkegaard promoted the opposing view that the truth is subjective and the individual is an existing spirit in reality and that all understanding comes after this fact. He writes that man searches for the truth from within the truth. So how he relates to his efforts are of prime importance more than what the thought actually is. “If a man knowing no better, worships an idol, but does it with absolute sincerity and the whole “passion” of his being, he is nearer the truth than the enlightened individual who has a correct knowledge of God, but …remains unmoved by it.” He thought the systematic thinker was simultaneously “…outside of existence and yet in existence, who is in his eternity forever complete, and yet includes all existence within himself – it is God.” The systematic thinker has an eternal aspect on account of God having entered into time as the true subject. Elsewhere he writes: “He (God) clothed himself in the visible world as in a garment. He changes it as one who shifts a garment, himself unchanged. Thus in the world of sensible things….In each moment every actuality is a possibility.”

Wrapped up in the idea of subjectivity one finds the idea he calls resignation which is acceptance of one’s true, actual self as subjective. To be as you are one must relinquish the urge to be more than what one is, this being characteristic of the sensuous urge. One lives in falsehood who seeks to be what is beyond one’s subjective self. Passion has no objective existence and Kierkegaard’s Christianity wishes to intensify passion to its highest pitch through infinite resignation, surrender to our personal actuality. The true subject. Infinite resignation is a total , a complete effacement of the self, a withdrawal of oneself from notice. Faith is the highest passion of human subjectivity but the tendency of objectivism is to make everyone an observer while the subjective man participates. There is no objective truth. Whomsoever God elects by his love, “He begins by reducing to nothing.” Thus we are brought up against the extreme limit, the pure springs of passion; and simultaneously thrust into faith! Thus Kierkegaard asserted the primacy of passion, not in the vulgar sense of aroused emotions, but as the primary ontological substance from which our world is built (William Poteat). Such a man renounces the world where he needs nevertheless to live but this living is informed with an infinite resignation. Such a man constantly leaps into the infinite but faultlessly and with complete abandon and confidence drops back into the finite where nothing about him noticeably changes (Denis DeRougemont). This infinite resignation is total surrender to God. Thus the doors of perception are cleansed and everything appears as it truly is – infinite (William Blake).

So faith is born of the intrusion of eternity upon temporality (Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik).

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of man (Proverbs 25:2). Wherever, however one seeks the true, the real, it’s never to be owned. It’s God’s – in his right hand. Kierkegaard: Correct understanding has it that we are closer to such understanding when its realized that we seek what we already have, we would be what we already are. Yet, to be in a state of mediation is to be finished, while to exist is to become but never to actually be finished, complete. Our passion to be in a relation with God involves a dialectical contradiction, Kierkegaard writes, turning our passion into despair. But the category of despair gives rise to, is indeed necessary for the emergence of faith. That is, one realizes the impossibility of being in a relationship with God thus entering into all that remains possible, the category of faith. And this comports with the teaching of great sages the world over. One must surrender to God forsaking knowledge, forsaking all, giving over to love of God. Understanding that it is out of the realm of possibility to know God actually gives rise to what is possible and that is love of God, devotion, faith.

Searching, seeking truth, the eternal, God, implies one is in truth from the beginning. An effort must be made, but how? Which how is subjective and thus infinite striving ensues, renewed repeatedly from the decisive passion of the infinite which is faith, belief. Speculative philosophy might think it grasps God objectively but is thereby bereft of faith. Faith involves risk. God can’t be grasped objectively which results in uncertainty. Speculative philosophy forgets the essential significance because of existence, that the knower is an existing individual who given over to striving embraces risk taking. Furthermore, if I think I grasp God objectively I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. It is the misfortune of speculative philosophy to again and again have forgotten that the knower is an existing individual.

Speculative philosophy holds that truth is objective, not to be realized inwardly, subjectively. That the Christianity of Kierkegaard’s time acceded to this view is perhaps best illustrated by the architecture of cathedrals since the earliest times of the Christian era. These edifices always have a steeple which always, of course, pointed up. Up and away from the imperfect realm here below to the pristine perfection of God’s heaven. This is a statement in stone and masonry that the objective is quite removed from the lowly existing individuals and, to such thinkers, subjectivity is the road to perdition. It also is, I think, a kind of self loathing to consider our earthly home is not itself floating in the heavens, in the so thought of perfect realms. But, I think heaven is not a place whereas the ancients, especially a profoundly influential Aristotle, for instance, considered heaven the realm of the stars, the unmovable stars thought of as exemplifying a kind of perfection because, well because they didn’t move. That made for a good point of reference one understands, a place or condition around which all else stands in stark contrast. So, the perfect above, the corrupt imperfect below. I wonder whether Kierkegaard would believe this. It should be pointed out Kierkegaard did not claim to be a Christian though he spent his life studying Christianity. He said he was always coming to be a Christian. Note this writer tends to view Kierkegaard’s view of a properly modified faith a kind of surrender to God and his work in that regard a kind of worship, love of God.

In existential philosophy much is made of the absurd especially by authors such as Albert Camus. Kierkegaard introduces the idea of the absurd, writing “The absurd is – that the eternal truth has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born…precisely like any other individual human being.” Citing Socrates’ shunning of the objective search for God paganisticly in nature and human history “where the quantitative siren song enchants the mind and deceives the existing individual.” This quantitative siren song quote is better applied to science nowadays. Some worship their stomach. Some worship measurement, quantitative analysis. They both live in the cellar.

A true God relationship is possible only when a breach is brought about annulling the paganisticly immediate relationship to God, Kierkegaard writes. God is elusive, he says, and attributes his invisibility to his omnipresence. “His visibility would annul his omnipresence…Nature is the work of God. And yet God is not there; but within the individual man there is a potentiality (man is potentially spirit) which is awakened in inwardness to become God-relationship, and then it becomes possible to see God everywhere.” My words: The ultimate reality is not revealed in the manifest, the relative, as such, yet the manifest, the relative, serves to awaken the process of self realization meaning “God” is not present but neither is “He” absent from sensible phenomena. This bears some similarity to contributions of Oriental sages. Kierkegaard writes the mystery of such revelation is the only way in which it is known. The potentiality of self realization actualizes. It is by faith one yields to an understanding forever beyond one’s quantifying grasp.

The reverence of the early Hebrew people, the early Israelis, and some Christians, too, cannot be overemphasized. I’ve written of this at other times but never tire of its reiteration. YHWH – Yod He Vau He transliterated into the Latin as Yahweh, but the original name of the divine creative spirit was unpronounceable, having no vowels and, by the way, is written right to left. Nevertheless it was pronounced in ancient times by the high priest, but only in a whisper, and only during their celebration of jubilee. This in recognition that this supreme being can’t be named, is improperly limited by a name. A noun is a person, place, or thing. Convenient that “he” is treated in that way so that we can have a handle on “him”. That is “his” making into something like man. Understand, this is not like man and, mysteriously, neither is this unlike man. The substratum for all manifestation reserves into itself its true nature and this in order to actualize as said substratum. Whatever is named is construed as in a sense owned. The eternal is not up for ownership, only participation. However man will have his comforts, his illusion, even arrogating to himself ownership of the divine creative spirit. While impossible, what comfort it gives is permitted and does at least put one in the neighborhood of the divine.

Study of Kierkegaard is challenging. My effort is admittedly somewhat cursory. Truly it is a task for dedicated scholars who have a deep grasp of Socrates, Plato, the 18th century philosophers especially Hegel. One needs to be thoroughly informed as to the history of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Jewish tradition, Christianity, of course, and much more. This writer comes up short on all of these when compared to a true scholar. So, my caveat. What one sees here is something more than a “man in the street” offering but something less than a scholarly offering. I don’t mean to apologize for any shortcomings and offer this for what it is which is a study by an interested individual – existing individual – in the work which aims boldly at – yet misses – the understanding of life’s meaning and purpose, at least getting into the neighborhood of those whose genius I am perhaps at least smart enough to recognize.

Those followers of Kierkegaard in later times are many. I’ve written about my study under Professor William Poteat of Duke University when he visited the University of Texas. From him I learned that Hebrew davar, word or action of God in space/time was merged in Christianity with the Greek logos, meaning reasonable, logical, word. Poteat taught, and this based on Kierkegaard’s work, that the Real is exhausted, that is, expressed completely in the process of creation. The Greek Arche’, beginning, original stuff of the universe, compares to logos and Hebrew dibur, to speak, is the root word of davar. Poteat taught that every davar expresses a dibur, a spoken message which is to say that every physical object or phenomenon, in addition to its physical reality, conveys a spiritual comment on existence. This, having some relation to Advaita philosophy, details somewhat the way the ultimate reality reveals its true nature and helps make sense of my statement that God is not as such revealed in the manifest but neither is He not so revealed.

Prof. Poteat made a lot of the implications of media and its use by various activities, for instance, the medium of architecture is matter, or as he put it, existential mass, and is the most concrete medium. The medium of music can represent the most abstract idea conceivable, namely, the spirit of sensuality, Don Juanism. Kierkegaard writes of being itself as a media. Poteat did not discuss this, however. Neither did Kierkegaard except this brief mention. But, of what would existence be the media? Life? Self realization? Perhaps life itself might be rightly thought of as media; the medium whereby matter transmigrates into spirit. These are interesting considerations I suppose and bring to mind something my revered teacher, G.V. Desani put forth, that “Time and Space are things, some of the tools he made, home made tools in his pocket. When we try to impose our limitations (our limitations of understanding, and our limited space and time) upon God, we are playing childish games, playing at being God.” So a proclamation: I do not know anything of myself. Compared to the truly great I am playing childish games. I make no claim to special knowledge or understanding and am the paltriest tool of that greater being who might have in his mere pocket space and time itself. Enough!

Some personal observations.

God is neither subject nor object and he can be approached, as Kierkegaard notes, only by approximation. As you approach him the probability that you have found what you seek increases – becomes more probable by the accuracy of your measurement, albeit measurement of the admittedly immeasurable. However, inwardness and outwardness I’m inclined to think both involve approximation and measurement of some some kind or another. To even speak or, yes, think of something is a kind of measurement. Also take note that when Kierkegaard says that God doesn’t think, he creates and he doesn’t exist, he’s eternal; the creating and the eternality I’m considering, are both, however subtle, limiting factors. In other words they are parameters that define/limit that to which they are intended to pertain. Which is to say they are just a more subtle way of characterizing God, the eternal, which by definition can not be said to have qualifying characteristics. These belong in the realm of the manifest. So, to say something creates or that something is eternal you must first posit it as being, as an object, a thing in being which is contradictory and paradoxical because that which is eternal can have no being and Kierkegaard says that himself. Furthermore let’s consider – Kierkegaard never says this – but the use of language, words, to establish or elucidate what language or words can not is a task of the wise. (One must go to the other side of the world to find such statements, which I think this is attributable to the Buddhist philosopher, sage, Nagarjuna.) However let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s likely trying to do what he privately or secretly knows within himself to be impossible though he never explicitly states this. So God doesn’t think, he creates. God doesn’t exist, he’s eternal. That’s a grain of salt with which everything here should be taken. That is to say that one knows it isn’t literally true what is stated there however one also knows at the same time what is intended to be expressed which because of the limitations inherent in language is impossible to state explicitly. Words, at best, point to a direction. So we should judge Kierkegaard by his intention rather than his actual words. That’s fair. We do not need to waste effort splitting hairs.

