Perennial Phil Ch 2 THE NATURE OF THE GROUND [11,5593]

Perennial Phil Ch 2 THE NATURE OF THE GROUND [11,5593]

OUR starting point has been the psychological doctrine, 'That art thou.' 

The question that now quite naturally presents itself is a metaphysical one:

 'What is the That to which the thou can discover itself to be akin?

 essentially similar, related, or compatible

To this the fully developed Perennial Philosophy has at all times and in all places given fundamentally the same answer. 

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circum­stances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. 

This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. 

The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive know­ledge of the divine Ground—the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to 'die to self' and so make room, as it were, for God. 

Out of any given generation of men and women very few will achieve the final end of human existence; but the opportunity for coming to unitive know­ledge will, in one way or another, continually be offered until all sentient beings realize Who in fact they are.

The Absolute Ground of all existence has a personal aspect. 

The activity of Brahman is Isvara, and Isvara is further mani­fested in the Hindu Trinity and, at a more distant remove, in the other deities or angels of the Indian pantheon. 

Analo­gously, for Christian mystics, the ineffable, attributeless God­head is manifested in a Trinity of Persons, of whom it is possible to predicate such human attributes as goodness, wis­dom, mercy and love, but in a supereminent degree.
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Definition of godhead신격

1: divine nature or essence

2  capitalized

a: GOD sense 1

b: the nature of God especially as existing in three persons —used with the

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Godhead in Christianity - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Godhead_in_Christianity

Godhead (or godhood) refers to the divinity or substance (ousia) of the Christian God, especially as existing in three persons — the Father, Son, and Holy ...

Godhead | theology | Britannicahttps://www.britannica.com › ... › Spirituality

Eckhart calls “Godhead” the origin of all things that is beyond God (God conceived as Creator). “God and the Godhead are as distinct as heaven and earth.” T

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ineffable 말로 표현할 수 없는

The divine Ground

Brahman

Brahman is the eternal, unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the divine ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being and everything beyond in this Universe.[64][65] The nature of Brahman is described as transpersonal, personal and impersonal by different philosophical schools. The word Brahman is derived from the verb brh (Sanskrit: to grow), and connotes greatness and infinity.

Brahman is talked of at two levels (apara and para). He is the fountainhead of all concepts but he himself cannot be conceived. He is the universal conceiver, universal concept and all the means of concept. Apara-Brahman is the same Para Brahma but for human understanding thought of as universal mind cum universal intellect from which all human beings derive an iota as their mind, intellect etc.[citation needed]

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https://sejinlifeforce.blogspot.com/2021/11/divine-ground-janet-smith-warfield.html

The perennial philosophy is not a formula for enlightenment, but its simple concepts have encouraged countless seekers to reach spiritual mastery. Although the perennial philosophy has far more to offer, here are four of its most basic and helpful concepts:

1. There is a Divine Ground that permeates the universe. The world we think we see is a temporary projection that originates from that Divine Ground
2. A change in consciousness is required to become aware of, and experience, the Divine Ground.
3. Everyone has the ability to experience the Divine.
4. Experiencing the Divine is life’s highest purpose.

Simply put: Life-giving intelligence permeates everything in existence. This intelligence wants to be known and can be known

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Finally there is an incarnation of God in a human being, who possesses the same qualities of character as the personal God, but who exhibits them under the limitations necessarily imposed by confinement within a material body born into the world at a given moment of time.

29 30 

 For Christians there has been and, ex hypotaesi, can be but one such divine incarnation; 

for Indians there can be and have been many. 

In Christendom as well as in the East, contemplatives who follow the path of devotion conceive of; and indeed directly perceive, the incarna­tion as a constantly renewed fact of experience. 

Christ is for ever being begotten within the soul by the Father, and 

the play of Krishna is the pseudo-historical symbol of an everlasting truth of psychology and metaphysics 

- the fact that, in relation to God, the personal soul is always feminine and passive.

