SPEAKING ABOUT IT WITHOUT SPEAKING ABOUT IT

We spiritual aspirants like to have something to hold on to and so we conceive of God in a certain way, form an idea of God.  Arising from this is cataphatic theology.

The word cataphatic is formed from two Greek words, "cata" meaning to descend and "femi" meaning to speak.  Combined, the words mean approximately “to bring God down in such a way so as to speak of him."

The trouble is, by defining what God, or the divine, is we limit the unlimited, so to speak.  To say, for example, that God is love, is to imply that this is the extent of God, that He is only love. 
 
Hence, apophatic theology, which speaks of God in terms of what He is not.  God is not love, or is not hate, which is to say that God, in the end, is not something that can be adequately described.
 
With both cataphatic and apophatic forms of expression, however, we still have something to hold on to, a handle that at the very least gives us a way to talk about God.

In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is defined, apophatically, as nirguna or without qualities.  Anything imaginable or conceivable is not deemed to be the ultimate reality.  A Hindu hymn speaks of Brahman as "one where the mind does not reach."  In the Upanishads, Brahman is described as "neti-neti" or "neither this, nor that."

As for the Atman, it is characterized in the Mandukya Upanishad, verse 7, as "not inwardly cognitive, not outwardly cognitive, not both-wise cognitive, not a cognition-mass, not cognitive, not non-cognitive, unseen, with which there can be no dealing, ungraspable, having no distinctive mark, non-thinkable, that which cannot be designated.”

The apophatic approach is found extensively in Buddhist philosophy, as well, a lot of speaking about it without speaking about it.

WHO HE WAS NOT: A SHORT STORY

When asked whether all his education was worth it, he replied, yes, because it showed him who he was not.  But then he went on to explain that this was true of his entire life, that the purpose of his life seemed to be to show him he was none of it.

PRACTICAL ADVICE FROM PRABHAVANADA

How long it will take you to gain liberation depends on your qualifications, i.e. how far along you have progressed spiritually, how long you have worked at it.
 
If you are new to it, you should intensify your effort gradually.  Do not try to do too much.  Don’t get carried away, particularly in the beginning when you are most keen.  Otherwise, when you don’t seem to be making much progress, you will get discouraged.  Don’t meditate for fifteen hours a day, day after day, for instance.

Also, do not anticipate liberation.  When and under what circumstances it occurs is not predictable.

Understand, meantime, that liberation is not what you imagine it to be.  It is unlike any other experience you have ever had, with the key word being experience.  Liberation is something that is experienced, as opposed to something that is understood intellectually, as with God.

IMPORTANCE OF WILL

To be liberated spiritually a person must first have the will to do it.  Ramakrishna said, pray that you have the will to do it.

Necessary for liberation:  health, the will, purity, and the desire to live a spiritual life.  Important is the ability to discriminate between the Atman and the non-Atman, i.e. between the real and the unreal, the eternal and the non-eternal, the changeless and the changing.

Needed as well:  the direct perception of Brahman, which comes in time, a continuous union with Brahman, which comes in time, and a commitment to constant recollectedness, i.e. recalling Brahman throughout the day. 
 
Liberation, however, can be known only by rare souls, as only rare souls desire for God, have the will to know God.

MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Hamlet said to his friend after encountering the ghost of his, Hamlet’s, father.  In Shakespeare’s time, people believed in otherworldly things.

Fast forward to 1991.  I took a trip back to my hometown where, at the local university, I researched the letters of an acquaintance of mine, “Tim” I will call him, who died in the Vietnam War.  The reason I was researching his letters was because I wanted to refer to him in a book I was writing.

When Tim was drafted, he declared himself a conscientious objector, the I-O classification, but he ultimately bowed to pressure from his conservative family and community to where he went in as a I-A-O noncombatant.  He’d be a medic.

Tim’s letters, mainly to his parents, were from his training as a medic, and then from the front lines of the war.  Often they were about how much he hated the war, all wars and all killing.

I, too, hated the war, all wars and all killing, and I, too, when drafted, declared myself a conscientious objector.  Like Tim I also felt pressure from my conservative family and community, and especially from the local draft board, who said I also should go in as a I-A-O noncombatant medic.  I-A-Os, by the way, added to the draft board’s monthly quota, whereas I-Os, who served in a civilian capacity, did not.  Since the job of a I-A-O medic was to patch up soldiers so they could go back into the war and do more killing, I could not accept that route.

I doubted Tim himself truly wanted to be a medic, doing so just to keep the peace, so to speak, among those around him.  With this in mind, I read every one of his letters to his parents and friends, until I felt very close to him, indeed.  Spiritually, I felt close to him.

When I got to the final letter, it became very dark outside all of a sudden, and loud claps of thunder echoed down the valley.  Then came a violent storm, a fierce, windy, driving storm that pelted the windows with rain like rocks.  The blinds whipped back and forth, and the overhead lights flickered on and off.   

But then, just as abruptly as the storm had appeared, it vanished.  I didn’t let myself think that this had anything to do with Tim and his letters, even though the hairs still standing on the back of my neck told me that it did.   

Indeed, on the front page of the local newspaper the next morning there was a large picture of Tim, along with the reminder that he did not last a month in the war.  He rushed into a field to tend to a wounded comrade, only to get gunned down himself, fatally.  That was in 1969.

Again, this newspaper article was in 1991, twenty-two years after Tim’s death, at age twenty-two coincidentally, leaving me asking what were the odds of it, what was the likelihood of his picture appearing the very next day on the front page of the local paper, after my reading his letters and then that violent storm? 

As for that I-O classification I had insisted on, the local draft board rejected me at every turn, which should not have surprised me in a conservative state where young men, like cattle, were always shipped off, no questions asked, to whatever the war might be. 