God does not think, he creates, God does not exist, he is eternal. Man does think and exist. One might consider this makes of man a decent partner to God. Thus subjectivity is truth and reality, by divine providence. Man is what God can’t be being ironically limited by his infinitude. Thus God confers on man universality, the eternal, and man returns with/by conferring on God temporality, particularity, the finite. This is the sharing between divinity and the secular, the sacred and the profane. God needs man, in order to be finite. Man needs God in order to be infinite.

The upshot of all this fooling around with language is that we will use the word God with the caveat that we must at the same time admit that such use means literally that God is a thing to be held, owned, and that is not what is intended. We name the unnameable for the convenience of discussion. On the other side of the world this is dealt with somewhat differently when the most wise would simply maintain silence instead of fruitlessly trying to speak the unspeakable. Kierkegaard writes there is that which “should be suffered and matured in silence.” He further, in the same passage, derides the craving for gossip and the lust for preaching. He is warning to be careful the sensuous does not carry over into the life of the person of faith. He writes the religious (and love) experience become ennobling when it teaches one to keep his feeling within oneself. “The religious individual is silent and whoever is silent before God doubtless learns to yield, but also learns that this is blessed.”

We cannot as lowly creatures endure leading constantly the life of the eternal in time. It is advised to deal with this with humility since there is this absolute difference between God and man, which humility frankly admits its human lowliness and frailty. This religious suffering is merely the “dieing away from immediacy.” He admits the profound difficulty with which one enters the strenuous life of inwardness on which religiosity has embarked though it is the “greatest of miraculous actions.” He writes here that “passion is man’s perdition but it is his exaltation as well.”

Allow me to make note of a somewhat more nuanced view of this from Oriental thought. While Brahaman has no qualities, is without attributes, there are those who hold that while this pertains to the true nature it does not hold for “its personality as God.” In that it might be considered that Jesus is a personality of God. We should accept it remains a mystery, however.

On Don Giovanni, Mozart’s opera: Kierkegaard was quite enamored of this opera. The immediate pertains to the sensuous. The sensuous genius confines himself to the immediacy of the sensuous. That’s Don Juanism, which one lives in the immediate in order to sustain a sense of the infinite thereby yielding to the Daemonic. He externalizes his experience by way of exclusion of the eternal, God. For him there is no tomorrow, only his immediate present. It is in this corruption the meaning of his self indulgence emerges as inconsequential. So he is free and the price is he is sociopathic. Ethical considerations are alien to him. He thinks only of himself, is not fit for society. His life is a perpetual beginning. But! Make some good out of this for surely one can live in the present – the immediate – but from an eternal perspective. I think surrender to God will get you there. One can live surrendering to God, the infinite, the eternal and thus yielding to his will deny the over indulgence of the sensuous. So replace the daemonic in nature with an ethically driven faith wherein accountability of the consequences of one’s actions are real.

End note.

Soren Kierkegaard thought of himself as poet and I can think of nothing more poetic that what he wished to be his epitaph. “Died of a longing for eternity.” Its not my intention to gainsay this superb author but I will allow my comment on this sentiment is that whatever is here it is through that that we live our lives. I conceive that whatever it is is eternal and whatever we are as living creatures, we perforce embody that. So longing for the eternal is longing for what we already are and is sort of like searching for God, as Kierkegaard holds, must begin from being “in” God. That’s saying too much for anyone can appreciate the beauty of Kierkegaard’s sentiment. It is poetic and as such, though perhaps taking a bit of literary license with the Real, it adds a perspective of wonder, of humility, indeed, of Love of God. He adds that from said eternal standpoint “…he would have nothing else to do but to [unceasingly] thank God.” He was one, therefore, who had love of the Lord. No one, I think, has ever been more intent on being in that attitude towards God than the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

* In the Bhagavad Gita Krsna tells Arjuna who asks that “God”, i.e., Krsna show himself in his true form, that in order to so reveal himself Arjuna must be given by Krsna a faculty capable of handling such a manifestation of God else it would destroy Arjuna.

The Greek insight was that Reason, the Logos, is nature steering all things from within…Nature is neither supernatural nor material; it is an organic whole, and man is not outside nature but within it. Huntington Cairns introduction to Plato Dialogues

Manichean: An adherent of Manicheism taught by Persian prophet (3rd – 7th century AD – Manes or Manicheus) Combines Zorastrian, Gnostic, Christian, and Pagan elements, and based on doctrine of contending principles – good/evil; light/dark; soul/body; god/satan.

Daimon (Daemon): see Demon. In Greek mythology, any of the secondary divinities ranking between the gods and men; hence a guardian spirit; inspiring or inner spirit or a demon, devil.

The Greek insight – this writer’s opinion – is comparable to the Buddhist idea of world as process on which is founded their statement that nothing is permanent which in turn is reflected in Heraclitus’ thought that all is flux.

In Plato’s Symposium we have Socrates speaking of Diotima, a woman from Mantineia who he says taught him that love and the like are not in themselves gods but daemons that act as a go between for gods and man. They carry commerce back and forth, so to speak, and were created by the gods to this purpose. Being unable to have direct contact with man they created these daemons to act as intermediaries.

Now, my mentor, G.V. Desani (and here), said this a little differently. Love is a spirit, he said. Our participation in love, he held, acts as an agent for love’s increase, growth, proliferation. This path having been established, is easier to follow at the next choosing. Moreover, it increases the attraction of love to others as a mode of being, a means of getting on in the world.

All is Flux – Heraclitus, opposed to Parmenides’ “all is one”. I’ve made a lot of this contrast in my study and finally have come to a more nuanced understanding of the apparently contrary view for these two ancient Greek thinkers. Namely, there is room in the fluxuations of manifested, relative reality, of empirical knowledge of things; there is room in the one whole of the unitary view, for the contraries. One is an extension of the many as the many is an outgrowth of the one. They are not different yet neither are they the same. And, from my study of Aristotle, If there is a one the one is both all things and nothing.%

It’s said (Huntington Cairns) Aristotle claimed that Plato accepted Heraclitus’ doctrine that things, as we are aware of them through our organs of touch, taste, sight, and hearing, are all in constant flux and therefore our sense organs cannot give us knowledge. “(Plato) was thus led to the view that if we are to have knowledge it must be of permanent entities distinct from those we know through the senses.” These he related to as forms or ideas, as principles, the actual reality of that which changes, which, Aristotle would call the actual substance or substratum, if I understand correctly. For we do not know that to which the manifest, the relative reveal – the actual substance, substratum. Phenomena serves the purpose of revealing this ‘essence’ though being neither different nor separate therefrom.  The myriads of manifested reality have no being in themselves, that is, while all the same serving to reveal that from which  they come. Forms and ideas give us permanence and order discoverable by intelligence setting aside the world of perceived fluxuating things. Our senses put us in contact with the world of becoming. Our consciousness puts us in contact with being itself. So it comes to pass – for Plato – that these principles become the basis for knowledge.  Think. There are many instances of love or beauty but let us have the form or idea of same then we can truly know.

This is a kind of refutation of Heraclitus’ “All is flux.” The senses must give way to guiding principles, intelligence, ideas, forms. And these must in turn give way too, to the soul, psyche, the principle of life force itself, mind, reason, and finally to consciousness, the illuminative factor which – not that I know of as a Greek idea – is the overarching principle that we see in Eastern thought, systems of Yoga, Vedanta (Advaita of Sankara and Guadapada) philosophy, Buddhist thought.

There is sensory perception. There is that which presides over the senses. There is that which presides over that which presides over the senses. Thus: Consciousness, mind, sensory perception. Or: Illumination, reasoning, data input or phenomena. Consciousness and mind are not the same but neither are they different. Say consciousness is the illuminative factor of mind and will, intention, the focusing factor. An adept of the spiritual practices of the east is said to, upon quieting the mind completely, ‘experience’ consciousness alone, in and of itself. Put another way, witdrawing from sensory input, the mind, the sense of self identity, consciousness alone remains. This would be the Asparsa yoga of Advaita (non-duality) Vedanta.

Now Aristotle held that matter is not inert. He had the idea of energia which I take to be the potency held within matter itself. This is further expressed in his notion of entelechy, the end within. Logically this makes matter the raw form of courage, of anything at all, including love, beauty, justice, wisdom, truth, honor, duty, liberty, and the like. Diotima, via Socrates: These, then are daimons, “…envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth…” Plato thought these were windows to the transcendent, and in reality were, in a sense, the transcendent. At least they were thought by Plato and Socrates, to be facets of the “Good”. Plato considered beauty the outward manifestation of the world’s ultimate nature. And, which, the ultimate reality being without attributes – generally the view of Eastern thought – can not therefore, being inscrutable, at least it would seem, ‘actively’ show its true nature. How is this different from the idea that God sleeps in matter, as it were, descends into matter as part of the process of creation, in order to reemerge, awaken, a fully self realized being? That being the lesson in the story of Christ, or any great Lord or Seer.

In this connection recall the conversation between Arjuna and Krsna in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna beseeches the great God, Krsna, to reveal himself in his true form. Krsna says to Arjuna that were he to do so he (Arjuna) would perish for he is not capable of seeing such in his current embodied form. Krsna, beneficently grants him the ability and does reveal his true nature.

Meanwhile in the western tradition God appears to the ancients, similarly, in some form of light. The burning bush of Moses’ experience on the mountain, the light that debilitated Saul, later Paul, on his way to Damascus. The effulgence permeating and surrounding Jesus  when he appears to some disciples after the resurrection.

While the ultimate reality might not have attributes in itself  surely these daemons of Love, and so forth, the herein named go-betweens, messengers, are facets of divine nature, the sacred, sharing that distinction with all manifestation. It depends on one’s standpoint. Love, beauty, truth, wisdom – I call these concomitants of consciousness, are no more or less sublime than a lovely flower. We can’t have or hold or own these attributes any more than we can own the “frost white felicity”* of a rose. We can, however yield to the attributes the better to actualize the rose. Some would say that the affirmation of phenomena is a necessary step, even part of its actualizaion. One might think this an example of the anthropic principle gone wild but a postulate of quantum mechanics holds ‘reality’ results from the conscious gaze. Things only happen, quantum states only resolve themselves, because we look at them. And Einstein is said to have asked about this idea, with some sarcasm, ‘would a sidelong glance by a mouse suffice?’ – Plato thought the universe a product of reason seeking to actualize. Quantum theory: “Matter and consciousness are regarded as dual aspects of one underlying reality.” That being another idea from quantum theory seems somewhat in tune with the thinking of some ancients.

Impicit in the universe is the identity axiom, that is, the universe is defined by itself. Only by itself. It is a tautology and conveys no information even though it contains all information. Truth doesn’t act. It just shines. So, the ultimate ontological principle is the principle of participation. And, the truth can be experienced but never written. Aristotle and Plato.%

Reason is a conveyance, then, and God is not to be seen because all that manifests is God – ‘he’ being immanent in nature – from the standpoint of ultimate reality. Yet, in the habit of being able to see or know who made particular things we ignorantly believe, trust it possible to know or see what (who) made the world itself. Assuming God is like man easily leads one wayward. God created man which, to many of the ancients is the same as saying man is an extension of God, Jesus being a prime Judaic example. So, the true way to know God begins with self knowledge which one might say the reason we worship God is ‘he’ is imponderable. Faith will quickly lead to understanding.