Mahayana Buddhism teaches these same metaphysical doc­trines in terms of the 'Three Bodies' of Buddha—

1. the absolute Dharmakaya, known also as the Primordial Buddha, or Mind, or the Clear Light of the Void; 
2. the Sambhogakaya, corre­sponding to Isvara or the personal God of Judaism, Christian­ity and Islam; and 
3. finally the Nirmanakaya, the material body, in which the Logos is incarnated upon earth as a living, histor­ical Buddha.

logos, (Greek: “word,” “reason,” or “plan”) - the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning

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Among the Sufis, Al Haqq, the Real, seems to be thought of as the abyss of Godhead underlying the personal Allah, while the Prophet is taken out of history and regarded as the incarnation of the Logos.

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Some idea of the inexhaustible richness of the divine nature can be obtained by analysing, word by word, the invocation with which the Lord's Prayer begins

—'Our Father who art in heaven.' 

• God is ours—ours in the same intimate sense that our consciousness and life are ours. 
• But as well as immanently ours, God is also transcendently the personal Father, who loves his creatures and to whom love and allegiance are owed by them in return. 
• 'Our Father who art': when we come to consider the verb in isolation, we perceive that the immanent-transcendent personal God is also the immanent-transcendent One, the essence and principle of all existence. 
• And finally God's being is 'in heaven'; the divine nature is other than, and incommensurable with, the nature of the creatures in whom God is 

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 That is why we can attain to the unitive knowledge of God only when we become in some measure Godlike, only when we permit God's kingdom to come by making our own creaturely kingdom go.  [31]

unitive

1.  tending to unite or capable of uniting

2. characterized by unity

God may be worshipped and contemplated in any of his aspects. But to persist in worshipping only one aspect to the exclusion of all the rest is to run into grave spiritual peril.

 Thus, if we approach God with the preconceived idea that He is exclusively the personal, transcendental, all-powerful ruler of the world, we run the risk of becoming entangled in a religion of rites, propitiatory sacrifices (sometimes of the most horrible nature) and legalistic observances. 

Inevitably so; for if God is an unapproachable potentate out there, giving mysterious orders, this kind of religion is entirely appropriate to the cosmic situation. The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.

Things are a great deal better when the transcendent, omni­potent personal God is regarded as also a loving Father. 

The sincere worship of such a God changes character as well as conduct, and does something to modify consciousness. 

But the complete transformation of consciousness, which is 'en­lightenment,' 'deliverance,' 'salvation,' comes only when God is thought of as the Perennial Philosophy affirms Him to be

—immanent as well as transcendent, 

supra-personal as well as personal

—and when religious practices are adapted to this conception.

transcendent경험을 초월한
beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience.
immanent내재
existing or operating within; inherent.

When God is regarded as exclusively immanent, 

legalism and external practices are abandoned and 

there is a concentra­tion on the Inner Light. 

The dangers now are quietism and antinomianism, a partial modification of consciousness that is useless or even harmful, because it is not accompanied by the transformation of character which is the necessary prerequi­site of a total, complete and spiritually fruitful transformation of consciousness.


Finally it is possible to think of God as an exclusively supra-personal being. For many persons this conception is too 'philosophical' to provide an adequate motive for doing anything practical about their beliefs. Hence, for them, it is of no value.[32]

It would be a mistake, of course, to suppose that people who worship one aspect of God to the exclusion of all the rest must inevitably run into the different kinds of trouble described above. 

If they are not too stubborn in their ready-made beliefs, if they submit with docility to what happens to them in the process of worshipping, the God who is both immanent and transcendent, personal and more than personal, may reveal Himself to them in his fullness. 

Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is easier for us to reach our goal if we are not handi­capped by a set of erroneous or inadequate beliefs about the right way to get there and the nature of what we are looking for.

Who is God? I can think of no better answer than, He who is. Nothing is more appropriate to the eternity which God is. If you call God good, or great, or blessed, or wise, or anything else of this sort, it is included in these words, namely, He is.

St. Bernard

The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object. When they are heard, they should enable the hearer to understand this meaning, and this according to the four categories of sub­stance, of activity, of quality and of relationship. 