I had no choice but to refuse induction, whereupon I was arrested, put on trial, and convicted by a jury who also had no choice; the judge’s instruction to them was to base their decision only on whether or not I had refused induction, which obviously I had, twice in person at the Induction Center.   

As I braced for being taken into custody, to begin my five years in prison, that dreaded five years, the judge, astonishingly, permitted me to be free on personal recognizance to be with my family at Christmas; the trial was eleven days before Christmas.  The prosecution strongly objected. 

A sentencing date was set for just after the holidays, but by then I was already out of the country, in exile, where I remained for the next six years, a year longer than had I gone to prison.

I visited Tim’s gravesite on that same trip back to do research on him, and he was there.  He was everywhere in those hills.  He was in the judge even.  “There are more things in heaven and earth--“

THE ONE WHO IS AWARE OF IT

During particularly energetic passages, the classical pianists Vladimir Horowitz, and Van Cliburn, whose past performances, some of them anyway, are on YouTube, seem to be marveling at what their hands are doing.  "I can't believe I'm actually doing this," their expressions seem to be saying.

The experience is not limited to classical pianists.  We all have such moments.  Surgeons and welders have such moments.  This is the witnessing, background consciousness that Vedanta calls Atman/Brahman.

Yet this observing consciousness is all too quickly swallowed up by the thinking mind.  And this thinking mind has a voice, the incessant chatter of which we are incapable of escaping, seemingly, although we do try.

Our attempts at relief include watching classical pianists on YouTube, going to movies, reading books, and so on.  These, though, are just more thinking, when we stop to think about it.  The bad news is that we identify with the thinking  mind and its voice, believing that they are our true self.  The good news is that we realize that they are not.

Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, talks about this same matter:  "When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.  When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice--the thinker--but the one who is aware of it.

Horowitz, and Cliburn, are in precisely this state of realization when they perform.

BECOMING

In the recent posting ON THE MOVE, the point was made that everything is in constant motion, forever in a state of flux, ever changing, always becoming something else.  The implication of this is that nothing ever arrives anywhere, that there is no completion of anything, including ourselves.  We, in this sense, are approximations.

Another word for this is “becoming.”  The Sixth century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Hephesus contended that nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming, an idea picked up by the Nineteenth Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. 
 
Nietzsche wrote that Heraclitus "will remain eternally right with his assertion that 'being' is an empty fiction," which is to say that "becoming" does not produce fixed entities such as being, subject, object, substance, thing.  Such false concepts, Nietzsche said, are the mistakes which consciousness and language employ as a way of interpreting the chaos of the state of “becoming.”

The view of Heraclitus and Nietzsche is in direct contrast to Parmenides, another Sixth century BC Greek philosopher, who believed that the “becoming” that we perceive with our senses is deceptive, and that there is a pure, perfect and eternal being behind “becoming,” which is the ultimate truth.

In Vedanta this pure, perfect and eternal being that is behind “becoming” is called Brahman, the realization of whom is the purpose of life.  The realization of Brahman is the finish line, so to speak.  Hence, the assertion that nothing ever arrives anywhere is false.

WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?

The earliest reference to solipsism in Hindu philosophy is in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, dated to early 1st millennium BCE.  There it is held that the mind is the only god and that all actions in the universe are the result of the mind assuming infinite forms.

Non-dualistic Advaita Vedanta and the dualistic Samkhya sects are thought to have originated concepts similar to solipsism.

Solipsism, in its metaphysical sense, says that the world and other minds do not exist.  Only a person’s own mind and own life exists. 

The notion arises when a person has experiences that ring so true to him, that are so intimate to him, that they seem to be coming from his own mind.  A person may even conclude that the entire world is somehow being generated by his own mind.  

Such uncanny experiences as, for instance, synchronicity, the so-called spotting a familiar face in a crowd when such a sighting is impossible, or nearly so, makes solipsism feel all the more likely.  The person says, “Only I spotted John Smith in those masses,” which then leads him to believe that he is the only one spotting not just a particular individual but everything in the world.

Psychiatry has this as a dissociative disorder, but is it?  How do we know, for sure, that our own life is not the only one?  Who can say, unequivocally, that he or she is not someone else’s life?

Philosopher Alan Watts liked to joke, “But whose life is it that we are all living, yours or mine?”

PLAYING DEAD

We are more than merely a person, body, mind, etc., who will die one day.  We are a consciousness, pure consciousness.  This survives.
  
“Death is but a change of condition,” Vivekananda said.  

ON THE MOVE

In the previous posting, MOVING TARGET:  A SHORT STORY, the person states that spirituality, for him at least, is a moving target.  In point of fact, it is a moving target for everyone.  Indeed, there is nothing that is not a moving target.

This transience, so-called, is the source of all suffering in the world, according to Buddhism.  Vedanta is more optimistic, contending that transience makes us yearn for what is not transient, which is God.  It motivates us to seek God, which Vedanta teaches is the purpose of life.

We are, at the same time, under the illusion, called Maya, that nothing is moving, or at least we don’t pay attention to the movement.

Our believing that nothing is moving means that there are static, permanent things, including ourselves, which, of course, is not true.  We point to things as if they were unchanging, saying, “it,” “this,” “there.”  We give ourselves a name, Joe Smith, Mary Jones, as if we were one constant thing. 
 
There is the argument by the Sixth century Greek philosopher Parmenides that the appearance of movement is just that, an appearance.  Movement is limited to the relative world and does not exist ultimately.  The trouble is, we do not live in the ultimate world, so we are stuck with movement.

Movement began with the Big Bang.  The good news is that there is such a thing as death, presumably the end of movement.  The bad news is that death leads to other things, to reincarnation for one, which means still more movement.  Relief is nowhere in sight.