The soul, psyche. Plato thought the soul, the activating power of being, imperishable, closely related to consciousness. Every ‘thing’ is subject to change – is perishable. All not perishable, changeable, are the forms, ideas, crowned by the soul. My thought is that the perishable proves the imperishable, the one the many, the impermanent the permanent. This is language playing here. Illusion is only known because there is the non-illusionary which we elect to call the ultimate reality, God – or Om – As activating principle capable of self manifestation. Advaita Vedanta holds that from the standpoint of the ultimate reality there is no change, that in reality, nothing is born, nothing perishes. One must go beyond all means of grasping, knowledge, void all attributes and so, the only thing that makes sense; “I am that” which happens to be what God said to Moses. “(Tell the people) I Am sends you.” In Vedanta this wording “I am that” or “That I am” is also used.

If you doubt then doubt is all that is. If you have faith then faith is all that is. The universe fills, informs, is that. Put differently, you confer individuality on the world and the universe confers on you eternality. I first encountered this in studying Aristotle.

The idea, the form, for instance, of a ‘table’ is eternal in which all tables in their myriads participate, are extensions. The activating principle of being is constant. Psyche, translated as soul might be more properly translated as reason, mind, intelligence, life, vital principle in things.  Plato thought the soul tripartite. It is one, many, and the proportion that fuses them.

Also, and I quote, “No soul which has not practiced philosophy, and is not absolutely pure when it leaves the body, may attain to the divine nature; that is only for the lover of wisdom. This is the reason…why true philosophers abstain from all bodily desires and withstand them and do not yield to them.” (from the Phaedo dialogue) That might be taken as from Manichean influence.

Consciousness is likely additive and the unknowable, God, is likely increased, made real even, by participation of creature existence in his transcendence, or, if you like, our yearning for same. That is to say, when you, for instance, love your family, love itself, transcendent principle of love – a facet of the good – is made stronger.

From Mary Renault, on love,  “the Last of the Wine”: “Yet sometimes in the night watch, when the Galaxy unrolled its book across a moonless sky, I knew what we were about, and where Sokrates was sending us. When Lysis had left me and gone to sleep, I would feel my soul climb love as a mountain, which at the foot has wide slopes with rocks and streams, and woods, and fields of every kind, but at the top one peak, to which if you go upward all  paths lead; and beyond it, the blue ether where the world swims like a fish in its ocean, and the winged soul flies free.”

Is the ultimate reality one or is it many? It is both. The ultimate reality is one but has many within. So, what Heraclitus says might be restated as, all manifestation that is within the one of the ultimate reality is changeable and knowledge is precluded therein because knowledge can only be of something unchanging. Like the petals of a flower Plato viewed the varied ideas or forms around the center as variations on a single theme. The theme was the intelligibility of the system, its power of self manifestation, and taken as a whole with the variations, without meaning in themselves, but organically coupled with the whole, purpose and meaning develops. The singular parts constantly change but their combination into a whole and unitary process does not. It’s there that one finds meaning and purpose which all sundry singulars reveal in their myriads. Multiplicity is in the all while the all subsumes multiplicity, the manifest.

And, when the Buddhists hold that nothing is permanent it might be said they are taking something akin to Heraclitus’ view as developed by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Likewise, when the Vedantists state that an object of our thought can never actually be the changeless absolute. Reason, Logos, is eternally about relative things and cannot enter the realm of the ultimate reality, being, however, useful to take one to the borders of said realm.

A bit more from Aristotle for whom substance is quite similar to the substratum of Vedanta. Substance for Aristotle stands under and supports all other realities. It is fundamental. Real things, i.e., substances do not exist in degrees, nor do they have opposites. Man need not have an opposite to be intelligible as white is intelligible only on the face of black. Real things can put off contraries while still remaining identical with itself, that is, while it is itself it can be other things. “John Smith at 81 is the same person as John Smith at 20. His qualities are just different.” The mark of a real thing for Aristotle is not an eternal and immutable thing (These characterized Plato’s real being.) But it is a ‘self’ that is able to maintain these qualities while undergoing change. But what is, then, after all this, substance? It is the substratum that remains when all qualities are taken away. All these things – form, matter, their composites – are substance, but not alone. They are all necessary for understanding. As mentioned above regarding the identity axiom, the substratum, like any tautology, is meaningless; conveying no information it is unknowable, can’t be understood, though it contains all information. However, when attributes, qualities, form, matter, their components, are expressed, knowledge and understanding come to be. Being is not universal but equivocal. Being is different for different things. All cats are cats in the same way. All things have being in different ways. The first, regarding cats, is universal, the second, regarding things, is equivocal. Being is like the word health – an equivocal term, as, I’m healthy, food is healthy. All things are one by virtue of their reducibility to substance, or primary reality.%

Those who take Heraclitus’ view should incorporate the idea that empirical means must be used to gather knowledge of things. Empirical knowledge is only of relative things, things we can know by comparing them to other things, mainly ourselves, in short, measurable things, but we can somewhat understand that which is changeless, without attributes; understanding unlike knowing requires no measurement. So, understanding is beyond knowledge, is in fact where knowledge leads then ends. Restatement. Heraclitus’ statement – all that is in flux is empirically knowable, but taken as a whole, as Parmenides’ one, is not, which one is rather understandable. Understanding being a function of wisdom not of mind which is limited to knowledge gathered through measurement.

Go deep! The discrete seemingly unconnected moments of consciousness aren’t consciousness at all. They are perceptions, empirical in nature. Consciousness illuminates them making them seem connected. Think rather – the mind serves to make them seem connected but even it arises anew with each perception – like musical notes. Memory plays an important part here. Remembering the antecedent note(s) the successive notes are intelligible, grow in meaning and purpose.  But only consciousness is continuous, a kind of light shining on all. That is, consciouness does not arise and fall away with the iota of perception, discrete parts of the ‘waterfall’ are united by mind, illumined by consciousness. Music might provide a more apt metaphor. Without each moment being related to the antecedent and the subsequent moments there could be no music. Music has, alludes to, illusion, uses illusion to further its purpose which is reflexive; it points back to itself as a means of illuminating that by which it is illuminated. Or, something like that. It changes constantly yet it is held together in a unity. How is that not reflective of the very nature of the ultimate reality? Only the unfathomable unity is real, the flux being somewhat mere instances of the whole intended to promote awareness of that which cannot be named.

The mind, and musical notes, are “born every moment” as discrete instances of the effulgent flux. Consciousness is the field in which their connections manifest and are made sensical.

Be mindful the universe is system and as such is organic, orderly, alive. That is – has always been recorded – as the Greek view. The real is exhausted by manifestation. That is, nothing is held back; relative things are a complete revelation of reality. But consider that though fully revealed in manifestation means not that change is absent in new, ever increasing revelation. So effulgence is ongoing. Creation should not be thought to exhaust an infinite potentiality which potential increases apace with continuing creation. Like a fractal. So it depends on one’s standpoint. Put another way, we have the power to make of it what we will which is a consequence of being a part of the whole in which we have life. Our individual lives are extensions, outgrowths of the life of the whole.

Now Jesus, it’s said, is love and is the word made flesh. So, with this scheme, he would be a vehicle to carry god’s love back and forth between man and the ultimate reality – to the Jews, a somewhat separate being likened as a father and named god. In this I don’t intend to reduce him to a mere ‘go between or messenger. Look deeper. We can’t know the incomprehensible god; even his real name is unpronounceable**. Instead we are given someone like us, Jesus, who though not god himself is not different from god either. Loving Jesus we love the father. We cannot own, grasp, hold the immeasurable father but we can the son, whom by grace is much like us. We can also, seeking wisdom, study the word, but we must simply accept, affirm the existence of the father as a matter of faith.

The erotic, Don Juanism, as a principle of nature is not daemonic in the Platonic sense of a spirit that acts as a messenger or go-between for the divine and man. It is an actual demon, corruption of the divine. Kierkegaard’s claim that it was Christianity itself that loosed this daemonic spirit on the world by ascribing evil to material nature is, I think credible. Thus Christianity ironically served, by his measure, that which it intends to defeat.

The duality of mind and body, soul and body, good and evil, follows the scheme of the Manicheans. But these, I think, are false dichotomies as the ultimate reality is not either/or but process itself, that is, both/and. The body is a continuation of soul, man a continuation of god, and so forth, like a rose is a continuation of its soil. Meaning that evil is a continuation of good. Of course, the good is life enhancing and evil is life destroying or corrupting. We must choose which to embrace. We will see eventually, I expect, if the struggle for dominance between cosmic forces of good and evil is real?

Huntington Cairns goes on in his introduction saying that in the Phaedrus dialogue Plato argues that writing is like painting. It has the appearance of life but if you ask it a question it preserves a solemn silence. Collingwood – of whom I’ve also written – said the same. Art is mute, yet is foundational for ensuing modes of being. Art evolves into religion, science, history, philosophy. Collingwood – this is contrary to Plato’s view – traces the modes of being from art through philosophy but thought that philosophy was where man’s activity found redemption after so many false starts wherein discovering a true path. Kierkegaard thought of the aesthetic mode of being as a “stage on life’s way”.

Kierkegaard used Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, to illustrate, give body to his notion of the forever disappearing, fleeting, doomed, apotheosis of the erotic on a perpetually receding horizon. Kierkegaard thought that the erotic in nature had gone wild. This madness is characterized by an urge to go beyond the self. This he named the daemonic urge which expressed as Don Juanism was fittingly suited to music as in Mozart’s opera; this, in other words, could be stated as viewing reality as greater than itself, a characteristic of Romanticism. Don Juan says his need is too great to ever be satisfied. Soren Kierkegaard’s daemon is not the daemon of the Greeks, of Diotima. He sees it as a real entity, not a messenger or go-between. As will, as power, the erotic in nature comes alive as a principle of nature, a force that lives through, within restlessness, yearning for the infinite satisfaction of longing, the insatiable desire to own, have, hold, continuous gratification of sensual desire. Don Juan’s only care is to find them, bed them, forget them.

This longing of Don Giovanni is a corruption, I think, of the longing for self realization or actualization, for a complete understanding of the Real. Furthermore, this corruption is the basis of the urge for self annihilation. But reality is here staring us in the face requiring only our affirmation, for whatever there is, be sure, is everywhere – and eternal – and without attributes – thus being freely given by the ‘primal spirit whence of old issued forth the whole cosmic activity.’***

Man’s enterprises continue unabated to follow this pattern. Salvation, for those who live by faith, is available only to those who go beyond life, and is to be granted in a separate, unsearchable realm sometimes called heaven. Science translates heaven into the so called grand unified theory which if reached would explain reasonably all that is, including the origin and the final end of the entire universe. History promises a utopia at its end which is approached dialectically one system of governance replacing another getting more perfect with each iteration. These are all on an ever receding horizon the closer to which one comes the more inaccessible. You can’t get there from here being the underlying principle.