• For example, cow and horse belong to the category of substance. 
• He cooks or he prays belongs to the category of activity. 
• White and black belong to the category of quality. 
• Having money or possessing cows belongs to the category of relationship. 

 

• Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. 
• It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like 'being' in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. 
• Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity, because it is without activity—'at rest, without parts or activity,' according to the Scriptures. 
• Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is 'without a second' and is not the object of anything but its own self. 

Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One 'before whom words recoil.'

Shankara  [33]

It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.
Truly, 'Only he that rids himself forever of desire can see the Secret Essences.'
He that has never rid himself of desire can see only the Outcomes.

Lao Tzu

One of the greatest favours bestowed on the soul transiently in this life is 

to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly 

that it cannot comprehend God at all. 

These souls are herein somewhat like the saints in heaven, 

where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly 

that He is infinitely incom­prehensible; 

for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so clearly as do these others how greatly He transcends their vision.

St. John of the Cross

• When I came out of the Godhead into multiplicity, then all things proclaimed, 'There is a God' (the personal Creator). 
• Now this cannot make me blessed, for hereby I realize myself as creature. 
• But in the breaking through I am more than all creatures; I am neither God nor creature; I am that which I was and shall re­main, now and for ever more. 
• There I receive a thrust which carries me above all angels. 
• By this thrust I become so rich that God is not sufficient for me, in so far as He is only God in his divine works. 
• For in thus breaking through, I perceive what God and I are in common. 
• There I am what I was. 
• There I neither increase nor decrease. 
• For there I am the immovable which moves all things. 
• Here man has won again what he is eternally and ever shall be. 
• Here God is received into the soul.

Eckhart

The Godhead gave all things up to God. 

The Godhead is poor, naked and empty as though it were not; it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. 

It is God who has the treasure and the bride in him, 

the Godhead is as void as though it were not.

Eckhart  [34]

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B] mind  influences matter


We can understand something of what lies beyond our experience by considering analogous cases lying within our experience. 

Thus, the relations subsisting 

• between the world and God and 
• between God and the Godhead 

seem to be analogous, in some measure at least, to those that hold

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• between the body (with its environment) and the psyche, and 
• between the psyche and the spirit. 

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In the light of what we know about the second—and what we know is not, unfor­tunately, very much—we may be able to form some not too hopelessly inadequate notions about the first.


Mind affects its body in four ways—

1] subconsciously, through that unbelievably subtle physiological intelligence, 

which Driesch hypostatized under the name of the entelechy; 

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entelechy /ɛnˈtɛləki,ɪnˈtɛləki/

• the realization of potential.
• the supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.

"such self-organization required a special biological force—entelechy"

the soul.

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2] con­sciously, by deliberate acts of will; 

3] subconsciously again, by the reaction upon the physical organism of emotional states having nothing to do with the organs or processes reacted upon; 

and, 

4] either consciously or subconsciously, in certain 'supernormal' manifestations.

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 Outside the body matter can be influenced by the mind in two ways—

first, by means of the body, and second, by a 'supernormal' process, recently studied under laboratory conditions and described as 'the PK effect.' 

Similarly, the mind can establish relations with other minds either indirectly, by willing its body to undertake symbolic activities, such as speech or writing; or 'supernormally,' by the direct approach of mind-reading, telepathy, extra-sensory perception.

Let us now consider these relationships a little more closely. In some fields the physiological intelligence works on its own initiative, as when it directs the never-ceasing processes of breathing, say, or assimilation. In others it acts at the behest of the conscious mind, as when we will to accomplish some action, but do not and cannot will the muscular, glandular, nervous and vascular means to the desired end. 

The appar­ently simple act of mimicry well illustrates the extraordinary nature of the feats performed by the physiological intelligence. 