Cairns also writes Plato thought, the Greeks thought, the world pervaded by reason and that its beauty is an outward manifestation of its ultimate nature. In the end one finds that their are elements in the thought of the ancient western world, in Greek philosophy and in Judaism complimentary to that of Buddha, Guadapada, Sankara, Nagarjuna, and Desani. I would only reiterate what I’ve written before and that is, what we seek, the ultimate truth, a full, complete understanding  with accompanying  appreciation of life’s purpose and meaning, can’t be finally owned because it hides in plain sight. You can’t find it because the premise you don’t already have it, is false. This, I think is the logical, reasonable outcome of being, as individuals, an extension of the universal which gives us eternality in exchange for our giving it individuality.

I never tire at similar points to bring T. S. Eliot’s apt expression of this into the picture: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The search for Truth and the other concomitants of consciousness – beauty, love, justice, etc.; the search for communion with the divine, or at least what is close to the divine, needs begin with love of wisdom. That love is the bottom rung, so to speak of a ladder. One needs take the first step then the following steps follow with increasing ease. Diotima: “(Love) is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between the two. He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He interprets between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together…For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse, and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual. Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love.”

I’ve written disparagingly of reason in this space many times saying particularly that it is disposed to address things in the relative realm – the measurable. A more nuanced view comes forth that while this is true and the implication also, that the transcendent can’t be revealed by reason alone, reason, nevertheless is doubtless a device for approaching the transcendent which, when got in sight one must make a leap of faith. At least I think so. This, however, is not the faith of which Kierkegaard so disparagingly wrote. There are esoteric teachings that the popular movements have forgotten if they ever really appreciated them. Romanticism grew out of the teachings of the ancients wherein are the roots of its failures. Indeed, this should be said of all that passes for knowledge, understanding. Key. A device is necessary. Reason, the mind, consciousness, the concomitants of consciousness, Love, Beauty, Truth, Liberty, and the like are given us. What is their purpose? Why is it they seem to only emerge concurrently with sentient life? Aren’t they truly the means – some of the means – by which we might become fully self realized beings? A teacher is needed and to deserve one an effort must be made with the available means. Working to reveal the transcendent allies will come. Looking back, looking around, is fruitful. One learns from others who have studied this. It would be foolish not to take advantage of their efforts. They failed here and there but also had successes. We will fail and will, likewise, have succeses. There most certainly are patterns to be discovered but, going back to Kierkegaard, we should recall gratefully perhaps the best advice one could have: “Life is a mystery to live not a mystery to solve.”

In that connection the wisest of our forbears, East or West, hold – and this writer concurs – all we can do is “soar to the sublime temple of solitude” and bask there in silence. For, as Socrates was known to say,  the only thing I know with certainty is I do not know. He also said “We shall either find what we are seeking, or free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.”

* Desani’s words

** In Africa it’s traditional that the most revered’s name is forbidden to be spoken. This, as a means of reverence. (To speak “God’s” name is to claim a familiarity denied. We are thus taught not to be presumptuous.)

# Huntington Cairns, introduction to Plato’s Dialogues, Bollingen series, Princeton University

*** Bhagavad Gita

% Notes from Professor Louis Mackey‘s Ancient Philosophy class, University of Texas, Austin. These statements harmonize with those of Guadapada and Sankara (Advaita Vedanta as expressed in the Mandukya Upanishad.

Reason cannot fathom what the heart knows intuitively.

We are garlands of God in so far as we personify the entire universe.

Study continues on the various spiritual approaches to understanding the Real, our place, our mistakes, disharmony.

Begin with Nagarjuna, Buddhism. In the Buddha’s first sermon a “middle way” was presented between the extremes of self-indulgence and self- mortification. This tacitly embraces an idea that those following then accepted, promoted, spiritual paths often erred  when adopting what Buddha considered extreme measures. Nagarjuna followed by philosophically expanding this notion into existence and nonexistence, or, between emptiness and absence of intrinsic existence. For Nagarjuna ignorance, the source of all suffering is the belief in svabhava, a term that literally means “own being” and has been rendered as “intrinsic existence” and “self nature”.  Nagarjuna employs the doctrine of the two truths, paramartha satya (“ultimate truth”) and samvriti satya (“conventional truth”), explaining that everything that exists is ultimately empty of any intrinsic nature but does exist conventionally. This is a necessary condition following that the conventional is the necessary means for understanding the ultimate. For it is the ultimate that makes the conventional possible. As Nagarjuna wrote, “For whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible.” Compare this to Vedanta Advaita (non-duality) which does not make such a specific claim but does state that relative existence is, when properly understood, when seen from the standpoint of the ultimate reality, identical with Brahman, the absolute. I take it that relative existence corresponds to the Buddhistic notion of that which is conventional.

Vedanta, the philosophy of Advaita (non-duality) put forth by Guadapada and his student Sankara it seems to this one share some similarities with Nagarjuna. Vedanta, Advaita, holds that nothing is real except the entire universe. All phenomena are illusory, that is, empty of any “intrinsic existence” at all, that phenomenal reality, the world of relative being, which for Nagarjuna would be called conventional existence, is illusory yet dependent upon a substratum, the ground for phenomena. In Vedanta the illusory, the world of manifested being is likewise used as a means of ultimately reaching true understanding of what is in reality the non-dual nature of existence which they call Brahman or Atman and which would correspond to Nagarjuna’s ultimate truth. So. For both these systems there is only one thing in existence. It admits of no intrinsic being of manifested reality yet makes use of same to arrive at a true understanding of the Ultimate Reality. It might be said of Advaita that emptiness is not the absence of existence but, rather, the absence of intrinsic existence. Isn’t this the same as denying that any manifested thing is real in itself but is actually an illusion based on what is really real and that is the substratum, the one pure, undifferentiated, eternal being?

Any manifestation is impermanent. It appears for awhile – as an illusion – it passes away. The whole process is dreamlike as any given phenomenon is unreal in itself. Yet, any given phenomenon is not different from the Real either and for Vedanta is properly understood to be identical with the Real. I would submit that there is a congruence here with  Nagarjuna’s idea that “the conventional is the necessary means to understanding the ultimate, and that the ultimate makes the conventional possible.” Nagarjuna went on to say that it is by the manifest that we first apprehend the ultimate reality though when focused on the manifest understanding of the ultimate reality is inhibited to the extent of the clinging thereto.

Important to note that, according to Nagarjuna, “To convey through concepts what lies beyond concepts and conventional entities is the skillfulness of the wise.” And in Guadapada’s Mandukya Upanishad we find this: “That which is indescribable by words cannot be discriminated (as real or unreal).”  This should be kept in mind.

The Mandukya Upanishad posits consciousness as the substratum of changing attributes as the only reality. Vedanta puts forth that the Buddhists fall into nihilism when they claim nothing exists. What the Buddhists mean here is that no relative thing has intrinsic existence, with which the Vedantists should agree. But the Buddhists seem not to distinguish between the “thing” and the consciousness of same. Things do not have intrinsic existence – in Advaitic terms they are illusory – but this is not the same as saying consciousness (of things) is without intrinsic existence for consciousness persists while things come and go it being the illumination of their passing.  According to Guadapada “consciousness when not in motion (imaginary action), is free from all appearances and remains changeless.” The discrete seemingly unconnected moments of consciousness aren’t consciousness at all. They are the quanta of perceptions. Consciousness illuminates them making them seem connected. The mind arises anew with each quanta and only consciousness is continuous, actually a kind of light shining on all experiential data which, as noted by the Buddhists, for instance, is a string of unconnected events. Iota of perception, discrete parts of the ‘waterfall’ are united by consciousness, held together. Music might provide a more apt metaphor. No thing is eternal. Its very essence is to come and go and to serve as a pointer to something deeper. That something is consciousness and is in itself the substratum, the ultimate reality by which appearances occur at all. One can’t define it, it is mistakenly taken as ever changing yet in actuality it is that by which there can be definition of the effulgence happening therein, illumined thereby. Sensory perception depends on it. It’s subtlety is infinite and its reach, too. There might be an infinity of universes – I don’t think so – yet consciousness itself is the same for all. So. The multiplicity dissolves into the One True Thing which is unknowable, pure, not subject to being owned, controlled, defined, measured.

That is correct. Consciousness is all that remains on suspension of sensory perception, of mind, as in deep sleep or the Yogic Samadhic trance. It should be the stated goal to realize this and the Yogis’ “Drsta” (the seer) being established in his own right seems a more advanced expression of the self realization of the Vedantic Atman/Brahman and the Buddhist Tathagata. One must go the way of Buddhahood for the ultimate actualization of beings’ purpose and meaning. For the end within, the entelechy, is ever striving to manifest in every possible effulgence of whatever it is that is this universe in which we find ourselves.

Coming from the same general time, the same general place, one expects a certain amount of harmony in the spiritual approaches to reality. It can’t be avoided. So the disputation is just a minor flaw to be taken somewhat lightly. These spiritual leaders might be said to have emphasized their differences in some cases  it being necessary to make their followers feel special that they chose the only true and right path among the many offered. In other words these are, after all, men and suffer the same afflictions as anyone. Forgive them for proselytizing. To be sure one must believe in one’s own message in order to convince others and the Vedanta method includes presenting only partial, carefully selected teachings as a means of waking the student to the full teaching after some period of acclimation. So. They might not truly claim to “own” the truth but only claim a “lease” on it. So. Follow me!

But the truth is out, I submit, when we continuously see the teacher finally yield to an ever deepening inclination to submit to a greater power. Is this a teleological pointer to the ultimate entelechy, the final end within? Guadapada, and countless others finally retire to the Himalayas – a cloister, a secluded place of and for devotion – to worship a deity. Some of these are Devas, some Devis – some Gods, some Goddesses. What is their claim on us? Love? Yes, I think so- in a personal way. It’s there always in the background and when finally one simply yields it issues forth to assume it’s proper, primordial place of grace and redemption.

Yet, love too is a kind of illusion, something to cling to along with beauty, liberty, truth and indeed all mental constructs. It’s a sign we in the end submit to our natural desire to anthropomorphize the world. Here, also, we should forgive the rose for thinking it is just a form of the dirt from which it came. And apply this too. It’s not unlike a fire brand, which is really just a point of light, being twirled to create the illusion of a circle, a line, and so forth. The final chapter of the Mandukya Upanishad, by the way, is titled “Quenching of the Firebrand.” But. These concomitants of consciousness are modifications of mind and its accompanying illuminative factor, having no existence of their own. Nagarjuna would say no svabhava. So, what part do they play? Like the fire brand they are mere points of light. They are in some sense eternal as they are not things that come and go and it seems important in some way that they seem to emerge only when, or after, sentient life forms do. And qualities have a different claim on being than mere quantitative things, concrete things, that is. We make them ourselves, by twirling the point of light. Our effort is key. Though illusory they do serve a purpose. These depend on us to actualize them as co-creators. By God’s grace they exist as potentialities, our partnership is required to actualize them. And isn’t this similar to making bread from wheat? Their being is on loan from God but it is worthy for it is by these illusions and our momentary attending thereto that we perhaps get a fleeting glimpse of the divine. And in that moment is all the time needed to realize our true nature and by that our partner does the same. We come hand in hand and this nameless transfiguration is in harmony with all these old teachers. Yes, the world of relative things is illusory. Yes. Avoid clinging to these as having intrinsic existence. They are not eternal. They do point to the eternal in the same way that the oak dreams of the acorn, the acorn dreams of the oak, and the stump lives in them both.

Ancient wisdom: Creation indicates an unsatisfied desire on the part of the creator. If the Ultimate Reality be complete or perfect in itself and self-satiated, then the act of creation can never be predicated of it. But if there be no creation how can one explain the multiplicity of empirical experience in the universe? Because this is the very nature of the Effulgent Being

Are heat and light attributes of sunshine? Of course, but they are not in themselves sunshine. Neither are they different from sunshine. In the same way embodied beings are attriutes of the Ultimate Reality, the undivided being. They (we) are not in ourselves the undivided being, the Ultimate Reality. Neither are we different. We are, as attributes, markers, manifestations of that from which we owe our relative existence. As such we can also be said to be the means by which that Ultimate Reality, undivided being is, or can be, known, understood. So! In the same way heat and light are ways of knowing or understanding sunshine, embodied beings, you and I, are ways of knowing or understanding Ultimate Reality, undivided being.

Jesus was, is an attribute of God, the Father. He was, is not God, the Father, but neither was, is he different from him. What he was is a way of knowing or understanding God, the Father. Jesus was – is – God as man. He was, is a Man-God.

Heat and light could also be said to be, besides mere attributes, instrumentation by which sunshine exercises a creative force. Heat and light make life, grasses, trees, creatures, possible.

We sentient life forms are like that, too. We can be said to be co-creators of the Ultimate Reality, undivided being, instruments by which God has self experience and by which he grows, cultivates the manifested universe because we share his very nature as an effulgent being. Notably, the emergence of sentient life runs concurrently with the emergence of things like love, truth, wisdom, liberty, justice, and beauty. What else is waiting in the wings to be made manifest? We have only just begun!

The realization of the non dual nature of the Ultimate Reality – that it is undivided being – is the condition for understanding what is said here. From that standpoint the relative existence of the world(s) of manifested beings, the phenomenal universe, is illusory, not real in itself, neither is it different from the phenomenal universe, but exists as an aid to realizing its true nature, our true nature, God’s true nature.

God appears as the world without forfeiting his essential nature.

I ask you, can you put your hand in the same river twice? Raja Rao

Does a waterfall ever change? Raja Rao

It is with rash insolence that we belittle the great to our own measure, as when talking of God. Blaise Pascal

Neither doeth anyone know the Father, but the son, and he to whom it shall please the son to reveal him. Matthew 11-27

As stated previously, I am not a scholar which does not mean I won’t enter into some conjecture about the religious or philosophical schools of India, the world. Here I am primarily concerned with Nagarjuna’s philosophy. I’ve written about Yoga, the Mandukya Upanishad also. A cursory reading by anyone reveals all those involved in the development, establishment, furtherance, of these systems were well versed in the work of their coevals, predecessors. A common style, common thread is discernible. They contend with one another, vie for attention, compete, use one another’s work as part of the learning process, as talking points. It has ever been so. Taken together the various formulations, structures, make a kind of dialectic. One leads to the next and is developed further and another plateau is established as ground for even more developed systems. Centuries, millennia are involved, yet these people, enlightened beings, talk to each other like you and I might, so, like contemporaries. They must have had a sense of time not common to most people. Buddha makes his mark and Jesus, a close study would reveal, counters with another. And, this writer, at least, finds it interesting that Jesus and Buddha walked the earth so near one another in time and that their teaching had in common an emphasis on compassion or love. Great teachers, Lords, appear and are followed immediately by those who would explain or amplify the insights. The author of the Mandukya Upanishad, Guadapada gives way to Sankara for amplification. In later times Desani puts it all in order for a new generation. It is like a celestial orchestration of self realization, actualization. And, to be sure, the bloom is ever on that rose. For any who have developed an appreciation, these expositions are exquisitely beautiful. The proponents were dedicated to and loved their work. One is joined in their joy of having found the precious gems and delighted in sharing them with anyone who might benefit. True, its said, some authors would sign well known names to their work in order to get attention; for instance, the Bhagavad Gita was a later work than the parent to which it is attributed – it is said.

The commonalities abound in Judeo Christian and Indian philosophies. and are centered around self realization, actualization, understanding the Truth. At University Raja Rao taught a course on Mahayana Buddhism. The text book was the one in the title of this post. An internet search reveals this work is still in print.

So, from the Vedas of the Indian sub-continent, to the contributions of Rabbinic Judaism of the Middle East, to the Upanishads, back in India, to Tibet, to China, Japan, its a long road from antiquity to modern times. Nagarjuna, who likely lived about a century after Christ, five centuries after the Gautama Buddha, takes up the task of setting to right what he considers to be the straying teachings of those who came after the Buddha. It might be said he was to the Buddha as Jesus’ disciples were to him, though, of course, the disciples were contemporaries of Jesus.

Ramanan was a fellow at Harvard’s Yenching Institute and this work was published with their assistance. Nagarjuna’s Prajnaparamita, which means the way of the perfection of wisdom wasn’t available in India at that time. Dr. Ramanan, traveling in China, found a copy translated by one Kumarajiva. It is also noted that Kumarajiva translated some texts on dhyana (meditation) and that his disciple, Tao-Sheng has been credited with founding the precursor to Ch’an (or Zen) Buddhism .

Buddha, Nagarjuna were proponents of the so called Middle Way (Madhyamika) which in turn came under the heading of Mahayana Buddhism, the highest truth of which is known, realizable in the state reached through contemplation, meditation, trance (dharna, dhyana, samadhi) as Nirvana.

Nirvana is not the Judeo-Christian heaven and, for that matter Buddha was never proclaimed as God. The family unit used in Judeo-Christianity as a metaphor to make easily understood the basic principles of the ultimate reality is not used at all in Buddhism. For that matter it isn’t used in any of the systems with which this writer is familiar except the Abrahamic religions. Buddha was considered Lord and no doubt it could be claimed, as I do, that he enjoyed a hypostatic union with the divine creative spirit, the ultimately real substratum from which mundane, relative existence comes to be. Relative existence, mundane things, are said to have conditioned reality and really are nothing in themselves. Having originated in the undifferentiated, changeless, unutterable ground of reality they reflect the ultimate even while having no separate existence. As ever changing entities they owe their essence to that from which they emanate, from which they spring and return to on expiring.  The manifest has no self being and the purpose of the created is only to fulfill the potentialities of the substratum.

Buddha’s core teaching was to make accessible a path out of the suffering, pain of existence in this world. To this end a great edifice of categories, causes, effects, a virtual world of sometimes very intricate formulae was built up and taught in a great variety of ways to his followers. Many other schools of thought on these matters existed before and clearly Buddhism takes these into account. After all, the Vedas date back perhaps four or five thousand years. They are the basis of Hinduism and the Upanishads are considered late or post Vedic writings.

It doesn’t take a scholar to see the common threads running through these ancient texts. The Prajnaparamita lays them out in a concise, easily understood manner. As already mentioned a basic tenet is that the conditioned reality has no meaning other than that borrowed from the unconditioned, ultimately real. Things of dependent origination are sunya, empty. What is Real is the conditioned in its eternal aspect.

What is common in all philosophy, in  all religion is the thirst for the Real. All that differs is the Way to that end. Jesus said “I am the Way, the Truth, the Life. No man cometh to the father except by me.” Buddha said the same thing substituting the ultimate reality for father. He said he actually was the unconditioned reality apart from that conditioned form with which he was embodied, made apparent. Made apparent. What is made apparent? Well, it is obfuscated by clinging. Clinging to illusion, to passion, to false knowledge, all kinds of things. Only proper understanding cultivated over a long time, with compassion, without hatred, anger, greed, in short, with clean living, can lead to a full self-realization; but mostly, avoiding the error of misplaced absolutes leads one to the truth of the undivided nature of ultimate reality, birthlessness, unaffected by time.

Nagarjuna set himself to the exposition of the teachings of the Prajnaparamita-sutras which “…embody the central teaching that the ultimate nature of the determinate is itself the unconditioned reality – that in the ultimate truth, the undivided being, there is no division of conditioned and unconditioned..” The wise do not cling to the determinate as indeterminate. The wise do not cling at all. What is speakable is determinate. Only silence, for the wise, pertains to the highest truth. Thus it is that the tendency to seize is the root of conflict and suffering.

The indeterminate is not a separate reality from the determinate, something to be realized transcendentaly, because determinate entities are dependent on the indeterminate as their ground. The ultimate truth cannot be taught, says Nagarjuna except in the context of the mundane. The ultimate truth can, however, be comprehended and only then can Nirvana be attained. I would add that its unlikely that it would be granted by a higher being though I believe that one who sets himself to the task gains assistance in some way from beings greater than ourselves. This I was taught. It has to be an achievement of one’s own efforts to have a full meaning. No specific view can be had of that. Being a specific view connotes divided being. Thus it is said that silence is the ultimate truth for the wise.

This makes me reflect again on Rabbinic Judaism. YHWH is supposed to be God’s name. But it has no vowels, is unpronounceable. Seems to me that the same understanding of the ultimate reality is at play here as for the Buddhists. The ultimate reality cannot be known, named, owned, or even pronounced. Only the conditioned can and this is owning an illusion since the conditioned has no reality, essence, unique to itself as a seemingly separate entity. To name God is to bind the ultimate reality to the world of named objects. I suppose that, also, is why Soren Kierkegaard made his well known statement that God doesn’t exist, he is eternal. Well. Simple people need something to carry them over life’s troubles and I’ve no quarrel if they want to name the unnameable. It gives comfort to have a personal savior and it is good that it aids some in their efforts to surrender to God. But, really, one doesn’t need a named deity for surrender. To realize the true nature of the ultimate reality in relation to mundane existence leads to a kind of evenmindedness which is the same as resignation to a God concept.

To reiterate. “Mundane existence itself becomes possible, conceivable, only on the ground of the unconditioned reality.” And, “That which is of the nature of coming and going, arising and perishing, in its conditioned (mundane) nature is itself Nirvana in its unconditioned (ultimate) nature…the unconditioned reality is the ground of the conditioned, contingent entities.” Therefore it can be said the world of becoming (Samsara) is Nirvana.

But those are just words to be made real, given the universal, cosmic, import they vainly attempt to embody. It is a pretty statement but living it is a different matter altogether. One has to see it with the eye of the Buddha.

There are claimed to be five eyes which this writer finds corresponds with the five Yogic levels of Samadhi. Based on that, the Dharma-Megha-Samadhi of the Yoga practice would correspond to the “eye” of the Buddha, the fifth eye. In Yoga that would be at the level of the ultimate reality characterized as Kaivalya, silence. For Buddhism that would correspond to Nirvana. It is a state in which silence prevails, in which the mind falls away and consciousness alone shines forth. The true nature of all is established in its own right. Determinate reality would no longer be seized as ultimate. The one who goes this way is entirely free from becoming.  The ground of the conditioned is understood as the unconditioned reality. The basic elements of existence are comprehended as not ultimate.