When a parrot (making use, let us remember, of the beak, tongue and throat of a bird) imitates the sounds produced by the lips, teeth, palate and vocal cords of a man articulating words, what precisely happens?   35   Responding in some as yet entirely uncomprehended way to the conscious mind's desire to imitate some remembered or immediately perceived event, the physiological intelligence sets in motion large numbers of muscles, co-ordinating their efforts with such exquisite skill that the result is a more or less perfect copy of the original. 

Working on its own level, the conscious mind not merely of a parrot, but of the most highly gifted of human beings, would find itself completely baffled by a problem of com­parable complexity.

As an example of the third way in which our minds affect matter, we may cite the all-too-familiar phenomenon of 'nerv­ous indigestion.' In certain persons symptoms of dyspepsia make their appearance when the conscious mind is troubled by such negative emotions as fear, envy, anger or hatred. These emotions are directed towards events or persons in the outer environment; but in some way or other they adversely affect the physiological intelligence and this derangement results, among other things, in 'nervous indigestion.' 

From tuber­culosis and gastric ulcer to heart disease and even dental caries, numerous physical ailments have been found to be closely correlated with certain undesirable states of the conscious mind. 

Conversely, every physician knows that a calm and cheerful patient is much more likely to recover than one who is agitated and depressed.

Finally we come to such occurrences as faith healing and levitation—occurrences 'supernorinally' strange, but never­theless attested by masses of evidence which it is hard to discount completely. 

Precisely how faith cures diseases (whether at Lourdes or in the hypnotist's consulting room), or how St. Joseph of Cupertino was able to ignore the laws of gravitation, we do not know. (But let us remember that we are no less ignorant of the way in which minds and bodies are related in the most ordinary of everyday activities.) 

In the same way we are unable to form any idea of the modus operandi of what Professor Rhine has called the PK effect. Nevertheless the fact that the fall of dice can be influenced by the mental states of certain individuals seems now to have been estab­lished beyond the possibility of doubt.   36  And if the PK effect can be demonstrated in the laboratory and measured by statis­tical methods, then, obviously, the intrinsic credibility of the scattered anecdotal evidence for the direct influence of mind upon matter, not merely within the body, but outside in the external world, is thereby notably increased. 

Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge has written that "psychokinesis, or PK, violates the principle that mind cannot act directly on matter. (If it did, no experimenter could trust his readings of measuring instruments.) It also violates the principles of conservation of energy and momentum.

Psychokinesis - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Psychokinesis

The same is true of extra-sensory perception. Apparent examples of it are con­stantly turning up in ordinary life. But science is almost impotent to cope with the particular case, the isolated instance. Promoting their methodological ineptitude to the rank of a criterion of truth, dogmatic scientists have often branded everything beyond the pale of their limited competence as unreal and even impossible.

But when tests for ESP can be repeated under standardized conditions, the subject comes under the jurisdiction of the law of probabilities and achieves (in the teeth of what passionate opposition!) a measure of scientific respectability.

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Such, very baldly and briefly, are the most important things we know about mind in regard to its capacity to influence matter. From this modest knowledge about ourselves, what are we entitled to conclude in regard to the divine object of our nearly total ignorance?

First, as to creation: if a human mind can directly influence matter not merely within, but even outside its body, then a divine mind, immanent in the universe or transcendent to it, may be presumed to be capable of imposing forms upon a pre-existing chaos of formless matter, or even, perhaps, of thinking substance as well as forms into existence.

Once created or divinely informed, the universe has to be sustained. The necessity for a continuous re-creation of the world becomes manifest, according to Descartes, 'when we consider the nature of time, or the duration of things; for this is of such a kind that its parts are not mutually dependent and never co-existent; and, accordingly, from the fact that we are now it does not necessarily follow that we shall be a moment afterwards, unless some cause, viz, that which first produced us, shall, as it were, continually reproduce us, that is, conserve us.'

 Here we seem to have something analogous, on the cosmic level, to that physiological intelligence which, in men and the lower animals, unsleepingly performs the task of seeing that bodies behave as they should. Indeed, the physiological intel­ligence may plausibly be regarded as, a special aspect of the general re-creating Logos. In Chinese phraseology it is the Tao as it manifests itself on the level of living bodies.37

The bodies of human beings are affected by the good or bad states of their minds. Analogously, the existence at the heart of things of a divine serenity and goodwill  신성한 평온과 선의  may be regarded as one of the reasons why the world's sickness, though chronic, has not proved fatal. 