Such an achievement cannot be put into words. Words can be used to point the way, like a finger pointing at the moon, but clinging to the finger prevents actually seeing the moon as clinging to the teaching actually prevents, inhibits, seeing the Real. The best that can be hoped for is to follow the words, the teaching, till a point is reached where it is realized that beyond here is uncharted territory and a leap of faith is needed. That leap is into understanding, or comprehension. A potentiality is realized, created anew, and that latency, manifested renewal, becoming, continues in a new light. Life is continuous renewal which means, basically, that it is the freedom to create. It is taught that the mind, and consciousness, operating through various vehicles operate to satisfy the so called thirst for the Real. As one progresses on this path the vehicles become more and more subtle till only the main instrumentality of consciousness, the mind remains. When that too, by meditation, is compelled to dispel itself, then the last veil covering consciousness itself falls away and the “seer is established in his own right.”

To be illuminated in or by consciousness is to borrow, take loan of a conditioned reality and it is mind that operates here. Existence is an attribute for that relative entity, the mind.

Process and simultaneity.

Fire. Each moment of a flame’s death is simultaneous with the birth of the next moment of the fire in the continuing process of burning. Fire is a constant renewal involving extinction and rebirth. That is a good metaphor for life. Subsets of simultaneous processes continuously work together to produce the phenomenon. The fire as process rests on top of multitudes of supporting conditions right down through molecular action to the sub-atomic participants of neutrons, protons, electrons and below these the quarks, muons, leptons, neutrinos, the pi-mesons, the higgs boson. The complexity is astonishing and needs to be appreciated when a claim is put forth that something is known or even knowable, or, for that matter even there at all except as an essentially empty shell. Some say, particle physicists, for instance, that without the higgs boson nothing at all of the phenomenal world would have mass. Therefore it is called the God Particle.

One breath, dieing, gives birth to the next. One instance of flame, dieing, gives birth to the next. For fire it happens so quickly that the separate parts are not discernible. Breathing, while following the same principle, is so much slower that the parts are easily discernible. Where does this principle take us? One star, dieing, gives birth to the next. One Universe, dieing, gives birth to the next. How about one God, dieing, gives birth to the next? Or put a bit differently, one Reality (Dharma), dieing, gives birth to the next? Becoming is, it seems, simultaneous birth and death. The way of the ever new follows this principle. For Buddhism this principle conflates into becoming, the elements of which do not really exist as discrete entities. The process has a stronger claim on the Real. Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, in opposition to Heraclitus, asserted something similar when stating reality is one, not many. The “many” therefore cannot be seized, held, owned, defined, bounded. In themselves they are not actual, real. They have no svabhava, self being, you see. Therefore phenomenal reality is illusory and the manifold being empty carries over to the ultimate reality which is itself likewise sunya, empty. Yet the manifested world has relative reality and finds its meaning and purpose in pointing to the substratum from which it, so to speak, borrows its reality as it ever and anon springs forth anew. Effulgence.

In this emanation we find, or try to find, or confirm, or manifest, or realize, ourselves. We have potentialities unknown but we do know the urge to actuate these, to fulfill, to make alive, to realize. If there is a meaning, purpose, to this can it be known or understood? Many have tried and failed. Many have tried and had partial success. The philosophies of the world must be appreciated in this light. Accordingly, a kind of evenmindedness is the most efficacious approach to life to be had. For those who fare the middle way, the way of the Madyamika this is known as non-clinging.

Notable, to this writer at least, one does not find in Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga the ideas of the ultimate reality conferring on the manifest, particularly sentient life forms, universality, or conversely, embodied beings conferring on the ultimate reality individuality, enabling thereby the substratum, whatever it is in itself, if it is anything at all in itself, the gift of self awareness. Not directly at least is this taught or appreciated in the East, or for that matter in the West, either. My mentor, G.V. Desani, did teach this, saying that the person is the instrumentality of “God’s” self knowing. So, we are the means by which the ultimately real has self knowledge, enjoys, experiences itself. And, yes, by the methods of the East you can realize the ultimate but does that make you co-creator? Are we in partnership with the Divine Creative Spirit? Is eternality conferred on man in what would be a hypostatic union? Does, conversely, this relationship confer on the ultimate, individuality? I think it is implied but not necessarily specified in all the spiritual practices if one goes deep enough into the esoterica. For it seems to me that, clearly, in it’s ultimate nature, any and all manifestation is essentially identical with the substratum. Therefore a fully self realized individual, Jesus, Buddha, “spark of the divine” is a wholly manifest instance of the ultimate reality. The Word incarnate. Put differently, the ultimate reality, whatever it might be in itself is totally, completely exhausted in the mundane, nothing at all being held back, reserved. So, and the Mahayana of Nagarjuna agree on this point when they express that the world of becoming, Samsara, is when seen from the right perspective, Nirvana. As Edward Conze puts it in his paper The Ontology of the Prajnaparamita “Nirvana and I are absolutely different. I cannot get it, and it cannot get me. I can never find it, because I am no longer there when it is found. It cannot find me, because I am not there to be found. But Nirvana, the everlasting, is there all the time. ‘Such-ness is everywhere the same, since all dharmas have already attained Nirvana.'” The ultimate reality is that all of conditioned nature, all of the mundane and/or manifest is illusory. There’s no division at all in the ultimate reality. Clinging to anything at all introduces division.

Yet Professor Irwin Lieb’s saying that the only true individual is the entire universe, taken all as one, is easy, though, not so much realizing it, acting on it, living it. Jesus and Buddha and others having done so show us the way but we must nevertheless walk that path for ourselves alone. The flame, dieing, gives birth to another. Setting one’s self up to be that other is a lovely dream to be realized by extremely rare individuals.

And by emptiness fullness is known, understood. So Samsara, the world of becoming, is not in itself Nirvana, the ultimate reality.Yet neither is it different from that. For to cling to either is to fall into error, what Nagarjuna would name eternalism. The philosophy of Prajnaparamita, the path of the perfection of wisdom, teaches that the tendency to cling, to “reduce the great to our own measure” is a most difficult error to root out. So, from the standpoint of the ultimate reality Samsara might be Nirvana, but only if one realizes it, in a sense, owns what is impossible to own. In other words, without the direct input of a Tathagata, one who goes the way of Buddhahood, it is not actualized, remains potential. So for Samsara to be Nirvana requires input, so to speak, of a sentient life form. One who has this attainment might be said worthy of having co-creator status.

This is a stretch, but thinking outside the box, one might go so far as to say God has gone astray and it is our duty to bring him back to reality. That might be, in part, what it means to be a co-creator. A notion from Rabbinic Judaism is that God having created the world withdrew so as to make room for man. Well, another take on that is that he didn’t withdraw at all. He just became so involved in his creation, shall we say, lost in his work? that he forgot his true nature. So, as embodied beings we are tasked with helping him realize same, come back to himself. From another perspective one might say God descends into matter, sleeps there in order to, on awakening, reascend a fully self realized being (Jesus, Buddha) to his own nature as a kind of renewal while at the same time benefiting the people of his creation, reviving their interest in realizing as much as possible their own true nature, this done out of love or compassion. This too gives a sense of what it is for Samsara to be Nirvana; as a means of refreshing a self realized being. What is a sentient life form other than the instrumentality of this renewal?

Involved in matter. This absorption amounts to the loss of true nature. Absorption in an endeavor frees abilities, might be a way of realizing hidden capabilities. Working from the bottom up created man makes of the sacred, individuals, whereas the sacred makes man, immortal and in hand with that it goes without saying that the variety of individuals is endless.

We would know God, the ultimate reality, as a final Thing. It would give us great comfort to have that. But ipso facto this reduces these to mundane reality. These are not like other things we own, have direct access to. Essentially they are unknowable. How can one know that which constantly changes? “Can you put your hand in the same river twice?” I know, it is said by some that God is the same today, yesterday, and forever. But that is defining “him” by man’s measure, putting him in a package we can take along with us. In reality he is certainly not different than that but at the same time he is not limited by that either. Finally, one must give up trying to understand and just be resigned to that; in other words one must, in order to be on the right path, simply surrender to God. Silence. Be still. Accept without any imposition at all. If you would be full first become empty.

It is by the manifest that we first apprehend the ultimate reality though when focused on the manifest understanding of the ultimate reality is inhibited to the extent of the clinging thereto. We might be walking down a path and see a snake there but on closer examination realize it is only a rope that our mind mistook for a creature. The snake imagined, still is real in a sense, but not in itself. Only the substratum, the rope, the ultimate reality, is real and the imagined snake has borrowed its reality from that rope and must relinquish it when realized to be an illusion.

Consummation

The Ultimate Reality is the whole Universe as the ground or substratum of all  mundane manifestation, of all divided entities. It is the only true individual on which all else depends. It is the conditio sine qua non, if you will. Its easy and natural to combine, conflate, all that is into one reality completely empty whatsoever. All the divisions of the Universe as a whole are of dependent origination no different, in principle, than the snake in the rope. There is only one thing here and it is that on which all “things” depend for their borrowed existence.

Venkata Ramanan, citing Nagarjuna, writes that when the bodhisattva attains Buddhahood “light emerges from the top of his head.” Interesting, I think, to compare that to the Christian Pentecost.

The disciples went into the “upper room”, which I think is a metaphor for meditation where one focuses consciousness in the region of the top of the head. There “appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit…”

Ramanan also writes that the Bodhisattva “…realizes the ability to understand the different languages of different kinds of beings and gains also the ability to teach every one in one’s own language.”

At the Christian Pentecost when the tongues of fire came to rest on the disciples they “…began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.” And “…there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”

I cite these items because, easily discerned, my purpose is to harmonize the various modes of self realization mankind has practiced.

The final word goes to a scholar, Edward Conze, which is congruent with the thought expressed herein of another scholar, my professor, Irwin Lieb. I am of the opinion that Nagarjuna and the Buddha himself would agree with Conze’s statement that “The ontology of the Prajnaparamita is a description of the world as it appears to those whose self is extinct.”

 

 

 

My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan

A lyrical mystique pervades in parts that lay skillfully against the march of the beloved infinite regress of efficiency of west world which is given expression in a language that to me treats the object of language as a kind of abstract space or form. The use is correlative to the use of these elements in the visual art of America in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s. Objects are seen to become muddled in each other. Does the arm of this nude end here? Does it matter? The object looses its boundary. Man lives more in the infinite each minute. So? Well, he does it less and less from the standpoint of the finite. One despairs of the body, the medium of existential mass. The sensual genius revels in music as the medium. One such obviously recognizes the absurd and is making in the same movement a grasp for faith. I am here in my body, a finite articulation of the infinite. This is how I find myself fundamentally, the condition without which nothing. This is home.

Concept and culture.
Compare psyche and pneuma, Greek and Latin, animus and spiritus.
In preliterate culture breath (psyche) and life (pneuma) were more or less equivalent, while in literate culture we can speak of these in two senses, one in which they are equal and one where they are not.

The exodus is the mother of the myth of creation. The Jews were brought out of Egypt. The world was brought out of the cosmos, of infinity.

What leads to self realization, the bringing of the absolute to the front of the consciousness, is vibration, frequency, whether visual, audible, or mental; the entering of the state of consciousness returning on itself is inevitably accompanied by the occurrence of a precipitating encounter of the “individual” soul with a certain harmony that, like a rose bears its fragrance, bears the “fragrance” of Ultimate Reality.

Desani, March 14, 1973
Burn the seeds (of deeds) by high Samadhi only. The weakened klesa is stronger than the klesas/passion full blown because its expression is more subtle, harder to root out because they are harder to recognize.

The daemonic urge is the erotic in nature gone wild.
The medium of architecture and sculpture is existential mass.

Jan 30, 1973
My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan

The unadulterated spirit is will. Will is power. The urge to go beyond the self, the daemonic urge, or romanticism, is a perversion of this power. Classicism to the extent that it elevates the intellect, or dwells on the distinction that can be made between the power of the mind, rationalism, and mere corporeality, sets up a tendency toward adulteration of the will. The next logical step from classicism is toward romanticism; one is respite for the other, in our history, in my personal life.

The daemonic spirit appeared through the movement of Christianity. Physical attraction, the daemonic urge, being suppressed was instead given prominence, life, perpetuated. What was natural was made evil. What was corrupted was faith, the opportunity for self actualization.

Romanticism – The daemonic spirit, erotic in nature, the sensuous genius of Don Juan, the music of Mozart.
The attempt of the soul to go beyond itself. The urge to see reality as greater than itself. The attributing to God what is properly shared by God/man when properly joined.

Music, absolutely speaking, gives perfect expression to romanticism, the post human force. Music is the most abstract medium.

Sculpture or architecture gives perfect expression to existential mass, pre-human force. It is the most concrete medium and is, as existential mass, the medium of architecture or sculpture. The only substance concrete enough to be worked for these. Music can not be a medium for sculpture.

Language, the word, gives perfect expression to the existential spirit; it is the medium most perfectly suited to express inwardness. The spirit, the void, is the beginning and end of force.

I feel the urge of romanticism, I give it perfect expression by making it into music.

I feel the urge of existential mass, I give it perfect expression by making it into sculpture or architecture.

An expression in language, in thought, is of inwardness. The perfect expression is one that expresses inwardness. Does every expression participate to a degree in this?

By virtue of regress a certain freedom – who can deny complexity which where is now, which time is there, on your beloved papers packed in their particularity, above below, between beyond?

What can I say that will stop the world, reveal the lives? The man centered universe? You expect an answer? You tempt a man who has elephants?

I do not make fun, but play; but loosing my pen my pen my pen the seed is extinguished.

Excited ideas carry away a place where presence in you is eternally presupposed. First meetings where the simplest seeds, just a transparent gaze of eyes into mind falling on most fertile furrows of honest openness where what now grows is rapidly evolving configuration tumbling cataclysmically in and about each other spontaneously like a waterfall of thought and emotion. Like light playing on light in the abyss, ecstatic revelation of the silent blackness behind that common nothingness around which our joined eyes play like solar flares and which alone could support our perpetual falling and simultaneously reflect our faces back and forth to each other in an infinite regress of images metamorphosing into worlds of progressive subtlety till finally I am a mere benumbed butterfly in the winter wind, chasing you, a fallen leaf blown into fluttering enticement.

The path we follow is in a sense the wake of our thoughts and emotions preceding us. This note is a part of that path, a sign post on the way.

“Thinking and the object of thought are the same for you will not find thought apart from being, nor either of them away from utterance.” Parmenides

We are what we seek in an artificial other, yet out of fear, perhaps, of being alone in the universe we are blinded by the nearness of the truth. Yet the thirst for the real is so great that finally all barriers fall as one embraces this last of a thousand demons, loneliness.

Bronowski
Errors can’t be taken out of observation. Stars or atoms; we can’t fix their location, boundaries. There is no scientific certainty. There is no God’s eye view. Errors are bound up in the nature of human knowledge. Fire electrons at atoms of thorium; we see a blurred outline. The act of observation inevitably shapes the observed.

Max Bohm stated that theoretical physics is actually the new philosophy

About 4.5 billion years till the sun dies.

Bodies stopped changing one million years past. Brains stopped changing about 100,000 years ago. Man’s evolution is perhaps in a way a closed chapter. But life itself? Consider that a billion years ago the worm was the most advanced form of life: at some time in the future a form of life will evolve that is a quantum leap above humanity. Perhaps it already is here but hidden.

Heisenberg. No events can be described with certainty.

Plank. The area of uncertainty in the atom is mapped out by the quantum.

It is true that any recognition whatsoever occurs only within certain tolerances. How the mind works. What if the mind is removed?

The theory of uncertainty fixes the fact that knowledge is limited. And understanding? And consciousness?

Measurement is not the same as understanding.

Hiroshima. 6th August, 1945, 8:15 a.m.

More Bronowski. Science does not turn people into unthinking, unfeeling monsters, psychotic invalids. The search for absolutes does. Hitler’s Germany is an example of what happens when people think they have certain knowledge. The scientific art is always on the verge of error and is therefore personal in that the witness sees himself as responsible for eliminating error, or for going further into it.

We must rid ourselves, all humanity, of the itch for absolutes.

Here is what I am perhaps looking to say. I am not so much the person John Hinds as I am a being in the primitive matter of the universe finding articulation through John’s activity. I am his spirit. He lives through me and I through him. It’s a matter of intention, ascending intensities, a continuum; John and his spirit are really one in one projecting simultaneously the universe. What an awesome task. Mind comes to matter to produce consciousness.

To supercharge with possibility sometimes with ambiguity in speech is to violate expectation, to startle, stun, silence. And then you are open, don’t know what to expect so the possibilities are endless. And whatever does happen is complete in and of itself because vulnerability asks for nothing more than what just comes out of each momentary necessity. This is the secret of real manipulation, for instance in advertising, or in the springing of the eternal trap by fear and panic, its eternal components. An exquisite move, whatever the medium (architecture, dance, painting, music, prose, poetry, philosophy) is merely one that provides a moment of surprise which provides what is really the object. Silence. In that openness, vulnerability, the message is given and it goes to the person because he has been stunned into vulnerability, into non-clinging. They have his attention and therefore his intention. Polarities and spin merge to a common purpose.

Ambiguity in speech is poetic. It makes for lightness which makes for uncertainty. There is also repetition, variation, transformation. Variation follows only when expectation is violated. Repetition is what is expected.

The silence, the sweet play of figures.

The wind sometimes blows so hard and so fast here, that it takes on a new meaning. It is fierce, awesome in its power to subdue everything in its way. Yet in the evening as the sun sets and the wind subsides, branches, grasses, dust, and birds respond to subtler forces than the departed winds. The dance continues in a different tone, at a different pace. Orchestration of the infinite.

Medieval world view was world as center of universe and man as center of world. Man was the measure of all things. Faith was depended on for an understanding of God. For Aristotle forms are perceived by the passive mind and abstracted then by active mind to become ideas. Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.

Descartes, educated by Jesuits, worked against the medieval scholasticism. Medieval man was in a quagmire as to how he could understand God, the infinite, from his finite view. Because of this quagmire mysticism sprang up to circumvent it. Mysticism does not attempt to explain. Descartes goal was to establish a new order. He was concerned with the real world and real problems.

Cartesian epistemology intends to take man from not knowing to knowing. He struggled against Meno’s paradox that if man is truly ignorant he can not come to knowledge. Descarte’s fundamental view of man in the knowing situation is that he starts with reason and many ideas, some true, some false. So it is not a moving from ignorance to knowledge but from confused knowledge to true knowledge. His philosophical task was how to think rightly in the mental journey to truth. He argues that there are some innate ideas from God, the source, and most, from experience through the senses. The method and its task are served previously by custom and habit because they work. The principle criteria was “what works”.

Descartes said, “Because we conceive of a possible state of order, there must be one.” This is why we should be concerned with searching after truth. He thought that realizing disorder is desiring order. Descartes accepts nothing as true which could not clearly be recognized to be so. (Distinct from this, but what occurs is the application of the doctrine of doubt.) He divides difficulties and proceeds from the simple to the complex. His method was mathematical in that he took the complex and divided it into simple parts, proved those, and then reconstructed. In this he has been accused of being reductionist.

Descartes was opposed by the Catholic church as he innocently advocated man’s return to himself for solution to consciousness crisis. If the people turned within for guidance, if he recognized thought over action, his thought, then the church would loose power over the realm of action.

Descartes’s method is not meant to find new wealth of knowledge but it is to form the mind and its confused data. He admits that one cannot live by the method. It is only a directional teaching or learning aid. It insists on radical subjectivism. He speaks in terms of “I” and “my mind”. This problem is alleviated by relegating the method first to the realm of thought and when truths are found to the realm of action. He thinks that radical subjectivism is man’s natural state. He must be such to function in society.

Descartes felt that numbers are something more than a mere quantitative metaphor, as the Pythagoreans. To him mathematics was an abstract, fundamental truth and he is fascinated by this in that we can all, eventually, agree on mathematical truths. He adopted this function as a procedure to aid us in coming to an agreement of truth in general and also to avoid the problem of radical subjectivism. He feels that objective means object for thought as it exists in my thought. The objective thought as it exists outside my thought is the “formal reality”. A chair, for instance, is a formal reality while as a chair in my mind it is an object for thought. He sought to establish whether something is indubitable because it is certain or vice versa.

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Something greatly distant engenders a longing to be joined. Bring yourself to this and finally achieve completion, salvation. Said of Christianity and the “Western” experience in General. See Camus, the Myth of Sisyphus, and also Kierkegaard and Sartre.

5/12/02. In this truth is the derivation of the “power” of the evangelicals, the “Imam”, the “guru”, indeed any teacher whatsoever. They thrive on false dichotomies.

The truth IS, reality is not a process but only seems so. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, held to this idea. “The real is complete.” The value of the “pastor’s coin” derives from the opposite idea, that the real is process or, becoming. Salvation, enlightenment, are so much flim flam. Whatever knowledge or truth there is in the cosmos commingles or coexists with all that is and is immediate to any consciousness whatsoever. The task of the acolyte of true knowledge is just to put a handle on the void by the mere means of realization and with just a little twist turn emptiness to fullness. When realized one sees that it was always there – waiting. Nothing has changed yet all is new.

5/4/07. Take neither process nor completion for the absolute. The “real” is both. Completion is process! All process is additive to completion, the whole, the Real.

Yet, absolutes are only to be seized; must avoid clinging to comprehend the Ultimately Real. Buddhist philosophy.

Nagarjuna – To convey through concepts what lies beyond concepts and conventional entities is the skillfulness of the wise

Zen proverb – There is nothing more that can be said for enlightenment than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for seeing the moon.

A renunciation is the first order. This one does not claim wisdom nor seek salutation. Wisdom arises of its own accord along with Truth, Beauty, Love. Salutation is a special case of vacuity.

Its almost as if the world system, the Sun and Planets, hurtling through space come upon a giant Star and are captured thereby. We enter upon a new orbit and begin learning to cope. Everything has changed. The old paradigm immediately set aside. Everything is new under this new Sun. And, this new Sun is the Mandukya Upanishad.

An initial conundrum to be dealt with is transcendence versus immanence. Transcendent. Distinguished from immanent. Extra cosmic creator, God or not.

How is a creator who withdraws to make room that the created sentient life forms can be co-creator not extra cosmic, transcendent? Illusion is surely involved here and is to be somehow addressed.