And if, in the psychic universe, there should be other and more than human consciousnesses ob­sessed by thoughts of evil and egotism and rebellion, this would account, perhaps, for some of the quite extravagant and improbable wickedness of human behaviour.

The acts willed by our minds are accomplished 

1. either through the instrumentality of the physiological intelligence and the body, 
2. or, very exceptionally, and to a limited extent, by direct supernormal means of the PK variety. 

Analogously the physical situations willed by a divine Providence may be arranged by the perpetually creating Mind that sustains the universe—in which case Providence will appear to do its work by wholly natural means; or else, very exceptionally, the divine Mind may act directly on the universe from the out­side, as it were—in which case the workings of Providence and the gifts of grace will appear to be miraculous. 

Similarly, the divine Mind may choose to communicate with finite minds either by manipulating the world of men and things in ways which the particular mind to be reached at that moment will find meaningful; or else there may be direct communication by something resembling thought transference.

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C] A temporal God


In Eckhart's phrase, God, the creator and perpetual re-creator of the world, 'becomes and disbecomes.' 

In other words He is, to some extent at least, in time. A temporal God might have the nature of the traditional Hebrew God of the Old Testament; 

or He might be a limited deity of the kind described by certain philosophical theologians of the present century; 

or alternatively He might be an emergent God, start­ing unspiritually at Alpha and becoming gradually more divine as the aeons rolled on towards some hypothetical Omega. 

(Why the movement shourd be towards more and better rather than less and worse, upwards rather than downwards or in undulations, onwards rather than round and round, one really doesn't know. There seems to be no reason why a God who is exclusively temporal—a God who merely becomes and is ungrounded in eternity—should not be as completely at the mercy of time as is the individual mind apart from the spirit. 

A God who becomes is a God who also disbecomes, and it is the disbecoming which may ultimately prevail, so that the last state of emergent deity may be worse than the first.)38 


The ground in which the multifarious and time-bound psyche is rooted is a simple, timeless awareness. By making ourselves pure in heart and poor in spirit we can discover and be identified with this awareness. In the spirit we not only have, but are, the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.

Analogously, God in time is grounded in the eternal now of the modeless Godhead. It is in the Godhead that things, lives and minds have their being; it is through God that they have their becoming—a becoming whose goal and purpose is to return to the eternity of the Ground.

Meanwhile, I beseech you by the eternal and imperishable truth, and by my soul, consider; grasp the unheard-of. God and God­head are as distinct as heaven and earth. Heaven stands a thou­sand miles above the earth, and even so the Godhead is above God. God becomes and disbecomes. Whoever understands this preaching, I wish him well. But even if nobody had been here, I must still have preached this to the poor-box.

Eckhart  

Like St. Augustine, Eckhart was to some extent the victim of his own literary talents. Le style c'est l'1omme. No doubt. But the converse is also partly true. L'homme c'est le style. Because we have a gift for writing in a certain way, we find ourselves, in some sort, becoming our way of writing. We mould ourselves in the likeness of our particular brand of eloquence. Eckhart was one of the inventors of German prose, and he was tempted by his new-found mastery of forceful expression to commit himself to extreme positions—to be dctrinally the image of his powerful and over-emphatic sen­tences. 

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D] God vs Godhead

A statement like the foregoing would lead one to believe that he despised what the Vedantists call the 'lower knowledge' of Brahman, not as the Absolute Ground of all things, but as the personal God.

 In reality he, like the Vedan-tists, accepts the lower knowledge as genuine knowledge and regards devotion to the personal God as the best preparation for the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. 

Another point to remember is that 

the attributeless Godhead of Vedanta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Christian and Sufi mysticism 

is the Ground of all the qualities possessed by the personal God and the Incarnation. 