The Mandukya Upanishad (MU) stresses foremost that all is one, that the manifold is an illusion like the imagination of a rope appearing as a snake. Only the rope is real and the illusion of the snake while depending on the rope is illusionary, requiring ideation. Non duality is the True nature of the Ultimate Reality whom the MU names Brahman. So, all is Brahman who is like the rope in the example. Simple enough. A child could understand.

So, it follows that the transcendent is the immanent because of non-duality; the implied duality is an illusion. If this is understood as an idea, concept, that too would be an illusion. Further follows that one should simply set aside all such ideation. But we are curious, and to some, such considerations lead to the sublime. A quote from MU III-18 helps in this regard. “As non-duality is the ultimate Reality, therefore duality is said to be its effect.” In other words duality might be said to serve the purpose of non-duality. I equivocate because, strictly, it might also be said there is no purpose; purpose being a product of our insistent anthropomorphism. That is, we insist man be the measure of all things. If it is then it is in relation to homo sapiens.

God doesn’t withdraw, as such, only appears to, or is only thought to by some. How can there be withdrawal if all is one? If there is any withdrawal it is into his creation. He appears to assume a separate identity, like the rope becoming a snake. If or when the created realizes his true nature can status as co-creator emerge. So, the transcendent reaches an understanding of its true nature as immanence. Illusion drops away along with duality and only the Ultimate Reality remains. Note, however, the MU says there is no creation and by the same, I guess, no creator. It just is, and I am that or, that am I! While the Christian God says “I am that I am.” The Truth is somewhere close. That statement is surely intended to convey the sense that language has limits, that concepts are useless when trying to explain the sublime.

I’m attempting to resolve seeming conflict of Rabbinical philosophy with that of the MU. The idea of man as co-creator is, of course, Rabbinical.

A quibble on knowing. MU III-33: “Knowledge is essence of thought.” So when mind disappears on realization of Ultimate Realtiy, i.e., Brahman, thought does likewise disappear? And the object of knowledge falls away, too, as the known, the knowing, the knower “become one and the same.” My scheme is somewhat different. The MU conflates understanding and knowledge. I think knowledge leads to understanding and when understanding does arise therein is the known, knowing, knower merged, and duality falls away. “Brahman which is of the nature of one homogeneous mass of eternal consciousness, does not depend upon another instrument of knowledge (for its illumination).” Further, this one might know, or think so, but when understanding arises this one is no longer there. Illumination only occurs in non-duality, knowing in duality; Knower needs an object (to know). It also requires action. When known, knowing, and knower merge then understanding arises. That’s my note on epistemology.

Authors, commentators of MU are fond of quoting the Bhagavad Gita (BG) and the BG posits a deity devotion to whom is held in the highest regard. Krsna tells Arjuna that those following the path of devotion to the Lord (Krsna) are dearer to him than any others, those that, for instance, follow the path of knowledge, renunciation, ritual, and so forth. Yet the authors (commentators) of the MU decry such as mere ideation, as failure, because duality inheres in such beliefs. The MU clearly states there is no extra-cosmic God. True. All is one, or, as the Upanishad puts it, all is Brahman. However, to construe that as positing an extra-cosmic God is perhaps not a fatal mistake. There are great mysteries to be confronted and the greatest might be that there is an extra cosmic God which transcendent is all the same immanent. Jesus, recall, is said to be the “Word” made flesh. So, across the world the reality is put forth that God, the “Word”, manifests as man, as a created being. You know, we make the God we want out of our intention, thoughts, worship. So how could one not hold that God is infinitely malleable? And, we are so welcome by the One that however we approach matters not. What matters is the approach, the worship. Alone.

Being in the world requires skill, crafts. Development of these is an endless discovery. None are cast in concrete. Every person is unique. All these meditative crafts are aids to stopping sensory input. Stopping sensory input the mind, that which continuously processes the input, ceases. What’s left? Consciousness? Being itself? In deep sleep something similar happens. Note that on quiescence of the mind only the seeds of deeds remain. We know this because they reassert themselves on reengagement of the mind with the instruments of sensory input.

Yes, only the One, Brahman, is truly real; but creatures need a personal touch, thus Krsna, the Great Lord of the BG, and Jesus, “God”, for the Christians, and so forth. The MU calls devotional people simple minded. (But, according to MU III-17, “Advaita alone harmonizes all other doctrines and theories.”) – Advaita is non-duality.  I am with those called simple minded, believing in devotion to the Lord, surrender to God. If deluded in that perhaps I do not fully realize that all it is is Brahman’s self seeking, self love, self realizing. I am Brahman. An ideation, the snake, so to speak, declaring it is the rope, a device by which, if you will, the divine creative spirit has self experience. I was taught this. But. Love of the Lord could be construed to mean Brahman loves Brahman. More ideation. I know. Some will look on this as nonsensical but there’s not much to be done about it but follow one’s own true nature. One with the Universal Truth I must go where it leads. I’m taught the best way to do that is simply to yield.

I said this was a rumination.

Surrender to God IS The Ultimate Reality. Who surrenders? To whom? Circular? Yes!!!

Always keep in mind Irwin Lieb’s teaching that there is only one individual and that is the entire cosmos. So consider that with the formula that on this life’s journey we are bound to arrive where we began and know the place for the first time. (Lieb was a teacher of mine and the sentiment about the journey is from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding.)

Pristine Bliss therein abides for the taking!!

No! Brahman does not love Brahman. That implies duality. There is no loving, really, there is no Brahman. Its an imagination, ideation, a construct based on duality. If only Brahman is, then enough said. All else is futile and designed to feed the ego, the false sense of self.

Brahman goes Poof! As all illusions must; for, when attachment arises wisdom is shut out. It’s said, in that regard, that one must kill the Buddha to know the Buddha. (Desani taught this.) To kill the Buddha means to drop the attachment, the duality. One can never concede only the rope has any claim on existence, and that ephemeral at best. One might consider that to claim existence at all requires duality. Who says what exists? One might also claim that the very use of language, symbols, is to assume duality. So, the snake in the rope is the first illusion that points to a more fundamental illusion, the rope itself. As co-creators we are in the business of supplying rope.

I don’t know, understand, but how concluding the Ultimate Reality itself is an illusion. You know, part of this “tale told  by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Words fail this test, biggly.

Think about Zen and Archery. “It” shoots. The teacher declares on success of the student. The student at that moment no longer exists, as such. The shot falls like a leaf giving way to an accumulation of snow.

There is here a great truth but it is not amenable to discursive thinking.

Aum!

I should have just done the laundry as drink tea from this empty cup.

Explain that last line. A Chinese master was asked by what was likely an impertinent student once what to do after enlightenment. Appropriately, the teacher replied, “do the laundry”.  That is, carry on as before. Nothing has really changed….except inwardly. Tea from an empty cup is a Zen Koan. Another would be “the sound of one hand clapping.” Koans are intended to help break beyond concepts, that is, as precusor to realization of the non-dual Ultimate Reality, to still the mind. When mind is stilled it falls away.  Deep sleep is a precursor. When mind is stilled only illuminating consciousness remains. This is the aim of spiritual or meditative practices.

I’ll revisit this later. But here is a caveat. There’s no end of material easily had on the subject of the MU, and the Vedas, and the philosophical discussion proceeds ad infinitum. So? Well, give my words whatever gravity you will. It matters little. At least I’m not trying to sell. I’m not buying, either. Those that Sankara disparaged one should consider were contending for the attention, indeed, material support of those who dispensed favors to such people in those days. Nothing has changed in this regard. Egos were involved, too. People always want to sway others to their side; people want, seek, validation. Even the enlightened. Those most likely to have actualized their complete realization will probably be the most difficult to find, identify, however. This one, of course, has a reason to go this way which will remain hidden. I don’t do this for myself. Today I came here to revert this post to draft but changed my mind. For the time being. I’ve updated this so many times I’ve lost count. And will likely continue. I’ve added a follow up post and would add that all my work here is more or less on the same theme, some old, some new, all mixed up in one potpourri.

Thoughts March 18, 2023

That condition in which knowing arises is the same as that which is its limit. So knowledge is bounded, is useless if not an impediment beyond that whence it arose. Beyond knowledge’s limit another faculty is needed and that is understanding.

The desire to know is the desire to feel. This is akin to desire for an object. And. The desire of a thing is animalistic. So. Wanting enlightenment, release, salvation, is falling again into the snare of delusion. The way out is simply to yield.

There are doors that open only of themselves. You won’t even know they are there and desire to find them only obscures. Seeking impedes.

Yes, “if you seek you will find, if you knock it shall be opened unto you.” However, forcing the issue means that what is opened, what you find is an ephemera, an illusion. It is merely a projection of yourself, in other words.

The effulgence of the Ultimate Reality will sweep you away of its own accord, if you exercise patience. And you might be left bewildered but you will understand you have been owned!

The embrace of the Lord, the Light, is eternal Bliss!

No matter your view, there is always another to benevolently enhance it. But don’t think there is only one outlook. If there were we would have a partial view. Imagine if there were only one science, say botany. Think about it.

Maybe the Lord is an equal opportunity redeemer.

When the Ultimate Reality is revealed knowledge ceases its activity. Or, rather, one who would realize this would be advised to inhibit knowledge’s activity, its grasping. The instrument of knowledge, invariably connected with its employer and an object can act only in the plane of duality. With the negation of duality, the instrument of knowledge itself becomes ineffective.*

That is why knowledge should be used as a negator more than affirmer.

That is why simply yielding to the will of God is the only way to Truth.

And that brings me to this. That which can said to be eternal cannot be a member of the class of things or objects which all have in common the ability to be named, that is, delineated – which means limited, in a sense. Further, any naming results in a designation of said thing as being finite, as having the characteristic of coming into being, of persisting awhile, of passing away. So. When God is named he becomes something we own, something we know, something we think we understand. In other words, God becomes an idea, a thing, an object, when named. Though its not intended THAT becomes an illusion. The Truth escapes in our effort to hold it close. That’s all.

* Mandukya Upanishad 1-7 Shankara’s commentary

On the occasion of a family outing a few days ago we were driving back to my place when the conversation turned religious. This is a rare thing. Three year old Vivienne – Vivi – sitting behind me asks “What is God?” Her mother, who is driving, makes an answer which doesn’t satisfy Vivi who repeats the question. At my son’s suggestion, I chime in but my words likewise do not suffice. I, of course, am very vague, I guess, to a three year old. Daughter-in-law gives the standard orthodox version. My answer is congruent – well somewhat. I didn’t want to say, like her mother, that God was our heavenly father. So I said, basically, the whole of creation was the deity and that “he” was impossible to know.

But my purpose here is not to give details of the conversation. After thinking about it and making a note last night I just want to do a small spin off of my previous post about Sean Carroll. The operative word here is small. This is just a thought fleeting.

January 25, 2023 note:

There is no such thing as eternity except in the context of time. Likewise: No such thing as good except in the context of evil. Or – vice versa…(for all opposites).

Another view/way: God is context in which man makes sense as man is context wherein God makes sense. Or: “God” confers on man universality. “Man” confers on God individuality.

Likewise:

Time and eternity are each axiomatic of the other, etc. – as is true for Beauty, Truth, Love, Liberty, etc. To accept one the other must also be accepted. You must believe one to deny one. (Axiom)

Hopefully Vivi will find this along her way.