'God is not good, I am good,' says Eckhart in his violent and excessive way. What he really meant was, 'I am just humanly good; God is supereminently good; the Godhead is, and his "isness" (istigkeit, in Eckhart's German) contains goodness, love, wisdom and all the rest in their essence and principle.' 

In consequence, the Godhead is never, for the exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, the mere Abso­lute of academic metaphysics, 

but something more purely perfect, more reverently to be adored than even the personal God or his human incarnation [Jesus?]

—a Being towards whom it is possible to feel the most intense devotion and in relation to whom it is necessary (if one is to come to that unitive know­ledge which is man's final end) to practise a discipline more arduous and unremitting than any imposed by ecclesiastical authority.39

There is a distinction and differentiation, according to our reason, between God and the Godhead, between action and rest. The fruitful nature of the Persons ever worketh in a living differentia­tion. But the simple Being of God, according to the nature thereof, is an eternal Rest of God and of all created things.40

Ruysbroecic

(In the Reality unitively known by the mystic), we can speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Per­sons. There were we all one before our creation, for this is our super-essence. There the Godhead is in simple essence without activity.

Ruysbroeck

The holy light of faith is so pure that, compared with it, par­ticular lights are but impurities; and even ideas of the saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in His purity.

J. J. Olier

Coming as it does from a devout Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, this statement may seem somewhat startling. But we must remember that Olier (who was a man of saintly life and one of the most influential religious teachers of the seventeenth century) is speaking here about a state of con­sciousness, to which few people ever come. To those on the ordinary levels of being he recommends other modes of know­ledge. One of his penitents, for example, was advised to read, as a corrective to St. John of the Cross and other exponents of pure mystical theology, St. Gertrude's revelations of the incarnate and even physiological aspects of the deity. 

In Olier's opinion, as in that of most directors of souls, whether Catholic or Indian, it was mere folly to recommend the wor­ship of God-without-form to persons who are in a condition to understand only the personal and the incarnate aspects of the divine Ground. 

This is a perfectly sensible attitude, and we are justified in adopting a policy in accordance with it—pro-vided always that we clearly remember that its adoption may be attended by certain spiritual dangers and disadvantages. The nature of these dangers and disadvantages will be illus­trated and discussed in another section. For the present it will suffice to quote the warning words of Philo: 

'He who thinks that God has any quality and is not the One, injures not God, but himself.'41

Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all two-ness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothing­ness to nothingness.

Eckhart

What Eckhart describes as the pure One, the absolute not-God in whom we must sink from nothingness to nothingness is called in Mahayana Buddhism the Clear Light of the Void. What follows is part of a formula addressed by the Tibetan priest to a person in the act of death.

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O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path. Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state

 (the' intermediate state' immediately following death, in which the soul is judged—or rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character formed during its life on earth, what sort of an after-life it shall have). 

In this Bardo state all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked, immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or centre. At this moment know thou thyself and abide in that state. I, too, at this time, am setting thee face to face.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

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Going back further into the past, we find in one of the earliest Upanishads the classical description of the Absolute One as a Super-Essential No-Thing.   [43]

The significance of Brahman is expressed by ned neti (not so, not so); for beyond this, that you say it is not so, there is nothing further. Its name, however, is 'the Reality of reality.' That is to say, the senses are real, and the Brahman is their Reality.

Brhadaranyaka Upanishad [The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is a treatise on Ātman (Self)]

In other words, there is a hierarchy of the real. 

The manifold world of our everyday experience is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; 

but this relative reality has its being within and because of the absolute Real­ity,

 which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it.

The extract which follows next is of great historical signifi­cance, since it was mainly through the 'Mystical Theology' and the 'Divine Names' of the fifth-century author who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite that mediaeval Christendom established contact with Neoplatonism and thus, at several removes, with the metaphysical thought and disci­pline of India. 

In the ninth century Scorns Erigena translated the two books into Latin, and from that time forth their influence upon the philosophical speculations and the reli­gious life of the West was wide, deep and beneficent. 

It was to the authority of the Areopagite that the Christian expo­nents of the Perennial Philosophy appealed, whenever they were menaced (and they were always being menaced) by those whose primary interest was in ritual, legalism and ecclesiastical organization. 

And because Dionysius was mistakenly identi­fied with St. Paul's first Athenian convert, his authority was regarded as all but apostolic; therefore, according to the rules of the Catholic game, the appeal to it could not lightly be dismissed, even by those to whom the books meant less than nothing. In spite of their maddening eccentricity, the men and women who followed the Dionysian path had to be tolerated. And once left free to produce the fruits of the spirit, a num­ber of them arrived at such a conspicuous degree of sanctity that it became impossible even for the heads of the Spanish Inquisition to condemn the tree from which such fruits had sprung.43

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Dionysius the Areopagite (/daɪəˈnɪsiəs/; Greek: Διονύσιος ὁ Ἀρεοπαγίτης Dionysios ho Areopagitēs) was an Athenian judge at the Areopagus Court in Athens, who lived in the first century. A convert to Christianity, he is venerated as a saint by multiple denominations.
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The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are 

hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret.

 For this darkness, though of deepest obscur­ity, is yet radiantly clear; and, 

though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of trans­cendent beauty. .. . 

We long exceedingly to dwell in this trans­lucent darkness and, through not seeing and not knowing, 

to see Him who is beyond both vision and knowledge—by the very fact of neither seeing Him nor knowing Him. 

For this is truly to see and to know and, through the abandonment of all things, 

to praise Him who is beyond and above all things. 

For this is not unlike the art of those who carve a life-like image from stone: removing from around it all that impedes clear vision of the latent form, 

revealing its hidden beauty solely by taking away. 

For it is, as I believe, more fitting to praise Him by taking away than by ascription; for we ascribe attributes to Him, when we start from universals and come down through the intermediate to the particulars. 

But here we take away all things from Him going up from particulars to universals, that we may know openly the unknowable, which is hidden in and under all things that may be known. 

And we behold that darkness beyond being, concealed under all natural light.

Dionythis the Areopagite

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The world as it appears to common sense consists of an indefinite number of successive and presumably causally con­nected events, involving an indefinite number of separate, individual things, lives and thoughts, the whole constituting a presumably orderly cosmos. 

It is in order to describe, discuss and manage this common-sense universe that human languages have been developed.

Whenever, for any reason, we wish to think of the world, not as it appears to common sense, but as a continuum, we find that our traditional syntax and vocabulary are quite inadequate. 

Mathematicians have therefore been compelled to invent radically new symbol-systems for this express purpose. 

But the divine Ground of all existence is not merely a continuum, 

it is also out of time, and different, not merely in degree, but in kind from the worlds to which traditional language and the languages of mathematics are adequate.   44      

Hence, in all exposi­tions of the Perennial Philosophy, the frequency of paradox, of verbal extravagance, sometimes even of seeming blasphemy. 

Nobody has yet invented a Spiritual Calculus, in terms of which we may talk coherently about the divine Ground and of the world conceived as its manifestation. 

For the present, therefore, we must be patient with the linguistic eccentricities of those who are compelled to describe one order of experience in terms of a symbol-system, whose relevance is to the facts of another and quite different order.

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So far, then, as a fully adequate expression of the Perennial Philosophy is concerned, there exists a problem in semantics that is finally insoluble. 

The fact is one which must be steadily borne in mind by all who read its formulations. Only in this way shall we be able to understand even remotely what is being talked about.

 Consider, for example, those negative definitions of the transcendent and immanent Ground of being. 

In state­ments such as Eckhart's, God is equated with nothing. And in a certain sense the equation is exact; for God is certainly no thing. 

In the phrase used by Scotus Erigena God is not a what; He is a That. 

In other words, the Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities. 

This means that discursive knowledge about the Ground is not merely, like all inferential knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; 

it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard patterns of thought, it must be, paradoxical knowledge. 

Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and 

union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the 'thou' from the 'That.'